GRACE KELLY'S COLD TOKAY

...There could be something like nostalgia for fables about princes and princesses—even for one so obviously contrived as a switch on the old sleeping beauty theme...

...But Henry James might have discovered its preposterous logic too much for his involuted analyses of the reciprocal effects of new wealth and old manners...

...In casting her in the title role of The Swan, the movie powers have acknowledged Miss Kelly's cold personality, as well as her cultured serenity, that led Time magazine in its cover story in January 1955 to remark, "Publicity men despair of her...

...Heaven, if this is so, is under new theatrical management...

...But for men, her appeal was something to be regarded as of even greater cultural significance...

...I don't think Grace would allow an anecdote to happen to her.'" In this light, her marriage to Prince Rainier accomplishes a double coronation in her career, uniting the worlds of public show and of show business with an integrity of design that is quite rare in either...

...Who could say...

...Today, the play, like most of Molnar, seems no more than tartly trivial—like an old Tokay turning sour and insubstantial...

...The power of parody can bring down the most commanding edifices of show business self-worship...

...First of all, of course, there is the constant reminder of Miss Kelly's coincident achievement of a kingdom infinitely less believable, albeit far more preposterous, than any Molnar might have conceived...

...The event, too, may be said to vindicate her Academy Award for her performance in The Country Girl in 1954, signifying recognition on the part of the voting members of the Motion Picture Academy that she had an authentic star personality, capable of capturing the public imagination as had the great stars of the ante-television heyday...

...When it opened on Broadway in 1923, with Eva LeGallienne, Basil Rathbone, and Philip Merivale in the leading roles—in the season whose hit play was The Show Off, by Miss Kelly's uncle George—the play had the advantage of seeming to deal with mythical kingdoms, just after a war that had crumbled so many real ones...

...The film, moreover, has a strangely realistic quality, for all its efforts at ingenuous unreality...

...The time of the action has been fixed definitely in 1908, and the place determined as Hungary...

...Prince Rainier's chaplain, Father Francis Tucker, who acted as booking-agent in arranging the match, has implied that it was made in Heaven—a belief apparently shared by Miss Kelly's mother, judging from her nationally syndicated series of modest reminiscences...

...The falsity was much too true to be anything but another disclosure of the facetiousness of fate...

...unrequited passion...

...Then, there are other reminders of reality, as if the coarse weave of history may be glimpsed beneath the gauzy fantasy...

...For gum-snapping girls dreaming of better dreams, her background of real riches, her swift success as a model, and her cometary course across the highest heavens of Hollywood were new, heady material for romantically futile fantasy...

...The event even had a certain old-fashioned virtue, out of the good old Edwardian days of America's upstart colonization of Europe's seats of seedy nobility...

...And even Brann the Iconoclast would have found the frontier red-eye of his insults of Eastern millionaires and their foppish old-country idols a little mild, after sipping the fruity vintages of Miss Kelly's tabloid travail...

...Perhaps he thereby signified that the rumored alliances were preferable to the kind of antiseptic society in which she usually moved—although the latter had the virtue of preserving her public character as the cold, aloof, untouch-ably respectable deity created to supplant the now-waning worship of the older, flamboyantly sensual Love Goddesses of the screen: Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, Marilyn Monroe...

...She had been "linked" by the professional gossips with such stalwarts of star build-up logistics as Oleg Cassini and Jean-Pierre Aumont...

...It is hardly inappropriate to treat as show business a matter that from the beginning "was more like a premiere than a betrothal," as Collier's ecstatically announced...

...Miss Kelly as the swan, Alec Guinness as the prince, Louis Jourdan as the professor, Brian Aherne as the princely monk, Jessie Royce Landis as the ambitious mother, Estelle Win-wood as the comic aunt, and Agnes Moorehead as the imperious queen, are all creatures of no time and place...

...Those who persisted to the last in hoping that the affair really was no more than a pitch for the movie could be forgiven their forlorn senti-mentalism...

...Not that there weren't suspicions that oracles were suborned and auguries altered by the ubiquitous agents of Hollywood publicity...

...This union of a true princess of the modern nobility of notoriety with a sovereign who is a caricature of ancient regal splendor had a taint of plausibility to begin with...

...And the outcome surely must have a happily-ever-after glow...

...II If anything, the marriage corroborates the supremely appropriate casting of Miss Kelly in her public role...

...But the thought that "ever after" could be no more than a few years somehow invades the imaginary episode—a realization no more irrelevant, after all, than that of Miss Kelly's real fantasy permeating the intended fiction of the film...

...Miss Kelly, after all, had been involved in breathlessly apocryphal romances with almost every one of the stars in whose special firmament she had been so carefully placed from the beginning of her film career: Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Ray Milland, William Holden, Stewart Granger, Bing Crosby, James Stewart...

...And the film's clearly genuine attempt to be merely entertaining inevitably suffered beside the travesty celebrated with sacramental solemnity amid the advertisements for perfume and underwear, and legitimated in the final officiation of the Monacan postage, commemorating the union in stamp albums forevermore...

...But men of good will could agree that Miss Kelly's real marriage to Prince Rainier and her movie marriage to Alec Guinness' prince in The Swan were more coincidence than concomitance: fortune's "unswerving punctuality" rather than any fabrication of fortuitous similarities...

...As a stunt to publicize her role in The Swan, it could only emphasize the interpenetration of false and true: ultimately, that she has become so identified with her painted personality that she cannot remember to relinquish the mask...

...Rainier and his minuscule principality—leading industries: gambling, tax evasion, and philately— may have been Miss Kelly's kismet all along...

...There could be no question that Miss Kelly as an ideal represents the modern longings of American men for...

...Where, indeed, could so sublime a personification of the American proletarian's worship of fame and substance and faith in limitless opportunity find fulfillment...

...Molnar's comedy—which is considerably improved in the screen version by John Digh-ton, directed by Charles Vidor—is a frothy meringue about the courtship of a princess whose character is and must remain that of a swan: coldly, if decoratively, sailing on the lake of life, far from any contaminating shore...

...Marriage for purposes of state invariably contain the seeds of at least a ceremonial disenchantment...

...A Grace Kelly anecdote?' said a friend...

...In fact, her brother, sculling champion John B. Kelly, Jr„ complained bitterly about "these oddballs she goes out with...

...In fact, it was possible to find sympathy for the poor devils who had to advertise the film as movie make-believe...