Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (51 page)

This had become Rainier’s way as the couple grew older. Once proud of his wife’s independent achievements, the prince seemed in later years to grow jealous of a fame and charm he could not match.
He
was Monaco. She was the import. It was a syndrome repeated a decade and a half later in the marriage of Britain’s Prince and Princess of Wales. Rainier was openly slighting to Grace in company. Though she was invariably supportive of him, he would make jokes about her weakness for people-pleasing and her “creamy smile.” His continuing fits of snoozing at the social events that she arranged showed his essential contempt for the things that were important to her. Through laziness and a self-absorption that came largely from the prince’s side, partnership had soured into a bizarre form of rivalry, with Monaco and Paris becoming the sites of the respective camps.

The deterioration hurt Grace badly at an already difficult time of her life. “She operated on adulation,” says Gwen Robyns today. “It was her fuel. She had got used to it in Hollywood, and she was still getting it from the outside world. In terms of the public, she was more beloved and admired than she had ever been. But that was her sadness. She was not getting it where she really wanted—at home.”

It was not just Rainier who failed to cherish Grace. Albert was a devoted son—kind and shy, and totally obedient to his mother. But his sisters were considerably less amenable, as Gwen Robyns discovered when she went to Paris to stay for a few days in the Square de l’Avenue Foch.

“Why have you come here, and when are you going home?” inquired the thirteen-year-old Stephanie, deputed to greet the visitor in the absence of her mother. “I
hate
my mother’s friends.”

Grace had prepared a lunch for her visitor, featuring Grace’s favorite blood sausage. Stephanie made a face. “I want a hamburger,” she pouted. “I want a hamburger now.” The teenager had been at the table for some time, sitting in front of several perfectly palatable alternatives to the dreaded blood sausage, but Grace appeared to treat her daughter’s tantrum as an absolute command. She called downstairs to the chauffeur, who was in the middle of his own lunch, and instructed him to take Stephanie to McDonald’s.

“Why are you doing this?” asked Gwen Robyns in horror. “You are ruining this girl!”

“Oh, darling,” said Grace, puckering up with a little girl face of her own. “She’s my baby doll. She’s my baby.”

Grace had become everybody’s doormat. Her welcoming of the pain of love had been exploited by those who were closest to her. Her submissiveness in public matters—not questioning, and not thinking, lest she be tempted to question—was a dreadful metaphor for the deadness of her personal life. The haughty facade of the frosty, cold-shoulder princess concealed a case of low to almost invisible self-esteem. Talking to Grace one day in these years, the Countess Donina Cicogna told her the story of a man whom she had loved passionately, but who, she had discovered, was flagrantly unfaithful to her.

“But you
did
have love,” said Grace eagerly, almost desperately. “It’s the love you had that matters, isn’t it, not the pain?”

Grace was the ultimate romantic. Let the north wind come. Let it shrivel the garden. She had dreamed the fantasy, and she was determined to live it through.

“You’ve got to make some compromises, you know,” she said, talking to Judy Kanter one day. “No marriage works without them. . . . I love Rainier, so I do my best to make things work.”

The two old friends were discussing the pattern of Judy’s divorces, and those of their other friends. Of the six lighthearted girls who had traveled to Monaco to be Grace’s bridesmaids in April 1956 not a single one was now in the same marriage. All six had been through separation or divorce. “Some of us sign on for a run-of-the-play contract—no options,” said Grace smiling wryly. “I do not have the luxury you have.” She had rushed into a love match and found herself confined within a marriage of convenience.

Donald Spoto met Grace twice in these years when he was preparing his book,
The Art of Alfred Hitchcock.
Grace gave him a long interview in Paris during the autumn of 1975, then met him the following summer in Monaco to discuss her writing a short foreword to the book. Caroline was with her on both occasions— “rather more princessly than her mother,” remembers Spoto. “She [Caroline] told me she had been taking several film courses at the Sorbonne, and rattled off the names of her professors. ‘Would
they
have heard of you?’ she asked.”

Spoto was entranced with Grace. She was warm and lively and enthusiastic, talking for three hours when their meeting had only been scheduled to last twenty minutes, then inviting the author to stay for dinner so that she could bring back still more memories of this period that had clearly been a high spot in her life.

“All these actors and actresses today,” she said, talking about
To Catch a Thief
with
pride, “they look so ugly and bedraggled—and then you look at Cary and me. . . . Excuse me, but you know what I mean.”

She missed the creativity of the film business, she told Spoto, talking about Hitchcock with a special fondness. She laughed about the director’s raunchy sense of humor, and remembered how he would push her to the limit to extract the performance that he really wanted.

“She was clearly very pleased to be asked about all this and to be taken seriously in her avocation,” remembers Spoto. “But it seemed to me that there was something sad about it, this woman of forty-something who was talking so much about the past.” Spoto had the impression that Grace was a person in whose current life something was very much missing—that she was having to put a good face on many unhappy things.

“Thank you,” said Grace, when Micheline Swift complimented her on her new home in Paris. “I can’t live with him anymore. It’s our way of getting separated.”

25

ANGRY JAWS

I
n the early 1990s, almost a decade after the death of his old friend the film star and princess, Rupert Allan was talking to Donald Spoto about Grace’s final years, and the disillusionment that she came to feel with her marriage. Spoto recalled his own meetings with the princess in Paris and Monaco in 1975 and 1976, and the sad direction that her middle age seemed to take. It was clear that life with Prince Charming had turned out to be no different from life with many another mortal man. When did the marriage lose its magic? wondered Spoto. It must have been tragic for a woman who believed so fervently in romance to experience the withering and dying of romance in her own life.

Allan looked hard at Spoto. Afflicted by heart problems, the seventy-nine-year-old publicist knew that he did not have long to live.

“I have to tell you,” he said, “that she was not entirely lonely. There was someone rather important to her—someone in Paris.”

The someone was Robert Dornhelm, a young film director whom Grace first met in 1976. Grace was then forty-six, Dornhelm just thirty, intense and hungry-looking, with a handsome shock of strong, wavy hair. Romanian by birth and Austrian by nationality, Dornhelm spoke with an attractively fractured English accent and had a knack of saying provocative things. Dashing and slightly mysterious, he had a touch of Lord Byron about him.

The couple met when Dornhelm came to film the introduction Grace had agreed to deliver to
The Children of Theatre Street,
a documentary on Leningrad’s Vaganova Institute, formerly the Russian Imperial Ballet school, which produced such stars as Nureyev, Baryshnikov, and Makarova. Grace had agreed to narrate the film as part of her campaign to heighten Monaco’s cultural profile—the opening sequence of the documentary found her on the stage of the Monte Carlo Opera talking about Diaghilev—but the princess rapidly became involved in the project for its own sake, and even more for the sake of its handsome young director.

Robert Dornhelm was no Hitchcock, but he brought passion and commitment to his filmmaking.
The Children of Theatre Street
was a well-made and elegant film that earned a nomination for Best Documentary Feature in 1977. According to Academy insiders, it came within a whisker of winning the Oscar. Something in Grace was rekindled by her involvement, for the first time in twenty years, in the excitement of filmmaking. “She was a genuinely creative person,” says Rita Gam, “and her creativity had been stopped right at the gate—just when she was really beginning to fulfill herself as an actress. I think she felt an emptiness all those years from her creative side not being realized.”

Grace and Dornhelm talked together about other projects they might pursue. In the same tradition as
Theatre Street,
they explored the idea of a film about child prodigies. The Year of the Child was coming up, and Grace thought she might be able to get sponsorship from UNESCO. They optioned Gore Vidal’s novel
A Search for the King,
in hopes of turning it into a rock musical. On a personal level, Grace wanted to make a film about the garden club that she had started in Monaco, while Dornhelm had long nursed the dream of making a movie about Raoul Wallenberg, the Swede who risked his life saving Jews from the Nazis and who vanished mysteriously in Russia at the end of World War II.

From their very different platforms, Grace and Dornhelm had ambitions to realize and ways in which each could help the other. Grace proposed herself as the casting director for the Wallenberg project, and she had her lawyer draw up a contract. From her point of view, the job provided a route by which she might ease herself back into performance—casting directors read with the actors that they are auditioning—while Dornhelm, for his part, knew that he would have no trouble getting serious actors to come and read with the former Grace Kelly.

Dornhelm’s dress code favored open shirts and flared blue jeans. On occasions he even sported a belt with a hammer and sickle motif, and this got him into trouble one day in Monte Carlo when he was sunning himself on the lawns outside the casino. Assuming that the long-haired young foreigner was the sort of drifter whom it was principality policy to kick back sharply into France, a policeman asked for his papers, and took him down to headquarters when he refused to hand them over or give his name. A phone call to Grace’s private office eventually got the filmmaker released, and he angrily demanded that the agent in question should be disciplined.

“Certainly not,” the princess replied, delighted. “We’re going to give him a medal.”

Dornhelm never minced his words with Grace. “All that time and energy that you devote to arranging dead, withered flowers,” he said. “Isn’t that the metaphor of your life?”

Far from freezing to such a comment—which trod the same dangerous ground as Rainier’s auctioning of petals in the restaurant—Grace actually listened to Dornhelm and took note of what he said. The young man’s rebelliousness seemed to awaken her own long-dormant spirit of independence. When the French minister of culture organized a banquet to celebrate the French premier of
Theatre Street
at the Paris Opera, he invited the Russian ambassador and numerous other dignitaries, but not Dornhelm, the director of the film, or Oleg Briansky, the artistic director. Grace politely asked the ministry if the pair could be included, and was told there was simply no room.

“Fine,” said Grace, and she boycotted the banquet. She attended the gala reception that followed the screening, but once she had shaken the requisite number of hands, she went on with Dornhelm and Briansky—along with Rainier and the three children—to a brasserie, where the party waited half an hour for a table.

“She was always a brave person,” says Dornhelm. “Very loyal to her friends—that was one of her great qualities.”

One day the following summer, Gwen Robyns got a call in Oxfordshire from Monaco. “Do you think Robert could come and stay with you for the weekend?” Grace asked. “He’s got to be in England for a few days on a film project.”

Dornhelm had scarcely arrived when the telephone rang. It was Grace wanting to speak to him. Gwen Robyns and her Danish husband, Paul von Stemann, held up lunch while the phone conversation went on—and on, and on. When they did finally sit down with their guest, they were interrupted after little more than twenty minutes by another phone call from Monaco, which resulted in a conversation of equal length.

“I can twist her round my finger,” boasted Dornhelm as he came back to the table again.

By the end of a weekend in which their houseguest seemed to spend considerably more time talking long distance to Monaco than he did to his hosts, Gwen Robyns and Paul von Stemann could not help suspecting that Grace and the young director had more than just film projects to discuss. A few months later Gwen’s suspicions were confirmed. Driving in the hills above Monaco with Grace and Dornhelm, the author was surprised by Grace’s sudden concern about her walking ability.

“Gwen, darling, haven’t you got a bad knee?” she asked. “Why don’t you sit here with Paul [Grace’s chauffeur], while Robert and I go off for a walk?”

Somewhat unwillingly, Gwen Robyns agreed to sit out the excursion, consoling herself by getting happily drunk with the chauffeur on a succession of brandies and water.

“Where on earth have you been, Grace?” Gwen demanded truculently when the couple finally came back down from the hills, flushed and tousled.