Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (57 page)

Perhaps the saddest of all the entries on the Rover’s crash report was the automatic-drive setting, which showed that Grace had been going down the mountain in “Standard” drive, and had not set the shift in the special safety or “Mountain” position that engaged the car’s engine as a brake. This low gear was specifically designed for twisting gradients like the road from La Turbie, and it would have slowed her descent significantly. But, infrequent and haphazard driver that Grace was, she evidently did not see the “Mountain” setting—or if she did, her mind was not concentrating on what it meant.

The facts about Grace’s final hours became distinctly less clear the moment she was transported from France over the border into Monaco. After completing all his measurements at the site of the crash, Roger Bencze drove down at twelve-twenty to the Princess Grace Hospital, where a doctor gave him the preliminary diagnosis. Princess Stephanie, he said, had suffered only light cuts and bruises. Princess Grace was not doing so well. Her thigh bone was broken. She had also suffered a fracture of the knee, a fracture of the arm, various bruises, and unspecified head injuries that the doctor described as “cranial traumatization.”

Bencze entered these details in his report, but when he went back to the hospital later that day for an update, the security guards directed him to the side and told him to stay in his car. A hospital official—not a doctor—came out and told him that there was no information to give. Bencze, who was wearing his French captain’s uniform, repeated the nature of his assignment, but met a blank wall. “I’m sorry, sir,” he recalls the official saying. “You can’t have any information. Blackout.” It was immediately after this brush-off that the French detective went back to La Turbie to discover Monaco’s letter telling him that he would not be able to interview or examine members of the princely family.

The sinister explanation of this blanket shutdown was that Rainier wished to conceal whatever had happened in the car between Stephanie and Grace. But it was equally likely that the prince had just panicked. Rainier suddenly found himself in the middle of a tragedy. He did not want to have to make decisions. In the days that followed, his press staff were to admit with rare frankness that the prince was just lost. It was impossible to get answers out of him on the simplest things. Rainier was wrapped up in his own grief, and he did not see that half the questions being put to him and his staff were any of the outside world’s business.

Grace, it turned out, was in a very serious condition. When she was rushed into the emergency room at around eleven a.m., the hospital’s chief surgeon, Professor Charles Louis Chatelin, had shone a light into both her eyes. One pupil narrowed and widened as it should have, but the other made no response. This indicated more than unconsciousness. A blown eye was a sign of brain injury, and Doctor Chatelin sent immediately to Nice for Professor Jean Duplay, the chief neurosurgeon of the Pasteur Hospital there.

The routine care of a patient with suspected brain injury in most modern Western hospitals is to get a CAT scan X ray of the brain as soon as possible. But when Duplay, an internationally respected brain surgeon, arrived in Monaco, he discovered that the Princess Grace Hospital possessed no CAT scanner. He also found that the princess was under the influence of “Gamma O.H.,” a French narcotic drug that the Monaco doctors had administered when she was put on a mechanical respirator. This lessened the possibility of causing pain to the princess as a tube went down her windpipe, and made it possible to work on other parts of her body—notably her thorax, which needed to be cut open and cleared of air and blood. But the narcotic could only deepen Grace’s unconsciousness, and it meant that no accurate reading of her brain activity could be taken until the effects of the drug had worn off.

It was nearly midnight, twelve hours after the accident, before Grace was moved to Monaco’s only CAT scan machine. This was located in a clinic on the other side of town, which provided testing services for many of Monaco’s doctors. Pregnancy tests, blood tests, X rays—Monaco’s inhabitants had made the trip for many reasons to the upper-floor clinic. The trouble was that the elevator of the building was an ancient, open, cagelike contraption, only large enough for two or three people standing up. So in order that the CAT scan could be accomplished, the body of the unconscious Princess Grace, attended by a hand-operated oxygen tank with her IV tubes held high above her, had to be physically bumped on a stretcher up the stairs, then bumped all the way down again.

The scan showed two distinct areas of damage to the brain. One was deep in the brain and indicated, the doctors said, that Grace had suffered a stroke. The other was in the frontal area and was “traumatic,” meaning that it was the consequence of physical impact.

The stroke was only a small one, Doctor Duplay later said, and Doctor Chatelin declared that if it had happened at home, the princess might simply have lost consciousness briefly and had to sit down for a rest. But as it was, said both doctors, the stroke had caused the princess to drive off the road, thus bringing about the second, traumatic set of injuries to her head.

This was a plausible—indeed, the most plausible—theory. It fitted with the facts of the police investigation, and with the headaches of which Grace had been complaining all summer. The Kellys had a family history of strokes. In 1975 Ma Kelly had suffered a stroke that left her mentally dysfunctional, and Kell was to die from a heart attack while jogging in Philadelphia in March 1985, at the age of only fifty-seven. Diet-wise, Grace had always been reckless when it came to fatty foods, gunking up her arteries with her hamburgers and blood sausage, and in the early eighties the role of cholesterol in provoking strokes and heart attacks was still only vaguely recognized.

But other doctors who studied the data that Chatelin and Duplay made public could not understand why the two French physicians went beyond what was likely, to insist that the stroke had definitely occurred before the head injuries. When questioned, the pair grew positively religious in their assertion that the stroke came first and the trauma second, even though there was nothing in the medical data to justify this degree of certitude.

A CAT scan can give a good picture of clotted blood in the brain, which shows up denser on the scan than water and other tissues. But there was—and is—no known way of determining from the scan alone whether Grace’s stroke happened just before she struck her head or just afterward. The doctors released their medical statements in the middle of the uproar over Sesto Lequio’s allegations, and their vehemence seemed to be connected with that.

“It was definitely Princess Grace who was driving,” Duplay insisted to an interviewer from Radio Luxembourg.

Stroke-before-trauma fortified the proposition that Grace was driving the car, while trauma-before-stroke allowed for the possibility that Stephanie was driving and that she took her mother over the edge.

More enduring questions, however, were raised by what happened next. Sometime on Tuesday, September 14, 1982, little more than twenty-four hours after the crash, Dr. Chatelin met with Prince Rainier, Caroline, and Albert outside Grace’s hospital room. Showing them the pictures from the CAT scan and explaining how Grace’s condition had deteriorated, the doctor said that the princess was now beyond his help. There was no point, he said, in continuing with the artificial life support.

Rainier, Caroline, and Albert conferred together and accepted the doctor’s verdict. They went into Grace’s room to say goodbye to her for the last time, then left her to the care of the doctor. Her life support machine was switched off.

28

“LORD, I ASK NOT WHY . . .”

G
race Patricia Kelly, Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco, died at ten-fifteen on the evening of Tuesday, September 14,1982. She was fifty-two years old.

She had had no chance to say goodbye. Her last moments of consciousness were filled, almost certainly, with distressed and angry words. It was not a neat or happy ending, and the shock to her friends and to the world in general was the greater for people presuming that she had escaped from the worst of the crash. Trying to downplay anxiety, and unaware of the medical reports that were getting no further than the distraught Rainier, the palace press office communiqués had given the impression that the princess was suffering from nothing much more serious than a broken leg. Acting on these reports, a wide slew of Grace’s friends—Gwen Robyns, Judy Quine, and Rita Gam among them—had all fired off jokey telegrams exhorting Grace to hurry up and jump out of bed.

It was only when Gwen Robyns phoned Phyllis Earle in London that Tuesday that she got closer to the truth. Grace’s friend and former assistant was helping to organize a poetry reading that Grace was due to give in Windsor the following week, and she had phoned Paul Choisit, Grace’s private secretary in Monaco, to find him distraught with grief.

“Don’t you realize?” he had screamed down the phone. “It’s her head! It’s her head!”

The questions raised by Grace’s medical treatment made things worse. The administering of the narcotic, the late-night journey across town and up the stairs to the brain scanner—might Grace have survived if things had been handled differently? Rainier seemed troubled by the same question when he spoke to Rupert Allan. “The prince told me,” Allan said to Linda Marx in 1983, “that the neurosurgeons told him that if all came off well, the best they could expect was that Grace would live, and be completely paralyzed on her left side, which would cause a major change in her personality.”

Allan did not say when the doctors had told Rainier this, but it sounded a long way from being brain-dead. There had clearly been some stage in the hours after the accident when there was a real chance that Grace might have been saved. The rapid switching off of the machine had an imperious, Monaco-style abruptness about it. It provoked so many doubts—rather like the doctors insisting that the brain-scan image revealed things that it could not.

It was easy to be wise after the event, however. Grace had suffered terrible injuries to her head and to her chest as she was bounced around the interior of the tumbling car. The doctors had not had much to work with. Stephanie was younger, and had had the good fortune to be thrown down into the foot well on the passenger side. The most obvious and comprehensive “if only” of the tragedy was that Grace would have stood a much better chance of survival after the crash if she had buckled herself into her safety belt before it.

The Kellys—Kell, Peggy, and Lizanne—arrived for the funeral furious and suspicious. They had not discovered until just before the end how much more serious Grace’s condition was than the stories in the papers, and Rainier had not considered it necessary to involve them in the decision to terminate her life support. Could he not have waited just a day or so to see what might happen, or have given them the chance to come across and say goodbye? In America such a decision involved complicated forms and notaries and second opinions.

Peggy, Kell, and Lizanne did not bring Ma Kelly with them. Their mother’s mind had been increasingly clouded since her stroke in 1975, and the three children decided there was no point in even telling her about Grace’s being gone. Ma Kelly was to linger on until January 1990, never aware of the deaths of either Grace or Kell, or of the alcoholic decline of her eldest daughter Peggy, who was to die in November 1991. At the time of this writing, Lizanne, age sixty-one, is the sole survivor of the glittering generation of Kellys from Henry Avenue who set out to conquer the world.

Four of the bridesmaids came back—Rita, Bettina, Judy, and Maree—checking into the Hôtel de Paris as they had done twenty-six years earlier, but going up to their rooms and looking out over the harbor toward the rock with emotions that were very different from what they had felt then. Crowds of onlookers and photographers pressed together outside the hotel in the style of that hectic pre-wedding week in 1956, but now they were numbed and somber. “We are all so sorry,” called out one old Italian photographer whom Judy Quine recognized from previous visits. “So sorry for everyone.”

The atmosphere in Monaco, bewildered as much as sad, reflected everyone’s assumption that Princess Grace could not actually die. There was much talk of her spirit living on, because people suddenly realized in her absence how kindly an inspiration she had been. Princess Grace at the garden show, Princess Grace at church, Princess Grace at the orphanage—she had worked so hard to breathe her own earnestness and care into her adopted home. The shop windows were shrouded in black. Just for a day or so the jewels and furs were taken off display, to be replaced, in unprompted tribute, by hastily framed postcards and newspaper photos of Grace that appeared everywhere like icons.