Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (45 page)

This last provision switched Monaco overnight from being a potential drain on French government revenues to representing a significant plus, since foreign investors who came to Monaco were bringing their funds into the French monetary system—spending, living, and banking in francs. Most tax evaders are quite conservative investors. They have already taken their risks and have made the major profit on their money by the avoidance of tax, which makes them prime customers for low-return, high-security investments like government bonds. So Monaco minus French tax evaders became an excellent source of financial reserves, and thus a certain underpinning to the stability of the French franc.

This may have been one reason why General de Gaulle did not go the whole way in 1962 and annex the troublesome and parasitical principality on his nation’s southern flank. But another reason was undoubtedly the fact that Rainier’s wife was Her Serene Highness Princess Grace. Monaco was an anachronism, and, until Grace’s arrival, a not very savory anachronism at that. The gambling, the tax evasion, the squabbling princely family, the dubious war record—who would have shed a tear, or organized a United Nations protest in 1962, if Monaco had not had its glamorous princess, and if de Gaulle had decided that he wanted the same sort of control over the place that Britain exercised over the Channel Islands, or the U.S. over Puerto Rico?

Grace Kelly was the principal reason why most of the world had heard of Monaco, and she was the only reason why anyone—with the exception of the Grimaldi family, 3,000 Monégasques, and 22,000 tax exiles—should care whether France ran the place directly or through the mechanism of a protectorate. Grace gave the place credibility—and likability as well. It probably helped that she had charmed de Gaulle personally when she met him. More significant was the international presence and personality that she had created for her adopted home. Between 1956 and 1962 she and Rainier had visited Washington, Paris, London, Spain, Ireland, and the Vatican in an official or semi-official capacity. Rainier alone did not have the charisma to command high-profile invitations to all these places, and he would certainly not have been treated by press, people, and the highest government officials with the fascination and affection that attended Grace.

“The Princess of Monaco.” What magic that conjured up in the captions to newspaper photographs, which were usually printed large, on the front page, wherever Grace went. It made the principality a genuine player, a member of the world’s family of nations in a way that it had never been before. It was thanks to Grace Kelly that Monaco became a real place.

22

IT’S ONLY A MOVIE

T
he first visible change that Grace Kelly brought to the life of Monaco was her stopping of the principality’s famous pigeon shoot. She found it a barbaric practice. It did not make sense to Grace that her husband should be trying to preserve and regenerate wildlife in his zoo on one side of the harbor while the patrons of Onassis’s
SBM
were shooting it by the basketload on the other—and it did nothing for the image of a civilized Monte Carlo. Rainier took her point. The prince had a word with Onassis, and that was the end of the
Tir aux Pigeons.

Grace’s role in her new home, as she saw it, was to soften, to humanize, and to serve. Consciously or not, she was recreating for herself a replica of the existence that she had observed her mother leading on Henry Avenue: caring for a consuming and autocratic husband, devoting herself to her children, and channeling what was left of her creative impulses into the doing of good works. Ma Kelly’s focus had been Women’s Med. Princess Grace’s bailiwick embraced just about every charity and social concern in Monaco—noblesse oblige meets the Junior League.

She started in her very first year, when she was pregnant with Caroline. In the winter of 1956 Grace organized a Christmas party at the palace for every Monégasque child between the ages of three and twelve. No parents were allowed. Five hundred children, in four shifts, were welcomed by Rainier and the heavily pregnant Grace into the august
Salle de Trône
for sticky buns, soda pop, a movie, a magician, and clowns. The party became an annual event, and was matched, in later years, on another afternoon in the Christmas season, with a tea party at which Grace would go to meet Monaco’s old and infirm, presenting each of them with a small gift—wherever possible, something new to wear.

Grace was a regular visitor to local homes for the elderly, as she was to Monaco’s orphanage, to the hospital opened in 1958 and named after her, and to the day-care center that she helped found a few years later for the children of working mothers. She took a practical, working interest in all these institutions, picking out color schemes, suggesting new gadgets and equipment, and bringing back decorations from her trips abroad. At the orphanage she had the open dormitory converted with little dividers so that each child should have its own separate living area.

“We were brought up to participate,” Grace explained when she was praised for her social activism. “My father didn’t care what interests we had, but we had to be interested in something. He couldn’t stand anyone who didn’t have enthusiasm.”

Grace found she needed to temper her enthusiasm somewhat at the committee meetings of the Red Cross. The Red Cross had always been Monaco’s masthead charity, and it was considered a signal mark of honor in May 1958, when Rainier transferred the presidency to his wife. Grace arrived for her first meeting armed with lists and agendas, and wearing her stern, schoolteacher glasses, to discover that the ladies of the charity committee had an altogether more leisurely and sociable interpretation of their duties.

It took a while to work out a compromise, the local worthies bestirring themselves to take on some of Grace’s American briskness; while the princess, for her part, learned to appreciate, if never quite to share, the Mediterranean pleasures of doing things backwards. “The Red Cross will be the end of me,” she wrote to Prudy Wise in January 1960. “You would be amazed at how hard I have to work!”

In her letter to her old friend, Grace dared to wonder whether she was, in fact, “cut out for charitable work,” but she need not have worried. Under her presidency, Monaco’s annual Red Cross Ball became established more firmly than ever as the premier event of the Riviera’s summer season. Grace used her old friendships to bring in Hollywood stars both as performers and as guests—David Niven, Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr.—and she also got her committees to direct an increasing proportion of their funds toward the work of the Red Cross overseas. Without reducing the cash flow to its own local projects, Monaco’s Red Cross became, proportionally, one of the most generous in the world, sending relief to the victims of wars and natural disasters from Peru to Pakistan.

Softhearted Gracie could get very serious. Early in the sixties she became the honorary president, and was one of the active founder members, of AMADE,
l’Association Mondiale des Amis de l’Enfance
—the World Association of Friends of Children. In underdeveloped countries AMADE lobbied for medicine and education. In richer societies it campaigned against such problems as violence on TV. If AMADE did not transform the world any more totally than many another philanthropy, it ranked in the plus column with those that made a difference—and Grace had no doubt that her time was well spent helping its campaigns. Her own son and daughter were so fortunate, she would explain, how could she not try to help children who had been less blessed?

It was Caroline and Albert who were at the heart of their young mother’s life—and of their father’s as well. When Alejo Vidal-Quadras, the Spanish painter, was in the palace in the early sixties doing a portrait of Albert, he was struck by the little boy’s constant references to his ancient Aunt Leonore. She was, apparently, a funny, bent, old woman, who was definitely kind, but who was also rather eccentric, living obscurely in a distant corner of the palace. The children could not wait for her weekly visit, when she would turn up, hobbling on a cane. When Vidal-Quadras asked Grace about this mysterious fairy godmother, he was told that he had already met her. Aunt Leonore was Rainier, who put on the performance once a week.

The prince and princess reveled in their children. One of the highlights of Grace’s day was when she read to them at bedtime. She would tuck them in, then throw herself into the narration of their fairy stories with such drama and feeling that the children’s English nanny, Maureen King, would try to linger in the nursery to catch the performance for herself.

Rainier and Grace took their child-rearing very seriously. It was a joint enterprise that they thought and talked about a lot. If they had to go out in the evening, and knew that they would miss the rituals of storytelling and putting-to-bed, Grace would make sure that her makeup and hairdressing left time for her to sit and talk with the children over their supper instead.

Not all her departures went so smoothly, however:

Every time her mother and father get ready to leave the palace without her
[reported Madge Tivey-Faucon of the young Caroline in the early sixties]
she bursts into floods of tears. The princess can never resist her daughter’s tears. She turns back at the first sob. This scene usually takes place in the Cour d’Honneur. All the secretaries, hearing the little girl’s screams, rush to the windows. The princess bends over the child and consoles her gently until she stops crying. This may last a quarter of an hour. But the princess never becomes impatient or angry.

Both Rainier and Grace wanted to create childhoods for their children that were more tender and carefree than their own. For Rainier, child of a broken home, the achieving of a single, stable family environment in itself represented light-years of improvement. For Grace, the objective was a parenting style that was less oppressive and awe-inspiring than that of Jack and Margaret Kelly. Like many of her generation, she was a devotee of Dr. Benjamin Spock and his progressive child-rearing ideas. Grace studied her Spock as if it were the Bible, seeking new, modern solutions to the age-old dilemmas that arise from the challenge of disciplining with love. When she was bathing Albert one night and discovered that Caroline had developed the habit of biting her baby brother, she promptly sank her own teeth sharply into Caroline’s arm.

“You really must not bite your brother,” she said. “It hurts.”

The story of Grace’s instructive bite was frequently repeated in the authorized magazine updates from Monaco on how royal offspring were being raised in the modern palace. Rainier and Grace were always telling interviewers what strict parents they were. “I’m afraid I’m very severe at times,” Grace confided to Mike Wallace in 1962. But outsiders seldom saw much evidence of strictness. When her children were only three or four, Grace would take Caroline and Albert with her to picture galleries or fashion shows, where they would slide raucously up and down the polished floor or fiddle with objects of priceless value. Anything but the disciplinarian, Grace would continue to study the pictures or the fashions, apparently quite oblivious to the mayhem—while no one else dared say a word.

It was partly a question of indulgence. After long hours spent playing around her mother’s feet during clothes fittings, the four-year-old Caroline asked for, and was given for her fifth birthday, a cocktail dress personally made for her by Givenchy. How could the mild and biddable little Albert not get a trifle willful as he drove around the palace grounds in an electric car that was a present from Aristotle Onassis?

It was, more profoundly, a matter of clashing cultures. Grace was bringing up her son and daughter to be young Americans in spirit, encouraging them to speak their minds and to be themselves—in direct contradiction to the European tradition in which children should be “seen and not heard.” When her New York and Philadelphia friends came to Monaco, they would comment on the little prince and princess with genuine approval. The kids were so bright and outgoing. Europeans and Monégasques were not so favorably impressed. In their opinion (usually whispered behind raised hands), Caroline and Albert were well along the road to becoming classic products of America’s TV-and-ham-burger culture—
enfants gâtés
(“spoiled brats”).

Micheline Swift, the wife of David Swift, Grace’s New York friend, found out just how spoiled Grace’s children could be when she entertained Grace and Caroline in America. The Grimaldis had come to Los Angeles for a family holiday—”so many new houses & buildings,” wrote Grace in excitement to Prudy, “that it is staggering”—and Micheline persuaded Grace to let her take Caroline on a shopping expedition with her own daughter, Michele, who was about the same age.

Grace was most concerned about it. “No one’s ever been allowed to take Caroline away without me,” she said. But she agreed it would be fun for her daughter, and the party headed off to Saks Fifth Avenue. There Caroline, still a very little girl, put on the most appalling display, pulling the clothes roughly on and off her body, throwing them on the floor, and treating the staff with absolute disdain.

“This cannot be your daughter,” said the sales assistant to Micheline in horror. “I can see that your own girl is so well-behaved. Where did you pick up this child?”

For reasons of security and to avoid alerting the press, it had been agreed that the condition for the whole excursion was absolute secrecy, but that did not bother Grace’s little Marie-Antoinette.