Sex & Relationships

The lady is a vamp

Prim and proper is the image we all have of Grace Kelly, those high-necklines and white gloves holding together her poise as queen of the screen and princess of Monaco. It’s enough to make the modern girl ask: “What would Grace do?” The answer, to get ahead in life, love and in Hollywood, is well, anything.

In 1947, at the age of 17, Grace Kelly enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where her acting coach was a 28-year-old man named Don Richardson. She barely knew him when he stopped by for a cup of coffee, and she came out of her bedroom to greet him completely nude. Her sexy hello worked: The two went on to have a short but passionate romance, as discussed in the book “What Would Grace Do?” by Gina McKinnon that claims to help you navigate life’s dilemmas using lessons learned from the queen of elegance herself.

Turns out Richardson wasn’t the first or the last in a long line of suitors that would make Taylor Swift blush: Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Bing Crosby, Tony Curtis and more. It seems Princess Proper’s rise to the top involved behavior we would expect from today’s Kardashians and Lohans. In fact, McKinnon says that some called her “a sexual predator with a voracious appetite for passion.”

Time to get what you want, Grace style.

Don’t fear the creepster.

Most women would probably steer clear of the lecherous advances of a huge chunk of man like Alfred Hitchcock. But Kelly knew she could reap benefits from the attraction without going all the way.

She learned his tricks, such as shooting murder scenes like love scenes and love scenes like murder scenes and how to use a Super 8 camera. Meanwhile, she bedded people under Hitchcock’s nose, like Ray Milland of “Dial M for Murder.”

Gold dig.

We ain’t saying Kelly was a gold digger, but she certainly wasn’t messing with no broke royalty. Her marriage to Prince Rainier III of Monaco was not the storybook romance it seemed. She had to offer up her own dowry, of $2 million [supplied by her wealthy family]. But she was rewarded with her royal status, and a 10.47-carat, emerald-cut diamond ring.

“Sometimes duty (including duty to yourself) should take precedence over desire,” Kelly said. Get down girl, go’head get down!

“Her advice would be to look for love in a pragmatic way because ultimately, you are signing a contract,” McKinnon says.

“She was queen of negotiations when it came to her career as well,” she adds.

Although this may seem like a dreary approach to marriage, McKinnon says that Kelly may have accepted it because she saw how quickly love and lust faded in her other relationships.

Keep ’em guessing.

Was Kelly a stylish screen siren or a sex kitten with ulterior motives?

She may have been both, with a bipolar prsonality.

Hitchcock called her sexuality “a ‘snow-covered volcano,’ or, as he put it in another, more direct way, Kelly was the most promiscuous woman he’d ever seen,” McKinnon writes. “In middle age, she had befriended a sprinkling of younger men who she referred to as her ‘toy boys.’ ”

But she was also considered a “doting, attentive and affectionate mother to her children,” and said she’d like to be remembered as “a decent human being, and . . . caring.”

Prince Rainier said she “put on a mask when necessary.”

So Kelly was as complex as today’s tabloid queens and she certainly had something in common with them: She loved the attention.

— Additional reporting by Kate Storey