Grace of Monaco

by Robinson, Jeffrey

  Next came Grace’s first poetry-reading American tour.

  The American International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh wanted her to do the “An American Heritage” program in the summer of 1978. She asked Carroll’s opinion.

  He devised a script with poetry and prose around the theme of animals and called it, “Birds, Beasts, and Flowers.”

  From an opening triumph in Pittsburgh, they flew to Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Princeton, and Harvard.

  By the time she returned to Europe, requests for more appearances were pouring in.

  She appeared at the 1978 Aldeburgh Festival in East Suffolk, England and at a charity dinner held at St James’s Palace in London with the Queen Mother in attendance.

  Believing that these recitals were, as John Carroll put it, “A compromise between her old career and the dignity of her position,” she performed in 1979 at Trinity College as part of the Dublin Festival, and in London again at both the Royal Academy of Arts and the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, now doing a program called “The Muses Combined,” a series of readings on the arts of painting and sculpture.

  Those were followed by appearances at Tatton Hall in Cheshire and the English Theatre of Vienna.

  “Grace could speak some German,” Carroll said. “She learned it from her mother. When she told me that, we added a couple of short verses from Austrian poets referring to the magic of Vienna. Grace recited them in German at the very end of the program and absolutely brought down the house.”

  Each success brought more offers.

  A second US tour was arranged for the end of summer 1980. Grace returned to Pittsburgh to do the Shakespeare program there, then performed something new by John Carroll called Evocations in Detroit, Dallas, Nashville, and Baltimore. It created such excitement that one Dallas paper wrote, there were more millionaires in the audience on Grace’s opening night than had ever been seen in one place in the city before.

  Between poetry recitals, Grace teamed up with a British writer to do a book on flower arranging. Like all best-selling authors, as soon as A Garden of Flowers was published, Grace embarked on a publicity tour, suffered endless interviews for newspapers and magazines, did live radio for the first time in many years and appeared on selected television shows where her hosts were pre-warned not to stray from the subject of the book.

  Financially, the book was a huge success and Grace’s portion of royalties was soon bolstering the bank accounts of charities such as the Monaco Red Cross.

  In connection with that, she put together a homemade film. Titled Rearranged, she wrote the script, supervised the direction, and starred in it. Shot entirely on location in Monaco, she included all her friends in it. There is even a cameo, flower-arranging appearance by her husband.

  Never meant to be anything more than a fun project strictly for the benefit of the Garden Club of Monaco, it’s only had a few select showings. Approaches were made about buying the rights to the film for commercial, public distribution. One offer was as high as $6 million. But Rainier felt that would have entailed re-editing the film and turning it into something it was never intended to be. The print is locked in a Palace vault and Rainier insisted that’s where it will stay.

  In 1981, Grace was back in England to do a poetry recital for the Royal Opera at Covent Garden. She next performed at Goldsmith’s Hall in the City of London and this time she had to share the spotlight with a young girl named Diana Spencer.

  Prince Charles had just announced his engagement and this was the first time he and Diana were seen out together.

  Diana appeared in a low-cut, black evening dress that made her look very busty. The photographers loved it but that only served to send the naturally timid 19-year-old deeper into her shell. Grace picked up on Diana’s discomfort right away and moved in fast to lend moral support.

  Carroll remembered, “Grace was very motherly with the future Princess of Wales. Diana was terribly nervous. This was her first public appearance apart from posing for pictures with the press in the garden at Buckingham Palace when her engagement was announced. If you remember she was a bit on the plump side in those days. The black dress was décolleté and it caused quite a stir. Diana was painfully shy but Grace understood what she was going through. She kept whispering things to Diana. She really was exactly like a mother with her.”

  Grace read at the Chichester Festival in March 1982, then went to Philadelphia to accept the hometown honor of a four-day Grace Kelly Film Festival.

  In cooperation with the Roman Catholic Congregation of the Holy Cross in New York, Grace agreed to host a series of three half-hour television programs. “The Last Seven Words,” “The Nativity” and “The Greatest Mystery” were filmed on location at the Vatican, St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, and Chichester Cathedral in England. They featured such varied singers as Placido Domingo and Petula Clark doing spiritual music with choral backgrounds plus British Shakespearean actors doing dramatizations from the Bible.

  “Grace was totally comfortable with religion,” Rainier affirmed. “She was a practicing Catholic and had a very strong, pure faith. She was certainly more rigorous than I was. If we were traveling someplace and it was Sunday, she’d insist that we find a church to attend mass. Maybe I wouldn’t have always bothered, but she made it an important issue. I think it was her Irishness.”

  Convinced that poetry readings were the next best thing to being a working actress again, she scheduled further appearances around her official duties in Monaco.

  One night, over dinner in a small restaurant in the south of France at the very beginning of September 1982, Grace told Mary Lawrence, “I’m so looking forward to this year. I’m coming into a whole new period of my life. The children are grown, Monte Carlo is great, everything is terrific. My responsibilities have changed and I can finally do so many of the things I really want to do. I’m excited about the future. Now is my time.”

  Added Lawrence, “She said she wanted to perform more. She said she wanted to paint more. She said she had all sorts of things set up in different places. They were personal, creative projects that she was going to do, as opposed to being a mother and supporting the children and being an image for Monaco. And I looked at her as she was talking and thought to myself, you have never been as beautiful as you are this minute.”

  A week later, Grace was dead.

  Midday

  Every parking meter in Monte Carlo is taken.

  In the summer, the public beach along the Avenue Princess Grace is packed with people lying on inflatable mattresses, or on huge monogrammed towels, or on fancy chaise-lounges that they rent by the hour for exorbitant fees, baking in the sun.

  Young men with flat stomachs and gold chains around their necks drink Pastis and play backgammon.

  Young women, the tops of their bikinis casually tossed aside, drink Vichy and rub oil on themselves as small beads of sweat trickle down between their toasted breasts.

  Children sit at the water’s edge where the gentle ebb and flow of the sea covers the pile of smooth pebbles they’ve used to build a castle, because there is no sand.

  A helicopter flies in from Nice airport.

  At the eastern end of the principality, the very private Monte Carlo Beach Club is like something out of Hollywood in the 1930s, with rows of pinkish-colored cabanas covered by green and white striped awnings and an old-fashioned wind sock stuck on the top of a tall pole so the driver of the boat that takes people parasailing knows which way the breeze is blowing.

  There’s a small wooden pier that juts out from the rock beach to the lake-like sea. And much further out there are two small docks floating on pontoons so that, if you can swim that far, you’ll have a place to rest or sunbathe or simply collapse.

  A waiter sets tables outside at the Café de Paris.

  Facing the port, on the sundeck below the Hotel de Paris, where the indoor pool is heated all year to a constant 82.5 degrees Fahrenheit, old men with paunches, gold Rolex Oysters on their wrists,
and spotless white terry cloth robes hanging loosely around their shoulders, walk barefoot to the bar where they order another glass of champagne for themselves plus a Kir Royal with a Nicoise salad for the no-longer-so-young woman in the stylish one-piece bathing suit with the matching gold Rolex Oyster on the next chaise-lounge.

  Around the corner from the railway station, a man who runs a small grocery starts taking in his wooden baskets of peaches and green peppers and onions and lettuce so that he can close for a three-hour siesta.

  In the winter, the public beach gets only truly hearty types, who take their daily dip no matter what. The Monte Carlo Beach Club is closed. But the Health Club is open all year round and, if you know someone who rents one of the private sauna rooms, you can meet your lover there for what is called here—as it is in much of the world—an early matinee.

  Depending on the restaurant, a $4 cantaloupe melon with a small piece of Parma ham on top and served on crested porcelain can cost upwards of $35.

  Chinese waiters on one of the larger yachts in the harbor set out a buffet for the owner and his 20 guests, who will board the ship soon for a two-hour cruise to nowhere, consuming $15,000 in fuel, while men in white slacks and blue shirts talk business and women in their summer dresses discuss the price of shoes.

  An architect sits hunched over his drawing board desperately trying to finish the final designs on a small block of flats, jammed in between other blocks of flats, where miniscule studios sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and even then you have to lean over the balcony, stand on tip-toe and twist your neck to get a glimpse of the sea.

  Less than a hundred yards away, an old woman in Beausoleil, just across the Monte Carlo line in France, who always dresses in black and lives in a narrow, two-storey villa with a breathtaking view of the sea, draws her green shutters to keep the afternoon sun out. Then she shuffles towards the rear door, across her polished linoleum kitchen floor, pushing her slippered feet on top of a dish cloth so as not to dull the shine.

  Outside, in one corner of her narrow yard, there’s a chicken coop. She bends down to fetch an egg and bring it back to her butane stove where she drops it in an old pot and boils it for lunch.

  In Monaco, on any given day at noon, between omelets, Nicoise salads, soufflés, quiches, flans, and pastries, more than 2,500 dozen eggs are cracked and cooked.

  Chapter 18

  Before the

  Laughter Stopped

  One night, when their children were very young, Grace and Rainier went out for the evening, leaving their nanny, Maureen, in charge. Maureen being Maureen decided to have some fun, and stuffed their bed. She took Grace’s nightgown and Rainier’s pajamas and filled them with pillows.

  The night-gowned pillow was reading a magazine. The night-shirted pillow was looking at a picture of Brigitte Bardot. To make the scene complete, she turned the lights way down so that at least, on first glance, it appeared that there really were two people in the bed.

  As Grace had just acquired a new puppy which hadn’t quite been house-trained, Maureen bought some plastic dog droppings and sprinkled them around the bedroom for good measure. She then went to bed.

  When Grace and Rainier returned home, they could be heard shrieking.

  Maureen repeated the joke a few years later when Caroline was old enough to be her accomplice. The two of them took an old shirt and some trousers and stuffed them to look like a body. Then they snuck out of the Palace and hid it under some shrubs.

  The two of them thought this was a riot. Unfortunately, the security guards who found it weren’t nearly as amused.

  As Maureen remembered, quite clearly, “It didn’t go down terribly well.”

  Not that Maureen, or her usual partner-in-mischief, Phyllis, always escaped unscathed.

  Accompanying the family on a ski trip, they shared a room and left their window open to have some fresh air as they slept. No sooner were they asleep than the attack began.

  Grace and Rainier were outside, pelting them in bed with snow balls.

  On another trip, a ski lodge piano player smiled at Phyllis while Rainier was watching. He teased her about it, insisting that a romance was obviously on the cards. She protested her innocence. No sooner had they returned to Monaco when flowers arrived for Phyllis from the piano player. The flowers were followed with notes swearing undying love and affection.

  Phyllis didn’t know how to turn off the piano player, until she found out that Rainier was behind the whole thing.

  GqH

  Another evening, Grace and Rainier had been invited to a small dinner party by some friends, who’d also planned to ask Grace’s secretary Phyllis Blum. But at the last minute the hostess realized there were too many ladies at the table.

  The hostess rang Phyllis to explain the situation, hoping that she wouldn’t mind backing out.

  But Phyllis, encouraged by nanny Maureen King had another idea.

  She showed up at the dinner party dressed as a man.

  Wearing a wig and a borrowed suit, she also sported a beard and dark glasses. The hostess introduced Phyllis to everyone as a famous Polish pianist who’d just arrived in the west for the first time.

  When presented to Princess Grace, Phyllis bowed gallantly.

  Grace said that she was very pleased to meet him.

  When the famous Polish pianist didn’t respond, Grace was informed that he didn’t speak English.

  At one point before dinner, Rainier quietly remarked to someone that the famous Polish pianist seemed to him to be, “a bit on the feminine side.”

  He was told, “Oh, well, you know how those musical types are.”

  Over dinner, Grace found herself sitting next to the famous Polish pianist and, being polite, tried to determine what languages he spoke.

  The hostess informed her—only Polish and German.

  Wrong answer. Because Grace now asked the famous Polish pianist in German if he liked the soup.

  When the famous Polish pianist didn’t answer, Grace supposedly mumbled, “Perhaps he doesn’t like the soup.”

  Not one to give up, Grace continued trying to make small talk with him in German.

  The Polish pianist was unmovable.

  Exasperated, Grace finally turned to her hostess and whispered, “Who is this person?”

  That’s when the hostess confessed everything.

  And it was Grace and Rainier who laughed the loudest.

  GqH

  One of the things that has always bothered Caroline about the way her family was typically depicted in magazines and books, is that the humor is never shown.

  “They don’t show us laughing,” she said, “which we did a lot. My mother had a terrific sense of humor and so did my father. No one ever writes about that. Mealtime was a time to tease each other. My parents always made sure that we’d have at least one meal a day together as a family. And when we did we laughed a lot.”

  Throughout their lives, Grace and Rainier exhibited their humor in different ways.

  Rainier could tell jokes, and often did. Sometimes, the dirtier the better. But he also had a natural sense of humor.

  While on a visit to Houston, Texas, he was taken to a football game at the Astrodome, the nine-acre, climate-controlled, covered stadium that seats just over 50,000.

  As he gazed around at this engineering feat, his host wondered, “How would you like to have this in Monaco?”

  Without skipping a beat, Rainier answered, “It would be marvelous. We could be the world’s only indoor country.”

  Grace, in turn, was witty, like the time she realized it was her dog’s birthday and decided to throw a party.

  “I was maybe about 11,” Caroline recalled. “I guess there were 10 or 11 dogs that came. They weren’t all ours, of course, we invited some from the neighborhood. You know, our dog’s friends. Because this was a birthday party, we wanted to do it right. So we had party hats for the dogs and a paper tablecloth on the lawn. We also had games for them to play and gave the winn
ers prizes. We gave them bones. We had dog biscuits and cookies they could take home and even baked a chocolate birthday cake which we brought out to them with candles. They loved it. But then who doesn’t love a birthday party?”

  GqH

  Grace and Rainier certainly did and in October 1971 they flew to Iran as guests of the Shah to join in the biggest birthday party ever—celebrations marking the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian monarchy.

  It was a party that was estimated to have cost anywhere from $100 million to $1 billion.

  After gathering in Tehran and going on to Shiraz, the Shah, his Empress Farah, and their 600 closest friends—including 37 heads of state and representatives of 69 nations—moved in armored convoy to Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the ancient Persian empire. The night’s feast was held in the huge state banqueting tent at the center of the spectacular canvas village that had been built in the middle of the desert especially for the occasion.

  The food was cooked by 180 chefs from Maxim’s in Paris, the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo, and the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz. First course was quails’ eggs stuffed with golden imperial caviar and served with champagne and Chateau de Saran. Next came a mousse of crayfish tails with an Haut Brion Blanc 1964. Then there was roast saddle of lamb with truffles served with Chateau-Lafite Rothschild 1945, followed by a sorbet of Moet et Chandon 1911. After that, waiters paraded in carrying silver platters with 50 peacocks, their tail feathers put back in place and surrounded by roasted quails. That was served with a salad of nuts and truffles and Musigny Comte de Vogue 1945. Fresh figs with cream, raspberries, and port wine came next, along with Dom Perignon 1959, coffee, and ­Cognac Prince Eugene.

  The only substitution on the menu went to the Shah himself who had artichoke hearts because he didn’t like caviar.

  With so many dignitaries in one place for the first time ever, it was an opportunity for all of the Shah’s guests to mingle with people they might not normally have a chance to see on such an informal basis.