The Official Grace Kelly Fan Club

In the mid-‘50s you could carry around a Kelly green business card that signified that you were a member of the Official Grace Kelly Fan Club.

via darlingdawnvintage

You’d think, perhaps, that Grace, who exploded onto the scene in 1954 with an astonishing six movies released that year—four of them classics, two of them forgettable—would only gain a fan club after Hitchcock and The Country Girl and an Oscar came into her life, but you’d be wrong: Grace’s fan club was formed in 1952, after the bittest of bit parts in Fourteen Hours.

In fact, its president didn’t even know Grace’s name when she saw the movie that led to its formation! She had to write to 20th Century Fox to find out who that blonde actress was. Kudos to her for seeing immediately what it took others years to discover.

Grace Kelly, the scion of a wealthy Philadelphia family of Olympians and bricklayers, had wanted to be a serious actress since she was a teenager. She worked in New York City, appearing on stage and live television productions, and booked her first role in 1951’s Fourteen Hours after its director had seen her on TV.

The role did barely anything to move the needle of her career. If it played any part in securing her next role in High Noon, it was basically insignificant—the story is that director Fred Zimmerman was shown a still photograph of Grace and her beauty was enough to get a meeting.

But it helps to have the press on your side. With that one small credit, Grace secured a spot in Photoplay’s ‘Choose Your Star’ feature in the summer of 1951. Her caption: “A beautiful blonde, the right picture might very well put her over. Current, Fourteen Hours.”

In Donald Spoto’s 2010 biography of Grace, High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly, he touches upon the formation of Grace’s fan club:

“There was one unforeseen consequence of Grace’s movie debut. An Oregon teenager named Gene Gilbert saw Fourteen Hours and founded a Grace Kelly Fan Club that within a year had spread like the proverbial wildfire across the country. Gene kept Grace informed of new local chapters and members, and Grace responded politely. Privately, she though this was terrifically amusing, as if she had entered a political race. After she opened the letters from Oregon, she would announce to friends, ‘We’ve got a new girl in Washington [or wherever], I think she’s ours!’”

via worthpoint

Gene Gilbert would tell the Eugene Register-Guard newspaper in 1956 that “Grace played a wife who was getting a divorce. It was practically a walk-on part, but I just knew she was going to be a star.”

The ‘Another Grace Kelly’ Tumblr blog found the full article, written in January 1956, weeks after Grace’s engagement to Prince Rainier was announced. In it, Gene talks about starting the club, watching it grow, and the uncertainty of what a future in Monaco meant for its members.

Gene shared that the Grace Kelly Fan Club started in Oregon with a handful of members. But when Grace took over Hollywood, its membership ballooned to over 500 people in 46 states, plus Hawaii and Alaska, which didn’t join the United States until 1959; as well as the Canal Zone and a dozen foreign countries, which weren’t named.

There’s this tea, too, about a splinter club in New York: “We’ve had a lot of trouble with one club in Brooklyn.” But she needn’t have worried: Gene’s club was the only officially recognized Grace Kelly Fan Club.

You’d think fan clubs might just be a fun thing to be a part of, but ‘stan culture’, in a way, has always existed. Gene travelled to Hollywood in 1955 for the International Association of Fan Clubs convention, she said, and wore white gloves (a Grace trademark). “When they saw we were wearing white gloves, everybody said, ‘Look, Grace Kelly fans.’ I’m supposed to be a big wheel in the fan club world.”

Here’s how Gene started the Grace Kelly Fan Club: she wrote to Grace and asked permission to set it up. Apparently, this was the thing, no matter which actor or actress you were a fan of. You’d write to their studios, the studios would share the letters with their stars, and it would be up to them if you could start a fan club if they didn’t already have one. If they already had one, you’d be directed to join it.

So Gene wrote to Grace, she said, and Grace agreed to let her start the only official club. “[Grace] feels it gives all her fans the same advantage. We sent her a bunch of membership applications and she sends them out to people who want to start chapters.”

Being the first official Grace Kelly fan also lent her extra benefits: when she was in Hollywood for the convention, she and fellow member/vice president Ardene Myrmo, got to visit Grace at her home. “She told us to come right out, and we were there about two hours. She was wonderful.”

To become a member of the Grace Kelly Fan Club, you paid $1 a year in dues and you were issued an official Kelly green card that was valid for the year. You’d also get copies of the Grace Kelly Journal and bulletins about breaking news in Grace’s life—like her engagement to Prince Rainier.

Gene said that most members were teenagers, like her, but there were also adults and servicemen among the membership.

The Grace Kelly Journal was grassroots initiative of the Oregon chapter: they wrote all the articles and drew all the portraits, but it was published professionally and sent around the world to members. According to Gene, the journal featured poetry, stories about Grace, how to add to Grace’s publicity, and contests like ‘I Like Grace Kelly because…’ where the prize was an autographed photo of the actress.

via desiree-clary

When Grace and Prince Rainier announced their engagement in early 1956, Gene organized a congratulatory card drive: members would send their messages to Gene, and she planned to compile a book to give to Grace. She received 42 letters in one day and joked “I thought I was going to have to quit school.”

I couldn’t find anything about what happened to the Grace Kelly Fan Club post-1956, but Gene seemed to be uncertain about its future. She seemed hopeful that perhaps the club could continue if she retired, saying, “It’s a little awkward. If Grace is going to quit the screen we’ll go along with her. It will be up to her.”

But after she became Princess Grace, the separation from her former life came into sharper focus. No longer was she a Hollywood superstar, in Prince Rainier’s eyes, at least: she was the dignified Serene Princess of Monaco.

In Once Upon a Time: Behind the Fairy Tale of Princess Grace and Prince Rainier, J. Randy Taraborrelli quotes Virginia Darcy—who’d been Grace’s hairdresser at MGM, and who visited the principality occasionally to help Grace get styled—telling a story of sorting through the Princess’s mail.

Darcy recalled: “Grace said that Rainier wanted to have any mail that asked for photographs separated from the bunch because he viewed that as fan mail. ‘No fan mail,’ he had said. ‘That part of her life is over.’ So she asked me to put the official mail in one basket and fan mail in another.”

I’d love to know what became of Gene Gilbert and the Grace Kelly Fan Club after Grace married.

Did she get to travel over to Monaco and sit in the Saint Nicholas Cathedral in Monte Carlo on April 19, 1956, reporting on what she saw for the next issue of the Grace Kelly Journal? Did she ever give interviews after Princess Caroline, Prince Albert and Princess Stephanie were born? Was she still a fan in 1982 when Grace tragically died?

If anyone has any leads on the Grace Kelly Fan Club post-1956, share them in the comments! And if you have any Grace Kelly Fan Club cards, like the one pictured above, that you’d be willing to sell, name your price!