‍Grace Kelly with one of her lovers, star William Holden

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‍FILM MAKER Alfred Hitchcock said she was “sex on the screen with the face of a saint.” She was the star who became a princess. She was the legendary Grace Kelly, an actress with a voracious sexual appetite that led her to sleeping with the best Hollywood could give.

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‍In Tinsel Town she was described as ‘fire under the ice’.

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‍Her lovers were mostly her co-stars,  including Gary Cooper, William Holden, Clark Gable, Bing Crosby, Aly Khan and Ray Milland.

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‍Frank Sinatra, another lover, said of her: “She was the most incredible human being I’ve ever known. Everything she touched came alive.”

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‍During the filming of the movie ‘Rear Window’, James Stewart’s wife Gloria was so paranoid that co-star Kelly would seduce him, because she had a reputation for sleeping with her co-stars, that she followed him everywhere.

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‍But Hollywood loved her. The public loved her. At first, they didn’t know about her wild affairs, said the LA Times. She was known as a lovely lass, a homely sort of girl. But slowly some newspapers were picking up on her steamy nights, and they began to brand her ‘a husband thief’.

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‍Nevertheless, when she died, she was mourned across the world as a “screen goddess” who morphed into a devoted royal, leaving a lasting mark on fashion and philanthropy. But were her wild affairs still going on during wedlock?

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‍Or did they stop after Grace Patricia Kelly of Philadelphia met the stocky, moustachioed Prince Rainier of Monaco and was parachuted into royalty by marrying him in 1955 and retiring to the glamorous sovereign state?

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‍Over 30 million TV viewers watched the wedding. The new princess wore an exquisite ivory wedding gown adorned with lace and thousands of hand-sewn pearls.

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‍But it wasn’t long before Hollywood writers said she felt trapped in a “gilded cage” after being told of Rainier’s own love affairs. It led her to commit adultery with stars like Sinatra.

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‍Things went wrong from the start. Hollywood biographer, Wendy Leigh, claimed Rainier had three mistresses within months of the wedding, which left Grace humiliated and unhappy. Her royal life was no longer a fairy tale.

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‍Star Marlon Brando comforted her, and gossip columnists were quick to put one and one together and make a twosome. They had met at an Academy Awards dinner after Grace had famously turned down the role as co-star in ‘On the Waterfront’.

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‍However, Grace and Rainier went on to have three children Caroline, Albert and Stephanie and the new Princess’s work focused on children and the arts. In 1964, she established the Princess Grace fund to support local artisans and threw herself into her royal role.

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‍But she was still unhappy and by 1976, she was living part-time in Paris, marking a separation from the prince, though they remained married. But rumours leaked home of discreet affairs in Europe.

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‍At the time, Grace reflected on her marriage: “I had been through several unhappy romances, and although I had become a star, I was feeling lost and confused. I didn’t want to drift into my 30s without knowing where I was going in my personal life,” she said.

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‍In 1982, at the age of 52, Grace was driving her 17-year-old daughter Stephanie to Paris where she was due at school. Unusually, they decided not to use a chauffeur for the trip and Grace was driving. She took a sharp left turn on a steep mountain road, sending the vehicle tumbling down a 120ft slope.

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‍While Stephanie escaped with minor injuries, Grace suffered a brain haemorrhage and never recovered. Her husband had her life support system turned off.

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‍The Telegraph reported that she left just $10,000 and a small rundown cottage in Ireland. Conspiracy stories were rife. Newspapers asked the question about what really happened that day. But Prince Rainer III chalked it up to the media trying to make headlines.

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‍OLD NEWS IN BRIEF

‍Birth and carriage

‍Hackney carriages first became available in 1625 at the Maypole in the Strand. By 1662, 400 licenses, each costing five pounds were granted and charges laid down of 18 pence for the first hour and 12 pence thereafter. From Fleet St to Westminster cost 12 pence.

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‍Hot metal

‍During the Great Fire of London, the lead roof of St Paul’s cathedral melted and gushed out of the rain spouts, forming a molten river that flowed down Ludgate Hill into Fleet Street.

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‍‘Ale and hearty

‍Water was rarely safe to drink in the cities and ale or beer was the usual way to quench thirst in the 17th century. By 1750 there were 50,000 ale houses in England, one for every 100 inhabitants. At that time there were exactly 19 recorded taverns along Fleet Street, alongside a much larger number of smaller, unlicensed backyard drinking dens.

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‍DAY FLESH RAINED FROM THE

‍SKY OVER A KENTUCKY FARM

‍Scientists examine the meat that fell from the sky

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‍I’VE HEARD the phrase: “It’s raining cats and dogs” and even “raining men” from the song, but never “it’s raining meat!” But that is what happened in March, 1876, according to the New York Daily Herald.

‍It was the day of the Flesh Shower.

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‍On the afternoon of March 3, Mrs Rebecca Crouch was in her garden in Bath, County, Kentucky, making soap.

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‍It was a typical day. The sky was clear and it was warm with no sign of rain, until something fell on her head. Surely it couldn’t be a hailstone? she thought as she looked up and then down at the ground … where she saw mouth-size chunks of meat.

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‍“The meat was everywhere, lots of it,” she told the newspaper reporter later.

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‍“The shower of flesh lasted about an hour. I said to my grandson, who was the only person in the yard with me at the time, ‘What is that falling, Allen?’ He looked up and said, ‘Oh grandma, I think it’s snowing!’

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‍“I walked around and saw a large piece meat strike the ground behind me, with a snapping like noise when it struck.”

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‍The flesh varied from the size of a pea to that of a human finger, she said. “The largest piece was the size of my hand!”

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‍When the newspaper broke the story neighbours and tourists flocked to Crouch Farm to see the aftermath of “one of the most singular and wonderful phenomena to have ever occurred in the modern world.”

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‍But of the hundreds of visitors no one was entirely certain what the meat-like substance was.

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‍Mrs Crouch described it as looking “gristly, as if it had been torn from the throat of some animal.” Two men brave enough to taste the meat declared it to be “mutton or venison.” A third claimed it was from a bear and very palatable.

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‍The news spread nationwide. Newspapers called the phenomena: ‘The Carnal Rain; The Rain of Flesh; The Flesh Fall; The Air Meat and the Kentucky Meat Shower.’

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‍But was it really meat and how did it get there?

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‍Samples of the flesh were gathered, preserved in alcohol, and sent to various scientists for analysis. One professor initially proposed was that it was dried fog spawn. Another that it was Nostoc, a type of cyanobacteria.

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‍The answer in the end was animal muscle fibre, cartilage, and lung tissue disgorged by a flock of buzzards, in other words, bird vomit. The birds were known to empty their stomachs in flight to be lighter when they need to make a quick escape.

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‍Mrs Crouch said: “The Lord only knows what it was. All I know about it is that it came from some place above my head. And a lot goes on up there.”

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‍GOLD RAIDERS SWOOP BY TAXI

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‍JUST before dawn on March 6, 1935, four men arrived at Croydon Aerodrome by taxi. The driver was told to wait for them as they were “only here for a quick business transaction.”

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‍The men went straight to the strongroom with their carpet bags and a set of keys they had copied from a bribed airport worker. Thirty minutes later they returned to the taxi with £2million at today’s value in gold, dollars and sovereigns in their luggage, the London Evening Standard reported. And the taxi driver didn’t have a clue. He dropped them in the centre of town and they didn’t tip.

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‍The heist of the gold, on route to the continent, made news in the national Press for weeks. The gang were later named as Cecil Swanland, Silvio ‘Shonk’ Mazzarda, John O’Brien and a mysterious figure referred to as ‘Little Harry’.

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‍Swanland was arrested and sentenced to seven years of penal servitude, receiving his fate ‘with a smile’. He had something to look forward to when he came out. For the others got off and no trace of the gold was ever found.

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‍TERRY MANNERS

‍1 June 2026

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