Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (44 page)

The solution was for Allan to work for Monaco alone, and over the years he helped Rainier and Grace create the PR network that suited them. Allan had already found the couple a press secretary who could handle day-to-day queries on the spot. Nadia Lacoste, a tough and intelligent woman of Grace’s age, dealt with most European press inquiries. Based in New York, Howell Conant photographed and arranged the picture features in the big American magazines. “If a fellow wanted a story on Grace,” remembers Conant, “he damn well wrote a
nice
story, not some sleazy thing.”

Look
magazine was the outlet of choice. “When Bill Arthur was the editor,” remembers Conant, “he would send over all the text to Grace for her approval.”
Look
was also willing to accept Conant’s packages of photos as edited by Grace. “
Life,
”
remembers Conant, “would not accept that, so we did not use them very often.”

Rupert Allan’s principal work was carried on behind the scenes. The correspondence files of Hedda Hopper, now in the archives of the Academy of Motion Pictures in Hollywood, are notable for the private “briefing” letters that were sent to the gossip columnist by movie stars anxious to curry favor—home-cooked press releases in which some of Hollywood’s most famous names groveled to plant stories or to correct unfavorable publicity. David Niven was particularly energetic with his “Dear Hedda” letters. In the case of Grace and Rainier, it was Rupert Allan who did the writing.

“I’ve never seen two happier people than Grace and the prince,” Allan wrote to Hopper from Gstaad in September 1957. “There is absolutely no truth whatsoever—nor that has there ever been—to the silly rumors made up by hungry European journalists about rifts and the like. . . . They are the happiest young married couple I know.”

Allan had a flatteringly personal tidbit to pass on to the columnist from the princess. “I told Grace how you thought her hair photographed better lighter, and she tells me that it is exactly the shade now that it was when she made her first films in Hollywood.” Grace’s blondness had always needed a little extra assistance.

Allan also had some sterner news. Uncle George’s friend, Gant Gaither, who had become part of the Manhattan House circle and had been one of the Kelly party on the
Constitution,
had published a book,
Princess of Monaco,
which had caused offense to both Grace and Rainier. Gaither had not written maliciously. The adulatory tone of his book was actually embarrassing. But he had trespassed into forbidden territory when he alluded to the rows inside the Grimaldi family—
and he had also hinted at Grace’s unhappiness over the newspaper series written by her mother.

“She is just very disappointed,” Allan wrote to Hedda Hopper. “She had only given him approval on the
Constitution
to write a story on the trip on the
Constitution
and the wedding. He enlarged the scope of the book on his own and without approval.”

Grace and Rainier did not speak to Gaither for years. He was cut off—abruptly banished from the group of old friends who would visit Monaco in the summer and get together with Grace and Rainier on their regular visits to the States. The ban expressed the couple’s sense of betrayal, but it was also intended, some of Grace’s friends suspected, as a warning to everyone else. “It was the first visible symptom,” wrote Judy Kanter, “of a disease Grace caught almost at the moment she got to Monaco. It was called royalism.”

This was not entirely fair. Gaither subsequently made his peace, and was, in time, invited back into the charmed circle. It was not especially “royalist” of Rainier and Grace to expect basic discretion of their friends. Their fault lay in wanting it both ways. It was their choice to exploit the details of their personal lives for the greater glory and prosperity of Monaco, so it was hardly realistic to get on their high horses when, from time to time, the wrong details got disclosed.

Wanting it both ways, however, was the way things worked in Monaco. It was the very nature of the place—a state which called itself independent, but which could not survive a day without the tolerance of France. Rainier’s public relations campaign was a modern version of the dance the Grimaldis had performed for centuries. He was laying claim to a sovereignty and substance he did not quite possess—and his bluff was called in the spring of 1962, six years after his marriage to Grace.

It was not just tourists that were enticed to Monaco in the late fifties. Businessmen and tax exiles came too. Monaco’s minimal corporate levies—and nonexistent income tax—had long attracted a select group of international cleversticks and the super-rich, but the wedding of the century had made it everybody’s secret. By 1961 Monaco’s business turnover had reached $128 million, a 400 percent increase in ten years. For 1962 a turnover of $200 million dollars was anticipated.

Rainier had actively encouraged this process. His country’s dependence on its casino income had embarrassed him ever since his school days, when boys called him “fat Monaco” and made jokes about his growing up to be a croupier. It was a regular theme of his interviews that the casino brought in less income than people imagined, and in 1960 he appointed an energetic young American, Martin Dale, the former U.S. Vice-Consul in Nice, to be the economic equivalent of Rupert Allan, drumming up business publicity and new investors for Monaco.

Wiry and brainy, the twenty-nine-year-old Dale carried the title of Privy Councillor to Rainier. Jealous s called him “the pocket Richelieu.” Endlessly scheming, Dale worked with Yves Laye, a French lawyer from Algeria, to set up MEDEC, the Monaco Economic Development Corporation, a glossy Chamber of Commerce operation, and they rapidly got results. In less than two years MEDEC attracted 103 new corporate entities to Monaco and helped arrange several hundred more business permits for foreign corporations.

The trouble was that a large number of these new arrivals were French. All that a Marseilles trucking contractor needed to do was to buy office space in Monaco, secure his business permit through MEDEC, and get Monégasque license plates for his trucks. The vehicles could remain garaged in Marseilles, and he could go on living in Marseilles, with no disruption to his life. It was not strictly legal, but he might even rent out his “office” in Monaco as a home to a local couple—and once he was established as a Monégasque corporate entity (the full process took five years) he would no longer have to pay fifty percent of his profits in French corporation tax. By 1962 there were no less than ten trucking companies all based inside the mile-square state of Monaco.

Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the French Minister of Finance, called a press conference at which he tried to telephone a variety of French businesses that were registered in Monaco. None of the businesses answered. France had tolerated Monaco’s tax advantages for almost exactly a hundred years in the spirit of the protectorate, but now the junior partner was clearly taking advantage. Giscard spoke of four multimillionaires known to him personally who were supposed to be domiciled in Monaco, but who spent all their time in Paris.

The ultimate insult for France’s imperious new president, Charles de Gaulle, was that many of the French colonists who were repatriating their money as a result of the war in Algeria were choosing to avoid French tax and to place their funds in Monaco. These embittered emigrés were de Gaulle’s most implacable opponents. They supported and funded the OAS which,
Day of the Jackal
-style,
was organizing assassination attempts upon the president’s life. So the little country which France had officially protected since 1861 was using its privileges to aid and abet the sworn enemies of France’s head of state.

Many of these political maneuverings went somewhat over Grace’s head. She and Rainier had met de Gaulle on a state visit to Paris in 1959. To prepare for the trip, Grace had sent to the municipal library for a copy of the general’s memoirs—then saw how huge the volume was. She asked a secretary to provide her with a resume.

Rainier did not believe that his wife needed to be involved in the details of his government work, and Grace totally agreed. It was not her function. The prince’s aristocratic view of his ancient duties precisely meshed with Grace’s middle-class values from the suburbs. Playing the role of a princess was not that different from vacuum-cleaning in her pearls. Grace saw her royal duty as being the model corporate wife to her husband—the chiefest of chief executives—and she did it to perfection in 1959 when she accompanied Rainier to Paris. The congenitally anti-American de Gaulle was enchanted by her insistence on speaking to him only in French, and he found her lapses of grammar and pronunciation quite “charming.”

Thanks to Grace’s style and smoothness, the visit was a triumph. “Grace of Monaco reigned over fifteen ministers and three hundred subjects at the Elysée,” reported
Paris Presse.
For three days Grace toured French hospitals, schools and orphanages, winning friends wherever she went. “The best ambassador I have is Grace,” Rainier commented proudly.

The prince might have been advised to let his wife handle the details of his 1962 dispute with France. Late one night in January of that year, angry voices were raised in the palace as Rainier met with Emile Pelletier, the French civil servant who, according to the Franco-Monégasque protocols, was effectively the prince’s prime minister. Some reports said that Rainier actually struck Pelletier. Pelletier would only admit that Rainier had insulted him with words that were “not repeatable in polite society”—and, worse, that the prince had made comments that slighted the honor of France.

The argument had been over the profits of Radio Monte Carlo, the prosperous commercial radio station whose transmitters were in France and whose principal audience and advertisers were French as well. Though the station made its living out of France, Rainier had sought to prohibit further French investment in its controlling company in order to protect existing Monégasque investors, and his attitude pushed de Gaulle beyond the limit. Here was the young Prince of Monaco wanting it both ways again, and doing so with extraordinary hubris.

Rainier sacked Pelletier. De Gaulle gave notice that he was abrogating France’s agreements with the principality. There were six months of desultory negotiations, and then the French president stopped the talking. At midnight on October 12,1962, on a night of pouring rain, bands of French customs officers, clad in oilskins, emerged from the darkness to block the main roads leading in and out of Monaco. They set up signs which read “Halt—Customs,” and they proceeded to stop the traffic. For the first time in nearly four centuries, the principality was under siege.

“They may enclose Monaco with barbed wire tomorrow,” wrote Grace in alarm to Prudy Wise. Grace and Rainier were in Paris when news of the blockade came, and they went hurrying back to Monaco.

The blockade was not quite what it seemed. The border between France and Monaco was clearly delineated at a few main roads, but it ran, for the most part, in a higgledy-piggledy fashion, down streets and alleys, and even, on occasions through the middle of buildings. The Church of the Sacred Heart was built squarely across the frontier, and Monaco’s professional soccer team played on a field which had one goal in France and the other in Monaco.

De Gaulle’s customs officers were carrying out an exercise in tokenism. They made no attempt to control travelers arriving or departing by train. Since Monaco and France had practiced free trade for centuries, and used the same currency, there were no customs duties to enforce, in any case. By checking papers and cargos, the
douaniers
were simply trying to make a nuisance of themselves. Long queues of fuming motorists built up at the exits and entrances to the principality. “Instead of traveling for twenty minutes, I was in the car for an hour and a half,” remembered John Pochna, who commuted every day between Onassis’s offices in Monte Carlo and his own home in Villefranche. “It was de Gaulle’s way of giving Rainier a spanking.”

The general meant business. The French government blocked the sale of Monégasque-produced pharmaceuticals in France. There were about a dozen small laboratories manufacturing medicinal drugs in Monaco, and the French ban immediately put three hundred technicians out of work. Another French ordinance threatened to shut down Monaco’s trucking companies. If de Gaulle decided to do more than just spank, the prospects scarcely bore contemplating. Monaco’s fresh water, electricity, and gas all came from plants in France.

Rainier had no choice. He had to capitulate. His negotiators did what they could to soften de Gaulle’s demands, but the agreement reached in May 1963 made clear the extent of the General’s victory. There was no more MEDEC—and no more Martin Dale. French investors could buy into Radio Monte Carlo as freely as Monégasques. As an incidental to the conflict, Rainier had been forced to patch up his quarrel with his troublesome National Council, which he had, at one point, suspended. Now the people of Monaco had a new constitution, limiting Rainier’s power to suspend their elected assemblies.

Most significant of all, French citizens could no longer enjoy Monaco’s tax privileges. They could live, work, and do business in the principality but, unless they had been registered as residents there prior to 1957, they had to pay full, French rates of tax. Monaco could continue to be a tax haven, but now this was only for the benefit of the Monégasques themselves and for people of other nationalities: Italians, Britons, Germans, Swedes—anyone, so long as they were not French.