Afterlives of the Rich and Famous Read online

  He also wants Michelle to promise their daughter that he will find his way to her when he comes back. She’ll be eleven years old when he’s born, and he’ll reenter her life as an “oddly familiar stranger” when she’s in her early thirties. He’s looking forward to it already.

  Grace Kelly

  She carried herself like royalty and became a princess. Her name was Grace Patricia Kelly, and she came into the world on November 12, 1929, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the third of four children born to Brendan “Jack” Kelly and his wife, Margaret. Grace’s determination to decide what she wanted and go after it came from her hardworking, ambitious parents. Her mother was the first female head of the University of Pennsylvania physical education department, and her father was an Olympic gold medalist in sculling (rowing) who returned home to become a self-made millionaire as a contractor and owner of a brick business.

  Grace knew from childhood that she wanted to be an actress. Her natural beauty made her a popular local child model and performer. After an education at the finest private schools in Philadelphia, she auditioned her way into the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. She modeled to help support herself and finally won her first professional acting job, in a 1949 Broadway production of August Strindberg’s The Father.

  Television and Grace’s career were in their prolific infancy at exactly the same time, and Grace was cast in almost sixty live television productions in New York before she happily gave in to the lure of Hollywood and headed west. Her first film role was a small part in 1951’s Fourteen Hours, directed by the esteemed Henry Hathaway. It wasn’t an important enough role to create any excitement on Grace’s behalf, so she returned to theater and television work. She was performing a play in Colorado in 1951 when she was surprised by a telegram from producer Stanley Kramer, offering her a role in High Noon, starring Gary Cooper and Lloyd Bridges. High Noon was a success, and the career of Grace Kelly was on its way. Next came the offer of a seven-year contract with MGM and a part in its upcoming Clark Gable–Ava Gardner film Mogambo. It was a prestigious project and a hit for both MGM and Grace—she received her first Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her work in Mogambo and won the 1953 Golden Globe Award in that same category.

  Her talent and her virginal, pristine beauty caught the eye of director Alfred Hitchcock, and he cast her in his 1953 Ray Milland thriller Dial M for Murder, which elevated her to stardom and created a lasting professional relationship between Hitchcock and Grace. She’d finished her next film, The Bridges of Toko-Ri with William Holden, in 1954, when she received a telegram from Hitchcock confirming her appointment with Edith Head, Hollywood’s most prestigious costume designer, to begin her wardrobe fittings for his next film, Rear Window. Despite the fact that Hitchcock had never formally offered her a role in the film, Grace promptly turned down a role opposite Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, kept her appointment with Edith Head, and costarred with James Stewart in Rear Window, another critical and box-office success for Alfred Hitchcock and Grace Kelly.

  Next came The Country Girl, in which she reunited with William Holden and added Bing Crosby to her list of costars and fans. Both Grace Kelly and Judy Garland were the talk of the town that year, Grace for her stunning performance in The Country Girl and Judy for her triumphant performance in A Star Is Born. They both won Golden Globes for their performances, and they were both nominated for Academy Awards, with Judy Garland being the odds-on favorite to win. After Grace won instead, Judy Garland was quoted as saying, “I didn’t appreciate Grace Kelly taking off her makeup and walking away with my Oscar.”

  After a box-office failure called Green Fire, Grace was off to France for her third and final Hitchcock film, To Catch a Thief, with Cary Grant, with whom she developed a close friendship and probable attraction that lasted for the rest of their lives. When asked to name his favorite costar in all his decades of film work, he replied simply and immediately, “Grace Kelly.”

  Grace was delighted by the invitation to head the American delegation at the April 1955 Cannes Film Festival and travel to the Palace of Monaco for a photo session with Prince Rainier III, Monaco’s ruling sovereign. She kept it to herself that, after she returned to the United States to shoot The Swan with Alec Guinness and High Society with Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, she and the prince began an active correspondence that continued until his arrival in America in December 1955.

  It was widely rumored that Rainier had come to the United States in search of a wife, for the most unromantic reason: according to a decades-old treaty, if Prince Rainier failed to produce an heir, Monaco would become a part of France again. For her part, Grace was twenty-seven, with all the career success she could ever have hoped for and ready for marriage, if she could find a man who met with her parents’ approval.

  Shortly after his arrival in America, Prince Rainier III met with Grace and her parents. Three days later, Rainier proposed. The Kelly family provided the prince with the required $2 million dowry, and the world excitedly began to prepare for the “wedding of the century.” On April 18, 1956, in the palace throne room of Monaco, in front of six hundred guests and thirty million television viewers throughout Europe, Grace Kelly became Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco in a real-life fairy tale.

  Immediately following the wedding, Prince Rainier banned all Grace Kelly films from the theaters in Monaco, and Grace never accepted another film role. Her first official act as Princess of Monaco was the founding of a nonprofit organization called AMADE Mondiale, dedicated to the well-being of children throughout the world. She also created the Princess Grace Foundation for the benefit of local artisans and held an annual Christmas party for local orphans. But her most important, highly publicized creations were her three children: Princess Caroline, born on January 23, 1957; Prince Albert II, born on March 15, 1958; and Princess Stephanie, born on February 1, 1965.

  On September 13, 1982, Princess Grace was driving along a narrow mountain road, returning her daughter Stephanie to Monaco from their country home, when her car swerved off the road and careened down the rocky cliff. While Princess Stephanie survived the crash, Princess Grace died the following day at the age of fifty-two without ever regaining consciousness. A subsequent autopsy indicated that moments before Princess Grace lost control of the car, she suffered a catastrophic stroke, which was ruled to be the underlying cause of the accident.

  Four hundred guests, including Cary Grant and Diana, Princess of Wales, attended the funeral, which was broadcast to an estimated hundred million viewers around the world. Princess Grace was buried in Monaco in the royal family vault, and Prince Rainier, who never remarried, was buried beside her when he died in 2005.

  From Francine

  Grace was too much in shock from the suddenness of her violent death to notice the large crowd that gathered to welcome her Home. She virtually fell into the arms of her father, who comforted her as best he could before he and her Spirit Guide, named Cordelia, gently took her to a cocooning chamber, while I’m told she repeatedly whispered, “Stephanie could have been killed. Stephanie could have been killed.” She was reassured that her daughter Stephanie was going to be fine, but she was still so stunned and distraught that she was given the blessing of being cocooned for almost six years in your time. She emerged fully healed, radiant and eager to proceed to the Scanning Machine and then back to her thrilling life here.

  She found her life themes of Infallibility and Winner to have been much more of a challenge than she’d anticipated when she chose them. But in the greatest possible overview of her last incarnation, which she insists really will be her last, she feels that the most important purpose she was on earth to fulfill was to bring her three children into the world—“not for my husband, not for the future of Monaco, but simply for the unique, extraordinary people they are.” (She wants Albert to know, incidentally, that she always knew that he would ascend to the throne with dignity, and she’s watching over him and his sisters “every moment of every
day.”)

  Given a choice, she says she would absolutely have continued her film career after marrying Rainier. She missed it terribly—the stimulation, the challenge, the sense of accomplishment, and above all the dear friends “who kept on making wonderful movies while I watched from the palace.” She quickly adds that her years as Princess Grace were painfully lonely, “but leaving would have meant losing my children, and that was unthinkable.” But now she looks back from the perspective of Home and realizes that she had no one to blame but herself for her loneliness. “I was blessed with so much. I was privileged, right from the beginning. It was a thrilling whirlwind of a life for the most part. But—no excuses—I devoted virtually no time at all to nourishing myself spiritually. I’m not referring to my charitable work, which came from my heart and was deeply important to me. I’m talking about all those hours alone when I felt empty and kept looking outside of myself to fill the void rather than inside. I enjoyed other people’s company far more than I enjoyed my own, and I found more depth in other people than I found in myself. The people I quietly envied were those who’d learned to be enough for themselves. It was an art I never took the time and trouble to master, and it would have cured my loneliness. And that was no one else’s responsibility but mine.”

  Grace is making up for lost time on the Other Side. She’s hardly cloistered, but she chooses to live alone in a Georgian style house that she says “feels like home.” She studies both theology and spirituality and will begin training soon to become an Orientator. She’s also resumed her research work, but has changed her focus from medicine to the forensic sciences, a new passion she neither explains nor discusses. She loves going to the theater with friends, but has no interest in performing, and she’s an accomplished equestrienne.

  She mentions in passing that she and Prince Rainier are perfectly pleasant on the rare occasions when they see each other, and she wants their children to know that they’re both watching over them and cherishing them.

  John Kennedy Jr.

  His image is crystallized in the memory of a nation grieving the death of its president—an innocent three-year-old boy stepping away from his mother and his uncle to stand at attention and salute the American flag on his father’s casket. At that moment John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr., the first child born to a president-elect, became “our” child, beyond politics and conspiracy theories, just a baby who’d suffered a loss he couldn’t possibly understand.

  He was born on November 25, 1960, in Washington, D.C., sixteen days after his father, John F. Kennedy, was elected the thirty-fifth president of the United States. He was the second child of John and Jacqueline Kennedy—his sister, Caroline, was born three years earlier, and his younger brother, Patrick, born in 1963, died just two days after his birth.

  After the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, Jacqueline moved with Caroline and John to a Manhattan apartment on the Upper East Side in an effort to shield them from the glaring media spotlight destined to follow the two beautiful children of the idealized “Camelot” first family. Tragedy hit again, on June 6, 1968, when John’s Uncle Bobby, Robert Kennedy, who’d become his father figure after the death of JFK, was assassinated as well, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after winning the California primary in his bid for the presidency. Four months later John’s mother, Jacqueline, married Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, a marriage that lasted until Onassis’s death in 1975.

  John, in the meantime, attended New York’s Collegiate School, then graduated from Phillips Andover Academy. His curiosity and interest in his education intensified in his late teens, taking him to Brown University to study American history, to Guatemala to literally lend a hand after a devastating earthquake there, and to Africa, where he studied environmental issues and worked with a mining firm in Johannesburg. His extraordinary good looks inevitably led to a brief turn at acting in several Brown University plays, but his passions ultimately guided him elsewhere. After graduating from Brown with a bachelor’s degree in history in 1982, he traveled to India and studied at the University of Delhi, then returned to the United States and devoted his time to such Kennedy family projects as the East Harlem School at Exodus House and his own creation, Reaching Up, a program to improve treatment for the disabled. He also worked for the New York City Office of Business Development and the 42nd Street Development Corporation before entering New York University Law School in 1986.

  Rumors of John’s potential entrance into the political arena spread like wildfire when, at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, his photogenic, charismatic, movingly articulate appearance to introduce his uncle, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, became the talk of pundits across the country. Instead, he graduated from law school with a J.D. in 1989, passed the bar exam on his third try, and became an assistant prosecutor in the office of New York district attorney Robert Morgenthau, a position he successfully held for four years, winning all six of the cases he prosecuted.

  In 1995 John took on the Herculean task of cofounding a new magazine, a glossy monthly called George, whose slogan promised “Not politics as usual.” He wrote essays and editorials for the magazine himself, occasionally even targeting members of his own family. While it wasn’t a blazing success, George did hold on until 2001, two years after John’s death.

  His social life was a constant source of media fascination and every bit as active as expected for People magazine’s 1988 “Sexiest Man Alive.” He was romantically linked with Daryl Hannah, Julia Roberts, Madonna, Brooke Shields, and Sarah Jessica Parker, to name a few, before he finally proposed to publicist Carolyn Bessette. They were married on September 21, 1996, on Cumberland Island, Georgia, in a private ceremony that managed to elude the press and at which John’s sister, Caroline, served as the matron of honor.

  On July 16, 1999, John, his wife, Carolyn, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, were en route to Martha’s Vineyard in a private single-engine plane with John as its pilot, ultimately headed to the wedding of John’s cousin Rory in Hyannisport, Massachusetts. The plane failed to arrive as scheduled, massive search parties were dispatched, and finally, on July 21, the bodies of John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, and his sister-in-law were recovered in the waters off Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard. Their ashes were scattered into the Atlantic from the USS Briscoe, and America mourned the loss of its handsome, magnetic prince of Camelot.

  From Francine

  John arrived Home in a heartbeat and immediately found himself in the arms of his mother; his grandparents, his Uncle Robert, and his father were waiting to greet him as well. It was all he could do to let go of his mother, from whose death on earth he had never fully recovered, to embrace the others, and there was almost a shyness about him as he and John Sr. met. “I was three years old when my father died,” he says. “I never had a chance to know him. I was much closer to my uncles, who did a great job of taking over for him while I was growing up.”

  There was no sadness, confusion, or regret in him. Instead, John was exhilarated to find himself here and had no need for Orientation or cocooning, nor did his wife and sister-in-law. He left the Scanning Machine to resume his rich, busy life with Jackie—his soul mate—by his side. Please let go of the fallacy that soul mates, on the extremely rare occasions when they both incarnate at the same time, are limited on earth to romantic relationships. They can be family members. They can be good friends. They can have any connection they choose to construct for themselves, for their own purposes, during a shared incarnation. Jackie and John chose to be mother and son in their one shared incarnation, so that they could be there for each other through the uniquely difficult charts they designed for themselves. Now that they’re Home again, they of course maintain their own highly distinctive identities and pursue their own interests, but they also live and work together.

  Their house is built, decorated, and situated identically to the house on Martha’s Vineyard, where they both felt safe and peaceful. “There was a gate at the ro
ad, at the entrance to our long driveway,” John says. “Even if it had been all over the media that my mother or I was at the house, we could leave that gate open, and often did, and never worry about anyone bothering us. Everyone respected our privacy, and we respected theirs, and we loved it there.” They continue to balance their love of privacy and social lives in which they each have their own friends with whom they prefer to spend time in small groups. Jackie loves gatherings at home with authors, artists, and classical musicians. John prefers hiking with historians, athletes, political leaders, and above all his uncles and his father—they’re enjoying getting to know each other, and John Sr. has expressed his appreciation and respect for his son’s decision not to become a politician, which John says he would never have pursued. His chosen life themes of Experiencer and Justice, he says, were incompatible with anything involving politics beyond studying and writing about them—as he puts it, he preferred getting things done to scheduling endless committee meetings to discuss getting things done.

  John and Jackie work together with a vast research team focused on the prenatal detection, treatment, and cure of birth defects. The team actively infuses scientists and medical researchers in North America, Japan, and Brazil, and they anticipate the announcement of a collaborative global breakthrough in or around 2026 in your years. John is also part of a team of ecologists who are working toward solutions for restoring the earth’s ozone layer.

  He and Jackie were among what seemed like scores of family members who gathered to welcome John’s Uncle Ted to the Other Side. Like the rest of the “Kennedy men,” John will not be reincarnating.