Grace Kelly was idolised as the cool and classy paragon of female elegance. That was certainly part of it, but the reality was rather more messy.
The blonde bombshell was notorious in Hollywood for sleeping with her co-stars, hardly unusual then or now.
But such was her reputation that one star’s wife even drove him to and from the studio every day to prevent any chance of a dalliance. And she broke another lover’s heart the night of her Oscar victory by bedding the Best Actor winner.
Frank Sinatra was equally infamous for seducing fans, friends and co-stars and had more going for him than that spectacular voice and piercing blue eyes.
His wife Ava Gardner famously said: “He is only 110 pounds, but 10 pounds of it is c..k”
Sinatra married first wife Nancy in 1939 but by the early 1940s was already notorious for his conquests in his early big band days. Bandleader Tommy Dorsey remembered: “He was no matinée idol. He was a skinny kid with big ears. Yet what he did to women was something awful.”
As his film career also began to flourish, Sinatra began to bed a succession of starlets and major Silver Screen goddesses from Lana Turner and Angie Dickinson to Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland.
Sinatra told his friend, Joey D’Orazio. “I can have every dame I want. I just can’t help myself. I don’t want to hurt Nancy. I just don’t want to sleep with her no more.”
Sinatra told D’Orazio in the early days: “We’re animals, each and every one of us, that’s what we are, and we’re damn proud of it, too. I’m just looking to make it with as many women as I can.”
His saxophonist Harry Schuchman added: “He had more broads around than you ever saw. I used to sit there and watch the gals with Frank and think, ‘What do they see in him? He’s such a skinny little guy.'”
Sinatra’s friend and actor Gianni Russo said: “He was just a womaniser. How can I say this politely? He was well-endowed, so he didn’t leave these women wanting anything.”
The idol’s valet George Jacobs revealed in his book Mr S that his boss actually had special underwear made to contain and conceal his size in public.
Jacobs was with Sinatra from 1958-1968 and said his employer also confided to him that Grace Kelly was his “dream girl.”
The two stars worked together on High Society from January to March of 1956 and Jacobs confirmed that they “dated.”
Kelly was equally voracious and was reported to be having affairs with actors William Holden and Clark Gable at the same time, as well as David Niven, who once declared she was the best sex he had ever had.
High Society co-star Bing Crosby, meanwhile, had dallied with Kelly two years before during their film The Country Wife, which won her a Best Actress Oscar. He’d been left devastated on the night of the 1955 Oscars to visit her hotel room and find her in bed with Marlon Brando.
A year later, Grace was married to Prince Rainier III of Monaco on April 19, 1956. However, it was rumoured that she remained close to Old Blue Eyes.
However, in True Grace: The Life And Times Of An American Princess, Hollywood biographer Wendy Leigh claimed her ongoing marital affairs were a direct reaction to her husband’s own indiscretions, sending her back to Sinatra and even Brando.
“I know my husband has affairs with other women,” Grace once confided to her hairdresser. “That’s very frustrating to me and makes me very unhappy.”
Leigh claimed that Sinatra and Princess Grace’s renewed dalliance lasted for years and they met at a secret, secluded French villa in Cap Ferrat, just along the coast from her husband’s Principality of Monaco.
It is certain that in public, at least, the pair maintained a close friendship. They were pictured together at official events across the following decades right up until her untimely death on this day, September 14, in 1982.
