Recalling the Princess They Called Mother

MONACO

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A FAMILY TRAGEDY The scene of Princess Grace’s accident as it looked soon after her death in 1982.

LONG before the current crop of celebrity bad actors with their jail stints and rehab visits, there were the Grimaldi kids, the wild children of the Riviera, who kept a generation of paparazzi and gossip columnists busy with their outrageous behavior.

The prince and princesses of Monaco titillated the world with their public cavorting and not-so-private affairs. The youngest, Stéphanie, bedded a succession of men - a race car driver, her bodyguard, her father's butler, an elephant trainer and a trapeze artist, to name a few - and gave birth to three children along the way.

But the Grimaldis are all grown up now and a dusting of snowy respectability has settled over them. Prince Albert II and his lawyers have resolved the paternity suits that dogged him, acknowledging fatherhood of a boy and a girl born to different women. Princess Caroline has settled down with a German prince. Even Princess Stéphanie has dropped out of the society pages.

During a recent interview in his palace, Prince Albert, 49, now in charge of the principality, reflected on the event that helped send him and his sisters into their difficult years: the sudden, tragic death of their mother, the former Grace Kelly, whose wedding to Prince Rainier III of Monaco took place in the days before the news media made public fodder of royalty's private indiscretions.

"It's obvious that it was difficult for all of us," the prince said. "It took me a while to get over it and try to help my family, help my father as much as possible."

Now, 25 years after her death, the children are commemorating their mother's life by exhibiting some of her most personal possessions. Hundreds of objects - from letters to dresses - will be displayed in the principality this summer. A separate, smaller exhibition will travel to Sotheby's in New York in October.

Princess Grace was 52 when she careered off a hairpin turn while driving to the palace from the family's retreat, Roc Agel, high above Monaco. Her green Rover tumbled 120 feet before coming to rest upside down.

"She had just left the family property, and I was still up there and I had seen her because she came in to my room to try and get me out of bed," Prince Albert recalled, raising his eyebrows in an expression of resignation. "I was still having breakfast when we heard the news from my father."

The death was hardest on Stéphanie, who was in the car at the time of the accident. She was just 17 and had been locked in a running battle with her mother over her love affair with Paul Belmondo, a race car driver and the son of the French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo. She survived with minor injuries.

"Coming to terms with her being in the accident was very instrumental in, well, in her difficult years after that," the prince said. "We all underestimated it. A lot of people did. A lot of people outside the family underestimated the trauma that she went through."

The news media speculated for years that a mother-daughter argument had distracted Princess Grace and caused the accident, or even that Stéphanie herself was at the wheel. The reality was far more banal: doctors concluded that Princess Grace had suffered some sort of attack, most likely a minor stroke.

Both Albert and Caroline also seemed to lose their bearings after the accident. Albert ran through women like water, leaving at least two pregnant. Caroline, with one failed marriage behind her, lost her second husband in a speedboat accident in 1990 and went on to marry Prince Ernst August of Hanover, who made a name for himself with drunken boorish behavior.

Today, with their father gone (Prince Rainier died in April 2005), Prince Albert on the throne and the scandals behind them, the children have decided that it is time to look back on the legacy of their American-born mother, including her Hollywood career.

"There were going to be some other people trying to commemorate her memory in different ways, so we thought it would be the most opportune time to celebrate her life," said the prince, sitting in the room of the palace where he was sworn in as sovereign.

Prince Albert, together with his sisters, selected hundreds of items from among his mother's possessions for public display beginning July 12 at the Grimaldi Forum, Monaco's modern barnaclelike conference center by the sea.

"It was very much a family process," the prince said, adding that he hadn't seen many of the things since he was a child. "It wasn't a painful process. It was an emotional one, but a joyful one."

The items include the very personal - a poem Princess Grace wrote as a gift for Albert on his 18th birthday and home movies never shown outside the family. But there are also mementos of her public life, letters from Alfred Hitchcock and from Jacqueline Kennedy, for example.

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