Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (47 page)

In 1956 Grace had given all this up quite blithely, with no very clear idea of what she might be missing. Now she knew.

23

THE ONASSIS FACTOR

F
or the best part of twenty years in the 1950s and 1960s, the most striking sight in Monaco on a warm summer’s night was the spectacle of Aristotle Onassis’s yacht, the
Christina,
sitting in the prime berth of the harbor—322 feet of unashamed opulence, lit from stem to stern and glowing like a Christmas tree. Onassis had bought the boat for $50,000 in 1952—it had been a frigate of the Canadian Navy—and he had spent another four million transforming it into the supreme symbol of his power and wealth. There was a nursery, an operating theater, a swimming pool whose floor could be raised to deck level for dancing, and nine luxury suites. The
Christina
dramatically outshone Rainier’s own 135-foot yacht, the
Deo Juvante II.
When the two boats were moored side by side—a comparison that the prince preferred to avoid—the
Deo Juvante II
looked rather like a tugboat.

The
Christina
was named after Onassis’s only daughter, and it was the vehicle for his fantasies and his rich man’s sense of fun. The footrests of the bar stools were made of whales’ teeth, and the seats themselves were of a gleaming white whale skin which Onassis described as coming from the scrotum of the animal—though sometimes he changed the story. “Madame,” he declared to one lady visitor, “you are now sitting on the largest penis in the world.” His sense of humor was tailor-made for the unusual young prince who was his partner in the business that was Monte Carlo, Inc.

Rainier had welcomed Onassis’s takeover of the
Société des Bains de Mer
in
1953, and the fresh dynamism that the Greek brought to its activities. “I’ll build, I’ll embellish, I’ll renovate,” Onassis had promised, and, to start with, he was as good as his word. He added three more floors to the Hôtel de Paris, and he topped off the building with a spectacular grillroom that gave a panoramic view of the harbor and had a roof that opened to the stars at night.

Onassis controlled fifty-two percent of the SBM’s shares. Rainier only owned two percent—a family inheritance—but the SBM’s license to operate in Monaco gave the prince the power of veto over most aspects of the company’s activities. This made the prince and the shipowner the effective codirectors of Monaco’s tourist fortunes, and their relationship was marked by all the pride and prickliness that two pint-sized Caesars could muster. There were occasions when their regular confabulations in Rainier’s palace office took on the character of rams butting heads, but each man knew how much he needed the other, and out of the conflicts emerged an unusual friendship and respect.

“One day they would be going for one another,” remembered one of Rainier’s advisors. “Next day they would be kissing each other on the cheek.”

Grace shared her husband’s ambivalence. She distrusted the ostentation that had won Onassis the tide of uncrowned king of Monaco. It was insulting to the position and prestige of her own husband. But the crude vibrancy of the man was compelling. Onassis could flatter a lady with all the energy and single-minded-ness of an Oleg Cassini, and he worked very hard on Grace. In the autumn of 1961, Grace and Rainier accepted an invitation to cruise the Greek islands on the
Christina
with Onassis and Maria Callas. While the two men toured the monasteries of Mount Athos, to which only males were admitted, Grace and Callas got in a little boat and sneaked as close to the shore as they could for a peek. They need not have bothered. “The boys said the monks smelled so badly,” Grace reported to Prudy, “that we were the lucky ones.”

Grace was finally won over by the tolerance that Onassis extended to her boisterous children. “They would tease him, tweak his ears, and pull him into the pool,” Rainier later remembered. “He wasn’t young then, and we used to get rather worried.”

Rainier later dated the souring of his relationship with Onassis from the tycoon’s love affair with Maria Callas, and the unpleasant, public breakdown of his marriage that followed. “There were nasty write-ups and gossip,” the prince told Peter Hawkins in 1965. “He sort of shriveled up, and perhaps because it was here that all this trouble started, he may even have taken an unconscious dislike to Monte Carlo.”

But the problem went much deeper than this. Far from disliking Monte Carlo, Onassis liked it rather too much. He enjoyed its exclusivity and cachet. His control of the SBM helped give him the class that he knew his wealth lacked, and he did not welcome the plans that Rainier was constantly urging to open up the principality to a less exclusive clientele. Rainier’s recruiting of Grace had generated all the glamour and prestige that Onassis had been hoping for when he launched his own, impudent embassy to Marilyn Monroe, but now the codirectors disagreed on the best way to build on this. By a strange paradox, the prince was arguing for sausages, while the self-made man was championing caviar.

Since his accession in 1949, Rainier had nursed an expansionist vision for the future of his realm. He wished to reclaim the two shallow areas of sea at either end of Monaco, making one the site of light industry and the other the sort of beach resort which the principality lacked. Much of the rock and soil for this landfill would come from the excavation of a tunnel carrying the Nice-Menton railway line under Monte Carlo, thus eliminating the eyesore of the existing open track, and releasing more land for residential redevelopment. By the early sixties most of these plans were well on the road to completion, and Rainier had no doubt about what came next. Bring in Holiday Inn!

“My own feeling,” he explained to Peter Hawkins in 1965, “is that the economic wealth of the principality would be greatly improved if we could start off with two thousand modern, comfortable hotel rooms of the kind at which the Americans are so good.

Not super-duper deluxe, but modernly equipped, functional, and agreeable hotel rooms with a maximum price of fifteen dollars a single a day.”

Even if he had not married Grace Kelly, the ambitious prince of Monaco would have been a devotee of things American, from jazz and gadgets to business techniques. The Holiday Inn chain was one of the great U.S. success stories of the 1950s and since Rainier was, essentially, a hotelkeeper himself, he had studied the chain’s mass-marketing of cleanliness, value, and efficiency. A Monaco Holiday Inn would bring a new sort of traveler to the principality. It might teach the snooty and complacent Hôtel de Paris a thing or two, and it would also accomplish another of the long-term goals of Rainier, to dilute the monopoly enjoyed by the SBM.

As chief shareholder and controller of the SBM, Onassis could hardly be expected to agree with much of this. He wanted to keep his semiprivate playground as exclusive as he could, and he also felt that the prince was unduly alarmist about the future of his ministate. “Monaco will always be prosperous,” Onassis used to say, “so long as there are three thousand rich men in the world.” Onassis felt that he, rather than Rainier, was the more careful guardian of what the principality really stood for. “He won’t be satisfied,” he grumbled, “until Monte Carlo is nothing but hotels, tourists, and tax shelters from one end to the other.”

The argument was fought out on yacht excursions and in long business meetings in the prince’s study—though Onassis’s Levantine style was not to confront, but rather to delay and discombobulate. “You can speak to him for an hour, two hours, three hours,” exclaimed Rainier in exasperation. “But when he goes out of your office you know perfectly well that nothing of what you have talked about is going to be followed through.”

Grace and Rainier still accepted invitations on Onassis’s yacht. Grace felt a creative bond with Maria Callas. It was fun to be woken up in the morning by the cascading arpeggios of the great soprano practicing her scales. But by 1964, it was getting increasingly difficult for business and friendship to mix. In the spring of that year, Onassis finally and reluctantly agreed to build a new luxury apartment block and two hotels in Monte Carlo, but he insisted on a guarantee that would exclude the Holiday Inn, or any other rival hotel development. Infuriated, Rainier invoked his veto to annul the whole scheme, and then went on television to attack the SBM for “lethargy and bad faith.”

Onassis shrugged off the comment in public. Rainier’s criticism, he said, had been directed at the SBM, not at him personally. But privately he was seething. When Charles Graves, an author who had written a history of Monte Carlo, met Onassis in September 1964, he found the shipowner “obsessional” in his hatred of Rainier, fishing constantly for dirt and gossip on the prince. Onassis had always made a point never to address Rainier as “Altesse” or “Monseigneur” in the subservient way that many did. Only on the most formal and public occasions did he call him anything but “Rainier,” and when talking with his office staff he would refer to him as plain “Mr. Grimaldi.” Delusions of divine right, he sneered, had no place in the world of modern business.

But in the end it was the comic opera prince who proved the cleverer businessman—or, perhaps, the more skillful wielder of realpolitik. 1966 was the hundredth anniversary of the foundation of Monte Carlo, and as part of the jubilee festivities Rainier and Grace went to Paris to celebrate the now restored entente with France. In conversations with de Gaulle, Rainier secured French agreement to the strategy he proposed against Onassis, and he also got his wife to voice the official Grimaldi line in the somewhat unusual context of
Playboy
magazine.

‘‘I don’t think Mr. Onassis’s investment in the
Société des Bains de Mer
of Monte Carlo is of very great importance to his overall empire,” Grace said in one of the long personality interviews with which
Playboy
filled the space between its pinups. “He has so many more and bigger investments than Monte Carlo. I feel that his ownership of the majority of shares, and therefore a controlling interest in the casino of Monte Carlo, has been more for his own amusement than a serious business affair.”

In June 1966 Rainier got his National Council to legislate the creation of 600,000 new shares in the SBM, all of them to be purchased and held by the Monégasque government. This forcibly wiped out Onassis’s majority position at a stroke, and the tycoon promptly went to court. Since he could only sue in the courts of Monaco, however, he enjoyed little success. The Monaco Supreme Court ruled against him. The Monégasque Treasury paid Onassis $10 million for his own personal shareholding—and Rainier was, at last, the master in his own house. In the context of Grimaldi history and his family’s control of Monaco, it was an even bigger coup for Rainier than the winning of Grace. The SBM was now Monaco’s property, and so long as the principality retained its shareholding, the company could never be held by an Onassis again.

Grace was at the heart of the 1966 centenary celebrations, which acquired extra savor from Rainier’s triumph. There were concerts, balls, ballets, and recitals. The most sacred moment came on November 4, 1966, when Rainier had the bodies of his ancestors brought up from the crypt to be reburied in the apse of the cathedral. Albert the Navigator, Charles III, the creator of Monte Carlo, Florestans and Hippolytes going back to the Middle Ages—each ruling prince was now laid to rest beneath his own, grand, brass-inlaid slab of beige marble, the princely graves running in an impressive semicircle in the floor around the back of the high altar. The dynastic display provided a telling flourish to Rainier’s year of victory—and it was not too long before the bulldozers moved in to break ground, down by the sea, on the new Holiday Inn, Monte Carlo.

In 1966 Grace was a mother again. On February 1, 1965, she had finally given birth to the third child she had been trying so hard to produce. Princess Stephanie Marie Elisabeth was seven years younger than her brother, Albert, and eight years younger than her sister, Caroline. She was very much the baby of the family, and she was the more treasured and pampered by her parents for the miscarriages that had preceded her.

Grace rejoiced in her new baby, but something was missing. 1966 was the tenth anniversary of her wedding, but the first flush of love had long faded. Asked by Rainier what she would like for her tenth anniversary present, she snapped, “A year off.” Only slightly more temperately, she told Ivor Herbert of the London
Evening News
that her greatest wish was for “someone to take these letters off my desk and answer them—and to have ten hours sleep at night.”