Legends

DIVINE GRACE

As actress and princess, Grace Kelly's life was as tightly scripted as any of her movies. But this excerpt from a new biography reveals the other side of the story: the ravages of middle age, the strained relationships with her headstrong husband and rebellious daughters, and the younger men who helped her through it all

ROBERT LACEY

Shortly before 10 o'clock on the morning of Monday, September 13, 1982, Gendarme Frederic Mouniama was emerging from a baker's shop in the French hillside village of La Turbie. An oldish brown Rover was coming through the village, aiming for the road that led down toward the sea. The car had appeared from the direction of Roc Agel, the weekend home of Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco, and as it drew to a halt to let the young gendarme cross the road, Frederic Mouniama realized that the Rover was being driven by Her Serene Highness Princess Grace herself.

She smiled at him from behind the wheel. Her 17-year-old daughter, Stephanie, was sitting beside her in the passenger seat. Princess Grace was by no means the face on the movie screen, the lithe and impish Grace Kelly who had come to Monaco nearly 30 years before. That film star had filled out significantly since then in face and body. But she still had her presence, that elegant and particular Grace Kelly glow, and as Mouniama stepped out across the road in front of this living legend, he instinctively tipped the hard brim of his kepi to her.

Excerpted from Grace, by Robert Lacey, to be published this month by G. P. Putnam's Sons; © 1994 by Robert Lacey.

"You know," Grace said, "I have come to feel very sad in this marriage. He's not really interested in me. He doesn't care about me."

when she was at the summit of her loveliness. Alfred Hitchcock, who coaxed the finest and most tantalizing film performances out of her, liked to compare Grace Kelly to a snow-covered volcano.

Arriving at the police station, Mouniama had an emergency phone message. A car had gone off a hairpin bend on the CD 37, the road from La Turbie to Monaco. Mouniama must get there straightaway.

Staring at the mangled wreckage, Mouniama realized it was Princess Grace's Rover, which he had seen no more than 15 minutes earlier, and peering inside, he took a hard look at the princess herself. She was lying flat on her back, as if the upturned roof were a bed, one leg bent sharply sideways, her eyes closed, totally unconscious. There was no sign of blood. She was not dead, but there was no obvious sign of life.

Grace Kelly had first driven in these hills when she was 24, making a film for Alfred Hitchcock called To Catch a Thief. She had come back the following year for a film festival, and the year after that she was back again, this time to marry a prince. That was in April 1956,

Gwen Robyns encountered this bew ilia dered and in some ways immature woman in 1975, as she drew toward the conclusion of the first-ever biography of the princess. Robyns had re-

Working closely with her on three films, he had witnessed the eruptions of sexuality that she usually managed to conceal behind her virginal exterior. The contradiction was one of the major issues of Grace's life. The public saw only the snow on the top of the mountain—perhaps that was all it wanted to see. But the truth about Grace Kelly was that she was, in some very important respects, quite the opposite of what she seemed. ceived no cooperation from Monaco. Rainier and Grace had refused to have anything to do with her book. Undaunted, the New Zealander, who had written biographies of Vivien Leigh and Agatha Christie, took herself to Philadelphia and won the confidence of Peggy, Grace's elder sister.

Through Peggy, Robyns met and interviewed Grace's brother, Kell, and her mother, and later 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. The author arrived early for her appointment in the Grimaldis' apartment on the Square de 1'Avenue Foch, 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. 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 10.

It was so important for a mother to be able to set her daughters a good example.

"Well," said Robyns, catching her drift, "we can go through the book together," and together the two women embarked on a long 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 Holdenwell, 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 up against her publisher's deadline. But Grace was being so candid and vulnerable and human, throwing herself on Robyns's mercy. "What can I do to help you?" she was asking. "I really want to help you get things right. ... 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 Robyns today. "She had told me it was true, and I should have kept it all in. But that is just not my style. 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."

Robyns'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 Kelly family, 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. Robyns 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 they shared. Grace went to visit Robyns's rose-decked farmhouse in Oxfordshire, and Robyns became a guest at Roc Agel. Staying in Monte Carlo at the Hermitage hotel, 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.

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. Nor would I say she had a 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 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-40s. She was starting to have problems with her looks and her weight. 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 chaperon Caroline while her daughter was engaged in her university studies.

"You know," Grace said to Robyns one morning, "I have 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 who was having problems with her husband. "He's not really interested in me," Grace said. "He doesn't care about me."

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 angry, the prince was certainly not a man to whom anyone would care to be married. People often whispered that Rainier had mistresses. On one occasion he invited the writer-director David Swift 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 20 years of marriage was that her husband was devoting the lion's share of his spirit to building up Monaco, his concrete wonderland by the sea, while he treated the interests of his wife with indifference.

As her children grew older, Grace 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.

Lady Di confided her unhappiness at the sudden influx of reporters into her life. "Don't worry, dear," said Grace. "It'll get worse."

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 pressed them against a plate. "Sold!" he exclaimed, holding up the random arrangement of petals with clear derision. "For 3,000 francs!"

Everyone laughed, but it seemed to one of Grace's friends that the princess had some difficulty sharing the joke. She had been well aware that, without her princessly imprint, her collages would not have commanded 100 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. 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.

This had become Rai-

nier's way as the couple grew older. Once proud of his wife's independent achievements, the prince seemed in later years to be envious of a fame and charm he could not match. He was Monaco. She was the import. It was a syndrome repeated a decade and a half later in the marriage of Britain's Prince and Princess of Wales. Rainier was openly slighting to Grace in company. Though she was invariably supportive of him, he would make jokes about her weakness for peoplepleasing and her "creamy smile." His continuing fits of snoozing at the social events that she had arranged showed his essential contempt for the things that were important to her. Through laziness and a self-absorption that came largely from the prince's side, their partnership had soured into a bizarre form of rivalry.

The deterioration hurt Grace badly at an already difficult time of her life. "She operated on adulation," says Gwen Robyns today. "It was her fuel. She had got used to it in Hollywood, and she was still getting it from the outside world. In terms of the public, she was more beloved and admired than she had ever been. But that was her sadness. She was not getting it where she really wanted it—at home."

It was not just Rainier who failed to cherish Grace. Albert was a devoted son —kind and shy and totally obedient to his mother. But his sisters were considerably less amenable, as Robyns discovered when she went to Paris to stay for a few days on the Square de l'Avenue Foch.

"Why have you come here, and when are you going home?" inquired the 13year-old Stephanie, deputed to greet the visitor in the absence of her mother. "I hate my mother's friends."

Grace had prepared a lunch for her visitor, featuring Grace's favorite, blood sausage. Stephanie made a face. "I want a hamburger," she said, pouting. "I want a hamburger now." The teenager had been at the table for some time, sitting in front of several perfectly palatable alternatives to the dreaded blood sausage, but Grace appeared to treat her tantrum as an absolute command. She called downstairs to the chauffeur and instructed him to take Stephanie to McDonald's.

"Why are you doing this?" asked Robyns in horror. "You are ruining this girl!"

"Oh, darling," said Grace, puckering up with a little-girl face, "she's my baby doll. She's my baby."

Grace had become everybody's doormat. The haughty facade of the frosty, cold-shoulder princess concealed a case of low to almost invisible self-esteem. "You've got to make some compromises, you know," she told Judy Kanter, the former wife of Jay Kanter, Grace's Hollywood agent. "No marriage works without them. ... I love Rainier, so I do my best to make things work."

Alfred Hitchcock liked to compare Grace to a snow-covered volcano. The public saw only tiie snow on the top of the mountain.

The two old friends were discussing the pattern of Judy's divorces, and those of their friends. Of the six lighthearted girls who had traveled to Monaco to be Grace's bridesmaids in April 1956, not a single one was now in the same marriage. All six had been through separation or divorce. "Some of us sign on for a run-of-the-play contract—no options," said Grace, smiling wryly. "I do not have the luxury you have." She was the girl who got it all—and she had discovered that all was not enough.

"How can I bring up my daughters not to have an affair with a married man when I was having affairs with mairied men aH the time?"

Donald Spoto met Grace twice when he was preparing his book The Art of Alfred Hitchcock.

Grace gave him a long interview in Paris during the autumn of 1975, then met him the following summer in Monaco to discuss her writing a short foreword to the book. Spoto was entranced with Grace. She was warm and enthusiastic, talking for three hours when their meeting had been scheduled to last only 20 minutes, then inviting the author to stay for dinner.

"She was clearly very pleased to be asked about all this and to be taken seriously in her avocation," remembers Spoto. "But it seemed to me that there was something sad about it, this woman of 40-something who was talking so much about the past." Spoto had the impression that Grace was a person in whose current life something was very much missing—that she was having to put a good face on many unhappy things.

In the early 1990s, almost a decade after Grace's death, Spoto talked to Rupert Allan, the Grimaldis' official publicist in America, about Grace's final years and the disillusionment that she came to feel with her marriage. When did the marriage lose its magic? wondered Spoto. It must have been tragic for a woman who believed so fervently in romance to experience the withering and dying of romance in her own life.

Allan looked hard at Spoto. Afflicted with heart problems, the 79-year-old publicist knew that he did not have long to live. "I have to tell you," he said, "that she was not entirely lonely. There was someone rather important to her— someone in Paris."

The someone was Robert Dornhelm, a young film director whom Grace met in 1976. Grace was then 46, Dornhelm just 30, intense and hungry-looking, with a handsome shock of strong, wavy hair. Romanian by birth and Austrian by nationality, Dornhelm spoke an attractively fractured English and had a knack for saying provocative things. Dashing and slightly mysterious, he had a touch of Lord Byron about him.

The couple met when Dornhelm arrived to film the introduction Grace had agreed to deliver to The Children of Theatre Street, a documentary on Leningrad's Vaganova Institute, formerly the Russian Imperial Ballet school, which produced such stars as Nureyev, Baryshnikov, and Makarova. Grace had said she would narrate the film as part of her campaign to heighten Monaco's cultural profile—the opening sequence of the documentary found her on the stage of the Monte Carlo Opera talking about Diaghilev—but the princess rapidly became involved in the project for its own sake, and even more for the sake of its handsome young director.

Robert Dornhelm was no Hitchcock, but he brought passion and commitment to his filmmaking. The Children of Theatre Street earned an Oscar nomination for best documentary feature in 1977. Something in Grace was rekindled by her involvement, for the first time in 20 years, in the excitement of making a movie. "She was a genuinely creative person," says Rita Gam, the actress, who was Grace's old roommate and one of her bridesmaids, "and her creativity had been stopped right at the gate—just when she was really beginning to fulfill herself as an actress. I think she felt an emptiness all those years from her creative side not being realized."

Grace and Dornhelm talked about other projects they might pursue, including a film about child prodigies. The Year of the Child was coming up, and Grace thought she might be able to get sponsorship from UNESCO. They optioned Gore Vidal's novel A Search for the King in hopes of turning it into a rock musical. On a personal level, Grace wanted to make a film about the garden club that she had started in Monaco, while Dornhelm had long nursed the dream of making a movie about Raoul Wallenberg, the Swede who risked his life saving Jews from the Nazis and who vanished mysteriously in Russia at the end of the war.

Grace proposed herself as the casting director for the Wallenberg project, and she had her lawyer draw up a contract. From her point of view, the job provided a route by which she might ease herself back into performing, while Dornhelm, for his part, knew that he would have no trouble getting serious actors to come and read with Grace Kelly.

Dornhelm's dress code favored open shirts and flared blue jeans. On occasion he even sported a belt with a hammer-and-sickle motif, and this got him into trouble one day in Monte Carlo when he was sunning himself on a lawn outside the casino. Assuming that the longhaired young foreigner was the sort of drifter whom it was principality policy to kick back sharply into France, a policeman asked for his papers and took him down to headquarters when he refused to hand them over or give his name. A phone call to Grace's private office eventually got the filmmaker released, and he angrily demanded that the agent in question be disciplined.

"Certainly not," the princess replied, delighted. "We're going to give him a medal."

Dornhelm never minced his words with Grace. "All that time and energy that you devote to arranging dead, withered flowers," he said. "Isn't that the metaphor of your life?"

Far from freezing at such a comment, Grace actually listened to Dornhelm and took note of what he said. The young man's rebelliousness seemed to awaken her own, long-dormant spirit of independence. When the French minister of culture organized a banquet to celebrate the French premiere of Theatre Street at the Paris Opera, he invited the Russian ambassador and numerous other dignitaries, but not Dornhelm, the director of the film, or Oleg Briansky, the artistic director. Grace politely asked the ministry if the pair could be included, and was told there was simply no room. "Fine," said Grace, and she boycotted the banquet. She attended the gala reception that followed the screening, but once she had shaken the requisite number of hands, she went on with Dornhelm and Briansky—along with Rainier and the three children—to a brasserie.

"She was always a brave person," says Dornhelm. "Very loyal to her friends— that was one of her great qualities."

One day the following summer, Gwen Robyns got a call in Oxfordshire from Monaco. "Do you think Robert could come and stay with you for the weekend?" Grace asked. "He's got to be in England for a few days on a film project."

Dornhelm had scarcely arrived when the telephone rang. It was Grace, wanting to speak to him. Robyns and her Danish husband, Paul von Stemann, held up lunch while the phone conversation went on—and on, and on. When they finally sat down with their guest, they were interrupted after 20 minutes by another phone call from Monaco, which resulted in a conversation of equal length. "I can twist her round my finger," boasted Dornhelm as he came back to the table.

By the end of a weekend during which their houseguest seemed to spend considerably more time talking long-distance to Monaco than he did to his hosts, Gwen Robyns and Paul von Stemann could not help suspecting that Grace and the young director had more than just film projects to discuss. A few months later Robyns's suspicions were confirmed. Driving in the hills above Monaco with Grace and Dornhelm, the author was surprised by Grace's sudden concern about Robyns's walking ability. "Gwen, darling, haven't you got a bad knee?" she asked. "Why don't you sit here with Paul [Grace's chauffeur], while Robert and I go off for a walk?"

Somewhat unwillingly, Robyns agreed to sit out the excursion. "Where on earth have you been, Grace?" she demanded truculently when the couple finally came back down from the hills, flushed and tousled.

"Oh, darling," said Grace, making one of her baby faces. "It was so lovely—so lovely just being with him."

Gwen Robyns is not sure how far Grace's friendship with Dornhelm went. "The physical side wasn't the main thing," she says. "Grace just loved the flirtation. It was something to give her all the cherishing and romance which Rainier didn't."

Dornhelm himself declines to discuss the personal aspects of his relationship with Grace. "It is a memory that doesn't want to be disturbed," he says. "It's better left as it was. It is not reality anymore."

"Dornhelm was quite often around when I was going out with Caroline," remembers Philippe Junot, who started dating Grace's elder daughter in 1976. "There was never any sign of Rainier. He was leading his own life down in Monaco, while Grace was leading hers up in Paris. Sometimes we would all go out together as two couples—Caroline with me and Grace with Dornhelm. I do not know if they were lovers, but let me put it this way: I would be very surprised if they were not."

The question of Grace's relationship with Robert Dornhelm is complicated by the fact that he was by no means the only younger man with whom she consorted in her later years.

Jim McMullen, the dashing New York restaurateur, says he could not even consider the princess in physical terms when she invited him to Monaco in the mid-70s. "She was somebody so special. She was Her Serene Highness." According to McMullen, nothing improper was even hinted at during the week he spent as Grace's guest, or at any other time in the six years that he knew her.

McMullen, a former model, was in his late 20s when Grace started visiting his Third Avenue restaurant, with its Irish-saloon atmosphere and famed chicken potpie. He remembers an excursion with Grace to Studio 54, where the crowds outside parted in front of the princess like the Red Sea, and to a surreal dinner during the week he spent in Monaco, where he found himself seated with Grace on one side of him and Ingrid Bergman on the other.

Not without a touch of envy, Grace's girlfriends referred to her young men as her "toy boys." "What she wanted was eternal glamour," says Gwen Robyns, "and those young men supplied it. They flattered her. They were fun."

They were also more intelligent and accomplished than the average young stud. Jeffory Martin FitzGerald, a 29year-old business executive, was boarding the Concorde in London one February morning in 1980 when he found a pile of shopping bags occupying his assigned seat. "Excuse me," he said, trying to be polite to the middle-aged traveler sitting beside them. "Are these your things?"

Grace, who was wearing a head scarf and whom he did not recognize, apologized profusely and hastened to clear away her bags. When lunch was served, FitzGerald, noticing how ravenously his neighbor attacked her portion of caviar, offered her his. "I don't really care for caviar," he explained, which led to a conversation about how people either love it or loathe it—which led, in turn, to a mutual exploration of backgrounds.

"Where do you live now?" FitzGerald asked after Grace had told him about Philadelphia.

"In Monaco," she replied, and still he did not get it. Not until she actually gave him her full name did he realize who his famous traveling companion was.

Jeffory FitzGerald was a tall and well-built Irish-American. The couple saw each other regularly whenever Grace went to New York. They would go out to restaurants in groups—McMullen's was a popular rendezvous—but they would take their leave of the party together toward the end of the night, for this was a relationship, according to some of Grace's closest friends, that definitely was physically intimate. "I thought he'd hate my lumps and bumps," she confided to one girlfriend delightedly, "but he doesn't seem to mind one bit!"

FitzGerald was a world traveler, as Grace was becoming in these years. They swapped tips on beating jet lag and relaxation techniques—FitzGerald was a corporate headhunter who traveled extensively scouting promising executives—and they fortified each other's wobbly resolves to diet. "Watch the lunch routine," Grace would caution in her postcards. "Iced tea instead of beer."

In the spring of 1982 the Annenberg Institute of Communications in Philadelphia organized a tribute to Grace's film career. James Stewart, Bob Hope, and other fabled survivors of her era agreed to come and pay their respects to Grace's artistry and her contribution to the cinema. It was a major honor, but Rainier decided that he would not have the time to be with his wife on her night. So Grace flew to New York without her husband, met up with Jeffory FitzGerald, and drove down to Philadelphia in the company of the young man who was 21 years her junior.

"I'm getting to the point," Grace said angrily to Judy Kanter Quine in these years, discussing the world's expectation that she should always be perfect, "where I don't care what you or anyone else, for that matter, thinks."

Whenever Grace suspected that press photographers might be around, she took care to hide her young escorts in a group of miscellaneous companions, but she made no secret of them when she was with her closest friends. She saw her young men as her proteges. She was proud of their accomplishments. She introduced Judy Quine to both Dornhelm and FitzGerald, and she was particularly eager that her old flame and drama coach, Don Richardson, get to know Dornhelm.

"I'd love you to meet Robert," she told Richardson when Rupert Allan arranged a reunion in California. "He's rather like you. He could be our son."

In 1976, Grace had accepted the invitation of Jay Kanter to become the first woman on the board of Twentieth Century-Fox. Four times a year the appointment took her, at Fox's expense, to board meetings in exciting locations, most frequently in New York and Hollywood. Grace used these trips to meet up with Dornhelm, McMullen, and FitzGerald. The young men knew about one another—McMullen and FitzGerald met quite frequently—and on one of her visits to Los Angeles, Grace asked Rupert Allan to invite Don Richardson and his wife to his house in the hills.

Grace and her former drama coach had been exchanging letters throughout their respective careers. They had not seen each other for more than a quarter of a century, but when they finally met on a cool Los Angeles night, it was as if they had never been apart.

"When I walked in," remembers Richardson, "she jumped up over the coffee table into my arms, and wrapped her legs around me. There was my wife, Laura, and all the other guests who were watching all this. But for Grace, in that moment, no one else mattered. We were suddenly back in days of old. She still had that quality you could write your dreams on—the sweet face, the wonderful eyes. But there was also something very tragic about her. It was heartbreaking to see her overweight and gone to seed—a little drunk, the seams of her dress opened, the makeup smudged. It seemed to me that she had been hitting the bottle pretty good."

Richardson subscribes to the popular theory that Princess Grace had a drinking problem toward the end of her life. This is largely based on the press photographs that show her putting on weight and getting puffy around the face. Trying to laugh about it with her friends, Grace took to describing herself as "Blimposaurus Rex." In 1976, the year of Grace's 47th birthday—and the year in which she started her relationship with Robert Dornhelm—Howell Conant had to make a special journey back to Monaco in order to reshoot the family's annual Christmas card. The princess had looked at the proofs of the first photo session and had decided that she was too fat.

The Grimaldi-family Christmas card, a formal shot by Conant of Grace, Rainier, and their children taken almost every year from 1956 onward in very much the same pose and setting, provides an extraordinary visual record of one family's expansion and development. Babies appear, change into children, then grow until they are standing over their parents as young adults. Rainier goes grizzled, then gray, then finally white. Turtlenecks, floppy collars, bell-bottom trousers, running shoes—the fashions of the decades come and go. Only Grace is a constant: tight, slender, blonde, and smiling, looking even better in her early 40s than she did at 18—until 1976, when startlingly, in just a matter of a year or so, the rose is blown.

Grace loved her food and she enjoyed her drink. But the reason for the dramatic change in her appearance around the age of 47 was not any special increase in her patterns of consumption. It was her time of life. Grace suffered from a particularly difficult and upsetting menopause. "She rang me about it endlessly," remembers Gwen Robyns. "'What do I do?' she would say. 'I'm getting so fat. I can't fit into my clothes, and I've got to be seen.' She went to this doctor and that doctor, and they all said the same. It was water retention. It was menopause."

The "angry jaws" was what Grace called it, as if turning the harsh medical word into a rhyme would make it seem better. The doctors put her on hormonereplacement therapy, at quite a high dose, but it did not stop her mood swings, and it increased her bloating. Her breasts swelled. "I've got this dreadful thing about my bosoms," she confessed miserably to Robyns. "They're so big. I have to confine them."

"Grace operated on adulation. It was her fuel. She was not getting it where she really wanted it—at home."

Menopause's undermining of the female texture is hard for any woman to take, but it was particularly difficult for one whose allure had depended so heavily on her beauty. Suddenly the geography of Grace's face was changing. Her features were shifting in an insidious continental drift. She went to expensive Parisian doctors, who prescribed blood transfusions and special injections, with no results. Desperate to hang on to her looks, Grace was engaged in a battle that she could not win, and at times she even wondered about her sanity.

The "toy boys" were Grace's defiance of the angry jaws, but they offered no real escape from the ultimate issues. Prayer, confession, and the Mass remained Grace's consolations through the most difficult passages of her life, but as she entered her 40s the dutiful princess did come to realize that there was a sense in which there could be no higher cause than herself.

"Some of us sgn on for a run-of-the-play contract," Grace told Judy Kanter after her divorce. "I do not have the luxury you have."

Grace's older daughter, Caroline, had become a teenager in the same year that her mother hit 40, and from that point onward the two women were on opposite trajectories. Grace found it difficult to cope with her elder daughter's blossoming sexuality.

One day in 1976, Earle Mack, the original inspirer and producer of Domhelm's Children of Theatre Street, was lunching at the Grimaldis' home in Paris. Caroline and Rainier were there, along with the pianist Arthur Rubinstein and his wife, who were neighbors, and the gathering proceeded through the afternoon in the leisurely tradition of the serious French lunch, until Grace noticed that Caroline had left the room and had not returned. The princess rushed to the window, her composure suddenly disintegrating.

"Where is she? Where's she gone?" she demanded frantically, her anger and frustration clearly visible. "Did you give her the car, Rainier? I know she's gone to see Junot."

Philippe Junot has been described as the sort of man that every mother hopes her daughter will not marry—which is probably the best explanation of why

Caroline did. Charming and amusing rather than conventionally good-looking, Junot was a successful businessman specializing at that time in real-estate deals in North America. He had stakes in shopping malls from Montreal to Dallas. With a father who was the deputy mayor of Paris, Junot came from solid French bourgeois stock. He was 17 years older than Caroline—36 to her 19 when they started dating in 1976—and he was a famous ladies' man. Gwen Robyns was staying on the Square de l'Avenue Foch one day when Junot came to call. "It was in the days of tight trousers," she remembers, "and Junot was wearing the tightest pants you have ever seen. When he came into the room, Caroline went up to him and rubbed herself up and down against him. It was the most blatant exhibition that I have ever seen. 'Grace,' I said, 'how can you allow that in front of people?'

"'Darling,' she replied, throwing up her hands as if she had long given up trying. 'What am I going to do?'"

Caroline was confronting her mother with the reality of her youth, her beauty, and her hold over an attractive and dynamic man. She seemed to be daring Grace to do something about it. Head over heels in love with Junot, she accepted his private proposal of marriage after they had been seeing each other seriously for a year, and when her mother expressed her unhappiness, Caroline offered the alternative. She would go off and live with Philippe.

"Mommy said, 'Of course he's the wrong man and you shouldn't marry him,' " Caroline remembered, " 'but now you've been compromised. You've been dating him for too long. . . . What are people going to think after you've been dating this guy for two years?' "

It was Grace at her most old-fashioned and status-conscious. Her judgment as a mother, that Junot was the wrong man for Caroline, was subordinated to the need to look good. Keeping up appearances had always been both Grace's greatest strength and weakness. Caroline had read her mother perfectly when she proposed the possibility of just going off with Philippe. She knew the option that Grace was bound to take.

The public announcement of the engagement was set for late August 1977. Rainier was as unhappy about his prospective son-in-law as Grace was. The prince's face would blacken if Junot's name was mentioned, and, when among friends, he would rail biliously at the behavior of the young couple. But Rainier found it as difficult to share his feelings with his daughter as he did with his wife. When he had something important to say to Caroline, he tended to write her a letter, and she found that the easiest way to communicate with her father was to write him a letter back. Rainier also shared his wife's belief that a generational rift was something to be avoided at all costs. So when Junot had come to the prince in the spring of 1977 formally to request his daughter's hand, Rainier had seemed almost encouraging. He had only mildly suggested that the marriage should wait until the following year, when Caroline would have completed her studies at the Sorbonne.

"I never had a proper conversation with him, man to man," says Junot today. "Soccer, motorcars, that sort of thing, but nothing solid. I think that for him I was always a problem that he just hoped would go away."

Rainier's hope was speedily fulfilled. Celebrated in the private chapel of the palace in June 1978, the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Philippe Junot soon ran into difficulties. Junot's dinner-and-disco style of doing business while on his trips to America was reported in gossipcolumn items and infuriated Caroline. She accused her husband of being unfaithful, though Junot today maintains that it was the other way around.

"I did not make any mistakes in the first 10 months," he says today. "She did —she was unfaithful—and I was willing to accept it. . . . She was 21 years old, a beautiful girl, suddenly discovering that it's a lot of fun to enjoy life, that it's great to be free, and that maybe it's a little early to be strictly married."

Caroline later admitted that she got married less because she wished to spend the rest of her life with Philippe Junot than because she wished to escape from a home situation that she had come to find stifling.

One day in the summer of 1980, Junot got home from playing tennis to discover a note from his wife saying that she needed to take some time out. "Don't worry," Rainier said when Junot phoned Monaco. "She's not feeling well. She's a little depressed."

The couple reconciled for a week, but then Caroline disappeared again—to England, Junot later discovered. The abandoned husband sought consolation with a former girlfriend on a trip to Turkey, which made tabloid headlines. A marriage that had been embarked on in the cause of propriety had ended up a source of scandal. Early in October 1980, Junot was served with divorce papers, to which he offered no objection, and the Grimaldis' lawyers pushed the formalities through Monaco's courts in a matter of days.

It was Grace who had put pressure on Caroline to get married, and now the notion of divorce came from Grace as well. "Mommy said, 'You have to get divorced,' " remembered Caroline. "I didn't dare to divorce or even mention divorce, because Catholics don't divorce. You're supposed to just make the best of it. . . .

I said, 'How can you talk like that? We're a religious family.' . . . But Mommy said, 'Religion is there to help people, not to make your life miserable.' "

Grace's urging that Caroline should defy her church's teaching reflected her practical and no-nonsense streak. Caroline was in pain, and Grace wanted to get her daughter started on a new track as rapidly as possible. But Grace was also displaying the less constrained character that she was starting to assume as she reached the age of 50. Personally and spiritually she was on the move. Finally refusing to live a life that was dictated to her by others, Grace was starting to live according to her own truths.

"I don't know if Grace and Dornhelm were lovers, but let me put it this way: I would be very surprised if they were not."

Recapturing the joy of performance was one of the most critical elements of her rebirth, and it started, by coincidence, in the same year that Grace met Robert Dornhelm. In 1976 the Edinburgh Festival was being organized with themes around the American Bicentennial. John Carroll, the organizer of the festival's main poetry recital, was looking for an American who had the right ear and speaking voice, and his choice fell on Princess Grace.

"I am worried about my projection," said the princess when they met.

"Don't be worried," replied Carroll, "because you've got a very good speaking voice. When you think of a poem, think about what it means. Bring out the meaning in the phrasing, and that will take care of the projection."

So Princess Grace of Monaco became a poetry reader. It was only to be expected, perhaps, that her four recitals that September in Edinburgh's beautiful, 200-year-old St. Cecilia's Hall should prove to be sellouts, but her performance also earned the praise of the festival's celebrity-wary critics. The consonants rang out as clear as ever in Grace's limpid and surprisingly youngsounding voice, which was offset by the baritone of Richard Kiley, a fellow American, and by the rounded English tones of Richard Pasco of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The highlight of the evening, all agreed, was Grace's rendering of "Wild Peaches," by Elinor Wylie. "I selected the poem," remembers John Carroll, "but I have to be truthful—I hadn't realized that Elinor Wylie came from the South until we were doing the rehearsal and Grace said, 'It's such a lovely poem, John. I must do this with a southern accent.' So she did it, and she was absolutely right." Grace's lilting, Georgia rendering of "Wild Peaches" was chosen by the BBC's Pick of the Week as the finest poetry recording of 1976.

"Well," said Carroll, "now that I've launched you, would you like to do some more?"

"Yes, please," said Grace, and for the next six years she traveled regularly to perform in poetry recitals. Dublin, Vienna, London, Aldeburgh, Stratford-uponAvon, Chichester—Grace did the rounds of Europe's leading arts festivals, and in 1978 the American International Poetry Forum invited her on a tour of northeastern cities that ended with tumultuous receptions at Princeton and Harvard. With the roses and the curtain calls, it was just a little like being an operatic diva, and if she got a good review the next morning, she could feel that she had earned it in her own right. "It seemed to me," John Carroll put it delicately, "that it came at a moment when it was very much needed."

Grace met up on her travels with Dornhelm and FitzGerald. She saw old girlfriends, went shopping, was in charge of her own life. "The moment that I always waited for," Carroll remembered in 1993, "was the moment when Grace would walk onto the stage. It would be dark, and I would have the lights come up on her, and as she walked forward the audience always gasped, because she just looked so beautiful—her long dress, her back so straight, her blond hair tied up above her head."

The most publicized moment in Princess Grace's poetry-reading career came in March 1981, when she delivered a recital in Goldsmith's Hall in London in the presence of Prince Charles, who had just announced his engagement and who brought along his fiancee. It was the first formal evening appearance of Lady Diana Spencer, and it was made more memorable by the way the young lady almost spilled out of her low-cut black gown.

"Good news," Grace reported conspiratorially to Gwen Robyns after a session with Lady Di in the ladies' room. "She's got them under control." At a supper party afterward in Buckingham Palace, Grace also passed on the benefit of her experience when the princess-tobe confided her unhappiness at the sudden influx of reporters and photographers into her life. "Don't worry, dear," said the Princess of Monaco in her most comforting tones. "It'll get worse."

"In 1978," remembers Robyns, "after Grace had done her tour in America and must have delivered a dozen recitals or more, she remarked rather sadly that Rainier had never once bothered to come and hear her perform. It so happened that she was due to give a reading later that year in London. The Queen Mother would be there. So Rainier came over. Before the end of the reading he had fallen fast asleep."

Father Patrick Peyton, the Catholic Billy Graham, invited Grace to work on his inspirational TV films, so she went to the Vatican to shoot the segues for his programs about Good Friday, the Resurrection, and the power of prayer.

"She was an amazing professional," remembers the director, Barry Chattington. "One night we were shooting late, out around 11 o'clock in the main courtyard of St. Peter's, and she said, 'When I was young and beautiful, I had it in my contract that I didn't shoot after 5 o'clock. Now I am old and fat. What am I doing here with you?'

"I said, 'You are young and beautiful.'

"'Yes,' she replied, 'that is the bullshit.' "

Grace made her film about her Monaco garden club with Robert Dornhelm. Rearranged was a story of mistaken identity based on a script by Jacqueline Monsigny, the French romantic novelist, who was a friend in Paris. Directed by Dornhelm, and playing opposite Monsigny's actor husband, Edward Meeks, Grace performed onscreen for the first time in 25 years. She played herself, Princess Grace of Monaco, dealing with an absentminded professor who thought he was coming to a scientific conference, but ended up at the princess's annual flower-arranging competition.

Grace's most cherished project as she entered her 50s was the creation of her own theater, a small playhouse overlooking Monaco harbor. For 20 years her energies in the principality had focused on good works and what other people wanted. This was something for herself.

Dirk Bogarde was one of the distinguished actors invited to the opening in December 1981. "It cost a bomb, and sat far too few people," he remembers, "but it was a showcase of which she was rightly proud. I sat at her table on her left. . . . She was, I remember, far more royal than our own Queen. But she was very easy to talk to. . . . She watched her husband with intensity. When he grew restless, as in that crowd he was bound to be, she murmured to me, 'Uhhhhu . . . The Dodo is getting bored.' And when he showed unmistakable signs of very visual distress, with enormous charm and ease she brought the long supper to a close."

Grace's plan was to create a repertory of productions with actors to whom she felt close—casting, directing, and perhaps one day doing some acting herself. "Grace was returning to serious public performing," remembers Rita Gam. "She was very excited about it. It was developing into a much larger, more intensive, more time-consuming, and, for her personally, a much more satisfying thing. Without creativity she had been an undeveloped woman in many ways. But now she was moving into a new, really vital and interesting phase. ... I remember that she wrote me a letter about it."

Gam received this letter early in September 1982. Less than one week later Princess Grace was dead.

"What she wanted was eternal glamour, and those youig men suppled it. They flattered her. They were fun."

The evolving of Grace's marriage from romantic love through discord and apathy to a new sort of tolerance and friendship was the best thing that happened to her in the late years. The prince was as liable as ever to his arrogance and moods. But Grace had learned how to laugh about "the Dodo," and Rainier in a good humor could be a delight.

Grace had stuck to her run-of-theplay contract. She had sworn she would make the relationship work, and she had persisted through the darkest moments. "If I had the choice," she had once confessed to Micheline Swift, her old friend David Swift's wife, "I would divorce him. But I have no choice. He would keep my children."

Grace was referring to Grimaldi-family law and to her marriage agreement, which reserved custody of the children to her husband in the event of divorce. But the issue was more complicated than that. Catholic dogma aside, Grace had not the slightest wish to give up being a princess. Staying married to her husband had a great deal to offer, and when things got sticky, well, she had not been an actress for nothing.

On this detached but mutually advantageous basis, Grace and Rainier had become each other's best friend. They had, after all, shared in the adventure that each made of their life. They had created something that the world fervently admired and believed in, and when the chips were down, they really made sense only together. They still shared the same bed, a capacious and voluptuous affair beneath a crucifix. For reasons both generous and selfish, the couple had come to accept each other's separate but not totally divergent path.

"He was always very tolerant," remembers Robert Dornhelm.

"I can remember quite a few evenings when we had dinner together, just the three of us."

In April 1981, Grace and Rainier had reached their 25th wedding anniversary, which they celebrated with a dinner with their children and their oldest friends. Albert made a toast, as did Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra, and then Rainier got to his feet and put his better feelings into words. In his staid, slightly stern public manner, he toasted Grace and told her what she had meant to him and to the three children. There was not a dry eye in the house.

At the end of August 1982, they flew to Norway with the two elder children for a cruise. Stephanie did not join them. Just 17, she had fallen in love with Paul Belmondo, the 19-year-old son of the actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, and she wanted to have her own holiday with him. Grace would not have allowed such license to Caroline at that age, but the Junot affair had changed her thinking. After some hesitation, she let Stephanie go off with the young Belmondo to Antigua. "She's my wild child," she would say with a grin.

Grace's tolerance toward Stephanie had the opposite effect to the one intended. When the girl returned from Antigua, she took it for granted that she could now see more of Paul Belmondo than ever.

Stephanie was due to travel up to Paris the following Monday. Having graduated, with some difficulty, from high school, she was enrolled in the Institute of Fashion Design in Paris, a prestigious and desperately hard-to-get-into establishment, where Stephanie owed her place to her name and to her mother's lobbying. But now, five days before she was due to start her studies, she announced that she was no longer interested in fashion. Paul Belmondo was going to attend racecar-driving school, and that was what she wished to do—be with Paul and learn to race cars.

Grace could not believe it. Her wild child had pushed her too far. During Stephanie's childhood, Grace had negotiated her younger daughter through a succession of schools, meekly moving her on to a more liberal Catholic school when Stephanie complained that the nuns were too strict, and then—when Stephanie refused to attend even that—on to a private, nonreligious school. Now Stephanie was planning to switch to racecar-driving school. But her mother, for once, had had enough. This was something that Grace absolutely would not accept.

Robert Dornhelm was at Roc Agel that weekend as the arguments raged. Grace was mortified. All that summer she had been agonizing with her friends over what she described in her letters as the "S&P situation." She had tried so hard not to be restrictive, to avoid making the mistake with Stephanie that she now acknowledged she had made when Caroline fell in love with Junot. Both of Grace's daughters had clearly inherited their mother's tendency to lose all her bearings over a man, yet neither was prepared, as the young Grace had been, to bow before the ultimate authority of her parents. Sulky and obstinate, Stephanie was just as determined that she would go off with Belmondo as Grace was that her daughter would not.

Dornhelm was glad to get out of an atmosphere which was rancid and tense. He left Roc Agel on Sunday, September 12, agreeing with Grace that they would meet up in Paris later in the week. An American TV network had shown interest in screening an hour-long version of Rearranged, which would require the shooting of additional scenes. Grace and the director could talk about that once she had dealt with her daughter. Grace's first job for the week was to get Stephanie down to Monaco, up to Paris, and then safely into the fashion institute.

Monday, September 13, 1982, dawned clear and bright. It was a perfect, sunny, South of France late-summer day. Driving down through the shrubs and pine trees with Stephanie—past the very spot where her To Catch a Thief picnic with Cary Grant had been set—Grace could see the yachts below in Monaco harbor.

Rainier had been driven down into Monaco an hour or so earlier. He had his usual weekday schedule of business to get through. Grace's chauffeur had been standing beside the Rover, ready to drive the two princesses when Grace and Stephanie came out of the farmhouse, but Grace said it would be easier if she did the driving and went down to Monaco with Stephanie on her own. She had brought out a pile of her dresses on hangers to spread across the Rover's backseat, and she explained that she did not want them to get creased.

The chauffeur later remembered that he protested a little. The dresses were not a problem, he said. He could easily come back for them, or have another car sent up from the palace. But Grace insisted. "It's just easier if I drive," she said.

Grace still had things she had to say to Stephanie, mother-and-daughter things that needed privacy to be expressed. They had wrangled all weekend, and the battle was still far from won. Grace had been terribly upset. As she had got into the car that Monday morning, talking properly to Stephanie had been what mattered most to her—certainly more than the fact that she hated to drive down this road. Grace knew that she was a terrible driver. After she had rammed a car broadside in Monaco a few years earlier, she had resolved that she would never drive again. But that resolution had gone the way of others, especially those about dieting. So here she was, 10 minutes or so into her journey, heading down the winding CD 37, which led out of the village of La Turbie. She had the radio off. She and Stephanie had serious talking to do.

Yves Phily, a truckdriver in his late 20s, caught up with the brown Rover as it was negotiating the last of the turns before the buildings started, coming into the outskirts of the town of Cap d'Ail. Monaco itself was little more than a mile away. These final hairpins were the sharpest, and even though his semitrailer was unloaded, Phily had put the truck into low gear so that its engine would act as a brake.

The Rover slowed as it approached a hairpin bend beside a miniature carracing track. It made the sharp turn to the left quite smoothly, then pulled away again—until suddenly, about 550 yards along the road, it started to wobble and waver. The car veered from the center of the road onto the left-hand curb, its side actually knocking into the mountain rocks. If Phily had seen a car doing that at night he would have said that the driver was falling asleep or had had too much to drink. At 10 o'clock in the morning he thought it must be an illness—some sort of fainting or pain.

(Continued on page 125)

"Grace watched her husband with intensity. When he grew restless, she muimured to me, 'Uhhhhu... The Dodo is getting bored.'"

(Continued from page 122)

The truckdriver sounded his horn loudly, and the Rover corrected its course. Perched up in his truck cab, Phily was looking down on the roof of the car. He could not see who the driver was. But as the Rover, now going straight and reasonably steadily, approached the next hairpin bend and reached the point where one would normally have expected the brake lights to go on, the car suddenly accelerated, shooting forward at a frightening speed, so that instead of negotiating the bend around to the right, it careered directly on through.

"The moment that I saw it accelerate," said Phily the next day, "I knew that it would not make the bend.

It was going too fast. The car took off straight through the corner. I literally saw the car flying."

Captain Roger Bencze arrived at the scene of the accident at 10:30 A.M.—about 35 minutes after the crash, and 5 minutes after Prince Rainier. The fact that Rainier went to the site of the crash was not revealed at the time, and has not been known since. The Monaco police routinely monitor the radio frequencies of their French colleagues, and when they picked up the radio reports of Gendarme Mouniama, they conveyed them directly to the palace. Rainier was rushed along the coast road to Cap d'Ail with his private secretary, the chief of his palace guard, and the chief of the Monaco police in a cavalcade of sirens and flashing lights. They arrived just in time to see the Monaco fire department loading Grace into its ambulance and taking her back to Monaco and to the hospital that bore her name. Confused, bruised, and still sobbing hysterically, Stephanie was taken there at the same time.

Bencze was unable to make out what condition Grace might be in. The police captain interviewed the witnesses who had found Grace and summoned help. Jacques Provence and his wife, Josette, had been having coffee with Jean-Claude Corneveau, a friend who was staying with them, when they heard the Rover come crashing down the hill outside. They ran out at once into the garden, where they were joined by Michel Pierre, a neighbor. Pierre took a sledgehammer to the only door of the car that was not wrecked beyond measure—the driver's-side door. Stephanie came staggering out, and Madame Provence comforted her and telephoned the police.

It was at this point that the Provences' landlord appeared on the scene. Sesto Lequio was a flower seller of Italian origin, 62 years old, rotund, illshaven, and fond of a good story. When reporters reached the scene of the crash around lunchtime, Monsieur and Madame Provence were nowhere to be seen. They had told the police all they knew, but they wished to steer clear of the press. Jacques Provence was a senior manager at the Loews Hotel in Monte Carlo. He had friends at the palace, and he did not want his name splashed all over the papers.

Sesto Lequio, however, had no such inhibitions. When the reporters found him tidying up his garden, he was only too happy to provide them with a story, and to take some money for it as well. He sold interviews to various papers at a brisk pace through the afternoon, the main gist of his tale being that it was not Grace but her 17-year-old daughter who had been driving the car—and thus breaking the law. In France you must be 18 years old to get a driver's license.

Much of what Lequio said was not borne out by other witnesses. "I heard Princess Grace say," he told James Whitaker of the Daily Mirror, " 'I want you to believe that I was driving the car,' " though all the other witnesses, including the gendarmes who were the first to arrive at the scene, were adamant that Grace was unconscious all the time and could not have said anything. The only evidence for Lequio's allegation that Stephanie was driving, and the starting point of his entire theory, was the fact that Stephanie had emerged through the driver's door, when that was, in fact, the only possible door through which she could have escaped from the wreck.

Just the same, Bencze felt he had to investigate the allegation. Gendarme Mouniama had seen Grace at the wheel of her Rover little more than 10 minutes before the crash, but there was one spot on the narrow CD 37 where a car could have pulled over for a change of driver—the bend by the miniature car-racing track. Yves Phily, the truckdriver, had testified that he was already following the Rover at that point, but to make doubly sure, Bencze asked Phily to meet him for a second time, and drove down the CD 37 yet again with him.

The truckdriver had no doubt. He had been following the Rover well before the bend, he said, and the car had gone right around the corner smoothly without stopping. There was no possible way that the princesses could have switched.

The mystery might have been dispelled then, or at any time since, if Stephanie, her father, or any of their spokesmen had issued a clear and convincing account of what actually happened inside the car. Rainier once said that Stephanie had tried to pull on the emergency brake, but the police report on the car is definite that the emergency brake had not been engaged.

The facts about Grace's final hours became distinctly less clear the moment she was transported from France over the border into Monaco. After completing all his measurements at the site of the crash, Roger Bencze drove down at 12:20 to the Princess Grace Hospital, where a doctor gave him the preliminary diagnoses. Princess Stephanie, he said, had suffered only light cuts and bruises. Princess Grace was not doing so well. Her thigh bone was broken. She had also suffered a fracture of the knee, a fracture of the arm, bruises, and head injuries the doctor described as "cranial traumatization."

Bencze entered these details in his report, but when he went back to the hospital later that day for an update, the security guards directed him to the side and told him to stay in his car. A hospital official came out and told him that there was no information to give.

"Ifs just easier if I drive," Grace told the chauffeur. She had things to say to Stephanie that needed privacy to be expressed.

"I'm sorry, sir," he recalls the official saying. "You can't have any information. Blackout." When Bencze got back to his headquarters in La Turbie that evening, he found a handwritten note from Monaco's chief law officer telling him that he would not be able to interview or examine members of

the princely family.

The sinister explanation of this blanket shutdown was that Rainier wished to conceal whatever had happened in the car between Stephanie and Grace. But it was equally likely that the prince had just panicked. Rainier suddenly found himself in the middle of a tragedy. He did not want to have to make decisions. In the days that followed, his press staff were to admit with rare frankness that the prince was just lost. It was impossible to get answers out of him on the simplest things. Rainier was wrapped up in his grief.

Grace, it turned out, was in very serious condition. In the emergency room, the hospital's chief surgeon, Professor Charles Louis Chatelin, had shone a light into both her eyes. One pupil narrowed and widened as it should have, but the other made no response. This indicated more than unconsciousness. A "blown eye" was a sign of brain injury, and Chatelin sent immediately to Nice for Professor Jean Duplay, the chief neurosurgeon of the Pasteur Hospital there.

The routine procedure for a patient with suspected brain injury in most modern Western hospitals is to get a CAT-scan X-ray of the brain as soon as possible. But when Duplay arrived in Monaco, he discovered that the Princess Grace Hospital possessed no CAT scanner. He also found that the princess was under the influence of "Gamma O.H.," a French narcotic drug that the Monaco doctors had administered when she was put on a mechanical respirator. This lessened the possibility of causing pain to the princess as a tube went down her windpipe, and made it possible to work on other parts of her body—notably her thorax, which needed to be cut open and cleared of air and blood. But the narcotic could only deepen Grace's unconsciousness, and it meant that no accurate reading of her brain activity could be taken until the effects of the

drug had worn off.

It was nearly midnight before Grace was moved to Monaco's only CAT-scan machine. This was located in an upperfloor clinic on the other side of town.

The trouble was that the elevator in the building was an ancient, open, cage-like contraption large enough for only two or three people standing up. So in order for the CAT scan to be accomplished, the body of the unconscious Princess Grace, accompanied by a hand-operated oxygen tank with her IV tubes held above her, had to be carried on a stretcher up the stairs, then carried all the way down again.

The scan showed two distinct areas of damage. One was deep in the brain and indicated that Grace had suffered a stroke. The other was in the frontal area and was "traumatic," meaning that it was the consequence of physical impact.

The stroke had been only a small one, Dr. Duplay later said, and Dr. Chatelin declared that if it had happened at home the princess might simply have lost consciousness briefly and had to sit down for a rest. But as it was, said both doctors, the stroke had caused the princess to drive off the road, thus bringing about the second, traumatic set of injuries to her head.

A little more than 24 hours after the crash, Dr. Chatelin met with Prince Rainier, Caroline, and Albert outside Grace's hospital room. Showing them the pictures from the CAT scan and explaining how Grace's condition had deteriorated, the doctor said that the princess was now beyond his help. There was no point, he said, in continuing with the artificial life support.

Rainier, Caroline, and Albert conferred together and accepted the doctor's verdict. They went into Grace's room to say good-bye to her for the last time, then left her to the care of the doctor. Her life-support machine was switched off.

Grace Patricia Kelly, Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco, died at 10:15 on the evening of Tuesday, September 14, 1982. She was 52 years old.