Monthly Archives: February 2012

Murdoch contrite as more evidence revealed

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LONDON

MEDIA mogul Rupert Murdoch has responded to police claims that The Sun newspaper had a “culture of illegal payments” to “a network of corrupt officials” with a vow that those practices were in the past.
The officer in charge of investigations into phone hacking and bribery by journalists, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers, on Monday told the Leveson inquiry into media ethics that The Sun had some public officials “on retainers”.
One official received more than £80,000 ($A118,500) over several years and one journalist was given more than £150,000 to pay sources, she said.
Also on Monday:
■The inquiry heard of an email that showed police leaked information about their investigation of the News of the World to a News executive;
■The email showed Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson knew hacking was rife in 2006, despite denials for years afterwards;
■Singer Charlotte Church and her family won £600,000 from News International in the largest hacking payout to date.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Akers said payments were authorised at a senior level and emails indicated journalists recognised it was illegal. “There is also an indication of ‘tradecraft’, ie. hiding cash payments to sources by making them to a friend or relative of the source.” She said most of the disclosures made as part of the system were “salacious gossip, not what I would describe as remotely in the public interest”.
Mr Murdoch issued a statement saying: “As I’ve made very clear, we have vowed to do everything we can to get to the bottom of prior wrongdoings in order to set us on the right path for the future . . . The practices Sue Akers described . . . are ones of the past and no longer exist at The Sun.”
Robert Jay, QC, told the inquiry an email written by a News International executive showed the then editor of The Sun, Rebekah Brooks, received detailed leaks about the police investigation into hacking at the News of the World in 2006. The email, written on September 15 by head of legal affairs Tom Crone to News of the World editor Andy Coulson, said police had learned that more than £1 million had been paid for voice hacking and that there were at least 100 victims, but they had no direct evidence of journalists hacking voicemail.

First published in The Age.

Sun’s hacking outed MP as bisexual, inquiry told

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LONDON

A senior British politician who was outed by The Sun as bisexual ? a revelation that might have scuppered his prospects of leading the Liberal Democrats ? last night told the Leveson inquiry that he had experienced many problems with his voicemails that he did not realise at the time were due to phone hacking.A senior British politician who was outed by The Sun as bisexual – a revelation that might have scuppered his prospects of leading the Liberal Democrats – last night told the Leveson inquiry that he had experienced many problems with his voicemails that he did not realise at the time were due to phone hacking.

Simon Hughes, MP, was standing as the front-running candidate for the leadership of the Liberal Democrats in 2006 when he received a phone call from a journalist at The Sun who said he wanted to speak to him about a private matter.

They met, “and he then shared with me the fact that The Sun had come across information which was records of telephone calls made by me”. Mr Hughes said he “admitted straightforwardly” the matter relating to the calls.

The Sun later ran a news story headlined, ‘Hughes: I’ve had gay sex’, and quoting him as saying, “It was wrong to keep denying it.” The story said, “In an exclusive admission to The Sun, he apologized for twice denying he is homosexual.”

Mr Hughes told the inquiry the story did not entirely reflect what he said in the interview.

At the time Mr Hughes was the front-runner in the contest for leadership of the party (which was won by Nick Clegg, who later entered the current coalition with the Conservative Party, prompting one political commentator to question whether The Sun’s story had changed the course of British politics).

Mr Hughes said media then aggressively pursued “on a fallacious assumption” two of his friends, one male and one female, with whom he had shared phone calls. “They were trying to establish a relationship between me and these people, neither of which were what they wanted them to be.”

Police later told him his phone had been hacked but gave him little information about how much they had uncovered, he told the inquiry.

Mr Hughes said he was surprised and disappointed that only two people were taken to court following the initial investigation, and said there was a “complete failure” to investigate whether other people should have been charged.

“It struck me as fairly obvious once everything was revealed, if you had seen the names of the other journalists from the same paper you would at least have asked some questions and got them in for questioning and investigate what their role was.”

He said if police had acted strongly in 2006, “a lot of the illegal action might have been shut down and a lot of the people who are now known to be victims might not be victims or might not have suffered as much”.

Mr Hughes settled his phone-hacking claim with News International earlier this month for £45,000.

First published on theage.com.au.

News International exec’s email reveals police leaks

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LONDON

AN EMAIL written by a News International executive showed that Rebekah Brooks received detailed leaks from police about the investigation into phone hacking at News of the World in 2006, the Leveson inquiry heard last night.The email said police had learned that more than £1 million  had been paid for voice hacking and that police had a list of more than 110 victims, Robert Jay, QC, told the hearing.The inquiry also heard that a second News International masthead, The Sun, had “a culture of illegal payments”, with one public official receiving £80,000 over time and one journalist receiving £150,000 to pay sources.

The head of the police inquiry into phone hacking, Detective Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers, said police were investigating “a network of corrupt officials”, some of whom had been placed on retainer by The Sun.She said payments were authorised at a senior level on the paper and emails indicated journalists recognised it was illegal,  ”reference being made to staff ‘risking losing their pension or job’, to the need for ‘care’ and to the need for ‘cash payments’. There is also an indication of ‘tradecraft’, ie hiding cash payments to ‘sources’ by making them to a friend or relative of the source.”

She said nearly all of the payments to public officials related not to stories in the public interest but to ”salacious gossip” and breaches of trust and privacy. Ms Akers’ reference to the systematic nature of alleged corruption, and its endorsement by senior executives, will be a clear signal to the US department of justice that her allegations, if proved, fall within the ambit of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Rupert Murdoch’s US parent company, News Corporation, could face fines of hundreds of millions of dollars unless it can show it has co-operated vigorously with the authorities in rooting out malpractice.The revelations came as classical singer Charlotte Church settled a court case over hacking for £600,000, the largest payout to date. Hacking of her and her family resulted in 33 stories in the News of the World.

She said outside court: “Nothing was off limits by those who pursued me and my family. I was a teenager at the time and my parents were not in the public eye. They were harassed, put under surveillance, and my mother was bullied into revealing her private medical condition [which included attempted suicide] for no other reason than that they were my parents.”

The critical email that reveals News was leaked information about the police inquiry into its malpractices undermines the way News International publicly claimed for years that hacking was confined to a single rogue reporter.

The email was written by head of legal affairs, Tom Crone, to News of the World editor Andy Coulson on 15 September 2006, and was based on what Mr Crone had been told by Rebekah Wade (later Rebekah Brooks), then editor of The Sun, who had been given a police leak.

The email, headlined ”Strictly private and confidential”, detailed 10 aspects of the police investigation, saying that the police raid on the home of private investigator Glenn Mulcaire had found voice recordings and voicemail notes from hacked phones.

t said police had records of payments to Mulcaire from News International that showed a pattern of a particular victim being focused on for a period of time before attention switched to another, and that police were visiting ”bigger” victims and asking them if they had given anyone permission to access their voicemails and, if not, whether they wanted to prosecute.

”In terms of the News of the World, they suggested not widening [the investigation] to cover other News of the World people but they would if they got direct evidence [of journalists accessing voicemails],” the email said. ”But they have got hold of News of the World’s back numbers 2004.”

The email said police seemed in one case to have a phrase from a News of the World story that was identical to the tape or note of Glenn Mulcaire’s access. ”They have no recordings of News of the World people speaking to Glenn Mulcaire or accessing voicemails [but] they do have Glenn Mulcaire’s phone records which show sequences of contacts with News of the World before and after access. Obviously they don’t have the content of the calls so this is at best circumstantial.”

The email also said: “They are going to contact RW [Mr Jay thought this meant Rebekah Wade] today to see if she wishes to take it further.”The email also appears to be evidence that Andy Coulson, who later become chief communications adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron before resigning over the phone hacking furore last year, knew in 2006 of the wide extent of phone hacking within the News of the World.

First published on theage.com.au.

Police tipped off Brooks over hacking investigation

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LONDON

An email written by a News International executive showed that Rebekah Brooks received detailed leaks from police about the investigation into phone hacking at News of the World in 2006, the Leveson inquiry heard last night.LONDON: An email written by a News International executive showed that Rebekah Brooks received detailed leaks from police about the investigation into phone hacking at News of the World in 2006, the Leveson inquiry heard last night.

The email said police had learnt that more than £1 million had been paid for voice hacking and that police had a list of more than 110 victims, Robert Jay, QC, told the hearing.

The inquiry also heard that a second News International masthead, The Sun, had ”a culture of illegal payments”, with one public official receiving £80,000 over time and one journalist receiving £150,000 to pay sources.

The head of the police inquiry into phone hacking, Detective Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers, said police were investigating ”a network of corrupt officials”, some of whom had been placed on retainer by The Sun.

She said payments were authorised at a senior level on the paper and emails indicated journalists recognised it was illegal, ”reference being made to staff ‘risking losing their pension or job’, to the need for ‘care’ and to the need for ‘cash payments’. There is also an indication of ‘tradecraft’, by hiding cash payments to ‘sources’ through making them to a friend or relative of the source.”

She said that nearly all of the payments to public officials related not to stories in the public interest but to ”salacious gossip” and breaches of trust and privacy.

The revelations came as classical singer Charlotte Church settled a court case over hacking for £600,000, the largest payout to date. Hacking of her and her family resulted in 33 stories in the News of the World.

The critical email that reveals News International was leaked information about the police inquiry into its malpractices undermines the company’s initial claim that hacking was confined to a single rogue reporter.

The email was written by the head of legal affairs, Tom Crone, to the News of the World editor Andy Coulson on September 15, 2006, and was based on what Mr Crone had been told by Rebekah Wade (later Rebekah Brooks), then editor of The Sun, who had been given a police briefing.

The email, headlined ”Strictly private and confidential”, detailed 10 aspects of the police investigation, saying that the police raid on the home of the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire had found voice recordings and voicemail notes from hacked phones.

”In terms of the News of the World, they suggested not widening [the investigation] to cover other News of the World people but they would if they got direct evidence [of journalists accessing voicemails],” the email said.

”But they have got hold of News of the World’s back numbers 2004.”

The email said police seemed in one case to have a phrase from a News of the World story that was identical to the tape or note of Mr Mulcaire’s access.

The email also appears to be evidence that Mr Coulson, who later become chief communications adviser to the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, before resigning over the phone hacking furore last year, knew in 2006 of the wide extent of phone hacking within the News of the World.

First published at smh.com.au.

Murdoch’s new Sun rises, with a vow to behave and a hint of mischief

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LONDON

Rupert Murdoch has not quite given it his all. The first issue of his much-trumpeted Sunday edition of The Sun does have a naked page-three girl, but the paper is still a coyly nipple-free zone because she has been shot with her hands clutching her breasts.
A concession to the Sabbath? Or to the twin commercial desires to hold on to the lads among potential readers without alienating lassies?
The cover story of the new tabloid was aimed squarely at female readers. It featured a Madonna and Child shot of blonde celebrity Amanda Holden, a judge on the Britain’s Got Talent show, talking about how she nearly died during childbirth.
Forget the tough investigative reports of the fake sheikh in the old News of the World, the paper Mr Murdoch shut down over phone hacking, and the paper the Sunday Sun is designed to replace. This story was pure girl-talk. Ms Holden and her husband told how she lost 15 litres of blood, which hit the floor like a bucket of water and created a scene from a horror movie, the sudden loss of fluid shrinking her face to half its normal size and stopping her heart for 40 seconds.
Mr Murdochpersonally supervised the final stages of the celebrity-heavy edition on Saturday night.
The celebrity-heavy paper had 92 pages plus a 28-page football pull-out and it is believed 3 million copies were printed.
Mr Murdoch pulled the plug on his most successful title, the Sunday tabloid News of the World, last July because it had become too tainted by phone-hacking after revelations it had broken into the voicemail of the murdered 13-year-old schoolgirl Milly Dowler. Its replacement, which he hopes will pick up many of the 800,000 News readers who have not gravitated to other titles, took pains yesterday to promise it would behave itself.
In an editorial headlined “A new Sun rises today”, the paper said it would be “fearless, outspoken, mischievous and fun” and that the daily Sun had been a “tremendous force for good” over the years.
Of the cloud hanging over the masthead – 10 senior journalists have been arrested over payments to police – it said: “Some of our own journalists have been arrested, though not charged, over allegations of payments to public officials for stories. We believe those individuals are innocent until proven guilty.”
But the paper said it would have an independent “Sun readers’ champion” who would “accept feedback and correct significant errors”.

First published in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Euro zone uncertainty threatens Greek rescue

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LONDON

Greek politicians were racing to implement the savage budget cuts demanded under the terms of the country’s emergency bailout as questions emerged over whether the deal could be derailed by arguments over how to fund it.
Germany could cause the deal to unravel if it continues to oppose the euro zone creating a €750 billion ($A930 billion)fund to act as a firewall against spreading of financial woes.
At a G20 summit of finance ministers in Mexico that starts on Saturday, the European Union will plead for increased contributions to the International Monetary Fund from non-EU countries to help shore up the firewall, which is seen as essential to stop Greek debt “contagion” spreading to Spain and Italy.
But the IMF is expected to refuse to make extra cash available and will threaten to pull the plug on its contribution to Tuesday’s €130 billion Greek bailout unless the euro zone creates a €750 billion fund.
The EU’s economic and monetary affairs commissioner, Olli Rehn, wants to unite the existing European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), worth €250 billion, with a new European Stability Mechanism valued at €500 billion.
“This is very important to show that we have credible instruments to ensure we have financial stability in Europe,” he said. “It is also very important to encourage our international partners in the G20 and IMF to move in order to increase the resources of the IMF, which form a global financial firewall but also contribute significantly to the European financial firewall.”
Germany has opposed calls to merge the two funds because it will increase Germany’s liability and exposure to a euro zone default by 50 per cent, an issue that threatens a Bundestag revolt on the Greek bailout.
The debate will dominate an EU summit in Brussels on March 1 and is expected to spark a major political battle when Germany’s parliament debates the Greek bailout in Berlin next week.
Meanwhile, the Greek government will push to qualify for the bailout by carrying out reforms by the end of the month, including a crackdown on bribery, tightening up tax collecting and selling state assets.
Analysts continued to cast doubt on whether the bailout could rescue the country’s troubled economy, which has lost 17 per cent of its gross domestic product in a five-year recession and would be bankrupt without aid. There are concerns further cuts might just deepen the recession, making it even more difficult for the Greek economy to recover.
Andrew Balls, the head of European portfolio management at Pimco, a leading bond investor, told the Financial Times: “It is all an exercise in make believe. Does anybody really believe any of the Greek sustainability numbers?”
Jennifer McKeown, senior European economist at Capital Economics, said there was still a risk of Greece leaving the euro zone later this year because of social unrest, the austerity measures and deeper recession.
But Greece’s Finance Minister, Evangelos Venizelos, said the deal meant “a nightmare scenario” had been avoided. “This was a significant development that gives our country a new opportunity.”
The deal is opposed by several of Greece’s left-wing parties who are mobilising against it before the national elections.

First published in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Europe’s $160bn bailout for Greece

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LONDON

EUROPEAN leaders have agreed on a €130 billion ($A160 billion) bailout for the Greek economy, averting the immediate threat of bankruptcy and of Greece being forced out of the euro zone.
But the deal depends on Greece implementing further tough austerity measures, ensuring more hardship for Greeks already suffering from the effects of massive spending cuts and economic chaos.
The deal, concluded after marathon overnight talks in Brussels, includes a major write-down of debt owed to private investors, who have accepted a “haircut” of more than €100 billion or 53.5 per cent of their holdings.
The deal includes provisions to ensure loan money be “ring-fenced” so it can be clawed back if Greece fails to make further savage spending cuts.
The deal is double the size of the 2010 bailout. Without it Greece, facing debt repayments of €14.5 billion by March 20, would have gone bankrupt.
Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos hailed the breakthrough, calling it a “historic day” for Greece. Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos said the agreement would allay fears that Greece would be forced out of the euro zone.
But its terms will mean decades of hardship for Greeks, a third of whom are already in poverty as the economy reels from massive cuts to government spending, jobs and wages. Greece has 48 per cent youth unemployment and its suicide rate has doubled since 2008.
The deal must survive further hurdles over the next month as it faces ratification by individual European Union parliaments and a stormy response from protesting Greeks, who have been rioting in the streets of Athens as the country endures a fifth year of recession.
Under the agreement, the Greek government has agreed to an extra €325 million in spending cuts. Mr Papademos is expected to push through emergency legislation today that will further slash pensions and wages. In longer-term measures, 150,000 civil servants will be axed and labour laws ditched.
The austerity program has seen support for Greece’s two main political parties, Socialist Pasok and its conservative coalition partner New Democracy, plummet to the lowest levels recorded.
In Athens, residents were cynical about the outcome. Said Spyros Papadopoulos, an employee at a cosmetics company: “Default is inevitable and all these sacrifices will be for nothing.”
“Our economy has collapsed and everybody knows it,” said Katerina Freri, a civil servant at the finance ministry until her retirement this year. “Officially we have not gone bankrupt because it is in nobody’s interest for us to go bankrupt and in Europe they fear the domino effect. But, unofficially, bankrupt is what we are, and at some point they will say it and there will be chaos here.”
Euro zone leaders fear that if Greece defaults on its debt it would trigger a chain reaction of economic collapses across the EU and destroy the euro.
The deal brings the total funds committed to save Greece, Ireland and Portugal to at least €386 billion.
But the latest bailout is unlikely to be enough to save Greece. A report by the troika’s own analysts warned that Greek debt could reach an astronomical 160 per cent of its gross domestic product by 2020 if its recession deepens and structural reforms are not made.
The report suggested Greece would need additional help to cut its debts to 120 per cent of GDP by 2020, and that Greek banks would need as much as €50 billion in recapitalisation rather than €30 billion.

First published in The Age.

Rape may well be natural. So what?

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COMMENT

KAREN KISSANE

THERE’S really only one question to be asked about the “new” theory from a pair of American researchers that men are genetically programmed to rape. And that is: So?Appalled feminists are arguing that the theory can’t be right. But even if it is right, what would that change? Little, I suspect.

It might further bruise the self-esteem of our sons, struggling to learn what decent manhood is about. It might complicate gender relationships that little bit more. It might even lead to the occasional desperate plea by an American lawyer trying to defend the indefensible in a fraught rape trial.

But it won’t change the way society deals with the problem.

The two scientists are biologist Randy Thornhill and anthropologist Craig Palmer. They have used observations of the scorpion fly to argue that rape is a natural and biological product of man’s evolutionary need to reproduce, as much a part of life as thunderstorms and epidemics. They say men will rape whenever their capacity to reproduce is thwarted.

It’s a wonder women are game to leave the house, really.

That’s the first reason not to be alarmed by their claims. Most men do not rape, so any link between their evolutionary make-up and their behavior in this regard must be less than overpowering.

The second reason the theory should not be feared, even if it turns out to have some validity, is that there is already a proved statistical association between maleness and other forms of violence that could be used to argue that men are genetically
more predisposed than women to aggression. But it’s not considered an excuse.

Most violent crime, from assault to murder, is committed by men on other men. The only difference with rape is that it is more often a violent crime committed by men on women and children. Studies have found that men convicted of violent crimes tend to have higher testosterone levels than non-violent offenders and non-offenders.

Having this “Ychromosome disability” is no defence to drunken pub brawls or domestic murders. Even if it were proved that males carry a genetic predisposition to general violence (as opposed to being conditioned by social experiences), it would not earn offenders freedom from arrest for their assaults, or lighter sentences for their crimes. So why would a built-in predisposition to rape get offenders off the hook for sexual violence?

The fact that some species of spider have been known to eat their young could theoretically be linked to depressed mothers who suffocate their babies. Infanticide could be interpreted as an evolutionary mechanism; the mother kills her child to preserve herself, in the face of what she sees as a threat to her mental wellbeing, in order to live to have more offspring later.

Would that defence save a murderous mother? Not on your life. Human adults are expected to be moral beings.

Rape is a “natural” phenomenon, in that it occurs in nature. A recent television documentary on dolphins, those New Age symbols of all that is beautiful and good, had chilling footage of a gang of young males pack-raping a young female. They worked as a group to separate her from her pod and then forced themselves on her, despite her desperate attempts to escape.

But it’s important to differentiate between what is “natural” and what is normal and healthy.

Studies of rats suggest that rape becomes common in rodent communities only as normal social mores break down under pressures such as overcrowding. Young bull elephants tend to become rogues only when the herd has lost the presence or authority of older bulls, who would normally keep the lads in line.

So even with animals further down the evolutionary tree than man, social factors play a part in an individual’s aggressive behavior.

Evolutionists such as Thornhill and Palmer fail to take social factors into account. They’re so mired in biological determinism that they interpret all findings in light of that one theory.

Evolutionists also pay no mind to the mind. But human consciousness makes for a difference between blokes and scorpion flies that will always leave men culpable for rape, no matter what geneticists might one day find under the microscope.

Human beings, unlike the scorpion fly, have emotions (so that the female of the species suffers during rape) and have rational insight into their behavior (so that the male of the species is able to detect another’s distress and make a decision as to
whether to proceed despite it).

Our legal systems are based on the understanding that this ability to think makes us responsible for our actions, no matter what our animal instincts dictate.

Perhaps evolution has left maleness associated with rape impulses. While that would be sad for both sexes, it doesn’t seem like news. But neither is it news that humans can analyse their impulses and choose which ones to act on. That includes the impulse in some to exploit the furphy that all men are beasts.

First published in The Age.

State of Grace

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With her cool elegance,  Grace Kelly epitomised both the glamour of Hollywood and allure of European royalty. The treasured clothes and accessories that made her an icon have long been safeguarded at her palace in Monaco. Now they are coming here.

COVER STORY

BY KAREN KISSANE

IT ALMOST didn’t happen, that first meeting between the actor Grace Kelly and the man who was to turn her life into a fairytale, Prince Rainier of Monaco. It had been set up by a French magazine as a photo opportunity during the 1955 Cannes Film Festival.
First, Kelly’s schedule was so frantic that she was tempted to cancel. Then her hotel suffered a power cut so she could not dry her hair or iron a frock.
The queen of Hollywood improvised. She pulled her hair back and wore her least-wrinkled outfit, a lush floral silk taffeta made from a McCall’s dress pattern that was quite different from her usual sleek look.
That evening she told Olivia de Havilland that Rainier was “charming, a very charming man indeed”. Her current love was consigned to oblivion. Within a year, aged only 26, she had had “the wedding of the century” and was elevated to Her Serene Highness — a title well suited to her trademark cool loveliness.
Royalty had long been her aim. As a child growing up in an Irish Catholic family in Philadelphia, she once told her sister Peggy, “I’m going to be a princess.”
Even as a child, she had been unruffled by life’s ups and downs. Her other sister, Lizanne, once locked her in a cupboard. Kelly did not cry or bang to get out. She sat inside and contentedly played with her dolls for hours. “She seemed to have been born with a serenity the rest of us didn’t have,” Lizanne said years later.
That self-possession was part of Kelly’s allure. Add regal bearing, deep blue eyes, a classically beautiful face the camera caressed and a distant gaze — not so much superior as unfocused, her short-sightedness corrected by thick horn-rimmed glasses in private — and you have the basis of the Kelly look that would so entrance a generation of filmgoers, photographers and directors, including Alfred Hitchcock.
He used her in three of his films — Dial M for Murder, Rear Window and To Catch a Thief — and said she had “sexual elegance” and resembled “a snow-covered volcano”: cool on the outside but with the suggestion of raging hot torrents within. It was a good analogy, judging by Kelly’s own remarks on her sexuality to her friend and biographer, Gwen Robins: “She just adored sex. She made no bones about it. We were lying on the bed one day and I said something about sex and she said, ‘It’s heaven.”‘ She told someone else it “put lights” in her eyes.
But Kelly understood that mystery was needed for mystique. She was discreet and tenaciously private about personal matters. Her active love life was a secret until after her death. It was customary in those days for the studios to release the body measurements of their stars; Kelly refused.
She carefully cultivated a picture that smoothed over any rough edges in her history. A book put out by the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco quotes her as saying that her family always trusted her choices and supported her career: “There was no such thing as a bad profession for them.”
Not so, says one of her bridesmaids, who later wrote a book on Kelly that said her father, Jack, thought acting was “a slim cut above street-walking”.
This already delectable package had to be fashionably packaged by Hollywood and it is the clothes that were created for her films and her public appearances that really launched the signature Kelly style. Left to her own devices when young, she dressed like the preppy private schoolgirl she had been: wool skirts, cashmere cardigans, pearls and little heels (at more than 1.65 metres, she was considered tall for an actress).
She worked out when modelling early in her 20s that she looked best with her hair pulled back off her square face and stuck firmly to that policy thereafter.
She did not flaunt. Even as a star, she would wear figure-hugging evening frocks but avoided overly revealing clothes; her breasts were always discreetly covered and she disliked short skirts when they later came into vogue (“After all, who has pretty knees?” she asked.)
She became known for classic understatement and clean lines. The waists were cinched, the skirts often full, the shoulders either bare or wispy with chiffon. Floaty fabrics conjured up feminine archetypes: the goddess, the sprite, the dancer. Her look was more adult than Audrey Hepburn’s gamine but not as sultry as Sophia Loren’s highlighting of Mediterranean curves.
Writing in Vanity Fair, Laura Jacobs says, “In To Catch a Thief and High Society, references abound to both classical draping and classical dance … Grace’s gowns are columnar, with waterfall pleats and cascades fluting, sheer trains flowing down from the back (where wings would be, if she had them) and sheer scarves like soft breezes around her neck …
“Grace’s day dresses have fitted bodices and skirts blossoming from the waist — a very clever fusion of the ballerina’s tutu with the American shirtwaist and a shape that allowed her to move freely (as she did in the sensational flowered shirtwaist of Rear Window, in which she climbed a fire escape). As for colour, Grace was given her own Apollonian palette. Wheat-field and buttercup yellows, azure and cerulean blues, seashell pink and angel-skin coral, Sun King gold and Olympus white — no one wore white like Grace Kelly.”
Except, perhaps, Marilyn Monroe in the iconic image with white sunray pleats billowing over a New York subway grating.
Kelly’s clothes from both her Hollywood and her Monaco days now reside in a small, fluorescent-lit basement room in the bowels of the palace on the rock in Monte Carlo that has been inherited by her son, Prince Albert, and his new wife with the uncertain smile, Princess Charlene.
Rack upon colourful rack of haute couture and home-made ball gowns, suits and dresses stand covered in white dustcloths, the air around them dehumidified and the temperature chilled to help preserve them. Shoes, hats, gloves and bags are wrapped in tissue. Everything is tagged with information about its designer, the year of origin and the major occasions upon which it was worn.
While it is clear the 1970s were unkind even to princesses — jewelled caftans could work in no other era and it could be argued they didn’t work even then — prowling the racks cannot help but produce crows of delight. Here, the pale blue frock in which she was photographed for High Society with Bing Crosby on one arm and Frank Sinatra on the other; there, a magnificent, 19th-century-style, full-skirted black net gown with gold embroidery she wore to a ball themed “1900”.
Many of the most famous items have been touring the world as part of an exhibition on Kelly’s life that is now in Toronto. An Australian version is due to be opened by Princess Charlene in Bendigo next month.
The exhibits will include a copy of her wedding dress, which had a 21-inch (53-centimetre) waist, and the original of the beautifully cut navy coat and cream shift she wore when landing in Monaco after crossing the sea with 66 family and friends and a media posse for her much-trumpeted wedding of the century (“the carnival of the century,” she dubbed it wryly).
The original wedding dress is now too fragile to travel. It was styled by Hollywood designer Helen Rose, who had fashioned her delicious frocks in the musical comedy High Society, and took 35 people six weeks to make. MGM had promised to let Kelly have the High Society wardrobe if she let the studio provide the wedding dress and film the ceremony.
It was the William and Kate wedding of its time, with 1800 journalists accredited to cover it and a live broadcast watched by 30 million people in Europe.
The Duchess of Cambridge last year paid homage to Kelly’s frock with her own wedding dress, which was also tightly waisted with a similar lace bodice and full skirt.
Kelly became pregnant with her first child, Caroline, on the honeymoon and that led to another fashion classic. She bought a large handbag from Hermes that she carried in front of her bump, pregnant bellies not yet having become a fashion accessory in their own right.
And thus “the Kelly bag”, which has been copied and tweaked in many ways since, was created.
The original, in tan leather, will be part of the Bendigo exhibition. So will a small, prettily worked tapestry bag that Kelly carried the night she won an Academy Award for The Country Girl in 1955 and to the official “reception of wedding gifts” after her marriage.
The basement collection is presided over by Kelly’s former palace wardrobe mistress, Maryel Girardin. She worked for the Monaco palace for 50 years, 25 of them with Kelly. She was the princess’s embroiderer and linen supervisor overseeing a staff of 30 and later worked as her seamstress, too.
Kelly was casual and spontaneous in her everyday life, Girardin says. She would roll up bare of make-up, in everyday clothes, carrying a Vogue pattern she wanted made up or asking for a special little something from Girardin’s nimble fingers, such as an embroidered apron to be part of a Monagasque national dress.
One of the special requests was a full-length coat in red and gold brocade, which Girardin made up for her from a sketch and from fabric that Kelly had already found. “She always knew exactly what she wanted,” Girardin says. “She was always very certain.”
Girardin had come to France at the age of 10 from Vietnam, orphaned by war and raised by nuns in a religious institution. She dislikes talking about that. “I don’t look back,” she says briefly. Thanks to Kelly, she says, she has had a happy life and seen many marvellous things, such as the glittering banquets laid out for special functions. She helped raise the princess’s children; Kelly wanted her in the nursery, too.
She performs a different kind of labour of love now. It was Girardin who, on Prince Rainier’s orders, gathered all Kelly’s clothes together after her death. She helps curators assemble and display them for exhibitions and she made Kelly’s replica wedding dress. Photographing clothes for The Saturday Age, Girardin knows just how to make them sit well with the help of a pin here or a judiciously placed fistful of tissue paper there. Some are wearing thin with age or developing age-related stains and Girardin has a rescue plan for each one.
After her marriage Kelly wore more haute couture, with Marc Bohan of Christian Dior a favourite. Two of her Bohan evening dresses cannot travel, however, as they are trimmed with ostrich feathers — they might be fit for a princess but they won’t pass modern quarantine rules.
Kelly always said she was frugal with her clothes and rarely threw any out, preferring to re-wear her old favourites. Rainier, on the other hand, liked to go shopping with her and sometimes overruled her thriftiness. She used to say he had excellent taste and instinctively liked the most expensive things, “a delightful quality in a man”.
She had long known she did not want to grow old in Hollywood, which she said was a “town without pity” where only success mattered. She had also seen what life was like for fading stars.
“I get up at seven for the make-up, Rita Hayworth at six, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis at five. I don’t want to know the time when I’ll have to come to the studio even earlier,” she said.
But she had not initially thought that her marriage would burn the bridge to Hollywood. She had thought before she married that perhaps she might make more films but somehow it never happened; she was busy with the children and her royal role, the right script did not come at the right time and somehow the possibility floated away.
But royal life brought its own problems. It sounds like there were times she felt like the princess in the tower. Vanity Fair reported that she had tears in her eyes when telling a friend, producer John Foreman, “I know where I am going to be every single day for the rest of my life.”
She had her own interests, though. She revived the glittering grand balls of Monaco’s past, inviting aristocratic as well as Hollywood royalty. Palace staff knew never to throw out telephone directories; she kept them to press flowers, which she arranged into artwork. She made home movies and often inserted herself as a cameo in a final frame — a homage to her old friend Hitch and to her old life, perhaps.
It almost didn’t happen, that plunge off the cliff on the Cote D’Azur that killed her.
Like her meeting with Rainier, Kelly’s exit from the stage of life was linked to fashion. She had filled the back seat of her car with clothes she was taking to be altered for the coming season.
She didn’t want them crushed, so she brushed aside her normal chauffeur to take the wheel herself, with her younger daughter Stephanie at her side.
Driving along the very road made famous in To Catch a Thief, she is said to have suffered a minor stroke that made her lose control of the car. In September 1982, aged only 52, the queen of style and princess of Monaco was dead.
Girardin’s face crumples even today when she is asked about it. “She was so beautiful,” she says through a translator, briefly covering her face with her hands. “Her eyes were sublime. I miss her very much. Twenty-five years [the period they worked together] is a long time.” Kelly once said she wanted to be remembered as a kind and loving person. In Girardin, she gets her wish.

The exhibition Grace Kelly: Style Icon will be opened by Princess Charlene of Monaco on March 10 and will run from March 11 to June 17 at the Bendigo Art Gallery.

Karen Kissane travelled to Monte Carlo as a guest of Monaco Tourism.

First published in The Age.

Fit for a princess

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With her cool elegance,  Grace Kelly epitomised both the glamour of Hollywood and allure of European royalty. An icon of the 20th century, her treasured clothes and accessories that embodied the look of the times have long been safeguarded at her palace in Monaco. Now they are winging their way here.

LIFE AND STYLE COVER STORY

MONTE CARLO

IT ALMOST didn’t happen, that first meeting between the actor Grace Kelly and the man who was to turn her life into a fairytale, Prince Rainier of Monaco. It had been set up by a French magazine as a photo opportunity during the 1955 Cannes Film Festival.
First, Kelly’s schedule was so frantic that she was tempted to cancel. Then her hotel suffered a power cut so she could not dry her hair or iron a frock.
The queen of Hollywood improvised. She pulled her hair back and wore her least-wrinkled outfit, a lush floral silk taffeta made from a McCall’s dress pattern that was quite different from her usual sleek look.
That evening she told Olivia de Havilland that Rainier was “charming, a very charming man indeed”. Her current love was consigned to oblivion. Within a year, aged only 26, she had had “the wedding of the century” and was elevated to Her Serene Highness — a title well suited to her trademark cool loveliness.
Royalty had long been her aim. As a child growing up in an Irish Catholic family in Philadelphia, she once told her sister Peggy, “I’m going to be a princess.”
Even as a child, she had been unruffled by life’s ups and downs. Her other sister, Lizanne, once locked her in a cupboard. Kelly did not cry or bang to get out. She sat inside and contentedly played with her dolls for hours. “She seemed to have been born with a serenity the rest of us didn’t have,” Lizanne said years later.
That self-possession was part of Kelly’s allure. Add regal bearing, deep blue eyes, a classically beautiful face the camera caressed and a distant gaze — not so much superior as unfocused, her short-sightedness corrected by thick horn-rimmed glasses in private — and you have the basis of the Kelly look that would so entrance a generation of filmgoers, photographers and directors, including Alfred Hitchcock.
He used her in three of his films — Dial M for Murder, Rear Window and To Catch a Thief — and said she had “sexual elegance” and resembled “a snow-covered volcano”: cool on the outside but with the suggestion of raging hot torrents within. It was a good analogy, judging by Kelly’s own remarks on her sexuality to her friend and biographer, Gwen Robins: “She just adored sex. She made no bones about it. We were lying on the bed one day and I said something about sex and she said, ‘It’s heaven.”‘ She told someone else it “put lights” in her eyes.
But Kelly understood that mystery was needed for mystique. She was discreet and tenaciously private about personal matters. Her active love life was a secret until after her death. It was customary in those days for the studios to release the body measurements of their stars; Kelly refused.
She carefully cultivated a picture that smoothed over any rough edges in her history. A book put out by the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco quotes her as saying that her family always trusted her choices and supported her career: “There was no such thing as a bad profession for them.”
Not so, says one of her bridesmaids, who later wrote a book on Kelly that said her father, Jack, thought acting was “a slim cut above street-walking”.
This already delectable package had to be fashionably packaged by Hollywood and it is the clothes that were created for her films and her public appearances that really launched the signature Kelly style. Left to her own devices when young, she dressed like the preppy private schoolgirl she had been: wool skirts, cashmere cardigans, pearls and little heels (at more than 1.65 metres, she was considered tall for an actress).
She worked out when modelling early in her 20s that she looked best with her hair pulled back off her square face and stuck firmly to that policy thereafter.
She did not flaunt. Even as a star, she would wear figure-hugging evening frocks but avoided overly revealing clothes; her breasts were always discreetly covered and she disliked short skirts when they later came into vogue (“After all, who has pretty knees?” she asked.)
She became known for classic understatement and clean lines. The waists were cinched, the skirts often full, the shoulders either bare or wispy with chiffon. Floaty fabrics conjured up feminine archetypes: the goddess, the sprite, the dancer. Her look was more adult than Audrey Hepburn’s gamine but not as sultry as Sophia Loren’s highlighting of Mediterranean curves.
Writing in Vanity Fair, Laura Jacobs says, “In To Catch a Thief and High Society, references abound to both classical draping and classical dance … Grace’s gowns are columnar, with waterfall pleats and cascades fluting, sheer trains flowing down from the back (where wings would be, if she had them) and sheer scarves like soft breezes around her neck …
“Grace’s day dresses have fitted bodices and skirts blossoming from the waist — a very clever fusion of the ballerina’s tutu with the American shirtwaist and a shape that allowed her to move freely (as she did in the sensational flowered shirtwaist of Rear Window, in which she climbed a fire escape). As for colour, Grace was given her own Apollonian palette. Wheat-field and buttercup yellows, azure and cerulean blues, seashell pink and angel-skin coral, Sun King gold and Olympus white — no one wore white like Grace Kelly.”
Except, perhaps, Marilyn Monroe in the iconic image with white sunray pleats billowing over a New York subway grating.
Kelly’s clothes from both her Hollywood and her Monaco days now reside in a small, fluorescent-lit basement room in the bowels of the palace on the rock in Monte Carlo that has been inherited by her son, Prince Albert, and his new wife with the uncertain smile, Princess Charlene.
Rack upon colourful rack of haute couture and home-made ball gowns, suits and dresses stand covered in white dustcloths, the air around them dehumidified and the temperature chilled to help preserve them. Shoes, hats, gloves and bags are wrapped in tissue. Everything is tagged with information about its designer, the year of origin and the major occasions upon which it was worn.
While it is clear the 1970s were unkind even to princesses — jewelled caftans could work in no other era and it could be argued they didn’t work even then — prowling the racks cannot help but produce crows of delight. Here, the pale blue frock in which she was photographed for High Society with Bing Crosby on one arm and Frank Sinatra on the other; there, a magnificent, 19th-century-style, full-skirted black net gown with gold embroidery she wore to a ball themed “1900”.
Many of the most famous items have been touring the world as part of an exhibition on Kelly’s life that is now in Toronto. An Australian version is due to be opened by Princess Charlene in Bendigo next month.
The exhibits will include a copy of her wedding dress, which had a 21-inch (53-centimetre) waist, and the original of the beautifully cut navy coat and cream shift she wore when landing in Monaco after crossing the sea with 66 family and friends and a media posse for her much-trumpeted wedding of the century (“the carnival of the century,” she dubbed it wryly).
The original wedding dress is now too fragile to travel. It was styled by Hollywood designer Helen Rose, who had fashioned her delicious frocks in the musical comedy High Society, and took 35 people six weeks to make. MGM had promised to let Kelly have the High Society wardrobe if she let the studio provide the wedding dress and film the ceremony.
It was the William and Kate wedding of its time, with 1800 journalists accredited to cover it and a live broadcast watched by 30 million people in Europe.
The Duchess of Cambridge last year paid homage to Kelly’s frock with her own wedding dress, which was also tightly waisted with a similar lace bodice and full skirt.
Kelly became pregnant with her first child, Caroline, on the honeymoon and that led to another fashion classic. She bought a large handbag from Hermes that she carried in front of her bump, pregnant bellies not yet having become a fashion accessory in their own right.
And thus “the Kelly bag”, which has been copied and tweaked in many ways since, was created.
The original, in tan leather, will be part of the Bendigo exhibition. So will a small, prettily worked tapestry bag that Kelly carried the night she won an Academy Award for The Country Girl in 1955 and to the official “reception of wedding gifts” after her marriage.
The basement collection is presided over by Kelly’s former palace wardrobe mistress, Maryel Girardin. She worked for the Monaco palace for 50 years, 25 of them with Kelly. She was the princess’s embroiderer and linen supervisor overseeing a staff of 30 and later worked as her seamstress, too.
Kelly was casual and spontaneous in her everyday life, Girardin says. She would roll up bare of make-up, in everyday clothes, carrying a Vogue pattern she wanted made up or asking for a special little something from Girardin’s nimble fingers, such as an embroidered apron to be part of a Monagasque national dress.
One of the special requests was a full-length coat in red and gold brocade, which Girardin made up for her from a sketch and from fabric that Kelly had already found. “She always knew exactly what she wanted,” Girardin says. “She was always very certain.”
Girardin had come to France at the age of 10 from Vietnam, orphaned by war and raised by nuns in a religious institution. She dislikes talking about that. “I don’t look back,” she says briefly. Thanks to Kelly, she says, she has had a happy life and seen many marvellous things, such as the glittering banquets laid out for special functions. She helped raise the princess’s children; Kelly wanted her in the nursery, too.
She performs a different kind of labour of love now. It was Girardin who, on Prince Rainier’s orders, gathered all Kelly’s clothes together after her death. She helps curators assemble and display them for exhibitions and she made Kelly’s replica wedding dress. Photographing clothes for The Saturday Age, Girardin knows just how to make them sit well with the help of a pin here or a judiciously placed fistful of tissue paper there. Some are wearing thin with age or developing age-related stains and Girardin has a rescue plan for each one.
After her marriage Kelly wore more haute couture, with Marc Bohan of Christian Dior a favourite. Two of her Bohan evening dresses cannot travel, however, as they are trimmed with ostrich feathers — they might be fit for a princess but they won’t pass modern quarantine rules.
Kelly always said she was frugal with her clothes and rarely threw any out, preferring to re-wear her old favourites. Rainier, on the other hand, liked to go shopping with her and sometimes overruled her thriftiness. She used to say he had excellent taste and instinctively liked the most expensive things, “a delightful quality in a man”.
She had long known she did not want to grow old in Hollywood, which she said was a “town without pity” where only success mattered. She had also seen what life was like for fading stars.
“I get up at seven for the make-up, Rita Hayworth at six, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis at five. I don’t want to know the time when I’ll have to come to the studio even earlier,” she said.
But she had not initially thought that her marriage would burn the bridge to Hollywood. She had thought before she married that perhaps she might make more films but somehow it never happened; she was busy with the children and her royal role, the right script did not come at the right time and somehow the possibility floated away.
But royal life brought its own problems. It sounds like there were times she felt like the princess in the tower. Vanity Fair reported that she had tears in her eyes when telling a friend, producer John Foreman, “I know where I am going to be every single day for the rest of my life.”
She had her own interests, though. She revived the glittering grand balls of Monaco’s past, inviting aristocratic as well as Hollywood royalty. Palace staff knew never to throw out telephone directories; she kept them to press flowers, which she arranged into artwork. She made home movies and often inserted herself as a cameo in a final frame — a homage to her old friend Hitch and to her old life, perhaps.
It almost didn’t happen, that plunge off the cliff on the Cote D’Azur that killed her.
Like her meeting with Rainier, Kelly’s exit from the stage of life was linked to fashion. She had filled the back seat of her car with clothes she was taking to be altered for the coming season.
She didn’t want them crushed, so she brushed aside her normal chauffeur to take the wheel herself, with her younger daughter Stephanie at her side.
Driving along the very road made famous in To Catch a Thief, she is said to have suffered a minor stroke that made her lose control of the car. In September 1982, aged only 52, the queen of style and princess of Monaco was dead.
Girardin’s face crumples even today when she is asked about it. “She was so beautiful,” she says through a translator, briefly covering her face with her hands. “Her eyes were sublime. I miss her very much. Twenty-five years [the period they worked together] is a long time.” Kelly once said she wanted to be remembered as a kind and loving person. In Girardin, she gets her wish.
■The exhibition Grace Kelly: Style Icon will be opened by Princess Charlene of Monaco on March 10 and will run from March 11 to June 17 at the Bendigo Art Gallery.
Karen Kissane travelled to Monte Carlo as a guest of Monaco Tourism. 

First published in The Age’s Life and Style Magazine.