Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (52 page)

“Oh, darling,” said Grace, making one of her baby faces. “It was so lovely—
so lovely just being with him.”

Gwen Robyns is not sure how far Grace’s friendship with Dornhelm went. “The physical side wasn’t the main thing,” she says. “Grace just loved the flirtation. It was something to give her all the cherishing and romance which Rainier didn’t.”

Dornhelm himself declines to discuss the personal aspects of his relationship with Grace. “It is a memory that doesn’t want to be disturbed,” he says. “It’s better left as it was. It is not reality anymore.”

“Robert was always the gentleman,” comments Maree Frisby Rambo, who saw quite a lot of the couple together.

“Dornhelm was quite often around when I was going out with Caroline,” remembers Philippe Junot, who started dating Grace’s elder daughter in 1976. “There was never any sign of Rainier. He was leading his own life down in Monaco, while Grace was leading hers up in Paris. Sometimes we would all go out together as two couples—Caroline with me and Grace with Dornhelm. I do not know if they were lovers, but let me put it this way, I would be very surprised if they were not.”

The question of Grace’s relationship with Robert Dornhelm is complicated by the fact that he was by no means the only younger man with whom she consorted in her later years. There was quite a list. Per Mattsson, a thirty-three-year-old Swedish actor who was being considered for a part in the Wallenberg project, tells an extraordinary story of stealing away with Grace from a grand dinner in New York in 1982, and her taking him up to her hotel room. According to Mattsson, he and Grace were alone in the room together until five in the morning—and spent their time doing nothing more compromising than sitting at the piano and singing duets.

It must have been confusing for a virile young man to find himself alone in a hotel room with a living icon. Was this middle-aged, and now decidedly matronly lady, expecting him to make the move on her?

Jim McMullen, the dashing New York restaurateur, says he could not even consider the princess in physical terms when she invited him to Monaco for a week in the mid-seventies. “She was somebody so special. She
was
Her Serene Highness.” According to McMullen, nothing improper was even hinted at during the week he spent as Grace’s guest, nor at any other time in the six years that he knew her.

McMullen, a former male model, was in his late twenties when Grace started visiting his Third Avenue restaurant with its Irish saloon atmosphere and famed chicken potpie. He remembers an excursion with Grace to the discotheque Studio 54, where the crowds outside parted in front of the princess like the Red Sea, and a surreal dinner during the week he spent in Monaco, where he found himself seated with Grace on one side of him, and Ingrid Bergman on the other.

Not without a touch of jealousy, Grace’s girlfriends referred to her young men as her “Toy Boys.” “What she wanted was eternal glamour,” says Gwen Robyns, “and those young men supplied it. They flattered her. They were fun.”

They were also more intelligent and accomplished than the average young stud. Jeffory Martin FitzGerald, a business executive of twenty-nine, was boarding a Concorde in London one February morning in 1980, when he found a pile of shopping bags occupying his assigned seat.

“Excuse me,” he said, trying to be polite to the middle-aged traveler seated beside them. “Are these your things?”

Grace, who was wearing a headscarf and whom he did not recognize, apologized profusely and hastened to clear away her bags. Once they were seated elbow-to-elbow in the Concorde’s narrow seats, FitzGerald tried to catch up on the paperwork of his business trip. But Grace interrupted his train of thought so persistently, tapping him on the arm to request his help with the crossword on which she was working, that the young man felt he must draw the line.

“Madame,” he said brusquely. “I don’t think I can help you with your puzzle. I’m illiterate.”

When lunch was served, FitzGerald relented. Noticing how ravenously his neighbor attacked her portion of caviar, he offered her his. “I don’t really care for caviar,” he explained, which led to a conversation about how people either love it or loathe it—which led, in turn, to a mutual exploration of backgrounds.

“Where do you live now?” FitzGerald asked, after Grace had told him about Philadelphia.

“In Monaco,” she replied, and still he did not get it. Not until she actually gave him her full name did he realize who his famous traveling companion was.

Jeffory FitzGerald was a tall and well-built Irish-American, not unlike Kell in his youth. The couple saw each other regularly whenever Grace came to New York. They would go out to restaurants in groups—McMullen’s was a popular rendezvous—but they would take their leave of the party together toward the end of the night, for this was a relationship, according to some of Grace’s closest friends, that definitely was physically intimate. “I thought he’d hate my lumps and bumps,” she confided to one girlfriend delightedly, “but he doesn’t seem to mind one bit!”

She had not lost the magic! Twenty years earlier, Grace would have had no difficulty securing the attention of a busy young businessman on a plane. But in true Grace fashion, she had persevered, and she had won. Grace had not realized, until it had stopped, how much of her identity had depended on the compliment paid by crude, old-fashioned, hormone-driven, male flirtation.

FitzGerald did not have Dornhelm’s artistic sensibilities. Some of Grace’s friends found him rough around the edges. They would raise their eyebrows when the couple went off into the night together. But the young man certainly had it over Rainier as an attractive and vital hunk of manhood.

FitzGerald was a world traveler, as Grace was becoming in these years. The Concord had been a very appropriate place for them to meet. They swapped tips on beating jet lag and relaxation techniques—FitzGerald was a corporate “headhunter” who scouted out promising executives—and they fortified each other’s wobbly resolves to diet.

“Watch the lunch routine,” Grace would caution in her postcards. “Iced tea instead of beer . . .”

In the spring of 1982 the Annenberg Institute of Communications organized a tribute in Philadelphia to Grace’s film career. Jimmy Stewart, Bob Hope, and the fabled survivors of her era agreed to come and pay their respects to Grace’s artistry and her contribution to the cinema. It was a major honor and promised to be a heart-stopping evening of celebration, but Rainier decided that he would not have the time to be with his wife on her night. So Grace flew to New York without her husband, met up with Jeffory FitzGerald, and motored down to Philadelphia in the company of the young man who was twenty-one years her junior.

“I’m getting to the point,” Grace said angrily to Judy Quine in these years, discussing the world’s expectation that she should always be perfect, “where I don’t care what you or anyone else, for that matter, thinks.”

Whenever Grace suspected that press photographers might be around, she took care to hide her young escorts in a group of miscellaneous companions, but she made no secret of them when she was with her closest friends. She saw her young men as her protégés. She was proud of their accomplishments. She introduced Judy Quine to both Dornhelm and FitzGerald, and she was particularly anxious that her old flame Don Richardson, should get to know Dornhelm.

“I’d love you to meet Robert,” she told Richardson, when Rupert Allan arranged a reunion in California. “He’s rather like you. He could be our son.”

In 1976 Grace had accepted the invitation of Jay Kanter to become the first woman on the board of Twentieth Century-Fox—a consequence of Women’s Lib to which she did not object. Four times a year the appointment took her traveling in luxury, and at Fox’s expense, to board meetings in exciting locations, most frequently in New York and Hollywood. Grace used these trips to meet up with Dornhelm, McMullen, and FitzGerald. The young men knew about each other—McMullen and FitzGerald met quite frequently—and on one of her visits to Los Angeles, Grace asked Rupert Allan to invite Don Richardson and his wife to his house in the hills.

Grace and her former drama coach had been exchanging letters throughout their respective careers. When Richardson went to Israel as a visiting drama professor in the early seventies, Grace had sent a donation to help the finances of his poorer students. They had not seen each other for more than a quarter of a century, but when they finally met on a cool Los Angeles night, it was as if they had never been apart.

“When I walked in,” remembers Richardson, “she jumped up over the coffee table into my arms, and wrapped her legs around me. There was my wife, Laura, and all the other guests who were watching all this. But for Grace, in that moment, no one else mattered. We were suddenly back in days of old.”

Grace had requested a menu of southern fried chicken, and she tucked into it avidly, holding the pieces of chicken in her one hand, while she held hands with Don Richardson below the table with her other. Halfway through the evening, in her best Monaco tradition, she had the places switched around so she could sit and talk with Don’s wife, Laura. What did
she
think of Women’s Lib? Was she taking good care of Don?

“It was very touching,” remembers Don Richardson. “She still had that quality you could write your dreams on—the sweet face, the wonderful eyes. But there was also something very tragic about her. It was heartbreaking to see her overweight and gone to seed—a little drunk, the seams of her dress opened, the makeup smudged. It seemed to me that she had been hitting the bottle pretty good.”

Don Richardson subscribes to the popular theory that Princess Grace had a drinking problem toward the end of her life. This is largely based on the press photographs that show her putting on weight in her later forties and getting puffy around the face. Trying to laugh about it with her friends, Grace took to describing herself as “Blimposaurus Rex.” In 1976, the year of Grace’s forty-seventh birthday—and the year in which she started her relationship with Robert Dornhelm—Howell Conant had to make a special journey back to Monaco in order to reshoot the family’s annual Christmas card. The princess had looked at the proofs of the first photo session and had decided that she was too fat.

The Grimaldi family Christmas card, a formal shot by Howell Conant of Grace, Rainier, and their children, taken almost every year from 1956 onward in very much the same pose and setting, provides an extraordinary visual record of one family’s expansion and development. Babies appear, change into children, then bulge and grow until, one year, they are standing over their parents as young adults. Rainier goes grizzled, then gray, then finally white. Turtlenecks, floppy collars, bell-bottom trousers, running shoes—the fashions of the decades come and go. Only Grace is the constant: tight, slender, blonde, and smiling, looking even better in her early forties than she did at eighteen—until 1976, when startlingly, in just a matter of a year or so, the rose is blown.

Grace loved her food and she enjoyed her drink. From blood sausage to fried chicken, her dietary preferences were invariably fattening, while her fondness for champagne and a good stiff cocktail before dinner did nothing to help her waistline. But the reason for the dramatic change in her appearance around the age of forty-seven was not any special increase in her patterns of consumption. It was her time of life. Grace suffered from a particularly difficult and upsetting menopause.

“She rang me about it endlessly,” remembers Gwen Robyns. “What do I do?” she would say. ‘I’m getting so fat. I can’t fit into my clothes, and I’ve got to be seen.’ She went to this doctor and that doctor, and they all said the same. It was water retention. It was the change of life.”

The “angry jaws” was what Grace called it, as if turning the harsh medical word into a rhyme would make it seem better. “The menopause with its angry jaws is catching up with me,” she wrote to Maree Rambo.

“It’s not so much the physical symptoms,” she said in a conversation with Judy Quine, “it’s more an attitude, a feeling. . . . I feel a bit mean, and I don’t like it.”

The doctors put her on hormone replacement therapy, at quite a high dose, but it did not stop her mood swings, and it increased her bloating. Her breasts swelled, creating exactly the opposite to the problem she had as a teenager. “I’ve got this dreadful thing about my bosoms,” she confessed miserably to Gwen Robyns. “They’re so big. I have to confine them.”

Menopause’s undermining of the female texture is hard for any woman to take, but it was particularly difficult for one whose allure had depended so heavily on her beauty. Suddenly the geography of Grace’s face was changing. Her features were shifting, in an insidious continental drift. She had sailed through more than twenty years of life—through marriage and childbirth and even the death of her father—with very little sense of getting older, and now her best friend, her body, was betraying her. She went to expensive Parisian doctors who offered blood transfusions and special injections, with no result. Desperate to hang onto her looks, Grace was engaged in a battle that she could not win, and in her disbelief, she even wondered at times for her sanity.

The sad news came through in these years that Carolyn Scott Reybold, the most soignée of all the bridesmaids, had “signed off” mentally after a number of personal setbacks and had now become a bag lady living in a shelter for the homeless in New York. Carolyn had declined the help of all her friends, including Grace. She wanted to be left alone.

“Isn’t it odd that there’s something about Carolyn’s life I actually think of enviously?” said Grace to Judy Quine, confessing to several of her friends that she had caught her mind lingering seriously over the attractions of life as a bag lady traveling endlessly around the Paris Metro. “I must be going ‘gaga’ with the change,” she said to Judy Quine. “It scares me.”