Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire

by Leslie Carroll

  At the civil ceremony, held in the throne room of the Palais Princier, the thirty-two-year-old groom wore the classic ensemble for a morning wedding: cutaway coat, pearl-gray vest, striped trousers, and silk top hat. His twenty-six-year-old bride was clad in a rose-beige lace-over-taffeta suit with matching pale pink gloves and silk pumps. Grace’s vows, as recited by the Minister of State, would set a twenty-first-century feminist’s teeth on edge. As Rainier’s wife, she was by law required to obey him in all things and to reside with him wherever he chose. If things didn’t work out (and Monegasque princes enjoyed a staggeringly high rate of divorce), Grace was free to leave—but would not be permitted to take her children with her.

  The following morning, April 19, amid a sea of white blossoms and gold candelabra, six hundred guests attended the religious ceremony in Monaco’s Romanesque cathedral. Billed as “the wedding of the century,” it, too, was literally an MGM extravaganza, funded by the studio and Jack Kelly’s checkbook.

  A red velvet carpet undulated all the way up the stone steps. Grace’s eight-thousand-dollar ivory peau de soie satin gown, embroidered with seed pearls and nineteenth-century Brussels lace, was designed by Helen Rose, the woman who had also created the sumptuous costumes for The Swan, Grace Kelly’s cinematic swan song. It took six bridesmaids to carry the nine-foot train; Grace’s updo, enhanced by a cap that matched her gown, accentuated with a white tulle veil, was styled by Virginia Darcy, the studio’s principal hairdresser. And the MGM PR machine handled the publicity. Thirty million people watched it worldwide.

  At 10:41 a.m. Grace and Rainer, whose black jacket was bedecked with medals and ribbons, golden epaulettes, and a diagonally worn red and white sash—the Order of St. Charles—were pronounced man and wife by the Bishop of Monaco.

  Grace Kelly was the second American to become Princess of Monaco. The first was Alice Heine, a Catholic convert who was the widow of the duc de Richelieu and niece of the Jewish German poet Heinrich Heine. On October 30, 1889, she became wife number two of Rainier’s great-grandfather, Prince Albert I. But Alice’s existence in Monaco was officially expunged after she committed adultery. When Albert denounced her in public in front of the first-night opera audience and slapped her across the face, Alice left the building—and the principality—never to return.

  The stocky, muscular Prince Rainier III, whose ancestors included James IV of Scotland and Prince William “the Silent” of Orange, descended from the offspring of an extramarital affair. His grandfather, Prince Louis II of Monaco, had fathered a daughter named Charlotte with the stepdaughter of an Algerian laundress. Because Charlotte was illegitimate, the girl’s grandfather, Prince Albert I, refused to recognize her as Louis’s daughter, so she was not formally legitimized until Albert’s death.

  In 1920, Charlotte married a minor European royal, Pierre de Polignac, and two years later she became the hereditary Princess of Monaco, making Pierre a prince. But because a woman could only inherit Monaco’s throne if she were married to a man named Grimaldi, Prince Pierre adopted the surname. Their son, Prince Rainier Louis Henri Maxence Bertrand, was born in 1923.

  Rainier was educated in England and Switzerland, where he was considered intelligent and a good student. Not one to use his noble birth to shirk military duty, he was an artillery officer during World War II. The prince bravely fought the Germans in Alsace, winning both the Légion d’Honneur and the Croix de Guerre.

  On Rainier’s accession to the throne in 1949, gambling accounted for 95 percent of his principality’s annual revenue. A decade later, Grace’s personal luster, her commitment to cultural and educational projects, and her arsenal of famous and glamorous friends combined to achieve Rainier’s Riviera Shangri-la. During the second half of the twentieth century, Monaco became a jet-setter’s Mecca, a haven for high-rolling playboys and the so-called glitterati. Gambling revenues now total a mere 3 percent of Monaco’s economy, with much of the balance from tourism and banking.

  Grace’s passion for culture was a tremendous asset to her adopted home, but there was little else she shared in common with the Monegasques or with their monarch. He slumbered through the ballet, but adored oceanography; she was seasick for most of their honeymoon aboard the royal yacht.

  Their lack of common interests might have been surmountable, but their dissimilar temperaments strained the royal marriage from the start. Grace was lively and spontaneous, while Rainier “was singularly lacking in joie de vivre,” according to American society columnist Dorothy Kilgallen. Rainier’s nephew, Christian de Massy, described him as “totally autocratic. You couldn’t contradict him.” In an effort to smooth the inevitable ruffled feathers, Grace employed the serenity for which she was famous long before she became Her Serene Highness. Playing the peacemaker, she would invent excuses for her husband’s rudeness. But it didn’t take long before there was marital trouble in the Mediterranean playground.

  In 1957, after she’d been married to Rainier for only a year, Grace entertained Cary Grant at the palace. The prince had not been amused to see a photograph in the local paper, Nice Matin, of his wife greeting her former costar from the Hitchcock thriller To Catch a Thief with a kiss. Although her numerous affairs during her single days had been well publicized, now that she was Princess of Monaco even the slightest semblance of sexual impropriety was not comme il faut. Rainier was visibly jealous. Grace’s other friends from her former life met with the same ill-tempered mopey treatment from her husband. Their shared showbiz lingo, and experiences from a past that he had never been a part of, made the prince feel like an outsider in his own realm. Fully aware of this dynamic, and apparently a bit frightened of her husband, Grace was always conscious of trying not to upset him.

  Whatever she had imagined her new life would entail, Grace had been singularly unprepared for the role of royal consort. Gwen Robyns, a New Zealand native who became Grace’s biographer and then a close friend, in part from excising much of her original text regarding Grace’s pre-Rainier romances, told Kelly’s most recent biographer, Wendy Leigh, that the new princess “was in a trap. From being a movie star with absolutely the whole world at her feet, she dropped to second place. Grace had always been able to twist men around her little finger. But not Rainier. He was His Serene Highness, and she was just a girl from Philadelphia. She was miserable from day one.”

  One reason for Grace’s unhappiness in the marriage was the double standard to which female royal consorts have been held for centuries. Three months after their lavish wedding, Grace began hearing rumors of not one but several royal mistresses. Her father, who had also been known to “step out,” had expressed his concerns about this very issue during Grace’s engagement, reminding her that all royal men were notorious philanderers. Now Jack Kelly’s prophecy was proving true. Two years into the marriage, in a phone call with a dear friend and former Hollywood hairdresser, Grace confided, “I know he has affairs with other women. That’s very frustrating to me, and it makes me very, very unhappy.” Once, she had been The Other Woman in a handful of Hollywood marriages. Now she was the shunned wife who was expected to bear her spouse’s infidelities in silence and with dignity. She was in danger of becoming her mother.

  Instead, she reverted to her old ways and became a mistress. Whether it was initially for solace or for a bit of revenge, in 1958, when her former High Society costar Frank Sinatra came to Monte Carlo to promote his film Kings Go Forth, they commenced a passionate affair that would last for years. He referred to her as his “dream girl” and affectionately called her “Gracie”; the princess called him by his given name, Francis.

  She would enjoy other extramarital affairs as well. But Grace fulfilled the royal consort’s primary duty three times. On January 23, 1957, she gave birth to her first child, Princess Caroline, in the palace library—without the aid of anesthetic. She bore Rainier two more children: Albert, on March 14, 1958, and Stephanie, on February 1, 1965. With Caroline’s birth, Monaco’s continued sovereignty was secure, although as a ma
le Albert would displace his older sister in the line of succession. It was during Grace’s pregnancy with Caroline that she was frequently photographed sporting a large Hermès handbag, a gift from her husband, which she held in front of her belly to obscure the bulge. The accessory, which still remains popular, became known as the “Kelly Bag.”

  While Rainier seemed torn between the desire to limit media access to their children and the awareness that feeding the publicity machine would insure continued notoriety for his tiny principality, Grace, who turned out to be the stricter disciplinarian, endeavored to instill as much normalcy as possible in their children’s lives.

  The royal family sought peace and quiet at Roc Agel, their sixty-acre estate located approximately two hours from Monaco in the Maritime Alps. Dotted with fruit trees, the property also boasted a working dairy; and Grace decorated their farmhouse in the latest American fashion in interior design, indulging her nostalgia for Hollywood by papering the powder room with her old movie stills. It was something of an ironic place for them. Rainier, who for several years of their marriage had forbidden the screening in Monaco of any of his wife’s films, may have been secretly pleased to have proof positive that Grace’s career was in the toilet.

  In 1966, after a decade of marriage, and at least three miscarriages that left her emotionally devastated, the princess granted an interview to Barbara Walters, who pointedly asked her if she was happy. Grace replied, “I’ve had happy moments in my life, but I didn’t think happiness—being happy—is a perpetual state that anyone can be in. Life isn’t that way. But I have a certain peace of mind, yes. My children give me a great deal of happiness [this was years before her daughters ended up as tabloid darlings while still in their teens]. And my life here has given me many satisfactions in the last ten years.”

  But in 1978 the princess confessed to Gwen Robyns, “You know, I have come to feel very sad in this marriage. He’s not really interested in me. He doesn’t care about me.” By then, Rainier’s numerous infidelities were an open secret. A few minutes later, Grace confided, “I so appreciate those times in my life when I was madly, desperately, and hopelessly in love. Those were the best of times. I don’t know that I ever had that with Rainier.”

  Back in 1973, Grace had made her first public appearance without her husband, and as the decade progressed the Grimaldis spent increasingly more time apart. Grace put down roots in Paris. And on June 7, 1975, an article titled “Princess Grace’s Marriage on the Rocks” was published in the National Star. Topics in supermarket tabloids tend to strain credulity, but in this case, the article contained enough truth to spawn a spate of hasty denials, even though it never saw the light of day in either France or Monaco because of laws restricting negative press of local royals.

  In 1977, over lunch in Manhattan with her old friend Charlotte Winston, Grace ruminated on what might have been had she not made the decision to wed Rainier, admitting that she had allowed herself to be pushed into the royal union “by my own mother,” caving in to Margaret’s strenuous objection to marrying Oleg Cassini. Oleg, of course, would have cheerfully supported Grace’s decision to remain an actress. “How many wonderful roles might I have played by now?” she asked Charlotte rhetorically. “How might my life have turned out? That one decision changed my entire future.”

  And to a former show-business pal, Grace confided the peace she had made with her marital unhappiness, saying, “Some of us sign on for a run of the play contract—no options.”

  But what Grace admitted to her friends is not what she said to the press.

  In 1979, looking back on her decision to quit Hollywood and wed Rainier, Grace told the Sunday Mirror, “All I ever wanted was to be someone’s wife, the wife of a particular man. I needed someone with a strong personality to hold his own against the fame of an actress. . . . I wasn’t happy in my personal life. I wanted to be married, so I made my decision and I’ve never regretted it.” However, she also found the transition from actress to royal consort a bumpy one. That same year, she told an interviewer, “After my days as an actress I had to become a normal person again, and at the beginning I suffered a personality crisis. My husband was determined to turn me into a real princess and it was with so much patience and understanding that he showed me the way.”

  On March 9, 1981, Grace had a brief encounter with another young royal who was in for the same treatment from her future husband and his chilly family. In the ladies’ room at London’s Goldsmith Hall, where she was participating in a poetry reading, Her Serene Highness ran into Lady Diana Spencer. It was Diana’s first public appearance as Prince Charles’s fiancée. Spilling indecorously out of a black gown that was two sizes too small because the dress she intended to wear hadn’t arrived in time, Lady Di confided her terror at the life that lay in store for her. Grace embraced her, and cupping Diana’s face in her hands bluntly replied, “Don’t worry, dear, it will get worse.”

  Personality differences and rampant extramarital infidelities notwithstanding, the Grimaldis did as most royal couples of theirs and earlier generations did, and stayed married, celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary on April 19, 1981. Although they played the happy couple in the presence of their guests, they remained estranged. Two months earlier, Grace’s older sister, Peggy, speaking to the Sun, had observed, “They like separate things. When they are apart they have individual lives. They are even financially independent of each other. It’s a nice agreement.”

  During 1981 and 1982, friends who had long known the prince and princess noticed that their relationship seemed to be enjoying a renaissance. Although the Monegasques never conscienced Grace’s decision to resume her career, the prince had finally come to terms with Grace’s passion for acting and was comfortable confessing that in the beginning of their marriage he had probably been too impatient for Grace “to fit in and to feel at ease. Often I didn’t understand her outlook on things; I have to be honest and admit that much.” The Grimaldis had mellowed, individually, and as a couple, and had finally developed a mutual respect for one another, a level of comfort ironically aided, perhaps, by so much time spent apart.

  Looking back on the state of Grace and Rainier’s relationship in 1982, Barbara Tuck Cresci, the widow of Rainier’s longtime Consul-General Frank Cresci, observed, “In the end, despite all of the separations over the years, they were getting back on the same track again and truly thinking like a married couple with a future.”

  Throughout the early months of 1982, Grace admitted to her friends that she had been battling numerous ailments, from heart trouble to a particularly difficult menopause to issues of body image. The once-lithe princess, who, during her acting career, got naked on more than one first date with confidence and ease, confessed to her friend Gwen Robyns, “I’m so fat, and I feel so horrible about myself. I just don’t want to show my body to anyone, it’s so awful.”

  On the morning of September 13, 1982, the fifty-two-year-old Grace and her seventeen-year-old daughter, Stephanie, who at the time harbored dreams of becoming a professional race car driver, were motoring along a winding road in the ten-year-old Rover 3500 that had been a gift from Rainier. Grace was at the wheel. In those days she rarely drove—and just a few weeks earlier, Rainier had expressly forbidden her to do so. Grace suffered severe recurring migraines, could not see well without her glasses, and had recently been involved in a near collision. That morning, she was supposed to have been chauffeured back to the palace in the prince’s Rolls-Royce, but had a demanding schedule during the coming week and first needed to see her couturier; so she took off for Monte Carlo on her own. For whatever reason, she never fastened her seat belt.

  Thirty minutes into the precipitous snaking drive along D37, Grace lost control of the car. In an utter panic, she exclaimed to Stephanie that the brake wouldn’t work. Stephanie tried to yank the hand brake, but succeeded only in putting the automobile in park. The Rover swerved across the narrow two-lane road, broke through the retaining wall that hugged the
precipice, and spiraled dozens of feet down an embankment, decapitating a tree, and coming to rest upside down near a vegetable garden.

  Eerily, in To Catch a Thief, director Alfred Hitchcock filmed Kelly speeding along the same winding corniche. Grace never liked to drive, petrified of losing her ability to control the vehicle. Apparently, she loathed that specific bend in the road, and had long held the presentiment that she would die in an automobile crash. Hitchcock took advantage of that fear on camera.

  At first it was believed that Grace’s injuries were relatively minor, not much more than a broken leg. But tests conducted during the hours that followed the crash determined that the princess had suffered extensive internal bleeding, a collapsed lung, and two brain lesions—one that might have represented a minor stroke that caused her to lose control of the vehicle in the first place and the other as a result of the accident.

  At noon on September 14, a sorrowful Rainier consented to the disconnecting of Grace’s life support, and at 10:35 p.m., Her Serene Highness Princess Grace-Patricia de Monaco was pronounced dead. Eight hundred people attended her funeral, held on September 18 in the same cathedral where Grace and Rainier had married. Notably absent was Princess Stephanie, who remained in the hospital recovering from her injuries.

  In 2002, on the twentieth anniversary of her death, Rainier invoked Grace’s memory, saying, “she is always present in our hearts and in our thoughts,” and praising her for “carrying out to perfection her role as wife and mother.” Despite the prince’s many extramarital liaisons, his French biographer, Philippe Delorme, believed that he “never really got over her death. It was an irreparable loss. It would have been very hard to replace her.” After Grace’s death, however, Rainier was romantically linked to his cousin Princess Ira von Fürstenberg, a Fiat heiress and the former sister-in-law of the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg.