The Prince & the Papers

At the Cannes Film Festival last May, an executive of Paris Match, France's top picture magazine, dreamed up a new angle for photographing Prince Rainier Ill's palace at Monaco: he asked visiting Grace Kelly to provide the foreground. She agreed, if he could arrange an audience with the Prince. Out of that unwitting stroke of Matchmaking grew a huge cornycopia, and the U.S. and European press filled it to overflowing last week with gags, gush and gabble.

In the aftermath of Grace's engagement to the Prince (TIME, Jan. 16), the week's actual events were sparse. Grace went back to Hollywood to finish The Swan, a movie about a girl who marries a prince. The Prince went to Florida to take a rest. Shipping Tycoon Aristotle Socrates Onassis, the man who owns the bank at Monte Carlo and who will be spared the fate of French taxes if the Prince sires an heir, announced, "I am mad with joy," and celebrated the engagement by giving 1,000,000 francs to the Monaco Red Cross.

But little Monaco was dwarfed by the acres of newsprint over which the press spread the contents of family albums, newsless interviews with Grace, reconstructions of the proposal scene (RAINIER

SEALED IT OVER PHEASANT, NATCH New

York's Daily News), analyses of Grace's wardrobe, even recipes for Monegasque specialties. Date, site and other arrangements for the marriage were not even settled, but the bride's mother, Mrs. John

B. Kelly, began receiving--in the columns of papers serviced by Hearst's King Features Syndicate. In ten "intimate," as-told-to installments, titled "My Daughter Grace Kelly, Her Life and Romances," Mrs. Kelly counted aloud: "Men began proposing to my daughter Grace when she was barely 15 ... Prince Rainier III . . . was at least the 50th man." Father Francis J. Tucker, the Prince's American chaplain, topped Mrs. Kelly by putting his by-line on two series about the Prince, one for I.N.S., the other in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

An American Base? The U.P. proudly reported how one of its men was allowed to walk Grace's poodle between trains in Chicago. The Los Angeles Herald & Express scooped the town by getting a man aboard Grace's train before it arrived; his interview clearly nailed down the fact that she is a blonde cinemactress. Then, respectfully removing its hat from the back of its head, the Herex editorialized: "This country has many allies, bound to us by various ties, but we sometimes wonder about the strength of the bindings. But not so in the forthcoming alliance between the United States of America and the principality of Monaco. There is a real alliance." International implications also weighed hard on a French reader of Le Monde who wrote: "Is Monaco about to become an American base?"

What Match had joined together, the Chicago Tribune desired to put asunder.

HE'S NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR A KELLY, groused the Trib. "She is too well bred a girl to marry the silent partner in a gambling parlor." But the editorial saw some hope: one day Britain's Prince Charles might marry a daughter of Grace, and "with an infusion of Irish blood, the British royal family might become more adept in the art of governing." Among the Tribune's bedfellows was the Communist Daily Worker's Joseph North, who seemed hurt that Grace had chosen a mate "who can't lay bricks ... or act ... or write plays ... or row a boat." Another class-conscious objector appeared in a Daily Mirror survey of New York Kellys. Said a Flatbush Avenue Kelly: "He's not even in her class." Others who disapproved: Long Island's Newsday, and the Denver Post (BENEATH HER STATION). In Britain, while slobbering over the romance, London's tabloid Daily Sketch let its columnist Candidus complain righteously about the "vulgarization" of it all. The Manchester Guardian, with a sense of fitness of things, headlined the story: PRINCE RAINIER ENGAGED. Tin Pun Alley. The loudest cackles came, of course, from the columnists. In New York, the News's Robert Sylvester asked: "Will the towels at the royal palace in Monaco be marked 'His and Heirs'?" In Chicago, the Sun-Times's Irv Kupcinet cracked: "It isn't the romance that interests Miss Kelly--it's the principality of the thing." Guffawed Hollywood's Daily Variety: "Show business wonders how Grace will do at the palace," and the U.P.'s Aline Mosby reported: "MGM's executives . . . are worried that she will fly off to Monte Carlo and be seen henceforth only on postage stamps." Columnist Hedda Hopper said right out loud: "[Her] friends are completely baffled; half of them don't believe she and the Prince will ever reach the altar."

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