Albert, it was claimed, was facing allegations that he had fathered a third illegitimate child and, understandably, Charlene was said to be having second thoughts about marrying him. According to reports in the French media, she had tried to flee to her native South Africa three times: the first attempt had been in May when she went to Paris to try on her wedding dress and allegedly attempted to “take refuge” in the South African embassy; the second was supposedly during the Monaco Grand Prix later the same month; the third had been a few days before the wedding, when royal officials were said to have confiscated her passport as she took the helicopter shuttle to Nice airport with a one-way ticket home to South Africa in her handbag.
Albert described the stories as “completely fabricated” and an attempt to destabilize his forthcoming wedding. Charlene’s father, Mike, told a South African radio station that the only time his daughter had come close to an aircraft over the previous weeks had been to fly to Paris to buy a hat and shoes for her wedding. Royal officials nevertheless confirmed that the Prince would face a paternity test.
Fears that Albert would be left alone at the altar proved to be unfounded. Charlene turned up on the day, looking stunning in an off-the-shoulder Armani silk dress, covered with 40,000 Swarovski crystals and with a sixteen-foot train. The groom was smart in the cream summer uniform of Monaco’s palace guards. Giorgio Armani himself was among the 850 guests, who also included Nicolas Sarkozy, Karl Lagerfeld, Naomi Campbell, Roger Moore and senior members of Europe’s royal families. Dinner was prepared by Alain Ducasse, the celebrated French-born chef. Although Charlene laughed as she placed the ring on her husband’s finger, the tears she shed after the ceremony seemed to be of despair rather than joy.
The couple left as planned on honeymoon to South Africa, but much of their time seemed taken up with official meetings, including a conference of the International Olympic Committee, of which Albert is a member. Although the Prince tried hard to appear affectionate towards his bride, the South African media claimed they stayed in separate hotel suites.
Yet even if Charlene really had attempted to escape, she did not try a second time. In the months that followed the couple was seen repeatedly by each other’s side, both within Monaco and on visits abroad. So had Charlene forgiven her husband his sexual indiscretions? Not necessarily. The couple, it was said, had drawn up a pact: they would stay together for as long as it took Charlene to produce the legitimate heir that Albert needed, and then they would go their separate ways. Had the curse of the Grimaldi family struck again?
Chapter 9
Marrying into the Family
Any message that is received from beyond the grave has a particular poignancy, but the posthumous confession made by Prince Bernhard, the German-born consort of Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, in December 2004 was an especially dramatic one. During the late 1990s, under conditions of great secrecy, Bernhard, then well into his eighties, had given a series of interviews to the journalist Martin van Amerongen, the editor of the weekly De Groene Amsterdammer and an avowed republican. There was one important precondition for their meeting: that the interview be published only after Bernhard’s death. Its contents were to prove explosive.
Bernhard, who died at the age of ninety-three, outliving his wife by nine months, was a celebrated bon viveur and lover of fast cars, planes and women, who enjoyed considerable popularity in his adoptive homeland, largely thanks to his heroic role during the Second World War and his subsequent founding of the World Wildlife Fund and peacetime role as a champion of Dutch business. A shadow had been cast over the latter part of his life, however, by claims that during the 1970s he had taken a one-million-dollar bribe from the Lockheed Corporation, a US aeroplane manufacturer, in exchange for providing contacts and helping the firm win a contract from the Dutch government. Such was the weight of evidence against him that the Prince had been forced to resign his business, charitable, political and military posts. Yet he had steadfastly refused to admit his guilt.
In his interview with van Amerongen, published on 3rd December, two days after his death, however, Bernhard finally confessed that he had indeed taken the money. “I had earned so much money that I didn’t need that million from Lockheed,” he said. “How can I have been so stupid?” Most of it, he claimed, he had given away, but he knew this would make little difference. “I have accepted that the word Lockheed will be carved on my tombstone,” he declared.1
That was not the only secret Bernhard had kept up his sleeve. It had long been rumoured that, besides his four daughters with Juliana, he had fathered another daughter, Alexia, in 1967 by Hélène Grinda, a French socialite and fashion model. But Alexia, it now emerged, had not been the only fruit of his extramarital dalliances.
In another series of interviews, this time with de Volkskrant, published in a twenty-four-page special three days after his funeral, the Prince revealed that he had had another daughter, Alicia, in the 1950s, at a time when his marriage with Juliana was going through a crisis. Bernhard declined to give more details – beyond that the daughter had been an accident and was now living in America. It subsequently emerged that her mother had been a German pilot based in Mexico, with whom Bernhard had had a long affair.
But was there also a third daughter? In August 2011, Mildred Zijlstra, born in February 1946, was named in a book as another of Bernhard’s illegitimate children. De Vrouwen van Prins Bernhard by Marc van der Linden, a Dutch royal expert, claimed Zijlstra’s mother had been a member of the resistance group Binnenlandse Strijdkrachten – and became one of the many women who became pregnant out of wedlock in the months immediately after the end of the Second World War. The girl was adopted and did not start questioning her background until she had children of her own. It was only then, the book claimed, that Zijlstra first found her biological mother and then learnt the identity of her alleged royal father. Van der Linden did not offer hard proof of the allegation, only statements from Zijlstra’s mother and friends of the family – but it was enough for the Dutch media to seize on the story, even though not everyone was convinced.
Being married to a queen or, indeed, a king is not an easy task – especially for someone uncomfortable with a status subordinate to that of his or her spouse. Yet while other consorts have been prepared to adapt to such a role, Bernhard was a far more uncompromising, larger-than-life figure – which largely explains his downfall. So who was this German prince and how did his life come to be so mired in scandal?
Queen Wilhelmina began the search for a suitable husband for her daughter when Juliana was twenty-six, but it was not easy: the successful candidate had to be a Protestant and meet the high standards of the strictly religious Dutch court. The future Edward VIII and his younger brother, the Duke of Kent, were among those cited as possibles, but nothing came of the idea. It was then during a visit to the Winter Olympics in Bavaria, chaperoned, of course, by her mother, that Juliana met Bernhard Leopold Friedrich Eberhard Julius Kurt Karl Gottfried Peter zu Lippe-Biesterfeld, to give him his full name, the man she would marry.
The couple became unofficially engaged during a meeting at the Weissenburg-Bad hotel in western Switzerland, twenty miles from Gstaad, presided over by Wilhelmina. The terms of their union were set out in a mixture of business contract and early prenuptial agreement that stipulated, in detail, what Bernhard could or could not do, how much money he would be given by the state and how their children should be educated. The Treaty of Weissenburg, as it became known, even set out when the engagement should be made public and contained the requirement that Bernhard give up his job with IG Farben in Paris and get a job with a Dutch bank. When it came to her daughter’s future, Queen Wilhelmina was determined not to leave anything to chance.
In the event, the announcement was brought forward because of fears the press would find out; Wilhelmina broke the news to her subjects in a radio broadcast on 8th September 1936. “I fully approve my daughter’s choice,” she announced, “and consider it a wise one, seeing t
he excellent qualities which my future son-in-law possesses.” Juliana and Bernhard followed her on air. They married the following January in The Hague.
Bernhard proved a controversial choice; relations between the Netherlands and Germany were very different from how they had been in 1901 when Wilhelmina had married Heinrich of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Juliana’s father. The Dutch Nazi party was delighted. Liberal opinion and the country’s sizeable Jewish opinion was not. “It would be better if the future Queen had found a consort in some democratic country rather than in the Third Reich,” commented Het Volk.2
Matters were not helped when the former Kaiser, allowed by Wilhelmina after the First World War to go into exile in the Dutch town of Doorn, sent his congratulations, while Hitler suggested the union was a sign of closer ties between the two countries. Bernhard’s past employment with chemical giant IG Farben, whose reputation was permanently damaged by its association with Hitler and the Nazis, counted against him. So too did his brief membership of the SS, although years later he said he had joined only to be able to continue his studies.
The couple married in January 1937 in a civil ceremony in The Hague Town Hall – with a blessing in the city’s Great Church (St Jacobskerk) – and moved into the Soestdijk Palace in Baarn. Their first child, the future Queen Beatrix, was born in January 1938. Irene, Margriet and Maria Christina, known as Marijke, followed over the next nine years.
As has already been seen, the Dutch royal family – and Bernhard among them – emerged favourably war, and by 4th September 1948, when Wilhelmina abdicated in favour of her daughter, Bernhard was already beginning to carve out a role for himself. The position of Inspector General was created for him, and he served as advisor and non-executive director of a number of companies and institutions, becoming an informal ambassador extraordinaire for Dutch business. In 1954 he was instrumental in setting up what was to become the Bilderberg Group, a forum for the business elite and intellectuals of the Western world.
At the same time, Bernhard’s marriage was coming under strain after Juliana became increasingly influenced by Greet Hofmans, a faith healer who had claimed to be able to cure Marijke, who was born almost blind. Hofmans, who was also a militant pacifist, did not succeed, but she developed a close relationship with the Queen, who became sympathetic to her views.
At a time when the Cold War was at its peak, this did not go down well with Prince Bernhard or the government, who were in favour of more armament to counter the threat of communism. The affair turned into a full-blown constitutional crisis in 1956, when Der Spiegel, the German news magazine, published an article about divisions in the palace.3 A commission was set up and Hofmans banished. The result was considered a victory for Bernhard – who, it subsequently emerged, had leaked the story himself.
It was about this time that the Prince fathered Alicia von Bielefeld – who was to learn her father’s identity only seventeen years later. Juliana and Bernhard came close to divorce – but eventually pulled back from the brink, realizing the damage it would inflict on the monarchy. Yet Bernhard was continuing to stray, having affairs, including the one that led to the birth of his second illegitimate daughter, Alexia, in 1967.
Juliana appears to have taken such infidelities in her stride. According to Alicia, Bernhard revealed her existence to his wife in the mid-1970s; from 1994 onwards she would visit the royal couple at the Italian home where they spent their summer holidays as well as the Soestdijk Palace. She called Juliana a “nice, sweet woman; very straightforward, too”. When Alicia was with Bernhard, she had to say that he was a friend of her father’s. “When others were there, I couldn’t call him dad,” she added. The contrast with the relationship between Albert II of Belgium and his illegitimate daughter, Delphine Boël, could not have been greater.
Bernhard’s indiscretions outside the bedroom were to prove a more serious matter, however. In December 1975, Carl Kotchian, a vice-chairman of Lockheed, gave testimony to a Senate sub-committee in which he admitted paying a one-million-dollar bribe to a “high Dutch government official”. Ernest F. Hauser, a former company employee, was more explicit: the money, he said, had gone to none other than Prince Bernhard to guarantee sales to Holland of Lockheed’s F-104 Starfighter, a supersonic interceptor aircraft.
As inspector general of the Dutch armed forces and a member of the board of Fokker Aircraft, which had a licence to assemble the planes in the Netherlands, the Prince was clearly in a key position. Yet the allegation seemed an unlikely one: Bernhard had a tax-free salary of £190,000 a year and a private fortune estimated at £7.5 million, while his wife was one of the richest women in the world. There was also his presidency of the World Wildlife Fund, his role in setting up the Bilderberg Conference and his membership of some three hundred national and international boards and committees. The suggestion that he should stoop to take a bribe seemed unthinkable.
Bernhard, however, was reluctant to respond to the allegation. Rather than denying it, he simply refused to address it. “If you say four words, ‘It is not true,’ I will print it,” declared a reporter from Newsweek who confronted him. “I cannot say that,” Bernhard replied. “I will not say it; I am standing above such things.” The explanation for his behaviour was simple: “He thought he was a nineteenth-century prince, that he could do whatever he wanted, that he was above the law,” said an associate of Joop den Uyl, who as prime minister from May 1973 until December 1977 had to deal with the crisis.4
Such a tactic did not work in the twentieth-century Netherlands, however. A commission of “three wise men” was set up and gradually the story began to emerge: Bernhard, it appeared, had been paid $300,000 by Lockheed in 1960, followed by the same amount again in 1961 and $400,000 in 1962. The money was said to have been channelled through Colonel Alexis Panchulidzev, a former member of the Tsarist Imperial Guard, who for many years had been a companion of Bernhard’s mother. Kotchian and Daniel Haughton, another Lockheed official, were in no doubt the money had been paid; they told the US Senate committee they were “absolutely” sure of it.
It is difficult to overestimate the severity of the accusations against Bernhard and its implications for Juliana and the House of Orange. Determined to fight both for her husband and for the royal house, Juliana said she would consider abdication if her husband was not cleared of the accusations against him – something neither she, the Dutch people nor the prime minister wanted.
In the meantime, Bernhard faced more allegations: it was claimed he received another $100,000 from Lockheed in 1968 after a meeting with a company representative on a Utrecht golf course. The Prince, it was alleged, had also paid a bribe of more than a million dollars to Juan Perón, the Argentinian president, to secure a one-hundred-million-dollar order for Dutch railway equipment. As part of the deal, there was also some expensive jewellery for Evita Perón and a deluxe private train for the pair.
Questions were also asked about the Prince’s financial and personal relationship with Tibor Rosenbaum, a Swiss banker, whose Geneva-based International Credit Bank was accused of being linked with organized crime, before it went broke in 1975. The previous year Bernhard had sold Warmelo, a castle belonging to him in eastern Holland, to a company owned by the bank for well under the market price, prompting suspicions in the Dutch press that he had squirrelled away some of the money.
As far as the media on both sides of the Atlantic was concerned, it was open season on Bernhard, whose behaviour seemed rather out of place in the Calvinist Dutch court. In a report in April 1976, Newsweek claimed the Prince would “sometimes mix his old ‘drinking pals’ with the nabobs of European business” – a blend that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. “On one bright morning, I found myself on his private plane en route for Paris, with the champagne already flowing freely on board,” a prominent Dutch businessman told the magazine. “After we arrived, we went to a plush hotel where more cold champagne and oysters were waiting. At eleven a.m. I was seeing stars, and at two p.m. I passed out.�
� The businessman also recalls a supply of attractive women, who, he claimed, were a frequent feature of Bernhard’s parties.5
The findings that the “three wise men” presented to Prime Minister den Uyl were damning. Despite overwhelming evidence against Bernhard, the Queen insisted that he be cleared. For den Uyl this was impossible, however, not least because of all the testimony on a record against him in the United States. When Juliana threatened to abdicate, den Uyl countered by warning her that Bernhard would then probably face prosecution – which would have been the ultimate disgrace for the House of Orange.
And so a deal was struck: in August 1976, the “three wise men” released their report, which immediately became a best-seller in the Netherlands. The Prince’s actions, they wrote, had “damaged the national interest”. He had been open to “dishonourable requests and offers” and “was the intended recipient of the one million dollars [from Lockheed], which was meant for his benefit alone”. It also suggested that some of the many corporate donations given to Bernhard for charitable purposes never found their way to their ultimate destination. “To sum up,” the report said, “the commission has come to the conclusion that HRH the Prince, in the conviction that his position was unassailable and his judgement was not to be influenced, originally entered much too lightly into transactions which were bound to create the impression that he was susceptible to favours.”
The day the report was made public, Bernhard resigned his various posts. On the insistence of den Uyl, he also issued a statement, but it was carefully worded and admitted the minimum. His relationship with Lockheed, he admitted, had “developed along the wrong lines” and he had failed to observe the caution “which is required in my vulnerable position as a consort of the Queen and Prince of the Netherlands”. He stopped short, however, of any admission that he had actually received the one million dollars. That was going to have to wait more than another quarter of a century.
The Great Survivors Page 21