So in some ways they behaved like a long-married couple, whether royal or commoner. The British Royal Family’s credo that they should (no matter how hypocritical the picture) represent the epitome of domestic virtue, unsullied by marital infidelity or divorce, was a convenient excuse for their ostracism of Edward and Wallis. The duchess spent decades endeavoring to be accepted by Edward’s parents, siblings, and nieces, and never recovered from all the official snubs she received instead. George VI’s queen consort Elizabeth’s refusal to allow Wallis to use the title Her Royal Highness would be echoed decades later when her daughter, Elizabeth II, would effectively strip Diana of her HRH following her divorce from Prince Charles.
After battling several illnesses, including throat cancer, probably caused by a lifetime of cigarette smoking, in the predawn hours of May 28, 1972, Edward died, one month shy of his seventy-eighth birthday. He lay in state in Windsor, but not in Westminster Hall, where British monarchs are traditionally honored before burial. It was at Windsor that Wallis paid her respects to his bier on June 3, their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. Her escort, Lord Mountbatten, recalled that “in the saddest imaginable voice,” the duchess said, “He was my entire life. I can’t begin to think what I am going to do without him. He gave up so much for me and now he’s gone. I had always hoped that I would die before him.” The former Edward VIII was interred in the royal burying ground at Frogmore, where he often played as a boy.
By this time Wallis had reached her mid-seventies as well, and her health was also deteriorating. In 1973, at the age of seventy-eight, she fell and broke her hip. A few months later, she suffered a number of fractured ribs in a second fall. Doctors had difficulty inserting the anesthesia tube down her throat because it was so tight from her numerous cosmetic surgeries.
Wallis spent the last five years of her life in complete seclusion, as dementia or Alzheimer’s continued to claim her lucidity. Near the end of her life she went blind, and by the beginning of 1984 she was completely paralyzed. On April 24, 1986, Wallis died of heart failure at her Parisian home in the Bois de Boulogne. She was ninety years old. Several members of the royal family, including her surviving sister-in-law Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and Queen Elizabeth II, attended the funeral service and the burial, as they witnessed Wallis, Duchess of Windsor interred beside her beloved Edward. Maybe they just wanted to be sure that the Fascist fashionista was really out of their lives.
RAINIER III, PRINCE OF MONACO 1923-2005
RULED MONACO: 1949-2005
and
GRACE KELLY
1929-1982
married 1956-1982
“You have no idea what hard work fairy stories can be.”
—Grace Kelly to journalist Michael Thornton in 1976
HE NEEDED TO REVIVE A SAGGING ECONOMY AND wanted to restore the luster to Monaco, his postage-stamp-sized principality sandwiched between France and Italy on the Côte d’Azur.
She, an Oscar winner by the age of twenty-five, was fairly certain that Hollywood could offer her no more than what she had already achieved and was searching for The Next Thing.
Does that sound like “once upon a time”?
In 1955, Grace Kelly, the Philadelphia-born beauty and recent winner of the Best Actress statuette for her role in The Country Girl, was invited to be the guest of honor at the Cannes Film Festival. Paris Match editor Pierre Galante was determined to fulfill his assignment to arrange a photo op between the cool blond Hollywood heroine and the ruler of Monaco, who was at the time a royal nobody, and whose realm—roughly the size of New York’s Central Park—was a Mediterranean backwater characterized by Somerset Maugham as “a sunny place for shady people.” It took a good deal of persuading; Galante’s success in effecting the Hollywood-Royal meet was aided by the fact that his wife, Olivia de Havilland, happened to be Grace’s favorite actress.
Over the centuries, Monaco’s ruling family, the Grimaldis, had weathered several reversals of fortune. By the early 1950s, they were sitting at the low end of the financial teeter-totter, and to the disgust of Prince Rainier, the shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis held the majority of shares in Monte Carlo’s casino. Money speaking louder than any royal title, it meant that Onassis was theoretically the most powerful man in Monaco. His plan was to turn the little seaside principality into a highly exclusive resort community for the world’s wealthiest citizens.
Then Monte Carlo’s largest bank crashed. The economy, as well as Rainier’s personal income, plummeted. When Rainier swallowed his pride and turned to Onassis for advice, the shipping magnate suggested that the realm’s financial woes might be solved, the economy turned around, and Monaco’s lost luster restored if Rainier were to wed an American movie star—an event that, naturally, would garner enormous press coverage. So the prince compiled a list, comprised mainly of pulchritudinous blondes, including Marilyn Monroe, who evidently self-eliminated when she kept referring to His Serene Highness as “Prince Reindeer.”
The five-foot-seven-inch Grace Kelly, twenty-five years old, slim, elegant, and poised (as well as appropriately Catholic), made it onto the short list; and the serendipity of her visit to Cannes in the spring of 1955 ended up setting the stage for twentieth-century continental Europe’s most famous, and glamorous, royal marriage.
Grace was the third of four children born to the handsome and athletic Irish immigrant bricklayer, entrepreneur, bon vivant, and sometime politician Jack Kelly. His wife was Margaret Majer, of German descent, although her background was hushed up during an era when the Germans were highly unpopular in the United States and Grace was being touted to movie audiences as the quintessential American beauty.
The morning of May 6, 1955, the day Grace was scheduled to meet Prince Rainier, began inauspiciously. The electricity went out across France due to a labor strike. Grace couldn’t dry and style her hair because the hair dryer wouldn’t work, nor did the iron, so she was compelled to wear the only dress in her trunk that wasn’t wrinkled—a bold floral print with a fitted, drop-waisted bodice and a pouffy taffeta skirt that rustled with every step. Appraising her appearance in the hotel mirror, with the loud frock and the wet hair she had smoothed into a chignon, she declared, “I look a fright.” Grace also discovered at the last minute that royal protocol demanded she wear a hat in the presence of the prince. She never much liked them, so she hadn’t packed one and had to make do with a friend’s headband, a broad crescent of faux flowers.
Ironically, Grace and Rainier’s relationship would begin and end with an automobile accident. En route to the Palais Princier, Grace and the publicist and photographer she was traveling with got into a fender bender with a Studebaker. By the time they arrived in Monaco, she was visibly shaken and even less eager to meet Rainier, who—much to the embarrassment of all concerned—was not at the palace to greet them.
Although Grace was known for thoroughly researching her roles, she had not done her homework before this annoying publicity stunt. As the minutes mounted and she impatiently waited for the prince to arrive, she wanted to know whether he spoke English. How would she be expected to address him? And, by the way, how old was he? After forty-five minutes with Rainier still a no-show, the starlet had had it. “Let’s get out of here,” she announced.
No sooner had Grace risen to her feet than the barrel-chested thirty-one-year-old chain-smoking monarch entered the room. He poured on the charm, and the Monegasque dog-and-pony show began—literally—as he led off the grand tour of his realm with a visit to the palace zoo. Then they shared a laugh over the fact that neither of them had been eager to agree to this meeting. Whatever else Rainier did or said that day produced the desired effect; during the limo ride back to Cannes, Grace couldn’t stop murmuring, “He is so charming, so very charming.”
By the time she returned to the United States, royalty was on her brain, and not merely because she had dived into the role of a continental European princess in The Swan. Grace and Rainier had become pen pals. Although there appeared to
be no erotic spark between them, in some ways Grace’s whirlwind royal romance was unsurprising, given her penchant for older men. While many of the roles she played on the silver screen were coolly composed ice maidens and “good girls,” she’d earned an off-screen reputation as a home wrecker for her numerous love affairs, usually with her leading men, including (according to her biographers) the very married Ray Milland, William Holden, Gary Cooper, and Bing Crosby.
During their stroll around Monaco, Grace had dropped the prince a hint that anytime he found himself in America, he should not hesitate to look her up. Naturally, he found a reason to do so within weeks. She brought Rainier to meet her family, and finally Jack and Margaret Kelly approved of her beau: this one wasn’t married, he wasn’t an alcoholic, and best of all, he was Catholic.
But Grace’s kid sister, Lizanne, was a bit more skeptical; in fact, she was utterly surprised to hear that Grace and Rainier were already engaged. According to Kelly’s recent biographer Wendy Leigh, Lizanne said, “She didn’t have time to be really in love . . . I don’t know why she decided to marry him so quickly.”
Grace had agreed to wed a man she hardly knew except through their correspondence, and to become princess of a place where she had barely spent a couple of hours and where she didn’t speak the language. Had she thought it all through? Monaco was no temporary location shoot; it was going to be where she’d commit to spending the rest of her life.
Acting was her true passion, and would always remain so, but evidently Grace had concluded that after her mid-twenties it would be downhill in Hollywood from then on. Perhaps it was merely a temporary disenchantment with the profession that caused her to lament that “Each year my makeup call is a lot earlier. And when I look at the other ladies who’ve been there since dawn, do I want to live like that? Get me out.”
So when the one-of-a-kind opportunity arose to exit with a bang and a flourish, Grace grabbed it. However, she did bump into a few men who were still waiting, and hoping, in the wings.
Shortly before Grace and Rainier were introduced, she had been engaged to the fashion designer Oleg Cassini, a French-born Jew who could trace his lineage to the Russian nobility. The pair had enjoyed a whirlwind courtship, and their decision to rush to the altar was precipitated by Grace’s discovery that she was pregnant. Torn between her Catholic, though relatively nonreligious, upbringing, her career ambitions, and her love for Cassini, she ended up having an abortion. Their raison d’être for marriage mooted, she called off the wedding, but she hadn’t quite ended the engagement. Believing he was still her fiancé, Oleg was shocked and hurt when Grace told him, during a meeting on the Staten Island Ferry, that she was planning to marry Rainier. When he asked her why she was doing it, her terse reply was not exactly brimming with enthusiasm. “I will learn to love him,” she told the designer. “I have made my destiny.”
An interesting choice of words.
Behind the scenes, a relationship between Rainier and Grace was heating up, primarily through their correspondence, although each of them coyly downplayed all rumors of a royal romance. Coached by his confessor-confidant, Delaware native Father Francis Tucker, Rainier hit all the right notes in his media interviews, telling the press that his greatest difficulty lay in “knowing a girl long enough and intimately enough to find out if we are really soul mates as well as lovers. I consider it a duty to my people to get married.” The Grimaldis were no strangers to family dysfunction. Spouses and siblings had a history of detesting one another; parents couldn’t abide their children, and vice versa. Rainier’s own parents had split acrimoniously when he was a small boy and he craved familial intimacy. Nearly twenty years later he told a journalist, “I think the experience of my parents’ separation when I was only six subconsciously made me very much want my own marriage to succeed. The Princess and I tried to minimize any disagreement between us in the interest of keeping the family together—so that the children would not suffer.”
On the subject of soul mates and marital harmony, Grace, a Scorpio, had always placed a lot of faith in astrology and the occult, and was keenly aware that one of her worst possible matches would be with a man born under the sign of Gemini. She nearly kicked herself for not asking Rainier’s birthday before agreeing to be his princess bride. It was a question she’d always asked very early in a relationship. How could she have been so remiss? The fact that Rainier was a Gemini was no small matter to Grace. She suffered serious misgivings about going ahead with their wedding plans. According to friends and family members, Grace’s primary reason for soldiering on was the intense desire to please her father, who never thought she would amount to much and continually downplayed her successes, including her Academy Award.
Rainier visited the States in December 1955, accompanied by a secretary and a French doctor, amusingly named Robert Donat, whose job it would be to supervise the obligatory, though mortifying, fertility test that would prove there was no impediment to Grace’s bearing an heir for Monaco. Grace took it in stride (although she refused to inform her parents about the test), telling a friend she was due for a checkup anyway, and heck, the prince was paying for it!
On December 28, 1955, Grace and Rainier enjoyed a romantic dinner at Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. “If you are to be at my side, then you may need this,” the prince told Grace and handed her a gift-wrapped copy of a “coffee-table” book about the history of Monaco. He planned to pop the question over dessert, but when the conversation turned to his family’s unfortunate marital history, and Grace grew visibly anxious, he thought better of it.
Plan B was a seductive stroll in Central Park, but on the way down to the lobby, they met Dr. Donat and his nurse Leanne Scott in the elevator and Grace invited the other couple to join them.
There was no plan C. As soon as they exited onto Park Avenue, the frustrated monarch grabbed Grace by the wrist and yanked her through uptown traffic to the median. There he proposed to her, offered her the ring, and curious bystanders overheard Grace’s yelps of delight, followed by an “Of course I will marry you!” Their public kiss right in the middle of Park Avenue received a round of applause.
The original engagement ring was exceptionally modest; the prince was told that he’d have to do a lot better if he wanted Grace to say “yes,” so he replaced it with a twelve-carat diamond surrounded by rubies, red and white being Monaco’s national colors. And Rainier’s bank account was a comedown from the nouveau riche lifestyle Grace had enjoyed growing up and the luxe trappings of movie stardom. Jack Kelly was expected to kick in an old-fashioned dowry—$2 million—before the prince would have his daughter. Cynics watching from the sidelines claimed that the bricklaying entrepreneur had merely brokered another business deal.
Additionally, Grace was expected to be an equal contributor to the expenses for the palace upkeep, but was to forgo any financial assets in her own right. Jack was worried that Rainier appeared to be dismissive of his daughter’s concerns. “It’s killing me that I can’t protect her,” he lamented.
In the end, Grace, a shrewd negotiator who’d managed to get her own way at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, took the mediation out of the hands of the lawyers and sat down with Rainier alone, hammering out her own deal with him.
But one enormous point of contention remained unresolved. Grace believed she was temporarily giving up acting to become Princess of Monaco. Rainier was adamant that she close the door forever on her career. Still convinced that she could eventually change his mind, Grace embarked, literally, upon her new life.
On April 4, 1956, at 9:55 a.m., from the deck of the glamorously appointed SS Constitution, Grace waved good-bye to the paparazzi popping their flashbulbs on Manhattan’s Pier 84. Also enjoying first-class cabins were seventy-eight Kelly relatives and friends, as well as a number of journalists, including a married photographer for Paris Match named Walter Carone. Grace permitted Carone an exclusive photo shoot—and a good deal more, according to her fellow travelers: she more than likely engaged in a shipboard
fling with him. Carone died in 1982, but his widow told Kelly’s biographer Wendy Leigh that her husband felt Grace “wasn’t full of the joy of getting married. He said that she didn’t seem to be happy. She didn’t seem to be in love with Rainier.”
A few days later, during a conversation Grace had with her friend Charlotte Winston, she unfavorably compared Monaco to “taking all of the city of New York and squeezing it onto the head of a knitting needle.” When Charlotte asked what Grace was going to do about it, the future princess testily retorted, “What do you think I’m going to do? The whole goddamn world is waiting for me to get married. I can’t very well not do it now, can I?”
Grace’s first taste of the life that lay in store for her was a bitter one. No sooner did the ship reach the Riviera than the typical in-law rivalry associated with most families’ wedding plans began to surface. The snooty Grimaldis found the fun-loving Kellys a boisterous bunch, ignorant of royal protocol. Rainier’s mother, Charlotte, and his sister Antoinette gave Grace a particularly chilly reception. The Kelly girls—Grace’s older sister, Peggy, and younger sister, Lizanne—found the Monegasques pretentious. On observing the soon-to-be-newlyweds, neither of them believed they were enjoying a genuine romance. “It was never a fairy tale come true,” according to Peggy, and Lizanne felt that “it was just a very nice agreement.”
On April 18, 1956, Grace and Rainier’s eleven a.m. civil ceremony was broadcast across the globe thanks to the magic of technology and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Long before the era of reality television, Rainier and Grace had sold the rights to their wedding ceremonies. Their arrangement with the studio included a percentage of the post-distribution profits, a 30 percent share that the couple donated to the Monaco Red Cross. Grace, who had broken her contract with MGM in order to become Princess of Monaco, had agreed to the filming in order to fulfill its outstanding terms. The prince, or more accurately, the principality, desperately needed the publicity to help tourists locate it on a map.
Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire Page 48