Once Upon a Time: Behind the Fairy Tale of Princess Grace and Prince Rainier

From master storyteller J. Randy Taraborrelli comes the powerful and moving story of one of royalty's most secretive families. Grace Kelly was swept away when the handsome Prince Rainier, a man she barely knew, asked for her hand in marriage. After a series of relationships with married co-stars, she was exhausted by the show-business lifestyle. If she married Rainier, she would be more than just a movie star, she would be Her Serene Royal Highness Princess Grace. Once in the palace, however, Grace found herself trapped in a fairy tale of her own making. Forced to make sacrifices that cut deeply into the core of who she was as a woman, she would then surrender her desires and ambitions for her spouse and her children. Grace and Rainier may have been royalty, but they were also husband and wife, and parents--and, as such, just as vulnerable to the conflicts that can contaminate any household. Drawing upon hundreds of exclusive interviews with family and friends, ONCE UPON A TIME portrays its subjects with passion and sympathy, revealing Grace, Rainier, Caroline, Albert, and Stephanie in ways both startling and compelling.

She was an Oscar-winning Hollywood actress; he the scion of Europe's longest reigning monarchy. The marriage of movie star Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier Grimaldi of Monaco (a romance ironically spawned by a chance, MGM publicity-driven photo op) was one of the 20th century's most enchanting fables come to life. Yet, in veteran Hollywood biographer J. Randy Taraborelli's retelling, (the first comprehensive chronicle of the royal couple's romance and quarter-century reign) their day-to-day struggle with romantic inertia and a legacy of familial dysfunction cast their fairy tale existence in a bittersweet light long before the 1982 automobile accident that took Grace's life.

Taraborelli's struggle to walk the fine line between the respectful biography he intends and the salacious, tell-all exposes he decries makes for occasionally awkward passages. However, the author eventually succeeds in giving his royal subjects--and the ongoing conflicts with their respective families--a familiar, all-too-human scale. --Jerry McCulley