He waved it about triumphantly. “Of course, now everyone is lining up to take the credit for having thought of it.”
That’s when an odd question suddenly came to mind—What else do you keep in your pockets?
One of those rare questions he’d never been asked before, he shrugged and searched through his pockets to produce a packet of cigarettes, a lighter, the keys to his office safe, and the keys to his desk.
Then, out of the aide-memoire, he produced his driving license and a $100 bill. “I keep this for luck.”
q: No house keys?
a: No.
q: No other money?
a: Yes, but I won’t tell you how much.
q: Oh, come on.
a: Enough, so that if I’m driving to work and run out of petrol I can fill up the car.
q: Do you work every day?
a: There’s always something to do. Even when I’m not in Monaco, there’s always so much to read and there are always people to see.
q: Don’t you ever think of retiring?
a: Constantly.
q: Really?
a: Of course. I’ll retire someday, except I can’t tell you precisely when it will happen because I don’t know when. It will be when Albert and I both feel that he’s ready to take over. When he feels settled and confident. It will also have to do with when Albert gets married.
q: Do you see yourself ever retiring here as a gentleman farmer?
a: No. I’m not that knowledgeable about farming.
q: What grows here?
a: Mostly rocks. Farming is very difficult in this region. It used to be a beet-growing area, you know, sugar beet, until the economics of the region changed and now everybody grows corn and a bit of wheat. But I’m not terribly interested in that.
q: So what will you do?
a: I have a lot of interests to keep me busy. I used to play tennis and ride horses but as I’ve gotten older I find I play more golf. I still ski and swim and scuba-dive every now and then. When I can find the time I also enjoy fishing. It’s good for the nerves but I’m not very knowledgeable about that either. All I know is that when there’s a storm they bite better.
q: Do you have any good fishing stories? You know, about the one that got away?
a: With me they all got away.
q: There must be more than fishing and golf.
a: There are plenty of things I’d like to do if I had the time. A mixture of traveling and seeing people I want to see, not only the ones I’m obliged to see. I’d like to spend more time in my workshop and arranging my property. I’d like to spend time at Roc Agel and Marchais and maybe even on my boat. I’d love to have the time to read all the diaries my great-grandfather left. They’re handwritten accounts of his scientific expeditions.
q: That’s not bad. But is that all?
a: Maybe not.
q: What else?
a: Ah, you know. Get into a lot of mischief. Take my revenge on society. Be rude to people. (He grinned widely and nodded several times.) Just do all the things I can’t do now.
Chapter 25
Caroline—
Life Goes On
With Stefano’s death, her life and family were thrown into turmoil, so Caroline withdrew to a farmhouse in the Luberon village of St. Remy, some three hours away from Monaco, to be alone with her family and to mourn.
She enrolled the children in the local school, and with great courage, helped them to get over the loss of their father. Unknowingly, they, in turn, helped her to get through that time. They were, she said, the reason she got out of bed every morning.
There is no doubt that she handled her husband’s death with the same dignity that marked the way she handled her mother’s. Still, the strain was evident. She lost a lot of weight, cut her hair very short, and dressed soberly. On those rare occasions when she was seen in public during the first year after Stefano’s death, it was to visit his grave.
Rainier, trying to protect her from the media while allowing her time to grieve, excused her from all of her official duties, saying that she could resume them when she felt she was ready. Albert and Stephanie stepped in for her, not because Rainier wanted them to, but because they, too, shared Caroline’s pain.
As Nadia Lacoste said at the time, “The calendar of the palace and the calendar of the heart are two separate things.”
It took a full year before she felt confident enough to make her first few tentative steps back to public life. It took somewhat longer before she started to laugh again.
Caroline has always been a joyous woman but joy was slow in returning, hardly helped by tabloid gossip that placed her in dire financial straits. It wasn’t true.
By leaving Monaco for the Luberon, she believed, it was easier for her to protect her children. They had all the obvious advantages there of small village life—like animals in the back yard—none of which they would have had as part of the sovereign family back in the Principality. She also hoped her children would be less accessible to the press. She was convinced that she and her brother and sister had been way too overexposed to the media in their own formative years, and that, in turn, the press had mistakenly come to believe that the three Grimaldis belonged to them, that the media had every right to follow them for the rest of their lives.
It was precisely the situation she wanted to avoid with her own children. All the more so, she said, because times had changed and these days that kind of exposure brings with it all sorts of ramifications.
In her mind, the security of her own children was paramount. But the media didn’t care about that. The paparazzi staked out her home and followed her children to school. It took some time before the locals stopped giving tourists directions to her house, and once they did, only once they began showing their displeasure when photographers arrived to stalk Caroline and her children, did life take on some semblance of normalcy.
Throughout that first year after Stefano’s death, and for the ensuing years, too, she stayed in touch with Stefano’s family, understanding their loss, and also so that her own children would never feel estranged from their grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.
Sometime around 1990, or so, the tabloids linked her name romantically with a young French actor named Vincent Lindon.
For a while, Caroline and Vincent seemed more than just comfortable together, in spite of the fact that they had plenty of quasi-friends happy to relate the progress of their affair.
After tracing his paternal forebears to the Citroen automobile family and discovering that, on his mother’s side, there was once a Third Republic government minister, the press took their gloves off and reported—on several occasions—that Caroline and Lindon had married.
Each time, the Palace had to deny the reports.
Eventually Rainier himself stepped in, promising journalists that if and when Caroline married, the Palace would announce it the same day.
But marriage with Lindon wasn’t to be.
And with that Kelly-green Irish courage that so plainly marks all three of Grace’s children, Caroline continued to get on with her life.
She had, since childhood, been a competent pianist and an avid reader with a wide range of interests—from the classics to 19th century opera critiques to contemporary fiction. At one point, just after her first marriage ended, she’d even flirted with the idea of writing.
In 1981 Caroline was approached by the International Herald Tribune in Paris to pen an article for them about her life in Monaco. She titled her professional debut as an author, “A Compulsive Need for Blue.”
“The temptation is to glamorize one’s childhood,” she wrote. “It probably is in all small towns with beautiful surroundings. The weather is lovely throughout the four seasons. You spend a lot of time outdoors. But as children we were never quite aware of the total beauty. We never thought we lived in a place others considered unique.”
She wrote that it wasn’t until she was older and had traveled more that she came to understand how much
she longed for the Mediterranean and its cloudless sky.
Then she gave an insider’s view of the relationship shared by the locals and the invading armies of visitors.
“The rules are simple,” she went on. “If you’re part of the jet-set you don’t just go somewhere, you make an entrance. Your conversation centers on other people’s private affairs. You have your dinner on the terrace of the Hotel de Paris and fiddle with the caviar on your plate. The buses drive by endlessly. The people in them stare and point at the women, the champagne, at you. So on the one hand there are groups who stagger out of hot, smelly buses. On the other there are people trying to be beautiful and desperately cool, swelling with pride at the mere thought of showing off. Where and how do the Monegasques fit into this social jigsaw puzzle? Quite frankly, I don’t think we do. We’ve had to learn to keep the visitor content, although it’s not been without some grunting and groaning. Now we superbly ignore the anonymous masses as well as the insolent elite. Over the centuries, starting long before people traveled for pleasure, our unique concern has been to preserve a sense of national identity and to cling to it rather fiercely.”
Unfortunately, the newspaper printed no more than excerpts of the piece, putting it next to an insipid photo of her aged eight or nine. It was a personal disappointment to Caroline, who’d worked hard to make the article right, and also to her mother who’d read it and felt Caroline might one day take her writing further.
Undaunted by having her work so badly mishandled like that, she wrote for French magazines and among her journalism credits was a very competent interview with the Italian opera star Ruggero Raimondi.
Although motherhood remained her first priority, she occasionally put pen to paper and along with a few friends in Paris helped out an annual satirical magazine.
She also had official duties in Monaco to cope with, especially when Grace died, because the burden of being Monaco’s first lady fell on Caroline. She took over the Monaco branch of the Princess Grace Foundation and the Princess Grace Dance Academy, which had been designed by her mother to help young dancers. In addition, Caroline also assumed the president’s chair at the Monaco Arts Festival.
“When Mommy was president of the festival,” she noted, “it was a sort of curious formula, spread out throughout the year, where various performances came under the auspices of the festival. I know she was thinking of grouping everything into a two or three week period but never had a chance to do that. One of the things I did was make it a proper festival, taking up three weeks in Easter.”
Putting her own stamp on the festival, Caroline helped to revive forgotten 17th and 18th century operas, catering to a more knowledgeable public. There was also a Baroque Music Festival, films on opera and music, sculpture exhibits, painting exhibits, photography exhibits, and some experimental theatre. And, in keeping with Monaco’s tradition for ballet, Caroline completed her mother’s work of creating a professional ballet company for the Monte Carlo opera.
It was, she said, a lot of work. “Setting it up, getting bookings and organizing tours, setting up the repertoire and getting the right choreographers. We try to keep a careful balance between Diaghilev and Ballet Russe repertoire and the big classics like Swan Lake and The Nutcracker. We also do some modern, experimental stuff.”
At the same time she established a project of her own, called Jeune J’ecoute—a phone line to help young people in trouble with drugs, or the police, or their parents, or who are just unemployed and need some guidance.
Accepting the fact that much of the void left by Grace had to be filled by her, for all intents and purposes, it was a part-time job. Her children would always come first and Rainier appreciated that. He understood Caroline’s desire to live in harmony with nature and out of the constant glare of publicity that dogged her life in Monaco. But then, he knew, perhaps better than anyone, why she wanted to raise her children in a way that her parents could never raise theirs.
“Sometimes,” she said, “there’s so much going on I don’t even have time to think about it. The hardest thing is when you get these desperate letters from people who need help, whose lives are in a real mess. The hardest thing is to find a way to help them. Every day we get requests for help. I feel most of the time I’m really just a social worker trying to help people.”
But again, that’s not the way the press painted the picture. They saw her as a conniving sister intent on mounting a Palace coup.
So, she was asked, how about all those stories about wanting to take over the throne?
Her eyes lit up. “You mean the ones that say that I’m maneuvering in dark corridors in the Palace? All that intrigue and counter-intrigue. Richelieu and Mazarin look like kids compared to what I’m apparently doing. The truth is that whenever I have any free time, instead of plotting, I spend it with the children. Frankly I can’t wait for Albert to get married because then I can pass along a lot of my duties to his wife. Of course he keeps telling me he has to find the right girl. Well, at this stage I have so little time for myself and my children that sometimes, albeit only in my weaker moments, mind you, I think even I’d settle for Joan Collins.”
GqH
While Caroline was still a teenager, Grace had arranged for her to meet one of Europe’s most eligible young men. The rendezvous, well chaperoned, took place while Grace and Caroline were on a visit to Germany.
In Caroline’s mind, this was never going to be anything more than tea and polite talk. On the other hand, Grace, the eternal matchmaker, was hoping that something might someday develop.
What it turned into was a ride in an uncomfortable car.
The young German fellow had just bought some sort of fancy sports car and, to show it off, he invited Caroline for a spin.
She couldn’t say no, although when she saw how tiny the car was, she wished she had. It was so small she felt like a contortionist getting into it and then, once in it, she couldn’t get out of it.
Back home, the episode turned into one of her funniest routines as she recounted—and even demonstrated—with great hysterics just how awkward the whole thing had been.
As for the German chap, she told her friends, it was an otherwise boring afternoon.
Twenty years later, she would find him considerably more fascinating.
As her romance with Vincent Lindon drew to a close, she and the German fellow rediscovered each other. It was during a ski trip in Switzerland.
He was Prince Ernst August of Hanover, head of the clan, and long married to a Swiss heiress, with two young sons.
Caroline and Ernst began meeting secretly.
Around the same time, autumn 1996, she started losing her hair.
Generally considered one of the most beautiful women in Europe, Caroline handled the problem with her usual elan, refusing to hide. Instead, she took an “in your face” attitude, donned turbans, scarves and hats, and even then allowed herself to be photographed without the turban—head shaved—in characteristic defiance to the press.
When the media reported that she was suffering from alopecia areata, a nervous condition which causes hair loss and is usually temporary, she refused to confirm or deny anything.
Next, the press decided, it must be something worse and guessed that she was having chemotherapy treatments for some undisclosed cancer.
Albert announced in an interview that Caroline’s hair loss was due to a skin condition. But she wouldn’t discuss it because, in her mind, it was absolutely nobody else’s business.
She went about her life, which meant raising her children. And also spending time with the man who was fast becoming a part of it, Ernst.
Two years her senior, and tall enough so that she could wear heels, the customarily good natured Ernst was the oldest of six children to Prince Ernst August of Hanover and Princess Ortrud of Schleswig-Holstein-Glucksburg. His youth was divided between Marienburg Castle and a family estate outside Hanover.
Leaving school at the age of 15—because his hair was too long
and he’d been caught smoking—he went to work on a farm, but returned to his education to study at the University of Guelph in Canada and at the Royal Agricultural College in England. Now a wealthy businessman and landowner—with property in Germany, Austria, London, and Kenya—he is the titular head of the House of Hanover, Germany’s oldest royal family. He is also, a British royal. His great-great-grandfather, Ernest Augustus, was King of Hanover, Duke of Cumberland, and the uncle of Queen Victoria.
Being a woman meant that Victoria was ineligible to take the German throne, so the line passed down through her cousin and, eventually, to the young Ernst August. That makes him a cousin to Queen Elizabeth II. Which means he holds a British passport, in addition, of course, to his German passport.
Over the winter of 1996–1997, Caroline and Ernst took a holiday together in Thailand. Soon after they returned to her home in the Luberon, Ernst’s wife of 16 years, Chantal, filed for divorce. It was granted in September 1997, awarding her around $10 million, but stipulating that the couple should have joint custody of their two boys, then 14 and 12.
Described in the press as Caroline’s “bespectacled suitor, with his amiable, slightly chubby face and frizz of hair falling on to his forehead,” he’d never been much of a headliner maker in Germany. Or, for that matter, in London where he and Chantal had been raising their children.
However, if there is such a thing as “the curse of the Grimaldis,” it is that they shall not be free from tabloid prying, and Ernst soon discovered how the paparazzi’s constant presence made it easy to make all the wrong kinds of headlines.
His temper flared once too often when cameras were shoved into the couple’s faces and a German photographer wound up on the wrong end of Ernst’s umbrella. The episode ended up in court and cost Ernst over $50,000, the bulk of it supposedly to keep the photographer from filing criminal charges.
The press was also, certainly, the reason why their wedding on January 23, 1999—which happened to be Caroline’s 42nd birthday—was not announced until the day before.
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