Grace of Monaco

by Robinson, Jeffrey

  She said, “Normally I’d be happy to but I have no music with me. It might be different if my piano player was here, but he’s gone off for dinner somewhere.”

  The SBM director wondered, “If we send a car to collect your piano player from the restaurant right now, will you do it?”

  She said, “Sure.”

  “Great,” the SBM director said, “Where did he go for dinner?”

  She told him, “He had reservations at Le Nautic.”

  The problem was that every village along the south coast of France boasts a restaurant called Le Nautic and there are a lot of villages along that coast. “Which Le Nautic?”

  “Ah,” she shrugged, “I don’t know. Just Le Nautic.”

  So SBM sent cars to every Le Nautic between Menton and Cannes until they found him and raced him back to Monaco. The show went on and Josephine Baker owned the night.

  However, if one night is ever to be called “the most memorable” it might well be the first Red Cross Ball held in the then brand-new Salle des Etoiles—Starlight Room—at the Summer Sporting Club.

  It was 1974.

  Part of Rainier’s master plan to modernize Monaco, the room was the centerpiece of a circular complex of discos, restaurants, and a casino built on a small landfill peninsula of colored lights and exotic shrubbery jutting out from Monte Carlo’s beach. The room got its name because the roof opens and the sides roll back and on a warm night you’re virtually dining under the stars. On a clear summer evening it is spectacular. On the other hand, when it rains it is decidedly less spectacular, especially if the roof is still open. Which is what happened that night.

  Jane Powell was on stage, singing and dancing, when a huge cloud moved into position, the roof mechanism jammed and suddenly tons of water came raining down onto the audience.

  Everyone in the room ran for shelter.

  Except for Jane Powell, who stayed right where she was, singing and dancing on a stage covered with half an inch of rain.

  And except for Grace and Rainier. They stayed right where they were—now clutching umbrellas that waiters had found somewhere—fixed in their chairs, because the show must go on.

  Chapter 20

  Grimaldi Inc.

  In the early 1800s the United States was heavily involved in naval commitments along the coast of North Africa.

  A pair of costly expeditions against Libyan pirates gave rise to the feeling in Washington that the US Navy could use a refitting and supply station somewhere in the Mediterranean.

  Prince Florestan supposedly learned of America’s interest, knew that his country’s most valuable natural resource was its deep, protected harbor, and considered negotiating the sale of his under-­capitalized principality to the United States.

  It was not such an outlandish idea.

  The Russians later tried to buy nearby Villefranche to use as a base for the Czar’s fleet. And Florestan’s grandson, Alben I, would one day entertain a similar proposition from the Swiss.

  There’s no telling how history might have been changed had ­Florestan gone ahead with the deal.

  Perhaps Monaco would today be the 51st state.

  Then again, anyone who’s ever witnessed bus loads of American tourists taking pictures of themselves on the steps of the casino might be excused for thinking the sale had indeed been concluded.

  GqH

  As Chairman of the Board of Grimaldi Inc., Rainier characterized himself as someone who saw opportunities rather than someone who studied balance sheets and worried about decimal points. Although he refused to accept the description of Monaco as “Grimaldi Inc.,” he preferred Chairman of the Board of a business called Monaco.

  “In a way, the principality has become a family business,” he acknowledged. “I don’t think it’s really Grimaldi Inc. And I’m not certain it will ever turn into that. But it’s much more business-like now than it was years ago. The way the world is today, it had to become that.”

  When he first married Grace, Monaco was a one product town. There was tourism, which included gambling, and there was nothing else.

  Rainier conceded, “It was pretty obvious that no company could survive very long on such a short season and with a regular clientele that was actually smaller than the number of employees in the ­company.”

  Until he came along, Monaco’s rulers tended to regard the principality as a part-time occupation. Most of them never spent more than three or four months of the year there, and even then they distanced themselves from the day-to-day workings of the country. Projects were only presented at the last stages for final approval. There were no intermediate stages where the prince could ask for revisions, or improve the text of some legislation or just put his own ideas into a project.

  “My grandfather did not adequately prepare me for the job,” he said. “The fact is, I don’t think he was terribly concerned with how I would get on. He was sickly at the end of his life, recently married and I guess he simply didn’t feel he had a lot of time for me.”

  Rainier noted that although he participated in some meetings chaired by his grandfather and discussed certain things with him, such as the basics of the principality’s administration, it was all the more difficult when he succeeded, because he didn’t really have anyone he could count on for help.

  “The staff who worked for him didn’t seem to care much either,” he went on. “I was pretty much on my own. Of course, sometimes that’s the best way to learn. There were so many things I suddenly had to do that I didn’t have a lot of time to worry about how hard it was to learn my job. I sat down and studied all the dossiers and figured out for myself where I was going.”

  Rainier was the first full-time sovereign, and also the first to approach the running of the country like the running of a business.

  Although he couldn’t make any decisions under his grandfather’s rule, he made himself aware of what was going on. Nor could he criticize his grandfather, which meant he had to keep his opinions to himself. But he was in a position to form his own opinions and once he took over he moved fairly quickly to change things.

  Specifically, he changed the economic base of the country.

  If it really ever was the “sunny spot for shady people” that Somerset Maugham wrote about in the 1930s, Rainier insisted, it wasn’t that any longer.

  “The economy is still geared to tourism,” he said, “but it’s a great deal more well rounded than it was 40 years ago. There’s no comparison. We now have a very important convention industry. And we now have a growing sector of light industry that has emerged as a major factor in our economy.”

  Grace’s role was to help establish and to maintain the image of Monaco as the world’s premier “jet setting” capital. That went hand in hand with the expansion of tourism that she helped orchestrate by bringing Americans to Monaco. But putting her influence aside, there was never anyone who could rightly claim to have been Rainier’s confidant and adviser in all things. Many of those who were closest to him in those years felt that Rainier’s two greatest strengths were his ability to keep things compartmentalized and his uncanny instincts.

  Now his instincts told him that he needed to attract new, and very specific types of businesses to Monaco.

  “We chose business carefully,” he explained, “because we didn’t want to ruin the place. The principality was off limits right from the start to any business that would require vast amounts of space, such as an automobile assembly plant. Then, no pollution of any kind could be permitted. No air, sea or noise pollution.”

  He only wanted industries with a high cost improvement factor, such as pharmaceuticals, perfumes, and some electronics. And with the tax advantages he could offer them—and lifestyle advantages, too—they lined up to come to Monaco.

  “We made small electrical components for the Concorde and NASA,” he pointed out. “Did you know that the shaving razors for the first astronauts were made in Monaco? They were wind-up razors. There are also certain plastic and rubber parts mad
e here for Renault, Citroen, and Peugeot. There are pharmaceuticals and beauty products either made here or packaged here. The point is that there is no unemployment in Monaco. In fact, we have to import people every day to work here.”

  To provide for those industries, he had to come up with somewhere to put them. “There were severe space limitations. But by 1974 we’d reclaimed about 53 acres from the sea. It enabled us to create Fontvieille, an entirely new quarter where we could house light industry. It meant that we could actively seek foreign investment and take yet another step away from a dependency on tourism. We expanded our borders peacefully. A rare thing these days, no?”

  Along with light industry, Rainier looked to cut Monaco into the European convention business. And with conventions came festivals. He invented the Circus Festival, and welcomed music festivals and television festivals, deliberately scheduled to bring money into the country during the eight months outside the high-tourist season. As someone once wrote about Grace’s and Rainier’s Monaco, “Find 30 people who play marbles and Monaco will have a festival.”

  To make that happen, Monaco needed world-class facilities. And when Rainier started this, there was hardly anything suitable. The Hotel de Paris didn’t even have a decent room for cocktail parties.

  So he built a convention center that could comfortably take groups of 400–1,000 delegates. Next to it, Loews Hotel Corporation constructed a 573-room hotel, the largest on the south coast of France.

  There were, however, some minor growing pains. When one of the new convention hotels was being planned, someone noticed that no provision was made to put bidets in the bathrooms. Bidets, the American designers explained, were not used by Americans and this was, after all, “the Americanization of Monaco.”

  No, the local authorities corrected them, this was not that and, anyway, bidets are a basic necessity in the civilized world. So bidets were duly added to the plans.

  Business boomed and for the first time in the principality’s history, the younger generation no longer had to look towards SBM for employment, the way their fathers did.

  Said Rainier, “Most of them realize that, having gone to university, there are other possibilities open to them. So the old adage that every Monegasque is born with a croupier’s rake in his hand simply isn’t true any more.”

  GqH

  At the same time, Monaco, and in a particular Monte Carlo, was gripped with real estate fever.

  It coincided with an outbreak of terrorism in Italy and the real danger that the Communist Party could come to power there. To protect themselves and to protect their assets—many of which had been hidden in Monaco, out of the reach of the Italian taxman—Italians flooded into Monte Carlo.

  Apartment prices hit outlandish heights. Building sites sprouted on every corner.

  At one point in the late 1970s there were no fewer than nine major construction projects under way, with 85 percent of those new flats pre-sold.

  Such was the craziness of the market that some apartments changed hands two, three, and four times while they were still in the blueprint stage.

  Everybody suddenly became a real estate speculator. Enormous fortunes were made. It was the ’49 Gold Rush, Monaco style. But prosperity was not without its price.

  Some people criticized the Prince for not speaking up soon enough or loud enough and for allowing too many unattractive buildings to mar Monte Carlo’s skyline. They said it could have been done differently, more tastefully, but because there was so much money involved and because it all happened so fast, controls and checks on the aesthetics of the urban development of Monte Carlo were too lax.

  It got to the point that some of the high-rises built along the beach at Monte Carlo were so badly planned that, at three o’clock on summer afternoons, shadows were cast across the beach.

  Grace was especially disappointed that the sleepy fishing village she’d moved to in 1956 suddenly looked like Hong Kong on the Mediterranean.

  “I didn’t necessarily like it either,” Rainier admitted. “But what can you do? You can’t make regulations that cover everything. As long as the builders are in conformity with the rules you can’t say, ‘I won’t allow this because it doesn’t suit my taste.’”

  Conceding that it all happened too fast, he didn’t want to go as far as to say that Monte Carlo has been spoiled. “The alternatives were to leave the place as it was or to have a spread of low-level building. And that gets back to a question of investment. People won’t put their money into a project if it isn’t large enough to make it worth their while. As soon as we realized what was happening we did try to change things. We put limits on the height of a building which any individual could build. But then builders started pooling their allocations in order to build very tall apartment houses. They got around the laws. So we tightened the laws.”

  Another area where Rainier came under some criticism was the often-contentious issue of Monaco’s status as “a tax haven.”

  Here, he was fast to point out, “This is neither Liechtenstein nor the Cayman Islands. They’ve acquired a certain reputation that we wouldn’t want here.” And to that he added, “I would never want Monaco to become the kind of banking haven you find in the Caribbean.”

  Anyway, he shrugged, “Being a so-called tax haven is of no financial interest at all. People live here and buy things here, yes, that’s fine. But if someone doesn’t pay taxes in England or Sweden, it doesn’t matter at all to us.”

  GqH

  Grace’s influence on her husband notwithstanding, some of the men who worked with Rainier for many years said that no one could rightfully claim to be his confidant and adviser in all things.

  They said that one of Rainier’s strengths was his ability to keep things compartmentalized. Others suggested that the secret to his success was in his instincts. They portrayed him as an emotional man, true to his Mediterranean heritage, who relied on his feelings and trusted his intuition.

  He saw it slightly differently. “I was born here and I’ve lived here, basically, all my life. When it comes to dealing with the people, understanding them, that’s a major advantage I’ve had over my predecessors.”

  On the other hand, he said, “I didn’t go to school here and I found it was a drawback not knowing my generation very well. Grace and I decided that Albert should go to the high school here and get his pants dirty with the other guys. When he takes over he’ll have grown up with an entire generation here. He’ll know them all. That’s a benefit I didn’t have.”

  Chapter 21

  Caroline

  Grace, Rainier, and their three children long had an association with London’s Connaught Hotel, which in turn has long had a tradition of catering to European royals. Because some royals are not as stuffy as the Connaught, the two don’t always mix.

  Very early one Friday morning, with Grace in residence, Caroline and a couple of her friends turned up at the hotel hoping to get breakfast. They’d been to the famous, pre-dawn Bermondsey antique market, making their way through the maze of stalls armed with flashlights to see the bric-a-brac. Then, still clad in jeans and heavy sweaters, they decided to cap the morning with coffee and croissants at the Connaught.

  Walking through the front door, Caroline asked the reception manager where they could get something to eat.

  Looking down his nose, he suggested that she and her friends were hardly properly attired for the Connaught.

  Caroline explained they’d been to Bermondsey.

  He shook his head and apologized, “Sorry ma’am.”

  She said, “All we want is coffee and maybe some toast or something.”

  He shook his head again and said, “Sorry ma’am, not dressed like that.”

  “Come on,” she protested, “you know who I am. We stay here all the time.”

  He stood his ground.

  She tried, “How about if we take a room?”

  He wouldn’t give in.

  “Okay,” Caroline finally said. “My mother’s here, we�
�ll have breakfast with her.”

  She went to the house phone and, despite the early hour, asked for her mother’s room.

  After a few rings Grace picked up the phone.

  Caroline said, “Good morning,” and explained the situation. “Just because we’ve got jeans on they don’t want to serve us breakfast.”

  Grace answered, “Perfectly right, dear,” hung up and went straight back to sleep.

  GqH

  Caroline was 10 years old when she discovered that her mother was famous.

  “I’d seen some movies when I was seven or eight but when I was 10 we went to California and visited some of the studios. They had some of her films in the archives that they showed us. There was so much fuss and commotion made over us that I started to understand who she’d been. But I don’t think it affected any of us too much. Albert and I used to tease her a lot, especially about Mogambo. There’s one scene where she turns to Clark Gable and says, ‘I didn’t know monkeys climbed trees.’ It was the silliest thing I’d ever heard. We’d repeat that to her and then break up. Being children, it was difficult for us to understand that she was acting. I thought it was just Mommy being filmed saying, ‘I didn’t know monkeys climbed trees.’”

  Even though her mother was a film star, Caroline never shared her ambition in that direction.

  “Not me. I didn’t want to be in films, I wanted to be a dancer. I never wanted to act. I couldn’t even make it into school productions. Or the few times I did it was very silent parts. I was once one of the three kings in a nativity play with a big beard. But I used to get such stage fright. When I danced it was better. But when I had to say something on stage, I’d be sick.”

  Nor did she inherit her mother’s general outlook on life. “Mommy was always busy doing something. She got that from her mother who couldn’t stand people sitting around doing nothing. So she was always keeping busy. She couldn’t just sit back and relax, which of course is miles away from me. I can perfectly well sit back in a chair and not do a thing for two solid hours. But maybe some of my mother has come through to me because when I do sit around like that I feel a little guilty about it. Not that it stops me from doing it, mind you.”