Grace under pressure

The Grimaldis of Monaco recall the princess they called mother...

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.
The prince and princesses of Monaco titillated the world with their public cavorting. The youngest, Steacute;phanie, bedded a succession of men 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 has 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 Steacute;phanie has dropped out of the society pages.

In an interview, 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 and actress, the former Grace Kelly , whose wedding to Prince Rainier III of Monaco.

Now, 25 years after her death, the children are commemorating their mother8217;s life by exhibiting some of her most personal possessions. Hundreds of objects 8212; from letters to dresses 8212; will be displayed in the principality this summer.

Princess Grace was 52 when she careered off a hairpin turn while driving to the palace. Her green Rover tumbled 120 feet before coming to rest upside down.

8220;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,8221; Prince Albert recalled.

The death was hardest on Steacute;phanie, who was in the car at the time of the accident. She was 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 .

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Both Albert and Caroline also seemed to lose their bearings after the accident. Albert ran through women like water, 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 Rainier died in April 2005, Prince Albert on the throne and the scandals behind them, the children have decided to look back on the legacy of their American-born mother, including her Hollywood career.

Prince Albert, together with his sisters, selected hundreds of items from among his mother8217;s possessions for public display beginning July 12 at the Grimaldi Forum.
CRAIG S. SMITHNYT