The cutting edge of that celebration, unfortunately, was anything but tender for those passengers on the
Constitution
who had to deal, day by day, with more than a dozen rival journalists and photographers cooped up on the ship, each of them searching for their own scoop to wire home. News organizations had competed bitterly to get their representatives into the limited number of berths on board the liner, and they wanted stories about more than shuffleboard contests to put on the front page. “It was awful,” remembers Maree Frisby Rambo. “Some of them were quite nice, but you got the feeling they were all hanging around just waiting for Grace or someone to fall down and break a leg.”
Grace Kelly’s engagement and wedding was the first modern event to generate media overkill—the concentration of reporting resources in gross disproportion to the number and importance of the facts to be reported upon—and the Kelly family had to cope with the consequences. Two days out in the Atlantic, cables from worried friends told of the sour and frustrated tone of the shipboard reports published in some American newspapers. There had been speculation about family discord based on the fact that the older and younger generations were observed to be sitting in different sets of deck chairs, along with criticism of the special areas of the ship that had been cordoned off to give Grace privacy.
Jack Kelly called a council of war. Over the rest of the trip, it was decided, Grace would have to give a little exclusive time to each of the reporters, and more effort should be made by everyone to make the press feel part of the party. Morgan Hudgins, MGM’s press representative, was put in charge of coordinating the program of interviews and photo calls. As the days went by, the stories wired home from the ship became more friendly and positive. But there were the best part of two thousand journalists and photographers from all over the world waiting in Monaco, and Grace would not be available to give exclusive time to any of them.
As the
Constitution
passed through the Straits of Gibraltar and started to strike north toward France, the mood of the summer camp sobered. The American ocean had been left behind. The Mediterranean was Rainier’s territory. The unknown was suddenly imminent.
Throughout the gaiety of the voyage, Grace had spent several hours every day in her cabin with her long baskets of letters, paying bills, sorting her papers, and writing personal notes to everyone who had given her a party or sent her a present. She wanted her old life wrapped up and tidied away before she arrived in Monaco, and this was the tone of her final night on the liner. She swore off a group dinner in the dining room. There were dinners aplenty scheduled in Monaco. Instead, she had a snack sent to her stateroom and sat alone for an hour with Bettina Thompson, her first roommate at the Barbizon, reminiscing about the old days and shedding more tears.
When Judy Kanter dropped in, she found the two women all cried out. Grace’s eyes seemed veiled and a bit distant, “not preoccupied with specifics but focused inward.” No one talked much. The princess-to-be was consciously calming herself. This was the last night. As Grace set aside all the razzmatazz of the voyage, it seemed to Judy Kanter that she was methodically composing her resources, “gathering some internal strength that she knew she would need.”
18
THE PRINCESS FROM THE SEA
A
round ten o’clock on the morning of April 12, 1956, the vibrations of the engines of the USS
Constitution
changed their tone. The 4,000-mile journey was coming to an end. There was a dullish, gray mist hanging over the sea, and the faces of Monaco’s pastel villas glowed vaguely through the haze. The anchor dropped into the water, and the
Constitution
listed slightly to the landward side as all its passengers and crew crowded the rails. At precisely ten-thirty a.m., a small white craft, Monaco’s antique and upright royal yacht, came veering purposefully out of the harbor. His Serene Highness Prince Rainier III was coming to claim his bride.
Grace looked magnificent. She was wearing a long, elegant, dark silk coat, with a round, white organdy hat that came out and down and shaded her eyes like a huge coolie bonnet. This hat was instantly criticized by the press. It was impossible to see her face under it, they complained. But Grace had thought hard about her new role. It was right for her to look shy and almost veiled. She was no longer Little Miss Hollywood. She was the princess from the sea, the new servant and mother of this overgrown fishing harbor. Good Catholic that she was, Grace had an instinct for ritual and symbolism. Although she was smiling, she arrived in Monaco with her eyes modestly downcast.
Clutching Oliver the poodle with one hand firmly to her chest, Grace stepped out across the gangplank that connected the liner to her fiancé’s yacht. A flotilla of small boats bustled around. Speedboats, houseboats, fishing boats, dinghies—it seemed as if all Monaco had come out on the water to welcome Grace to her new home. Showers of red and white carnations fluttered down from a seaplane overhead, courtesy of Aristotle Onassis. It was Grace’s grandest entrance ever.
Rainier only shook her hand politely when he met her on the deck. He was a prince on his own territory now. The couple were nervous together—it was like starting at the beginning again. They had not seen each other for nearly a month, and it did not help having Jack and Margaret Kelly with them on the yacht. Jack Kelly puffed on a cigarette, showing the strain. He had been in his element on the liner, the grand playmaster of the lodge, but now he had to take his cue from another master of ceremonies.
Waiting at the dock were a clutch of Monégasque dignitaries, adorned with the sashes, medals, tailcoats, and top hats beloved of French municipal officials. There were bowings, addresses of welcome, and much shaking of hands. Schoolchildren lined the streets with flags. Smiling faces waved down from balconies. It seemed as if every brass band on the Riviera had come to make its contribution to the gaiety.
“You look happy, my dear,” said the English-speaking wife of one of the Monégasque officials.
“The only thing that seems to happen,” replied Grace, “is that I get happier and happier.”
The couple got into a car to drive through the cheering streets around the harbor and up the twisting road that led to the palace, where there were more hands waiting to be shaken—the palace servants lined up in all
their
medals. “Do they get one for every meal they serve?” asked a disrespectful member of the visitors.
It was exactly a week before the wedding was due to take place, and the seven days until then were dedicated to an elaborate roundelay of receptions and parties, one of whose purposes was the time-honored marriage ritual of trying to make friends of two unfamiliar and generally unwilling families. This process kicked off with a lunch in the palace on the day of arrival—twenty-four assorted Kellys and Grimaldis in formal clothes, shaking hands and making small talk—and Grace’s progression from happiness to happiness ended abruptly at the reception line. Her future mother-in-law, the Princess Charlotte, known in the family as “Mamou,” made no attempt to welcome her. She was chilly and disdainful, in a black mood, which Grace’s own mother did little to improve by slapping Mamou heartily on the shoulder with the greeting, “Hi! I’m Ma Kelly!” Almost all the Grimaldis behaved with a strange reserve. It was as if they were hiding the existence of some mad cousin whom no one wished to talk about, and it took several days for the Kellys to work out the truth—that their new European in-laws disliked each other so much that there were scarcely two of them who were on speaking terms.
For a family who had managed to hold on to power for over six hundred and fifty years, the house of Grimaldi was a quarrelsome clan—and remarkably uninhibited in letting the world know about it. Rainier’s parents had separated around the time of his birth, and were divorced soon afterward. His mother, Princess Charlotte—the “Mamou” who snubbed Grace so obviously at their first meeting—was a troubled woman who ran off with an Italian doctor in the late 1920s, loudly bewailing the formality and pomposity of her husband, Prince Pierre de Polignac. “To make love,” she complained, “he needs to put a crown on his head.”
Rainier was the younger child of this unhappy union, and adversity had not drawn him closer to his only sibling and elder sister, Antoinette. A conspiratorial and undersized character known in the family as “Tiny”—she was “Princess Tiny Pants” to the press—Antoinette had spent much of her childhood and adult years at loggerheads with her brother. In April 1956, Tiny was separated from the first of her three husbands, Monaco’s former tennis champion, and she was conducting an ill-concealed romance with Jean-Charles Rey, an ambitious local notable who was one of the members of the principality’s National Council. Tiny and Jean-Charles Rey had been plotting together to depose Rainier, hoping to capitalize on quite a general feeling in Monaco—prior, at least, to his wooing of Grace—that Rainier had been languid in his princely duties. Rainier “is now disposed,” reported the U.S. consul in Nice, “to cut off the Princess’s funds,” and, on top of all this, Rainier had also quarreled recently with his step-grandmother, the Princess Ghislaine, an actress whom his grandfather had married in later life. The prince had had her expelled from the palace.
The Grimaldi weakness for undignified feuds and vendettas was one of the reasons why every royal house in Europe had refused to come to Grace and Rainier’s wedding. They sent the standard silver tray or cigarette box, but they declined, to a man, to elevate the occasion with their presence. The closest approximations to royal dignity were the Aga Khan, obese and jewel-laden in a wheelchair, and the equally overweight ex-King Farouk of Egypt, who skulked around the Hôtel de Paris in dark glasses and a fez, perpetually on the lookout for assassins.
The Grimaldis had a flashy, seaside-pier reputation, and, as is often the case with those who feel themselves scorned, this only increased their personal arrogance. Rainier had a healthy dose of it, but his womenfolk, Mamou and Tiny, were mortally afflicted. The true purpose of the Los Angeles visit of Prince Pierre, Rainier’s father, while Grace was filming
High Society,
had been less to meet his prospective daughter-in-law than to discuss with his son the ways in which some of the more embarrassing family fractures might be repaired. These good intentions had backfired, however, when the prince, a slightly stuffy old gentleman with a white mustache and a taste for literature, returned to Monaco singing Grace’s praises. Prince Pierre proclaimed that this American girl was exactly the woman that his son and Monaco needed— which guaranteed that his ex-wife, Mamou, came to exactly the opposite conclusion. Mamou arrived at the family lunch on Thursday, April 12, with her mind already made up. Her son was marrying beneath himself, and she made her feelings obvious both to Grace and to the Kellys.
It was an incident next day, however, that really stirred the family furies. On Saturday, April 14,1956, Matthew McCloskey, an old friend and political ally of Jack Kelly and publisher of the Philadelphia
Daily Inquirer,
announced that $50,000 worth of his wife’s jewels had vanished from their room in the Hôtel de Paris the previous night—and a few hours later the bridesmaid Maree Frisby announced that $8,000 of her jewels were also missing. The two thousand or so members of the international press who had gathered in Monaco, and who had, to this point, been significantly starved of stories, rejoiced at the excitement, reveling in its echoes of
To Catch a Thief.
“Prince Rainier III is so furious over the jewel robberies,” wrote Art Buchwald, “that. . . he has decided to ban all jewel thieves from the wedding. This drastic measure has raised a howl of protests from jewel robbers of every nationality.”
Buchwald was closer to the truth than he imagined. The jewel thefts in the Hôtel de Paris had enraged Rainier for a very personal reason, since his headstrong mother had moved on from her Italian doctor—Mamou had tried to shoot her lover during one of their romantic disputes—to strike up a series of bizarre relationships with criminals who had been paroled from prison. The princess had come to see it as her mission in life to give of herself to redeem these fallen men, and the companion whom she had brought to Grace’s wedding, dressed in a tight-fitting white uniform and accompanying her, officially, as her chauffeur, was René Girier, a jewel thief who flaunted a walking stick and went by the name of “René la Canne” (René the Cane).
As news of the missing jewels circulated, “the Cane” was the obvious suspect. He was on parole from a sentence for robbery, and Rainier insisted that he should leave the principality immediately. But Mamou refused to be parted from her chauffeur, and the row broke into the open when Prince Pierre joined battle on
behalf of his son. At one of the pre-wedding receptions, the Kellys were amazed by the sight of the groom’s two elderly and long-separated parents quarreling bitterly in front of the entire party, exchanging none-too-subtle insults which, in the case of Prince Pierre, traded on the fact that his ex-wife had been born illegitimate.
Grace never liked a scene. When voices were raised, she tried to pretend that she was somewhere else, and she took Mamou’s hostility particularly to heart. Her mother-in-law had been so openly disdainful that Grace doubted whether she could ever make her a friend—and so it proved. Mamou never returned to Monaco after her son’s marriage to the film actress whom she had decided to despise, and though Rainier and Grace regularly traveled after their marriage to visit her in her chateau at Marchais in northern France, taking their children with them as they were born, Mamou never relented. Mamou’s home, wrote Grace to Don Richardson in 1972, was “cold as a witch’s teat [the handwritten letter shows that Grace first wrote ‘tit,’ then crossed it out for the more decorous word]. Of course, my mother-in-law’s attitude towards me does nothing to warm up the atmosphere.”