| Dispatch
#26: A Profile of Monaco
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None of Ranier’s children are currently
married. This is also true of Rainier’s sister, Atoninette, and her daughter,
name tk. Some attribute the difficulties to a curse put on the Grimaldis,
by a young woman, spurned by an ancestor centuries ago. She supposedly
became a witch and decreed that no Grimaldi would ever be happy in marriage.
There was a particularly vicious period at the beginning of the sixteenth century when Jean II, the seigneur of the Rock, was stabbed to death by his brother Lucien, who was in turn killed by his nephew. Lucien was a friend of the Florentine diplomat Nicolo Machiavelli, author of The Prince, the ultimate treatise on political immorality. In the 17th and 18th centuries the Grimaldis spent most of their time at the court in Versailles, where they were important foreign princes et pairs, and at their beautiful Chateau Marchais in Champagne, an hour and a half outside of Paris. “The essential reign,” Rainier told me, “was that of Charles III [1818-1889]. He decided to develop the quartier of Monte Carlo, which was then olive and lemons groves. The bold scheme worked because Charles had the idea to exploit roulette, which was banned in France. After a railroad was built in 1868, the casino at Monte Carlo really took off, particularly with the Russian aristocracy. One night in l911 no less than four Romanoff grand dukes were seen dining at the Hotel de Paris. The Russians came down in private railroad cars and lost millions in a night. “A few Russians— the most reckless gamblers in the world—constitute the elite of Monaco society,” the Daily Telegraph reported in 1870. “To be a Russian count, or better still a countess, is to have the homage of every croupier. Waiters fawn... Officials salute. They have the most perfect facilities for ruining themselves” The Thursday night I visited the casino, the only customers were a smattering of low-stakes Russians and Hungarians. The decor was fabulously rococo, whorehouse red predominating. I felt in the presence of a dying vice receding into history like, say, the fashion for laudanum drops. This is one of the last places where you can play baccarat or chemin de fer. I had to force myself to remember that this was where Mata Hari was unmasked, where Dick gave Liz an eye-popping tk-carat diamond necklace. The atmosphere was cheezy—the only place in Monaco I encountered that didn’t live up to the glamorous image. It’s probably been that way from the beginning. Here is Guy de Maupassant on the casino in l887 : “Around the tables a horrible riff-raff of players, the scum of the continents and of society, mixed with princes or future kings, ladies of the world, bourgeois, usurers, wasted young women, a unique melange on earth...” ***** Charles III’s son Albert I (Ranier’s great-grandfather) succeeded him upon his death in l889. An austere, imposing man, he married a well-born Scotswoman, Lady Mary Victoria Douglas-Hamilton. At this point things get a little murky in the family bloodline. According to one source, Mary Douglas-Hamilton became pregnant, not by her husband, but by the dashing Hungarian Count Tassilo Festetics de Tolna, She gave birth to a son, Louis, in 1870 in Baden Baden on her honeymoon, and left her husband after only a few months of marriage to live with the count happily ever after. So if Louis is not a Grimaldi, neither are Rainier and his children. Regis Lecuyer, the curator of the palace archives, seemed highly uncomfortable with this line of inquiry. “All I know from the archive is that Albert the First was the father,” he said. “I’ve heard of the Count Festetics, but gossip doesn’t interest me. I don’t know how it got started.” What is known is that Louis bore no resemblance to Albert, and that Albert despised him. Louis, like many an unwanted son, joined the French Foreign Legion, where he repeatedly demonstrated fearlessness and sangfroid in life-threatening situations. Later, in Paris, he fell in love with Marie Juliette Louvet, who was working in a nightclub in Monmartre. In l898 Louis and Marie had a daughter, Charlotte, known in the family as Mamou. Lecuyer had no information, and no photographs of Marie Louvet, la blanchisseuse, the laundress, as the Comtesse de Chantrelle, and others familiar with the Grimaldi family tree, call Louis’s paramour. Mamou was Louis’s only child, and it soon became apparent that she was the only heir in sight. If there isn’t any heir, Monaco reverts to France according to the treaty of l861. So Albert legitimized Mamou when she was twenty. To make her more respectable, she was married to Count Pierre de Polignac, a society dandy. Mamou and Polignac had two children, Antoinette in l918, and three years later, Rainier. Once the heir had been produced, Comte de Polignac was eased out. He lost even visitation rights after his 15-year-old daughter Antoinette accused him of abusing her. Mamou and Polignac divorced in l933. At the end of her life Mamou took up with a famous jewel thief, René Gigier, formerly France’s public enemy number one, known as the Walking Stick, due to his peculiar stiff, hobbled gait. She even brought Gigier to Rainier and Grace’s wedding. Princess Caroline strongly resembles Mamou, who had no interest in running the principality. Upon her father’s death in l948, she abdicated immediately in favor of her son, Rainier III.
Rainier’s sister, Princess Antoinette, known in the family as Tiny, lives in a modest villa under the corniche in outlying Eze sur Mer with thirty-five old or abandoned dogs, eighteen stray cats, and, when I called on her, two young maids from Yorkshire. “She’s completely mad,” one of them told me. The livingroom had an almost overpowering dog odor. Tiny greeted me in the foyer, chasing two dachshunds behind a gate. “Bloody dogs. Excuse my language. My grandfather was in the foreign legion.” Family photos took up every available surface, snaps of her young self at galas, of her third and last husband, the balletmaster John Gilpin, who supposedly had danced the best Spectre de la Rose since Nijinsky. “My grandfather Louis brought me up,” she told me. “He was a love. On summer holidays in Switzerland he would take us out in his bright yellow Hispano-Suizza convertible. He would sit in front with the chauffeur, Rainier and I in back with nanny (Kathleen Wanstall, a cousin of Churchill’s), waving at and pretending to know the dumbfounded Swiss. You know the Swiss are not particularly rapid. My brother and I had great fun doing naughty things. Grandfather would take us to Franz Carl Weber’s famous toy shop in Lauzanne and would tell the attendant to ‘give them whatever they want.’ While we were choosing, he would sit down, take out his pince-nez, put his silver tobacco case on one knee, his case with papers on the other, then he would wet his fingers and roll himself a cigarette, pinching off the tobacco on the fag end. The Monégasques loved him because he was very simple. He fretted for the Foreign Legion.” Late in life, at the age of 67, Louis took up with a buxom actress thirty five years his junior named Ghislaine Dommanget, whom he married three years before his death and to whom he left everything. Rainier successfully blocked the will, using his power as absolute monarch and the argument that his father’s fortune was not personal but belonged to the Crown and was therefore not his to give away. Hoping there would be photos of her grandmother, la blanchisseuse, I asked if I might look through a row of albums on a shelf. She took them out. Their edges had been chewed into shavings by mice who were nesting behind them. Tiny said, “One’s never sort of bothered about that part of the family. I don’t even know the name of my grandmother. “My mother was a character-- strong-willed, her own person,” Tiny went on. “Mother founded a home in Menton [up the coast] for the White Russians who were milling about. Lost souls, they were totally helpless. They didn’t even know how to lace their shoes. In those days Monaco was very elite, and one had to be frightfully posh. Mother threw galas to help the Whites Russians and got involved in Diaghilev’s ballet. [The ballerinas] Tcechinskaya and Karsavina would come up to the palace and teach us steps, and my grandfather would imitate Nijinsky’s famous leap to amuse us.” Anne Edwards, in her book The Grimaldis of Monaco, with which the palace was extremely displeased, claims that when Rainier was born, Tiny felt cheated out of the throne, and in the early fifties, before Rainier married Grace, she spread rumors that his then mistress, a French actress named Giselle Pascal, couldn’t have children. She even supposedly plotted a coup to put in her six-year-old son Christian. When she later married her second husband Jean-Charles Rey, the fiery head of the Monégasque opposition, she continued to work actively to undermine and unseat her brother, according to Edwards, and to Christian’s even more distressing memoir, Palace, for which he was banished from Monaco. But when I brought up this period of her life, Tiny said, “It’s absolute trash that I was trying to get the succession for Buddy [as Christian is known in the family]. I’ve always been perfectly satisfied with my own lot.” ***** Buddy is the blackest of the family black sheeps. Even Albert, the most compassionate of Buddy’s generation, had nothing good to say about him. “He’s pretty much of a bum,” Albert told me. “He blew it in every sense of the word, not only with the book, but he gave a lot of mean interviews.” Albert wasn’t sure where Buddy was, maybe Italy, he said, but Tiny claimed he was living in Miami, about to have a baby with his fourth wife, “a very nice colored girl from Jamaica. I’m going to be the grandmother of a little black boy and it’s going to be fun.” But she didn’t have his number. She said to try the consul in Miami. But there isn’t any Monaco consul in Miami. (There was a Christian de Massy in Miami information but his number was unlisted.) I asked Tiny if she saw much of her brother these days. “Very seldom,”she replied. “But when we do see each other, it’s always like we had just been together the day before. I’m always behind him, whatever position he takes politically or with our kids. His kids are much younger, more independent, and more spoiled, but I’d throw myself over the deep end for them like I would my own. Rainier and I were very close as children, but in sovereign families always people try to get between to get the power”. ***** Fluent in six languages, an avid reader and supporter of the arts, Princess Caroline is the most intellectual of Ranier’s children. But she is also a tough cookie. What’s she like? I would ask people who knew her. (Furious at the coverage of her most recent affair, she is giving no interviews to the press.) “Trés sympatique,” they would invariably say. But dure? “Oui.” Caroline is often remembered for her youthful rebellious phase--at the age of twenty, to get out of the palace and to spite her mother, as she would later say, she married the 38-year-old boulevardier Phillipe Junot. According to her shoe designer Christian Louboutin, “Junot and another old playboy Alix Chevassu decided one night to marry the girls most en vue. Alix married Maria Niarchos, the only daughter of Stavros, and Junot took Caroline to the altar. It was very jet set.” After sixteen months the marriage was over. According to Louboutin: “In the mid-eighties [her younger sister] Stephanie started getting media, while Caroline had divorced Junot and disappeared, so the media dropped her. So she had time to reconstruct a new elegance and beauty while the attention was on Stephanie. When she reappeared she was completely transformed.” . After several liaisons (including Guillermo Vilas) she fell deeply in love with Stefano Casiragi, a rich, handsome, Italian three years her junior. They married and had three children. On August 3, l987, he got into a sixty-foot-long speedboat shaped like an elongated shoe box and flipped at 120 mph, killing himself instantly. It was several years before Caroline was ready for another relationship—with the 37-year-old British actor Vincent Linden. Linden adored her children, and after five years it got to the point of marriage, but Linden balked at the nine points to which he had to agree in order to join the family, among them converting to Catholicism (he was Jewish), wiping his feet on entering the throne room, and not speaking to Rainier unless spoken to. Caroline’s latest beau is Prince Ernst August of Hanover, a forty-two-year-old German nephew of Queen Elizabeth and the head of the German House of Hanover. He is rich, with a fortune estimated at $162 million. The trouble is that Ernst is already married—to the beautiful Chantal Hochuli, a daughter of the high Swiss bourgeoisie. Supposedly, last fall Chantal had a big scene with Caroline, asking her to leave her husband alone, and telling her she was destroying the lives of the Hanover’s two innocent children, Ernst, 13, and Christian, 12. This so upset Caroline, or so those in the know were saying, that a few weeks later, her hair began to fall out in clumps. The medical term was alopecia areata, la pelade nerveuse, thought to be related to stress or a sudden shock. Prince Albert tried to calm everyone down: “It’s a skin problem, a dermatology thing. It’s nothing serious, and her hair will grow back... Other than that, she’s fine,” he told tk. Alopecia, your basic baldness, is a dominant trait, i.e. it is transmitted directly from generation to generation. An obvious predisposition comes from the Kelly side. Grace’s father was bald, and Grace herself had very thin hair, which she often braided with artificial hairpieces. Albert is almost completely bald. When and if the hair of a person visited by alopecia areata will grow back is completely unpredictable. Areata means patchy, and Caroline’s baldness was not of the chic Michael Jordan/Sean Connery variety, so she cut all her remaining hair off, apparently in the presence of Ernst. One of her daughters applied the shaving cream, claims someone who got it from someone who was there. Valerie La Londe, a close friend who has a country mas near Caroline’s in St. Rémy, told me that the alopecia had nothing to do with Ernst’s wife. “She caught a skin thing in Turkey,” explained La Londe. The entire subject has become somewhat moot, because “now her hair is growing back really well,” the palace told me. And indeed recent public appearances show that her hair is cropped, but dark-brown and healthy. “Caroline has her own tastes and
values,” the photographer and writer Francois Marie Banier told me. “Everything
she does, she does perfectly. We first met in l974 when she was only a
little girl, but already showed extraordinary strength of character. When
she speaks about her life she is very frank and honest. She knows values.
She is very attentive to others; she’s completely other-directed and absolutely
pas conventionelle. When I was with her in St. Remy she was playing with
her kids [names and ages tk] morning noon and night in extremely creative
ways. She’s completely different from celle des magazines. Sometimes
she comes to my atelier to talk literature. One time I went with her and
Agnes Good to a Jasper John show and we discovered she already knew a lot
about him.”
*****
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