Grace of Monaco

by Robinson, Jeffrey

  Being as strong-willed as she is, Stephanie was the one who always seemed to react in the most candid ways when she was hassled by the press.

  There were times when she’d even stick her tongue out at them and tell them to go to hell. “Yeah, I did. When they were rude to me, I never saw why I should have been anything else to them. If they’re polite with me, I’m polite with them. If they ask for a picture, I let them take one on the understanding that once they’ve got what they want they leave me alone. But if they’re rude to me, yelling obscene names to me, I’m going to be just as rude back to them. That’s the way I am.”

  Unfortunately, there were times when even her best sword-­rattling bravado in the face of Nikons let her down.

  Late one winter afternoon, Grace rang Nadia Lacoste to announce that the paparazzi had been massed in front of the house all day and that, because of them, Stephanie was now in tears. Grace said Stephanie was refusing to leave the house and would not go back to school as long as they were there.

  “Can you blame me?” Stephanie demanded. “Do you realize how embarrassing it is to be that age and to arrive at school with a horde of photographers behind you? The other kids made fun of me or stayed away from me because of the photographers. It didn’t bother me as much when I was with my family, but at school it was horrible. I felt as though it scared them off and I didn’t want that. What kid would?”

  So it was up to Lacoste to plot Stephanie’s escape.

  Second guessing the photographers’ behavior—obviously they were going to follow Stephanie to school—Nadia phoned Prince Rainier’s chauffeur and told him to drive slowly away from the residence. She told him to make absolutely certain the paparazzi saw that Stephanie was not in the car.

  She then told him to wait nearby but out of sight.

  Lacoste arrived at the apartment a few minutes later. So did the Monagasque ambassador’s car, which drove into the garage.

  Once it began to get dark. Nadia wrapped a scarf wrapped around her head, got into the back seat of the ambassador’s car and crouched down. The chauffeur then pulled out of the garage and raced down the Champs-Élysées.

  Convinced Stephanie was in the back seat, the paparazzi raced after them.

  It wasn’t until they converged at a red light along the Champs-Élysées that Nadia sat up and the photographers realized they’d been duped.

  By that time, the Prince’s chauffeur had been notified on his car phone that the coast was clear, returned to the apartment, and fetched Stephanie.

  “Those were the sorts of silly games we were forced to play,” Lacoste recalled. “It became a constant battle of wits between us and the photographers. Maybe a grown-up can understand that sort of thing but it’s awfully difficult to make a child understand. It got so bad in the last two years before Princess Grace died that once she stopped her car in the middle of Paris, got out, and berated the photographers to please leave them alone. She said, ‘You’ve been following me around all day. I can take it. But please don’t do it to my children. Please stop doing to them what you’ve been doing to me for years.’”

  Her case fell on deaf ears. The photographers merely took pictures of her pleading with the other photographers.

  Lacoste continued, “They became so aggressive that they’d follow her into shops and restaurants. And no one would stop them. Although one day when she was in a store and couldn’t find anyone to help carry her packages, she turned to a photographer who’d followed her inside and said, ‘The least you can do is make yourself useful.’ She loaded him up with packages and led him back to her car.”

  Of the three Grimaldi children, Albert fared best with the press.

  He happily admitted, “I was lucky. When the press started getting interested in Caroline and then Stephanie—I’m talking about the European social press—I was at Amherst, in Massachusetts. I wasn’t hiding but I was far removed from that whole Paris disco scene. Also, as a guy, I was more capable of defending myself. Yet I think the real reason they pretty much left me alone is because pictures of Caroline or Stephanie or my mother sold more magazines than pictures of me. Sure, we were all bothered at official functions and on holidays, like when the whole family went skiing in Switzerland. I’ve had to deal with the press from an early age. But, thankfully, I’ve never been harassed like my sisters were.”

  It seems that the only times the press bothered him during his four years in the States was the first week of college and at graduation. The rest of the time he was free to roam around and do his thing.

  He believed, “I was semi-incognito. It was great. And that’s why I have such fond memories of those years. I can still be that way when I go to the States. Not too many people there know me and if I don’t tell them they don’t necessarily know where I come from. After the 1988 Winter Olympics, I took a road trip with some friends. We drove from Texas to Los Angeles and stopped at some pretty cheap motels in Arizona and New Mexico. It was great fun. No one knew who I was. And no one cared. I enjoyed that.”

  The nearer Albert got to succeeding his father, the more that changed.

  Living in Monaco as heir to the throne, life became a little more difficult for him, vis-à-vis the media.

  “I don’t like to see my face spread all over the scandal sheets,” he admitted, “so I try not to give them a lot of opportunities to do that. I have to be careful where I go and who I go with. But I try not to let it get in the way of my social life. It’s hard to do and as time goes on it will be increasingly difficult. Though I’m sure there’s always a way to be relatively anonymous.”

  It’s never been very easy for him to be seen in public with a girl, because the photographers are always hoping to get the first pictures of Monaco’s next Princess. They’ve also been known to hound him when he goes somewhere in Paris with one of his sisters. More than once he’s had to enlist the aid of a friend to drive a second car behind his just to keep the photographers from catching up.

  One night, one of his pals swung his car sideways to block the street, allowing Albert and Stephanie time to get away. Just as he did, the car with the pursuing photographers slammed into him. The friend complained that they’d ruined his car. The photographer who’d been driving replied, “It doesn’t matter. With the money we make selling pictures of them we can buy you three cars.”

  Chapter 16

  Grace

  A perfect summer’s evening party on St. Jean-Cap-Ferrat, what now seems like a very long time ago.

  Deep in conversation with someone, Grace slowly wound her way across the huge, well-manicured lawn, down to the squat stone sea wall. Strings were playing somewhere in the shadows. The moon was shining on the water.

  As she moved further and further away from the party, men in white evening jackets and women in long, sleeveless gowns, speaking softly, arm in arm, drinking champagne, and eating canapés, drifted that way, too, relaxed, almost unintentionally forming a huge semi-circle around where she stood. Then very gently, as if someone was deliberately lowering the sound track, little by little, everyone else’s conversation hushed until the only voice you could hear was hers.

  A moment passed.

  Suddenly aware that something was happening behind her, she turned to find the entire party simply watching her.

  Flustered for only a split second, she clapped her hands, organizing everyone, leading them back towards the beach house where she announced, “Let’s go swimming,” and from there she lured them all into the water.

  The woman could cast a spell.

  GqH

  The Monegasques had welcomed Grace warmly when she arrived, had rejoiced heartily with their Prince when he took her as his bride, had applauded her and had feted her. But deep down they were suspicious of her. They would point at her and say, there’s Grace Kelly. They couldn’t understand what this foreigner was doing here. It would take her four or five years before the locals began calling her Princess Grace.

  “I had so many problems when I first came he
re,” she once explained. “To begin with, there was the language. I still spoke very poor French. What I knew of it I’d learned in school. You know, ‘la plume de ma tante.’ I was smothered with problems. But I think my biggest single problem was becoming a normal person again, after having been an actress for so long.”

  During her years in New York and Hollywood, a normal person meant, for her, someone who made movies.

  Not any more.

  It was, she went on, exactly like learning a new job. “It was a very hard job that I had to take step by step. Luckily I had the Prince, who was very helpful and very patient with me. But even so, there were some difficult moments. I got pregnant right after our marriage. Nobody knew this but it meant taking my first steps as Princess of Monaco while being sick as a dog. I didn’t let it stop me though. That’s the Irish in me. I can laugh at myself. It’s a great help. That’s a talent I would never exchange for any other.”

  Because she knew she had to be seen, had to earn her acceptance, she refused to hide in the Palace. She deliberately set out to create a presence in Monaco. And that wasn’t easy.

  But, little by little, especially once Caroline and Albert were born, you saw her there. She was visible, not just at official functions when you were supposed to see her, but at normal times when you saw normal people living normal lives. She’d go shopping. She’d have tea with friends. She’d take the kids to school or to the dentist, she’d buy shoes with them or stop at their favorite pastry shop to buy them cakes.

  Yet, just as she was winning her way into the hearts of the Monegasques, word spread that she was not very friendly.

  Some people went so far as to say she was pretentious, snooty to the point where she would walk down the street and not say hello to anyone. People started asking, “Who does she think she is?”

  A better question would have been, “What does she think she is?” Because the answer was, terribly short-sighted.

  Without glasses she couldn’t see three feet in front of herself. She wasn’t snooty at all. She simply couldn’t see people across the street to say hello to them.

  In fact, one of the things that made her special was that the average person could relate to her. She was accessible in Monaco. People were always coming up to say hello and she was always happy to smile and shake hands.

  She was also accessible to people outside Monaco, albeit mostly by mail or through stories in magazines. She spoke to journalists about her fears and her dreams. She might have once been a movie star and she was now a princess but she was also a wife and mother, and she allowed much of the rest of the world to see her as that.

  “I think she had fun being a princess,” claimed Mary Wells Lawrence, one of America’s most successful woman entrepreneurs, founder of the Wells, Rich and Green Advertising Agency and a very old chum of Grace’s. “In fact, I know she did. But I also think she was a very motherly mother and a very good wife. She was a woman who enjoyed being pretty. Although I know she felt that she had to make a constant effort not to be an outsider in Monaco. After all, she was an American and it wasn’t easy for her to be accepted. It took time.”

  It also took a special kind of talent, Lawrence added. “Not just anyone could have done it. She had a very specific talent, a gift. She was larger than life. She was not just a human being, she was an idea. She was an idea that Monte Carlo was a fairy tale in an increasingly ugly world. You see, in a world where things were getting more and more difficult, and smaller, and where more and more things were becoming the same, Monte Carlo had a fairy-tale quality. I think there was something about Grace that gave that to Monaco. It was in the way she did things, the way she acted. She was a real star. And in the world today there aren’t a lot of real stars. There are loads of people who are famous, but there are very few real stars.”

  After her secretary Phyllis Blum left for England to get married, Grace hired a young French woman named Louisette Levy-Soussan, who was with her for the next 18 years.

  “The Princess was not just pretty,” Levy-Soussan maintained, “she was beautiful. But she never flaunted that beauty. It was a perfect kind of beauty and maybe that was one of the things that made her so special. Because she was so perfectly beautiful and yet at the same time so simple in her own way, other women were never jealous of her. Of all her children, I think that Prince Albert is probably the one who is most like her. They have the same temperament. I look at him and I can see her. I’ll tell him something and he doesn’t seem to be listening and then three or four days later he’ll say something about it. That’s exactly the way his mother was.”

  While Grace was very easy to work for, Levy-Soussan noted she was very strict about certain things, especially trust. “Once she trusted someone she would trust them forever. Let’s face it, Monaco is a small town and there is always a lot of gossip but once she trusted someone she would defend them and never believe the gossip she’d hear. I remember she once received an anonymous letter from someone obviously involved with the Garden Club because it was about another woman at the Garden Club. It was very nasty. But the princess laughed about it. She said, ‘I can just see this woman sitting with a cup of tea writing this letter to poison her friend.’ She understood.”

  Some people have written that Grace was cold, but Levy-Soussan insisted that wasn’t the case. “She was poised. She kept her feelings to herself, unless she was with friends and then she’d let them out. People who didn’t know her sometimes found her, well, maybe the word is guarded. She didn’t show everyone the private side of her that she showed to her friends. But she was certainly not cold. She was genuinely kind and very concerned about other people.”

  That not only showed in the way people communicated with her, but in the way she reacted to them.

  She’d receive letters from people who needed help: a mother asking for money for a sickly child; an old age pensioner wanting a new heater to keep warm for the winter; a battered woman looking for shelter; a young boy trying to get off drugs.

  Wanting to help, and seeing that, for whatever reason, the Monaco Red Cross couldn’t react quickly enough, she established the Princess Grace Foundation and, at least initially, funded it ­herself.

  “I don’t need to have an administrative council decide that someone needs an operation or a roof over their head,” she once explained to her press secretary, Nadia Lacoste. “This way I can say what I want to do with the money.”

  Nor did her concern for other people stop there. When she saw how various artisans in Monaco were struggling to sell their wares, she set up a local boutique as a non-profit venture to help them earn a living. When it proved successful, she opened a second boutique for them.

  During the summer months, when she was at Roc Agel, she’d often work there, preferring not to come into Monaco, asking instead that Levy-Soussan bring her mail to her in the afternoons.

  Letters poured in every day and unsolicited gifts were a regular part of her post. Especially when her children were born. She was inundated with knitted sweaters and booties.

  Occasionally, when one of those gifts pleased her, she’d display it on a shelf in her office or bring it back to the private apartments. But most of the time she donated the countless coffee mugs with GRACE written across the face and the ashtrays with her picture on them to charity bazaars. She also gave a lot of her own clothes to the Red Cross for their jumble sales.

  One woman in Genoa so admired Grace that she put together scrapbooks of her newspaper and magazine clippings and sent them to her every year for Christmas. Every year, by return post, Grace would send her a handwritten note to say thank you. Every now and then Grace would also invite her to the Palace for tea.

  Then there was the man from Moscow who started sending her Russian stamps. Grace responded by sending him Monegasque stamps and their correspondence lasted for years.

  When a little girl wrote to ask, “How many hours a day do you spend sitting on your throne and wearing your crown?” Grace wrote back to explain tha
t modern princesses don’t do that.

  Understandably, she liked to keep in touch with friends and, at least during the holiday season, the mail was the best way to do that. According to Levy-Soussan, Grace had a constantly expanding Christmas card list—“It got bigger and bigger every year”—and she often added a few words in her own hand.

  Although shopping was not important to her—“If there is one thing that is foreign to me,” Grace would explain, “it is shopping for pleasure”—there’s no doubt that she loved clothes and wore them well.

  She would say, “I believe that it is right to honor all those who create beautiful things and give satisfaction to those who see me wearing them.”

  Accordingly, she was a regular on all the various lists of the world’s ten best-dressed women.

  However, if she was going to spend the day in the office and not see anyone, or when she was at home with her family, she dressed simply. Slacks, flat shoes, and frequently a scarf tied around her head. At Roc Agel she often wore jeans and sweatshirt, but it was extremely rare for her to dress that casually in Monaco.

  “We live in a palace,” she said, “one is thus a little embarrassed to walk about it wearing blue jeans.”

  When Grace first arrived in Monaco she had a private tutor to help her with French. She worked very hard at learning the language but progress was, decidedly, slower than she would have wanted. Later in life she decided she wanted to speak better Italian so she and a few friends took lessons. As soon as they all felt confident enough, they decided to show off their newfound skills with a private show for a small group at the Palace. Decorating hats and donning masks for costumes, Grace and her Italian class staged a 30-minute all-Italian rendition of Pinocchio.

  Another thing she got good at, because she enjoyed it so much, was needlepoint. In addition to doing a lot of cushions, she even did a waistcoat for Rainier. In fact, she got so involved with needlepoint that she formed a local needlepoint club. She also painted, did collages, and for many years went to pottery classes.