Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (59 page)

Rainier came to feel that this should be sooner rather than later. He had never assumed that he would go on to the end. Princes do not have thrones and crowns and solemn coronations as kings do. It is much easier for them just to retire, and with the arrival of his sixtieth birthday in May 1983, the idea of retirement became more and more appealing to Rainier. “I will abdicate in favor of Albert,” he told Sheridan Morley in September 1984, “just as soon as he feels he is able and ready to take on the responsibilities of running Monaco. He is twenty-six now, and I don’t want him to wait around until I die. . . . I can’t tell you exactly when I shall go, but it won’t be long now.”

Rainier made similar remarks in other interviews at this time, and Tim Graham, the British royal photographer, was flown down to shoot a portfolio of pictures that could be released when the handover was officially announced.

That was in 1984. Ten years later Rainier remains firmly in charge of Monaco, and though he is now in his seventies, there is no more talk of the prince being in any hurry to hand his powers over to his son. “Let us just say,” Rainier once remarked on the subject, “that as soon as Albert is in the right position, and has the moral strength to take over, I would like him to do so.”

Moral strength is the issue, for Prince Albert has failed to grow up. “Nice,” “sweet,” “eager,” “kind”—everyone who knows the prince says the same. But words that were positive about a fresh-faced young fellow in his early twenties have a sad ring when applied to a balding man of thirty-six. Occupying his mother’s former office in the palace, Albert attends meetings, delivers the speeches that his staff write for him, and turns up dutifully at official openings. But apart from competing in motor rallies and bobsled competitions, the prince has yet to do one memorable thing in his life. Grace had a tendency to blandness, and it has been Albert’s misfortune to inherit that in full measure. When Caroline got her mother’s tough genes, and Stephanie inherited the wild, Albert was left with Grace’s eagerness to please. He is the eternal Boy Scout.

The common rumor runs that Prince Albert is gay. But there is no evidence for this, and to judge from the number of paternity suits against him, the opposite would seem the case. In March 1991, Bea Fiedler, a topless model of thirty-three, told Europe’s press about a night of passion with Prince Albert in Munich—”he tore off my panties with his teeth”—and in November, 1992, the prince was served with papers by a California woman, Tamara Rotolo, who had spent a month with Albert in the summer of 1991, and claimed that he was the father of her daughter, Jasmine.

The fact that Albert slept with these women is not in serious dispute. Until the paternity suits started, the prince made little secret of his conquests, and his father would cluck indulgently over Albert’s “wild oats.” What the family lawyers are most bitterly contesting is whether these romantic adventures have truly produced any offspring, for if Jasmine Rotolo turns out to be Albert’s daughter, then she will take precedence over Caroline’s children in Monaco’s succession. Jasmine’s position will be almost exactly that of “Mamou,” Rainier’s mother, the illegitimate offspring of the prince and the washerwoman’s daughter in Algeria nearly a hundred years ago. Fathering a suitable heir for Monaco is the most crucial of all the responsibilities in Albert’s life, and the casual ness of his sexual encounters suggests the rebellion of a boy who has found no other way to rebel.

The traditional remedy for a young prince in such a state of confusion has always been to marry him off to a good, strong woman, but finding a wife for Albert has not proved an easy task. The prince can get women into bed, it seems, but he cannot get them to the altar. This may have something to do with Albert himself. Having witnessed the private toll that a very public marriage took on his own parents’ lives/ it would only make sense for him to be nervous of commitment.

But it also reflects the fact that becoming Princess of Monaco is not the job opportunity it once was. What intelligent young woman would welcome the prospect of two forceful sisters-in-law who have, between them, done more than anyone to diminish the prestige that was once attached to being a princess—on top of the challenge of living up to the memory of the woman who embodied the very ultimate of the type?

Princess Stephanie did not go to race-car driving school, and by the time she had recovered from her bruisings and trauma in the autumn of 1982, it was too late for the fashion institute. Her mother’s friend, Marc Bohan, the chief designer at Dior, arranged a fashion apprenticeship for her in Paris, but Stephanie came into the studio too late too many mornings for that to last long.

This did not halt her fashion career, however. Less than two years after Grace’s death, in the spring of 1984, the Grimaldis gathered around the pool of the Hôtel de Paris to lend their support to Stephanie’s first swimsuit collection, some of the costumes being revealingly modeled in the publicity photos by Stephanie herself. The venture proved a success for little more than a season, collapsing when Stephanie’s talent and capacity for work had to take over from the excitement attached to her name, and the same went for her next career, in the pop music business. The princess had a hit in France with her first recording,
“Ouragan”
(“Hurricane”), then scarcely sold another record. The history of her third venture, a sortie into the perfume trade with a scent labeled
“l’Insaisissable,
“followed a similar pattern.

“L’Insaisissable”
meant “the Unpossessable One,” and it provided an ironic comment on the succession of love affairs that were Stephanie’s most sustained activity through these years, since she treated her boyfriends with the same mixture of dependence and cussedness with which she had tormented her mother.

“She needs a strong man to control her,” said Rupert Allan, talking to Linda Marx in 1983. “She’s a determined young woman, selfish and egocentric, spoiled by both parents.”

Stephanie had no difficulty finding strong men, but it was not always clear where their strengths lay. Mario Oliver Jutard was a convicted sex offender. Anthony Delon, another film star’s son, had been convicted of possession of a dangerous weapon. Stephanie’s hurricane of a life through boyfriends, discotheques, and the hustling of her latest product burned her out early. Friends of the family were horrified when they encountered the princess hanging out in New York and Los Angeles nightclubs. “She was just blown away,” one remembers. “It was extraordinary how a girl who had once seemed so sweet and nice could go downhill so fast.”

The decline and fall of Princess Stephanie prompted a question that came to be asked about all three of Grace’s children in the years that followed their mother’s death. How could such a lovely lady have produced such wayward offspring? Was it their royal spoiling, the lethally permissive combination of Dr. Spock and Monte Carlo—or the fact that they were products of a marriage that was considerably less happy and healthy than the outside world knew?

Stephanie appeared to have plumbed the depths in May 1992, when she announced that she was pregnant by her former bodyguard, Daniel Ducruet. Posing for photographs in the arms of her lover, Stephanie proclaimed her intention to have the child out of wedlock, while Ducruet, who admitted fathering a love child by another woman less than twelve months previously, smiled fondly and placed his hand on her stomach. The couple sold the picture, along with a collection of other intimate snaps, to
Oggi, Hello, Paris Match, People,
and just about every other magazine that had ever offended the Grimaldis.

People said that Grace must be turning in her grave, and Rainier’s reaction to this ultimate scandal was a wounded “No comment.” But two years later, at the time of this writing, Stephanie continues to live with Ducruet. Still unmarried and happily not keeping up appearances, she has borne him two children—a son, Louis, and a daughter, Pauline—and it even seems possible that Grace’s much indulged wild child has finally found some kind of peace.

From her earliest days, Stephanie mistrusted the public dimension of her life. Part of her felt threatened by it. She had nightmares about being kidnapped. At her own wish, she would travel to gymnastics class in the trunk of the car to avoid being photographed, and as she grew up, she was the Grimaldi who reacted most aggressively toward the paparazzi—thus providing them, to their delight, with pictures of a princess sticking out her tongue and making obscene gestures. When the moment came for Stephanie to sound the retreat, where better to seek refuge than in the arms of a bodyguard?

Today she and Ducruet live a quiet and domestic life in their unpretentious apartment near the sea. They push the pram, and watch television. They see a lot of his mother, and rather less of Rainier, who now meets with his younger daughter only rarely and privately. It is an exciting day when Stephanie and Daniel go to the town hall for the wedding of one of their young friends in the police or in the security-guard business. Their address happens to be Monaco, but it is
la vie de province.
Once upon a time Stephanie used to dream that she could grow up to lead a normal life and not become a princess, and by dint of hard work she has made her dream come true.

Prince Rainier does not pose much for photographs these days, but when he does, he usually stands in front of a painting depicting his late wife, Grace. It is a painting of Grace in the first months of her marriage, tall and slim and sheathed in silver, vibrant in that first springtime of 1956. It is poignant to see Rainier in front of it, round and droopy with the years, but you can appreciate his pride. He wooed her and won her, this vision of a woman, and that will always be Rainier of Monaco’s chief claim to fame.

He makes a melancholy figure, the widower prince alone on the rock, coping as best he can with the failures of his children, whom he continues to bankroll on Grace’s principle that the door should never, ever, finally be closed. He is usually overweight, frequently depressed, and congenitally withdrawn. Trying to brighten the picture, Europe’s press has been trying to marry him off for years—to David Niven’s widow, to the widow of his friend the builder, Loulou Marsan, or to the amply endowed Princess Ira von Furstenberg. (“Such a big girl,” commented Princess Margaret on this last prospect, “for such a little country.”)

Rainier is not interested. Grace was half his life, sometimes more, sometimes less, and he still has the other half, which is Monaco. These days it looks rather more like Hong Kong than Manhattan—a mouth into which even more buildings have been shoved, as John Vinocur once put it, like too many teeth in a denture. The eighties was a decade made for Monaco—the thump of the construction drill, the swish of the crane. Every one made money. Real estate prices went up by 650 percent in the period 1977-1992, and in the years 1981 to 1991, the number of banks more than doubled, from twenty-five to fifty-seven. Statistics are not available for the growth rate of money-laundering, but significant transfers of Colombian narcodollars have been traced to Monaco, and a French parliamentary commission recently condemned the availability of Monégasque banks for the processing of Italian Mafia money. It was no accident that fifteen or sixteen million dollars of the illicit payments that made up the Iran-Contra scandal were channeled through Monte Carlo in the mid-eighties.

Rainier exercises a tight and rather humorless control over this modern Casablanca. Police TV cameras survey the streets, phones are routinely tapped, and notices on the sidewalk inform you what you may and may not wear. The locals just love it. Monaco, they will tell you, is one of the last corners of the earth where a lady can safely wear her emeralds on the street. They are correct. But since the destruction of the Iron Curtain, the principality is also the last functioning despotism in Europe.