Letters to the Dead: Things I Wish I'd Said. Ann Palmer

       I Should Have Replaced Her in Films

      GRACE KELLY – Birth name: Grace Patricia Kelly

      Height: 5’7”

      Birth: November 12^th, 1929 - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – born to one of Philadelphia’s leading families

      Death: September 14^th, 1982 - Monacoville, Monaco - killed in an automobile accident in her adoptive home country. She was just 52 years old. Her death stunned the world and ended what had seemed a fairy-tale life. She is interred at the Cathedral of St. Nicholas, Monte Carlo, Monaco. The inscription at her burial site in Monaco’s cathedral does not refer to her as a princess. It uses the title “uxor principis” (prince’s wife), which is traditional in the House of Grimaldi.

      Dear Grace,

      As twilight grew dim, the golden-orange lights shinning up on your palace atop the rock of Monte Carlo lit up the entire palace with an eerie beauty. Directly across from your “princess palace,” the apartment I rented was in the Monaco Post Office Building. What a coincident, I thought, that I should find an apartment with an outstanding view of your palace directly across the bay. You had your palatial one and I had a one-room apartment in a building with the name “Palace” – Palace of the Stairs – (even though it had an elevator.)

      Another bewildering revelation was that the symbol for Monaco is a dove. Years before, three Sundays in a row doves flew into a glass picture window of my house killing them. Feeling this was a symbol of some kind, by the third Sunday when a helicopter was flying over, I got out of the house. Repeated episodes of doves had followed me. Since it continued I assumed them to be a good omen but since the first episode involved death, I could find no one or any material to give me the answer. Perhaps that was what brought me to Monaco. No plans were made to end up there; I just happened to like it when I rented a car in Marseille and drove up and down the coastline. Determined to complete a book I started, I wanted to find a place to stay for a while. “Sex, God and You” was the title. Today it is still filed away unfinished. No matter what I have done in my life, the basic goal was to bring more enlightenment into our individualized spirituality.

      What was my connection with you? I never worked on a picture with you nor saw you in person before you departed your throne in Hollywood for the one in Monaco. The only connecting I had was that I liked you very much as an actress. Not only did you have beauty but class, dignity and sophistication. I wanted to think of myself and project myself in the same manner. I did not like the copycats of Marylyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. On casting calls, I was called in for “the Grace Kelly type” and often compared to you. Even the shop owners in Monaco commented that I looked like you. I was honored and flattered to be compared to you for I felt of all actresses I admired, you and Audrey Hepburn gave the screen more class and dignity than anyone else.

      Often I would sit having coffee or a glass of wine, reading a book in the outdoor café near the main gambling Casino in Monte Carlo. A cute yacht captain came up and asked if he could join me. We had a few drinks. He asked if I would like to see the yacht that he was Captain of and invited me to join him there. We walked down to the bay and to the yacht. We had more drinks and talked for hours. We discussed the fact that I had been compared to you in Hollywood as well as in Monaco. He told me you often had beach boy lovers. Who really knows what your life was like in that palace by the sea. It could have been very lonely for you and probably was. Many people regretted that you gave up your career to marry Prince Rainier while others saw you as living the dream of many young women – marrying a prince, living in a place and living happily ever after. Married to a prince with three beautiful children appears to be the perfect fairly tale life, but was it? And what did it cost you, your LIFE? Rumors were that gambling cartels had you killed in an attempt to control Rainier. Was it ever solved as an accident or murder? What if you had not married him? No doubt your career would have been a lasting one and today you would have been the quintessential mature woman carrying yourself with beauty and dignity no matter what age you reached!

      I loved Monte Carlo with the bay filled with the most luxurious yachts in the world, the outdoor cafés, the nightly loud speaker music, especially during the Pyrotechnics World Competition, when the music played was from each country whose fireworks were to be displayed that evening. It was a happy jaunt down the hill to the bay. The displays were more than fantastic and unbelievable creations of scenes in the sky, lasting only moments. The streets were always clean, the shops and restaurants were charming. I loved the walk along the beach with the dancing waters fountain. I had never seen gravel or rock beaches before where a straw mat became a necessity. I loved Monte Carlo so much; I assumed I would return every couple of years.

      There was a live broadcast of your funeral. I felt grief and shed tears even though we never met. Perhaps we were a part of the same Over Soul; your challenge was by success, me, the antithesis, learning through what appears as failure but forced to grow into the understanding that the wealth we learn and earn inside is eternal wealth that cannot be lost, stolen or taken from us. As I sat there, crying along with your family while watching the middle-of-the-night broadcast, I became aware that you sitting the room with me. No, I could not see you, only an empty chair. In my mind’s eye, I could see you clearly. As the funeral progressed, I thought what a silly imagination. This was impossible, yet, as you began talking to me with the words forming in my head, you seemed angry at first as you watched. You seemed quite comfortable sitting in my den with me. You made fun of Prince Rainier. Now he was shedding tears of grief but in life it was not so; that you had very trying times with him. You told me how devoted you were to your children and how you loved them but now that