Who wouldn’t want to read Grace Kelly's love letters?
Whether you’re in a relationship or not, few could resist the temptation of reading a legendary film star’s love letters.
The famed Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles has acquired the correspondence between Grace Kelly and her then-boyfriend, the designer Oleg Cassini, written in 1954 while the star was staying at the hotel during promotion for The Country Girl – a movie she would later win an Oscar for. She slept at the same hotel after the ceremony in a suite that has since been named after her.
Addressing to the letters to her “darling”, she writes: “How lovely it was to come home and find your flowers. We are watching Charles Boyer on the television, and as much as I love him, I can only think of you.”
She later tells her boyfriend that she thinks of him “constantly”. “The few minutes we talk each night are so wonderful for me, but I’m sorry I sound like an idiot... I love you.”
In another letter, we see Cassini become jealous over Kelly’s friendship with Bing Crosby. “You have upset me so that I could die,” she writes dramatically. “I just don’t understand your attitude.” She compares his behaviour to a “school boy”, stating that a group dinner with friends is nothing to feel jealous about.
“I have no interest in anyone but you but I shouldn’t have to explain,” she says adding that she has few friends in Hollywood so shouldn’t be expected to end her friendship with Crosby. Kelly does also admit that Bing was in love with her, “but there are many people that he feels that way about”.
She goes onto say that the studio is keeping her busy and that she misses Cassini “terribly”. The designer, who also dressed Jackie Kennedy, was responsible for Kelly’s elegant look, but this wasn’t enough to win over her family. Despite the two getting engaged, the actress was forced to call off the engagement to marry Prince Rainier upon her parents’ wishes.
Kelly later said she regretted the decision. “Do you realise if my mother hadn’t been so difficult about Oleg Cassini, I probably would have married him?” she was quoted as saying. “How many wonderful roles I might have played by now? How might my life had turned out? That one decision [to marry Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956] changed my entire future.”
For Cassini, it was simple: “We were in love. We were engaged to be married. That is the truth. No more, no less.”
