Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (34 page)

“Rupert,” she insisted, “really, there is no romance.”

Prince Rainier wanted a wife. He was on the wrong side of thirty— May 31,1955, had marked his thirty-second birthday. It was a matter of dynastic necessity for him to take care of the succession, and in the eyes of some of Monaco’s more influential inhabitants, it was a matter of business necessity as well.

Somerset Maugham famously described Monaco as “a sunny place for shady people,” and if anyone exemplified that Côte d’Azur cocktail of swank and scandal it was Aristotle Onassis. The Greek shipping tycoon controlled the
Société des Bains de Mer et Cercle des Étrangers,
the Sea Bathing Society and Foreigners’ Club, whose quaint name belied its basic and unsentimental purpose, to extract maximum profits from Monte Carlo’s famous casino and luxury hotels. The SBM was a public company, and Onassis had recently won control of it through some nimble maneuvering on the Paris bourse. But his investment was not living up to his expectations. The big spenders were not coming to Monaco. A decade after World War II, the principality had a drab and dated air. It was the fading dowager of the Riviera.

Onassis was worried about what he described as this “legend in decline.” Monaco had lost its sparkle, he complained in 1955 to his American friend George Schlee during the cruise that he took with Schlee and Greta Garbo every summer. The place was nothing if it did not have glamour. Could not Schlee find some chic and scintillating American personality that young Prince Rainier could marry? It would attract rich Americans—and it might also put a smile on the face of the rather lugubrious prince. Onassis had all sorts of means by which he could bring a pretty girl to Monaco and make sure that she and Rainier would meet.

Schlee carried the challenge back to America to Gardner Cowles, the loquacious founder and publisher of
Look
magazine, who took great pleasure in broadcasting the story widely in later years—to the considerable irritation of Prince Rainier. The prince had not the slightest inkling of the activities of his self-appointed matchmakers, and he was less than amused by their idea of a chic and scintillating princess. Marilyn Monroe was staying with Milton Green, the photographer, not far from Cowles’s home in Connecticut, and Cowles invited the star over for drinks to see how she felt about the prospect of marriage to the Prince of Monaco.

“Is he rich? Is he handsome?” Marilyn wanted to know, giggling happily at the idea of marriage to the prince whom the party disrespectfully dubbed “Reindeer.” She had no idea where Monaco was—was it somewhere in Africa?—but she had little doubt that she could capture the heart of its retiring young ruler. “Give me two days alone with him,” she said to Gardner Cowles, “and of course he’ll want to many me.”

By the time Marilyn Monroe was joking over Monaco’s future beside Gardner Cowles’s Connecticut swimming pool, Prince Rainier was deep in correspondence with a film star who had a very different image. Struck at the start by how Grace did not conform to the normal movie-star stereotype, Rainier had felt himself increasingly drawn toward the aura of purity she evoked. He discussed her with his personal chaplain, Father Francis Tucker, an Irish-American member of the order of St. Vincent de Paul, and Father Tucker took it upon himself to send Grace a little note of his own. “I want to thank you,” he wrote, “for showing the Prince what an American Catholic girl can be, and for the very deep impression this has left on him.”

Rainier had taken to Grace from the moment she confided in him, soon after they met, that she had not really wanted to do the photo session that brought them together. Rainier himself had felt just the same. He had been a shy child, just as Grace had been, never feeling quite adequate in the duties placed upon him by membership in a demanding and high-profile family. As adult celebrities, neither the prince nor the movie star had any intention of giving up their fame, but both were starting to betray naggings of unhappiness about it, as if they felt that their public faces did not do justice to their private selves. Grace struck Rainier as steady, constant, honest—and he also liked her sense of humor. She had the spontaneity of an American without the besetting American sin of brashness, and as she revealed more of herself to him in her letters, he came to feel he was in touch with “someone very special.”

As a moderately good-looking prince with a yacht, a sports car, and a palace on the Riviera, Rainier had never had much trouble getting girlfriends. “My greatest difficulty,” he said at the time, “is knowing a girl long enough and intimately enough to find out if we are really soul mates as well as lovers.” Rainier’s correspondence with Grace solved that problem. He later described their letters as his “secret treasure garden”—the path that led him, step by step, toward the girl of his dreams. The challenge now was to test the dream against the reality. If Rainier and Grace were to progress beyond being pen pals they had to devise a way to meet, some casual-but-serious context in which they could get to know each other without too much pressure—and in the summer of 1955 they received help from an unexpected quarter.

Aunt Edie and Uncle Russ Austin were Philadelphia friends and Ocean City neighbors of the Kelly family, two of the crew of loud and laughing adults who featured prominently at Henry Avenue parties. They were not blood relations to Grace, but they were “uncle” and “aunt” to her when she was growing up, and Uncle Russ considered the connection strong enough for him to get in touch with Rainier when the Austins arrived in Cannes in 1955. The couple were on a European summer holiday, and Aunt Edie was anxious to go to Monaco for the Red Cross Ball, the highlight of the Riviera summer season. Uncle Russ knew about Grace’s meeting with the prince in the course of the Cannes Film Festival. So when the hotel concierge told them there was not a single ticket to the ball to be had by anyone on the coast—least of all by a couple of stray tourists—the Americans did not hesitate. Demonstrating all the brashness that little Grace so charmingly lacked, Uncle Russ called the palace to see if the prince could get them in.

The Kelly circle still cringes at the memory of Russ and Edie’s presumption. “We heard later that Rainier had just had his appendix taken out,” remembers Alice Godfrey. “One of his banks [the Monaco Bank of Precious Metals] was failing, Aristotle Onassis had taken over the casino, and Uncle Russ Austin gets on the phone to tell him that
he’s
got a problem.”

Uncle Russ’s request ended up on the desk of Father Tucker, and the sprightly chaplain did not hesitate. He got in a car, drove to Cannes, and personally delivered two ball tickets to the Austins, compliments of Prince Rainier. The priest then sat down with the visitors, and with all the skill of a seventy-three-year-old father confessor, got them to tell him everything they knew about Grace— her parents, her local church, her family background. The Austins needed no encouraging.

Those in Monaco who disliked Francis Tucker considered him a busybody who exerted a manipulative and even sinister influence over their prince. They compared him to Rasputin, and felt their mistrust justified when his career in the royal service ended badly in the early sixties, with a scandal over choirboys. By that date, however, Francis Tucker had played matchmaker to the most spectacular and widely watched Catholic wedding service of modern times, and, as such, had more than fulfilled his mission from the Vatican, which had assigned him to the principality in 1950.

The relationship between the Catholic church and Monaco’s ruling family had been particularly close since 1858, when the local bishop had allayed the fears of Rainier’s great-great-grandfather, Charles III, that the game of roulette, banned elsewhere in Europe, looked suspiciously like the immoral and forbidden pastime of gambling. In the right cause, the bishop assured the prince, gambling was no sin, and he proved it by holding a service of dedication for the new casino.

The bishop’s prayers were answered in a spectacular fashion. The casino of Monte Carlo, which opened on May 13, 1858, proved the key to the modern identity of the principality, bringing prosperity to the ruling house of Grimaldi and a life without income tax for the populace as a whole. It was only right that the church should get its share in the shape of a major contribution to the construction of a grandiose white marble cathedral up on the rock beside the palace, and it was in this tradition of cooperation that Father Tucker exerted himself in 1955 to find a suitable bride for the master he referred to as “My Lord Prince.” Russ and Edie Austin found themselves going to more than the Red Cross Ball. Father Tucker invited them up to the palace to take tea with Prince Rainier as well.

In years to come it was only natural that Aunt Edie and Uncle Russ should have come to see the contact they established with Prince Rainier and his chaplain in the summer of 1955 as the decisive moment in the romance of the century, the initiative from whose enterprise everything flowed. It was not realized at the time that Grace and Rainier were already writing to each other, and that the couple would, certainly, have contrived some way of their own to meet. But the when and the where of the meeting was definitely the work of the two Austins and Father Tucker, who, between them, fixed on Philadelphia as the first major stop on the itinerary of the prince’s forthcoming trip to America. The Austins would return Rainier’s gracious hospitality by having him to lunch at their home, then they would take him over with them to Henry Avenue for the Kelly’s traditional Christmas evening party. Aunt Edit took it upon herself to prime Grace for the occasion.

“He’s a very nice young man,” she told her, “and he would like to see you again.”

Edie had telephoned long distance, catching Grace while she was caught up in the shooting of
The Swan,
and the actress was carefully noncommittal on the subject of Prince Rainier.

“He’s short,” she said. “I met him”—her tone implying to her auntie that she had not been that impressed.

“Well,” persisted Edie, “he would very much like to see you again—and I am not going to bring him along unless you promise you’ll be nice to him. I don’t want any of this, you know, frosty, cold-shoulder bit.” Edie had had some experience, she would explain in her retelling of the story, of how Grace “could knock you down with a stare.”

“All right, Aunt Edie,” Grace replied, being careful to reveal not the slightest excitement. “I’ll be nice to him.”

John Pochna was Aristotle Onassis’s general counsel and legal advisor. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he was a member of the bars of New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, so when Onassis heard of Prince Rainier’s plans to visit America at the end of 1955, he suggested that his attorney should go along for the ride. Pochna might be able to proffer some useful legal advice, and it would be a very good way of keeping an eye on whatever the prince and his energetic American chaplain might be up to.

Pochna had already spent some time with Rainier, and he had not been enormously impressed. The prince was a profligate golfer—he might lose as many as half a dozen balls in the course of a round—and he cut a knock-kneed figure on the tennis court. You did not often catch him in shorts. This did not sit well with Pochna, a strong and salty hunk of American physique who was not too different in build or outlook from Jack Kelly. The lawyer had been especially alarmed when, in the course of a visit to Paris, Rainier took him to a
Cage aux Folles
style
nightclub featuring drag queens. “It was this little dingy theater,” remembered Pochna, “with truck drivers and all the rest of it, fondling each other.”

Pochna decided that the prince was not gay. Rainier was curious and daring—a man who stuck his arm in tigers’ cages. He was also a spirit who seemed faintly bored and lost. He could be a melancholy fellow, a young man who had so many options, and nothing that he really wanted. For six years in his twenties, Rainier had had a love affair with the French actress Gisele Pascal, living with her openly in his villa at Cap Ferrat—to the neglect of his princely duties, in the opinion of some Monégasques. Rainier himself was offhand about the liaison. “It was fine while it lasted,” he later said, suggesting that it was never a matter of great moment to him. “It simply ended.” But the prince did get on his boat and depart on a solitary voyage down the coast of West Africa when that “simple” ending came about.