Post by countess on Aug 19, 2012 10:40:01 GMT -5
Monte Carlo, a dream: the azure sky, the azure sea. Sunday, the 12th September 1982. I was there for two days as a reporter for "Colorful" followed the footsteps of the rich and famous.
I had spent the afternoon at the "Monte Carlo Beach Club" as a guest of Anja Lopez, the widow of a South American sugar baron. At four had departed Madame Lopez of me and had got into full gear, including ruby necklace into the sea to swim their orbits.
Shortly before seven, we met again, she had invited me to dinner at the hotel of their friend Max Grundig, the "Vista Palace" high above Monaco.
While driving from a good five minutes in her champagne-colored Rolls-Royce Convertible said Madame Lopez: "This is the turning for Roc Agel, the country seat of Monaco's royal family."
Enlarge
13th September 1982. Grace and her daughter Stéphanie Rover 3500 plunged her into a hairpin bend of the D 37 about 40 meters into a ravine. That evening Grace was declared brain dead, the devices were switched off
Photo: dpa Picture-Alliance
Later we drank champagne, ate sole and spoke also about Princess Grace, who was a young woman came 26 years ago in Monte Carlo to give up her old life as a Hollywood star Grace Kelly and take her new life as Princess of Monaco.
Madame Lopez she had met only weeks ago, the last time at the Monaco Red Cross Ball. She found that her Highness not looked happy.
In Thilo Wydras new biography "Grace" describes the Austrian director Robert Dornhelm, a close confidante of the princess, whose state of health on that same weekend: "Grace," said Dornhelm was, "since returning from the common voyage of the royal couple with Caroline and Albert not happy also been ailing. "
He continued: "There was a lot to eat, and she has not felt comfortable. It has since grown and get a sinus infection. At our last meeting, she was very depressed, very depressed. I tried to cheer her up. "
After dinner with Madame Lopez returned to the hotel, I opened the window of my room overlooking the golden lit Casino, the Opera and the elegantly dressed people.
Monte Carlo - the life of a party, If I wanted to call my report. I lay down on my bed, still a little read in Graham Greene's "Nothing Too in Monte Carlo," in which the English author described the glamorous life in Monte Carlo from the fifties.
What happened that night on the estate Roc Agel, Thilo Wydra explains, "Just in this family weekend at Roc Agel Stéphanie has opened her stunned parents that they are not the sought after (fashion) training was going to run, but rather with her boyfriend Paul Belmondo wanted to attend a racing school. Racer to be that this is now their goal. Grace and Rainier can hardly believe it, especially since Grace has always had a strong aversion to driving. Grace and Stephanie have had at the end dispute - this part I have seen, "recalls Robert Dornhelm.
Monday morning, the 13th September, again such a beautiful day. By ten, I strolled down to the harbor, made me in café au lait and croissant notes for my next interview: Anneliese Abarth, the Austrian entrepreneur, Victor Pastor, the gray eminence in the princely state, Mariana, the estranged wife of Bjorn Borg.
Against one I was back at the "Hotel de Paris". The concierge, who I held out my room key, asked me: Have you heard? What? Princess Stéphanie and have been in a car accident. When? This morning. Where? On the way back from Roc Agel. Something serious? No!
From my room, I called at the office in Offenburg. Back then there were no cell phones or laptops that you could get fast information on the Internet. Around this time, two and a half hours after the accident, nothing had gone on the news ticker. I ran to the press office of the palace, asked Nadja LaCoste, the spokeswoman for the prince and got the information that Madame LaCoste was still on vacation.
But it gave me a message in the hand, the read is harmless. There was talk of a broken leg and slight external injuries. The entrance to the Centre Hospitalier Princesse Grace, where the Princess Stéphanie and were hospitalized, were a few policemen who politely asked me to move on. Back at the hotel I met a colleague from the local newspaper "Nice Matin", and he knew no more than a broken leg.
The truth was different.
Excerpt from "Grace": "In the hospital, Grace Kelly is examined by Dr. Charles Louis Chatelin, chief of surgery, and finally a first four-hour emergency surgery undergone: Your bruised chest is opened as well as her abdomen.
Internal bleeding must be stopped. The bleeding in the head appear to be very strong, the brain damage sustained and heavy, it had a CT scan of her head urgently be made to classify the extent of the damage can be. "
Because, as Thilo Wydra writes in the hospital was no CT scanners, the princess was transported to a private doctor.
Is "The practice in the 2nd Stock. First they tried to lift the unconscious Grace boot for Docteur. In the narrow elevator they would - strapped to the gurney - was erected almost vertically. After that you get them, still. On the stretcher, dragged up the stairs and tried to keep the stretcher as horizontal as possible "
In the afternoon I visited Victor Pastor, the builder king of Monaco. During our conversation, a call was put through. He asked me to leave his office. After ten minutes, his secretary informed me that Mr. Pastor had unfortunately no time.
When I met him years later, he told me that there had been a call from the palace, informing him was that the Princess was seriously injured.
I phoned from my contacts Monaco, Christine Esswein, the close friend of the princess, a Bauunternehmerin from Karlsruhe, Vanis, the director of "Hotel de Paris", Henri Francois-Poncet, the Germany head of Moët Chandon.
All shook soothingly. I spent the evening in my hotel room, as there was no news until around midnight, I lay down to sleep.
At night, the drama took to the last hours of the princess its inexorable course.
"It is about 6 clock in the morning. Grace was now almost clinically dead, the brain damage that are seen on the scanner images are too strong and extensive, also partially inoperable: submits that this is a brain hemorrhage, bruising of the anterior brain lobe and bleeding in the back of the right brain. Even if she woke up unexpectedly from a coma, a high probability would have been that she would no longer have their mental powers. There would be "no more prospect, is in Wydras biography.
"After son Albert and daughter Caroline said goodbye to her mother, Rainier remains behind alone with his wife. At noon Rainier finally granted the doctors permission to turn off the devices that were previously his wife alive. It's a tough decision in a lonely hour. "
Nothing of all this had spread to the outside. Because I could not always wait for my hotel room on a call, I pleaded with the receptionist to inform me immediately if she learned something new.
At half past eleven at night I stood at the railing of my balcony as the lights went out to the casino. At the same time, the phone rang. Tearfully whispered the attendant: Elle est mort - she's dead
Enlarge
15th September 1982. Grace laid out in an open coffin in the chapel of the Prince's Palace, a day after her death. Prince Rainier ordered eight days of national mourning
Photo: AP
The phone rang a second time, the news team from Offenburg. Tomorrow I'm gain, a team of reporters and photographers on his way.
In the hall, burned candles. A waiter carrying a tray full of champagne glasses around the hall. An elderly gentleman had ordered champagne and asked that we toast to the queen, the young princess, who has survived and on the health of the prince.
Later told me her friend Christine Esswein that the duchess had taken refuge in the last years of her life ever deeper in their faith and in an intense spirituality.
In "Grace" Thilo Wydra quoted from an interview in which she talked about growing old: "For a woman it is a torture, the end. I think it's pathetic, forty to be. . . I'm a wreck. I can not bear it. "
Twelve years later, on 14 September 1982 at 22.35 clock has Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco, left their lives.
She was 52 years old
I had spent the afternoon at the "Monte Carlo Beach Club" as a guest of Anja Lopez, the widow of a South American sugar baron. At four had departed Madame Lopez of me and had got into full gear, including ruby necklace into the sea to swim their orbits.
Shortly before seven, we met again, she had invited me to dinner at the hotel of their friend Max Grundig, the "Vista Palace" high above Monaco.
While driving from a good five minutes in her champagne-colored Rolls-Royce Convertible said Madame Lopez: "This is the turning for Roc Agel, the country seat of Monaco's royal family."
Enlarge
13th September 1982. Grace and her daughter Stéphanie Rover 3500 plunged her into a hairpin bend of the D 37 about 40 meters into a ravine. That evening Grace was declared brain dead, the devices were switched off
Photo: dpa Picture-Alliance
Later we drank champagne, ate sole and spoke also about Princess Grace, who was a young woman came 26 years ago in Monte Carlo to give up her old life as a Hollywood star Grace Kelly and take her new life as Princess of Monaco.
Madame Lopez she had met only weeks ago, the last time at the Monaco Red Cross Ball. She found that her Highness not looked happy.
In Thilo Wydras new biography "Grace" describes the Austrian director Robert Dornhelm, a close confidante of the princess, whose state of health on that same weekend: "Grace," said Dornhelm was, "since returning from the common voyage of the royal couple with Caroline and Albert not happy also been ailing. "
He continued: "There was a lot to eat, and she has not felt comfortable. It has since grown and get a sinus infection. At our last meeting, she was very depressed, very depressed. I tried to cheer her up. "
After dinner with Madame Lopez returned to the hotel, I opened the window of my room overlooking the golden lit Casino, the Opera and the elegantly dressed people.
Monte Carlo - the life of a party, If I wanted to call my report. I lay down on my bed, still a little read in Graham Greene's "Nothing Too in Monte Carlo," in which the English author described the glamorous life in Monte Carlo from the fifties.
What happened that night on the estate Roc Agel, Thilo Wydra explains, "Just in this family weekend at Roc Agel Stéphanie has opened her stunned parents that they are not the sought after (fashion) training was going to run, but rather with her boyfriend Paul Belmondo wanted to attend a racing school. Racer to be that this is now their goal. Grace and Rainier can hardly believe it, especially since Grace has always had a strong aversion to driving. Grace and Stephanie have had at the end dispute - this part I have seen, "recalls Robert Dornhelm.
Monday morning, the 13th September, again such a beautiful day. By ten, I strolled down to the harbor, made me in café au lait and croissant notes for my next interview: Anneliese Abarth, the Austrian entrepreneur, Victor Pastor, the gray eminence in the princely state, Mariana, the estranged wife of Bjorn Borg.
Against one I was back at the "Hotel de Paris". The concierge, who I held out my room key, asked me: Have you heard? What? Princess Stéphanie and have been in a car accident. When? This morning. Where? On the way back from Roc Agel. Something serious? No!
From my room, I called at the office in Offenburg. Back then there were no cell phones or laptops that you could get fast information on the Internet. Around this time, two and a half hours after the accident, nothing had gone on the news ticker. I ran to the press office of the palace, asked Nadja LaCoste, the spokeswoman for the prince and got the information that Madame LaCoste was still on vacation.
But it gave me a message in the hand, the read is harmless. There was talk of a broken leg and slight external injuries. The entrance to the Centre Hospitalier Princesse Grace, where the Princess Stéphanie and were hospitalized, were a few policemen who politely asked me to move on. Back at the hotel I met a colleague from the local newspaper "Nice Matin", and he knew no more than a broken leg.
The truth was different.
Excerpt from "Grace": "In the hospital, Grace Kelly is examined by Dr. Charles Louis Chatelin, chief of surgery, and finally a first four-hour emergency surgery undergone: Your bruised chest is opened as well as her abdomen.
Internal bleeding must be stopped. The bleeding in the head appear to be very strong, the brain damage sustained and heavy, it had a CT scan of her head urgently be made to classify the extent of the damage can be. "
Because, as Thilo Wydra writes in the hospital was no CT scanners, the princess was transported to a private doctor.
Is "The practice in the 2nd Stock. First they tried to lift the unconscious Grace boot for Docteur. In the narrow elevator they would - strapped to the gurney - was erected almost vertically. After that you get them, still. On the stretcher, dragged up the stairs and tried to keep the stretcher as horizontal as possible "
In the afternoon I visited Victor Pastor, the builder king of Monaco. During our conversation, a call was put through. He asked me to leave his office. After ten minutes, his secretary informed me that Mr. Pastor had unfortunately no time.
When I met him years later, he told me that there had been a call from the palace, informing him was that the Princess was seriously injured.
I phoned from my contacts Monaco, Christine Esswein, the close friend of the princess, a Bauunternehmerin from Karlsruhe, Vanis, the director of "Hotel de Paris", Henri Francois-Poncet, the Germany head of Moët Chandon.
All shook soothingly. I spent the evening in my hotel room, as there was no news until around midnight, I lay down to sleep.
At night, the drama took to the last hours of the princess its inexorable course.
"It is about 6 clock in the morning. Grace was now almost clinically dead, the brain damage that are seen on the scanner images are too strong and extensive, also partially inoperable: submits that this is a brain hemorrhage, bruising of the anterior brain lobe and bleeding in the back of the right brain. Even if she woke up unexpectedly from a coma, a high probability would have been that she would no longer have their mental powers. There would be "no more prospect, is in Wydras biography.
"After son Albert and daughter Caroline said goodbye to her mother, Rainier remains behind alone with his wife. At noon Rainier finally granted the doctors permission to turn off the devices that were previously his wife alive. It's a tough decision in a lonely hour. "
Nothing of all this had spread to the outside. Because I could not always wait for my hotel room on a call, I pleaded with the receptionist to inform me immediately if she learned something new.
At half past eleven at night I stood at the railing of my balcony as the lights went out to the casino. At the same time, the phone rang. Tearfully whispered the attendant: Elle est mort - she's dead
Enlarge
15th September 1982. Grace laid out in an open coffin in the chapel of the Prince's Palace, a day after her death. Prince Rainier ordered eight days of national mourning
Photo: AP
The phone rang a second time, the news team from Offenburg. Tomorrow I'm gain, a team of reporters and photographers on his way.
In the hall, burned candles. A waiter carrying a tray full of champagne glasses around the hall. An elderly gentleman had ordered champagne and asked that we toast to the queen, the young princess, who has survived and on the health of the prince.
Later told me her friend Christine Esswein that the duchess had taken refuge in the last years of her life ever deeper in their faith and in an intense spirituality.
In "Grace" Thilo Wydra quoted from an interview in which she talked about growing old: "For a woman it is a torture, the end. I think it's pathetic, forty to be. . . I'm a wreck. I can not bear it. "
Twelve years later, on 14 September 1982 at 22.35 clock has Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco, left their lives.
She was 52 years old