CHAPTER FIFTEEN
On August 2, over Radio Monte Carlo, Prince Rainier announced to his subjects that his wife was expecting a baby. “It is a great joy for me to associate you all in our new happiness,” Rainier said. “This must reinforce our hope in the future.” The impending birth of Monaco’s heir stirred joy in the Monegasques and renewed world interest in the tiny country. Once again a circus mentality took hold: in London insurance brokers set premiums for insurance against no heir being born, and in Monte Carlo casino gamblers were laying money on the baby’s sex: the odds were five to seven the child would be a boy.
As the birth neared, the world’s press again streamed into Monaco, hoping for scoops, inside stories, and the first pictures of the infant. Lack of news, as before, resulted in absurdity: much was made over the fact that Rainier had bought a pony, an act somehow interpreted as an indication that the Prince expected his child to be a boy. Rainier explained it meant nothing of the sort.
Her pregnancy proved difficult for Grace. She felt nauseated for months: “They told me about morning sickness, but they didn’t tell me you could be sick all day every day.” Her childhood tendency to colds and infections returned; she seemed to suffer an interminable series of sore throats and viruses. She also became ravenously hungry at all hours of the day and night, and she gained over twenty-five pounds. Pregnant women are urged to eat well, but Grace went so far that her doctor told her she was eating too much.
Grace’s preparations for her baby’s arrival became, in the absence of any other pressing obligation, all-consuming. She read books on natural childbirth and breast-feeding, and she worked closely with George Stacey to convert a room within the palace apartments into a nursery. “He’s designed a really ingenious cabinet and shelving arrangement for the baby’s linen!” she wrote home.
Toward the end of 1956, as her condition began to show more and more, Grace rarely ventured out of the palace. On one of her outings, as she made her way to her car to return to the palace, a crowd of subjects gathered around her. A woman pushed forward and suddenly put her open hand on Grace’s belly, rubbed it, and wished her luck. Grace and many in the crowd laughed, but Madge Tivey-Faucon gasped in horror. It wasn’t until Grace was in the car and the potential danger of the situation was impressed upon her that she became frightened. From then on, even Grace’s simplest excursions from the palace were sheathed in secrecy.
This encounter led Grace and Rainier to change their plan to have her give birth in a hospital. The Prince was already concerned about the growing hordes of reporters and photographers in Monaco. Now there was fear that the Monegasques themselves might get carried away in their excitement, and a jostling by either press or subjects could not be risked. Citing the Monegasque tradition that princely heirs be born in the palace, Rainier announced the change of plans. The newsmen were sorely disappointed—they had already asked the ambulance driver to slow down as he passed a preappointed spot so that cameras could catch Grace in labor.
Hastily a library in the apartments was converted into a delivery room and draped in green silk. (An Irish superstition says that surrounding a newborn baby with green will assure the child a pure, happy, and prosperous life.)
The child was due early in February, but in mid-January Grace’s gynecologist, Dr. Émile Hervet, told her that the delivery would probably be sooner. Hervet and two colleagues remained in Monaco to await the birth, and Grace telephoned her mother to ask her to be at her side for the delivery. Mrs. Kelly arrived shortly before Grace went into labor.
Traditionally the citizens of Monaco learn of the birth of their prince’s heir by a salute of cannons; 21 firings signified a girl, 101 a male heir. On January 20 a twenty-one-gun salute was heard, setting off jubilation in the land, but it was a false alarm: the firings were in honor of the visiting Sultan of Morocco.
Grace began her labor at 3 A.M. on January 23 and was taken to the delivery room. Rainier waited in an adjoining room, chainsmoking and pacing nervously as the hours wore on without word. After sunrise Prince Pierre, Princess Antoinette, and Mrs. Kelly joined him for the wait. At 9:27 A.M. Grace delivered without anesthetic a healthy, eight-pound, three-ounce girl. When she saw the child, Grace wept. Dr. Hervet described the baby’s wails as “like a melody resounding through the palace.” Rainier, moved by both the personal and political implications of this birth, gazed at his daughter for several minutes, then kissed his wife. He phoned the news to his mother.
Outside the palace, a young cyclist got the word and raced to the harbor. A cannon on the waterfront roared twenty-one blasts —and this time the Monegasques knew it was the real thing. As soon as the cannon stopped, fourteen churches around the principality began ringing their bells, and boats in the harbor sounded their horns —led by Aristotle Onassis’s yacht, Christina, its siren audible six miles away.
As Grace cradled her daughter and sipped champagne, Rainier went to a nearby chapel to pray, then addressed his subjects. “My beloved wife, the Princess, has given birth to a baby princess who has been given the name of Caroline Louise Marguerite. Thank God and rejoice.” In a traditional ceremony, Monegasque government officials were brought in to view the infant and be assured that she was indeed their prince’s heir. Then television cameras were rolled in to broadcast the sleeping face of Monaco’s littlest princess to her subjects.
A national holiday was declared. School was let out, Monte Carlo’s sole prisoner was freed from jail, gambling ceased, free champagne was served throughout the principality, and red-and-white bunting was draped over every available surface. Monaco’s sovereignty was once again assured.
Back in Philadelphia a reporter asked Grace’s father for his reaction to the heralded arrival. His response was in character. “Oh shucks,” he said. “I wanted a boy.”
Although Jack Kelly’s bluntness was typically insensitive, he expressed a sentiment many others felt but were too polite to reveal. Monaco had never had a princess at its helm of state, and unless Grace produced a male heir, the Monegasques would never feel completely comfortable with Rainier’s successor. People the world over, in fact, apparently would have preferred a little prince: of the thousands of baby gifts sent to the palace before the birth, almost all were intended for a boy. There were stacks of clothes in the nursery sent by well-wishers, almost all boys’ suits and pullovers. Only one dress could be found among the piles. Grace, indifferent to the sex of her child, said in a newspaper column shortly after Caroline’s birth, “If we have a boy later on he will become the heir to the principality; but he will never be more important or dearer to us than the present heir, our firstborn, Caroline.”
In the same column, Grace revealed that she was breast-feeding her baby. An American public heavily wooed by advertised modernity and convenience, yet still prudish in matters of health and sexuality, was shocked by both the fact and the admission. Bottles, formulas, and disposable rubber nipples had taken the place of a mother’s breast, particularly among the middle and upper classes, and Grace’s decision seemed to fly in the face of progress. To her, this “advance” was abhorrent: nothing was more important to her than the spiritual and physical closeness of mother and child; manufactured “conveniences” distanced a vulnerable and dependent human being from its chief nurturer. Grace was surprised by the disapproval. Breast-feeding, she retorted, was “wholly normal and right—I never considered anything else.” Later Grace would become involved in the La Leche League, to which breast-feeding is a carefully considered political issue. But in 1956 her decision was made purely on maternal instinct.
Six months after Caroline’s birth, newspapers reported a kidnap threat against the baby. The palace had received unsigned letters detailing an abduction plot, the reports said, and although Grace and Rainier considered the threats only a “vicious prank,” they were taken seriously enough that a group of Swiss plainclothesmen were sent to guard the child at the family villa in Gstaad, where they were vacationing.
The parents were horrified with the international coverage the threats received; they feared that it might put a madman in mind of just such an abduction. The palace issued an official denial of the story, and Prince Pierre told a reporter, “If Prince Rainier had received any anonymous letters threatening my granddaughter, I, as a grandfather, would be much less calm than I am this morning.” The palace asserted that the security measures around Caroline were routine. (It was sadly true that threats against all members of the princely family had become a fact of life.)
Two months later Grace gave her first press interview since the birth of Caroline. Sounding every inch the proud mother, she said of her daughter, “I must agree with people who say she’s gorgeous. She weighs nineteen pounds now, has big fat cheeks and very long legs. She has dark blue eyes like her father and she’s even getting more hair—with the beginning of a blond curl which we are coaxing along. She’s got her first tooth, a bottom one, and she was pretty fussy when it came too. Now she’s chewing everything she can get into her mouth. She has chewed her bedclothes, all my beads, my husband’s ties, and even the ears on our poodles.”
Grace denied that she was pregnant again; she said that reports that Rainier had ordered profile pictures of her destroyed were false: “I myself killed those pictures. I don’t like looking fat, especially when I’ve lost weight during vacation playing tennis and hiking. I weigh about 120 pounds now. That’s above my old movie weight but my husband refuses to let me lose weight—he says I was too thin before.” In fact, Grace was two months pregnant at this point, but for whatever reason she preferred to deny it. She did admit, “I’d like to be pregnant again, and sooner or later those rumors of my pregnancy are going to be true.”
She had conceived again less than five months after Caroline’s birth. “It’s hard to remember not being pregnant in those days,” she said later. Rainier’s strong desire for a son may have had something to do with the immediacy of Grace’s next conception, but in any event, on March 14, 1958, the Prince of Monaco had his heir apparent: Grace gave birth to an eight-pound, eleven-ounce boy whom the Grimaldis named Albert Alexandre Louis Pierre. Once again Grace delivered in the palace, and as Dr. Hervet stepped out of the delivery room he said simply to Rainier, “My Lord Prince, I congratulate you on your son and heir.”
This time, the excitement was so great there was no waiting for the cannon salvos. One of the palace staff stuck her head out a window and yelled to the crowd gathered below, “It’s a boy! It’s a boy!” Aristotle Onassis, informed that a child had been born to the Prince, telephoned the principality from his London hotel suite in order to hear the number of cannon shots. After the twenty-second blast, he hung up. There were seventy-nine more. For this birth, Grace received two million orchids and, from the Prince, “a river of diamonds.”
His voice faltering, Rainier once again took to the airwaves. “Monegasques and residents of the principality, you will understand my emotion and very great joy in announcing to you that the Princess, my beloved wife, has given birth to a little prince. Let us thank God for this new happiness, this proof of His special blessing.”
One of the Grimaldis, however, wasn’t all that happy about the new addition. Caroline, while only a toddler, felt envious of all the attention the new addition was getting. As an adult she recalled that shortly after Albert’s birth, “I was taken to see my mother. She was holding Albert in her arms. I had a little bouquet of flowers I was supposed to give her, and everyone kept saying, ‘Go on, give your mother the flowers,’ but I wouldn’t. Finally, I just threw them at her.”
Motherhood was to Grace her most important role, and she was determined to carry it out well. Hurt by her mother’s delegation of many of her maternal duties to nurses, Grace vowed to herself that she would do better by her own children. After Caroline’s birth, she told a reporter, “I’m not going to let public life or anything else push me out of my job as a mother. In America children of wealthy parents are so often given over completely to nurses from the start. Mine is not going to be.” Grace was asked how her own childhood would influence her upbringing of her children, and her response was described as “cautious”: “I think you have to give a child love and understanding—and, above all, treat him as an individual.”
Still, Grace wanted to guard against any overreaction in her avoidance of what she saw as the deficiencies in her own upbringing: “Even if there were things that your parents didn’t do for you, that doesn’t mean you ought to do that particular thing for your child. He might not require it.”
While Grace tried hard not to give her children “over completely to nurses,” she did engage them. Margaret Stahl, a sweet-faced young maternity nurse from Switzerland, was the first, joined by Englishwoman Maureen King after Albert’s birth. Grace hired nurses roughly her own age, so that she would not feel intimidated by an overbearing older woman with entrenched ideas of her own. Prince Pierre may have been instrumental in that decision; Rainier and Antoinette’s nurse, he told Grace, was a formidable woman who tyrannized over him: “I was never allowed into the nursery to see my children.”
Caroline’s and Albert’s nurses were helpmeets to Grace, nothing more. The parents had very definite ideas about child rearing, particularly of the princely variety. Albert’s upbringing posed special problems; he had to be groomed to one day take over Monaco’s helm from his father. Don Richardson says, “The boy was totally isolated from Grace. She was able to visit him and eat with him and all that, but his upbringing was entirely in his father’s hands, because he was training him to be the prince.”
Grace’s sister Peggy confirms that Albert was being “trained” by his father, and she adds, “Albert’s godfather Prince Louis— Rainier’s cousin—was just as instrumental in Albie’s upbringing. He had to be groomed to take Rainier’s place as the leader of the country.” But, Peggy says, “Grace had a lot to say about Albie’s upbringing, too. She was the one who wanted to send him to camp in the United States ... Rainier went along with that. He was willing for his children to have the American influence that they did.”
That influence was unavoidable. As the children grew older, their sensibilities were more or less equally American and Monegasque. The only caution was that they shouldn’t confuse the two. They were taught French and English, for instance, but were allowed to speak only one language at a time—to avoid developing a hybrid of the two tongues.
“Hybrid” is perhaps as apt a term as any to describe the rearing of the littlest prince and princess. Just as in the marriage of their parents, conflicting necessities often arose. Both children needed to understand as much as possible the niceties of protocol and the responsibilities of their positions. At her third birthday party, for example, Caroline acted as hostess to twenty-five children. While Albert’s attentions were focused on the birthday cake, Caroline “received” the other children as they bowed and curtsied to her. Such an exalted position created problems for the little girl; as one observer asked, “On what basis do you play with somebody who has to bow to you?” To help balance things a bit, Grace began a class within the palace when Caroline was four that included other Monegasque children, to allow her daughter to interact with other girls her own age (presumably, they did not have to bow to her). The following year, Albert and two other boys joined the class.
Caroline and Albert’s rarefied life, according to their cousin Grace LeVine (Lizanne’s daughter, the child she was carrying at the time of Grace’s wedding), was as natural to them as any other. “When you don’t know anything else, you don’t miss it. When I went over there at a very young age, being followed around by a nanny really bothered me, and I was glad I wasn’t growing up there and had to always answer to somebody. You couldn’t just run out to the backyard anytime you wanted to ...”
Grace was always on guard against the children’s developing a regal hauteur. When Albert said sharply to a butler, “You may take my plate away,” Grace told him to do it himself. It took some doing, however, to make Caroline respectful; Madge Tivey-Faucon recalled that when the child would call her in the morning to fetch her for her private lessons, she would yell into the receiver, “I’m awake!” and hang up. Eventually, through reprimand and example and lack of special treatment, Grace and Rainier were able to avoid having their children turn into haughty monsters. “I don’t think they realized they were anything special for a long time,” Maureen King recalled.
Grace’s sometimes unorthodox child-rearing methods became the talk of Europe during the early 1960s. A typical story tells of how the Princess got Caroline to stop biting her little brother. Warnings didn’t work, and Albert did nothing to defend himself. Finally, Grace took Caroline’s arm and bit it, hard, to show her how it felt. Caroline stopped.
“I’m afraid I’m very severe at times,” Grace said. “Outsiders might think I’m too hard on the children. But I give them just as much love as I do discipline, and it seems to work out very well.”
There were times, however, when Grace seemed anything but disciplinary. Observers marveled at the freedom Albert and Caroline were given. In Europe children of wealth are most often “seen and not heard,” and are relegated to separate parts of the house during meals and activities involving adults. Grace and Rainier frequently brought their children along on state visits, and it was not unusual for them to burst into official functions and interrupt their father. Several times Grace was permissive even by American standards. During an artist’s exhibit, Madge Tivey-Faucon reported, Caroline had the artist “tearing her hair” by running up and down the aisles, sliding on the polished floor of the gallery. Grace did nothing but look at the pictures. And during a reception for ex-Queen Victoria Eugenia of Spain, at which precious ornaments were on display in the palace drawing room, Albert and Caroline tore around the room “like a hurricane,” Tiv wrote, touching the artifacts “with irreverent baby fingers. ... The Princess just went on looking at the collection. She did not bat an eyelid.”
The children’s displays of temperament often went unpunished; Grace interrupted evening plans whenever Caroline wailed as she and Rainier were leaving the palace—which, according to Tiv, was almost always. “The Princess can never resist her daughter’s tears,” she wrote. “She turns back at the first sob ... the Princess bends over the child and consoles her gently until she stops crying. This may last a quarter of an hour. But the Princess never becomes impatient or angry. To avoid these frequent dramas, she often prefers to bring Caroline and Albert with her.”
The children could scarcely have been less alike. Caroline, it seemed, had inherited her father’s Latin disposition as well as his dark looks. She was mercurial, quick to laughter and to tears, strong-willed and definite, and jealous of any attention paid to Albert, especially by her father. Albert clearly took after his mother, from his fair hair and skin to his disposition—an “easy, sweet nature,” as Grace put it in a letter to Don Richardson. Willing to let his sister bite him at will without complaint, he was quiet, self-involved, able to sit through mass at the age of two and a half without fidgeting. Both children were enormously bright, but while Caroline’s intelligence took the form of scattered curiosity and mimicry, Albert’s was more linear. Once, at the circus Rainier had to continually coax his son to watch the performers rather than read the program; Albert was intensely interested in whether the acts were doing exactly what the program stated they would do.
There was no way to avoid spoiling the children with material lavishness; practically every palace visitor brought toys for Albert and Caroline, and they were frequently duplications of toys the children already had. On one occasion, French President and Mme. Charles de Gaulle arrived with a doll for Caroline and a red rocking horse for Albert. After a few minutes Grace whispered frantically to Madge Tivey-Faucon, “Fly down to the nursery, Tiv, and hide Albert’s red horse!” The children expressed only mild interest when she did so, and when Mme. de Gaulle gave Albert the horse, he took it eagerly, never mentioning that he already had one just like it. “Madame de Gaulle was delighted,” Tiv wrote, “and the Princess sighed with relief.”
Caroline’s collection of dolls was housed in its own specially built cabinet; one doll, a gift from America, came complete with a trousseau including a bikini, cocktail dress, and evening gown. Aristotle Onassis sent Albert a miniature car that ran on electricity and duplicated every aspect of a real automobile. Rainier, according to Grace, was frequently the worst offender: “Sometimes he goes too far as a disciplinarian, but more often he goes too far by spoiling them. He’s likely to arrive loaded down with presents because he hasn’t seen them for ten days. Once, when we were in Spain for the coronation of Juan Carlos, he spent a whole afternoon saying he had to bring something back for [the children]. I kept telling him, ‘Forget it, they don’t need anything.’ There was nothing to be done. He went off on a hunt for Spanish records. He has always loved running around the shops ...”
Never far from Grace’s mind was the vulnerability of her children to harm. The publicized kidnapping of young Eric Peugeot sent Grace into a near-panic for Albert’s safety. “I am afraid,” she told Tiv. “There are so many maniacs capable of anything.” And an outbreak of infantile paralysis led the Princess, according to Tiv, to have “the nursery quarantined: neither the children’s nurses nor I were allowed to leave for a month.”18
On another occasion, Grace received a letter from a doctor in America who wrote that he had seen a photograph in which she was holding Caroline’s arm in a way that could result in dislocation. “I advise you to be very careful,” the doctor concluded, “for it could be very painful for your child and frightening for you.” Grace vowed to be more careful in the future, but only a few days later, at the family ranch at Roc Agel, Grace heard screams coming from the garden. “It was Caroline,” Tiv wrote. “The young nursemaid had done this very thing when she was taking Caroline for a walk, and the child’s arm hung like a puppet’s. I thought the Princess was going to faint. Then suddenly she pulled herself together and flew at the nurse. This is one of the rare times I saw the Princess lose her self-control.”
Roc Agel, although just a few miles from the palace, afforded the princely family an entirely different lifestyle than that of “the Rock.” The Prince purchased the building and sixty acres in 1957, and by 1959 Grace had renovated the structure into a charming farmhouse with a tiled roof, heavy beams, and stone walls. There, the Grimaldis lived a far more self-sufficient lifestyle. The children pitched in with the chores, Grace tended to the vegetable and flower gardens, Rainier cared for the animals and rode the horses. More than anything, Roc Agel was Rainier’s concession to Grace’s homesickness; there, she could be more herself than anywhere else except Philadelphia: the kitchen she’d designed was entirely American (including the plumbing), and symbolically, one of the bathrooms was covered with stills from Grace’s movies. Usually the family would barbecue hamburgers and hot dogs; if the weather was bad, Grace would prepare experimental Chinese and Italian dishes, with varying success.
It was important for Grace and Rainier to maintain a sense of balance by getting away from the strictures, pomp, and protocol of the palace; it was even more vital, they felt, for the children to do so. Caroline and Albert not only needed to learn self-sufficiency, their parents believed, they also had to remain level-headed about their stature: they were special, yes, but they were not put on earth to be waited upon. Lizanne LeVine recalls that the children learned this lesson very well: “They could come to anyone’s house here in America and make their beds, clean up their rooms, pitch in with dinner and the dishes. They were taught to do that, not that they should expect someone to wait on them all the time.”
To raise children in a bilingual, bicultural environment, to give them a balanced outlook while never letting them forget the responsibilities of their positions, to make them understand the subtle and not-so-subtle differences among Monegasque, French, and American customs and sensibilities, could not have been an easy task for Grace and Rainier. But these would prove among the couple’s easier challenges. More difficult would be molding individual, self-confident personalities among children whose parents were not only the vortex of their world but of their country’s as well. Many children feel inadequate to live up to their parents’ accomplishments; how daunting this must then have been for Caroline and Albert.
As her children grew up, Princess Grace was most often heralded in women’s magazines as “Monaco’s Perfect Mother.” She was no more so than any other woman has ever been. She was a good mother, loving, concerned that she do what was right for her children. But she made mistakes, and she repeated a few of the ones her mother had made with her (the irony of which was not lost on her). Years later, as Caroline grew into womanhood, a great deal of friction developed between mother and daughter and caused them both great pain. To Grace, the realization that it was the kind of upbringing she had worked so hard to give Caroline that caused much of her troubles with her daughter was the most painful thing of all.
18 Tiv doesn’t say whether the three were confined to the nursery or the palace. One hopes it was the latter.