Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (58 page)

The list of dignitaries flying in for her funeral was a tribute of another kind. In April 1956 there had not been a president or crowned head of note at the marriage of Grace and Rainier, but the roll call of arrivals in the second week of September 1982 testified to the prestige that Grace had brought to the shady principality by the sea: the King and Queen of Belgium, the Queen of Spain, Prince Bertil of Sweden, Prince Philip of Liechtenstein, Madame Francois Mitterrand, Nancy Reagan, accompanied by more beefy security guards than anyone could imagine, and Diana the Princess of Wales, who, on the strength of one meeting, had come to consider the Princess of Monaco a friend.

Frank Sinatra was tied up by concerts in America. David Niven was already too ill with Lou Gehrig’s disease to attend. But Cary Grant arrived to bring the right touch of Hollywood and the old days—and, of course, the memory of
To Catch a Thief.

Grace looked ghastly in her coffin. The wounds on her head had been concealed by a bizarre yellow wig. Her girlfriends looked at it horrified, not knowing whether to laugh or to cry, but afterward they decided that it had to be seen as the sort of joke that Gracie at her most giggly would have enjoyed.

The funeral was held at 10:15 on the morning of the Saturday following her death. There had been a silence hanging over Monaco since the principality had woken up on Wednesday without its princess, and the fanfare of trumpets that sounded Grace’s ebony coffin out of the palace signaled an end to the holding of breath. People wept in the streets. Nowhere was mourning more tragically displayed than on the features of Rainier as he followed his wife’s body through the cobbled alleys of the old town to the cathedral. Sobbing openly and frequently, the prince appeared crushed and devastated, a spirit laid waste—though people who knew the story wondered from which particular well of sorrow his unhappiness was drawn.

“They are all sorry that they were not nicer to her,” declared Virginia Gallico, widow of the writer Paul Gallico and lady-in-waiting to Grace. “They are going to have so many regrets.”

Stephanie watched the funeral on television, lying in the hospital with her neck in a brace. But the service had scarcely begun when she broke down crying, and a few minutes later she passed out. Paul Belmondo turned off the TV.

“We are united in pain,” declared the Archbishop of Monaco in his sermon. The sudden destruction of this exceptional person, he said, “provides no answers to the questions of life, suffering, separation, and death.” The best answers seemed offered by the little, black-edged memorial mass cards that had been set out in each mourner’s place: “I would like to be remembered,” read some words from the last interview Grace had given at the end of July, “as a decent human being and a caring one.” “Lord,” read a quotation from Saint Augustine, “I ask not why you took her away from me, but I thank you for having given her to us.”

After the ceremony, Rainier received the guests in the garden of the palace, shaking their hands and accepting their condolences. Suddenly overcome, he walked away to the terrace and stood on his own, standing where he could look out over the sea and all of Monaco. The prince began to cry again. Caroline and Albert walked over to comfort their father, putting their arms around him, and they began to cry as well. When fairy tales do not finish happily, their ending often tends to be cruel.

For three days the coffin lay in a side chapel of the cathedral, surrounded by flowers. Then on Tuesday, September 21, 1982, a week after her death, Grace was laid to rest in the Grimaldi family vault, taking her place in the great semicircle of princes and princesses around the high altar. “Gratia Patricia,” read the inscription on the plain marble slab of her tomb, “Principis Rainierii III Uxor, Obiit Ann. Dni. MCMLXXXII. . . . Grace Patricia, wife of Prince Rainier III, died the year of our Lord, 1982.”

Most of her obituaries dwelt on her film career, with relatively uninspired catalogues of her innumerable good works, but one captured the spirit of her, a lyrical tribute from William Buckley, Jr., a fellow Catholic, and a very old friend.

“Grace Kelly,” he wrote in his
National Review,
was “trained to perform professionally as an actress. But before that she had been trained by her family to perform as a human being, to control herself, and to strive for perfection. . . . She had been trained to hide pain, to disguise effort—all that was a part of her character. . . . If she had decided to become a nun rather than a princess, there would not have been a distinctive difference in her approach to her vocation.”

Buckley recalled how he had gone to Rome a few years earlier to appear with Grace in one of Father Peyton’s religious documentaries. “She said then,” he recalled, “that nothing changes in respect of the opportunities, which are always there, for the individual Christian to attempt to do good, and, in doing good, to repay the great munificence of the Providence that gave us life. . . . There are no princesses where she is bound, but the secular imagination must at least suppose that wherever she is, a special light will irradiate.”

Grace had shone that light on her family, on her friends, and on everyone who felt that their lives had been touched by her. Most of these people had never met her. They had experienced her vitality through her movies, her photographs, and through the more general presence that goes with being a star. Even people who were not very interested in the cinema or princely personalities felt that they knew Princess Grace.

Grace’s public face was her finest creation, and her greatest virtue, in an often false and artificial world, was that she genuinely strove to be as good as she appeared. She was a fallible human being, but she was always willing to learn from her mistakes, and she made real changes in her life as she came to appreciate the emptiness and cost of the dream she had been programmed to pursue. Maintaining the public illusion of happiness with a man who often made her miserable was the greatest of all her performances, and she stuck with it because that was what she had promised—and because she knew that happiness is usually complicated and is seldom self-indulgent. Grace Kelly, Princess Grace of Monaco, was authentic. Her physical beauty was the mirror of her better qualities, not a camouflage. She was lucky with her looks, but she led a life that lived up to them.

TO FOLLOW THE CIRCUS

O
f Grace and Rainier’s three children, it was Caroline who made the most obvious recovery from her mother’s death. Her marriage and separation from Philippe Junot had fired and toughened her. “When you’re young,” she said of the experience in her terse fashion, “you make mistakes.” Suddenly Caroline grew up.

At Grace’s funeral, and in the months that followed, Caroline was particularly supportive of her father. She had been in England at a health farm on the Monday of Grace’s crash. She arrived back in Monaco the following morning, and she immediately started to assume something of the role that Grace herself might have played in similar circumstances.

People remarked on Caroline’s physical similarities to her mother. As the puppy fat fell off her, Caroline lost the unpleasant pout that had been a trademark of her teenage years. Her features thinned and refined. She had her mother’s cheekbones, and her mother’s carriage. She also had Grace’s elegance, and the same ability in social situations to look more intelligent and concerned than perhaps she really was. She had a lovely smile.

All these attributes made Caroline ideally suited to become the new first lady of Monaco, and she played the part seriously and well. She assumed responsibility for the ballet festival and for the ballet school. She took over the Monaco branch of the Princess Grace Foundation, the vehicle that Grace had established for her donations to charity. She opened the garden show, she visited the orphanage and the other good causes beloved of her mother, and she made a dazzling consort when she escorted her father to the Red Cross Ball.

Caroline avoided several of her mother’s mistakes. After she married Stefano Casiraghi, a young Italian businessman, in December 1983, she did not serve up the three children that she had by him as fodder for magazine features, and she gave few interviews herself. She was a tough, businesslike presence, definitely less softhearted than Grace. But this toughness shielded her privacy, and probably gave her children a more natural and unaffected quality of life.

Caroline’s marriage to the handsome and clean-cut Casiraghi put a smile back on the official face of Monaco’s ruling family. The strange gap where Grace had always been in the Christmas cards and in official photographs was filled by Casiraghi, and the arrival of grandchildren—two sons and a daughter—helped lift Rainier out of the gloom in which he had been sunk since Grace’s death. Caroline and her young family made their headquarters in a villa not far from the palace on the rock. Rainier was a frequent visitor. Monaco was back on track again—until October 1990, when Casiraghi was competing in an offshore powerboat race. He lost control of his craft, was catapulted into the air, and was killed immediately as his boat came down on top of him.

The tragedy devastated Caroline. For the second time in a decade the magazines ran pictures of her fine features riven with sorrow. She ceased appearing at public functions. She cut her hair dramatically short. She took to wearing nothing but black. Most drastic of all, she uprooted her family from Monaco and shifted them nearly two hundred miles westward into the French countryside, setting up home in a stone farmhouse near Avignon outside the remote mountain village of St. Remy de Provence. There the thirty-four-year-old princess rode her bicycle, did her own shopping in the local market, and took her children to the village school, seeking solace and some new direction in the texture of the simple life.

With time the wounds healed, and after a year or so Caroline was occasionally seen in some of her old haunts. She was spotted in Monaco, Paris, and even New York. There was talk of a boyfriend and perhaps of remarriage—to the French actor Vincent Lindon. But though the princess reappeared on her father’s arm, doing her duty at the Red Cross Ball and particularly at fund-raising events for her mother’s foundation, there was a sense in which Caroline’s spiritual headquarters were no longer in Monaco, but in a farmhouse near St. Remy de Provence.

Caroline’s steps back toward the mainstream were helped by the announcement from the Vatican in May 1992 that her 1978 marriage to Philippe Junot had been annulled. It had taken twelve years, two papal commissions of inquiry, and, finally, it was rumored, the refusal by Prince Rainier to pay his annual multimillion franc tithe to the church, to secure the verdict.

The granting of the annulment meant that Caroline could take communion again, and could be remarried within the church. More important from Monaco’s point of view, it meant that her marriage to Stefano Casiraghi was no longer religiously invalid, and that Caroline’s three children by Casiraghi—Andrea, eight, Charlotte, six, and Pierre, five—could now be recognized as both civilly and religiously legitimate. In the event of Prince Albert not producing any children, the Grimaldi succession was secured by two healthy and handsome young male heirs.

This raised the question of Albert. As the three young children of Rainier and Grace had been growing up in the sixties and were starting to display their very different characters, observers would agree how fortunate it was that it was Albert who would be doing the job. The boy was polite, obedient, dutiful, and charming. Of the three children, he was clearly the one that contained the best of Grace. It was true that his stutter hinted at some unresolved conflicts—Rainier was always so much tougher with Albert than he was with the girls. But the stutter faded as Albert grew older, and the prince matured with scarcely a ripple from a bright-eyed and pleasant teenager into a bright-eyed and pleasant young man. Albert spent his college years in America, studying at Amherst, then went on for work-study experience in New York in an advertising agency and in a merchant bank. Already twenty-five at the time of his mother’s death, the prince seemed firmly on course to assume the helm of the principality before many more years had passed.