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Prince Albert’s first impression, as everyone had warned, was not impressive. Our first meeting took place in the Monaco Embassy in Paris. He seemed strangely lacking in pizazz. One of my uncharitable colleagues had gone so far as to call him a “dork.” He wears glasses, giving him a Clark Kentish appearance. During his early thirties, the curly locks of his youth receded from his frontal and parietal regions, and he is now, at thirty-nine, bald on top. Two years ago, on a dare from the captain of the Italian bobsled team, he shaved his hair off completely-an interesting footnote in light of his elder sister’s experience.  

After fifteen minutes of our meeting he started to yawn uncontrollably, which I found rather surprising in that Royals are supposedly taught to listen attentively, heads cocked, no matter what you are saying. Was this some kind of hereditary narcolepsy? I wondered, recalling his father’s penchant for falling asleep in public. In the middle of a long disquisition on the history of Monaco’s relationship with France, Albert completely forgot what he was talking about. As I left, he shook hands with me twice. .  If his father is a fox, Albert is more like a springer spaniel. The things people say about him, that he is completely accessible and unstuffy, are absolutely true. But he is also bland. Grace was slightly bland. Albert is really bland. The second time we met in the palace, however, Albert began to relax, and I started to get a warm feeling about him. He is even, in his own way, quietly charismatic. 
 Rainier obviously put more pressure on him as only son and heir than on the girls, but it was Grace who was “the government,” as Rainier put it. Her approach to the children was, according to Buddy, “velvet-gloved discipline.” 

 After tk boarding schools and Amherst College, Albie, as he is known in the family, did a stint as a tk at Morgan Guaranty in New York in 19tk. For most of his adult life, though, he has merely been waiting to ascend the throne. Passionate about sports, he has put his own stamp on the principality as the president of its swimming, track, and bobsled federations and of the yacht club (where he feels most at home, a friend of his told me). He has a black belt in judo and is the only member of the International Olympic Committee who has competed in the games (his bobsled came in 35th at Lillehammer in 19tk). Once at a black tie ball at the Waldorf in New York my friend the marquis went into the men’s room to find Albert doing push-ups on the floor, with his bodyguard standing by.

 Albert blames his not being married on the paparazzi, who, he claims, have unsettled his various girlfriends, especially the American swimmer Mary Wayte, a Sharon Stone-lookalike who won a gold medal the l984 Olympics. Albert was crazy about her, he says, and evidently she felt the same way about him, but “she was one of the ones who got scared.” That his bride would inevitably be compared to Grace makes this not an easy family to come into.

 Albert takes after his mother, which may account for his almost feminine softness. As Buddy wrote: “Albert continues to astonish me in how he resembles his mother in his correctness, his sense of balance, order, and dignity.” This has given rise to speculation that he is gay. “There were rumors about boyfriends when he was in the Marines,” the Comtesse de Chantrelle told me, “and a moment when he was said to be having an affair with Pierre d’Arenberg id tk, but I’ve never been under his belt, so I wouldn’t know.”   
At our second meeting we addressed the rumors of his homosexuality. Prince Albert had clearly heard them before. 

 “Several things happened,” he explained. “Part of the rumor originated in Paris. Some guys were jealous that I stole their girlfriends.”

 So they put out disinformation.
 “Exactly.” 

 “Secondly, I have lots of gay friends who are artists, very creative people, and people see pictures of me chatting with some of them at a gallery opening, and they conclude I am gay, too. And at official events for a long time my parents did not want me to bring any dates, so people automatically assume I’ve never seen him with anybody so he must be gay.” In fact Albert has been seen with many beautiful women, including Catherine Oxenberg and Claudia Schiffer, about whom he said, “We’re just friends. We only had a few dates.” 

 “I’m nearing 40,” he went on. “It would be nice to have kids. I don’t want to be too old for them. I’m getting pressure from friends and from Caroline’s kids, and Caroline would love to retire as first lady.” Privately the palace has been spreading word that Albert will marry this year. Obviously, a big wedding would be a nice cap to the septicentennial. 

  At a buffet lunch for invited guests at the auto museum after the Te Deum, I found myself sitting next to Albert, Stephanie and Rainier’s libel lawyer, Thierry Lacoste, who told me that Albert can’t go to California because he would have to face a paternity suit there. I was amazed that Albert’s lawyer would reveal this sensitive piece of information to a total stranger, and a journalist at that, which he knew I was because I had told him so. Maybe this was a planned leak, a clever attempt to beef up Albert’s lusty hetero image. But it wasn’t planned seating. Lacoste and I just happened to sit down at the same table. If there is a child in California, this could change the succession. As it now stands, if Albert has no children, or were not to become the prince for some reason, the line of succession would go to Caroline, then to her eldest son, Andrea. But a child who could be proved to be Albert’s would be legitimized, as happened with Mamou, and then it would go to him or her. 

 “I don’t think Albert will have the guts, intelligence, and toughness of his father,” the Comtesse de Chantrelle told me. “But you never know.” This retiring late-bloomer could even become a great ruler. Rainier was extremely shy when he took the throne at the age of twenty-six, and he only “revealed himself in stages,” as I was told by Raoul Bianceri, the president of the Societe des bains et mares, which owns the Hotel de Paris, the casino, the golf club, and everything that makes Monte Carlo the chic resort that it is.

 *****

Stephanie is the most complex of Ranier’s and Grace’s children. “Obviously a disturbed kid,” pronounced a person who knew her. An adorable tomboy, the apple of father’s eye, she was spoiled rotten. Even as a child she was unmanageable. “I could have struck her with a gong and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference,” her mother recalled. Following Caroline couldn’t have been an easy act for either Stephanie or Albert because, as Tiny told me, “There’s a lot of Caroline.” Once Grace came upon Caroline holding Stephanie upside down, about to dunk her head into a toilet bowl. So perhaps Stephanie learned early on that the way to get attention was to be an enfant terrible. Buddy recalls that she “behaved like a little girl long past the age, sulking and sucking thumb until she was fourteen.” 

 As a tk year old, she was in the car when it crashed, killing her mother-there were even rumors that Stephanie was driving. What followed was a most difficult phase, as she moved to Los Angeles in 19tk. Having gone out with the relatively respectable sons of the actors Alain Delon and Jean Paul Belmondo and with Rob Lowe, she fell in with what the Comtesse de Chantrelle called “a collection of creeps.” She got engaged to Mario Jutard, a twice-divorced club-owner with a criminal record (for rape plea-bargained down to tk), then to Jean Yves Lefyr, an ex-boyfriend of supermodel Karen Mulder, whom she ditched for Ron Bloom, a scruffy record producer 16 years her senior. Then she took up with a property dealer??? who allegedly had a record for fraud and whom she sued for the cost of their 19tk engagement party. 

 Sexy in a masculine, Amazonian sort of way, square-shouldered, long-legged, and muscular, she become a sort of Princess Rock and Roll . She had a hit single, name tk, designed a line of swimwear, Pool Position, launched her own fragrance, name tk, and was on her way to becoming a top model until the career was nixed by her father. Buddy wrote in l986 : “Today Stephanie does not exactly project the classic image of the young, aristocratic family girl reassuring and gratifying her parents. Unlike Caroline, she does not enjoy being a princess. She is resolutely, aggressively modern, endowed with a futuristic allure and beauty. Dressed in leather or in her disco outfits... she seems to step out of a space-age fairy tale.” 

 None of her relationships or her careers took, and in l991 she returned to Monaco, where she soon became involved with Ducruet. According to a friend of the family, it was just like the Whitney Houstin/Kevin Costner movie, Bodyguard. Ducruet was a local boy, a native of Beausoleil, who had joined principality’s security force after being a fishmonger. Already married, he betrayed his post and seduced Stephanie. They had two daughters, Louise and Pauline, out of wedlock, and while she was while was pregnant with their third child, and Ducruet was having a child by another woman, Stephanie lobbied her father strenuously for permission to marry him. Finally Rainier consented. “She worked hard on him,” a palace source told me. “Ducruet had very low-class attitude. Stephanie rebelled against the rich and famous people that she had to live with, people who seemed to be unreal. But Ducruet’s type was even worse, he was opportunistic. He could have learned the lessons of the palace, how to say thank you and to drink a cup of tea, but he didn’t make the slightest effort.” The wedding invitations were uncrested, and only 30 close friends attended the private ceremony, at which a grim-faced Rainier supposedly said, “This young man has put my daughter back on the right path.” 

 Last summer Stephanie sank $3 million into a clothing store with a restaurant called the Replay Cafe in partnership with her husband and his brother, Alain. It is on the Rue Grimaldi, in the quartier of La Condamine, right below the palace. 
 The European press was rife with speculation about who could have set the fishmonger up until last January when Paris Match revealed what really happened. Two years earlier, while still a bodyguard, Ducruet had bodily ejected the famous paparazzo Stephane de Lisiecki from a Palace event, and de Lisiecki had plotted his revenge ever since.  He hired Fili Houteman, who was working as a topless dancer, to seduce Ducruet last summer at the SPA Francorchamps formula race in tk, in which Ducruet was a contestant. He gave Fili his cellphone number there. A month later, with everything in place, Fili called and said she was at a villa with a friend and there was something she needed to talk to him about right away. Ducruet went there with his bodyguard, Alain Launois. Fili took him out to the pool, where two still and one video photographers were secreted behind blinds. The couple put on a riveting show of naked lust, and the photographers captured every moment of it. “When I saw Fili posing with her sunglasses on her head and her gut sucked in, I knew it was a coup monté,” Christian Louboutin told me. “No one pities anyone so stupid.” 

  I stopped by the Replay Cafe at lunchtime, hoping Stephanie would be there. Since her divorce she’s been throwing herself into the business and can often be found at the store where she’s a big draw for secretaries on lunch breaks and tourists who come to see her behind the cash register. (Her private secretary had already made it clear she not want to be interviewed. She has made no comments about Ducruet except a terse “His life no longer has anything to do with mine.”) The cafe is part of a chain of 150 Replay clothing stores started five years ago in Italy by Stepahnie’s friend, Claudio Buziol. It was Stephanie’s idea to add a restaurant to the Monaco store. 

Ducruet and his brother still came in all the time, a man behind the sales counter told me. According to the New York Post, Ducruet was “said to be weighing an offer of one million to make hard core porno with Fili.” But in June, as a guest on a German talk show, he trashed the set and stormed off, when Fili suddenly walked on. 

 A bartender at Le Texan, a night spot in La Condamine, told me, “Ducruet lost everything. He got two hours of pleasure for fifty years of regret. Stephanie has recovered. She threw a big party the night of the divorce [October 4] and danced at Jimmy’s till three o’clock in the morning.” Last tk Paris Match ran a spread of a bikinied Stephanie romping with her kids on a beach on St. Maarten. She was alone, except for a bodyguard (not the one I met in the Replay Cafe), a femme libre. To celebrate her freedom she had gotten a new tattoo, a discreet flower on her left wrist. As Albert told me, she is doing more ceremonial work these days, taking over First Lady duties when Caroline is out of town. She owes her dad. 
   
*****
 
 
 
 
 

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