It was 1989, and 29-year-old Nyna Giles was grocery shopping with her young son in Westchester. She was waiting in line when she spotted a magazine-headline that made he𝔉r heart stop: “Princess Grace Bridesmaid Living in NY Shelter for Homeless: Photo Exclusive.”
Giles began to panic. She grabbed the magazine and turned to page 19. There she was: an elegant older woman with cropped hair and a white scarf, sitting on th🍬e steps of an Upper East Side shelter. Her name was Carolyn Scott Reybold, and she’d once been Princess Grace’s bridesmaid. She was also Giles’ mother.
“It was terrible,” Giles told The Post about seeing her parent exposed like t♌hat. “It was just shocking to see it made public.”
Giles knew her mother had been friends with Grace Kelly, and a bridesmaid for the actress’ wedding to Prince Rainier of Monaco. Yet Giles, the youngest of three girls, mostly knew her mother as a frail and sad, if loving, woman. She was upset that her mother refused help and i𒁏nsisted on living in a shelter, going to Bergdorf’s every morning to wash herself in the basin in the luxury depart🌌ment store’s ladies’ lounge. She had tried to keep her mother’s predicament a secret.
But she also didn’t quite understand or know h𓆏er. How did someone who had once been one of the country’s premier fashion models, who counted the glamorous Kelly as one of her best friends, who had a beautiful house and life on Long Island, become so dama🍷ged?
Now, Giles is coming forw⭕ard with the whole, unvarnished truth about her mother, who died in 2007 at the age of 79. After years of piecing together Carolyn’s story, she has written (St. Martin’s Press), out Tuesday. The book, co-written with journalist Eve Claxton, chronicles Carolyn’s journey, as well as Giles’ own tumultuous childhood.
“The most important꧅ thing for me was really understanding how I grew up and what happened to her,” Giles said. Writing thꦰe book, she added, “was very, very painful to do. I cried probably almost every day for four years.”
Carolyn Scott was born in 1928, in Steubenville, Ohio. Her parents had divorced when she was young, an🅘d Carolyn lived with her mother and stepfather, who treated her like a servant. After washing her half-siblings’ clothes and clearing the dishes and scrubbing the floors, young Carolyn would lock herself in hꦗer room and pour over fashion magazines, dreaming of New York.
The summer after high school, in 1947, she won the Queen of Steubenville beauty contest. The d🎃ark-haired, fair-skinned 19-year-old took her $500 prize money and booked a one-way train ticket to the Big Apple, landing a room at the Upper East Side’s Barbizon Hotel for Women. She was scouted by a fashion photographer almost right away, while eating dinner at an automat. Her first job was for the teen magazine Junior Bazaar.
“One of the things that impressed me [researc💎hing this book] was how good of a model she was,” said Giles. “She did tell me that she worked with [photographers] Francesco Scavuꦜllo and Richard Avedon . . . but before it was just this abstract thing.”
Carolyn first noticed Grace Kelly — “a round-faced teenage girl with light brown wavy hair” — stepping out of the Barbizon’s revolving doors. It turned out that Grace, an aspiring actress from Philadelphia, was living in the room next to Carolyn, and the two became fast friends, listening to Louis Armstrong records and spending their money on baꦉllet tickets and drinks at the Russian Tea Room. It was actually Grace who introduced Carolyn to her future husband, Giles’ fat♈her, Malcolm Reybold, who was a friend of one of Grace’s short-lived beaus.
Yet as Grace began starring in films, their relationship began to change. One time, when Carolyn accompanied Grace to one of her premieres, Grace got angry when a photographer asked to take a picture and instead of moving ou🌄t of the way, Carolyn cozied up to Grace and smiled for the camera.
Still, Carol♎yn asked Grace to be the godmother to her second daughter, Jill, and Grace would visit their apartment bearing beau🍌tiful dresses and toys for Jill and Carolyn’s first child, Robin.
“I think probably for all of Grace’🥃s friends it was a sort of an overwhelming time as she became more and more famous,” said Giles. “So I think all of them started to step back a little — even before the royal wedding.”
By the time Giles was born, in 1959, Carolyn had changed. She was in her early 30s, married and living on Long Island. She was no longer modeling. “That young a♍nd🦹 determined woman at the Barbizon,” Giles writes in her book, “is a person I never knew.”
♈“She was very depressed and very isolated,” said Giles. “I think she missed he💟r life in New York.”
To make matters worse, Giles’ birth had been rough. When Carolyn’s water broke, her husband had been out socializing with friends. He barely set foot in the hospital. After the difficult de🐟livery, the doctor needed to remove Carolyn’s uterus in order to save her life. She never recovered.
Doctors posthumously diagnosed her with postpartum psychosis, w𝐆hich would explain her paranoid delusions later. “That was very hard to hear,” said Giles.
Giles spent her childhood in doctors’ offices. Her mother mistakenly believed she was too ill to go to school, and instead she spent her days in their modernist Long Island estate that Malcolm had dubbed the “dream house.” Sometimes Giles would have tutors come to the house, but usually her mother would drive her into Manhattan to visit a string of doctors, none of whom could tell what was wrong with her — because it was all in her mother’s mind.
“I just remember being home my whole childhood,” said Giles, who didn’t even know how much school she had missed until she tracked down her school records while researching the book. “The total amount of time ꦗI spent in [elementary] school is the equivalent maybe a little more than one full year of education.♑” Robin and Jill, who were eight and six years older than Giles, had their own, independent lives and moved out of the house when they were both teenagers.
Mꦡeanwhile, Carolyn’s behavior got more worrisome. One evening, Giles woke up in the middle of the night to find her mother frantically tearing down the wallpaper in a panic. Then there was the time, when Giles was 11, that Carolyn woke her young daughter in the middle of the night, packed her into a vehicle and drove her all the way to Steubenville. She seemed scared of her husband, who was barely home and had a short temper when he was.
Another time, she whisked Giles away and took her and Robin, then a folk musician scraping by in Philly, to Lourdes, France, on an ocean liner where she hoped they would be “cured.” Carolyn di🍌dn’t tell her husband where they we𓄧re going.
“I really believe at the core🍰 it was mental illness,” said Giles. “Through al♏l of my research and interviews with mental-health professionals and looking into her history, I believe I know the truth now.”
Carol𝓡yn and Malcolm divorced in 1974. Gil🎐es was 15 at the time and had recently moved to Manhattan with her sister Jill in order to get away from her mother’s neediness.
In 1979, Robin died in a car crash. Two years later, Grace was also killed in an automobile accident. Carolyn shut down. She refused to let Giles help her. By 1989, the year Star magazine exposed her mother’s story, Carolyn was living at the 🍸women’s shelter at the old Park Avenue Armory.
“I think she liked the anonymity of being in the shelter, honestly,” said Giles, who would visit Carolyn “as often as possible,” taking her for෴ walks o𓃲r to lunch. “[She had] nothing to live up to.”
M🌊other and daughter talked on the phone several times a week, and Giles, who was married by then and had three children of her own, set up a monthly account at a nearby diner so Carolyn could eat her meals ther🌱e.
Carolyn developed a ꦆheart problem in 1999, and Giles moved her to an adult home in Long Island. She died there in 2007 at age 79, but in those few years mother and daughter💝 got closer and Giles began to ask her mother about her past. The older woman talked lovingly about her best friend Grace.
That inspired Giles to bring the full story of her mother to light and reconnect with Carolyn’s estranged family members, former modeling colleagues and friends.
“I felt like I could bring 🍨some closure 🅷to them,” she said. “They had this hole in their hearts not knowing what happened to her.”
Giles, who is now 58, living in Westchester and married to her third husband, hopes the book will help others with family members suffering from ment💖al illness.
“I don’t think we’re doing enough to help 🦩those people who can’t help themselves,” she said. “So I do hope in a way that her story can put a face on that.”