Grace of Monaco
Page 12
By dawn, traffic was backed up for ten miles.
In Rainier’s eyes, de Gaulle’s actions were a direct threat to the sovereignty of the principality and there was simply no way he could permit that.
Reacting to an intractable Rainier, the French president next threatened to cut off Monaco’s electricity and water.
Rainier didn’t know what would have happened to Monaco had he done that but he always believed it could have been fatal for de Gaulle.
“It would have been a really stupid thing to do,” he maintained, “because there was never any aggression on our part. I was giving interviews at the time trying to show that we weren’t being anti-French by standing up to de Gaulle. I was only making a stand against measures that affected us, that were taken in the name of France when we were not given any chance to discuss them.”
At one point there was actually talk around the French Foreign Ministry of dethroning Rainier and sending him into exile.
It wasn’t until December, with the press continuing to describe Monaco as a country under siege, that the two parties started talking again. Several months of mediation followed.
“Once we got down to serious negotiations,” Rainier said, “with the technicians at the various ministries, we knew everything would be all right. We could see that they were even a little embarrassed about all this because de Gaulle had gone too far.”
Rainier agreed that French citizens, resident in Monaco for fewer than five years, would no longer enjoy their tax exempt status, and that they would be subject to French income taxes. Furthermore, any Monegasque company earning more than 25 percent of its turnover outside the principality would also be subject to French taxes.
“After all the hassles,” he said, “our main concession was that French people living in Monaco would have to pay French taxes as if they were living in France. We worked out a compromise that from 1963 onwards no Frenchman would be allowed to evade French taxes by living in Monaco. But then that’s what de Gaulle had been after all the time.”
The customs checks disappeared, the gendarmes were stepped down and life returned to normal.
Rainier and de Gaulle were destined to lock horns again a few years later, when the General decided to close the American bases in France and withdraw French military support from NATO.
Rainier, who was staunchly pro-American, announced that US ships would indeed be permitted to stop in Monaco. “De Gaulle didn’t like it when I refused to turn my back on the Americans. But this time there wasn’t much he could do about it. I didn’t invite them to stop here for economic reasons, even though there’s always a lot of money at stake whenever a warship comes to call. The guys come ashore and they spend. I just thought de Gaulle’s attitude towards the Americans was wrong. I didn’t see any reason why we should have adopted that same stance.”
Using the words “hard, bitter, and difficult” to describe that period, Rainier believed that one of the ways he got through those times was by learning to count on Grace. “In the beginning she said maybe I should have toned myself down a bit with Pelletier. But she could see that he hadn’t fulfilled his responsibilities to me. This was the first serious diplomatic crisis in her career. It was unknown territory for her. She had to learn about it, had to find out for herself what was going on. Once she realized what was happening she backed me up all the way.”
He said that they discussed what was happening at great length, that he confided in her and that he turned to her for support.
“She always offered suggestions,” he said, “but she never interfered with my decisions. I wouldn’t say she was my closest adviser because she never took the position of an adviser. Instead, she was always cautioning me not to be in a hurry. She took the human side, wanting me to keep a dialogue going with the French, telling me not to push too quickly or too hard.”
He paused for just a second, then added with a tinge of sadness, “She and I were a pretty good team.”
Photo Section 1
Above: It was Grace’s ice-cold beauty—a new
kind of sex appeal in the 1950's—that made
her a show-business star at the age of twenty.
(courtesy Photo Archive, Palais Princier, Monaco)
Below: At Cannes, the day after she met Ranier.
(courtesy Popperfoto Ltd.)
Grace Kelly at nine months.
(courtesy Photo Archive, Palais Princier, Monaco)
Grace Kelly at two years.
(courtesy Photo Archive, Palais Princier, Monaco)
Grace Kelly at twelve years.
(courtesy Photo Archive, Palais Princier, Monaco)
Rainier at four months.
(courtesy Photo Archive, Palais Princier, Monaco)
Born with a sense of adventure, Ranier
kept wild animals as pets.
(courtesy Photo Archive, Palais Princier, Monaco)
Rainier loved the sea.
(courtesy Photo Archive, Palais Princier, Monaco)
Rainier always enjoyed motorcycles and fast cars.
(courtesy Photo Archive, Palais Princier, Monaco)
Grace with the man who made her a movie star,
Alfred Hitchcock, on the set of To Catch a Thief in 1954.
(courtesy Paramount Pictures)
Romance blossomed between Rainier and Grace
with the help of Rainier’s Irish friend Father Tucker.
(courtesy Popperfoto Ltd.)
The engagement ring marked the official start of the endless
Rainier-and-Grace-must-now-pose-for-photographs season of 1956.
(courtesy Popperfoto Ltd.)
On the ship to Monaco, photographers followed Grace,
here with her poodle, even on lifeboat drills.
(courtesy Photo Archive, Palais Princier, Monaco)
Grace arrived in Monaco to a standing-room-only
harbor crowd in April 1956.
Only her hat got in the way of her joyous arrival.
(courtesy Photo Archive, Palais Princier, Monaco)
A civil wedding at the palace.
(courtesy Photo Archive, Palais Princier, Monaco)
The religious ceremony in St. Nicholas Cathedral.
(courtesy Photo Archive, Palais Princier, Monaco)
She was a fairy-tale bride.
(courtesy F. Picedi)
Clockwise, from top left: Grace and her mother in Monte Carlo.
(courtesy Photo Archive, Palais Princier, Monaco)
Grace and Rainier at home.
(courtesy Photo Archive, Palais Princier, Monaco, G. Lukomski)
Rainier and Grace on official duties with Caroline,
Rainier’s father, Prince Pierre, Albert, and the nannies.
(courtesy Popperfoto Ltd.)
Rainier with young Albert.
(courtesy G. Lumoski, Photo Archive, Palais Princier, Monaco)
Grace at the beach club with Caroline and Albert.
(courtesy Photo Archive, Palais Princier, Monaco)
Grace walking in Monaco with the children.
(courtesy Photo Archive, Palais Princier, Monaco)
Grace with infant Stephanie and Albert and Caroline.
(courtesy Photo Archive, Palais Princier, Monaco)
Chapter 13
Mr. and Mrs. Grimaldi
and Their Family
Within a week of their marriage, Grace was pregnant. She spent much of the summer of 1956 nauseous with morning sickness. That autumn she and Rainier sailed to the United States. It was Grace’s first trip home as a Princess. It was also her first trip to the White House.
“We went to Washington and called on President Eisenhower,” Rainier said. “He was a glorious figure but a bit dull, the way all military men are when they’re out of their element.”
They returned to Monaco with two tons of white lacquered nursery furniture, a wicker crib, and toys. The theme for the baby’s room would be bushy-tailed rabbits.
Caroline Louise Marguerite was born i
n the rain on the morning of January 23, 1957. It was a good sign. According to the local superstition, a child born in the rain has health and character and brings prosperity.
She was called Heiress Presumptive, as she would lose her right to succeed to the throne if a boy came later. Still, all of Monaco rejoiced because Rainier had an heir, because the line was secure, because the child born in the rain had assured their continued freedom from the dreaded French tax man.
Towards the end of that year, Grace and Rainier took Caroline to meet her paternal grandmother. Grace was determined to patch up the strained feelings between her husband and his mother.
Charlotte had turned much of the estate at Marchais into a half-way house for ex-convicts. She’d given them shelter in the 100-room castle and hired them to work on its huge grounds with a three-mile moat. Rainier felt it was too dangerous having such types around and he argued with his mother about it. Grace hoped the baby could somehow heal the wounds.
This was not Charlotte’s first grandchild, but Caroline would always hold a special place in her grandmother’s heart.
Just as “Mamou” would in Caroline’s.
Within five months of Caroline’s birth, Grace was pregnant again.
Albert Louis Pierre, now the Hereditary Prince of Monaco, was born on March 14, 1958.
Eighteen months later Rainier named Grace regent, issuing a decree that she would rule in the case of his death until Albert was 21. In the meantime, he gave up sports car racing and skin-diving.
The children now occupied much of their free time. They still traveled but Grace flew with Albert in a separate plane from Rainier and Caroline. They began dividing summers between the Kelly family house on the New Jersey shore and their farm in the hills above Monaco, Roc Agel, where they moved into all 14 rooms and stocked the stable with two horses and a donkey.
They also did a lot of sailing, although Grace was never much of a sailor.
She convinced Rainier it might be better if he replaced the Deo Juvante II with something that didn’t rock back and forth quite as much. So Rainier sold the ship in 1958—today it is called M/Y Grace and sails tourist charters off the Galapagos Islands—replacing it with a handsome 40-year-old Spanish banana boat.
But that didn’t exactly solve the problem because, as Rainier put it, “Without bananas in the bottom it still rolls.”
Grace brought teachers into the Palace for Caroline and Albert when they were of kindergarten age, starting them off in school together. But she quickly decided that wasn’t very wise even though they’re only a year apart.
For much of his youth, Albert suffered from an awkward stutter. And some people think it might have stemmed from that period. Whatever the cause, it was a great concern to his parents.
Like both his parents, Albert was naturally shy. His speech problem only added to his timidity. But as he grew older he realized he could overcome it. Today there is only a very faint trace of stutter. He speaks slowly and at times very deliberately, but the problem that haunted him during his childhood is gone.
Caroline, perhaps because she was that year older, became the outgoing one. She was the one who always organized him and their friends into games. Her favorite game as they grew up was playing school. Albert and the others had to be the students. Caroline, of course, was always the teacher.
On February 1, 1965, Stephanie Marie Elisabeth joined them.
“The thing about them as a family,” observed Nadia Lacoste, “is that they were just that, a real family. The Princess would read to her children in the evening. The Prince would balance all three kids on his shoulders or get down on his knees and play with them. They were a team at work and a team when it came to raising their children. They shared the feeling that it was important to be close, to be together. You know, to stick together. The Prince and Princess both wanted to make certain that their children had a happier childhood than they had.”
GqH
In those days they lived in a terrace, off the main courtyard, Pullman style, with all of their rooms in a straight line. There was a drawing room, dining room, study, the master bedroom, a dressing room, and the children’s room. You walked through one to get to the next one.
All three children were born in the study, which was converted for the purpose into a delivery room. Caroline and Albert shared a room with a sliding partition down the middle that could be closed at night.
When Stephanie came along, Grace put her in Caroline’s side of that room. But as the children got older, Grace and Rainier decided the arrangement wasn’t very convenient so they built a wing onto the Palace, and together they designed new private apartments.
“In about 1976 or so,” Rainier explained, “we found a series of old drawings and plans for the Palace and decided to add a wing on the west side of the main entrance.”
Wearing gray slacks and a custom-made pale blue shirt open at the neck with his personal crest on the pocket, he sat on a couch in front of the huge fireplace in the double-storied living room at the heart of his private apartments which take up the entire left wing of the Palace.
A bright, airy room with marble floors, there are enormous French windows overlooking the private gardens and huge leafy green plants climbing towards the ceiling.
“There’d been a wing here up to the end of the 18th century,” he continued, “but it was destroyed during the French Revolution when the Palace was occupied and part of it was turned into a hospice. Sadly the Palace was emptied of everything it contained. We’ve since found a few of the original pieces—furniture and paintings, that sort of thing—and bought them back. But it would be impossible to find everything. Anyway, we got our architect to re-create this wing and Grace designed the apartment. This was our home.”
Furnished modern, with family photos in silver picture frames on almost every table, there’s a small lofted study overlooking the living-room where the Prince sometimes worked in the evening.
Next to it is the small study, which Grace occasionally used.
There’s a dining room and a kitchen leading off the living room and down the hall there’s a second, less formal living room that doubles as a family room.
The master bedroom is upstairs, with en suite dressing rooms and a large bathroom.
Albert, Caroline and Stephanie each kept a two-room suite there as well, separated by a large communal room where, as children, they had their desks and did their schoolwork.
“Grace was always very concerned with the Palace,” Rainier said, “in restoring it to its original beauty. She also paid great attention to Le Rocher, which is now an historic monument. The whole quarter around the Palace is protected. In order to build anything here you need a permit based on a very precise plan. You must conform to the traditional style of all the buildings on the Rock. Grace was so concerned with maintaining a sense of historical harmony here that she even changed the color of the Palace. It used to be a kind of pale yellow. She thought that a pale, salmon pink might be better, more harmonious with the rest of the Rock, so that’s the color it is today”
Rainier conceded that those early years were especially difficult for her. After all, she was the one who’d made the biggest change. She’d given up her career, right at the top, and in her mind there would always be a distant question mark over what might have been had she stayed in the business. She’d also given up her friends. Apart from Rainier and his father, she didn’t really know anyone else in the entire country. She’d moved from comfortable rented houses in California and a well-appointed flat on Fifth Avenue, to a huge empty Palace in the south of France that hadn’t been lived in for any length of time in many years.
“The Palace itself was very beautiful,” Grace used to say. “It was enormous but it was also a bit sad. It was uninhabited most of the year. But we planned to live in it all year long, to make it our home. So I threw open the windows, opened them all the way, put flowers in the pots, and got a legion of people to sweep away the dust.”
R
ainier convinced her to design a new Palace projection room and stood by as she re-designed the sky-blue, oval-shaped swimming pool in the Palace gardens.
They brought specialists from Italy to do stone-work and craftsmen from France to put the woodwork into shape. And they spent a fortune restocking the period rooms with the correct furniture and tapestries.
Little by little, the two of them turned the Palace into a home.
GqH
They raised their family with some simple rules, Rainier explained, like believing that good manners are a virtue because everything rare is precious.
There’s no doubt that, by modern standards, they were strict parents, approving of old-fashioned manners, insisting on basic courtesies like “please” and “thank you” and generally rejecting any arguments in favor of what used to be called the “permissive society.”
As Grace once put it, “If one doesn’t impose some discipline on one’s children at an early age then life will impose it later on perhaps but with a great deal more brutality than any parent could be capable of. There was a time when religious institutions used to take over a child’s education if the parents were too weak. Or boys would go off to the army. But the church seems to be falling to pieces and discipline in the army is out of favor.”