One spring day in 1952, Miss Grace Kelly, of Philadelphia, now resident in New York, went across to “a barn-like studio on the far West Side of Manhattan.” That is how she later described it, as if recalling a foreign trip. In the barn, she did a screen test, for a movie called “Taxi,” opposite Robert Alda: the fair young maid and the darker, troubled fellow, each pleading with the other. Kelly wears a soft sweater and, beneath it, a white blouse, whose demure collar is just discernible. We can also make out a mild Irish accent—not much of a stretch, for one of the Kelly clan. “It ain’t that I’m not fond of you,” she says, in words that have weighed like lead, throughout history, on the hearts of disappointed guys. Her eyes keep moving across the man, as if he were a passage of verse. There is both hesitancy and force in this woman; you can picture her, faced with a decision, flitting back and forth, and yet, once decided, becoming quite fiery and sure. It was a combination that appealed to the director of “Taxi,” Gregory Ratoff. He liked the look of Kelly, all the more so because, in his view, the look was that of a plain Jane. According to Kelly, “I was in the ‘too’ category for a very long time. I was too tall, too leggy, too chinny. I remember that Mr. Ratoff kept yelling, ‘She’s perfect! What I love about this girl is that she’s not pretty!’ ”

Kelly in 1955, in the gown she wore when she won the Oscar for best actress. Photograph by Philippe Halsman / Magnum

Few movie directors have been certifiably blind, and on the strength of this oversight Ratoff tops the list with ease, but, to his credit—and to Kelly’s relief—he was ready to rave about this creature for reasons other than her looks. Ratoff’s bosses at Twentieth Century Fox didn’t share his eagerness, and she failed to get the part, but his fellow-directors knew better. Donald Spoto, the author of a new biography, “High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly” (Harmony; $25.99), seems to place her screen test in 1950, but I watched it recently, and there, in the corner of the frame, is the date “May 26 1952.” In short, it was only a matter of months before Kelly came to the attention of John Ford, at M-G-M. (Spoto’s remark on such practice—“it was common for studios to exchange screen tests made by actors they subsequently rejected”—has the right ring of pitiless mercantile behavior. You take my leavings, I’ll have yours.) Ford warmed to what he saw—“This dame has breeding, quality, class,” he said, adding, “I’ll bet she’ll knock us on our ass!”—and, come November, the dame was in Africa, shooting “Mogambo” and knocking Clark Gable on his ass. That may have rattled a bit, because he had false teeth.

And still “Taxi” sped on. In the summer of 1953, Kelly was summoned to the presence of Alfred Hitchcock, who wanted to inspect her for a leading role in “Dial M for Murder.” He had not yet seen “Mogambo”; he was not even certain, he once told Spoto, that he had seen “High Noon,” which had been released a year before, and in which Kelly played Gary Cooper’s Quaker wife. But he had seen her in the “Taxi” test, and that was sufficient; to those fleeting minutes, therefore, we owe not only “Dial M for Murder” but “Rear Window,” one of the monuments of the medium, and “To Catch a Thief,” one of its blithest feats of seduction.

Mathematically, Kelly presents an unusual case. She made only eleven feature films, in a career that lasted just five years, from 1951 to 1956. Of those eleven, six are treasured—five and a half, maybe, depending on how you feel about “Mogambo,” with its amusing study of the way baby elephants behave in proximity to mud. Of the remaining movies, “Green Fire” is a certified stinker, while “The Country Girl”—for which Kelly won an Oscar—is drab and overwrought. Kelly appears in “The Bridges at Toko-Ri,” despite her lofty billing, for about fifteen minutes, and in “Fourteen Hours” for a fraction of that. As for “The Swan,” her penultimate film, it was a smash in its day but has faded into a delicate curiosity, like a watercolor on a sunny wall. Yet the patina of Kelly herself—the gloss of her name and fame, the freshness and directness of her look—has, if anything, acquired a richer lustre. Accounts of her modus vivendi never cease to accrue, yet the more we know the less we seem to grasp. Starlight can be quantified—1954 was “this year of Grace,” according to Life—but its effect on maddened mortals below is all but impossible to gauge. The Kelly effect is not unlike the James Dean effect (three great films, three bit parts), whereby a few brief hours of screen time continue unquenchably to burn.

Grace was the third child of John B. Kelly, and far from his favorite. He was a strapping, outdoors figure, who grew rich in the construction business, and won three Olympic gold medals for rowing; Franklin D. Roosevelt made him National Physical Fitness Director. He pushed his only son, John, Jr., in similar directions. Grace was soft and sickly as a child, “always sniffling,” she recalled, and her father preferred her elder sister, Margaret (known as Peggy), for whom he predicted great things. “I thought it would be Peggy whose name would be up in lights one day. Anything that Grace could do, Peggy could do better,” he told McCall’s in January, 1955, shortly before the disappointing daughter got her Academy Award. Peggy and John, Jr., for their part, grew up to lead problematic lives, dampened by drink.

A home movie exists of the children at play, on a beach—perhaps at the family vacation home in Ocean City, New Jersey. The children, in bathing costumes, are still small, and each is summoned forth to face the camera and salute, as if being a Kelly were a form of active service. When in Rome, you can see the movie for yourself; just wander down the Via del Corso and duck into the Fondazione Memmo, where an exhibition entitled “Gli Anni di Grace Kelly, Principessa di Monaco” is showing till the end of February. There is much to dote upon, beginning with a birth certificate, dated November 12, 1929. There are film clips, posters, magazine covers, dresses, jewels, a giant Hermès Kelly handbag, and a room devoted to the day, in 1956, when Kelly married Prince Rainier and became Princess Grace. There are letters from a range of acquaintances, including George Balanchine, Jacqueline Onassis, and Greta Garbo, who admits to being “upside-downy” and confides, as one deity to another, that “I have not been around much with human beings lately.” No, indeed. The deal that Kelly struck with herself is, in some ways, even stranger than Garbo’s withdrawal from the world. The younger woman’s kernel of privacy was no less keenly guarded, yet she chose to live and marry in the public glare, as if daring herself to bury any frailties beneath the sheen of self-possession. Even when wretched, she would be right-side-uppy.

The most touching object in the show is the scrapbook compiled by the teen-age Grace. A paper napkin, a Christmas-tree decoration, a Schaefer beer mat, a bookmark with lines from Emily Dickinson, a red matchbook, a ticket for a charity golf match, and the wrapper from a pack of Wrigley’s Doublemint, its cheerful greenness still bright. Joseph Cornell would have taken one look and wept. There are notes, inscribed in ink by the owner: “This is where Harper got me the silver compact he gave me for Valentine’s,” “Daddy bought this for me at the Penn Cornell game,” and, beside a torn blue ticket stub for the Locust Street Theatre, in Philadelphia, the words “Dec. 9th ’43. Our class went in to see ‘Kiss + Tell.’ ”

The stage bug, unencouraged by her parents, was starting to bite, and, with barely a jump, Kelly went from collecting playbills to appearing on them. In 1947, before enrolling at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, which charged a cool five hundred dollars a year, she moved to New York, where she resided, as nice young ladies did, at the Barbizon Hotel for Women, at Lexington and Sixty-third Street, and had an affair with an actor and director eleven years her senior, as nice young ladies didn’t. What is more, he was married, though separated, and Jewish; “The fact that I could fall in love with a Jew was beyond them,” Kelly said of her parents, in a letter to a friend. For the next two years, she alternated between theatrical training and professional modelling, including spots on TV commercials. The first of these, for insecticide, required the future Princess to run about, “smiling like an idiot and spraying like a demon,” as she put it, but, sadly, no whiff of it lingers. Shortly after graduation, in 1949, she won roles at the Bucks County Playhouse, in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and Donald Spoto, helpfully, reprints a program note. It is a masterpiece of belittlement:

She is the daughter of John B. Kelly, of Philadelphia. Her brother recently figured in the news by winning the Diamond Sculls at the Henley Regatta in England. Her father was a champion oarsman and is well known as the former chairman of the Democratic Party in Philadelphia.

Reading this, you can’t help marking out the time line of Kelly’s liberation. What she did was escape from one starchy, disapproving, tradition-tight environment, become her own woman for eight or nine years, and then dive head first into another, as if her conscience had caught up with her. If, for the term of her fame, she was able to enslave the attention of all who knew her, as well as the millions who didn’t, it may be because she was forced—or forced herself—to pack a lifetime of freedom into the briefest span. She sometimes comes across as the last of the Jamesians, slipping the bonds of the New World, “affronting her destiny,” as James says of Isabel Archer, yet winding up before long in a parody of the Old—in a miniature state, antiquated and fussy, where she could live in limitless style but never at ease. (It is reported that, as a gesture of good will on the occasion of her marriage, Monaco’s only prisoner was released.) Every woman who came to visit her, Princess Grace learned, was obliged to wear a hat.

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According to Spoto’s calculations, Kelly, having been noticed by scouts, performed in no fewer than thirty-five live television dramas between 1950 and 1954. (Who wouldn’t wish to have seen her as Dulcinea to Boris Karloff’s Don Quixote?) Amid these, she did indeed play a character from Henry James, a nineteenth-century enchantress from his late, time-travelling novel “The Sense of the Past.” Onstage, two years before, she had played Marian Almond in an adaptation of “Washington Square.” Marian is described by James as “a pretty little person of seventeen, with a very small figure and a very big sash, to the elegance of whose manners matrimony had nothing to add,” and what is extraordinary, in retrospect, is the number of Kelly projects that arrowed in on marriage—on the loom and the lure of it, on the sacrifices that might be incurred, on the dreams of flight that it could not help but promote. Her first appearance on the big screen, in “Fourteen Hours,” already fits the bill; in fur coat, veil, and pearls, she is helped through a gridlock of cars, in a hurry to get to the lawyers’ office, where her divorce will be finalized. In the end, she decides to halt the proceedings and give love another go. Next came “High Noon,” which begins with Kelly as a newlywed, worried—and no wonder, when you see the varmints whom her husband must confront—that she is set to become an instant widow. Then we get “Mogambo,” in which Kelly must tamp down her attraction to a hunter and safari guide (Clark Gable) in favor of a stolid husband; “The Country Girl,” in which her marriage is imperilled by drink; “The Bridges at Toko-Ri,” in which she sees her husband off to war and death; “Rear Window,” where her dearest wish is to win Jimmy Stewart; and “To Catch a Thief,” in which she is pretty much pimped by her own mama.

And so to “The Swan,” where we find Kelly’s Princess Alexandra, a noblewoman in a sunlit European land, in the lull before the First World War, torn between a royal tutor (Louis Jourdan), glossy and flame-hearted, and the dry, balding prince (Alec Guinness) for whom she is intended. “Your whole life, your whole upbringing, has been devoted to just one thing: to make you fit to be a queen,” Alexandra’s mother tells her. Temptations are resisted; duty calls, and the happy couple—or, at least, the correct couple—get hitched. “The Swan” wrapped in December, 1955. On December 28th, Prince Rainier proposed to Kelly, and what one longs to know is: Had she planned what kind of groom she would snare in the end, and, perhaps unconsciously, angled her choice of movies in that direction, or did the matchmaking simply prove—to a world thirsty for illusion, only a decade after the Second World War—that movies could still come true?

To that last question, “High Society,” which was filmed during Kelly’s engagement, is a tarter response than its reputation might suggest, with Kelly, playing the ex-wife of Bing Crosby, veering back toward him on the eve of her second marriage. (And enjoying a bracing dip with Frank Sinatra along the way.) It is customary to denigrate “High Society” by comparing it with its parent, “The Philadelphia Story,” but I knew the child first, when I was a child, too, and nothing can undo the movies that we are led to in our youth, or the skein of impressions that they leave. I remember my mother explaining to me, drawing on who knows what store of apocrypha, that Prince Rainier had watched the scene of his wife-to-be, droopy with drink, being lugged through the moonlight in Sinatra’s arms, both of them in towelling robes, and that His Serene Highness had bridled at the outrage and declared that her works be outlawed, henceforth and on pain of death, within the bounds of his kingdom. This struck me as precisely how a jealous monarch should behave, and the twin sense of Kelly as both sovereign and subversive was planted in my brain. I was told how remarkable it was that Kelly had deigned to sing, and therefore how natural it was that her yacht-borne duet with Crosby, “True Love,” should have sold a million copies on record. She fondles the end of his squeezebox as they harmonize, but that, I suspect, went over my head, as did their bizarre exchange beside the swimming pool: