Grace of Monaco

by Robinson, Jeffrey

  It was fifteen months after her mother’s death when she married Stefano Casiraghi. Then he got killed, leaving her a single mom with three children. Retreating to Saint-Remy, she still had her ­father in Monaco, and responsibilities there, and although it took some time, she eventually found a balance between her life as a Princess and her life as a single mum.

  Then came the long affair with actor Vincent Lindon, the new one with Ernst of Hanover and her marriage to him.

  Caroline’s daughter with Ernst, Alexandra, was born in July 1999 in a hospital in Voecklabruck, Austria, some 40 miles east of Salz­burg, where Ernst has a large property.

  Walking into the hospital that day, Ernst was surrounded by photographers. He asked that they not take his picture and when one of them refused to comply, Ernst tried to take his camera away. The police arrived to send the photographer packing. And security around Caroline’s room was stepped up, so that no one could get close enough for a photo.

  Caroline, Ernst, and their collective family now divided their time between the Luberon, Monaco, and London. It seemed, at least for a while, that she and her husband could settle down to a normal family existence.

  But battles with the media were never far away.

  In 1998, they’d secured an apology from the French magazine Paris Match for doctoring a photograph of Caroline and Ernst. The magazine had digitally brought them closer together and removed people standing between them. In May 1999 they’d sued the German magazine Bunte and won $51,000 on the grounds that the magazine had practiced “irresponsible journalism.”

  Then, in January 2000, Ernst’s temper put them back in the news.

  Caroline and Ernst, along with six-month-old Alexandra, had been vacationing at Ernst’s villa on the Indian Ocean resort island of Lamu, off the coast of Kenya. The German owner of a disco just across the water on a neighboring island, had been playing music too loud and too late and Ernst didn’t like it. He’d asked several times that something be done.

  “Every night there was music until five in the morning,” Ernst complained. “And every night between Christmas and New Year he trained a laser beam on my house.”

  Ernst was not alone on the island in asking that something be done. Several neighbors had also filed complaints with local officials. But the club owner simply chose to ignore the problem. So, one night when Ernst spotted the club owner in Lamu, he confronted the man.

  By all accounts, what followed was a boisterous argument that ended in punches being thrown. According to the disco owner, Ernst showed up armed, and with 15 thugs who held the man down while Ernst throttled him. As a result, the club owner claimed, he had six broken ribs.

  According to Ernst, any injuries the man suffered did not happen that night. He swore that he did not arrive with a gang and that he was absolutely not armed.

  One German news agency quoted Ernst as saying, “I had the great pleasure of giving the man a left and a right.”

  But by the time the story hit the international media, especially the British, French, and Italian tabloids, the club owner was hospitalized.

  Ernst then took out full-page ads in several papers to refute the man’s claims.

  His ad in the Daily Nation and East African Standard labeled press reporting of the incident as, “one-sided.” It went on, “If the prince was indeed involved in an altercation with one of his compatriots on the island of Lamu, it is inaccurate that he was accompanied by gangsters and even less that he was armed.”

  Flushed with his 15 minutes of fame, the German club owner quickly told every reporter who bothered to inquire, “I’m happy to still be alive.”

  None of this amused Rainier.

  He accepted Ernst’s presence at his daughter’s side—after all, compared to Stephanie’s choice of men, Ernst was bordering on sainthood.

  But, according to an old friend, Rainier was “less than thrilled” with this story and worried that his son-in-law’s temper might now be provoked by the media, on purpose, to produce more headlines.

  “He hates these kinds of scandals,” the old friend said of Rainier. “He’s had more than enough of them to last a lifetime and is sick and tired of the way his family seems to be a magnet for this kind of negative publicity.”

  GqH

  Compared to the rest of the family, Rainier was probably the least approachable in public and the least photographed. However, his face is just as well known and when he was outside Monaco there were often occasions when someone would come up to him, point a finger and ask, “Don’t I know you?”

  If it was a very pretty woman, he might suggest she did know him. But most of the time he kept to himself and avoided public confrontation by denying that he was Prince Rainier.

  He would tell people, “Funny you should say that because I’m often mistaken for him. In fact, you’re the third person today who’s asked me if I’m him.”

  That’s when they’d take another long look and decide, “Well, no, I guess you’re not him. But you sure do look like him.”

  After that, they would leave him alone.

  But people on the street were very different from the paparazzi.

  “Even if you’ve lived with it all your life,” Rainier noted, “you never get used to the pressures of living in a fishbowl. There’s no denying that we’ve had our difficulties with the press but you have to understand that as soon as something gets printed it’s too late. No matter what you do afterwards it’s still always there in black and white. People believe what they read the first time. Retractions, when you can get one, are usually too little and much too late.”

  Typical of the way the press dealt with him, especially in the years after Grace’s death, was to link him romantically to every woman he was ever seen with. That’s what they did, for instance, to his friendship with Ira von Furstenberg.

  A princess in her own right, her title came from the first of three well-publicized marriages, this one in 1955 at the age of 15, to an Austrian nobleman.

  “Her father was friendly with my grandfather,” Rainier explained, “so they used to come to Monaco when she was growing up. We’ve known each other a long time. She’s good company and she’s amusing, but that’s all. There’s never been any question of marriage. But I guess each time I go to say hello to a woman the press immediately invents a romance because it makes for a better story than the truth.”

  The way the story got started was innocent enough. Von Furstenberg came to the principality on business in 1985. She’d taken a stand to exhibit antiques at Monaco’s biannual show. She and Rainier were not only distantly related, he’d been to school with her first husband. Anyway, as old friends it was to be expected that when Rainier toured the exhibit he would stop at her stand to say hello.

  That’s when they were photographed together.

  A few days later Gianni Agnelli arrived in Monaco on his yacht for the annual Red Cross Ball. He hosted a luncheon on the boat and quite naturally invited Rainier. He also invited Ira von Furstenberg, who happened to be his niece.

  As it turned out, strictly by coincidence, Rainier and Ira arrived at the same time.

  That night, at the ball, she sat next to Rainier.

  The photographers now had pictures of them together all over Monaco, which quickly led them to the obvious conclusion that their engagement would be announced at any moment.

  With great authority, one scandal sheet noted, “His 28-year-old daughter, Princess Caroline’s second marriage to wealthy former Italian playboy Stefano Casiraghi is shaky. And his other daughter Stephanie, 20, is constantly in man trouble. Rainier hoped that strong-willed Ira, a close friend of the Grimaldis for many years, could help him overcome these problems.”

  It was total fiction and both Rainier and Ira denied that anything was going on.

  But then her son might not have wanted to believe that the rumors were just rumors, and announced it was a sure bet that his mother would marry Rainier.

  The story stayed on the front pages for
over a year.

  The very same photo of Rainier and Ira von Furstenberg walking onto Agnelli’s boat was later run by newspapers and magazines around the world with a caption describing Rainier and his fiancée in the Caribbean; Rainier and the future Princess of Monaco in the South Pacific; and Rainier and the new Princess of Monaco on their secret honeymoon.

  The episode only ended when she did, in fact, get married—to somebody else.

  Wearily, Rainier conceded, “What can I say? It sells magazines.”

  Chapter 31

  In a Talkative Mood

  Rainier had spent the entire day at his desk.

  His office, in the Palace tower, was a large room, filled with half a century’s worth of stuff. There was a table to the right of the door, covered in folders and silver picture frames—his children and his grandchildren—and near that there was a large, very old safe that was locked shut, protecting, one imagines, large, very old valuables.

  His desk was set back in the far corner of the room, facing the door, with a couch and a chair and a coffee table in front of that. On the tables next to his desk there were more silver picture frames.

  Of course, there were several pictures of Grace.

  In the corner of the room there was a private lift, a sort of decorated triangular cage that took him up one flight to a second office he used mainly as a conference room. That was the room just below Albert’s office.

  The same size as Rainier’s main office, there was a round, green felt table off to one side and a small desk against the opposite wall. There were more family photos on the tables but here there were also several glass cabinets filled with mementos, such as a collection of life-sized sterling silver crustaceans and fish.

  There was a large bronze telescope aimed out of the east window and a huge architect’s mock-up of the museum Rainier was building to house his automobile collection. There were several paintings on the walls, including a particularly striking one called Storm, which depicts a small boat being hurled about by waves far out to sea. The sky in that painting exactly matched the steel-gray blue of those office walls.

  Back in his main office, dressed in a blue blazer with gray slacks and a white shirt with a blue wool tie, he reached for a cigarette, then sat down in the chair next to the couch. There were no lights on in the room, and as the sun faded, as the room grew dark, he spoke quietly and reflectively about his reign.

  “Mistakes?” He thought for a moment, then nodded, “Yes. Who doesn’t make mistakes? One would be terribly boring if one didn’t. But I’d like to think there have not been any major mistakes which have handicapped the principality in its development. I suppose, though, there have been minor ones. In fact, I’m sure there have been. Maybe sometimes our timing was bad in some decisions that were made.”

  Such as?

  “Such as certain construction in the country,” he conceded. “Maybe we shouldn’t have built as many skyscrapers as we did, or at least controlled the building better. But as I’ve said, it all happened very fast. Of course we learn from our past. When you look down from here you see La Condamine, the port area, where there are a lot of old buildings that will one day have to come down. Some of them date from 60 or 70 years ago and haven’t the proper sanitary installations. So we’re remodeling that quarter. But we’re not building high.”

  Building might well be a key word when it comes to his reign, and some people felt that his legacy would be that of “Le constructeur”—the builder.

  He pondered that. “The builder or the constructor is a nice image and I like it. But I must explain that it hasn’t been building just to please the speculators. Far from it. Fontvieille is a project that’s brought a great deal to Monaco but that was a major gamble because it meant reclaiming so much land from the sea. Then again, I’m not sure if the builder or the constructor is the way I would describe my legacy. Perhaps I’d rather it read that I did good for the country. That my reign was successful. That I was right.”

  And that, when the time came to make unpopular decisions, he had the courage to make them. “It’s not easy to take an unpopular decision but there are times when you don’t have a choice. I’m open to advice. I’ve never wanted yes-men around me. I always tried to insist that everyone give me their point of view before I make a decision. It’s generally easy to spot the yes-men because they’re the ones who wait for me to say what I think. So I find that at meetings I generally don’t begin by telling anyone what I think. I ask everyone in the room for their opinions before I express my views. Naturally there are times when some people are sitting there merely trying to second guess my opinion but they can’t be right all the time. I’ve learned this through experience. Believe me, it works. Albert is now in on these cabinet meetings so he’s seeing my style and hopefully learning something from it.”

  Albert knew only too well that he had a tough act to follow because no one could argue that Rainier hadn’t done well for the Monegasques. Compare the principality with any city in the world whose population is only 30,000. Not many have an acclaimed symphony orchestra, a recognized ballet company, a world-renowned opera company, quality public gardens, a beach, a port, high-class restaurants, high-class hotels and the same kind of international ­sophistication.

  All of this in a place that, when Rainier first took over was, decidedly, pretty dreary.

  The Monegasques are prosperous and healthy and educated and safe. In fact, they might be the safest people in Europe. Monaco’s police force is just about 500 strong, which translates to something like one cop for every 60 residents.

  “I’m a great believer in the idea that a strong police presence is an obvious answer to crime,” he said. “That and modern equipment so that the police can do their job. There is no real crime here. Nor is there a serious drug problem here. Of course, there are some petty crimes and there are young people I guess who sniff glue but there are no serious crimes here and drugs are not sold here. The only time there’s been any shooting is at a get-away car when some bank robber has tried to escape. The great thing is that there are only four roads leading in or out of the principality and the police can very quickly and very efficiently shut them off. We have a system of rakes with points that can be pulled out and blow the tires of any car trying to get away. We are fortunate enough to have an easy border to defend.”

  Street crime in Monaco is almost unheard of. There are occasional murders of passion and burglars have been known to break into safes or steal valuable paintings.

  In 1999, the banker Edmond Safra was murdered, the victim of arson. A suspect was taken into custody within a few days. Muggings are rare, prostitution is illegal—at least the street-corner variety—X-rated films are not shown and you can’t even walk barefoot in the streets without risking a police warning to you to put on your shoes. Monaco is billed as one of the last places on earth where a woman can wear her jewels. That’s very much by design.

  And Rainier was extremely proud of that. “We have video cameras in key locations around the principality, on street corners, in passageways, and in public lifts. It’s proven very dissuasive so we’re extending the system. Let’s face it, if a fellow sees a camera on a corner he’s not going to do much because he knows that the police are watching.”

  But cameras on corners and cameras in lifts have brought on cries of “Big Brother.”

  He scoffed at the mere mention of those words. “I think that’s very unfair. This isn’t a police state. I’ve heard that comment but I don’t agree with it at all. Come on, what is a police state? It’s a place where the police interfere with your life, with who you see, with what you say, with what you think. That’s not the case here. There are no restrictions on any of your liberties. The strength of our police force is for protective reasons, not restrictive ones. The major part of the force is in plain clothes. But let’s face it, this is a small community and everybody knows everybody else. How long do you think you could be a plain clothes policeman in this place before everybod
y knew who you were? You know, there’s a great imbalance in the world. Some people seem ashamed to show authority and discipline. Well, I don’t agree that authority and discipline are a threat to liberty. Without authority and discipline there is only anarchy. And that is a threat to liberty.”

  He said, for example, that the state religion is Catholicism but there are all sorts of places of worship in Monaco. All the major sects and religions are accounted for, as are many small ones. “We didn’t invent ecumenicalism, but I think we thought of it long before the Pope did.”

  Having mentioned religion, it seemed only natural to ask about the strength of his own faith. He admitted that, over the years, he had many questions but credited Father Tucker with keeping him in the Church.

  “I rebelled the way many people do,” he said. “I had a lot of questions and no one could give me satisfactory answers. But Father Tucker understood my rebellion from the Church and didn’t over-dramatize it. That’s the way he got me coming back towards the Church. He explained things. He didn’t force anything on me the way some other priests probably would have. Let’s be honest, most of them, I suspect, would have tried to convince me that by questioning my personal relationship with the Church I’d committed a great sin. He had an important influence on my life.”

  Among other things, Rainier said, Father Tucker helped him see what the Church should be. “What is the Church? It’s charity, tolerance, and understanding, isn’t it? That’s also what Father Tucker was all about. You know, I’ve always been appalled by those schools conducted by nuns for little kids where they have a triangle on the wall with an eye in the middle representing God and they tell the kids, that’s God watching you. I don’t think that’s the right image of God at all. I see God with a smile. Or maybe more with the heart than with the eye.”

  As a Catholic royal, Rainier enjoyed a special relationship with the Vatican. They sent a representative to his marriage and together with Grace he’s called on all the popes since Pius XII. “He was an extraordinary man, absolutely saintly. I always had the impression with him that he was the closest one could ever get to God. He didn’t receive us around the coffee table with chummy talk. I don’t want that from a pope. He received us in a little throne room. Grace and I sat on each side of him. He was affectionate and nice but deeply committed to his faith and deeply inspiring.”