Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (55 page)

The Seabrooks had not seen Grace for twenty-six years. Liz Seabrook had noticed from press photographs how Grace had put on weight, and when they met she found out the reason why. As they sat talking and drinking, Grace absentmindedly consumed a whole bowl of peanuts single-handed. “Now, why do I do that?” she giggled, a little embarrassed when she realized what she had done.

Liz Seabrook knew that excessive weight and eating was often a sign of unhappiness in a woman, but she did not see any sign of that in Grace. On the contrary, the princess appeared particularly buoyant. She had great fun exploring the ship, tracking down her own cabin and those of her family—and she was especially relaxed and warm with Rainier. The couple laughed and joked with each other like old and true friends. Jack and Elizabeth Seabrook found it impossible to credit the rumors they had heard about rifts in the marriage. The prince and princess were hardly young lovers, but they seemed a well-matched and contented pair.

The evolving of Grace’s marriage from romantic love through discord and apathy to a new sort of tolerance and friendship was the best thing that happened to her in these years. The prince was as liable as ever to his arrogance and moods. But Grace had learned how to laugh about “the Dodo,” and Rainier in a good humor could be a delight.

Grace had stuck to her run-of-the-play contract. She had sworn she would make the relationship work, and she had persisted through the darkest moments. “If I had the choice,” she had once confessed to Micheline Swift, “I would divorce him. But I have no choice. He would keep my children.”

Grace was referring to Grimaldi family law and to her marriage agreement that reserved custody of the children to her husband in the event of divorce. But the issue was more complicated than that. Catholic dogma aside, Grace had not the slightest wish to give up being a princess. She might toy with the idea from time to time, but to divorce Rainier and walk away from Monaco would have been to walk out on her life. It was an admission of failure that was impossible to contemplate—and one she had no need to make. With her poetry reading, her multiplicity of interests, and her secret life with younger men, Grace had found a way to fly out of the cage and still enjoy all the benefits that went with being inside. Staying married to her husband had a great deal to offer, and when things got sticky, well, she had not been an actress for nothing.

On this detached but mutually advantageous basis, Grace and Rainier had become each other’s best friends. They had, after all, shared in the adventure that each made of their life. They had created something that the world fervently admired and believed in, and when the chips were down, they really only made sense together. They still shared the same bed—in the palace and up at Roc Agel—a capacious and voluptuous affair beneath a crucifix.

For reasons both generous and selfish, the couple had come to accept each other’s separate but not totally divergent paths.

“He was always very tolerant,” remembers Robert Dornhelm. “I can remember quite a few evenings when we had dinner together, just the three of us.”

In April 1981, Grace and Rainier had reached their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, which they celebrated with a dinner with their children and their oldest friends. Albert made a toast, as did Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra, and then Rainier got to his feet and put his better feelings into words. In his staid, slightly stern public manner, he toasted Grace and told her what she had meant to him and to the three children. There was not a dry eye in the house.

At the end of August 1982, they flew to Norway with the two elder children for a cruise. They crossed into the Arctic Circle, sailing in the same waters as Rainier’s adventurous great-grandfather, Albert, the oceanographer. Grace had been complaining of headaches that summer—she had cried off some dinner parties uncharacteristically—and during the voyage the pains had got worse. But that did not stop her from organizing shipboard exercise sessions and some riotous dressing up.

Stephanie did not join them. Just seventeen, she had fallen in love with Paul Belmondo, the nineteen-year-old son of the actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, and she wanted to have her own holiday with him. Grace would not have allowed such license to Caroline at that age, but the Junot affair had changed her thinking. After some hesitation, she let Stephanie go off with the young Belmondo to Antigua—”She’s my wild child,” she used to say with a grin. Why should her daughter not have some fun? One of Grace’s private projects for the autumn was to find a place of her own where she could stay on her visits to Manhattan, not far from the apartment of Jeffory FitzGerald.

Grace’s tolerance toward Stephanie had the opposite to the intended effect. When her younger daughter arrived back from Antigua on Friday, September 10, the girl took it for granted that she could now see more of Paul Belmondo than ever. It is fashionable to talk of parents who abuse their children, but when it came to Grace’s younger daughter, it is arguable that the reverse was the case.

Stephanie was due to travel up to Paris the following Monday. Having graduated, with some difficulty, from high school, she was enrolled in the Institute of Fashion Design in Paris, a prestigious and desperately hard-to-get-into establishment, where Stephanie owed her place to her name and to her mother’s lobbying. But when Stephanie arrived back from Antigua, five days before she was due to start her studies in Paris, she announced that she was no longer interested in fashion. Paul Belmondo was going to attend racing-car driving school, and that was what Stephanie now wished to do—to be with Paul and learn to race cars.

Grace could not believe it. Her wild child had pushed her too far. Through Stephanie’s childhood, Grace had negotiated her younger daughter through a succession of schools, meekly moving her on to a more liberal Catholic school when Stephanie complained that the nuns were too strict, and then—when Stephanie refused to attend even that—on to a private, nonreligious school. Now Stephanie was planning to switch to racing-car school in the same fashion. But her mother, for once, had had enough. This was something that Grace absolutely and finally would not accept.

Robert Dornhelm was in Roc Agel that weekend as the arguments raged. Grace was just mortified. All that summer she had been agonizing with her friends over what she described in her letters as the “S & P situation.” She had tried so hard not to be restrictive, to avoid making the mistake with Stephanie that she now acknowledged she had made when Caroline fell in love with Junot. Both of Grace’s daughters had clearly inherited their mother’s tendency to lose all her bearings over a man, yet neither was prepared, as the young Grace had been, to bow before the ultimate authority of their parents. Sulky and obstinate, Stephanie was just as determined that she would go off with Belmondo as Grace was that her daughter would not.

Dornhelm was glad to get out of an atmosphere which was rancid and tense. He left Roc Agel on Sunday, September 12, agreeing with Grace that they would meet up in Paris later in the week. An American TV network had shown interest in screening an hour-long version of
Rearranged,
which would require the shooting of additional scenes. Grace and the director could talk about that once Grace had dealt with her daughter. Grace’s first job for the week of September 13 was to get Stephanie down to Monaco, up to Paris, and then safely into her fashion institute. When Grace spoke on the phone to Gwen Robyns late that Sunday night, she complained that her headaches had come back.

Monday, September 13, 1982, dawned clear and bright. It was a perfect, sunny, south of France late-summer day. Driving down through the broom and the pine trees with Stephanie—past the very spot where her
To Catch a Thief
picnic with Cary Grant had been set—Grace could see the yachts below in Monaco harbor and out through the haze along the Riviera coast.

Rainier had been driven down into Monaco an hour or so earlier. He had his usual weekday schedule of business to get through. Grace’s chauffeur had been standing beside the Rover, ready to drive the two princesses when Grace and Stephanie came out of the farmhouse, but Grace said it would be easier if she did the driving and went down to Monaco with Stephanie on her own. She had brought out a pile of her dresses on hangers to spread across the Rover’s backseat, and she explained that she did not want them to get creased.

The chauffeur later remembered that he protested a little. The dresses were not a problem, he said. He could easily come back for them, or have another car sent up from the palace. But Grace insisted that was all too much trouble.

“It’s just easier if I drive,” she said.

Grace still had things she had to say to Stephanie, mother-and-daughter things that needed privacy to be expressed. It was at the forefront of her mind. She had wrangled all weekend, and the battle was still far from won. Grace had been terribly upset. As she had got into the car that Monday morning, talking properly to Stephanie had been what mattered most to her—certainly more than the fact that she hated to drive down this road. Grace knew that she was a terrible driver. After she had rammed a car broadside in Monaco a few years earlier, she had resolved that she would never drive again. But that resolution had gone the way of others, especially those about dieting. So here she was, ten minutes or so into her journey, heading down the winding CD 37 as it led out of the village of La Turbie. She had the radio shut off. She and Stephanie had serious talking to do.

Yves Phily, a professional truck driver in his late twenties, caught up with the brown Rover as it was negotiating the last of the turns before the buildings started, coming into the outskirts of the town of Cap d’Ail. Monaco itself was little more than a mile away. These final hairpins were the sharpest, and even though his semitrailer was unloaded, Phily had put the truck into low gear so that its engine would act as a brake.

The Rover slowed as it approached a hairpin bend beside a miniature car racing track. It was the spot where local model car enthusiasts staged their remote-control competitions. The Rover made the sharp turn to the left quite smoothly, then pulled away again—until suddenly, about five hundred meters along the road, it started to wobble and waver in its tracks. The car veered from the center of the road onto the left-hand curb, its side actually knocking into the mountain rocks.
If Phily had seen a car doing this at night he would have said that the driver was falling asleep or had had too much to drink. At ten o’clock in the morning he thought it must be an illness—some sort of fainting or pain.

The truck driver sounded his horn loudly, and the Rover corrected its course. Perched up in his truck cab, Phily was looking down on the roof of the car. He could not see who the driver was. But as the Rover, now going straight and reasonably steadily, approached the next hairpin bend and reached the point where one would normally have expected the brake lights to go on, the car suddenly accelerated, shooting forward at a frightening speed— seventy or eighty kilometers an hour,
the truck driver later estimated—so that instead of negotiating the bend round to the right, it careered directly on through.

“The moment that I saw it accelerate,” said Phily the next day, ‘ T knew that it would not make the bend. It was going too fast. The car took off straight through the corner. I literally saw the car flying.”

Today there are very obvious warning signs and a crash barrier where Princess Grace went off the CD 37. But in September 1982, there was nothing to prevent a car from driving straight through the corner and out into the void. To the left of the road stood a sign with a single, inconspicuous arrow indicating a corner, while straight ahead was a gap where people discarded rubbish onto the hill.

The Rover flew through the air over a drop of some forty-five meters. There were woods beyond and below the corner, and as the car sailed onward, it sliced through the top of a tree—the police later found the topmost branches freshly decapitated—before starting to curve down. Thirty meters lower, the Rover struck into the trunk of another tree, then bounced upside down onto a pile of rocks, crushing the passenger-side doors and roof. The car rolled over several times noisily before tilting on its nose and roof, finally coming to rest.