Grace Kelly

at the Hotel de Ville

I think it was the hottest day (so far) this summer, and I was feeling anything but graceful... all sweaty and exhausted from Wednesday's running around. But I had been meaning for weeks to visit the much publicized Grace Kelly exhibit at the Hotel de Ville, so I took a break from my errands and joined the cue in the afternoon shadow of the impressive building. The wait was about 45 minutes followed by a quick pass though the metal detector, my small purse through the x-ray machine.



Now I don't pretend to be a great fan... Until Wednesday, all I knew about the princess was that she was one--and that Madonna names her in "Vogue." Since visiting the exhibit, I know only a little more, but enough... for now. These photos come from the Taschen book I bought on my way out. Admission to the exhibit is free, so the book seemed requisite, especially since no photos are allowed.



As an American film star, she made 10 movies in the 3 1/2 years (before she met His Serene Highness Prince Albert Rainier III of Monaco in 1956,) three of which were Alfred Hitchcock films. The exhibit had letters and telegrams on display spanning the length of her whirlwind career, many from Hitchcock himself who seems to have been one of her biggest fans. These photos come from her work on Dial M for Murder in which her character's husband hires someone to kill her.



What I find most fascinating about these photos is Francois Truffaut's observation that "Hitchcock filmed scenes of love as if they were scenes of murder and scenes of murder as if they were scenes of love." Though fascinating, this is not exactly groundbreaking art... I observed the same thing at the Musee D'Orsay and wrote a poem about it, "An Hour with Madame Sabatier:" "How death can look like pleasure/on a woman..."



Film footage projected on the walls of the salon shows segments from her movies and her life. But my favorite aspect of the exhibit was the generous spattering of costumes and dresses placed around the rooms. This one is platinum colored satin with a matching shawl. She wore it to the Oscars in 1955 where she won Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama for her roll in The Country Girl. Of course, there's nothing country girl about the dress!



She wore another gorgeous dress on screen in a film I might have seen while channel surfing back in California--Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. I love to see the designers' sketches... what a production to dress such an icon!



At the far end of the salon is her royal wedding dress, silk, I think. I have no pictures of her in that lovely gown, but I love this pre-wedding photo of her with Louis Armstrong, taken more to show off her giant rock-of-a-ring than to prove her interest in jazz!



After seeing her invitations, seating plans, and photographs from the big event, you climb a few steps to a long corridor lined with some of the ball gowns she wore as Her Serene Highness, Princess of Monaco. I wonder if my mother and grandmother thought of Princess Grace as I did/do Princess Di... My grandma even shared her name, though she always used her middle name instead.

The couple were married twenty-six years before she died after a car crash due to a stroke. She was almost fifty-three. She lived a charmed life which ended tragically as do so many charmed lives... Reportedly, Princess Di was the only funeral attendee from the English Royal Palace.

Grace Kelly once said that her success came too easily for her to truly appreciate it. Isn't this the case for so many beauties? She has been remembered as a vixen dressed as an angel... at once expressive and repressed... but these easy juxtapositions are too typically feminine.

In any case, I think that her legacy is her passionate spirit outfitted in pure grace.

De Ma Fenêtre I

(From My Window I)


It’s Sunday morning and he’s sleeping late. Filou is snuggled against my left leg on the sofa and Buddy stakes out the space to my right. Sophia is, as is often the case, perched on the breakfast bar by the open kitchen window. Outside, intermittent drizzle drifts between the buildings like aspiring snow. Someone once told me that it’s always a little bit warmer just before it snows.

On the sidewalk below, people line up around the Théâtre du Châtelet for a matinee of something. The access road along the Seine is closed to traffic, but the bicyclists and pedestrians haven’t taken to it yet. A crowd of demonstrators descends upon the Hotel de Ville where a few early-bird ice skaters make their circles in the temporary rink. If there were any leaves on the trees lining Avenue Victoria, I wouldn’t even know about the demonstration; though from here, I have no idea what they’re marching for. Pigeons. Sirens.

I’d take pictures for you, but I can’t find my camera. He asked for it yesterday when he was working on the printer and he doesn’t know where it is. Anyway, I have a long list of things to do today… Laundry is waiting in the bath room, unfinished crafts are piled up on the table. I want to make a fruit salad for brunch, maybe a goat cheese omelet and some toast with orange marmalade. There will be dishes. We’re too late for the Sunday marchée, so we will certainly make the trip up rue Saint Denis—past the closed store fronts and daylight hookers—for the week’s produce and kosher meats. I want to paint my nails… and then there’s the Salon d’Agriculture at the exposition center.

I like the days he’s home. It’s nice to have someone to do things with… for. While we’re out, I gather images, keep them until they burn a (w)hole. I’ve got a few poems in the air, on my virtual desktop, but I probably won’t get to them today… unless he’s content to stay a while in bed and watch TV. (He likes the science and society documentaries, and there’s always a few worth rewatching on PersoTV—a cable channel devoted to client generated footage and films.) If not, there’s always the solitude of his work week…