After attending primary school in Monaco, Caroline was enrolled at St. Mary’s College in Ascot, England, where she was taught by young nuns with a relatively modern approach. Her headmistress was a brilliant woman whom Caroline adored and the two kept in touch for many years.
Initially, Caroline’s plan was to then go off to the States to university—there was talk of Princeton—but she wound up in Paris, enrolled at the Sorbonne, and romantically involved with a man 17 years her senior, Philippe Junot.
Junot was well known in Parisian circles as a playboy—and with Caroline being the ultimate playboy’s prize—the tabloids kept their romance on the front pages, tracking them from nightclub to nightclub. Their engagement, and every step of their way to the altar was headlined in newspapers and magazines to such an extent that, at least for a short time, they rivaled Burton and Taylor, the Windsors, Grace and Rainier, and maybe even Romeo and Juliet in history’s “most-hyped-love-affair” category.
Throughout it, the media never missed the opportunity to wonder out loud if Caroline would wake up in time to see that this was never going to work. But she was in love with him and her two-day wedding to Junot, on June 28–29, 1978, was the social event of the 1970s. It was a media event to rival Grace and Rainier’s own wedding, although this time the press was predicting that the marriage would never last. There was even a betting line started a week before the event that it wouldn’t happen at all.
The official guest list topped 600. Because the Palace throne room is far too small for that number, only the immediate family—about 50 people—attended the Wednesday morning civil ceremony.
Thursday morning’s religious service had originally been planned for the Palace chapel, but that was also too small. At the last minute, Grace and Rainier moved the service outside so that all their guests could attend.
Desperate to avoid the kind of chaos that overshadowed their own nuptials, they quickly resigned themselves to reality—that there was no chance of making this a simple, family wedding. How could they? More than 200 reporters and photographers were encamped in Monaco, each of them trying to out scoop the other, while none of them had anything more to report on than printed hand-outs.
The first of those handouts noted that the press would be permitted to operate in total freedom, without special permission, in spite of the fact that they would not be admitted into any official ceremony or to any of the several parties planned to fete the bride and groom. The rest of the press kit contained potted histories of the throne room, the chapel, Princess Caroline and what everyone in the wedding party was wearing.
A late entry, complete with a photograph, was everything anyone ever wanted to know about the wedding cake—500 eggs, 145 pounds of sugar, 45 pounds of almond paste, lots of smiling chefs, etc.
Then came the news that Mr. and Mrs. Junot could be photographed while they walked from the Palace to City Hall.
As for photos during the official ceremonies, Grace had asked an old Hollywood chum, Howell Conant, to take pictures. His negatives were rushed off to be developed so that six photos could be chosen as official handouts. In other words, every reporter got the same six photos. It meant that anyone who could manage to get past the Palace walls with a tie-clasp Pentax would have cleaned up.
And a few tried. One of the paparazzi even dressed up like a priest. But they were all caught and no one came up with anything.
So the press did what the press usually does when there’s no one to talk to. Reporters bribed taxi drivers, bartenders, croupiers, shopkeepers, barbers, manicurists, hotel concierges, and anyone else who might be able to tell them anything at all about the wedding. But that didn’t produce much because the people they were bribing hadn’t been invited either. Some media outlets let it be known that they were prepared to pay up to $15,000 for any unofficial pictures taken during the ceremonies, parties, balls, anything at all.
The money went unspent.
The only scoop of the week came when the press mob traipsed off to David Niven’s house on Cap Ferrat and learned that Gregory Peck’s car had backed into Cary Grant’s car. There was no damage, no one was hurt, and everyone involved remained friends. Still, the story made front pages.
The best stories, however, were the ones they didn’t get.
Like how, the night before the wedding, Grace was up until 4 a.m. trying to figure out how to seat everybody at the celebration luncheon. There were royals and there were heads of state, and protocol was a nightmare. Tables were set up under the trees on the square in front of the Palace. The whole area had, of course, been roped off from the general public.
It was, as Rupert Allan described it, “The luncheon of the century in that part of the world.”
After the luncheon, the Junots flew to Tahiti. And it was there, on her honeymoon, that Caroline began to understand what everyone else had feared, that the marriage would never work.
“It was very paradoxical,” she said. “It all had to do with the way were brought up. Mommy said, ‘Of course he’s the wrong man and you shouldn’t marry him but now you’ve been compromised. You’ve been dating him for too long, so now either get engaged officially or stop seeing him and go off to the States and finish university there.’ She wanted me to go to Princeton. So, of course I said, ‘Okay, let’s get engaged.’ I was 20 or 21 and didn’t really want to get married. If I’d lived with him for six months, or even just three months, I’d have found out right away what he was like. But I wasn’t allowed to go off on vacations with him or even spend weekends with him, except at his parent’s house, which was all very proper. I really didn’t know him very well. Getting married was simply the correct way out.”
Caroline noted that when she announced to her mother that she wanted to marry Junot, it was with the proviso, “If you’re really against it, I won’t.”
She promised her mother, “I’m not going to run away and get married against your will. Maybe I’ll be miserable if I can’t see him any more but don’t worry, I won’t do it.”
Her mother answered, “Go ahead and get married. After all, what are people going to think after you’ve been dating this guy for two years?”
How times have changed, Caroline said with hindsight. “It’s amazing. I married Philippe because I was in love with him. That’s a good enough reason for marrying anybody. But then one day you wake up and wonder what you’ve done. I guess I started to wake up and wonder what I’d done while we were still on our honeymoon. He’d arranged with a photographer friend of his to meet us there to have the exclusive rights to our honeymoon pictures. That’s when it all started to click. That was terrible. The end started right there. But it took me a year and a half to finish it. A long time.”
When she finally gave up on Junot and wanted to come home, her parents were very supportive. “Mommy was very helpful. I didn’t dare divorce or even mention divorce because Catholics don’t divorce. You’re supposed to just make the best of it. But Mommy said, ‘You have to get divorced.’ I said, ‘How can you talk like that? We’re a religious family.’ I told her I was trying to find a way to work something out. But Mommy said, ‘Religion is there to help people, not to make your life miserable.’”
While Caroline continued to go to church every Sunday, she couldn’t take communion. But she was never excluded from the church. She filed for and won a civil divorce in 1980. Her annulment inquiry made its way at a snail’s pace through the Vatican bureaucracy and by the time it was finally granted—twelve years and two Papal commissions later—life for Caroline had moved on.
Tragically so.
GqH
Looking back on that wedding, Caroline shuddered, “Not one of my better days.”
She said her mother once told her that she hated the whole fiasco of her wedding, too. “I remember Mommy saying that it was just a circus. Not only didn’t they look at their wedding pictures for years after that, on their honeymoon they didn’t talk about it. It was madness. She didn’t want that for mine.”
/> With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, it’s hard to see how Caroline could have avoided it. Her face sold magazines, so much so that she even made it to the cover of Time at the age of 16.
“That wasn’t my idea at all,” she insisted. “They were writing a piece on Monaco and it turned out to be on me. When they said they wanted to ask a few questions, I was frightfully rude. I didn’t want to talk to anybody because I was about to go on to university where I’d decided I wanted to be anonymous. I wanted to be forgotten about. But I was told they were going to take a picture. I’d just come back from school, walked into the apartment and the photographer was there. So we went out onto the balcony. As I remember it was a pretty lousy picture.”
Not surprisingly, she agreed with her father that it was impossible to get used to all the unwanted publicity. “When I was living in Paris I went everywhere with my German shepherd dog. As long as I was with my dog they tended to keep their distance. Or, at least, they only used their long lenses. Even today when I go out I worry that somebody is following me or hiding behind bushes. You never think you’re completely alone or completely free to move around. It’s a terrible feeling. The pressure of being spied upon is awful. Lots of people can’t understand why I’ve tried to stop it whenever I can because they think I love it, they think we love the publicity.”
She has never collected her own press cuttings and said that when they arrived in her mail—which they do regularly from people who think she might want to have a copy of a story or picture—she hardly, if ever, reads them. “Yet when I do read something, it’s like reading about somebody else’s life. I look through some of the articles and for the first ten minutes I giggle because it’s so absurd. They write such complete nonsense. Then, all of a sudden I say to myself, but they’re writing about me and they’re lying. That’s when I get furious. When they have nothing else to write about they invent things.”
She also agreed with her father that being in her position has always made it difficult to make friends. Not because she doesn’t want to, but because there is a little voice inside her that asks, what does this person want of me?
Many of her adult friendships, therefore, began in childhood. “The problem is you can’t spend too much time worrying about who you’re real friends are. You just have to take everybody at face value. After all, if you start worrying, is this one going to be a real friend or behave badly, well it’s a shame to have to think that way.”
Yet, it was always difficult for her to trust anybody past a certain point. “If you ask them to be faithful and non-demanding and be there to help you, to stick by you and never want anything in return, that’s maybe asking a little too much from people. But you can’t expect too much or you risk being disappointed. It was lonely at times while we were growing up. I think it’s getting easier as I get older. Actually lots of things get easier as you get older. A lot of the nonsense fades away.”
At the time of her bust-up with Junot, one of her old chums was Ingrid Bergman’s son, Robertino Rossellini. After suffering the stress and embarrassment of a very public divorce, he became a comfort in her life. She was there for him when his mother died. And he was there for her, two weeks later, when her mother died. Friends predicted a wedding, but after a couple of years, the romance lost its glitter. Anyway, by 1983, she’d met someone else.
A tall, blond, quiet Italian from outside Milan, Stefano Casiraghi was three and a half years her junior. She joked at the time that he would make the perfect husband for her because he had a financial interest in an Italian shoe company and there were few things in the world she liked better than shoes.
Hearing that, he had special labels made to put in her shoes saying they’d been created exclusively for her.
The two were virtually living together when she found herself pregnant. A private wedding ceremony was arranged.
The son of a wealthy industrialist, Stefano settled in Monaco where he expanded his own business interests to include real estate and boat building. Their son Andrea was born in 1984, followed by daughter Charlotte in 1986 and their second son, Pierre, in 1987.
The five of them lived mostly in Caroline’s house near the Palace, dividing the rest of their time between Roc Agel, Paris, and trips to Italy.
Caroline and Stefano spoke Italian at home together although she spoke French to the children.
Seeing her with her children, and with Stefano always near by, it was evident that she’d settled into marriage and motherhood with ease and delight. In quiet moments she and Stefano spoke of someday having six children.
That her life with him had changed her, matured her and given her some substance was unmistakable in one remark she made about how she saw her role as a wife, mother, and Princess. “It wouldn’t bother me at all if I weren’t Princess Caroline of Monaco. I prefer to be at home with my husband and children than attacked by photographers. I’m just the sister of the future prince, and my children come first. I work my schedule around them.”
But it wasn’t to last.
On October 3, 1990, Stefano was killed in an offshore powerboat race within sight of the beach at Monte Carlo.
He’d taken up the sport several years before, devoted his energies to mastering it, and in 1989, had won the world championship at a series of races in Atlantic City. This time, in his 200 kph catamaran, Pinot de Pinot, he and co-pilot Patrice Innocenti were favorites to retain the title.
About half an hour into the heat, while making a run at 150 kph, the 42-foot boat struck a wave and overturned. Innocenti was thrown clear, but Stefano was trapped inside and drawn under the water. The emergency rescue teams failed to get to him in time.
Caroline was in Paris. It was her father who broke the news to her on the phone.
Within a few hours, a young, black-veiled widow returned to Monaco—accompanied by her best friend and neighbor, model Inès de La Fressange—to face life as a single parent of three very young children.
That Christmas, when someone asked Andrea what he wanted, he answered, “To have my papa back.”
As with the accident that had claimed Grace—who hated driving and rarely did—Stefano’s death was also filled with ironies. Knowing how Caroline worried about the inherent dangers of power-boat racing, Stefano had announced the week before that this championship would be his last. He was planning to move from racing into the much safer business of boat building.
Then, again, he never should have been racing that Wednesday. Two days before, in an elimination heat, he’d stopped his boat to help a competitor in trouble. That was against the rules and he’d been disqualified.
But Stefano had helped to organize the race—he was the one who brought it to Monaco—and after all, he was the defending champion. So the ruling committee voted to bend the rules and they reinstated him.
Just 30, Stefano was a gentle, soft-spoken man with the confidence to let his wife be the star. He stood by her side whenever he was called on to be with her for official duties, but was not the sort of man who even thought about trying to steal the spotlight from her. He cared for her as much as she cared for him and he adored his children. They were always around him, crawling on him, dangling from his arms, hanging off his back. He laughed with them and he laughed with her and helped her to create the family she had always craved.
Looking for scandal, because that’s what they do, Europe’s tabloid press discovered that Stefano had managed to escape Italy’s obligatory military service. That story, and the inevitable old chestnut that his death was a message from the Mafia, could not soil the dignity with which Caroline and her children, together with Rainier, Albert, and Stephanie handled the tragedy. Anyway, Stefano had been medically excused from his military service and the Mafia link was wholly invented.
Chapter 22
Albert
As sovereign-in-waiting or, more accurately, as Vice Chairman of the Board of Grimaldi Inc., Albert went to the gym every morning early for a swim or a light workout. He stayed in shape, played
better-than-average tennis, and held a black belt in judo. After that, he went to his office, where he handled the business of the various associations he patronized.
He attended his father’s cabinet meetings and continued to pursue his interests in international sport. When he could, when their schedules matched, he’d have lunch with his father, just the two of them, so that they could talk.
Afterwards, there were always more people to see and more matters to deal with in the afternoon.
As Vice Chairman, he said, he took his job seriously because training for succession was a serious matter. “It’s been an ongoing process for years. I guess I was made aware of my future responsibilities from about age five or six. And it’s something that’s always kind of scared me because I’ve seen over the years that there’s so much responsibility and so many different problems to deal with. I’ve come to face some of those problems and to help my dad with the work he does. But it’s not easy and I’m not sure if I’m up to it. I mean, I’m fairly confident that I have the right tools to do that kind of work. But I don’t know if I can do it as well as he can.”
After saying that, he hastened to add that he was not avoiding the issue, just recognizing the fact that he was being called upon to fill some very large shoes.
“I read the papers,” he continued. “I know a lot of the press has hinted that I’m just hanging around and not eager to do any work. Well, I think that’s unfair. I’m helping my dad and working as hard as I can. I’m giving my best. Whenever the time is right, it will happen. I don’t see any reason why I should press the issue because I’m enjoying the present situation and as long as my dad feels comfortable with the present situation, that’s fine. Whenever it’s going to happen it will happen. There’s no timetable. We’ll just both know when it’s ready.”
The closer he came to the day when he would assume the responsibilities of his birthright, the more he saw his father’s legacy as being inexorably tied to his mother’s prominence.
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