Despite polls showing that his future subjects were less than enamoured of the relationship, Haakon persisted, and in September 2000 he, Mette-Marit and Marius moved into a flat in a smart but far from exclusive area just north of Oslo’s city centre. The building was on a fairly busy road and had an overgrown front garden with a bus stop right outside and just a couple of discreet security cameras by way of protection. From there the Prince and his girlfriend, dressed in jeans and trainers, would go out to coffee bars, concerts and record shops like any other young couple. They even bought their furniture from Ikea.
And so it might well have continued, if there had not been pressure from Norway’s Lutheran Church – of which Crown Prince Haakon is due one day to become head. And so, on 1st December 2000, after obtaining a green light from the prime minister, the King announced his son’s engagement.
The following August, at a news conference three days before the wedding, Haakon expressed thanks that he had not been made to choose between love and the throne. Mette-Marit, meanwhile, made a heartfelt confession of her youthful indiscretions. “My adolescent rebellion was stronger than most,” she said, holding back tears. “I was in an environment where we experimented and we went beyond the established norms.” She did not deny suggestions of previous drug use, but insisted: “I have had experiences for which I have paid dearly. I would like to take this occasion to condemn drugs.”
The news conference proved a masterstroke: from then on Mette-Marit’s wild past ceased to be a story for the Norwegian media. There was one still problem though: her father, Sven O. Høiby. His career had gone downhill since the breakup of his marriage. While his daughter had moved in with the Crown Prince, Høiby, now in his mid-sixties, was living alone in a small flat in Kristiansand. He was also drinking heavily. For a woman hoping to become the next Queen of Norway, “Sven O.”, as he became known, was a disaster waiting to happen – and a gift for the tabloid press.
Håvard Melnæs, an ambitious young journalist from Se og Hør, a celebrity magazine with a circulation of more than 400,000 copies a week and deep pockets, knew just how to exploit him. After news of Haakon’s relationship with Mette-Marit broke, Melnæs had been given the job of trying to find her friends and family, and based himself down in Kristiansand for six months for the purpose. Past boyfriends were a particular target. Melnæs wanted photographs and stories and was happy to pay thousands of pounds for them – in cash, if necessary.
Almost a decade later, seated over a beer in the bar of the Grand Hotel on Oslo’s Karl Johans Gate, Melnæs still seemed surprised by their willingness to cooperate. “I tracked down about ten to fifteen boyfriends, which, given she was twenty-seven, meant an average of one every six months,” he recalls. All but one of them had a criminal record – mostly for drugs. Many of them, he claims, were ready to help the magazine in return for money – as too were many of the future Crown Princess’s other friends. “The more people we paid off, the more copies we sold,” he said.3
None of this could have prepared Melnæs for the experience of meeting Høiby. Melnæs had tried to contact him from Oslo but failed to find a telephone number, so he looked up his address in Kristiansand and went round to try his luck. After he had been standing several hours outside his apartment building, an elderly man, still distinguished and ramrod straight, appeared. Melnæs suggested they go for a coffee. Høiby proposed beer instead.
Later that evening they sat for four to five hours in Høiby’s local bar, downing six or seven beers. Melnæs noticed a plastic bag he was carrying with him. It contained photographs of Mette-Marit – fifteen of them. “They were all innocent stuff: Christmas Eve, the first day at school, that kind of thing,” Melnæs recalls. For a magazine that wanted to build up a picture of the future queen, they were worth a lot of money, which Melnæs was happy to pay. But Høiby, whose media background gave him an idea of how his daughter would be treated by the press, wanted something else: a story in Se og Hør painting his daughter in a positive light. Melnæs duly obliged. “I wrote the most positive story possible, even making up anonymous sources whom I quoted saying what a great future queen she would make,” he says.
It was the beginning of a mutually beneficial friendship. Melnæs’s bosses were so pleased with their new source they started to pay Høiby a retainer of 15,000 kroner (about £1,680) a month and provided him with a mobile phone so he could stay in touch. That was only the starting point: extra information or new photographs from his daughter’s past would earn him more than £10,000. And now Høiby had a phone and was back in contact with friends and family, the information – and money – began to flow. “Over the first two years, we must have paid him 700,000 to 900,000 kroner [£78,000–100,000],” Melnæs recalls. “Lots of times it was black money – I used to carry the money in envelopes and hand it to him.”
With the wedding approaching, Mette-Marit was faced with the problem of how to deal with the increasing embarrassment of her father. It is unknown whether she knew he was the source of all the photographs, but she realized he had to be brought under control. Initially it was not clear whether he would be allowed to come to the wedding. Eventually he received his invitation, although he was not permitted to accompany his daughter down the aisle. According to Melnæs – who had by then turned into a kind of surrogate son for Høiby – Mette-Marit also made her father sign an agreement pledging not to drink for the duration of the festivities.
Sven O. was left largely to his own devices: it was his “sponsors” at Se og Hør who not only paid for the four different suits he needed for the various formal wedding functions, but also financed his stay at the Grand Hotel, one of the most expensive in Oslo. They also gave him a pocket camera so he could take pictures of the wedding. “He was driven into our arms,” says Melnæs. In the event he behaved himself (even though the camera was confiscated by a security guard).
The elevation of Sven O.’s daughter to Crown Princess had not solved his money problems – nor made him more reluctant to use the only means at his disposal of resolving them: the press. But the media’s interests had changed since the wedding: the appetite for details of Mette-Marit’s past life had faded. It was time for Sven O., hitherto an unnamed source, to become the story himself.
The result was his first on-the-record interview – with Se og Hør, of course – in which he talked frankly about his life. It was published under the headline: “I drink beer at nine in the morning”. Sven O. was well paid for this too, but the money was soon gone, and he had to find other ways of cashing in on his new-found fame. He was also beginning to enjoy the attention.
Ever creative, Sven O. then announced he was going to write a book about his grandson, Marius. Haakon and Mette-Merit, who had both since gone to London to study, were horrified. It was announced that Sven O. would go to Britain for a “crisis meeting” with them. In the event the Crown Princess refused to see her father. The book was never written – nor was it clear it was ever going to have been. The important thing was it meant another story for the magazine, and more money for Høiby.
There was more embarrassment to come: in 2004 Sven O. went on tour with Sputnik, a veteran country-music singer. Also part of the act was Renate Barsgård, a stripper whose career, now she had reached her thirties, was on the way down. Sven O., in his late sixties, suggested they marry – which meant another exclusive for Se og Hør and a further four thousand or so pounds for Høiby. “It is strange that an old man like me could fall in love with a woman who is the same age as my youngest daughter,” he told the magazine. “But it’s true love.”4
Even before the wedding took place, Sven called the magazine to say his young fiancée was pregnant. He was getting greedy, though, and claimed a rival publication was ready to pay 250,000 kroner (£28,000) for the exclusive. Se og Hør was ready to match that – but only if they could make sure the story was true. And so, since Melnæs was away, another reporter was dispatched from Oslo to meet Barsgård with a pregnancy-testing kit. She decli
ned to take the test.
The wedding was still on track, and Se og Hør took control of the organization; it decided to hold the ceremony in a Norwegian embassy abroad, so the couple would not be recognized and the magazine would keep its exclusive. They chose The Hague, on the grounds that there were unlikely to be any Norwegian tourists around. The magazine paid for everything, including the rings, although Melnæs, who went along, was amused to see that Sven O. bought the cheapest ones possible – one for four euros and another for twelve euros – so he and his “bride” could keep as much money as possible for themselves. This didn’t stop the Norwegian ambassador from congratulating the couple on their rings.
Se og Hør also had the rights for the couple’s honeymoon in Thailand, but to Melnæs’s relief it was a colleague from the magazine who went with them. “It was like a mental hospital,” he says. “I never saw anyone as exhausted as my colleague when he came back. As for Sven O., he had stopped eating. It was just beer, gin and tonic and cigarettes.”
Three months later, in June 2005, predictably enough, the unlikely couple announced they were divorcing – which meant another story and another 50,000 kroner fee (£5,600) for Sven O.
It was soon afterwards that Melnæs decided he had had enough of the magazine and left. To the embarrassment of his former employers, he decided to write a book about his experiences, with the ironic title En helt vanlig dag på jobben (A Normal Day at Work). Its contents were explosive. Those in the know had long suspected Se og Hør of employing dubious methods, but Melnæs’s claims that the magazine had bought information not just from sources like Sven O. but also from police, banks, the civil service and other organizations provoked considerable hand-wringing.
“We had so many informers, it was like the Stasi,” he claimed.5 Others in the Norwegian media queued up to disassociate themselves from such methods. Despite protests from the magazine, Melnæs claimed he had got his facts right and was obliged to change only one word from the first to the second edition. In response to his revelations, a number of inquiries were set up. The book was itself turned into a film that opened in Norwegian cinemas in March 2010.
Sven O., meanwhile, had been edging towards a reconciliation of sorts with his daughter, despite the embarrassment he had caused her. It was to prove short-lived, however. In 2006 Sven O. was diagnosed with cancer. He died the following March at home in his apartment in Kristiansand – but still had the potential to cause problems even from beyond the grave. In November 2007, a biography written with his cooperation by Anette Gilje, a Norwegian journalist, was published.6
Among the guests at Haakon and Mette-Marit’s wedding were Willem-Alexander, the Prince of Orange and heir to the Dutch throne, and his fiancée Máxima Zorreguieta. Máxima was born on 17th May 1971 in Buenos Aires to Jorge Zorreguieta and María del Carmen Cerruti. The generally accepted version of her background was that it was an affluent one – which seems to be confirmed by her education at the bilingual Northlands School, where the rich of Buenos Aires send their children, followed by the private Universidad Católica de Argentina.
The reality was different, according to Gonzalo Álvarez Guerrero and Soledad Ferrari, two Argentinian journalists who researched Máxima’s life for an unofficial biography that appeared in 2009. The Zorreguietas lived in a fairly standard 1,290-square-foot apartment in the Barrio Norte part of Buenos Aires, while her father, far from being a wealthy landowner, began his working life as a customs officer, they found. When Máxima was born, her father was still married to another woman, by whom he already had three daughters. Because of Argentina’s restrictive divorce laws, it was not until 1987 that he was finally able to marry her mother.7
If they could afford to pay their daughter’s school and university fees, then it was only because they saved on everything else. Máxima repaid the investment: with her degree in economics, she worked in finance and in 1996 moved to New York, getting a job first at HSBC James Capel Investment Management and then at Dresdner Kleinwort Benson.
Máxima and Willem-Alexander met in April 1999 at the Feria de Abril de Sevilla, an annual fortnight’s festival in southern Spain during which the banks of the Guadalquivir River are covered with rows of casetas – individually decorated marquee tents – owned by prominent families, companies and other institutions. The official version has it that they met purely by chance, but Guerrero and Ferrari claim they were brought together by the matchmaking skills of Máxima’s old school friend Cynthia Kaufmann, who had also moved to New York and met the Prince when he ran in the marathon there in 1992.
The Prince, still getting over the end of his four-year relationship with Emily Bremers, was immediately smitten. When he suggested going to New York to see her, she didn’t say no – although she apparently said subsequently that when he turned up three weeks later, “I’d nearly forgotten what he looked like.”
What began as a fling turned rapidly into a serious relationship. Over the next few months the Prince was to be a frequent visitor to the apartment at 225 West 20th Street that Máxima had until recently shared with Dieter Zimmermann, her former boyfriend. Máxima also visited the Netherlands. The Prince was soon ready to introduce her to his parents – a sensitive moment for anyone, particularly for the heir to the throne. That August Máxima was invited to join the royal family at Beatrix and Claus’s house in Tavernelle near Florence; they also went to visit Willem-Alexander’s grandfather, Prince Bernhard, at his villa in Porto Ercole.
It didn’t take too long for the paparazzi to notice the glamorous new woman on Willem-Alexander’s arm and by late August the story was out. Compared with Mette-Marit, whose existence was about to be revealed, Máxima seemed an ideal candidate to be a princess. Admittedly she was a commoner, but this no longer seemed a problem – and was perhaps even an advantage. In an increasingly secular age it also did not seem such a major drawback that she was Catholic, the religion of Holland’s former Spanish masters. She made no secret that she liked to enjoy herself, but there was no history of drug use and, above all, no illegitimate child.
Yet, as with Mette-Marit, there was a problem with Máxima’s father. As the Dutch media discovered within a few days, Jorge Zorreguieta had progressed from humble beginnings in the customs service to become an under-secretary of agriculture in the military junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, during which thousands of people disappeared or were killed – making him a potentially embarrassing father-in-law for a future Dutch Queen.
But what had Jorge Zorreguieta himself done? He claimed that as a civilian he had been unaware of what was going on during the dictatorship. Not everyone was convinced. And so, at the request of the Dutch parliament, Professor Michiel Baud, an expert on Latin American history, was charged with conducting an investigation into his past. Baud cleared Máxima’s father of direct involvement in any of the atrocities, but concluded it was highly unlikely that a person in such a powerful position should have been unaware of what the regime was doing.
Concern about the union rumbled on. Beatrix, mindful of the criticism that had surrounded her engagement with Prince Claus more than thirty years earlier, stood by Willem-Alexander’s choice. In November 2000, she hosted a dinner for her son’s potential parents-in-law. And then, the following January, during her sixty-third birthday celebrations in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, she gave her stamp of approval to the union, posing for photographs alongside the couple, who were appearing together in public for the first time.
Yet speculation was growing that Willem-Alexander might have to renounce the throne if he wanted to go ahead and marry Máxima – which would have meant his younger brother, Johan Friso, then aged thirty-two and working for Goldman Sachs in London, would have to take his place. Willem-Alexander did not make things any better with a rather clumsy defence of his father-in-law at a news conference in New York; members of the Dutch parliament described his comments as “painful” and “incomprehensible”, while Wim Kok, the prime minister, said he had “asked h
im to keep quiet about the matter”. A compromise was found: Kok sent Max van der Stoel, a former foreign minister, on a secret mission to meet Máxima’s father and explain “that his presence at the wedding would be impossible”. Zorreguieta agreed to stay away, as did his wife.
Matters moved more quickly than most observers would have predicted: on 30th March in a rare televised address, Queen Beatrix, accompanied by her husband, son and future daughter-in-law, announced Willem-Alexander’s engagement and praised his fiancée as “an intelligent modern woman”. At a news conference afterwards, Máxima, speaking in near flawless Dutch, said she abhorred the military regime and “the disappearances, the tortures, the murders and all the other terrible events of that time”. As for her father, she said, “I regret that while doing his best for agriculture, he did so during a bad regime.” That July, a joint session of the two houses of parliament gave their formal consent to the union, although fifteen of the 225 members voted against.
The wedding, held on 2nd February 2002 in Amsterdam, passed off without incident. After a civil ceremony at the Beurs van Berlage, a former bourse, the couple pronounced their vows in a Protestant ceremony at the Nieuwe Kerk, kneeling on a prayer stool specially made for the 1901 wedding of Willem-Alexander’s great-grandmother, Queen Wilhelmina. The newly-weds then rode through the streets in the Golden Coach given to Wilhelmina by the city when she took the throne in 1898.
The only sign of dissent was a small group of demonstrators carrying placards that read “Where is my son?” – a pointed reference to the many young men who had “disappeared” during the junta’s rule – but it was nothing compared to the riots that marred Beatrix’s wedding in 1966. One of Máxima’s first actions after the ceremony was to telephone her parents, who, according to the authors Guerrero and Ferrari, watched the ceremony on a television in a suite at the Ritz Hotel in London paid for by Beatrix.
The Great Survivors Page 28