Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (41 page)

Up in the palace there were photos to pose for and the wedding cake to cut. There were more than six hundred guests at the reception in the courtyard, and it was impossible for Grace and Rainier to meet every one. The bride and groom were polite, but it was clear to those close to them that they could not wait to get away. They had done their social duty for the best part of a week. Now their own time was approaching.

Soon after two-thirty they vanished discreetly, to reappear an hour later in their going-away clothes. Grace had said her farewells in private to her family and friends. Then the couple were driven, for one last, cheering, open-car ride, out through the palace gates, back past the cathedral, and down from the rock to Rainier’s yacht, moored and waiting below.

The rest of the wedding party went up onto the battlements, so they could look down into the harbor, and eastward, out toward the sea. One of the bridesmaids had brought a few handfuls of rice with her from the States, and she tossed it up and into the air. Grace’s light form could be seen on the bridge of the distant yacht beside Rainier, waving farewell as the boat moved away. Their wake was attended by a navy of small craft that was as busy and boisterous as the flotilla that had greeted Grace the previous week, and it was nearly five o’clock, with the sun already beginning to set behind the hills, before the thin white vessel bearing the new princess seaward had left the last of its escorts behind.

19

FAMILY BUSINESS

O
n a winter’s night in January 1297, a group of hooded friars came knocking on the doors of the castle of Monaco asking for shelter. Taking pity on the holy men, the Genoese occupiers of the fortress on the rock swung open the gates—to be slaughtered where they stood. The “friars” were members and soldiers of the Grimaldi family, an ambitious clan of adventurers from northern Italy, led by Francesco Grimaldi, known to history as “il Malizia”—”Francois the Cunning.” The attackers wore armor and carried swords beneath their religious camouflage. They seized control of Monaco from the Genoese, and they were to remain the rulers of the place, with just a few interruptions, from that day forward.

The Grimaldis have always been proud of this story. When they acquired a coat of arms, they chose as their crest the figures of two saintly-looking friars producing swords from their robes. Their modern guidebooks start by celebrating the original and productive cunning of “il Malizia”—Prince Rainier’s current yacht bears the name—and to judge from the number of times that Grace herself told the tale, it was the starting point for her own understanding of her new family’s history. But the American princess was not so aware, or, perhaps, she chose not to be aware, of how sleight-of-hand and ruthlessness were ongoing traditions in the family business of which she was now a partner.

The rock was the foundation of the Grimaldis’ power. It looms sheer and tough out of the Mediterranean, a northerly Gibraltar. When you look down on it from the mountains above, you can see how, in the age of swords and sailing ships, the man who controlled the rock controlled this corner of the coast. For centuries the Grimaldis made their living by extortion, levying their tolls on passing ships for the right of safe passage, and sallying out, effectively, as pirates, to discipline any vessel that declined to pay up. They played off their more powerful neighbors against each other, winning their status as princes after they sided with Spain in the sixteenth century, then switching smartly to France when that kingdom’s star moved into the ascendant a hundred and twenty years later. They never quite made it as full-scale royal princes, but they did secure the lesser rank of “Serene Highness.”

The native Monégasques regarded their Grimaldi rulers with a reverence that approached awe. A small, quick, and swarthy people who resembled the Corsicans in their mixture of French and Italian characteristics, these few thousand fisher folk and olive farmers were both enriched and protected by the strong men up on the rock. There was not a coastal community from Marseilles to Genoa that enjoyed a better deal. So the locals shut their ears to what an envious world had to say about their rulers. Princess Charlotte-Catherine Grimaldi was a byword for her promiscuity at the court of Louis XTV in the late seventeenth century. A coquette who shocked even the libertines of Versailles, “Madame de Monaco” was said to have enjoyed affairs with both men and women, not to mention, more conventionally, the favors of the Sun King himself. But back in Monaco she was known as the protectress of the Convent of the Visitation, and it is as a pious and exemplary figure that she is recalled in official Monégasque history to this day.

The mid-nineteenth century heralded the end of ministates like Monaco. In 1861 France annexed the surrounding towns and villages—over ninety percent of the principality’s surface area—leaving it with the rock, the harbor, and not much more. But just when all seemed lost, Prince Charles III, the ruling Grimaldi, came up with the casino that was to guarantee the principality’s survival into the twentieth century. Reorganizing Monaco’s infant tourist business and leasing it out to the
Société des Bains de Mer,
Charles more than justified his subjects’ confidence in their princely rulers, and the hill across the harbor on which the new casino stood has borne his name ever since—Monte Carlo.

The casino transformed Monaco and inspired its racy modern identity. The visitors who set the tone were the archdukes from Russia and Eastern Europe with their entourages of servants and private rail cars. They gambled in the casino at night and worked off their hangovers next morning by promenading beneath the palm trees or taking potshots at the hapless pigeons released by the dozen from baskets on the casino cliffs—the famous
Tir aux Pigeons.
Lillie Langtry, Alice Keppel, La Belle Otero, Mata Hari— Europe’s most glamorous courtesans reigned in Monte Carlo. Sarah Bernhardt and Raoul Gunsbourg brought theater and opera. Diaghilev brought his
Ballets Russes.
The glamour and naughtiness bubbled endlessly, both embellished and symbolized by the lush stucco curves of the casino building, the Hôtel de Paris, the Hermitage, and the other creamy masterpieces of Charles Gamier, supreme architect of the belle époque.

The Grimaldis themselves steered clear of the social whirl on the hill across the harbor. Less flamboyant than some of their ancestors, they framed laws that forbade members of the princely family, or any Monégasque, from entering the casino as a player. Charles III spent the last decade of his life a total recluse, while the passion of his son, Albert, was for long voyages of maritime exploration. Albert’s architectural contribution to the principality was a huge Oceanographic Museum that he raised on the rock near the cathedral, and he filled it with narwhal horns, stuffed grampuses, and the countless pale and pickled specimens that he brought back from his maritime expeditions.

The enthusiasm of Albert’s son, Louis, was for soldiering. Louis enlisted in the French army, being assigned to service in North Africa, and this led to the bizarre arrangements surrounding the birth and succession of Rainier III and his sister, Tiny. In the course of his months quartered in Constantine, Algeria, Louis had a love affair with the daughter of his washerwoman. They had a child together, born in 1898, a little girl originally given the name of Louise-Juliette, but later to be known as Princess Charlotte— and eventually, in the family, as “Mamou,” the mother-in-law who disliked Grace so intensely. Having spent the first twenty years of her life under the slur of illegitimacy, Mamou found her status transformed at the end of the First World War, when the victorious allies woke up to the fact that, in the event of Albert and Louis dying, the Monégasque succession would pass to a German family—the house of von Urach, who were relatives by marriage.

Overnight the washerwoman’s granddaughter became a princess, legitimized and rapidly married to a young French aristocrat, Count Pierre de Polignac. The business nature of this alliance, concluded in March 1920, was made clear by Pierre agreeing to change his surname to Grimaldi and by the count being moved up several noble stations to become an instant prince. By the normal European rules of noble succession, Pierre’s children were Polignacs, but by changing his surname, the new prince had made it possible for the Grimaldis to maintain their claim, by their own rules at least, to be the one-and-only, centuries-old ruling house of Monaco.

The marriage of Mamou and Pierre might have survived without love. Without much affection or respect, the couple were doomed, and the price was paid by their children. Tiny and Rainier became pawns in the all-too-open battles that were fought between their parents. “When we were with mother,” Rainier told Jeffrey Robinson in 1988, “we were always being told, ‘When you see your father don’t say anything to him about me . . .’ When we were with father, we were always being told, ‘Don’t say anything to your mother . . .’ That wasn’t easy.”

In 1935, the twelve-year-old Rainier, who was just starting his studies at Stowe, the English public school, found himself the object of an embarrassingly public custody battle in the British High Court that dragged on for eighteen months. The marriage that had been arranged to create the appearance of family unity and continuity had produced the very opposite.

World War II generated further disrepute. Monaco’s substantial Italian colony, who had moved there to staff the developing tourist industry, were largely pro-Mussolini, while Prince Louis, who had succeeded his father Albert in 1922, thought along the same lines as the many French army officers who supported Petain and his Vichy government of collaboration. Hitler was the dominant power in Europe, and Louis was willing to live with that. He received the Consul General and Military Commandant that Berlin sent to Monaco, and from 1943 onwards the principality became an R & R center for German officers of all the services, including the SS and the Gestapo. The Germans played in the casino, which remained open for business throughout the war, and patronized the prostitutes in the ever-understanding Hôtel de Paris. Monégasque lawyers did a brisk trade in the paperwork of companies created to launder the war profits of several hundred leading Nazis and collaborationist businessmen.

On the outbreak of hostilities, Monaco’s trade consuls in the United States tried to claim that the principality was technically neutral and should, accordingly, be granted the concessions that went with neutral status. But the State Department dismissed the claim with scorn. “There is no reason for hair-splitting construction here,” wrote one official on a document in 1940. “Monaco is, to all intents and purposes, belligerent.”

Once the Allies had invaded Europe, the Grimaldis shifted their stance in their time-honored fashion. Rainier had spent the war comfortably and far from danger. He was a wealthy young university student in Vichy France, studying in Paris and Montpellier. But late in September 1944, three weeks after Monaco was liberated by the Allies, the young prince volunteered to join the French army, where he was assigned to the intelligence department. In this capacity he saw seventeen months of service and was awarded the medals that he wore so proudly on his wedding day.

As the new alignment of Europe took shape, State Department memos flew on the subject of Monaco’s dubious war record. “It was well known,” minuted the U.S. Embassy in Paris on February 10, 1945, “that the Prince and his advisors, as well as a large proportion of the people of Monaco, had been highly uncooperative with the Allies, and pro-Axis.” Using their special banking and taxation arrangements, “these people had connived to defraud the French and other Allied treasuries.” The U.S. Consulate in Nice sent a query to Washington. The prince of Monaco had invited the American general in charge of the area to make an official call, but the general was reluctant to do this in view of the prince’s “alleged pro-Axis attitude and sympathies during [the] occupation period.”

Washington considered the matter, then instructed the officer to make his visit. “If the French do not contemplate any action . . . there would appear no reason why our general should not call.” It was State Department policy to leave questions about Monaco to France. “Monaco appears to be, in theory, a Constitutional Principality,” ran Washington’s briefing paper on the subject, “but, in reality, it is a protectorate of the French government.” If France was prepared to let bygones be bygones, why should America make a fuss?

The Nazi Consul General and the SS officers whooping it up in Monte Carlo were consigned to history, and the accession of Rainier in 1949, following the death of Prince Louis, seemed another reason to forgive and forget. Rainier himself had “not so far shown himself to be possessed of force of character or qualities of leadership,” reported Albert Clattenburg, Jr., the US consul in Nice, bringing Washington up to date on Monaco’s problems at the end of 1955; the principality remained “a hot-bed of gossip, scandal and neighborly bad feeling.” But there was always the hope that “an energetic young wife with a talent for running things . . . could right the present situation.”