celebrity gossip, academic style

Grace Kelly for Life magazine wearing the gown designed by Edith Head that she wore to the 1955 Academy Awards. © Philippe Halsman/Magnum Photos. (Taken from Vanity Fair Profile)

About once a year, Vanity Fair likes to feature a classic Hollywood star — and a classic rhetorical rehashing of their established star image — on its cover. Last year, if memory serves, it was Marilyn Monroe; this year it’s Grace Kelly.

The article, entitled ‘Grace Kelly’s Forever Look,’ featuring a slideshow of her ‘Eternal Style,’ ostensibly celebrates the opening of the exhibition ‘Grace Kelly: Style Icon’ at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, which will ‘retell her story’ in ‘artifacts.’

But the real purpose of the article is to reactivate the memory of Kelly, highlighting exactly what made her, and her image, so culturally resonant in the 1950s — and to do so in a way that further mythologizes and reifies Kelly as all that was virginal, sophisticated, proper, and perfect about that time. In this way, she becomes the last artifact of true class — and true Hollywood. And, in the process, makes me want to vomit all over her ‘pure-white cupcake of a skirt.’

My repulsion is not with Kelly — how I love her in To Catch a Thief! And that aforementioned white dress in Rear Window — I covet! - but the rhetorical twists and turns employed throughout the article render her into something saccarine….a play-thing with princess-dreams. Or, to quote directly from the profile,

The rare beauty and stunning self-possession that propelled Grace Kelly into the Hollywood pantheon, onto the Best-Dressed List, and ultimately to Monaco’s royal palace were more than captivating—they were completely genuine.

Which, of course, is how she has endured in the public memory. A blonde exemplar of the 1950s, so perfect in the Dior silhouette, demure and everything that that hussy Marilyn Monroe was not. What troubles me is the ways in which that particular memory is reproduced for contemporary consumption — and unchallenged. And, in positing her as the last ‘true star’ of classic Hollywood, the profile enacts some serious (and seriously flawed) revisionist history.

How is this accomplished? In classic Vanity Fair celebrity profile style: with an immense amount of banality, false invocations of intimacy, and quotes from ‘experts’ regurgitating the profile’s thesis, e.g. that Grace Kelly was effortlessly, eternally, and ethereally sophisticated, classy, and stylish. That much is quite explicit. Less explicit are the undertones; namely, that Kelly’s sexuality, at once virginal, clean, authentic, unthreatening, and immaculate, was, and remains, ideal. She’s sex drive dressed in fine pearls — orgasmic yet without a fear of vagina dentata….the virgin/whore dichotomy washed of all negative connotations. And she’s a figment of our imagination — an image of complex ideological maneuvering whose persistence highlights the regressive sexual politics that continue to structure our understandings of women, sexual desire, pleasure, and, even more importantly, how each of those is attached to class.

Along these lines, the text of the profile emphasizes three overarching traits: sophistication/class, authenticity, and ‘passion.’

1.) SOPHISTICATION

Kelly came from money: ‘The Kellys built a 17-room home in the Philadelphia neighborhood of East Falls, overlooking the Schuylkill River, upon which Jack rowed. And there they stayed, enviably wealthy, sailing through the Great Crash without a dip because Jack didn’t play the stock market.’

It was Irish-Catholic money, so it wasn’t as high society as many believed, but it helped craft her image as ‘well-bred.’ Her family is likened to the Kennedys, those shining beacons of Eastern patrician sophistication: ‘bright, shining, charismatic, Irish-Catholic Democrats, civically and politically engaged.’

Kelly’s voice (elocution) and poise are repeatedly emphasized — the voice hadn’t always been that way; rather, ‘she put a clothespin on her nose and worked to bring her voice down a register, to achieve clarity and depth. The result was diction with a silver-spoon delicacy—slightly British—and the stirring lilt of afternoon tea at the Connaught.’ Kelly had taken years of ballet, and she never ‘lost her ballet posture or a dancer’s awareness of her limbs in space…..This too contributed to a poise, an inner stillness, in the way she moved. Her walk became something unique: regal above the waist, shoulders back and head high, and a floating quality below, akin to a geisha’s glide, or a swan’s.’

Crucially, the voice and posture were, and remain, shorthand for class. Not because they magically ooze class….but because they indicate the amount of money spent on training.

Kelly’s clothing of course signified class as well: she wore white gloves, little make-up, nude hose, creating a ‘Bryn Mawr look.’ Later in her career, she was outfitted in ‘light, airy, and ineffable’ fabrics, including ‘chiffon, watered silk, unlined linen, and that most levitational textile, silk organza.’ In this way, she ‘became shorthand for a very polished and well-accessorized look’; while ‘no one wore white’ quite like her. The Kelly Hermes bag, renamed for her, became ‘the icon of impeccable breeding and quiet good taste.’

Just look at those adjectives! Polished, white, quiet, light, ineffable, Bryn Mawr…..put differently, she wasn’t garish, or speaking, or taking up too much space. She knew her place, and occupied it. According to this understanding, she never did, or wore, something that was untoward, never stepped out of place. And that brand of understanding — of knowing where she belonged and not challenging it — is here elevated as the very pinnacle of achievement. To be a Goddess and a Princess, it seems, is to shut-up, look virginal, and float across the room with good posture and clothing that suggests, rather than displays, the fact of sexuality.

2.) AUTHENTICITY

The invocation of authenticity infuses the article. Kelly is consistently referred to as ‘Grace,’ effectively creating a a sense of intimacy and knowing: the author knows ‘Grace’ like a close friend; when she tells you that Kelly’s ’voice, walk, and reserved bluestocking style’ all ‘came together in a kind of crystalline equation. You couldn’t say it was calculated. Grace was well brought up, and disciplined, and cultured, and shy. She was only highlighting what she had,’ it seems believable. Of course it wasn’t calculated!

It doesn’t really matter whether not it was calculated: what matters is that the reader and consumer of the Kelly star image believe that it wasn’t. Because calculation is artifice, and artifice is the opposite of class.

Kelly is likewise constructed as destined for her role as a princess — the absolute pinnacle of class and sophistication, where men and women are literally bred for their roles as models of wealth. The author recounts an anecdote of Kelly’s childhood, when she apparently “‘told her sister Peggy, “One day I’m going to be a princess.’” Particular roles are singled out for their immaculate conflation of the ‘true’ Kelly and the performing one: when she played Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story, ‘it was the beginning of the potent, sometimes prophetic connection between life and art that would reverberate’ throughout her career.

And then, in the biggest claim of all, she’s heralded as the last genuinely charismatic and sophisticated star — ’With the newer generations we subconsciously know there’s artifice involved. And we don’t quite believe what we see. But we did believe what we saw with Grace.’

I can’t overemphasize the falsity of that claim. People knew there was artifice involved in all of the Hollywood stars — see, for example, the lengthy fan magazine articles detailing Rita Consuelo’s transformation into Rita Hayworth, including photos of the electrolysis of her hairline. Then, as today, some fans chose to be more excepting or oblivious of the strings of construction than others. Many, many stars had extra-textual lives that mirrored their onscreen ones; many, many stars had back stories that seemed to magically and perfectly support to their adult star images. What is essential to understand, then, is that discourse picks up on the parts of the background and lifestyle that fit with our perception of the star — such as Kelly’s history as a ballerina, her parents’ wealth, her role as Tracy Lord — while selectively ignoring those that do not fit. People believed what they saw with Grace, but they also believed what they saw with Diane Keaton, with Tom Cruise, with Julia Roberts. Believing what you see is part of a well-maintained star image — not indicative of ‘innate authenticity.’

3.) PASSION

Finally, Kelly is not sexual, per se, but passionate. Passionate about sex. But not sexual. Hitchcock loved her ‘potential for restraint’ and ‘sexual elegance.’ She was ‘ladylike yet elemental, suggestive of icy Olympian heights and untouched autonomy yet, beneath it all, unblushing heat and fire.’ Under her ‘snowcap’ was a ‘volcano…surprisingly active and full of fire.’

Following her death in the early ’80s, a number of biographies alleged that she slept with every man who crossed her early Hollywood path. The profile makes it very clear that she did not. Rather, she was ‘romantic and passionate. She followed her heart, which might or might not lead to bed. All her biographers agree that she never used sex to win roles. Judged in retrospect, not by 50s standards but by feminist ones, she was as self-possessed about her sexuality as she was about her work.’ She wasn’t constantly having sex; rather, she was ‘constantly falling in love.’ She was ‘devout, an absolutely sincere Catholic’ who ‘took full advantage of Catholic mechanisms for private misdemeanors.’

And she wasn’t frigid. This is essential. According to actor Alexandre D’Arcy, “She was … very warm indeed as far as sex was concerned. You would touch her once and she would go through the ceiling.”

What emerges is a portrait of Kelly’s sexuality that defends the posthumous revelation of her sexuality….but simultaneously maneuvers it to fit in with the established image of class and elegance. Sure, Kelly had sex — she even had sex before she was married, and with multiple men. She wasn’t a virgin when she was married, but she still signified as virginal (‘no one wore white like Kelly’) and that was what mattered. Her sexuality is turned into passion; her desire turned into love. She is not over-sexualized, but appropriately sexualized — especially in hindsight. She’s a proto-feminist!

Importantly, while Kelly herself may have been far more progressive in her personal and private actions and beliefs than was ever represented at the time, the ways in which she is crafted retrospectively is not, in any way, feminist or progressive. The author yokes sophistication to money, beauty to demurity, desirability to a very specific (and heterosexual) and unarticulated form of sexual appetite. This profile is imbued with nostalgia for a certain type of womanhood and legible class distinction. And it’s that untempered nostalgia — not Kelly herself — that makes me want to vomit.