Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (53 page)

The “Toy Boys” were Grace’s defiance to the angry jaws, but they offered no real escape from the ultimate issues. How could she go on hiding behind her famous front when some of the most important components of that front were crumbling? Grace had spent her entire life pleasing others—her father, her mother, her husband, her children, the world as a whole that wanted her to
be
Princess Grace, and her church, which had taught her from her earliest days that the way to happiness lay through sacrifice to the higher cause. Prayer, confession, and the mass remained Grace’s consolations through the most difficult passages of her life, but, as she entered her forties, the dutiful princess did come to realize that there was a sense in which there could be no higher cause than herself.

26

POETRY AND FLOWERS

T
he curse of the Grimaldis” originated in the thirteenth century. According to the legend, the first Prince Rainier kidnapped and ravished a beautiful maiden from the Low Countries, then cast her aside—at which his victim engineered her revenge by transforming herself into a witch. “Never will a Grimaldi find true happiness in marriage,” she prophesied.

History has appeared to fulfill the curse. The marital record of the Grimaldis across the centuries has been a scarcely relieved catalogue of divorces, separations, and early deaths, culminating in the sad misalliance of Rainier’s parents. Grace and Rainier were the first princely couple to achieve any degree of public stability in their marriage. But when it came to the marriage of their daughter Caroline in 1978, the pattern of the generations was resumed.

The Prince and Princess of Monaco had dedicated their parenting to the belief that they could give their children a lavishly fun-filled and contemporary childhood, while also raising offspring who were serious and sober models of the princely virtues. This might have been possible in the sort of fairyland where witches are the only serious threat to happiness, but it proved unattainable in the Monaco of the sixties and seventies. Topless bathing, discotheques, fancy restaurants, private yachts—life in Monte Carlo provided a crash course in affluent self-indulgence, and no pupil studied with more enthusiasm than Grace’s firstborn child, Caroline.

Grace came to appreciate the danger. Every year she liked to get the children out of Monaco for a spell, packing them off to healthy and hearty summer camps in Pennsylvania, and when Caroline reached the difficult years, Grace decided that her daughter would be better off in a convent. From the age of fourteen to sixteen, Caroline was a student at St. Mary’s Ascot, where the principles of a convent education were reinforced by the traditions of an English boarding school. But if old-fashioned Catholic schooling had fostered conformity and polish in Grace, it had the opposite effect on Caroline.

“When Grace was growing up in Philadelphia, she went to ordinary schools where she was just one of the girls,” says Rita Gam. “But when you are born a princess, it is difficult to be ‘one of the girls.’ The mark of God is on you, and that is a curse, in a way.”

The teenage Caroline grew up spoiled and willful, very conscious of her privileges but not so attentive to the duties that went with them. The little girl who had asked for a Givenchy dress at the age of five graduated without difficulty to become the world’s first topless princess.

“The two girls
are
Mediterranean,” Grace was wont to offer by way of an apology.

The 1990s has grown accustomed to the idea that being a princess is likely to make a pretty young woman even more vain and self-indulgent than she might otherwise be, but this was quite a novel concept in the 1970s. Princesses were presumed to be innately demure and self-effacing—rather like Princess Grace, in fact—and people found it shocking that Grace’s own daughter should be pioneering the destruction of the illusion.

Grace did not like it either, but she found it difficult to be confrontational with Caroline. Jack and Margaret Kelly had never hesitated to be severe with their daughter when she fell short of what they expected, but Grace wanted something better for her own children than the series of painful showdowns she had lived through with her mother and father. When conflicts loomed she tried to be understanding. Her overriding wish was to remain Caroline’s best friend. “Whatever happens,” she would say, “you must always leave a door open.”

In many respects, Grace secured the friendship she desired. Living together in Paris from 1974 onward, mother and daughter were like a couple of flatmates as they shared in the adventures of life in the big city. But while Grace’s hope was that this life together might prove the means by which she could shape and shepherd her daughter, Caroline was working to her own agenda. She had become a teenager in the same year that her mother hit forty, and from that point onward the two women were on opposite trajectories.

Grace found it difficult to cope with her elder daughter’s blossoming sexuality. One day in 1976, Earle Mack, the producer of Dornhelm’s
Children of Theatre Street,
was lunching at the Grimaldis’ home in Paris. Caroline and Rainier were there, along with the pianist Artur Rubinstein and his wife, who were neighbors, and the gathering proceeded through the afternoon in the leisurely tradition of the serious French lunch, until Grace noticed that Caroline had left the room and had not returned. The princess rushed to the window, her composure suddenly disintegrating.

“Where is she? Where’s she gone?” she demanded frantically, no longer the suave hostess, but a panicked mother. “Did
you
give her the car, Rainier? I know she’s gone to see Junot.”

Philippe Junot has been described as the sort of man that every mother hopes their daughter will not marry—which is probably the best explanation of why Caroline did. Charming and amusing rather than conventionally good-looking, Junot was a successful businessman specializing at that time in real-estate deals in North America. He had stakes in shopping malls from Montreal to Dallas. With a father who was the deputy mayor of Paris, Junot came of solid French bourgeois stock. He was seventeen years older than Caroline—thirty-six to her nineteen when they started dating in 1976—and he was a famous ladies’ man. With his comparatively advanced age, his wit, his sense of mystery, and the nimble charm which earned him such success with women, Philippe Junot came out of the same mold as Oleg Cassini.

Caroline had inherited Grace’s knack of choosing boyfriends calculated to infuriate her parents, and she took some pleasure in pushing her mother to see how far she could go. Gwen Robyns was staying in the Square de 1’Avenue Foch one day when Junot came to call. “It was in the days of tight trousers,” she remembers, “and Junot was wearing the tightest pants you have ever seen. When he came into the room, Caroline went up to him and rubbed herself up and down against him. It was the most blatant exhibition that I have ever seen.”

“‘Grace,’ I said, ‘how can you allow that in front of people?’”

“‘Darling,’ she replied, throwing up her hands as if she had long given up trying. ‘What am I going to do?’”

It was Caroline’s equivalent of accepting jewels from the Shah.

“There are times,” Grace admitted in June 1978, “when I see myself in her.”

Caroline was confronting her mother with the reality of her youth, her beauty, and her hold over an attractive and dynamic man. She was daring Grace to do something about it. Head-over-heels in love with Junot, she accepted his private proposal of marriage after they had been seeing each other seriously for a year, and when her mother expressed her unhappiness, Caroline offered the alternative. She would go off and live with Philippe.

When faced with a similar impasse with her own parents over Oleg Cassini, Grace had backed down. Having toyed with the idea of elopement, she had settled for a low-key liaison removed from the public eye. But there was no chance of Caroline being so timid or discreet, and, as Grace then saw it, it was quite out of the question for the daughter of the Prince and Princess of Monaco to be seen by the world to be living in sin.

“Mommy said, ‘Of course he’s the wrong man and you shouldn’t marry him,’” Caroline remembered, ‘but now you’ve been compromised. You’ve been dating him for too long. . . . What are people going to think after you’ve been dating this guy for two years?’”

It was Grace at her most old-fashioned and status-conscious. Her judgment as a mother, that Junot was the wrong man for Caroline, was subordinated to the need to stay looking good.

Keeping up appearances had always been Grace’s greatest strength and weakness—as a Kelly, as Hollywood’s Ice Maiden, and as Princess of Monaco. Caroline had read her mother perfectly when she proposed the possibility of just going off with Philippe. She knew the option that Grace was bound to take.

The public announcement of the engagement was set for late August 1977, and Gwen Robyns went up for dinner in Roc Agel the night before. As she entered the house, Rainier came darting from his study and motioned her aside.

“Gwen,” he said, “you’re good at getting things out of people. Take Junot for a walk in the garden and ask him what he does for a living.”

“Don’t you know what he does?” the author asked in astonishment.

“No,” said Rainier, “not really.”

Rainier was as unhappy about his prospective son-in-law as Grace was. The prince’s face would blacken if Junot’s name was mentioned, and he would rail biliously, when among friends, at the behavior of the young couple. But Rainier found it as difficult to share his feelings with his daughter as he did with his wife. When he had something important to say to Caroline, he tended to write her a letter, and she found that the easiest way to communicate with her father was to write him a letter back. Rainier also shared his wife’s belief that a generational rift was something to be avoided at all costs. So when Junot had come to the prince in the summer of 1977 formally to request his daughter’s hand, Rainier had seemed almost encouraging. Far from being hostile, he had only mildly suggested that the marriage should wait until the following year when Caroline was twenty-one and had completed her studies at the Sorbonne.

“I never had a proper conversation with him, man-to-man,” says Junot today. “Soccer, motorcars, that sort of thing, but nothing solid. I think that for him I was always a problem that he just hoped would go away.”

Rainier’s hope was speedily fulfilled. Celebrated in the private chapel of the palace in June 1978, the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Philippe Junot soon ran into difficulties. Junot’s dinner-and-disco style of doing business while on his trips to America was reported in gossip column items and infuriated Caroline. She accused her husband of being unfaithful, though Junot today maintains that it was the other way around.

“I did not make any mistakes in the first ten months,” he says today. “She did—she was unfaithful—and I was willing to accept it. . . . She was twenty-one years old, a beautiful girl, suddenly discovering that it’s a lot of fun to enjoy life, that it’s great to be free, and that maybe it’s a little early to be strictly married.”

Caroline later admitted that she got married less because she wished to spend the rest of her life with Philippe Junot than because she wished to escape from a home situation that she had come to find stifling.

“I was twenty or twenty-one,” she told Jeffrey Robinson ten years later, “and didn’t really want to get married. . . . But I wasn’t allowed to go off on vacations with him or even spend weekends with him, except at his parents’ house, which was all very proper. . . . Getting married was simply the correct way out.”

One day in the summer of 1980, Junot got home from playing tennis to discover a note from his wife saying that she needed to take some time out.

“Don’t worry,” Rainier said when Junot phoned Monaco. “She’s not feeling well. She’s a little depressed.”

The couple reconciled for a week, but then Caroline disappeared again—to England, Junot later discovered. The abandoned husband sought consolation with a former girlfriend on a trip to Turkey, which made tabloid headlines. In true Grimaldi tradition, a marriage that had been embarked on in the cause of propriety had ended up a source of scandal. Early in October 1980, Junot was served with divorce papers, to which he offered no objection, and the Grimaldis’ lawyers pushed the formalities through Monaco’s courts in a matter of days.

It was Grace who had put pressure on Caroline to get married, and now the notion of divorce came from Grace as well. “Mommy said, ‘You have to get divorced,’” remembered Caroline. “I didn’t dare to divorce or even mention divorce because Catholics don’t divorce. You’re supposed to just make the best of it. . . .
I said, ‘How can you talk like that? We’re a religious family.’. . . But Mommy said, ‘Religion is there to help people, not to make your life miserable.’”

Grace’s urging that Caroline should defy her church’s teaching reflected her practical and no-nonsense streak that could be traced back to Ma Kelly. Caroline was in pain, and Grace wanted to get her daughter started on a new track as rapidly as possible. But Grace was also displaying the less constrained character that she was starting to assume as she reached the age of fifty. Personally and spiritually she was on the move. Her relationship with Robert Dornhelm, her menopause, her growing emancipation from her husband—and even, within limits, from the conventions of being a princess—were all part of a sea change that was transforming her attitudes. Grace was finally refusing to live a life that was dictated to her by others. She was starting to live her own truths.