marriage of the century; She was a rising young reporter devoted to her career.

Byline: John Seabrook

When I was very young, I listened to the story of how my parents met as if it were the story of the creation. I suppose it was, in a way, the story of my creation, but that wasn't what I found so enthralling. Listening to my mother tell it, watching the sapphire in her engagement ring sparkle as she gestured, and hearing my father, if he was around (he wasn't very often), lower the flap of his newspaper to embellish the tale-all this transformed mere coincidence into fait accompli. I believed in the romance of the story and think I believed that a marriage could never go wrong as long as the story came out right.

Later, when I was old enough to think of marrying, I assumed I would meet my wife under equally romantic circumstances. Later still, when I did meet her (she was the copy editor on a piece I wrote about Dan Quayle-not exactly the stuff of fairy tales), I tried to use what I knew of my parents' meeting and courtship as a guide in my own blind leap into marriage. But their story kept leading me astray, and finally I had to forget about it and find my own way.

Now I've been married for twelve years, and maybe I'm ready to tell the story myself, putting in what they told me and imagining some things that might have been left out, hoping it will still come out right in the end.

It begins, as it always began, on a crisp but springlike day-April 4, 1956. The SS Constitution, an ocean liner, is waiting at Pier 84 in New York City, ready to carry Grace Kelly and her family, along with 60 friends and a small press contingent, to "The Wedding of the Century" in Monaco. Among the ticketed passengers are my parents, although they haven't yet met. My father is one of the wedding guests, and my mother is a reporter covering the wedding for the United Press, later rechristened United Press International. They're waiting for fate, in the form of a ship, to carry them down the Hudson River and into the ocean of possible destinies.

But the deck was still crowded with unticketed visitors who had to go ashore before the ship could leave. Some were society people, raising glasses in one last toast to the glorious 26-year-old bride, "Gracie" to her friends, who wore a beige tweed suit with white gloves and a small white hat and was holding her French poodle, Oliver, in her arms. There were dozens of journalists who had not been lucky enough to secure tickets onboard and were hoping for a photo or an item to run in the evening papers, because ever since the news of the movie star's engagement to the prince had become official, around Christmastime, the public's demand for the story had been insatiable. For the society reporters, used to having their work consigned to the back of the newspaper, the Kelly-Rainier wedding was a chance to bask in the light of the front page. Photographers were rushing from the gangplank to the deck, despite the ship's officers' attempts to stop them. John B. Kelly, Grace's bull-in-a-china-shop father, had reputedly gotten into a scuffle with one photographer. The wedding was becoming something of a circus, which Grace and her family had been hoping to avoid, and they hadn't even left the dock yet.

Standing by the ship's railing, taking notes on the scene, was Elizabeth Toomey, a single, 32-year-old UP staff reporter who was, along with her colleague Helen Thomas, perhaps the best-known female byline on the UP's news service. Her daily column, "Woman's View," ran in the New York World-Telegram and Sun and dozens of other papers around the country. She had got the taste for real news reporting shortly after graduating from the University of Missouri's Columbia School of Journalism twelve years earlier, when many of the men who would have been in her class were away at war and she was given opportunities that a woman ordinarily wouldn't have received. But when the war ended and the men came back, she returned to the women's beat-weddings, food, clothes, and the occasional feature story on an actress. Apart from a couple of interviews with Margaret Truman and several vivid pieces on Marilyn Monroe, her stories rarely made news.