Grace

Grace is Robert Lacey’s biography of Grace Kelly, published in 1994 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. The Open Library description sets the public princess against the private woman and claims the book as “the first balanced portrait” of her. A Book News, Inc. annotation on the Google Books record calls it a “sympathetic bio” in which Lacey tries to “sell an image of the tragic” Kelly. By both accounts, it is a book for a reader who wants the private life along with the public record.

Of the 15 other Kelly books catalogued alongside it, 11 came out earlier and 4 later. Its closest neighbors in date are Elizabeth Gillen Surcouf’s Grace Kelly, American princess and Howell Conant’s Grace, both from 1992, and Jenny Curtis’s Grace Kelly from 1998. The later titles also include Wendy Leigh’s True Grace (2007), Donald Spoto’s High society (2009) and Jennifer O’Callaghan’s Rear Window (2025). Conant’s book shares Lacey’s title, but Wikipedia describes it as a book of photographs he took during Kelly’s 26 years as Princess of Monaco.

For fans

The Open Library description

The description on the Open Library record follows the life in order. It begins in Philadelphia with a father, an Olympic athlete and local hero, who often shunned a shy and sickly daughter, and it says Kelly set out to win his attention and the world’s. It sets the white-gloved image she cultivated against private conduct it calls “brazen” and “reckless,” and it names her best friend’s husband, her drama teacher, Clark Gable and William Holden among the men she slept with. It says her parents vetoed earlier marriage choices, and that Rainier won over Kelly and her family in a fast courtship supported by secret letters.

According to the same description, Lacey writes of Kelly’s joy at the wedding and her gradual disenchantment with palace life. It says that after ten years of marriage she was deeply hurt by Rainier’s “arrogance, petulance, and autocratic treatment” of her. In middle age, it says, she lived apart from him in Paris, fought with her daughters and looked to young men for affection, while keeping up her public image and her official and charitable work. It ends with the crash of September 1982 and promises new details about the accident, her medical care and her death. It also credits Lacey with “unprecedented access” to Kelly’s friends and colleagues.

The author and the editions

The Open Library description says Lacey had written books on Queen Elizabeth II, Saudi Arabia and the Ford family, and the Book News annotation identifies him by Ford, the Men and the Machine. The records disagree on length: Open Library gives 463 pages and Google Books gives 506, and neither explains the difference. Open Library’s subject headings include biography, motion picture actors and actresses, princesses and large type books. Wikipedia’s article on Kelly lists a 1995 Chivers Press edition, printed in Bath, England, in its bibliography.

Lacey on Kelly in Wikipedia

Wikipedia’s article reports that engineers found Kelly had left her Rover in its “Standard” drive mode on the descent instead of the “Mountain” position. It attributes to Lacey the argument that the “Mountain” setting would have “slowed her descent significantly,” though that sentence does not name the work. The article also records a 2010 remark, made 16 years after this book appeared, in which Lacey ranked the wedding as the earliest modern event to produce “media overkill.”