Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (49 page)

The 1962 row with de Gaulle had excluded French citizens from the benefits of Monaco’s special tax rates, so Rainier widened his focus to recruit tax dodgers from everywhere else. Tax exile became big business as welfare states grew top-heavy in the sixties. In Liechtenstein, Panama, or the Cayman Islands, you could get away with a brass plate outside a lawyer’s office. In Monaco, princely decree required that you buy or rent yourself a tangible, three-dimensional home inside the principality—which is why Vaduz, the capital of Liechtenstein, remains today a reasonable facsimile of an Alpine village, while the towering high-rises of Monaco fully justify Alan Whicker’s comparison with Manhattan.

Monaco was not totally tax-free. Its annual government budget, which covered the expenses and income of the princely family, was mainly financed by TVA, a form of sales tax on all transactions, along with variable taxes on net profits. But citizens and residents of Monaco had not paid personal income tax since 1869, and it was this that attracted the flood of new arrivals. One prosperous newcomer in the sixties was one of the world’s largest arms dealers, Sam Cummings, an American whose warehouses were in Britain and America, but who made Monte Carlo the headquarters of his International Armament Corporation. From its office in Monaco, Interarmco organized the supply of rifles, bazookas and even Vampire jets to such despots as Trujillo, Somoza, Sukarno, Tito, and Gadhafi. Cummings preferred dealing with dictators, he would explain, because “they have a sense of order—and they pay their bills promptly.”

Cummings did, at least, reside in Monte Carlo and operate a genuine office there. The scandal of Rainier’s tax-exile business in the 1960s and 1970s was that many of the other new arrivals did not. The facades of the new high-rises featured sun terraces and conventional sea-view apartments, but the rear of the buildings were often a honeycomb of small, dark, one-room “studios” where a self-respecting refugee might hesitate to lay their head. Technically these studios were living units. In reality they were the equivalent of Liechtenstein’s brass plates—and the chances were that the apartments at the front of the building were only occupied by their owners for a few weeks every summer.

Bogus residence was—and is—the skeleton in the closet of Prince Rainier’s tax paradise by the sea. Rupert Allan found that it made the place unbearable. He had toyed with the idea of shifting his home base to Monaco in the 1960s. He could supervise his PR work on the spot, while paying less tax—but he abandoned the idea after only one winter in the ghost town. “It grew lonesome sitting in,” he told the American reporter Linda Marx in 1983. “I did watch movies some nights with Grace, and I ate well. But that wasn’t enough.”

Rainier’s plan to build a Holiday Inn in Monte Carlo proved the mistake that Onassis had always predicted that it would be. By the time the hotel opened in 1972, its high construction costs had priced it out of the reach of normal Holiday Inn travelers, while people who could afford the room rates did not want to stay in a Holiday Inn. The hotel went out of business in the early eighties and was converted into another apartment block.

The prince encountered more success, however, with the construction of what turned out to be the Loew’s Hotel and Conference Center, an amalgam of all the elements with which Rainier loved to play. He would show the model to visitors with delight. There was a traffic tunnel, a helicopter pad, a cluster of convention and banqueting halls, an indoor shopping mall, and a new, Nevada-style gaming room, all to be notched into the cliffs below Garnier’s original belle époque casino and extended out over the sea on a forest of concrete stilts.

Rainier looked to America again, and fixed on the Loew’s Corporation to build and operate the project. Under the ownership of the Tisch brothers, Larry and Robert, Loew’s had demonstrated their expertise in the running of hotels, casinos, and convention centers in places like Miami and Atlantic City. In 1971 Loew’s formed a partnership with the SBM and the government of Monaco, along with a Franco-German partnership of investors, to build and operate the sprawling, 23,000-square-meter complex.

The Loew’s Hotel was constructed where Monte Carlo’s old pigeon shoot used to be, and in the eyes of all but the most fervent concrete-lover, the pigeon shoot would have been preferable. Built in the raw and angular style of 1970s architectural brutalism, Loew’s encased the tumbledown cliff below the old casino in a jagged amulet of cement zigzags, which jutted out at the mouth of the harbor like so many gun emplacements. The hotel/convention center would have seemed gaudy in Miami Beach, but ringing the entire base of Garnier’s graceful masterpiece, it was cumbersome and gratingly out of scale.

Even more gaudy was the clientele that Loew’s attracted. Its Nevada casino was stocked with craps tables and slot machines to attract the Las Vegas crowd—and they arrived by the planeload. It was ironic that the public relations for the hotel’s opening in September 1975 was entrusted to Princess Maria Obolensky, a descendant of one of the great Russian families that had helped set the style on the top of the cliff a century earlier. The Russian princess was horrified as she saw the parade of sunglasses, shiny black shirts, and porkpie hats arriving to inaugurate the tables.

“This,” she murmured faintly, “is the end of Monte Carlo as we know it.”

Princess Grace of Monaco took the cultural traditions of her principality very seriously. She started an annual ballet festival to help recapture the spirit of Diaghilev and the
Ballets Russes,
and when it came to architecture, she felt a strong commitment to the little cluster of belle époque buildings on the hill of Monte Carlo itself. At the height of Monaco’s redevelopment fever, she successfully foiled an attempt to knock down the charmingly faded Hermitage Hotel. “I suggested that I would nail myself to the door,” she said, “if they moved in to demolish it.”

But that was a solitary effort. “I’m not too keen on some of the modern buildings and their height,” Grace admitted in May 1975, and she agreed that some of the principality’s new construction clashed with the “spirit” of the place. Yet that, she stressed, was only her “personal opinion.” She had no plans for any more threats of door-nailing. “I protest when I can,” she explained with resignation, “and then I have to learn to go along with whatever is the decision.”

“Why did Princess Grace participate in a modernization policy she didn’t always agree with?” asked the author Steven Englund, talking to Rainier after Grace’s death.

“Faithfulness to me—devotion,” replied the prince. “She was fulfilling that part of the [marriage] contract without perhaps liking it so much.”

Grace had been trained since childhood to put on a front. She had continued the process as a film star, and now she brought it to perfection in her life as a princess. The charm of Monaco was a facade. To some observers, the uncritical overbuilding of the place reflected a greed and thoughtlessness that was no different from the something-for-nothing ethos of the casino. Rainier might have moved his country forward in crudely material terms, but it could not be said that his sponsoring of tax evasion represented any great moral or spiritual advance.

This was not an area that Grace greatly cared to discuss. Business was Rainier’s side of things, she liked to say. This avoided any exploration of her own opinion—or the ethics of providing a front for gambling and tax evasion—and it allowed her to step back into the easy and submissive role in which she felt more comfortable, that of the obedient wife. Being the embodiment and inspiration of even a pint-sized ministate was a daunting job, and the girl who had fought the Hollywood slave contracts had come to accept the compromises involved in “going along” with the status quo.

Grace’s kind heart was not in doubt. When she heard that Joséphine Baker, the great black singer and dancer who had settled in France, had fallen on hard times, the princess personally organized the rescue that paid Baker’s debts, helping to reestablish the “Rainbow Tribe” of adopted children whose expenses had got the performer into financial difficulties. At palace receptions it was noted how Rainier would studiously ignore Charles Soccal, Monaco’s solitary and outspoken Communist who headed the principality’s union organization, while Grace went out of her way to make conversation with the somewhat isolated firebrand. She never lost her soft spot for the underdog.

But there was another part of the princess that was deeply conservative. Grace did not just tolerate, she had come actually to
believe
in the way things were, and this could have a deadening effect on her critical faculties. Journalists who were not writing admiring copy to accompany the latest set of Howell Conant photographs sometimes encountered a woman whose “frosty, cold shoulder” side had been chilled to the freezing point by life as the Princess of Monaco.

“She has less warmth and spontaneity than anyone I’ve ever talked to,” declared Leslie Bennetts, who flew out to interview Grace in the mid-seventies for the Philadelphia
Bulletin.
“I realize she’s been interviewed to death ever since she was about nineteen. Nevertheless, no matter how unusual the question, she reverts to something familiar and noncontroversial, something that doesn’t require thought. . . . She’s a woman of very rigid opinions, one who doesn’t question a lot of things.”

Alexander Walker, the British film critic, noticed the menacing neutrality with which Grace reacted to questions that touched a nerve. “I really don’t have much interest in films now,” she said, dismissing his attempt to open the old question of a return to Hollywood. Walker persisted, wondering whether the princess might not consider a role in the project that Joséph Losey was currently trying to put together, a cinema version of Proust—”with roles for people accustomed to acting out the protocol of a society long past its natural term.”

The princessly lips tightened.
That
description, she said, hardly applied to Monaco. “We have all levels of society here, all in touch with each other. . . . Doctors, teachers, businessmen, street cleaners . . . Here we have no unemployment, none at all. You mustn’t think we’re unique. Why, recently, we even had a strike!”

The strike, it turned out, had been a brief affair in the casino, and “His Serene Highness” had put a stop to it. “But one doesn’t talk about that.”

Grace had come to treat Monaco and her status there with absolute seriousness. If she was not a princess, what else could be said about her life? Black-tie, white-tie, fancy dress—the annual summer round of galas and parties was her existence, and she dedicated herself to it with a thoroughness that made even Rainier wilt.

“They both act as if they’re royal,’’ sniffed Rainier’s usually supportive father, Prince Pierre, to Gore Vidal on one occasion. “But they’re not royal. Grimaldis are only princes.”

Grace’s old friends could not understand how an American girl could feel so very comfortable with people bowing and scraping and saying, “Your Highness.” The girl who was never invited to the Philadelphia Assemblies gave her name, and helped stage in her palace, a debutante presentation for the
Bal des Petits Lys Blancs
(“the Ball of the Little White Lilies”), a function which enabled the daughters of the nouveaux riches to “come out” at enormous expense. But Grace had made this her destiny. It had been her dream, and now it was an article of faith.

“She actually studied for it,” says Rita Gam. “She went to the library and got out the books on Queen Victoria. She studied English royalty. She studied the hairdos of power—big hairdos, with hairpieces and so on. . . . If you are the tallest, you are the biggest. It was a calculated observation on her part. She studied the pictures and she did it.”

Her old Hollywood roommate had noted the pleasure that Grace derived from flexing her muscles with MGM in the months leading up to her Oscar victory. Now, as a princess, Grace had even more power, and she clearly adored the slightly spurious roles that she and Rainier played on the world stage, rubbing shoulders with other heads of state. Always welcome for a glamorous and noncontroversial photo opportunity at the White House or the Vatican, they were guests of the Shah at Persepolis, and were even invited to Ascot by the House of Windsor, who had decided that Grace’s dignity and charm made the Grimaldis a family with whom they could associate after all.

Grace loved it. She carried it off with such style, and it was only natural that, as a paid-up member of the grand and famous, she should tend to stick with her own. Her friends who did not live in palaces came to find her conservatism difficult to stomach. Happy to hobnob with Frank Sinatra’s pal, Spiro Agnew, Grace remained a fervid defender of Richard Nixon through every sordid revelation of the Watergate crisis, genuinely puzzled that people should be turning against him.