“Grace, this is great for all of us,” said Rita Gam, eager to discuss some of the new ideas that were being advanced in the early seventies by the pioneers of Women’s Lib.
“I think those women are disgusting,” Grace replied.
Rita knew that Grace had given a lot of time to certain women’s causes. The princess had thrown her prestige behind the La Leche League and had given speeches advocating breast-feeding. So Rita tried again, maneuvering to broach the subject from a different direction.
“Don’t you think they are smart,” she asked, “to put a name on what we are suffering from?”
“Suffering
from?” asked Grace, not understanding—or not willing to understand.
“She just didn’t know what I was talking about,” says Rita Gam. “She was one of the first independent women in America. She left her home, she earned her own living, she made her bed. . . . But she was also trapped by her position.”
Grace had met the challenge of putting a good face on some rather unpleasant realities by anesthetizing part of her mind, and there were times when she sounded like any other Monte Carlo dowager. “Take things like pornography and the sex magazines you see being sold everywhere,” she complained to Roderick Mann of the
Sunday Express
in September 1974. “How must it be for a young girl walking past, seeing them? Either she’ll turn into a sex maniac or become completely frigid.”
It was a curiously basic and extreme pair of alternatives. Grace’s sense of sexual security was not what it was. “When I pass a newsstand selling those magazines,” she told Mann, “I go and talk to the seller. . . . I tell him exactly what I think.”
It was almost comical, the picture of a newsvendor welcoming the famously demure princess into his shop, to find himself hit figuratively round the ear by her handbag. Judy Kanter encountered the same contradictions one night over dinner at Rupert Allan’s. Allan shared a little villa in the Hollywood Hills with his companion, Frank McCarthy, and they would invite up a few dozen friends, old and new, whenever Grace came to Los Angeles. When Judy Kanter—now in her third marriage as Mrs. Don Quine—happened to mention a film she was hoping to produce about Jesus coming back in modern times and trying to get his message across through such contemporary roles as that of a TV-show host, Grace brought the party to a standstill with her anger. “Why would you make a picture like that today?” she barked. “Don’t we have enough problems without sacrilegious films being made for mass audiences?”
Since the Quines had taken the trouble to submit their script to the Vatican, and had secured permission to shoot the movie (which was never actually produced) in Italy, this outburst made Grace more conservative than the Pope. But the extraordinary thing happened only an hour or so later. Grace had come to the party with her pretty goddaughter, Mary Lee—Peggy’s daughter, who had eloped with, and was now divorced from, John Paul “Bindy” Jones IV—and toward the end of the evening the young woman strolled out into the garden in the company of Ryan O’Neal. Rupert Allan remarked that the couple were taking their time about returning.
“Oh, to be young again,” sighed Grace with real feeling. “I wish it were me!”
As Judy Quine remarked when she got home that night, it was like having dinner with two different people. Grace seemed to be losing her center. Her natural, human impulses, the old frank and fallible Grace, would not be suppressed, but she seemed confused and wandering, unable to bring the conflicting components of her spirit together.
The author Gwen Robyns encountered this bewildered and in some ways immature woman in 1975 as she drew toward the conclusion of the first-ever biography of the princess. Robyns had received no cooperation from Monaco. Rainier and Grace had refused to have anything to do with her book. But undaunted, the New Zealander, who had previously written biographies of Vivien Leigh and Agatha Christie, took herself across to Philadelphia and won the confidence of Peggy, Grace’s elder sister.
“Frankly,” remembers Robyns today, “I think there was some jealousy there. Peggy really was a bright and lively mind. She was the eldest, the firstborn. According to the Kelly scenario, everything that happened to Grace should have happened to her.”
Through Peggy, Robyns met and interviewed Kell and Ma Kelly, and was passed on to Grace’s Hollywood friends, who gave her a very full briefing on Grace’s tangled love life before her meeting with Rainier. It was not the story Robyns had expected to write about the eminently respectable Grace Kelly, but she recorded it all faithfully in her manuscript, then sent it off to Monaco.
“I like to check my facts with my subjects wherever possible,” says Robyns. “Grace hadn’t helped me till that point, but I hoped that this might make her change her mind.”
The phone rang within days. Paul Choisit, Grace’s private secretary, was on the line to invite the author to Paris to meet the princess. Grace and Rainier had always kept a pied-à-terre in the French capital and they were in the process of exchanging this for a town house in the semi-private Square de l’Avenue Foch, a green and gated little enclave leading off the Paris equivalent of Eaton Square.
When the journalist Leslie Bennetts went to interview Grace, she had encountered a snooty princess who seemed to feel she was breathing different oxygen from the rest of mankind. The Grace that Judy Kanter and Maree Frisby Rambo knew was a warm and giggly, usually unpretentious woman. Now Gwen Robyns met yet another character—someone who appeared vulnerable and curiously unempowered.
The author arrived early for her appointment, and as she sat down to wait, she was passed in the hallway by what seemed to be a schoolgirl. “Face scrubbed, hair scraped back, a pleated skirt—I thought, ‘That can’t be Princess Grace.’ But when I got inside, I discovered that it was. She was behaving exactly like a schoolgirl, very shy and anxious, and extraordinarily insecure. She sat there across the room from me, pushing back on her fingernails. She seemed to be a bundle of nerves.”
The world-respected princess was confronted by the reality of her past, and she did not know quite what to do about it. “There are some things in the book . . . ,” she hesitated after some opening pleasantries, then launched into a discussion about the problems of raising daughters to be moral in the modern world. Caroline was a teenager, she explained, and was already starting to have boyfriends. Stephanie was ten. It was so important for a mother to be able to set her daughters a good example. . . .
“Well,” said Gwen Robyns, catching her drift, “we can go through the book together”—and together the two women embarked on a long and fascinating journey through the history of Grace’s premarital love affairs. Clark Gable, Ray Milland, William Holden, Oleg Cassini—Grace did not attempt to deny anything. “It would just be so very embarrassing,” she pleaded. “Ray Milland lives just up the road from us in Monaco. And William Holden—well, my husband doesn’t know about
that
one.”
Grace’s frankness was quite disarming. “How can I bring up my daughters not to have an affair with a married man,” she asked, “when I was having affairs with married men all the time?”
Gwen Robyns was right up against her publisher’s deadline. Grace was being so candid and vulnerable and human. She was little Gracie again, throwing herself on Gwen Robyn’s mercy. “What can I do to help you?” she was asking. “I really want to help you get things right—I’ll put you in touch with Phyllis.” [Phyllis Earle, formerly Phyllis Blum, had been Grace’s personal secretary in Monaco for many years and had become one of her closest friends.] “If only I had been briefed properly. If only somebody had picked up the telephone and told me you are one of us.”
“All right,” said Gwen Robyns, feeling both panicked and seduced—and feeling, above all, that she wanted to do something to help this new friend she appeared to have made. “Everything comes out.”
“I was crazy,” says the author today. “She had told me it was true, and I should have kept it all in. But that is just not my style. She’d told me about her daughters. I already had some inkling about the state of her marriage. What would have happened to her, personally, if I had published it? I just couldn’t do that to her. She had worked her spell on me.”
Gwen Robyn’s biography
Princess Grace
was published in the spring of 1976. It was warm and complimentary, with scarcely a hint of scandal, and a few weeks later the author received a call from Monaco. “I didn’t believe you would really do this,” Grace said. “Come and see me.” It was the beginning of a relationship that took rapid wing. Through the writing of her book, and through her contacts with the family in Philadelphia, Gwen Robyns already shared a curious intimacy with Grace. She had uncovered the secrets, and she had kept them. She had acted as if she were a friend—and now she became one, admitted to the private circle of women who basked in the glow of Grace’s giggles and baby talk. Gwen Robyns had written about it, but she was not ready for quite how playful and kittenish Grace could be.
The author and the princess decided to collaborate on a book about flowers, a passion which both women shared. Grace came to visit Gwen Robyn’s rose-decked, sixteenth-century farmhouse in Oxfordshire, and Gwen became a guest at Roc Agel. Staying in Monte Carlo at the Hermitage, she would be driven up the mountain every morning to spend long hours in the glass-ceilinged family room, strewn with piles of old telephone directories under which Grace liked to press and dry wildflowers.
Gwen Robyns was struck by how plain and almost peasantlike Grace looked in the morning, off-duty, without any makeup and with just a simple scarf on her head. “She didn’t look beautiful at all,” Robyns remembers. “She was not a vain person, always fussing about her appearance. Nor would I say she had natural dress sense or any great sense of style. There were times, in fact, when she could look really dowdy. But she got better as the day went on. She somehow became more beautiful with every passing hour, so that by eight o’clock at night, when the hairpieces went in and she had done a little bit of what I called her ‘no makeup makeup’ she looked truly fantastic. She wore just a light smear of foundation and some eye shadow. It was all she needed. That wonderful skin, her eyes, the cheekbones which still showed, even though her face was getting fuller—she would just knock you out.
It was her business to turn herself from something normal into something big, and she really knew how to do it.”
As they worked on their book together, the two women would have long talks about life. Grace was entering her mid-forties. She was starting to have problems with her looks and her weight. Gwen Robyns had noted how much time Grace was spending up in Paris, away from her husband, and wondered if this was really just for the official reason—the need to chaperone Caroline while her daughter was engaged in her university studies.
“You know,” Grace said to Gwen one morning, as they walked together in the rose garden, “I have to come to feel very sad in this marriage.”
The facade fell away. The admired and envied Princess Grace, the face that launched a thousand magazine covers, was suddenly a lonely woman in her forties who was having problems with her husband.
“He’s not really interested in me,” Grace said. “He doesn’t care about me.”
Gwen Robyns did not know what to say. In her time up at “the farm,” she had seen quite a lot of Rainier, and she had enjoyed his mildly malicious sense of fun. The prince and the author would secretly fill their glasses with vodka when Grace imposed a “water only” ordinance upon the household. In his “up” mood, Rainier could be the life and soul of the party.
But when he was down—or downright angry, which seemed to happen more as he entered his fifties—the prince was certainly not a man to whom anyone would care to be married. People often whispered that Rainier had mistresses. He invited David Swift on one occasion to join him on a men-only expedition to Paris, boasting of being able to obtain women who, as the prince put it, “tore the wallpaper off the walls.” Swift declined the invitation.
If Rainier did work up the energy for infidelity, however, his dalliances were very discreet. It was not something that Grace would complain of to her girlfriends. Her problem after nearly twenty years of marriage was that her husband was devoting the lion’s share of his spirit to his concrete wonderland by the sea— while he treated the interests and activities of his wife with indifference.
As her children grew older, Grace had spent more and more of her free time gathering wildflowers in the French hills above Monaco, drying and pressing them, then gluing them into collages which she framed. Several friends suggested that she should exhibit and sell some of her work, and the Galerie Drouant in Paris agreed to try a show.
Rainier made a rare visit north for the opening, which turned out to be
a glittering success. Almost every one of Grace’s dried flower arrangements was sold, and afterward the princely party adjourned to a restaurant for dinner. Sitting on the table was an arrangement of flowers, and Rainier plucked some petals from it and held them up against a plate.
“Sold!” he exclaimed, holding up the random arrangement of petals with clear derision. “For three thousand francs!”
Everyone laughed, but it seemed to one of her friends that Grace had some difficulty sharing the joke. She herself had been well aware that, without her princessly imprint, her collages would not have commanded a hundred francs, let alone a show in a Parisian art gallery. But it was a cruel moment to remind Grace of the fact. Nervous and uncertain before the opening, she had swelled visibly with pride as the red “sold” stickers began to multiply on her creations around the walls. Her friends had singled out particular pictures for special praise, pressed-flower experts had congratulated her on her technique, her ego had been delightfully caressed—and now her husband had turned it all to ashes.