Grace of Monaco Read online

  Grace of

  Monaco

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  Also by Jeffrey Robinson

  Title Page

  Author’s Note

  Foreword

  Dawn

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 Becoming Grace

  Chapter 2 A Shy Man

  Chapter 3 A Public Romance

  Chapter 4 The Last Secret Treasure Garden

  Chapter 5 The Private Story

  Chapter 6 Making Plans

  Chapter 7 The Wedding

  Chapter 8 Rainier Reminiscing

  Chapter 9 Growing Up Monegasque

  Chapter 10 The Birth of Modern Monaco

  Chapter 11 Taking On Onassis

  Chapter 12 Battling de Gaulle

  Photo Section 1

  Chapter 13 Mr. and Mrs. Grimaldi and Their Family

  Chapter 14 Coming Into Their Own

  Chapter 15 The Press Feeding Frenzy Never Stopped

  Chapter 16 Grace

  Chapter 17 From Princess to Performer

  Midday

  Chapter 18 Before the Laughter Stopped

  Chapter 19 Teamwork

  Chapter 20 Grimaldi Inc.

  Chapter 21 Caroline

  Chapter 22 Albert

  Chapter 23 Stephanie

  Chapter 24 Rainier on Stamps, Russians, Prison, Banishment, and the Money in His Pocket

  Chapter 25 Caroline— Life Goes On

  Photo Section 2

  Chapter 26 Albert— Friends and Lovers

  Chapter 27 Stephanie— Following Her Heart

  Chapter 28 The Accident

  Chapter 29 After Grace

  Chapter 30 Moving On

  Chapter 31 In a Talkative Mood

  Chapter 32 Rainier Revisited

  Chapter 33 The End of the Fairy Tale

  Dusk

  A Personal Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  also by Jeffrey Robinson

  e-book originals

  Jeffrey Robinson’s Criminal Intent—Following the Money

  Jeffrey Robinson’s Criminal Intent—The Swiss Wash Whiter

  e-book fiction

  A True and Perfect Knight

  The Monk’s Disciples

  The Margin of the Bulls

  Trump Tower

  e-book non-fiction

  The Laundrymen: Inside the World’s Third Largest Business:

  Money Laundering

  The Merger: The Conglomeration of International Organized Crime

  The Sink: Terror, Crime and Dirty Money in the Offshore World

  The Takedown: A Suburban Mom, A Coal Miner’s Son and

  the Unlikely Demise of Colombia’s Brutal Norte Valle Cartel

  The Manipulators: Unmasking the Hidden Persuaders

  The Hotel: Upstairs, Downstairs in a Secret World

  e-book biography

  Rainier and Grace: 30 Years after the Death of Princess Grace

  Bardot: Two Lives

  e-book as told to

  Standing Next to History: An Agent’s Life Inside the Secret Service

  (with Joseph Petro, United States Secret Service, Retired)

  Leading from the Front (with Gerald Ronson)

  Author’s Note

  At Princess Grace’s funeral in 1982, one of her old Hollywood buddies, Jimmy Stewart, summed up what so many people in the church that day, already knew: “I just love Grace Kelly. Not because she was a princess, not because she was an actress, not because she was my friend, but because she was just about the nicest lady I ever met. 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.”

  Years before, when Frank Sinatra sang to her in High Society, “You’re Sensational,” he got that right. Years later, after her death, he was right again when he told friends, “She was one helluva special broad.”

  Princess Grace of Monaco, nee Grace Patricia Kelly in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is lovingly remembered by everyone who knew her.

  This book was originally written in 1989, with the full and unprecedented cooperation of the four people who loved her best: Prince Rainier III, Prince Albert, Princess Caroline and Princess Stephanie.

  Over the years I have revised it for various editions. Grace of Monaco is the latest incarnation. Understandably, then, this book will forever be dedicated to

  Grace (1929–1982)

  and to Rainier (1923–2005)

  And to Albert, Caroline, and Stephanie, too.

  Your parents were sensational.

  Foreword

  by Nicole Kidman

  I knew Grace Kelly, the actress, from films such as Rear Window and To Catch a Thief, but I only knew Princess Grace from her very public image, the fairy tale we all witnessed from afar. I didn’t know anything about her childhood. Or about her struggles as an actress, as a young artist trying to find herself, to find her place in the world. I knew even less about her marriage to Prince Rainier, and what her family life was like.

  For me, approaching this role, there was a disconnect between the public Grace—the actress and the Princess—and the private Grace, the mother, the wife, the daughter. For me, the central question became, what lies beneath the fairy tale? Grace was very private, deliberately so, and I wanted to honor that. But I also wanted to be true to her life and experiences.

  The problem is that any time an artist or performer is asked to portray a real person, especially someone as famous as Princess Grace, there is the risk of impersonation or imitation. That’s not what I wanted. So I started by reading everything about her I could find. I studied her interviews. And I watched her films. My goal was to absorb the essence of her, so that I could honor with integrity the person she was, while also bringing a sense of expression to the part.

  From experience, I knew that by taking it all in, letting everything sink in, the Grace I would portray would emerge, almost subconsciously.

  At the same time, I have always been fascinated by the blurry line between art and reality. But there is also an overlap. And that’s where an artist can find expression to translate into the fictionalized world of film. I’ll show you what I mean. There is a moment in the film when Grace is struggling to succeed as a royal figure, when she is told by her confidante, Father Tucker, that she needs to approach her royal duties as if she is acting the role of a lifetime. It’s a key moment, because that’s how Grace discovers who she is in Monaco. That became one of my keys to understanding her. It stayed with me because I could imagine how complex and difficult that was. As a head of state, you have to act, you have to perform, and yet, it is not an act or a performance, it is your life. In real life, you don’t have the walls of the movie set, the frame of the camera, to tell you who to be. Grace survived a tremendous challenge of identity: finding the right balance between actress, mother, wife, and princess.

  That’s impressive.

  As I got to know her, I was also very impressed how deeply dedicated she was to her children and to her husband—to providing for her family. Her early years had been spent amidst the wealth of old money Philadelphia. Then came the struggle to succeed as an artist, and the fame of Hollywood stardom. After that came ever greater fame, plus the glamor of Monaco. And yet, she stayed true to her convictions, to her belief that love is the most important thing of all.

  It was love, compassion, and sensitivity that served as her compass as she navigated her way through life. We all know that fame and wealth can be deceptively misleading. And Grace knew that more than most. But she knew what mattered, set her compass true and often referred to it for guidance. It told her, listen to your heart.

  Staying true
to her heart is why, I think, people connect so strongly with her. And nowhere is that connection greater than in Monaco. She arrived in 1956 as Grace Kelly, the actress, but by 1962, around the time that Alfred Hitchcock asked her to return to acting and star in his film Marnie—which is one of the central themes of the film—she was no longer Grace Kelly, she had become Princess Grace.

  It was a unique transformation, something the world had never seen before. Even today, you can feel Grace’s presence in Monaco. It’s something that Olivier Dahan, the director of the film, kept ­saying—that Grace became Monaco and Monaco became Grace. That the two were inseparable then. That they are inseparable now.

  I find something beautiful about that—a person, a moment of existence, and a place being aligned so clearly.

  But I also came to feel a certain emptiness.

  I got to know Grace by reading about her and studying her and seeing her films, and with that familiarity came a sense of loss.

  I feel deeply that, when she died in 1982, the world lost a really special woman.

  What remains is the film version of her life, which has taken gentle liberties with her story for the sake of the cinema, and this biography, which tells it like it really was. For my part, I have tried to keep alive in the film the true magic that was Grace. And Jeffrey has kept that same magic alive in this book.

  I hope you enjoy both.

  Dawn

  There is a slight chill in the air as the sun starts to climb its way over the edge of the horizon, far out to sea.

  The water goes from pale gray, a mirror of the sky, to a stunning bluish green as the morning steadily sneaks into the corners of the port and lights up a building there that is strawberry pink.

  It lights Le Roche, the rock overlooking the harbor the juts into the sea where the Prince’s Palace sits guarded by its ancient ramparts. It lights the high-rise apartment houses that line the Avenue Princess Grace, along the fabulously expensive stretch of seafront called Monte Carlo Beach. It lights the old villas, piled almost one on top of the other, along the face of the hill the stares down at the casino and the Hotel de Paris and the Café de Paris and the Mediterranean behind them.

  At first everything seems flat.

  All the colors seem washed out.

  But the early morning sun casts a special light that you only see in the south of France, especially after the nighttime Mistral has swept away the clouds. It’s intense, dustless, crystal-clear light which brings colors alive in such a way that you think to yourself—nowhere else on the earth does it color everything quite like this.

  The sun catches the buildings almost unawares. For a second it turns them all a pale pinkish orange. But almost before you notice it, that’s gone. Now you see red and yellow and some of the buildings are a soft, rich Assam tea golden shade—gold in this case being an appropriate color considering the price of real estate here.

  Now you also see awnings opening across thousands of balconies—blue awnings and pink awnings, and faded red awnings that have lived through too many summers, and bright yellow awnings that have just been bought.

  The night train from Barcelona pulls into the station on its way to the Italian border town of Ventimiglia. A voice with a marked accent announces over the loud speaker, “Monte Carlo, Monte Carlo ... deux minutes d’arret ... Monte Carlo.”

  On the other side of the tracks, the morning train from Ventimiglia pulls into the station on its way to Nice and Antibes and Cannes, and the man with the marked accent makes the same announcement. “Monte Carlo, Monte Carlo ... deux minutes d’arret ... Monte Carlo.”

  The first room-service shift has already begun at the Hermitage and the Hotel de Paris where the smallest croissants on earth arrive promptly, in a basket with coffee and orange juice, at a cost of $40.

  A lone helicopter flies the length of the beach.

  At La Vigie restaurant on the cliff behind the pink stucco 1930s style Old Beach Hotel, they’re already setting up the buffet lunch tables. While an old man in a boat with an outboard engine sails by. And two women take an early morning swim together, dog-­paddling and talking all the way out to the far buoy.

  Gardeners are trimming rose bushes on the road up to Le Rocher.

  A very large yacht leaves the port, ever so slowly.

  A police officer in his well-starched red and white uniform directs traffic at the Place d’Armes.

  A sometimes-famous tennis player poses next to a swimming pool for a spread before going up to the Tennis Club to spend the next three hours working on his once devastating backhand.

  Two rather pretty German girls walk back to their tiny studio apartment after a night at Jimmyz.

  A teenaged Italian boy stands behind the service bar at the Moana, washing glasses and listening to music on a portable radio while a teenaged French boy piles chairs on top of tables so that the dance floor can be buffed.

  A middle-aged man in a blue work smock runs a vacuum cleaner over the carpets in the casino.

  An old woman dressed in black makes her way through the narrow streets of Le Rocher towards the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, which the locals call, St. Nicholas.

  The quartier is empty, except for a single policeman walking slowly past the Oceanographic Museum, and a black-robed priest taking some fresh air on the steps of the church before the morning mass.

  The old woman dressed in black gives the priest a simple nod and moves into the darkened church, crossing herself and mumbling under her breath, hurrying past the altar to a pair of marble slabs.

  One says, rainierivs iii.

  The other says gratia patricia.

  She crosses herself, pauses for only a second, then leaves the church and hurries towards the large open place in front of the Palace.

  Two Carabiniers are guarding the entrance, another is standing near the smaller side door and a fourth is walking casually through the street where a thick black chain prevents cars from parking just there.

  The old woman dressed in black stops at the end of the street and looks at the Palace, to see the Prince’s ensign flying there, then nods and crosses herself again.

  Prologue

  From where Grace sat at her desk in her fair-sized office on the top floor of the Palace tower, she had a view from two windows looking at the yacht laden harbor below, and the tiny hill behind it that is Monte Carlo.

  She’d decorated the room in pale greens and pale yellows, and placed a big couch in the middle of it—she’d brought that couch with her from Philadelphia—and on either side of it were tables covered in magazines.

  There were silver-framed photographs of her family scattered around, on her desk, on tables and on shelves, and on the walls she’d hung paintings and drawings, her favorite being a large oil of New York City.

  Now, staring down at the blank piece of paper, thinking about this letter she never wanted to write, the woman who’d given up Hollywood fame as Grace Kelly to become Princess Grace of Monaco, took her fountain pen and in her very deliberate and very neat handwriting, put “June 18th, 1962” at the top.

  It was a start.

  Then she wrote, “Dear Hitch—”

  Had it been 12 years already?

  In 1950, as an aspiring actress living in New York, she was offered a black and white screen test by Twentieth Century Fox, for a role she didn’t get.

  But the director Fred Zinneman had seen that test and two years later cast her opposite Gary Cooper in High Noon.

  It was her first major screen role.

  And while the public found her beautiful, and Cooper won the Academy Award for best actor, Grace didn’t even figure on the original poster. The New York Times review only gave her passing mention.

  The director John Ford had seen that screen test, too. He decided she had, “breeding, quality and class,” and convinced MGM to fly her out to Los Angeles to audition for Mogambo, a picture he was going to make in Africa with Clark Gable and Ava Gardner.

  The part was
hers if she wanted it, which she did, but MGM insisted that she sign a seven-year contract to get it. The studio was going to pay her $850 a week, which might have seemed like a lot of money at the time to many people, but by Hollywood standards, was paltry.

  Holding out as long as she could, she managed to get two important concessions from the studio. They wouldn’t up the money, but they agreed she could have time off every two years to work in the theater, and that she wouldn’t have to move to California, that she could stay in New York.

  “The studios are tenacious,” she had to admit, “when they want someone or something, they always get it”—signing her name with a borrowed pen, standing at the airport counter with the engines of the plane that would take her to Africa, already turning.

  In the meantime, Alfred Hitchcock had also seen that 1950 screen test. He decided she was, “a snow-covered volcano.”

  She wrote, “It was heartbreaking for me to have to leave the picture—”

  This was the first time she’d confessed that to anyone, besides her husband.

  The British born Hitchcock had moved to Hollywood in 1939 and had just become a US citizen. In his mid-50s, he was bald, shaped like an egg, had a very distinctive voice, and was right at the top of the A-List of Hollywood directors, making films that are now considered classics: Spellbound with Ingrid Bergman and ­Gregory Peck; John Steinbeck’s Lifeboat; Suspicion with Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine; and Notorious, again with Cary Grant but this time with Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains.

  When he cast Grace to play alongside Ray Milland in a thriller called Dial M for Murder, he did what no previous director had done—put her on a pedestal and turned her into a movie star.

  Now she wrote, “I was so excited about doing it and particularly about working with you again—” using dashes instead of commas or periods, which she often did.

  Throughout the filming of Dial M, he kept talking to her about his next picture, this one with Jimmy Stewart called Rear Window. He’d been so enthusiastic about it, that when the time came, she turned down the chance to work with Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront—her replacement, Eva Marie Saint, won the Best Actress Oscar for that role—and opted for Hitch’s new film.