Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (43 page)

In the middle of January 1957, Grace’s gynecologist, Dr. Emile Hervet, a specialist from Paris, told her he thought that the baby would be arriving earlier than the scheduled February delivery date. Grace telephoned Philadelphia, so Ma Kelly was waiting outside the library soon after dawn on the morning of January 23, with Prince Pierre, Tiny, and a chain-smoking Prince Rainier.

The mother-to-be was worried. “I still can’t get used to being a wife,” she had written to Prudy a few days earlier, “let alone a mother.” But Grace had done her homework as usual. After reading the latest childbirth and child-rearing manuals, she had decided that the infant would be breast-fed, and would also come into the world as naturally as possible, without the benefit of anaesthetic. She went into labor at three o’clock in the morning, and at 9:27 a.m. she gave birth to a healthy, eight-pound, eleven-ounce baby girl—just nine months and four days after the day she had married. The doctors handed Grace her child, and she wept.

Down in the harbor a cannon fired twenty-one blasts, and the bells of the principality’s fourteen churches and chapels jangled out in merry disorder. Onassis’s huge yacht, the
Christina,
led a chorus of ship’s horns and sirens. A national holiday was declared. Monaco’s solitary prisoner was released from jail. The new baby was given the names Caroline Louise Marguerite—and 4,000 miles away in Philadelphia Jack Kelly was asked how he felt.

“Oh, shucks,” he replied. “I’d been hoping for a boy.”

One year and two months later, on March 14, 1958, he was granted his wish—and the cannon in the harbor sounded 101 times, suggesting that Monaco had probably felt much the same, but had been rather more considerate toward the feelings of a first-time mother. Less than two years after her wedding day, Grace had most efficiently safeguarded the succession of her adopted family and country. His voice quavering with emotion, Rainier announced that his son and heir would be christened Albert Alexandre Louis Pierre.

The family setting that Grace and Rainier created to relax with their new baby son and daughter was Roc Agel, an isolated, sixty-acre estate in the hills above Monaco, which they purchased soon after their wedding. Rainier’s romantic, dawn escape with his bride-to-be up into the mists around La Turbie had been the private highlight of a hectic and overloaded time, and now Roc Agel played the same role in their family life. “Roc Agel is the place,” said Grace, “where we close the door on the world.”

Perched at 2,300 feet above sea level, Roc Agel was an old Provencal
mas
—part farmhouse, part fortress. It had thick stone walls, huge beams, and a heavy tiled roof. Even when restored by Grace and Rainier, it had a tumbledown quality about it. Literally up in the clouds at many times of the year, the place could not be overlooked from any point, and its new princely owners left most of its scrubby, fragrant terrain of herbs and bushes to run wild. A mixture of pets and farm animals—goats, rabbits, pigs, chickens, and cows—were free to roam or be played with as they wished, and they might find themselves joined at the weekend by an animal or two from Rainier’s zoo.

Cool, green, and disorganized, Roc Agel was the very opposite of the manicured, dusty grind of Monaco in high summer, and it became home to Grace in a way that the palace on the rock never did. This was where she could barbecue her beloved hamburgers and put on the faded shirts and jeans she had told Rupert Allan that she
knew
she would be wearing in the south of France. Rainier was also at his best here, shaking off his moods and Ruritanian grandeur in the cast iron and metal workshop where he donned welder’s mask and gloves. He had a big-band drum kit which he would beat to death, creating his own accompaniments to his favorite records from the swing era.

Sleepover guests were not encouraged. Rainier did not like strange faces at breakfast. Visitors were lodged down in the palace or at one of the hotels in town, and were ferried up the mountain for a rare and privileged peek. George Stacey had decorated the main living area of the farmhouse with a sombre black chintz that was a curious echo of the dark, cabbage rose dress that Grace had been wearing when she first met Rainier, and specially favored friends were allowed into Grace’s personal bathroom. Here, at the very private heart of her very private place, the princess had decorated the walls with the mementoes of a life that had come, in only a short space of time, to seem remarkably remote—the hard-won career of a film star in Hollywood.

Early in 1960, Grace got word from Henry Avenue that her father was feeling sick. At the age of seventy, Jack Kelly’s robust good health had suddenly deserted him, and in April he went into hospital for exploratory surgery. The doctors carried out a second operation at the end of May, but found there was nothing they could do for him except to sew him back up. Jack Kelly had cancer of the stomach.

Grace flew immediately to Philadelphia. Her father was lying in a private room that Ma Kelly had arranged for him at the hospital of Women’s Med, and the nurse who showed Grace to the room was struck by the anxiety that made the princess’s features almost unrecognizable—until the door was opened. Then the actress paused, drew a deep breath, straightened up her body, and spread a smile across her face. Daddy was in need of cheering up.

Jack Kelly died on June 20, 1960. “My wife and children have . . . given me much happiness and a pardonable pride,” he declared in his will, a rambling twelve-page document that he had composed in his own, inimitable, grandstanding style—short on financial details and definitely long on advice: “In this document I can only give you things, but if I had the choice to give you worldly goods or character, I would give you character. . . . With character you will get worldly goods, because character is loyalty, honesty, ability, sportsmanship—and, I hope, a sense of humor.” [Having already distributed most of his shares in Kelly for Brickwork among his children, Jack Kelly showed an estate of $1,193,062.99 (just over $5 million in 1990s values). An enterprising small publisher in Philadelphia reprinted the will and sold it at $7.00 a copy.]

It was classic Jack Kelly, the proclamation of tough and heroic principles that he had dared to try to live up to, and if, in life, his imperfections had sometimes inflicted pain and had caused confusion in his family, it was only right, in death, that his achievements should be granted the honor they deserved. John Brendan Kelly had pulled pretty close to his dream. His energies and paradoxes were the mixture that had made Grace what she was, and it was not surprising that she took her father’s loss very hard.

Soon after she got back to Monaco from the funeral, Grace was sitting one evening beside Rainier on the little balcony that overlooked the palace courtyard. She was listening to a Chopin concert, and as the music rolled over her, she was suddenly overcome with such emotion that she had to get up in tears and leave her seat. It was a most un-Grace-like display of public distress, and people could only conclude that she was seeing herself suddenly in that same courtyard four years earlier, on her wedding day, coming down the great marble staircase, steadying herself on her father’s solid and brawny arm.

Now Coach was gone. Grace Kelly, Princess Grace of Monaco, had graduated by any measure. In November 1959, she had reached the age of thirty. She had a husband, two children, her own kingdom. She would have to row the rest of the course out on her own.

21

PUBLIC RELATIONS

T
he arrival of Grace Kelly had a dramatic impact upon the financial fortunes of Monaco. As Grace had been able to boast to Hedda Hopper on her trip back to America in the autumn of 1956, hotel bookings and tourist revenues in the principality increased spectacularly in the months that followed her wedding. In the early fifties Monaco’s economy had been so depressed that the employees of the
Société des Bains de Mer
had one month’s pay deducted from their annual salary. By the end of the decade that situation was quite reversed.

This reflected, in part, the growing prosperity and mobility of Europe and the postwar world. The age of mass tourism was just beginning. But the attraction that gave Monaco its special aura after April 1956 was not the casino and the SBM, the Oceanographic Museum, or the historic traditions of the House of Grimaldi. It was the fairy-tale presence of Princess Grace.

This posed a dilemma which haunts the Grimaldi family to this day. Publicity was their lifeblood, but it was the death of them as well. The yellow color scheme of the nursery, the childbirths without anesthetic, the breast-feeding of the babies—these were the humanizing details that helped make Monaco a destination with an identity of its own. But they were also surrenders of privacy that threatened to deny the human beings who were living the fairy tale the basic rights and decencies of an ordinary human life.

Prince Rainier had never been especially fond of the press, and the coverage of his engagement and wedding pushed his feelings to the point of loathing. “I don’t HATE, I despise!!” he wrote to Rupert Allan in April 1957, the first anniversary of his wedding. “The mighty press can stretch like an enormous octopus and inject its poison through its stinging suction.”

Rainier was writing from Switzerland, where he and Grace had taken the three-month-old Caroline for their first family holiday. The
Daily Sketch,
a London tabloid, had reported a kidnapping attempt against the baby, and other papers had embellished the story. “The kidnapping was a pure invention,” wrote Rainier in fury. “It is criminal, as it could give someone the idea.”

Grace and Rainier had thought long and hard about the problems of bringing up their children in the spotlight. “I do not want that my daughter has her childhood encumbered and poisoned by an excess of journalistic publicity. . .” the prince wrote to Allan in January 1958. “It MUST be dosed and carefully timed so not to become saturated . . . I think we must choose a number-one magazine and give it to them and not have more than two stories a year on her.”

This was Rainier’s and Grace’s fatal fallacy. Both felt quite confident—Rainier, as a prince, Grace as someone who had played the Hollywood game and had emerged triumphant—that they could control their publicity and exploit it to their own advantage. The rulers of Europe’s comparable royal ministates, the principality of Liechtenstein and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, had a horror of personal publicity. Their pictures were never in the papers, and they were proud to be considered out of date. But even as the most precious experiences of his life were being sullied, cheapened, and distorted by the mass media, the Prince of Monaco cherished the illusion that he could turn it all to his own advantage.

“Object,” ran a document that Rainier sent Rupert Allan under the tide
Idea for the Organization of Press Relations Service to TSH
[Their Serene Highnesses]
the Prince and Princess of Monaco,
“the good-taste publicity that does not seem promoted or sponsored. The dignified and true stories on TSH and the principality. Protection against the bad, ill-meaning press articles, and screening of the press demands, with elimination of a quantity of them, and a proper scheduling and program of those accepted.”

The memo was unsigned, but it could have been drawn up by the sorcerer’s apprentice. Rainier and Grace had not appreciated—and, to be fair, no one else in the 1950s seems to have considered—that controlled doses of personal publicity might not, in fact, quieten public curiosity about the lives of the rich and famous, but could actually have the opposite effect. The press coverage of the engagement and marriage of Rainier and Grace, followed by the regular, glossy magazine peekings into their family life that the couple themselves organized over the next twenty years, blazed the trail that led from the nudges and winks of Walter Winchell to the tabloid exposes
of Hard Copy.
The access might be controlled, but people came to take its relative intimacy for granted. They wanted to know still more. The world’s heady dream life with Princess Grace and her growing family through the 1960s and 1970s was to provide a major stimulus to the modern, mass-market addiction to celebrity.

Rupert Allan was the man to whom both Grace and Rainier looked to supervise “the good-taste publicity,” and at first Allan worked through the American publicist, Arthur Jacobs, and the Los Angeles firm of Rogers, Cowan & Brenner, who represented some of Hollywood’s major stars and producers. As their name suggested, Rogers, Cowan & Brenner were something like a Wall Street law firm, charging high fees and operating corporately, and Rainier did not like it. He objected to the expenses that seemed to double their fees, and he took exception to the representative they assigned to take care of him and Grace on a visit to London soon after the start of her second pregnancy. “He could not have been more useless and wrong in every sense of the word,” he complained to Allan. “I was appalled at the idea that your company was represented by such a complete, cheap ‘zero.’”