The Bridesmaid's Daughter

by Nyna Giles

  I could dimly remember visiting my sister Robin in Philadelphia once with my mother and hearing something about some kind of affair. I was about fourteen years old. Robin and my mother were in my sister’s kitchen, sitting close together, talking intimately with each other as they often did. Grace’s name was mentioned. I came closer, hoping to eavesdrop on their conversation. Then I thought I heard my mother say that Grace and my father had had an affair. But even then, it didn’t make sense. My father and Grace? I couldn’t reconcile the idea of Grace, the perfect princess in Monaco, with my father. When my mother and sister saw that I was listening, they quickly changed the subject.

  All these years later, as I tried to learn the truth about what had happened, I discovered that there was very little evidence to go on. The only documentation I could find from that era was a Cholly Knickerbocker gossip column from January 1961, which claimed that all was not well between my parents that year:

  “Malcolm Reybold, who at one time was a big name in Grace Kelly’s life (in fact, Princess Grace confessed to his wife that they had been a romance), has now moved his quarters to the elegant Colony Hotel in Palm Beach. The reason—to establish residence for a divorce from his pretty brunette wife Carolyn, who was one of Grace’s closest friends.”

  I was fourteen months old at the time. I have no recollection of these events, but if my father did move out, he must have come back again, as my parents stayed together for another thirteen years. In the book The Bridesmaids, Judy Balaban Quine writes that Grace insisted Malcolm invented the affair. “Grace had met Malcolm before he and Carolyn knew one another, but she had never gone out with him. She couldn’t imagine why Malcolm would prolong this fiction of a romance between them, especially at a time when it might so wound Carolyn.”

  Another one of Grace’s biographers seemed to suggest that the affair did take place but after Grace was married and living in Monaco. That just didn’t seem feasible to me—how could Grace and Malcolm have managed it, living so many thousands of miles apart? Surely if something had happened between them it would have been when they were both living at the Manhattan House, years before Grace moved to Monaco. Was it possible my father had exaggerated details of the relationship and his connection to Grace in order to impress others? Was it possible that my mother was having delusions after my birth and invented the whole thing? I had seen the pain in my mother’s eyes in the nursing care center when she talked about the affair; as if the betrayal had happened only yesterday. I believed her when she said the affair had taken place, but what evidence did I have beyond my mother telling me so?

  The only people who could confirm the affair were Grace and Malcolm, and they both were gone. What I did know was that my mother never held anything against her friend. If there was an affair, she forgave Grace completely. And although Grace never came back to visit us on Long Island, the princess continued to write to my mother, and my mother continued to write letters in return. Despite the separation of miles and the troubles of the past, Grace and Carolyn’s connection, forged in youth and hope, continued.

  * * *

  I DECIDED TO contact Judy Balaban Quine, Grace’s close friend who had written the book about the princess and her bridesmaids. We talked first on the phone. I told Judy that I wished I had spoken to her when she was working on her book, but I had been too afraid, too protective of my mother and her story. Now I understood the importance of connecting with the people who had known my mother—and I hoped we could meet in person soon. Judy invited me to visit her in Beverly Hills next time I was in Los Angeles to see my son. We arranged to meet at an Italian restaurant near her home. That day, Judy was waiting for me when I arrived, still elegant in her eighties, warm and bright-eyed. That night, we talked and talked. She was so compassionate, so understanding. I learned that in the course of researching her book, Judy had met with my mother while she was living at the shelter, interviewing her multiple times. They sat together in Central Park, or once, when it was raining, retreated to the Barbizon Hotel, where Judy rented a room for the afternoon so they could stay warm and dry. When my mother asked Judy to buy her some small items—socks and underwear—Judy set up an account at Bloomingdale’s so that my mother could purchase whatever she needed. I had no idea that Judy had done this for my mother and I was so grateful.

  Then I asked Judy about Grace. Judy explained to me that Grace had guessed something was very wrong with my mother’s mental state after the move to Long Island, but like so many people, had no idea what to do or how to help. She reminded me that the 1960s and 1970s were a time when the stigma around mental health kept everyone in silence, not only sufferers but friends and relatives, too. Could Grace have done more for my mother? From a distance of thousands of miles, sequestered in her palace and her role as princess, what would have been possible? It was very hard to say.

  That night, leaving the restaurant with Judy, I told her I wished we lived closer to each other. Being able to talk to someone who had known my mother and Grace, someone who cared about my mother, someone I could be completely open with, brought me a kind of comfort I had never experienced before.

  * * *

  DURING THIS TIME of searching and trying to understand the past, I found myself confronting questions that had dogged me for a lifetime. Growing up, I had been kept out of school for the majority of my childhood, by a mother with a severe mental illness. Why hadn’t someone—the school, my father, the authorities—stepped in to save me? Why had it been up to me to remove myself from my mother’s care?

  I began to wonder how my case would have been handled if I were a child in the education system today. Would things have been different? Would the authorities have taken greater action? I arranged to go back to my old elementary school to meet with the principal there, to see if I could learn more. I knew that I couldn’t fix the past by speaking with the principal—she hadn’t even been working at the school when I was a child; I just knew it was something I felt strongly compelled to do.

  The night before going back to the school, I had a dream. I was in the living room at my home. My husband asked me to pick up a blanket that had fallen to the floor. I tried to lift the blanket, but it was out of reach. I wanted to let Peter know that I couldn’t pick up the blanket, but when I tried to speak, the words wouldn’t come out. It was as if something was pressing down on me, suffocating me. The next time I reached for the blanket, I found myself being dragged in the opposite direction, as if I were going to slide away under the bookshelf and disappear. I tried to call out, but I couldn’t make a sound. When I woke up, I was screaming, my head aching, my temples throbbing.

  The following morning, I felt nauseous, anxious, bordering on panicky. I couldn’t remember why I was putting myself through this! I didn’t have a single positive memory from my time at elementary school. All I remembered was the feelings of sickening dread, being on the school bus and not wanting to go inside, afraid of not being accepted, of being bullied, of being embarrassed because I didn’t know an answer in class. By the time I climbed into my car that afternoon to go to the appointment, I had to force myself to turn on the engine and make the drive south to Lloyd Harbor Elementary School.

  When I arrived, it was just before the end of the day. I was a little early, so I sat in the parking lot for a while, watching as the mothers came to pick up their children. The students all looked so young, so innocent. I thought about how I often blamed myself for what had happened to me as a child, as if it had somehow been my fault that I had been kept home all those years. I remember deliberately telling my mother many times, “I don’t want to go to school, I don’t feel well,” so she would keep me at home. But looking at the little children that day, I knew I couldn’t blame myself anymore. They were so small, so completely dependent on the adults around them. How could a child be held responsible for his or her school attendance? That was a parent’s job.

  Eventually, I worked up the courage to go inside the building. Everything was so much smaller, much
less intimidating than I remembered. I met with the assistant principal first. I asked him about how the school deals with attendance. He told me that if a child is as much as ten minutes late, the nurse is notified, and then a call automatically goes out to the parent. At the end of the week, the school office accounts for all absences. If the absences are longer than a few days, the school tries to meet with the family, and then a social worker and psychologist are called in before any legal action is taken. The assistant principal was matter-of-fact as he recounted the school’s procedures to me—like an accountant reciting end-of-year numbers—but when I told him that as a child I had been absent from school as much as a full year at a time, he looked genuinely shocked and disturbed. Next, I met with the principal. I told her my story, too. She confirmed what the assistant principal had told me about the school’s procedures. Then she paused.

  “Are you angry about what happened to you as a child?” she asked.

  I told her, yes. And I thanked her. In that moment, I felt a kind of validation and acknowledgment of what had taken place all those years ago. I was glad I’d come. Growing up, there had been so many invisible barriers and misunderstandings keeping my mother from seeking the help she needed. The visit to the school only strengthened my conviction that I had to channel my own experience into speaking out, to do whatever I could to break through silence, so that others wouldn’t need to suffer as my mother and I had.

  Climbing into my car, I felt as if something had shifted. I had gone back to a place that had terrified me so much as a child, only to find that there was nothing to be scared of anymore. I was a woman in my fifties now. I had three grown children. I was happily remarried with my husband’s three children in my life as well. Driving home that day, I knew that despite the odds, I had made it.

  CHAPTER 20

  I kept going back, visiting all the places associated with my mother and my childhood, replacing each of the unhappy memories with new, more positive ones. By 2015, I had been to nearly everywhere on my list; Steubenville, Long Island, Philadelphia, and Manhattan included. But there was one last trip to make. I wanted to go to France, to the places I had visited with my mother and Robin when I was a young girl. And I wanted to go to Monaco, Grace’s home for almost thirty years, to see the palace and the cathedral where the wedding took place, where my mother had stood beside her friend on the most important day of Grace’s life.

  When I visited France with my mother as a young girl, we never made it as far as Monaco. Monaco was a destination in a journey still unfinished.

  In the years since my mother’s death I had often thought about contacting Princess Grace’s family, but I had never gotten up the courage to do so. Now I decided to write to Prince Albert—Grace’s son—to tell him about my plans to visit. The prince’s private secretary wrote back, explaining that while he would be out of the country during the dates of my stay, he had read my note. The secretary then said that she would like to arrange a private tour of the palace during my visit. I gratefully accepted. This acknowledgment of my mother and her friendship with Grace after so many years meant a huge amount to me.

  In October 2016 I flew to Nice, traveling the short distance from the airport across the border to Monaco.

  Until now, Monaco had always seemed as fantastical to me as an illustration from a fairy tale or one of the Technicolor scenes from Grace’s movies. Now here I was, driving through the tiny streets of Monaco-Ville and Monte Carlo, the pink-and-yellow-painted buildings nestled into the hills surrounding a boat-filled harbor. It was late fall, and the colors were softer than I had expected in the gentle October sunlight. I visited the Hôtel de Paris, where my parents had stayed when they came for the wedding. I went for drinks at the hotel’s American bar and ate in the Café de Paris across the square, where they gathered to socialize with friends.

  On the morning of my palace tour, I stood outside Grace’s former home under clouded skies, nervously waiting for the doors to open. The palace, painted a pale pink, was much smaller than I’d always imagined it to be. Ahead of me, smartly uniformed carabiniers guarded the way, and to my right, a crew of workers with jackhammers dug up the cobblestones outside the palace, the sounds of their drills echoing across the square.

  At the entrance, a young woman in a navy-blue dress introduced herself. Her name was Marina, and she was my guide. We hurried through the security area so we could stay ahead of the school groups that would soon be following behind us. Marina led me through a small entranceway and up a narrow staircase to the palace’s main gallery overlooking the courtyard. I recognized this place immediately: it was the Galerie d’Hercule, where Grace, my mother, and the other bridesmaids had posed for photographs immediately before the wedding ceremony. I had looked at those familiar black-and-white photographs so many times: the picture of Grace, standing at the marble balustrade, looking out over the palace courtyard, my mother in the background, keeping her within her sights. The group photographs with the little flower girls standing on either side of Grace, holding their bouquets in their little white gloves, my mother to Grace’s far left. The photo where Grace stops to adjust my mother’s hat, looking at her so tenderly.

  Now I was standing in the same spot where those photographs had been taken, the grays of the past transformed into vivid life and color. What the black-and-white images had failed to convey was the jewel tones of the frescoes on every wall of the gallery, saturated with the deepest reds, yellows, and greens.

  Following Marina, I walked through the rooms of the palace, each one filled with gilded French furniture, with chandeliers of cut Venetian glass hanging overhead. I stood in the throne room, with its red brocade walls and large golden throne, where Grace and Rainier’s civil ceremony had taken place the day before their cathedral wedding. Above our heads there were murals depicting each of the signs of the zodiac, and in that moment, I was certain that both my mother and Grace would have approved of these astrological symbols, feeling reassured that the planets were watching over them that day.

  In these hallways and rooms, Grace, the movie star and princess, finally became human to me. I imagined her here, walking as a wife and mother within her own home. To what degree had this palace been a gilded cage, as some of her biographers suggested? By all accounts, she was happy with her husband and her children—but she had sacrificed her career for her life here, and it was impossible to believe that there weren’t days when she missed her work, her home in New York, her independent existence. Not long before her death, Grace confided to her friend Judy that she felt almost envious of my mother’s freedom to come and go as she pleased while living in Philadelphia. These were the years when Carolyn struggled with stable housing, before she moved to the shelter.

  “I know it might sound awful and insensitive,” Grace explained. “But the thought of just getting up every day and doing what that day brings you sounds wonderful to me in certain ways.”

  Was it a mark of how tightly Grace’s role as princess was circumscribed that she equated my mother’s vulnerable situation with freedom and anonymity? I had read in Judy’s book that it had been Grace’s intention, just before her death, to find an apartment in Manhattan and live there for at least some part of each year. She missed New York, she told Judy. New York was her town, the city where she felt most herself. She even talked about starting her career again, maybe with a role on Broadway. Some part of her must have wished to recapture those formative years of youth, with their excitement and promise. Grace was due to come to New York in September 1982, to begin her search for an apartment, but she never made the trip. She died that same month, on September 14.

  Three years later, when my mother arrived in New York to live at the shelter, she had been rounding a circle that even a princess had been kept from completing.

  * * *

  AFTER MONACO, I took the short train ride along the coast to Nice and Cannes, to see the places where I had stayed with my mother and Robin all those years ago. And from Cannes, I took another
train, this time heading west, deeper into France. I was going back to Lourdes, to the place where my mother had taken my sister and me to find a cure.

  At Lourdes, I visited Saint Bernadette’s grotto, just as I had done with my mother and sister. Again I walked alongside the crowds of pilgrims, making their way to the shrine, with its white statue of the Virgin Mary that seemed to glow within the craggy rocks. I walked the narrow cobbled streets of the city, imagining my mother and how she must have felt when she came here, with two daughters and without money or plans for what would happen next. I tried to put myself in my mother’s shoes: What did she think she was doing coming here? How did she think she would be able to make a life for herself in France? Everywhere I turned in Lourdes I was reminded of my mother: the statues of the saints; the people praying, their heads bowed and hands clasped; the gray and the white of the churches; the images of Saint Bernadette kneeling in prayer, submitting to a higher power. My mother believed in the saints, the Virgin, and the Holy Father, trusting in their absolute benevolence. I began to realize that from my mother’s perspective, coming to Lourdes was the fulfillment of her dearest wish. She knew something was very wrong, and she truly believed that the shrine would give her the peace and healing she craved. Perhaps in her own way she understood more about her illness than I realized; perhaps she came to Lourdes, not only for a cure for Robin and me, but also for a cure of her own.

  Later that afternoon, as I walked the streets of the city, I heard music coming from a nearby church. Curious, I walked toward the source of the singing, up the steps of the building and in through a tall, narrow archway. The church had high white stone arches and wide marble pillars. In the pulpit, a choir was singing, and in the pews, the congregants were singing, too. I didn’t know the hymn but I heard the words “ave Maria,” over and over.

  I stood there, listening to the beauty of the music in the ancient church, the light streaming in through stained-glass windows like a blessing. In the past, I had always been a little skeptical about religion, at times even blaming my mother’s faith for her obsession with prayer and miracles, fixations that I felt prevented her from confronting the reality of our situation. But standing in that church at Lourdes, I finally understood why her belief was so compelling to her. In that instant, I saw myself as she did, as a small dot in a much larger continuum of planets and time and cosmic influence, everything always moving, our fates not entirely in our own hands.