Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (40 page)
Mamou was an unpleasant reminder that life for real princesses seldom imitates the fairy tales, and the other reminder lay in the jostling multitude of press reporters and photographers who had crowded into Monaco for the wedding week. Prying, rumbustious, and more disrespectful with every passing day that did not yield them a decent story, the world’s press settled on the principality like the foraging party of some invading army. Driving with Grace and the Kellys one afternoon, Rainier slowed and stopped when he saw a prostrate body lying across the road. When he got out to help, he found himself ambushed by a crowd of photographers, while the body jumped up to take some photos of his own. It was all-out war. Whenever Howell Conant saw paparazzi sneaking photographs from unauthorized vantage points, he would try to restage the picture from the same angle, then release his own version in an attempt to spoil the scoop.
Conant did this with Rainier’s blessing, for the prince had become obsessed with controlling the privacy of his wedding. In America, Rainier had had to put up with treatment that he considered disrespectful, and he saw no reason to stand for it where he was master in his realm. A local school had been set aside and converted into a makeshift press center, but its inexperienced Monégasque director took his tone from the prince, disdaining personal contact with his visitors and communicating through booming loudspeaker announcements—in French. As the pressure intensified, the harassed young man retreated into his office completely, refusing to speak to anyone.
It made for impossible confusions and resentment. Journalists spent a lot of their time just trying to find out the scheduled times of quite uncontroversial public events—and matters came to a head on the night of Sunday, April 15, four days before the wedding. Rainier and Grace had been attending a white-tie reception at the Winter Sporting Club beside the Hôtel de Paris, and hundreds of photographers waited patiently outside for nearly five hours in the rain. When the couple emerged, however, they dashed straight for their car, shielded by umbrellas, telling their chauffeur to drive off without delay. The outcry was immediate. The press surged around the car, angry and booing, fighting with the police and shaking their fists. “Go home, Gracie!” someone was heard to say. Two reporters were arrested.
A Monégasque policeman broke one French reporter’s camera, and the Frenchman bit him angrily in return.
At one-thirty the following afternoon, Jay Kanter was enjoying a quiet lunch with his wife at the Hôtel de Paris when the summons came. Rainier had relented. He invited Grace’s agent over to the palace to discuss a new press strategy. Morgan Hudgins, the MGM man, would supervise a daily press briefing—in English and French. There would be more written communiqués in both languages, and it was agreed that the prince and his bride-to-be would linger at least one prearranged point in their program every day to allow fresh photographs to be taken without loss of dignity.
That night Grace’s whole experience of the wedding week shifted to an easier gear. The evening was scheduled as a sit-down palace dinner for the bride and groom and their bridesmaids, but the couple decided to change the occasion into a more informal gathering. A dozen of Grace’s old friends were added to the guest list, and dinner was a help-yourself buffet supper off a long refectory table. There was a huge fire of crackling logs in an open stone fireplace. People ate off their laps, and Grace led off giggling parties of her friends to show them her wedding gifts and some of the sights of the palace.
Rainier was in a particularly relaxed mood, sharing in the rounds of reminiscence and joke-telling—sometimes at his own expense. “Isn’t it amazing how fluently Grace speaks French?” he described himself saying to Father Tucker. “My Lord Prince,” the priest had replied, “I knew love was blind, but I didn’t know that it was deaf as well.”
The dinner was due to end before midnight. Both Grace and Rainier had a busy schedule the following day. But twelve o’clock came and went without either of them showing the slightest impulse to break up the party. They were enjoying themselves too much, and it was nearly dawn before the fun and games were over.
The host and hostess led their guests out into the palace courtyard and put them in their cars, but they still had no wish for the evening to end. The sky was just starting to lighten. The harbor was silent. The streets were bare and deserted. On several occasions in the chaos and stress of the previous days, Grace had remarked to Rainier how nice it would be to escape from everything, to run away and get married, just the two of them, in some remote mountain chapel. Now her prince did the best for her that he could. Without the benefit of escorts or bodyguards, Prince Rainier drove his fiancée out and down from the palace, then headed the nose of his Mercedes sports car out of Monaco and up into the hills.
They drove up into the picturesque French villages of Èze and La Turbie, getting out of the car to wander between the sleeping houses, hand in hand, climbing the steep cobbled alleyways to find a spot where they could rest, then racing each other back down the hill again. They watched the sun come up over the green-blue waters of the Mediterranean.
By eight-thirty they were driving back down the winding La Turbie road into Monaco again, ready for another hard day of social duties on the basis of absolutely zero sleep. Grace would shudder in later years at the memory of her wedding week. “It was a nightmare, really, the whole thing,” she recalled, confessing to her friends that it was nearly a year before she and Rainier could look at their wedding photographs with any pleasure. But, up in the hills around La Turbie, the pair of them had successfully demonstrated, if ever there had been any doubt, that they were very much in love, and that there were two real people at the heart of the often undignified circus going on down below.
On the morning of Wednesday, April 18, 1956, in the throne room of the palace of Monaco, Grace Patricia Kelly went through the first of her three wedding ceremonies, the civil ceremony required by Monégasque law. A repetition of the ritual was scheduled immediately afterward, as required by the film cameras of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The final and conclusive religious marriage in the cathedral would not take place until the following day.
Grace looked tired. Her night without sleep and the unremitting pace of her public engagements showed in the black rings beneath her eyes. But she exuded a strange sense of calm and strength. She was a woman on the cusp. She was moving into her destiny, the thing she had wanted and worked for all her life without knowing what it was, and nothing was going to stand in her way. The Count d’Allières, Rainier’s chamberlain and chief organizer of the wedding formalities, had collapsed that morning and was in hospital, lying in an oxygen tent. The young director of the press center was still barricading himself from the press, and the bridesmaids were atwitter over the myriad of last-minute emergencies. But Grace was entering her own stratosphere. If she doubted her love for her prince or the decision she had made, she did not show it. She was on track, and there was absolutely nothing that could deflect her now.
The civil wedding and its filming was followed by an immense garden party in the grounds of the palace for the adult citizens of Monaco. They crowded in excitedly, all three thousand of them in their best suits and hats, raising their glasses to toast the health of their prince and princess, and consuming three thousand slices of specially baked wedding cake. Their tribute to the happy couple had been the most successful of the public evenings of the pre-wedding week, a series of folkloric singing and dancing displays on stages set up in the square outside the palace, culminating in an hour of an art form which Monaco considered particularly its own—a spectacular fireworks display. Ex-King Farouk happened to be coming out of the Hôtel de Paris at the moment that the explosions started, and he turned around and headed straight back into the safety of the lobby.
The wedding day dawned clear and bright. It was Thursday, April 19, 1956, and Grace was up early to work on her hair with Virginia Darcy. Outside, the cannon were booming in the harbor. The bridesmaids arrived at eight-thirty on the dot, and Grace had a special little joke or comment for each. It was typical of her to be thinking of her friends, trying to put them at ease. But it also struck Judy Kanter that the bride was drawing on her techniques as an actress to keep herself relaxed before she had to go on stage.
All the guests had been requested to be in their seats in the cathedral by nine-thirty a.m., and to avoid congestion, no private cars were allowed up onto the rock. Even the grandest of guests found themselves required to step out of their limousines down by the harbor and travel up the hill to the cathedral in shuttle buses—which brought Mrs. Barney Balaban, wife of the founder of Paramount Pictures (and mother of Judy Kanter), to a dead halt. She absolutely refused to countenance such an undignified method of transportation, until the waiting bus was pointed out to her. In the front seat sat the Duchess of Westminster, with the seats behind her occupied by rows of equally smart ladies and penguin-suited gentlemen.
The guests made up a striking phalanx as they took their seats in the cathedral—Aristotle Onassis, Randolph Churchill, Ava Gardner, the oriental potentates. Perusing one another intently with their assorted tans and face-lifts, they perfectly illustrated Somerset Maugham’s dictum about sunny places and shady people— and the old lizard himself was to be found seated near the front of the congregation, complaining of cold in his feet and gazing balefully at the television cameras. The wedding was being broadcast live to over thirty million viewers in nine European countries, the biggest and most complicated television hookup in history, at that date.
As the bridesmaids came down the aisle, Father Tucker directed them to their seats. It was his job to supervise this little posse of non-Catholic girls, and throughout the service he directed them to “Rise,” “Kneel,” or “Sit” in a loud stage whisper. The service was conducted by Monseigneur Gilles Barthe, the Bishop of Monaco, with the assistance of Father John Cartin, the Kelly’s parish priest from St. Bridget’s.
Rainier had designed his own uniform for the occasion, a chocolate soldier mishmash of gold leaf, epaulets, ostrich feathers, and sky-blue trousers, which claimed to take its inspiration from the costume of Napoleon’s marshals. Spattered with medals and orders, it would have looked overblown in a comic opera, but it verged on the tasteless in the ruler of a less-than-independent country that had not fought a battle in centuries and had sheltered itself behind others in the bloodshed of two world wars.
Hollywood, fortunately, had shown more discrimination in the design of the bride’s elaborate but simple-looking costume— twenty-five yards of silk, twenty-five yards of silk taffeta, ninety-eight yards of silk tulle, and over three hundred yards of Valenciennes lace. Grace looked superb in this dress created for her by Helen Rose—sweeping, elegant, and swanlike. With her hair pulled straight back beneath a little heart-shaped Juliet cap, there was something Elizabethan about her. Grace had lost ten pounds in the seven days since her arrival in Monaco, and it made her waist even more slender. Within the misting of bustles and puffs could be traced the silhouette of a very beautiful woman.
“Rainier Louis Henri Maxence Bertrand,” asked the bishop, “will you take Grace Patricia here present for your lawful wife, according to the rite of our Holy Mother the Church?”
“Yes, Monseigneur,” replied the prince.
“Grace Patricia, will you take Rainier Louis Henri Maxence Bertrand here present for your lawful husband, according to the rite of our Holy Mother the Church?”
Grace did not hesitate. “Yes, Monseigneur,” she replied.
It was a moment whose solemnity was not lessened by the whirring of the cameras and the glare of the television lights. It was personal. It was universal. A frisson ran through the entire congregation. The bishop delivered a short address in which, among several items of advice, he reminded the prince to temper his authority with tenderness, while reminding Grace that earthly beauty is but fleeting. “He doesn’t know Gracie very well,” remarked one of the bridesmaids afterward, “if he thinks he has to say that.”
The doors of the cathedral were pushed open, and the Mediterranean sunshine streamed inside. As Maree Frisby and her friends walked down the aisle behind Grace toward the light, they felt an extraordinary sense of closeness to their old friend—a feeling of pride and shared achievement. But they knew at the same time that she was no longer theirs. She was moving into the dimension represented by the cheering crowds outside.
The joy and applause enveloped them as they drove slowly down the road that wound from the rock to the harbor below. There had been something mystical and trancelike about Grace all day. The feeling was almost tangible, and it reached its culmination as the procession drew to a halt outside a little chapel in the corner of the port. It was the church of St. Devota, the patron saint of Monaco, a martyr who had preached the gospel in Corsica back in Roman days, and whose body had been borne back to Monaco in a storm—miraculously guided, it was said, by a dove. Monaco’s fishermen did homage to Devota on her feast day every January, burning a boat outside her chapel in a dark, almost pagan ritual, and Grace had come to pay homage of her own. All through the wedding ceremony she had carried a small white bible in her hand, with a spray of lilies of the valley. Now she knelt in front of this ancient shrine and laid her bridal bouquet upon its altar, her lips moving almost imperceptibly in prayer. Grace was consecrating herself—offering herself. She was Sister Inez on the floor of the chapel at Ravenhill.