#JUDITH BALABAN QUINE

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Judith Balaban Wedding Attended by Celebrities By NANCY RANDOLPH

A brilliant wedding here yesterday united Judith Rose Balaban, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Barney Balaban of New York and Rye, to Jay Ira Kanter. The ceremony in the Terrace Room of the Plaza Hotel was attended by many celebrities on stage, screen and president of Paramount Pictures At the 6:30 rites, the bride wore a dress of white organza over Italian satin and embroidered in seed pearls. She wore a crown of pearls holding a long tulle veil.

Her bouquet was of white orchids with streamers of lilies of the valley. Notable Attendants. Six attendants - among them singer Rosemary Clooney and screen actress Peggy Ann Garner -wore bouffant dresses of champagne-colored organza, with matching hats and carried orchids in the same hue. Famed actor Marion Brando was best man. After the ceremony, performed by the Rev.

Dr. Norman Gertstenfeld of the Washington Hebrew Congregation of Washington, D. C., a reception, followed by a dinner, took place in the grand ballroom of the Plaza. Ted Straeter's orchestra played for dancing. The bride, a graduate of Rye Country Day School, studied at Bradford Junior College in Haverhill, Mass.

The bridegroom, the son of Mrs. Sidney Genser of Beverly Hills, Calif., and the late Harry H. Kanter, went to the University of Southern California and served with the U.S. Naval Air Arm. He is now with Music Corporation of America Artists, Ltd.

The couple radio. The bride's father is Corp. (By Bradford Bachrach) Mrs Jay Ira Kanter She's the former Judith Rose Balaban. will live in New York following a honeymoon in Mexico and California.

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Paramount President Balaban’s daughter Judy (Mrs. Jay Kanter) compliments Grace Kelly on her wonderful performances in four Paramount Pictures. Locale of the meeting is the Harwyn Club. (caption & photo: Paramount World - Vol.1 No.2 July 1, 1955)

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(I remember) Grace Under Pressure

(I remember) Grace Under Pressure

During every gathering, Grace Kelly beamed and blessed us. (more…)

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INSIDE GRACE'S WADROBE - BEN ZUCKERMAN II

While shopping for her trousseau, Grace Kelly (soon to be Princess Grace) bought a number of suits from Ben Zuckerman, including this lovely example. She wore the suit to her wedding rehearsal  She accessorized it with a pair of white gloves, a turban, and a clipboard, which caused, according to Judith Balaban Quine, bridesmaid to Miss Kelly, several people to confuse Grace for a secretary, as no future princess could look so business-like!

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Prince Rainier Did the Dishes at Grace Kelly's House Before They Married.

This and more details of their engagement are revealed in the book Grace Kelly: Hollywood Dream Girl.

Lizanne Kelly LeVine, Grace’s sister, says Rainier fell into their family almost immediately. She and her husband Don LeVine had Grace and Rainier over for dinner in the days that followed their 1955 engagement, and were pleased with how seamlessly the royal meshed with them, even taking on chores that he’d likely never done at the palace — including the doing the dishes!

“Don and I were at our own little apartment, and we asked them over for dinner,” she said. “He fit in very well—even helped with the dishes. Rainier, when we first met him, I think might have been a little shocked with us when we’d say ‘Come on, Rennie,’ you know. But he fit into the family beautifully.”

Just before their engagement, Rainier visited Grace at her childhood home just outside Philadelphia for her family’s annual holiday party, where he got to know the star and her family better. He stayed in the area for two more days, where they truly fell for one another — and Rainier proposed days later in New York City, the New Year’s eve. 

“[They were] away from all public focus, walking in the woods, driving through the mountains and talking about life and values — and they fell in love,” said Judith Balaban Quine, an actress and one of Grace’s eventual bridesmaids during her 1956 wedding to Rainier.

They didn’t make their engagement public until January 1956, and the month before, Grace hosted a party in New York to introduce her friends to her new fiancé. Balaban Quine says that the two were clearly “wildly in love” and “adorable together.”

“They were both these wonderfully attractive people that had all this romantic charm, intelligence and wit, and coziness,” she said.

The next month, they announced their engagement, and shortly after, Grace started filming what would be her final feature film, High Society. Production had been sped up to accommodate her April 1956 wedding, and it wrapped in time for her to sail to Monaco on April 4 and say “I do” just over two weeks later.

“[It was] so hectic and quick and frantic,” Grace later recalled of her engagement. “There was no time to sit and think about anything.”

Source: “Grace Kelly: Hollywood Dream” Girl by Jay Jorgensen/ Via People.com.

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Grace Kelly pleads for a better clue from agent Jay Kanter during a game of charades, on board the SS Constitution bound for Monaco, 1956. (photo by Howell Conant)

“Grace was an avid charades buff. We split into teams, wrote our charades and began to play. The teams were running neck and neck, midway through the first round, when it was Jay’s turn at bat. For a good part of the charade his team managed to get what he was doing, but then he began to act out something that none of them could understand. Frustration turned to frenzy. Grace cajoled, pleaded and screamed for Jay to give her and his other teammates something they could understand. Try as he might, nothing was getting through - and the clock was ticking. Grace was tearing her hair, jumping up and down, waving her arms, shrieking for a better clue. Finally she threw herself to her knees directly at Jay’s feet, her eyeglasses skewed across the bridge of her nose, her arms raised in prayer, mouth agape in a cry of anguish, looking for all the world like a cockeyed supplicant at Lourdes. For those who devoured by the hundreds photos of a woman believed to be the world’s coolest cucumber, this picture (which I hold even now in my mind’s eye) belied the publicized self-containment. The truth was that just like the rest of us, Grace wanted desperately to win the game. Perhaps more than the rest of us.” - Judith Balaban Quine (The Bridesmaids: Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco and Six Intimate Friends, 1989)

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‘Toward the end of June, Grace went to Philadelphia to be maid of honor when her younger sister, Lizanne, married Don LeVine. Their older sister, Peggy, was matron of honor. Peggy’s two daughters, Meg and Mary Lee, were the flower girls. There is a photo of the women in the wedding party taken at the base of the Kellys’ staircase. All the girls are attractive, the three Kelly girls beautiful. The five attendants are dressed exactly alike. You would be hard-pressed to know that one of them was the leading movie celebrity in the world. Grace looked merely like a very pretty girl from a nice family in Philadelphia who was one of the gang.’

 - Judith Balaban Quine (The Bridesmaids: Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco and Six Intimate Friends, 1989)

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The most personal aspect of Grace’s letters was always the style of them. They were written in sentence fragments, punctuated loosely, the way one would punctuate spoken thoughts, with equally casual attention paid to the use of capital letters, paragraphing and other grammatical conventions. They read the way Grace talked, so that, regardless of content, they always overflowed with her familiar warmth and coziness. If the letter was of any length, however, somewhere within it Grace would usually drop a single line that told you more about what was really on her mind at that moment than a whole dissertation could have. Though the letters were offhand and couched in humor, I had learned to interpret these enigmatic lines like divining rods that would lead me nearer to Grace’s soul.

Judith Balaban Quine on letters from Princess Grace (The Bridesmaids: Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco and Six Intimate Friends, 1989)

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The conversations I remember most particularly are the ones I shared with Grace. That is because Grace was mysterious and I always hoped I could better understand her mystery if I thought about what she had said to me long enough and hard enough.

Judith Balaban Quine, preface to The Bridesmaids: Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco and Six Intimate Friends (1989)

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The Bridesmaids: Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco and Six Intimate Friends by Judith Balaban Quine (1989)

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Photos from The Bridesmaids: Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco and Six Intimate Friends by Judith Balaban Quine (1989)  - Part 2 [Part 1]

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Photos from The Bridesmaids: Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco and Six Intimate Friends by Judith Balaban Quine (1989)  - Part 1 [Part 2]