Queens did not generally enjoy the freedom for such amorous adventures. Few monarchs went quite as far in punishing infidelity as Henry VIII, who executed two of his six wives, but male pride meant it was a rare king who knowingly allowed himself to be cuckolded – even if he was indulging himself with his own mistress. As the case of Struensee showed, a man who dared to lay his hands on the Queen could be severely punished for what was considered treason.
That was certainly the experience of Tsar Peter the Great’s chamberlain, William Mons, who earlier in the eighteenth century was foolish enough to have an affair with Catherine, the Tsarina. Peter was not a man to cross: he had already thrown his first wife, Eudoxia, into a convent and, when she subsequently had an affair, had her tortured and her lover impaled, even though he had long since lost interest in her. When Peter found out what Mons was up to, he had him beheaded – although to preserve the Tsar’s honour the official reason given for his punishment was that he had been caught stealing from state coffers. Peter allowed his wife to keep her freedom but ordered that no one should obey her commands and cut her off from all her funds. Returning to her room on the evening after the execution, Catherine found her late lover’s newly severed head staring at her from a jar of alcohol on her table.19 Fortunately for Catherine, Peter died shortly afterwards.20
Different rules applied to queens regnant, who ruled in their own name rather than owing their titles to marriage. Although, like the men, often forced by parents into unsuitable unions, they were free, as sovereigns in their own right, to take lovers as they wished without fear of punishment. Elizabeth I, England’s “virgin queen”, had several favourites, among them Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester – whom she came close to marrying – and, in later life, his step-son Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, who was more than two decades younger than the Queen.
In Russia, Peter and Catherine’s daughter, Elizabeth, who crowned herself empress in spring 1742 after leading a bloodless revolt with the support of the royal guards, had an eventful love life, complicated by her difficult relationship with her aunt, Anna, who ruled the country from 1730 to 1740. Described as “content only when she was in love”, the young Elizabeth got through a succession of men, among them Alexis Shubin, a handsome sergeant in the Semyonovsky Guards regiment – who was banished to Siberia and had his tongue cut off on Anna’s orders. Elizabeth eventually consoled herself with Alexei Razumovsky, a tall, muscular Ukrainian peasant with a good bass voice who had been brought to St Petersburg by a nobleman for a church choir. Razumovsky, who was a few months older than Elizabeth, was showered with titles and honours and became an increasingly important figure at court; the pair may even have married secretly. This did not prevent the Tsarina from taking other lovers: by the time she reached her forties, she had enjoyed the attentions of several virile young men in their twenties.
This was nothing compared to the sexual antics of Catherine the Great, who disposed of her husband Tsar Peter III after he had spent just six months on the throne and became Tsarina in her own right. The couple had married when they were both still teenagers, but after seven years Catherine was still a virgin. Frustrated, she embarked on an affair with the dashing Count Sergei Saltykov; a series of other lovers followed, chief among them Stanisław August Poniatowski, the Polish count later rewarded with his country’s crown, Gregory Orlov, Alexander Vasilchikov, Gregory Potemkin and Peter Zavadovsky.
By the time she reached her forties, Catherine had reduced the process of finding a suitable lover to a fine art: a potential candidate would first be checked out by a doctor for possible signs of venereal disease; he would then spend a night with Countess Prascovya Bruce, Catherine’s friend and lady-in-waiting, who would act as “éprouveuse”, rating the candidate on his appearance, his sexual technique and the size of his penis. Only those who passed such a stringent test would be passed on to the Tsarina.
Catherine remained sexually active until her death in November 1796, aged sixty-seven. A few years earlier, a barrel-shaped toothless grandmother, she had taken her last lover, Platon Zubov, who, at the age of twenty-two, was thirty-eight years younger than her. “The Empress wears him like a decoration,” noted one observer.21
Nineteenth-century Catholic Spain was a very different country, but this did not prevent Isabel II from playing the field. Although proclaimed queen regent when she was three, on the death of her father, Isabel was not free to choose a husband for herself. Instead, at the age of sixteen, she was obliged to marry her cousin, Don Francisco de Asís de Borbón. Slightly built, with a shrill falsetto voice and an unusual fascination with perfume, jewels and bathing, he was widely assumed to be gay. “What shall I say of a man who on his wedding night wore more lace than I?” the Queen recalled later.22
Understandably, Isabel went on to have a number of lovers, most of them officials and military men, a practice which helped contribute to her political downfall. After ruling for more than thirty years, she was forced to flee to France in 1868 and abdicate. Of her twelve children – only four of whom reached adulthood – few, if any, were thought to have been fathered by her husband. Her son, Alfonso XII, who became king in 1874, for example, was believed to have been the product of a liaison with either Enrique Puigmoltó y Mayans, captain of the Spanish Royal Guard, or General Francisco Serrano. This did not prevent Francisco from holding aloft the infant on a silver salver at each baptism, the traditional gesture of acknowledging the child as his own.23
Given that Isabel was a queen in her own right, the true identity of her heir’s father – at least from a dynastic point of view – was something of an irrelevance. Of more dynastic significance is the curious case of Olav, the only child of King Haakon VII, the Danish prince who went on to found the current Norwegian dynasty, and his English wife, Queen Maud, the daughter of Edward VII. The couple married in 1896, but it was not until seven years later that their only child, the future King Olav, was born – a suspiciously long time given the importance traditionally attached by all royal families to producing an heir.
Various reasons have been given for the delay. Maud certainly spent a lot of time in Sandringham rather than her adoptive homelands of Denmark and then Norway. There were even rumours – put about by republicans – that Haakon was gay. Then in 2004 came another and rather more bizarre explanation: in the second volume of Folket, his voluminous history of the royal couple, Tor Bomann-Larsen, a Norwegian writer, claimed that Olav, who went on to become king in 1957, may not have been Haakon’s son at all.24 The strange assertion was based on examination of the royal couple’s travel records, which Bomann-Larsen said showed that Olav had not been with his wife at the time the baby was thought to have been conceived. The book also claimed that medical records suggested the future king may have contracted a sexually transmitted disease during a particularly “debauched” naval tour to the West Indies, which could have left him sterile.
So who was Olav’s father? Bomann-Larsen claimed Maud might instead have been artificially inseminated – perhaps without her knowledge – with sperm from her Harley Street doctor, Sir Francis Henry Laking, or his son, Guy Francis. Photographs included in the book certainly showed a remarkable resemblance between Olav and the Lakings – and a lack of one between the future monarch and his father. “At the time when the fertilization normally would have taken place, King Haakon was on a marine vessel in Denmark and Queen Maud was lying in hospital in England,” Bomann-Larsen told a news conference to launch the book. “One cannot say precisely who knew what. Maud might not even have known herself.”25
Not everyone was convinced. Odd Arvid Storsveen, a historian at the University of Oslo, claimed in a review of the book published in Historisk Tidsskrift that he couldn’t find adequate evidence for Bomann-Larsen’s hypothesis. “King Olav’s descendants can take it easy,” he declared.26 A spokesman for Norway’s royal family said the King had no information suggesting that Olav had not been Haakon’s son.
Chapter 8
It was a turnout worthy of one of the greatest style icons of the twentieth century. When the Victoria & Albert Museum in London held a reception in April 2010 to mark the opening of an exhibition showcasing the fashion of the late Princess Grace of Monaco, the guests were an appropriate mixture of show business and royalty. The Hollywood actress Joan Collins, the model Erin O’Connor and the former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr were there; so, too, were Prince Edward, third son of Queen Elizabeth, and his wife the Countess of Wessex.
On show was an extraordinary collection of forty dresses that charted the journey of the woman born Grace Patricia Kelly from Philadelphia socialite and Hollywood star to princess, via a fairy-tale marriage to Prince Rainier III of Monaco. There was the satin number that Grace wore when she collected her Oscar for The Country Girl in 1955, and across the aisle a black chiffon evening dress in which she appeared in Rear Window. There was the rather modest “easy to sew” floral outfit from a McCall’s pattern book she wore when she first met the Prince (a power outage at her hotel prevented her ironing any of her other more formal gowns) and a gorgeous cream frock she sported that December when her engagement was announced. And an emerald-green wool dress by Givenchy in which Grace met that other fashion icon of the age, Jackie Kennedy, at the White House. There were accessories, too, such as the Hermès bag that was so closely identified with Grace that its designers nicknamed it “the Kelly bag”.
Unfortunately, her wedding dress – with its twenty-inch waist (a result of understandable nerves) – was not on display. It was deemed too fragile to travel from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it is by far the most popular attraction. As part of the show, scheduled to run for five months, there were film clips, posters and photographs – including one of Grace in a stunning pink ball gown, caught halfway up the marble staircase of Monaco’s Princely Palace, almost as if she were in flight.
More than a quarter of a century after her premature death, Grace was on the cover of magazines again. “At a time when it can be difficult to find that rare quality known as class, it is refreshing to see Grace Kelly back in the limelight,” observed the New York Times.1 Reviews of the exhibition itself were mixed, but there was no doubting the enduring appeal of its subject. “She’s one of the few people who deserves this title of style icon,” said Jenny Lister, who curated the exhibition for the V&A. “It’s very hard to find anyone else today who can be remembered in the same way fifty years from now.”
Guest of honour at the reception was Grace’s son, Prince Albert II, head of the royal house of Grimaldi since his father’s death in 2005, who spoke of his mother’s “exquisite taste”, which had remained timeless since her death. Long seen by the media as a confirmed bachelor, the Prince, now balding and with his fiftieth birthday behind him, had been linked over the years with a series of glamorous actresses and models – most of them many years his junior, including Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer, Gwyneth Paltrow and Brooke Shields.
At his side on this occasion, however, was a glamorous thirty-two-year-old woman, who some said looked uncannily like his mother. Her name was Charlene Wittstock and she used to be a teacher and Olympic swimmer. They had first met almost a decade earlier when Charlene had been swimming for her native South Africa at a competition in Monaco; since the couple appeared side by side at the Turin Winter Olympics in 2006, she had been his permanent companion. In contrast to Albert’s many previous relationships, this one seemed serious.
The name of Grace Kelly, star of films such as Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief and High Society, has been synonymous with Monaco since April 1956, when she turned her back on a glittering Hollywood career to marry Rainier, who had become ruler of the pocket-sized Mediterranean principality on the death of his grandfather seven years earlier.
But it was a royal wedding quite unlike any other. The ceremony in the Cathedral of St Nicholas was attended, among others, by the actors David Niven, Gloria Swanson and Ava Gardner – but not by members of any of Europe’s reigning royal families, who were unwilling to be seen at the marriage of a prince of a country associated with sleaze and gambling to the actress daughter of a self-made millionaire who had begun his professional life as a bricklayer. The closest among the guests to “real” monarchy were the Aga Khan and ex-King Farouk of Egypt. Aristotle Onassis arranged for fifteen thousand carnations to be dumped on Rainier’s yacht from a plane.
Grace, born on 12th November 1929, grew up in a Philadelphia mansion; her family were wealthy and broadly middle-class, but they were also Irish and Catholic, which meant they were scorned by the east-coast Wasp establishment. The third of four children, Grace struggled for acceptance at home too: her father, a triple Olympic-gold-medal-winning sculler and man of enormous ambition, never expected her acting to come to much.
After starting as a stage actress at the age of eighteen, Grace appeared in her first film, Fourteen Hours, which was released in April 1951. It was a tiny role – she appeared on screen for just two minutes and fourteen seconds – but it was long enough for her to be spotted by Gary Cooper. It was only after she appeared alongside him the following year in Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon that her career really took off. In January 1955, she made it to the cover of Time. In a profile the magazine described how Kelly, still only twenty-five, had within eighteen months been paired with six of Hollywood’s biggest male stars – Clark Gable, Ray Milland, James Stewart, William Holden, Bing Crosby and Cary Grant – and had been transformed in the process from a promising newcomer (generally thought to be English) to the “acknowledged ‘hottest property’ in Hollywood”.2
“From the day in 1951 when she walked into Director Fred Zinnemann’s office wearing prim white gloves (‘Nobody came to see me before wearing white gloves’), the well-bred Miss Grace Kelly of Philadelphia has baffled Hollywood,” Time noted. “She is a rich girl who has struck it rich. She was not discovered behind a soda fountain or at a drive-in. She is a star who was never a starlet, who never worked up from B pictures, never posed for cheesecake, was never elected, with a press agent’s help, Miss Anti-aircraft Battery C. She did not gush or twitter or desperately pull wires for a chance to get in the movies. Twice she turned down good Hollywood contracts. When she finally signed on the line, she forced mighty MGM itself to grant her special terms.”
Rainier, like many a royal prince, had a penchant for actresses, and for several years during his twenties had lived openly with Gisèle Pascal, a French performer, in his villa in Cap Ferrat – prompting complaints among some of his subjects that he was neglecting his official duties. Pascal had caught the Prince’s eye when he was a student at Montpellier University during the Second World War and she was appearing in boulevard plays. Pascal was not marriage material, however, and was reported (erroneously, it subsequently emerged) to be infertile – a major drawback for a royal bride. When Rainer succeeded to the throne in 1949, it became clear he had to find himself a wife.3
Rainer met Grace in May 1955 at the Cannes Film Festival. An executive of Paris Match had thought up a new angle for photographing the Prince’s palace at Monaco: he asked the actress to pose in the foreground. Grace did so only on condition that she be granted an audience with its owner – who was only too happy to oblige.
After a whirlwind romance conducted largely by letter, Rainier flew to New York that December and proposed. Grace accepted and went back to Hollywood to finish The Swan, a film, appropriately enough, about a princess from the minor branch of a European royal family whose mother is trying to set her up with the heir to the throne, played by Alec Guinness. Rainier went to Florida to take a rest. The American press went wild at this union of Hollywood royalty with the real thing. There were some notes of humorous dissent, though. “He’s not good enough for a Kelly,” claimed the Chicago Tribune. “She is too well bred a girl to marry the silent partner in a gambling parlour.” A columnist for the United Press news agency claimed executives at
MGM were worried “she will fly off to Monte Carlo and be seen henceforth only on postage stamps”.4
However unlikely a pair, the couple seemed genuinely in love. Like many marriages, though, theirs was also underpinned by some rational calculations on both sides. Grace was not just beautiful, she would also bring a much needed dose of glamour to Monaco and bear Rainier, now in his early thirties, the heir he needed. For Grace, marriage would turn her from screen goddess to real-life princess. She had been determined not to marry a man who would be belittled by her screen success and turned into a mere “Mr Kelly” – there was no danger of this happening with Rainier.
There was a price to pay, however: at her husband’s insistence, Grace had to give up her film career; he even banned any screening of her films in the principality. The new first lady of Monaco, ensconced in her two-hundred-room pink palace overlooking the Mediterranean, instead confined her energies to charitable works, garden clubs and the narration of inoffensive child-friendly documentaries, as well as to bringing up her own three children, Caroline, Albert and Stéphanie.
The fairy tale came to an abrupt end on the morning of 13th September 1982. Grace suffered a stroke while driving her ten-year-old Rover down a winding road. The car tumbled a hundred feet down a ravine, turning over several times before coming to rest in a garden. Grace died of her injuries the next day after the life-support system was turned off. Stéphanie, who was with her in the car, escaped with only minor injuries.
Tens of thousands of people from around the world sent cards and letter of condolence; the funeral was watched by an estimated one hundred million people across the world. “Grace brought into my life, as she brought into yours, a soft, warm light every time I saw her, and every time I saw her was a holiday of its own,” declared the actor James Stewart in his eulogy.
The Great Survivors Page 19