Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (48 page)

“Are you happy?” was the question that every interviewer wanted to put to the princess. It was a quality check on the fairy tale. People wanted to be reassured that Grace really had lived happily ever after, and she was far too honest to fob off the query with plastic cheeriness. “I’ve had happy moments in my life,” she said to Barbara Walters in another of her tenth anniversary interviews, “but I don’t think that happiness—being happy—is a perpetual state that anyone can be in. Life isn’t that way. But I have a certain peace of mind, yes. My children give me a great deal of happiness. And my life here has given me many satisfactions in the last ten years.”

It was significant that Grace’s answer made no mention of Prince Charming, for Grace was not personally happy in her marriage. She remained committed to her husband. In terms of public achievement, her first ten years with Rainier had been a triumph. But if Grace had come to find her public duties hard work, her private life had become even more of a trial. Life with Rainier had not proved the loving and romantic experience that Grace had dreamed, and far from softening with the passage of time, her husband’s moods and arrogance had actually grown worse.

David Swift, Grace’s old friend from the Gene Lyons days, got a taste of this when he visited Grace in her tenth anniversary year. Swift had become a successful filmmaker—in 1960 he had written and directed
Pollyanna
for Walt Disney—and in the summer of 1966 he was in Nice directing a movie for United Artists. Invited to the palace with his wife, Micheline, he was delighted to find the old Gracie very much alive. “Eat some of these rose petals,” the princess advised him as they toured the garden. “Very good for sexual vigor.” But neither of the Swifts was impressed by some of the strange sides of Rainier’s temper.

It was decided that the most equal pairing for tennis was for Rainier to partner Micheline Swift, while David, the strongest player, played with the princess—whereupon Rainier hit every ball, as hard as he could, straight at Grace.

“Oh, it hurts!” Grace cried as one ball hit her in the face.

“Keep your eye on the ball,” growled Rainier, and kept on hitting hard at her.

“He was just desperate to win,” remembers Swift. “He was like a child, and it was embarrassing when he was playing with Albert as his partner. If the boy played a bad shot—and he was only a kid— Rainier went mad, shouting at him.”

The Swifts could not believe it. On one occasion Rainier even threw his racket at Albert, though the boy ducked nimbly. Albert seemed to be expecting it. Rainier’s Golden Labrador was equally agile when his master missed a golf stroke and went to hit the dog with his club in his frustration. Those who lived within striking range of His Serene Highness evidently learned to keep their heads down and their wits about them.

“I came to realize then,” says Swift, “what I have thought ever since—that Grace was a princess long before she married Rainier.”

“This is the first time since my marriage that I’ve been out on my own like this,” Grace confided to Micheline Swift one night, as the two women walked home through the streets of Monaco from a restaurant. Rainier had reluctantly agreed to Grace accompanying Micheline, while the two men went back to the palace by car. “He has me cornered. I can’t move. I can’t go anywhere. I have no freedom.”

This was far from the happy domestic life that the Swifts had read about in the magazines, and the saddest thing was the passivity with which Grace submitted to Rainier’s tyranny. She was like the little girl whom her mother and father used to cow with their anger or the threat of it. Submission for Grace was part of any intimate relationship, and in her ten years of marriage this had actually encouraged her husband to become worse.

“You can’t let him control you like this,” counseled Micheline Swift. “In marriage you have to mold a man. You have to stand up for what you want.’’

Grace rationalized her timidity as being part of life’s learning process. One of her favorite quotations was from the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran (
The Prophet
)
:
“When love beckons to you, follow him—though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden. He is for your growth. . . .”

It was both heroic and depressing. Grace had been brought up to see herself as the servant of those whom she loved, and this made her an enabler of her husband’s difficult side. Guests at the dazzling summer concerts and soirees that she arranged at the palace noted how little trouble Rainier often took to hide his boredom. “Another of my wife’s little parties,” he would sigh to his staff, rolling his eyes.

“Rainier acted like the wallflower at his own party,” remembers an American visitor to one of Grace’s evenings in the palace. It was a dinner under the stars for over thirty, with the guests seated at several separate round tables on a terrace that was lit by candles and smelled lingeringly of evening jasmine. Though the setting was entrancing, those people who were not seated at the tables of either Grace or Rainier could not help being somewhat crestfallen—until halfway through the evening, when Grace suddenly appeared in their midst. She had made arrangements to sit at every table for some part of the evening—while the prince remained stolidly, and for one period definitely sleepily, in his own spot.

Wherever she was in the course of the evening, Grace kept looking across the gathering in her husband’s direction, anxiously monitoring his mood. It seemed that the worse the prince got, the more attention his wife paid to him. Her whole identity was tied up in being the perfect wife to this willful and difficult man. “Nowadays,
I suppose I would say she was mistaken in being so subservient,” remarks her guest. “But at the time, I came away feeling I had met someone who was close to being a saint.”

“She was the only member of our bizarre family,” wrote Tiny’s son, Buddy de Massy, “who had both compassion and consideration. . . . She was completely truthful and trustworthy.” The difficult son of a difficult mother, Buddy de Massy was an untamed young man who could not go for long without getting into trouble at school or smashing up a sports car. Rainier had no time for his nephew, and made his contempt very obvious, but Grace always greeted the prodigal with a smile. Comforting a rebel against her husband’s authority was one small way of expressing a little rebellion of her own.

Family prodigals became something of a speciality for Grace as the sixties clothed America’s youth in flowers and beads and rebellion. In 1963 Peggy’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Mary Lee, got pregnant and eloped to Iowa with her eighteen-year-old boyfriend, John Paul “Bindy” Jones IV
.
Mary Lee was Grace’s goddaughter. She had been one of the flower girls at Grace’s wedding, and the FBI’s nationwide search for the couple made headlines.

As the public person with most to lose from the scandal, Grace might have been expected to be particularly disapproving. “But she was the most supportive of all the family,” remembers Bindy Jones. “When we were finally discovered, she wanted to hear our side of the story. She did not agree with what we had done, but she was prepared to listen. When we said that we wanted to get married, she agreed to support whatever we were going to try.” Grace invited the young couple and their baby to Monaco several times for their summer holidays. “I know she had this cold reputation,” says Bindy Jones, “but I must say that I never saw that. To us, she was always a very, very warm person.” The prim and proper Princess of Monaco had not forgotten the rebellious young woman who had been planning her own elopement less than ten years earlier—and she had come to feel a particular empathy with people who were lonely and disconnected.

It became a regular occurrence every summer, the phone call from the station or the airport announcing the arrival of another grubby young backpacker from Philadelphia who wanted to speak to Aunt Grace. She would send a limousine for them, take them up to Roc Agel, wine them, dine them, and lay them out on the sand with her children at the Beach Club, where the family spent sunny summer days around their cabana. She would listen fondly to the latest news from Chestnut Hill and Germantown, then send the visitors on their way, fed and rested, with tall tales to tell their college mates about crashing at the palace. She was everybody’s auntie. In the absence of Jack Kelly, she was the new head of the Kelly clan, welcoming all the family to stay—particularly Uncle George, who was now in his early eighties. The old playwright could not get enough of it. “Of courts and cities I have known,” he said, “this is my home.”

In the absence of Jack Kelly, the rest of the family were not doing that well. By the late sixties Peggy had gone through one marriage, and was getting to the end of another. She and her second husband, Gene Conlan, were both heavy drinkers—Conlan’s mutilated face bearing painful testimony to the near-fatal car crash he had suffered while under the influence. Lizanne’s family life had not proved the easiest, while brother Kell was the most spectacular burnout of all. Having been flagrantly unfaithful to his wife for a number of years, he deserted his young family in the late sixties to embark on a career of philandering that was almost comical in its obsessiveness. As he brought his ever younger consorts to breakfast at the country club, his older friends remonstrated with him. But Kell just shrugged his shoulders. “The old man pushed the hell out of me,” was all he would offer by way of explanation.

The ultimate scandal was to come a few years later when Kell started appearing at parties in the company of Rachel Harlow, the former Richard Finocchio, who had gone through a much publicized sex-change operation. A tall and striking blonde, Harlow ran a discotheque in central Philadelphia, and Kell seemed to court the notoriety of being seen in her company. “We were at dinner once,” remembers Harlow, who dated Kell, on and off, for nearly two years. “It was a very well known place, and he asked me about my childhood and what it was that had given me the strength to be my own person. He told me he admired that. He said that he wished that he had had the courage to be his own person throughout his life, to go against all the odds, and against everybody’s opinion in his own hometown. I shall never forget what he said. ‘I have always been either John B. Kelly’s son,’ he said, ‘or Grace Kelly’s brother. I have never been myself.’”

Only Ma Kelly flourished in the absence of the patriarch. Moving out of Henry Avenue to start a new life in the Alden Park Towers around the corner, she positively bloomed. “Elbows!” she would shout gleefully at Rainier, jabbing him sharply in the ribs with her fork when the prince forgot his table manners on his visits to Ocean City. She even found herself a boyfriend, Jules Lavin, a courtly inhabitant of Alden Park who escorted her around Philadelphia and whom she took with her on at least one of her summer jaunts to Monaco.

Grace’s involvement in other people’s lives and problems was a very effective distraction from her own. But in July 1967, she was brought up short. The prince and princess were in Montreal, visiting the World’s Fair, Expo ‘67, with their two elder children. They had traveled through London, where Grace had spent a few days interviewing prospective nannies. At the age of thirty-seven, she was pregnant again, expecting her fourth child the following January, and according to the official announcement, she was “very happy and very well.’’

Rupert Allan was in the party, masterminding a hectic program of engagements, when, unexpectedly one evening, he was summoned to Grace’s and Rainier’s hotel suite. As he arrived, Grace was being loaded onto a stretcher under the supervision of two solemn-looking doctors. Her pregnancy had gone very badly wrong.

Allan accompanied her to the hospital, sticking beside her through all the swing doors until they came to the operating room. Grace was weeping. It had been her decision that Rainier should stay at the hotel with the children, but now she wanted him there. “In all the years that I knew her,” Allan later recalled, “I never knew her so sad.” She reached her hand off the trolley, gripping pathetically to her old friend’s fingers until the moment that they wheeled her away. Allan would break down in tears himself as he told the story.

The operation that Grace underwent was known, medically, as a missed abortion, and it brought an end to her sixth pregnancy in eleven years. The baby, a boy, had been dead for more than one month inside her. The doctors told her there could be no more pregnancies.

24

RUN-OF-THE-PLAY CONTRACT

I
n the early 1960s, the British journalist Alan Whicker brought a BBC camera crew to film the rich and happy inhabitants of Monaco, only to find himself talking to a group of disgruntled folk who painted a picture which was anything but idyllic. Noise, dust, foreigners, rising prices—Monte Carlo, they complained, was no longer the gracious, sepia picture postcard oasis of legend. Ruritania was turning into a building site. The beautiful old villas and their gardens were vanishing, and construction cranes now outnumbered the palm trees. Everyone seemed to be losing their sea view. Looking at the skyline, Whicker decided that the place deserved a new name. He called it “Manhattan-on-the-Med.”

Rainier III was the driving inspiration in this orgy of concrete-pouring, and it transformed the character of Monaco in the course of his reign. The prince’s twin recipes for the prosperity of his realm were the expansion of tourism and the multiplication of Monaco’s tax-sheltered businesses—and both meant construction on a massive scale. Dig a tunnel here, fill the sea there—when Grace’s husband got working on his plans to cram record numbers of people into the limited square footage of his little principality, he was like a boy with a Lego set. It seemed at times as if His Serene Highness saw prestressed concrete as a virtue in its own right, and he took no little pride in the title awarded him in the travel and financial supplements:
Le Prince Bâtisseur
—the “Builder Prince.”