Once-married-then-frustrated-actress Grace Kelly once found it acceptable as a Princess to read poetry.
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"With the actors Richard Kiley and Richard Pasco, she participated in "The American Heritage," prepared In honor of the U.s. Bicentennial. Grace recited poems by Anne Bradstreet, Carl Sandburg, Ogden Nash, T.S. Eliot,and Robert Frost. (Originally staged at the Edinburgh International Festival, the program played later in Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Princeton, Harvard, and Washington D.C.
"The staged poetry reading continued sporadically from 1976 through 1981 and were a source of great pleasure for Grace and her audiences. She canceled them early in 1982 when she suffered the first of a series of severe headaches that seemed to be migraines but were not. No cause or remedy could be found, except that her blood pressure was abnormally high, and she could not tolerate the side effects of most antihypertensive medications then available to her. The headaches came and went, but her blood pressure was not well controlled. These ailments were the first signs that she was suffering form vascular disease, just like several members of her family.
C 2009 Donald Spoto
Harmony Books
