Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (54 page)

It was a slip-sliding, learn-as-you-go, and by no means obvious process. There was no single dramatically visible break or revelation, and Grace could still revert when frightened or lazy to her old snobberies and stiffness. But shuffling sideways on occasions and picking her way around old pain, she was finally starting, as Rita Gam put it, “to grow back into herself.”

Recapturing the joy of performance was one of the most critical elements of her rebirth, and it started, by coincidence, in the same year that Grace met up with Robert Dornhelm. In 1976 the Edinburgh Festival was being organized with themes around the American Bicentennial, and John Carroll, the organizer of the festival’s main poetry recital, was looking for an American who had the right ear and speaking voice. “How about Princess Grace of Monaco?” suggested Carroll’s old friend Gwen Robyns.

“This is what you’re looking for,” Gwen told Grace on the phone. “You want an extension of your life, some way to express yourself. You can’t do it in Hollywood, but this might be the answer. John is an honorable man.”

Eccentric, mildly scatterbrained, and totally devoted to poetry, John Carroll was delighted to meet Grace. “I can’t think of anything nicer,” he said, “than going to Paris for lunch with a beautiful princess.” But the director had worked with some of England’s finest actors, from Ralph Richardson to Peggy Ashcroft, and he had no intention of compromising his standards.

“I want you to do something for me,” he said once the ice had been broken. “I want you to read this poem to me.”

The poem was called “Nod.” It was about an old ship, and though Grace read it well, to John Carroll’s ear there was definite room for improvement. The director’s hearing had been damaged since childhood—he had been rejected for war service on account of his deafness—but this handicap had fine-tuned his antennae to the music of verse.

“When you read poetry aloud,” he explained, “your projection is helped very much by the phrases, because it is not just a question of going stanza by stanza. Some stanzas need to be slightly lengthened because of the sense of the poem.”

“She took the criticism and she thought about it,” Carroll later remembered. “She was very intelligent.”

“‘Can I read that again now?’” she asked.

“‘It was good the first time,’” I told her.

“But she wanted to read it again, and the second time it was much better.

“ T am worried about my projection,’ she said.

“So I said, ‘Don’t be worried, because you’ve got a very good speaking voice. It is a soft speaking voice, but that’s got nothing to do with it. It’s a question of the phrasing. When you think of the poem, think about what it
means.
Bring out the meaning in the phrasing, and that will take care of the projection.’”

“I see what you’re getting at,” she said—and Princess Grace of Monaco became a poetry reader. It was only to be expected, perhaps, that her four recitals that September in Edinburgh’s beautiful, two hundred-year-old St. Cecilia’s Hall should prove to be sellouts, but her performance also earned the praise of the festival’s celebrity-wary critics. The consonants rang out clear as ever in Grace’s limpid and surprisingly young-sounding voice, which was offset by the baritone of Richard Kiley, a fellow American, and by the rounded English tones of Richard Pasco of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

“At the beginning she was extremely nervous underneath,” remembers Pasco. “But she learned from each performance. It was wonderful to watch. We somehow fed off one another, like working on the stage. You give and take. She had this gift for lifting up her spirits. It lifted up mine, and I think it lifted up the spirits of the audience as well.”

The highlight of the evening, all agreed, was Grace’s rendering of “Wild Peaches” by Elinor Wylie:

When the world turns completely upside down

You say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore

Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore;

We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town.

You’ll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown.

“I selected the poem,” remembers John Carroll, “but I have to be truthful—I hadn’t realized that Elinor Wylie came from the south until we were doing the rehearsal and Grace said, ‘It’s such a lovely poem, John. I must do this with a Southern accent.’ So she did it, and she was absolutely right. The accent enhanced it beautifully.” Grace’s lilting, Georgia rendering of “Wild Peaches” was chosen by the BBC’s
Pick of the Year
as the finest poetry recording of 1976.

“Well,” said John Carroll. “Now that I’ve launched you, would you like to do some more?”

“Yes, please,” said Grace, and for the next six years she traveled regularly to perform in poetry recitals. Dublin, Vienna, London, Aldeburgh, Stratford-on-Avon, Chichester—Grace did the rounds of Europe’s leading arts festivals, and in 1978 the American International Poetry Forum invited her on a tour of northeastern cities that ended with tumultuous receptions in Princeton and Harvard. With the roses and the curtain calls it was just a little like being an operatic diva, and if she got a good review the next morning, she could feel that she had earned it in her own right. “It seemed to me,” John Carroll put it delicately, “that it came at a moment when it was very much needed.”

Grace met up on her travels with Dornhelm and FitzGerald. She saw old girlfriends, went shopping, was in charge of her own life.

With actors like Pasco, who was regularly teamed with her, she could recapture the collegial feeling of summer stock and work on the set—and then there was the difficult and demanding John Carroll, her deaf Hitchcock of the sonnets.

“The moment that I always waited for,” Carroll remembered in 1993, “was the moment when Grace would walk onto the stage. It would be dark, and I would have the lights come up on her, and as she walked forward the audience always gasped, because she just looked so beautiful—her long dress, her back so straight, her blonde hair tied up above her head. Everywhere, all round the room, you heard this ‘Ahhh.’”

Carroll had brought the legend of the princess to life. “She had such presence,” he remembered. “She always carried herself so well. It was a wonderful moment. . . .”

The most publicized moment in Princess Grace’s poetry reading career came in March 1981, when she delivered a recital in the Goldsmiths’ Hall in London in the presence of Prince Charles, who had just announced his engagement and who brought along his new fiancée. It was the first formal evening appearance of the Lady Diana Spencer, and it was made the more memorable by how the young lady almost spilled out of her low-cut black gown.

“Good news,” Grace reported conspiratorially to Gwen Robyns after a session with Lady Di in the ladies’ room. “She’s got them under control.” At a supper party afterward in Buckingham Palace, Grace also passed on the benefit of her own experience when the princess-to-be confided her unhappiness at the sudden influx of reporters and photographers into her life.

“Don’t worry, dear,” said the Princess of Monaco in her most comforting tones. “It’ll get worse.”

There was nothing prim or prissy about the way Grace read poetry. Many of her readings were about pretty things—honeybees, orchards, and her beloved wildflowers—but her style was tough and taut, reflecting her coaching all those years ago with Sanford Meisner. Grace would drive out hard from the feeling, going with her instincts rather than trying to dress it up with thought or premeditation. It was the very opposite of the caution required of a don’t-offend-anyone princess.

“She read me a Wallace Stevens poem one day,” remembers William Allyn, her old friend and colleague from her days in summer stock. “She was using me as the audience for a recital that she had coming up. The poem was about the perfection of a flower, and, as she read it, I had to turn my head away because it was so moving. There were tears in her eyes and running down her cheeks. There was such truth in the emotion.”

Serious actors came to watch Grace perform, and went away impressed. Poetry reading is the chamber music of the actor’s craft. But Grace found it more difficult to generate her husband’s interest or respect.

“In 1978,” remembers Gwen Robyns, “after Grace had done her tour in America and must have delivered a dozen recitals or more, she remarked rather sadly that Rainier had never once bothered to come and hear her perform. It so happened that she was due to give a reading later that year in London. The Queen Mother would be there. So Rainier came over. Before the end of the reading he had fallen fast asleep.”

At moments like that it could be very consoling to think of an adoring young man with a hammer and sickle belt. As a child, Grace had devised a secret life to cope with an overbearing male authority figure. Now she fell back on the same stratagem. Let Rainier slumber. Grace had developed her own new sources for her self-esteem.

She took on more television work. Father Patrick Peyton, the Catholic Billy Graham, invited Grace to work on his inspirational films, so she went to the Vatican to shoot the links for his programs on Good Friday, the Resurrection, and the power of prayer.

“She had a way of chewing the words,” remembers the director Barry Chattington. “Everything came out so clear. She was an amazing professional. One night we were shooting late, out around eleven o’clock in the main courtyard of St. Peter’s, and she said, ‘When I was young and beautiful, I had it in my contract that I didn’t shoot after five o’clock. Now I am old and fat. What am I doing here with you?’

“I said, ‘You are young and beautiful.’”

“‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘that is the bullshit.’”

What
did the princess say?

“That is the bullshit,” repeats Chattington. “That is what she said. She was just great to work with. I mean, it was funny, lots of jokes and things. She was just a natural, genuine, tell-it-like-it-is human being.”

Grace made her film about her Monaco garden club with Robert Dornhelm.
Rearranged
was a mildly farcical story of mistaken identity based on a script by Jacqueline Monsigny, the French romantic novelist who was a friend in Paris. Directed by Dornhelm, and playing opposite Monsigny’s actor husband, Edward Meeks, Grace performed on screen for the first time in twenty-five years. She played herself, Princess Grace of Monaco, dealing with an absentminded professor who thought he was coming to a scientific conference, but ended up at the princess’s annual flower-arranging competition.

Rearranged
was no
To Catch a Thief,
but Grace dominated the action. She was warm and solid, rather like a friendly schoolteacher, her spirit calm and focused on important things. American TV executives declared that, with a little extra footage, the film could make a solid hour of prime time.

Grace’s most cherished project as she entered her fifties was the creation of her own theater, a small, summer stock-style playhouse overlooking Monaco harbor, just below the Hermitage. For twenty years her energies in the principality had focused on good works and what other people wanted. Now her playhouse by the harbor was something for herself.

“She showed me around just before it opened,” remembers Bill Allyn. “It had been converted from some sort of convention hall, and she had set out to make it the ideal theater. She remembered working in the theater, the lack of comfort in the dressing rooms, and she had got involved in making sure that every detail of
her
theater was different.’’

Dirk Bogarde was one of the distinguished actors invited to the opening in December 1981, as a “godparent” in the French tradition. “It cost a bomb, and sat far too few people,” he remembers, “but it was a showcase of which she was rightly proud. I sat at her table on her left. . . . She was, I remember, far more royal than our own Queen. But she was very easy to talk to. . . . She watched her husband with intensity. When he grew restless, as in that crowd he was bound to be, she murmured to me, ‘Uhhhhu. . . . The Dodo is getting bored.’ And when he showed unmistakable signs of very visual distress, with enormous charm and ease she brought the very long supper to a close.”

Grace’s plan for her theater by the harbor was to create a repertory of productions with actors to whom she felt close—casting, directing, and perhaps one day doing some acting herself. She could mount her own drama festival on the Riviera. “She told us that she wanted us to come down and help her create a company of fine English actors in Monaco,” remembers Richard Pasco.

“Grace was returning to serious public performing,” remembers Rita Gam. “She was very excited about it. It was developing into a much larger, more intensive, more time-consuming, and, for her personally, a much more satisfying thing. Without creativity she had been an undeveloped woman in many ways. But now she was moving into a new, really vital and interesting phase. . . . I remember that she wrote me a letter about it.”

Rita Gam received this letter early in September 1982. Less than one week later Princess Grace was dead.

27

“IT’S JUST EASIER IF I DRIVE”

I
n the spring of 1982, six months before her death, Princess Grace flew to Hong Kong with her husband at the invitation of C. Y. Tung, the Chinese shipping magnate, who had invited Grace to rededicate the USS
Constitution.
Tung had refitted the liner for luxury cruises around the Hawaiian islands, taking great pains to restore the ship to the style it had enjoyed when it dropped Grace in Monaco in the spring of 1956. Tung also invited the couple who had fallen in love on that voyage, Jack Seabrook and his wife, Elizabeth, the former UPI reporter, who first met each other on the
Constitution.