Grace of Monaco

by Robinson, Jeffrey

Believing, “what children need most is the love and attention of their mother,” she also tried hard to give her two daughters the confidence they would need to become independent women. “I’m basically a feminist. I think that women can do anything they decide to do.”

  She used to say that she stressed certain moral principles with her children but agreed that getting any child to believe in such things was a struggle. “You explain certain eternal values, in which you yourself believe implicitly, only to see everything you teach them contested and made fun of by newspapers, films, television, books, and the theatre. I’ve also tried to treat my children in accordance with their different personalities. I’ve always respected in them the adults which they will one day become.”

  She said, “I’ve never lied to them because I feel that would be tantamount to treating them as inferiors. At home I’ve insisted that they respect the rules of life which my husband and I have established. And when it comes to those rules, we are inflexible. He and I are both convinced a child senses that the discipline you subject him or her to is nothing more than a reflection of the love you have for that child. A child left to himself is an abandoned child. And abandoning your child is the worst injustice I can think of.”

  While Grace and Rainier were anxious to raise their children in a normal way, like other children, there was never any doubt that Caroline, Albert and Stephanie were more privileged than most. Even if they couldn’t be allowed the same freedom that average children know—they had to grow up with bodyguards nearby—at least Grace and Rainier stressed that privilege should be earned and not simply expected.

  “My father had a very simple view of life,” Grace would often say. “You don’t get anything for nothing. Everything has to be earned, through work, persistence, and honesty.”

  Caroline was the first to realize they were not like other children. “I was maybe 14. It wasn’t a complete shock finding out that we were different from other kids because we’d sort of gotten used to certain things, like people taking our picture all the time. But that’s when I started to see there were a lot of things my friends could do that we weren’t allowed to do.”

  Acknowledging that her parents were very strict, she explained, “We weren’t allowed to go the beach every day. They wanted us to stay home and read and take our schoolwork seriously. We had to dress properly all the time. My mother didn’t want me to wear a two-piece bathing suit when I was a teenager. She thought it would be more proper if I wore a one piece even though other girls my age were wearing bikinis.”

  There were also issues like walking to school. “We had to have somebody walk us to school and back. We couldn’t just hang out with the kids. We didn’t understand it then and I’m not sure I understand all of it now. I’m not sure all of it was necessary.”

  That meant, at least in her mind, it wasn’t always easy to have friends. “When I was 12, it was a big deal to go and sleep over at a girlfriend’s house. Everybody else did it but Mommy wouldn’t let me do it, except for a couple of times when she really knew who the people were. And we couldn’t just ask friends over to the house. First we had to ask Mommy. I’d come home from school to ask if so and so could come over and maybe she wouldn’t be there or she’d be in her office so we’d have to wait and the day would go by. Then the next day I’d ask if my friend could come over and play and she’d say, maybe another day. When you’re eight years old and want to play with your girlfriends and your Barbie dolls, it’s not always easy to accept being told, maybe tomorrow. Mommy always used to say, ‘Maybe.’ She said it so often that I used to imitate her telling me, ‘I said maybe, and that’s final.’ I guess what I’m saying is that we were a little too protected.”

  Albert had the same reaction. “I couldn’t bring just anybody home either. I had to ask Mom and Dad and they always wanted to know who he or she was. It was sometimes hard to handle. But Caroline broke the ice so by the time she convinced our parents that it was sometimes all right to bring friends home, I was able to do it, too.”

  At least in that area, Stephanie appeared to have had it easiest of all. “I didn’t have that much of a problem because I went to school in Paris and lived there with my mother. The rules weren’t as tight at the apartment as they were for the Palace of Monaco. I could almost always bring girlfriends home or have a girlfriend stay over. Everything was more relaxed in Paris.”

  Asking each of them who was stricter, their mother or their father, they laughed and answered in exactly the same way.

  They all agreed, “It was pretty even.”

  But Caroline and Albert both contended that, of the three children, the one who got away with the most was Stephanie.

  Being seven years younger than her brother and eight years younger than her sister, they claimed, Stephanie was the one who could do what the other two couldn’t. Being freer than they were to bring friends home with her was just one example.

  Said Albert, “Stephanie learned very quickly how to wrap my mom around her little finger. And probably my father even more so than my mother. But don’t tell him that.”

  Stephanie, however, didn’t see it quite the same way. “I was the smallest one so maybe it seems to them that I got more attention than they did. They were close enough in age that they had many of the same friends. They played a lot together. I was more alone at home. Then they went off to school and Caroline got married and I found myself the only one left at home with my mother and father. That’s why they think I could wrap them both around my little finger. But there wasn’t much of a contest because I was the only kid in the house.”

  At the time, she admitted, she thought her parents were particularly strict with her. “I remember when I was 15 or 16 thinking to myself that my father was the only father in the world who was that strict. I kept saying to myself, why are my parents giving me such a hard time? I always thought they were after me. Of course every teenager goes through that. I didn’t realize until lately how lucky I really was. Looking back, I see now that it wasn’t me being able to wrap them around my little finger as much as it was them being very understanding parents who helped me grow up. Every kid, at one point or another, thinks their parents give them a hard time. But when I look back I can see they did everything possible for me.”

  Both parents stressed the importance of developing true family values in their children. It was, she recalled, a central theme. “We were raised to respect each other and to be honest with each other and above all to communicate with each other. We were raised to understand that we were a family. When any of us had a problem we’d bring it out, we’d talk about it with each other instead of just keeping it inside. We do it to this day. We’ve always done that.”

  Early on both girls were exposed to music, opera and ballet, while Albert was encouraged to pursue his interest in sports. His father even set up a soccer net in the garden so he could play there. Caroline still maintains an interest in the classical arts and Albert still plays soccer and tennis. They’ve both competed in events like the Paris-Dakar Rally while Albert also became an Olympic class ­bobsledder.

  Stephanie is somewhere between the two. “I did ballet when I was very young but stopped and went into swimming and gymnastics. I liked that. For a while I was even in training to be on the French national gymnastics team. I didn’t make it though because I was too tall. I still read a lot but I can’t say I read very intellectual books the way Caroline does. She reads philosophy and history. I like a good love story. We both love music but there again our tastes are hardly the same. I can’t stand opera. On the other hand, I’m not sure she’d enjoy sitting through a Guns N’ Roses rock concert.”

  Where the three are very similar is that they were each raised to be multi-lingual. They spoke English with their mother and their nanny, but French with their father and the household staff. While they were still very young, Grace and Rainier encouraged them to learn other languages. Caroline, Albert, and Stephanie speak absolutely perfect French and equally perfect Engl
ish with slightly east coast American accents. They each also speak German, Italian, and some Spanish.

  Grace and Rainier mostly spoke English together. Grace however perfected her French, as she used to say, “Because the children demanded that I do. Whenever I made mistakes they’d make fun of me so I had to learn to speak it well.”

  Chapter 14

  Coming Into

  Their Own

  In 1957, Grace and Rainier had hired a young English woman named Maureen King to be Caroline’s nanny. When Albert came along she took charge of him, too.

  At about the same time, Grace had hired a young American woman named Phyllis Blum to be her secretary.

  The two young women became kindred spirits.

  Following one trip to the United States, Rainier returned with some dress shirts that he was very proud of. Maureen was often given the extra chore of ironing the Prince’s shirts in a little room next to Phyllis’s office.

  Being so fond of these shirts, Rainier kept reminding Maureen to be extra careful with them. So Maureen and Phyllis found an old sheet, burned holes it in and waited at the ironing board for him to check on Maureen’s progress.

  The next time he poked his head through the door, there was Maureen ironing what appeared to be scorched remnants of his shirts.

  They thought that was pretty funny.

  Only after they convinced him the burnt sheet wasn’t really one of his new shirts, so did he.

  GqH

  In 1964 Rainier’s father passed away.

  Six months later Grace’s father died.

  In July 1967, while visiting Expo 67 in Montreal, Grace suffered her third miscarriage. She and Rainier wanted another child but it wasn’t to be.

  The 1960s turned into the 1970s and the decade dawned that might one day go down in Monaco’s history as the greatest in modern times.

  Grace and Rainier were totally in sync with each other and it showed in the easy way they appeared in public. They were photographed driving in the vintage car rally from London to Brighton. Although it was too chilly for Grace, she cheated a bit, driving most of the way in a comfortable modern car and only getting into Rainier’s 1903 de Dion-Bouton in time to reach the finish line. And they were photographed at masquerade balls—Rainier with a bald wig and a huge black moustache and Grace with a fat-cheeked rubber mask and her hair in braids under a straw hat.

  They were raising their children to be totally comfortable both as young royals at official ceremonies in Monaco and in touch football games every summer at camp in the Pennsylvania Poconos.

  “I don’t think there is any formula for handling children,” Grace told a women’s magazine when pressed to come up with an easy solution to the problem. “All a parent can do is play it by ear and hope for the best. That and raise them with a lot of humor and a lot of love.”

  No one who’s ever seen them up close can doubt the love.

  GqH

  In spite of their earlier experiences in dealing with the press—her days as a Hollywood star and his days as the most eligible bachelor in Europe—it wasn’t until Grace and Rainier announced their engagement that they were truly baptized by fire.

  Neither of them was prepared for the attention showered upon them. They found themselves sitting through endless press conferences, forever answering the same questions.

  Rainier might have been all right in the beginning, during the first few interviews about their pending marriage, but his patience quickly wore thin. Before too long he simply couldn’t hide his extreme discomfort. You see that quite clearly in newsreel footage from those days. It’s almost as if he’s trying to become invisible.

  Grace obviously understood and tried her best to protect him.

  But at one press conference, just as Rainier thought he was finished, a photographer begged a few more pictures and, after Grace agreed, Rainier was heard to mumble under his breath, “They don’t understand that I’m not under contract to MGM.”

  Then there was the media nightmare that was their wedding.

  The principality was bursting at the seams with journalists and photographers. The bar at the Hotel de Paris became the unofficial press headquarters and there was such an overflow of scribes that the management had to fill the lobby with tables and chairs all the way to the entrance.

  Mayhem reigned.

  Part of the problem lay in the fact that most weddings are basically the same. There is a bride and there is a groom and there are people who cry with joy. Afterwards there are drinks and there is food, so that friends can get together, offer congratulations, and wish the couple luck as they run away on their honeymoon.

  But that’s really all there is.

  Perhaps had Rainier employed a professional press attaché in those days, a few hand-outs could have filled reporters in on who was there, on who wore what, on how many eggs were used for the cake, and how the smiling couple danced till dawn.

  Instead, in the absence of any real stories, reporters wrote about Grace’s too-big hat.

  When a photographer tried to snap Randolph Churchill’s picture on the steps of the Hotel de Paris and Churchill punched the photographer, they wrote about that, forgetting to add that the general confusion had worn everyone’s nerves to a frazzle.

  They also wrote that Rainier’s mother, Princess Charlotte, had been driven to Monaco by her chauffeur, formerly one of France’s most wanted criminals. She always insisted that she was trying to rehabilitate him. But coinciding with their arrival, there were two burglaries at the Hotel de Paris.

  Besides that, there really wasn’t much else to write about.

  By the time the couple returned from their honeymoon, Grace and Rainier were in perfect agreement that they needed help to manage the media.

  Grace asked Rupert Allan if he could recommend someone. Allan told Grace about a young American woman in Paris named Nadia Lacoste who had experience in movie and show business public relations. So Lacoste was asked to come and speak with the Prince.

  “I met him in Paris in July,” Lacoste recalled. “We talked for about an hour. Then he said he wanted to speak with the Princess and asked me to come to see both of them the next day. We made a verbal deal for a three-month job, to be renewed if they wanted to do that. I said okay and started right in because they were leaving for a visit to the States in September and we realized there would be a great deal of press interest in their first trip to America since the wedding.”

  In a very real way, Lacoste got to know Grace and Rainier at a time while they were still getting to know each other.

  “She was a warm, likeable person. But there was a big difference in those days in the way she behaved when we were alone or with the Prince, and the way she was when she saw the press. It was odd because she had a lot of experience with reporters. I expected her to be relaxed but she wasn’t. On the other hand, I expected him to be shy, which he was. But I discovered that he has a wonderful sense of humor. I remember going with them to fashion shows. The Princess would be on his right and I’d be on his left. As the afternoon wore on he’d start to get bored so he’d make remarks out of the corner of his mouth, without moving a muscle. He’d comment on everybody and everything. The dresses. The hats. The people in the room. He was so funny that I’d be in stitches.”

  Grace and Rainier’s first professionally arranged press conference was in September 1956 before sailing to New York on the USS United States.

  Meeting at the Monaco Legation in Paris, Lacoste put journalists in one room and photographers in another. It was an old trick to give everyone a chance and keep the two groups out of each other’s way. And it obviously worked because Grace and Rainier were as comfortable as they’d ever been in front of the press. From there, Lacoste, with selected members from the Legation and a few photographers, took the train with Grace and Rainier to Le Havre.

  Because they were relaxed, the photo story that followed was a good one. The group then gathered in their cabin for champagne and caviar before the ship sai
led although Grace would not eat the caviar.

  “Someone had informed her that pregnant women should not have any kind of seafood,” Lacoste went on. “It was what pregnant women believed in those days.”

  Once Grace and Rainier arrived in America, Rupert Allan took over and handled the press for them there.

  “Grace was okay with the press,” he said, picking up the story. “But Rainier was still usually pretty ill-at-ease. I’d arranged a few interviews for them and tried to make the ordeal as easy as possible, especially for Rainier. And when he was uncomfortable he tended to scowl. He’d see the photos published the next day, see himself scowling, and that merely served to re-enforce his discomfort when the next photographer appeared. I finally said to him, ‘Listen, every time you meet the press, just think of them all standing there in front of you in their shorts. Just react the way you would if they had nothing on but their underwear.’ And that old trick worked. The next time Grace and Rainier did a photo session, there was Rainier grinning.”

  While they were in the States much of their publicity surrounded Grace’s new life.

  “The biggest difference in my life isn’t the title,” she announced, “it’s changing from being a single career girl to a wife.”

  There was also plenty of talk of the expected baby. “I’ve already gained 26 pounds. When I became pregnant I was pretty sick for the first three months. They’d told me about morning sickness but they didn’t tell me you could be sick all day, every day. Once I got over that I started eating. The doctor says I shouldn’t eat too much but I’m ravenous. I had this terrible craving for noodles and spaghetti all summer. I wake up hungry at night. The Prince is excellent at scrambled eggs but I had to teach him how to make sandwiches. Now he invents ones for me.”

  With that Rainier chimed in, “I’m the gendarme on her diet. I keep reminding her not to eat but it isn’t easy. I really don’t mind because she was so thin when we married.”

  Grace didn’t always say she wanted a boy, that “a healthy baby is what’s important,” but on other occasions she’d concede, “Rainier would like a boy a lot.”