So she was buried the next day, after workmen had prepared a place next to her where he, too, would rest.
Chapter 29
After Grace
The Monegasques had lost their Princess.
The dignity that characterized their mourning was only surpassed by the elegance of the woman herself. There were, however, a few incidents that posed a minor risk to the solemnity of the event.
When First Lady Nancy Reagan’s limousine came within sight of the Cathedral—she was not only there representing her husband, the president of the United States, but as a personal friend—the Secret Service spotted someone on the roof. They whisked her round to the rear door while agents cornered the man who turned out to be a specially assigned film photographer with authorization to be there.
Even most of the paparazzi showed their respect.
Although a few of the principality’s foreign residents had an oddly warped view of the future. Some of them had grown smug in their belief that, as long as Grace and Rainier were on the throne, all would be well with their non-taxable world. Now, with Grace gone, the things that concerned them were: Will all of this change? Will Rainier abdicate? Will Monaco collapse?
For them, the death of an ideal was sad, the death of one’s financial security and one’s quality of life was something serious.
GqH
Stephanie had been tabloid fodder all her life, but never more than after the accident. Within hours, the then 17-year-old Stephanie was accused of driving the car.
She wasn’t.
Caroline, who’d moved into Stephanie’s hospital room to live there with her until she was fit enough to go home, was the only member of the family to have spoken to Stephanie about what happened in the car that morning.
As Caroline explained, “Stephanie told me, ‘Mommy kept saying, I can’t stop. The brakes don’t work. I can’t stop.’ She said that Mommy was in a complete panic. Stephanie grabbed the handbrake. She told me right after the accident, ‘I pulled on the handbrake but it wouldn’t stop. I tried but I just couldn’t stop the car.’”
It was many year later when Stephanie spoke about the accident, for the first time, on the record, for publication.
And it was for the original edition of this book.
“I remember every minute of it,” she said, trying to control her emotions. “It’s only in the last few years that I’ve been starting to cope with it. I had some professional help and especially in the last eight months I’ve been learning to deal with it. I still can’t go down that road, even if someone else is driving. I always ask them to take the other road. But at least I can talk about it without crying. Although it’s hard for me to get it out in front of my dad. As far as I’m concerned, I can live with it. But I still can’t talk to my dad about it because I know it hurts him and I don’t want to do that because I love him.”
To set the record straight, once and for all, this is what happened:
Grace had gone through a very busy summer. She was always exhausted at the end of the season, but this one had been even more hectic than usual. The cruise on the Mermoz had helped. But she was still tired, irritable, suffering from high blood pressure, and going through a very difficult menopause.
Caroline confirmed, “She wasn’t feeling too well. She was incredibly tired. The summer had been very busy. She hadn’t stopped going places and doing things all summer long. She’d done too much. She never mentioned it or complained about it though. But she wasn’t in great form.”
On that fateful morning, Grace and Stephanie drove past the French policeman directing traffic near the monument at La Turbie. He later reported that he’d recognized Princess Grace at the steering wheel and had saluted. A truck with French license plates followed the Rover down the D-37. The driver later testified that Grace was driving.
Somewhere along the road Grace complained of a headache. It continued to bother her as they headed down the hill. Then suddenly a pain shot up through her skull. For a fraction of a second she blacked out. The car started to swerve. When she opened her eyes she was disoriented. In a panic, she jammed her foot on the brake. At least she thought it was the brake. It appears now, she hit the accelerator.
The French truck driver reported that he was 50 yards behind the Rover, nearing that very steep, sharp curve, when he saw the Rover swerve violently from side to side, zigzagging across both lanes. Then the car straightened out and shot ahead very fast. He knew the road and knew that the bend was coming up and, in those two or three seconds when he didn’t see any brake lights on, he realized what was going to happen.
At that instant, Grace screamed to Stephanie, “I can’t stop. The brakes don’t work.”
Stephanie lunged across her seat to grab the handbrake. She also somehow managed to put the car into park. But the car kept going. Stephanie said she’ll never know for sure if her mother got the accelerator and the brake pedal mixed up or just didn’t have the use of her legs. But when the police investigated the accident and checked the road, there were no skid marks.
Neither Grace nor Stephanie were wearing their seat belts. A gardener was working on the property below the road. He heard a loud noise and immediately recognized the sound. He later reported that in 30 years it had happened at least 15 times. He also later claimed to have pulled Stephanie out of the driver’s window, giving the impression that she’d been driving. Seeing the interest he created with those remarks, he continued embellishing his own role in the tragedy through so-called “exclusive interviews” which he sold for a fee to any magazine or newspaper that paid him.
The fact is, he wasn’t the first person on the scene.
And he did not pull Stephanie out of the car.
She got out herself from the passenger side. “I found myself huddled under the space below the glove compartment. I lost consciousness as we fell down. I remember hitting the tree and the next thing I remember is waking up and seeing smoke coming out of the car. I thought the car was going to blow up. I knew I had to get out of there and get my mom out of there and so I bashed down the door with my legs. It wasn’t hard because the door was half gone anyway.”
She said she ran out, saw a lady standing there and started yelling, “Please get help, call the Palace, I’m Princess Stephanie, call my father and get help.”
The woman, who lived at the house, sat her down.
Stephanie was in shock.
The stitches in her scalp from her water skiing accident had opened and she was bleeding badly. She’d also cut her tongue and lost a tooth. And now pain began shooting up through her back.
She kept screaming, “My mother’s in the car, call my father.”
The woman and her husband kept asking who her father was. She told them, “He’s the Prince. I’m Princess Stephanie and he’s the Prince of Monaco.”
It was several minutes before anyone understood her and several minutes more before they believed her.
She said, “I kept pleading with the woman, ‘Call my father at the Palace. Please get help. My mother is in there.’ Everything else is blurred in my mind until the police came.”
Grace had been shoved into the back seat and pinned there by the steering column, which opened a severe gash in her head. She appeared to be conscious but was covered in blood. Stephanie said, “The firemen got Mom out of the car and put her in an ambulance. I waited there for another ambulance.”
The car was severely damaged and someone who examined it closely later that afternoon asserted that the only area not twisted beyond recognition was the space under the glove compartment in front of the passenger seat. Only someone hunched down in front of that seat, where Stephanie was, could have survived.
GqH
When something like this occurs, there are always lingering, unanswerable questions.
For instance, why didn’t Grace let the chauffeur drive?
For example, why was she fated to black out at exactly the wrong spot on that road? If it had happened 100 yards further up the
road, Stephanie might have been able to swing the car into the hill and stop it. If it had happened 100 yards further down the hill, they would have passed that dangerous hairpin turn.
Ironically, a few years later, Grace’s brother Kell would die while jogging of an identical cerebral hemorrhage.
As the accident had occurred in France, Rainier was approached by the French Government who’d immediately ordered an official investigation and asked if, under the circumstances, he’d like that investigation accelerated.
He said no, that everything should be done step by step, by the book. “I wanted them to do whatever they had to do without any interference. All right, the car was taken away from the spot right away. We were criticized for that in the press. But we had to do that otherwise we would have had tourists chipping off bits of it as souvenirs. It was the French gendarmerie who told us to take it to a police garage in Monaco. The local French judge who was in charge of the investigation told his colleagues in Monaco to seal off the garage so that no one could tamper with the car. They did that right away. No one in Monaco had anything to do with the final report or could influence it in any way.”
Rover engineers, expressly flown in from Britain, went over the car to check for mechanical failure. They also investigated the possibility of sabotage. But no mechanical failure was found. The brakes, they wrote in their final report, had been in perfect working order. The French investigation concluded that the accident occurred when Grace blacked out and lost control of the car. In spite of a mountain of evidence that corroborated the findings of the French investigation, the tabloid press and a few hack journalists writing books, continued to fuel the fires of doubt.
But Rainier never had any doubt. “When I got the phone call at Roc Agel that morning, I drove down to the hospital immediately. The doctors didn’t want to say anything in the beginning because they wanted to do a thorough examination. But the press was diagnosing faster than the doctors. Based on the information supplied by that wretched gardener who says he found the car, and supplemented by the gendarmes, rumors spread very quickly. But it took a long time before the doctors knew what the situation was. They’d come out and tell me they’d found a fracture here and a fracture there, then go back inside and look for more. As they went on finding things they’d tell me. I waited a long time before I knew how serious her condition was and I knew before the press did. It’s the press who wouldn’t let the story alone.”
One down-market American supermarket tabloid sent no fewer than 17 reporters. Armed with cash, they paid anyone who’d speak to them. The result was a continual stream of speculation about how the accident happened, who was driving and how the medical teams at the hospital were too slow in their treatment of Grace.
“They did their best to keep the story running,” Rainier said, “and didn’t show much human compassion for the pain that we were suffering. It was dreadful. There was all sorts of speculation about what we should have done to save Grace. I just can’t understand why. Practically everybody at the hospital was mobilized for her. And I don’t know how many times we’ve had to say that Grace would never have allowed Stephanie to drive her down to Monaco, especially on that road as dangerous as it is. Yes, Stephanie did drive the car from the house to the garage at Roc Agel but she never drove that car off the property.”
He stopped to shake his head, then confessed, “When the press makes up a story about the Mafia wanting to kill Grace, though I can’t for a moment see why the Mafia would want to kill her, if there was some interpretation that seemed even only minutely possible, I’d say, all right. But when they keep rehashing the story that Stephanie was driving and they know it’s not true, when they know it’s been proven that she wasn’t driving, it hurts all of us. It’s done a lot of damage and that isn’t fair. Maybe if there had been some sort of mechanical error, I don’t know, but if there had been, Stephanie might have been able to master it better than her mother. But that’s not the point. The point is people don’t know to what extent Stephanie has suffered.”
Psychiatrists have noted that there is a fairly common reaction when someone survives an accident in which someone else is killed. It’s known as the “Why Me?” syndrome. The survivor keeps replaying the accident over and over again, asking, why did I survive and the other person die? In Stephanie’s case the unanswered question was made even more perplexing by those well-meaning people who reminded her what a wonderful woman her mother was and then added, “Too bad she had to die.” It was a subtle way of suggesting, “Those of us who admired your mother would have found it easier to accept your death instead of hers.”
Two other things made the problem especially complex for her. The press, by constantly playing up the possibility that Stephanie was driving, subjected her to enormous stress. She tried to fight back by saying, “How can they think I killed my mother?” But because her voice wasn’t as loud as theirs, no matter how much she continued to protest, they merely rehashed the story, and her stress refused to subside.
Even then, the tabloid press might not have mattered so much if there wasn’t also the guilt that lingered every time she thought about grabbing the handbrake, every time she told herself that she’d tried to save her mother, and every time she remembered that she could not stop the car.
It’s clear that, had this been anyone else besides a Grimaldi, a Windsor, or maybe a Kennedy, what happened that day in September 1982 might be accepted as an understandable explanation for the way Stephanie behaved in the years following. But lurid stories linked to Stephanie Grimaldi—true or false—sell newspapers and magazines. In the end, from her point of view and from her father’s, the treatment Stephanie received in the media since the accident was, in some ways, almost as tragic as the accident itself.
GqH
Nearly 100 million people around the world watched Grace’s funeral on television. But at the time, neither Rainier nor Caroline nor Albert in the church, nor Stephanie in the hospital, knew just how widely the world was sharing their loss. Any solace that might have come from the outside escaped them that day.
And like that famous scene so long ago when a three-year-old boy watched as the caisson rolled by bearing the casket of his President father, and he saluted—the scene so indelibly etched in the memory of that morning in Monaco is of Rainier, in his uniform, shattered with grief and of his oldest daughter, ashen and veiled in black, reaching out to touch him.
Chapter 30
Moving On
Burdened, and greatly troubled by the false rumor that she’d been driving the car, and haunted by that accident, Stephanie’s otherwise chaotic love life might be easily understood and otherwise accepted.
That is, if she was anyone besides herself.
Instead, because her face sold magazines, virulent stories of romances with unsuitable men—including one who had a criminal record—were followed by tales of her father disowning and disinheriting her.
But even if Rainier had, at times, been displeased with his daughter’s antics, she was still his daughter and he was still her father.
And even if there were times when he was angry at her, he said without any hesitation, “No matter what, the most important thing is to keep the door open.”
Rainier’s worries were naturally shared by Albert and Caroline. And both of them were willing to admit that, to some extent, Stephanie herself had created a lot of the forage that has fed the tabloids.
Albert never hid the fact that, “She is not always very careful, maybe, and leaves herself a little open to that sort of attention.”
After the birth of her third child, she fell in love with Franco Knie, an animal trainer and owner of the circus that bears his family name. Family and friends were dubious, but they accepted that Stephanie has always been impulsive. Anyway, most of them had long ago decided that liking Stephanie means accepting her the way she is.
She lived in Switzerland with Knie for 18 months, left him and promptly fell in love with, and married, circus acrobat Adan
s Lopez Peres. She was 38, he was 28. That marriage lasted eight months.
Although her reputation as a wild child followed her into her 40s, Stephanie never considered herself anything but a normal, healthy young woman with an unreserved outlook on life. But then, she willingly conceded, “It all depends on what you consider normal.”
Fast approaching 50, she is a remarkable, beautiful, and confident mother of three who continues to live her life her way. But, she insists, she has never forgotten that there are people who cannot.
In 2003, Stephanie created a charity called Fight Aids Monaco. Three years after that, she was appointed a joint ambassador to the United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS. Next, she made a brief return to music, assembling a group of singers for a charitable single called “L’Or de Nos Vies” (“The Gold of Our Lives”). And in 2010, she opened La Maison de Vie (The House of Life) in Carpentras, France, which offers material aid to people with HIV/AIDS.
GqH
When Albert and his father felt enough time had passed—when they decided that it would not be trespassing on Grace’s memory—Albert moved into his mother’s office, two floors above Rainier’s in the Palace tower.
He shifted Grace’s desk around to the far wall, facing the windows and changed the colors from greens and yellows to Japanese bamboo.
Grace’s favorite painting—that New York scene—was rehung in his secretary’s office. In its place, he put up his own favorites, including a huge color photograph of himself with his bobsled before a race at the Winter Olympics in Calgary.
GqH
Caroline, in the meantime, immediately stepped into the role of Monaco’s First Lady.
She’d always been very daughterly, Rainier said, and now spent a considerable amount of time caring for him.
But she still had her own life to lead, and that wasn’t always easy.
Grace of Monaco Page 27
