She’d also explain that, while her husband had helped choose the layette, he wasn’t taking any special lessons on how to handle a baby.
That’s when Rainier would chime in with, “When I show the baby to people, I promise I won’t drop him. Though I may drop myself.”
Knowing that this sort of friendly patter was how they won friends for themselves and for Monaco—the purpose of the exercise—Rupert Allan skillfully manipulated the interviews to highlight Grace and Rainier as real people with real concerns, and all the more attractive for their sense of humor.
He got Grace to say, “I suppose royal babies should be born in a Palace, but I’ll feel better, more secure, in a hospital.” And, “No matter where the child is born, my husband won’t be welcome in the delivery room because that’s no place for husbands.”
She said she liked the name Henry but the Prince didn’t, “So it won’t be Henry.”
She said she believed in spanking children, “And royal children probably need more spanking than others.”
She said she’d eventually like to have three children, “Not more.”
Then she pre-empted the next question by volunteering, “So there’s your answer as to whether or not I’ll be making any more movies. I’ll be too busy raising a family.”
By the time they returned to Monaco, Nadia Lacoste understood that the key to the couple’s public appeal was a combination of their natural charm and the “handsome prince marries beautiful actress” fairy tale.
Her three-month trial as press attaché turned into a lifetime career.
“The difference between him and her,” she explained, “at least in the beginning, was that he had nothing to prove. He was born a prince. He knew who he was. But she believed she had to prove that the person being interviewed was not Grace Kelly the actress but Princess Grace of Monaco.”
Lacoste acknowledged that Grace was all too well aware that she was being watched carefully and that she desperately wanted to do the right thing. “She didn’t want to make any mistakes. She didn’t want to do anything that would embarrass her husband or reflect poorly on Monaco. It wasn’t a part she could play like an actress. If it was, she could have gotten away with simply playing the role of a princess. That would have been easy for her and she would have played it beautifully. She would have been very comfortable playing a role. The problem was, being Princess of Monaco was real life. Finding her way was not very easy.”
Lacoste said that once she got to know the Prince well enough she’d screen newspaper men so that no one ever got in to see him if she didn’t feel the two would get along. She’d discovered that because the Prince took an interest in the world and what was happening, he had a tendency to start asking the journalist questions. And on more than one occasion journalists came out of an interview and reported to Lacoste, “I told him more than he told me.”
But it took a long time before she could make it work that way with Grace. “I can still see her during her very first in-depth interview with a French journalist in Monaco, literally sitting on the edge of her chair with her hands clenched together. She was grinning too hard and swallowing too hard and her answers were almost too practiced. It must have been excruciating for her. I decided then and there not to ask her to do any other interviews for at least six months, at least until she could find her place in the Palace and get settled into her whole new life.”
Even many years later, once Grace had mastered French, she was never totally at ease speaking it for any length of time on radio or television.
Lacoste again. “One afternoon, it might have been as much as 15 years later, I was trying to explain to her that the best way to let the public know about some of the things she was doing in Monaco like the Flower Show and the Princess Grace Foundation, was for her to talk about them. I argued that for me to tell the world about them was of no interest to anyone. She finally agreed to talk about the Ballet Festival.”
So Lacoste carefully offered that interview to a radio journalist she liked, one she’d always found to be knowledgeable about the arts. But within 15 minutes Grace was in such a state, so unnerved by the whole thing, that Lacoste had to stop it and ask the journalist to please be kind enough to wait outside.
“Once he left, Grace started to cry. Tears were running down her face. She said she felt totally frustrated being interviewed in French. Of course she’d made comments on French radio before, but when it came to expressing herself in a long, important interview, she said she simply felt too limited by a language which was not her own. She kept telling me, ‘This is terrible.’ I promised her, ‘Okay, never again in French.’ And I kept my promise. That was the first and the last in-depth broadcast interview in French she ever did.”
Chapter 15
The Press Feeding Frenzy
Never Stopped
In sculpting a public image for Grace and Rainier, Nadia Lacoste found, each story created bigger and bigger crowds wherever they went.
At the same time, those crowds generated more stories in the press.
Once, while Grace and Rainier were stopping at London’s Connaught, a British paper reported, “Big premiums were being offered last night to house and flat owners near the Connaught Hotel where the couple are staying. These Peeping Toms, for that is what they are, were eager to get a bird’s eye view of Grace and Rainier, and blatantly said they wanted to use field glasses and binoculars. ‘I was astounded,’ said a Mount Street householder. ‘An estate agent telephoned me saying he would pay a premium if I let my flat, or one room in it, overlooking the hotel.’ Not since high premiums were offered to view the bed in which Mrs. Simpson slept has there been such a rash of peepers.”
A few years later, Grace and Rainier visited Dublin.
The crowds along O’Connell Street were estimated by one paper to be 5,000 people and by another to be 20,000. Whatever they were, everyone rushed to get a closer look inside the car bringing them to their hotel.
Panic erupted and 50 people were hurt.
The papers reported, “Princess Grace was escorted into the hotel, weeping and upset, and her appearance at the ball was delayed for more than half an hour. She later made an appearance on the hotel balcony to acknowledge cries of, ‘We want Grace.’”
A couple of days after that, thousands of people lined the streets when Grace and Rainier traveled to County Mayo to see the home where her grandfather was born.
One journalist pointed out, “Every bar and restaurant with Kelly in the name—and there are plenty, as I counted eight Kelly’s Bars in Dublin alone—are laying on celebrations tonight.”
Another wrote, “Among their 800 pounds of luggage was one marked ‘fragile.’ It contained presents for everyone including, I’m told, all the Kellys in County Mayo.” To that he added, “Since Princess Grace has been expected, everyone around here has discovered their name is Kelly.”
While a third journalist disclosed, “At a conference among close relations which went on until the early hours today, a compromise was reached. Originally only second cousins of Princess Grace were to be officially received by her. But it was finally decided that one third cousin would also be allowed in.”
When Grace and Rainier returned to Ireland on their next trip, this time with Albert and Caroline in tow, they got even bigger headlines.
“A prince and princess were ‘at home’ yesterday to representatives of the press,” commented the Irish Press. “There just is no other way to describe the disarming informality of the press conference given by Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco. The quote of the day came from Albert who announced in the middle of his parents’ conversation with the press, ‘I want to milk a cow.’”
Lacoste was, to say the least, overwhelmed with requests for interviews. “We got them every day of the year from all over the world. I think the only country I never spoke to is Russia. Even the Chinese asked for interviews. I’d say that between interviews, appearances, and photographs we got at least 20 request
s a week. That’s over 1,000 a year. For obvious reasons we accepted very few.”
Almost right from the beginning, she never set up more than five or six interviews a year for Grace. And in later years, even fewer, only one or two.
“For the Prince,” she said, “there were usually a bit more but they tended to be on specialized subjects. Let’s say, the architectural press requested an interview to discuss something about the development of Monte Carlo or a financial journalist wanted to talk about the Monegasque economy. Maybe he did as many as eight or ten interviews a year.”
Inevitably, every now and then, something would come up that was beyond Lacoste’s control.
Especially embarrassing and all the more infuriating was the photo of Grace at a Monaco carnival shooting gallery.
She’d gone there with her children on a Friday morning to open the carnival, and walked around with them to play at various booths. She stopped at the shooting gallery, took aim with a rifle, and fired at some clay pipes. No one recalls whether or not she won a Kewpie doll because it was Friday, November 22, 1963.
The photo of Grace with the rifle ran in newspapers around the world the following day. The caption under it berated her for being so insensitive as to have played with a rifle when John Kennedy had just been murdered.
But Monaco is seven hours ahead of Dallas and the photo of Grace with the rifle was taken a full nine hours before Kennedy was killed.
However, that pales with what happened the day the paparazzi discovered there was a market in photos of Caroline and Stephanie. That’s when all of their lives took a huge turn for the worse.
Noted Rainier, “You can imagine the kinds of photos they’re looking for because they all walk around with huge telephoto lenses and hide behind bushes. What no one ever seems to understand is how distressing it is for us to live our lives knowing that they could be anywhere, spying on us. It was especially terrible for the children when they were younger. It wasn’t fair to them. They were paralyzed by it, never knowing how to play or what to play because they were always afraid that someone might be photographing them.”
The system, he claimed, was based entirely on making someone look ridiculous. The more ridiculous the photo, the higher the price. To get that one big-money shot required snapping tons of pictures. So they paid people at airports to ring them when Caroline arrived. They came to Monaco disguised as tourists with cameras strung around their neck to blend into the background. They sprinkled roads with tacks so that Albert would have to stop his car or risk a flat. They even rented ultralight gliders to sail over the family property at Marchais hoping to get a glimpse of Stephanie.
One photographer, after checking the family flat in Paris to see if anyone was home, discovered there was an empty apartment next door. He somehow got inside and waited there for several nights. The picture he got for all his trouble was of someone—it turned out to be Caroline—closing the curtains. She was dressed and you couldn’t see her face but that didn’t matter. The photo ran.
“It became unbearable for all of us,” Rainier shook his head. “Once, on a skiing holiday in Switzerland, Grace found Stephanie hiding in her room in tears, afraid to go outside because the paparazzi frightened her. I wonder how those photographers would have reacted if their own children had been subjected to those same pressures.”
Grace found it just as aggravating to watch the press abuse her children.
One of the things Hollywood had equipped her for was being able now to accept certain comments in the papers about herself. But when they wrote about her children, she looked at it differently.
There were times when she’d be so incensed at the treatment her children were receiving that she’d write to editors to ask them please to leave the family alone, or she’d write to correct them when they published something about her children that struck her as being particularly stupid.
When that failed—which it usually did with the German press in particular—she showed her frustration by going after the entire nation.
“Germany is a horrible country and the Teutonic press is disgusting,” she lashed out. “I read some of the things written about my family in German magazines and newspapers and there are times when they say such despicable things that I can’t bear it any longer.”
The thing that truly panicked Grace and Rainier was when the French or Italian papers publicized the family’s address in Paris. They looked on that as a direct threat to their children’s security.
“I went after them for that,” Rainier said. “Happily, the law in France protects people from that sort of thing. Once they printed pictures that showed where Caroline lived in Paris. You could very clearly see the number of the house and all the nuts in the world starting ringing her doorbell. I wouldn’t stand for it. We went to court to stop that.”
On several occasions over the years, Grace and Rainier took photographers and magazine editors to court.
In 1978, when an Italian magazine superimposed Caroline’s face on the nude photo of another girl, Rainier pressed the case and the magistrates sent the guilty editor to jail.
That was an exception. In all too many other cases, there was little anyone could do. The paparazzi photographed Caroline in low-cut dresses bending over in a nightclub and sunbathing topless on a boat. The pictures were published. Long lenses captured Albert and a girlfriend nude together on a boat. The pictures were published. The paparazzi once even got Rainier in his underwear through a second-floor window. The pictures were published.
Certain big-circulation magazines and downmarket tabloids in the United States, France, Italy, and Germany refused to put a price limit on embarrassing photos of the Grimaldis. It was well known in the trade that anyone with the right photo could name his own price and probably get it.
Certain smaller picture agencies in France, Italy, and Germany considered photos of the Grimaldis to be their bread and butter.
Faced with that kind of market pressure, and not necessarily helped in every country by privacy laws, Rainier conceded, “In the end you can’t really do much. You have to let a lot of things go. You just have to write some of it off as part of the apprenticeship of life.”
GqH
The dual burden of structuring the family’s public relations and also defending them against the press fell squarely on Nadia Lacoste.
“Right after the Prince and Princess were married,” she said, “whenever they were in Paris, there were always four or five photographers stationed outside their apartment snapping pictures of them coming in or going out. Okay. But as the years went by, the photographers became less and less reserved.”
Now they began following Grace and, especially Caroline and Stephanie, on motorcycles through the streets of Paris. Or, during the summer in Monaco, they’d hide in the small stretch of public beach just around the corner from the Old Beach Hotel because from there, with their long lenses, they could photograph Grace in her bathing suit.
In the winter, when the family went skiing, the photographers would follow them to the slopes and hide in the bushes so they could get pictures of them, hopefully falling in the snow. The solution Lacoste proposed was to arrange a family photo call.
Wherever they went, especially if it was on a private holiday, Lacoste negotiated a truce with the photographers. She’d get Grace and Rainier and the children to pose for 15 or 20 minutes and once everyone had their pictures, the photographers were supposed to retreat and leave the family alone.
It was a good idea on paper. And it even worked the first few times. Then one photographer stuck around for a few more days to get the picture that everyone else missed, and before long all the other photographers were doing it, too. Eventually it got so bad that instead of four or five paparazzi on guard in front of the apartment in Paris there were 20.
In 1980, word went around that there was big money in any photos anyone could get of Stephanie at school.
To protect her from daily harassment and allow her to get on with her lif
e, the question became how to keep the press from finding out which school she was attending. It wasn’t easy because the family always tried to get together at weekends, either in Monaco or Paris. The paparazzi, therefore, knew that Stephanie would be going back to school on Monday mornings. Their game plan became to find out where they were spending the weekend, then wait them out until Monday.
So Grace and Rainier, with the help of Nadia Lacoste, had to devise new ways every week to get Stephanie back to school without being followed. Life for their youngest daughter quickly deteriorated into one, big, unhappy race between the family’s chauffeur and the photographers.
“Dad always told me,” Stephanie said, “‘If you and your sister weren’t beautiful, no one would care, so take it as a compliment.’ I guess he’s right. If we were ugly dogs and never did anything exciting except sit home desperately seeking a husband, the magazines wouldn’t have bothered with us. I guess they’re interested in us because we’re well brought up and not too bad looking and we do things with our lives. It’s hard sometimes, but I always try to find the good side of things.”
Stephanie observed that Grace had also been philosophical about the situation, telling her children there was nothing anybody could do but accept the fact that the photographers would be hanging around.
“She urged us not to let it get to us,” Stephanie went on, “or to depress us or to make us go completely nuts. She was a great help because she’d gone through this sort of thing when she was in films. She didn’t over-dramatize things or allow it to have more importance than it should have. When we were children she tried to get us used to it and warn us that we were going to be hassled and chased around by a lot of photographers. So in a way, when I got older, I was expecting it. I don’t think it was so much Caroline’s experience that taught me anything because there really isn’t anything to learn. Even if I wanted to use the same tricks she did to avoid the photographers, they already knew them. I had to find my own.”
Grace of Monaco Page 14
