At times he bore it very well. At a Princess Grace Foundation dinner in New York, he was introduced to Tyne Daly, who insisted he sing a duet with her. They did “True Love,” the song Grace did with Bing Crosby in High Society. It proved he can sing. And if he was uncomfortable on the inside, he seemed to be enjoying himself on the outside.
Where he was always totally at one with himself was when he was involved with sports in general and bobsledding in particular.
He’d seen bobsledding firsthand at the 1980 Olympics, first tried a two-man sled while on a skiing holiday in St. Moritz in 1985 and, the following year, formed the Monaco Bobsled and Skeleton Federation. He intended to put a team together to represent the country at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Canada.
It meant starting from scratch, hardly an easy thing to accomplish in a country with no mountains, no snow, and hardly anyone who’d ever been in a bobsled. He nevertheless managed it, and he captained Monaco’s first two-man bobsled at the Calgary games. They finished way down towards the bottom, but this wasn’t about winning races. He was never under any illusions about that. “It’s difficult to put a bobsled team together from a country that only has 6,200 nationals.” This was about Albert saying he could get a team there to compete, and doing it. In that sense, he won big.
“There were some people in Monaco who weren’t thrilled at the idea of me going down an ice track in a sled going 90 miles an hour,” he said. “I heard all the rumors, like how this was just my toy, that I was just doing it to show off. But I didn’t start this for myself. I loved the sport and I wanted to bring it to Monaco.”
Immediately following Stefano Casiraghi’s death, Albert announced his retirement from a sport that was, decidedly, very risky for an heir to a throne. But by 1992, he and Team Monaco were back competing at the Albertville, France games and returned two years later to the games at Lillehammer, Norway. His final appearance as an Olympiad was in a four-man in 1998 at Nagano, Japan. Never having finished higher than 25th in a two-man event, that year he only came in 26th.
But at every one of his four Olympic appearances, he reinforced the point that Monaco could compete, and win friends for the country. It was not as much an exercise in international diplomacy as it was a statement about international sportsmanship.
To everyone’s surprise—albeit typical of a man whose image is that of “the people’s prince”—the sporting press discovered what the tabloid press had never known. That Prince Albert was good at being just plain Al Grimaldi, a guy who shunned fancy hotel suites to live in the decidedly less-than-luxurious conditions of the Olympic village.
“I don’t consider you get the fullest experience out of the Games if you don’t live in the village,” he explained, as if they should have guessed by now that’s the sort of person he is: an athlete who could be just one of the guys. A man born with a silver spoon in his mouth who was equally comfortable with plastic trays, paper plates, and cramped rooms. Someone who was rarely allowed to be that kid at summer camp in the States or that young man in a dorm at Amherst.
“It is a relief from everyday duties,” he said. “A great way to clear your mind. I don’t ask for extra privileges. It’s rare to get such privacy.”
But four Olympics weren’t just about clearing his head or a search for privacy. Competing in sports, he said, had also given him one very important thing that neither money nor position could buy. And that was, confidence.
“I had a big confidence problem when I was growing up. I went through a period when I was very shy and had problems expressing myself. I had some therapy, but sport has helped me an awful lot. It is not only the physical change that goes along with being competitive in sport but also the character and the dedication you need. It makes you grow as a person.”
He announced at Nagano that those games would have to be his last because the demands on his time were getting in the way of the rigorous training schedule that this level of competition required. “I never thought I was going to last 12 years.”
Age was catching up to him, too. “There have been times when I have come back from a function and gone to the gym at one in the morning.” And while he admitted that there have been times when, at official functions, his mind has wandered back to bobsledding—“It happened to me once at a concert. I tried to visualize a track and had my eyes closed. People must have thought I had fallen asleep”—with some obvious remorse he told the press at Nagano, “I think we’re looking at pretty much the waning moments of my 12-year career.”
What he didn’t say was that Rainier was increasingly concerned—“not outwardly anxious,” as one friend put it, “just increasingly concerned”—that the heir to his throne was still engaged in such a dangerous sport. In turn, Albert was increasingly concerned with his father’s health. Although Albert didn’t help matters when he joked that his retirement from the sport might only be temporary. “I seem to have come out of retirement a few times already.”
That sort of candor was one of the things that marked his style. Like his mother, he always demonstrated just how approachable he could be. And how disarming, too, especially when it came to humor. At that same press conference, a cellphone rang. He noticed it belonged to a female reporter. Before it could ring a second time, Albert quipped, “Would you like me to answer that?”
Chapter 27
Stephanie—
Following Her Heart
As Stephanie slipped through her mid-20s, she seemed more settled and more together than at any time in the previous 10 years, thanks in large part to an American record producer she’d fallen in love with, named Ron Bloom.
“My father likes him,” she said at the time. “He’s in his mid-30s, writes music and lyrics, plays 20 instruments, and produces my records. He and I have a lot in common. We have a great relationship. He’s a very intelligent man, with strong family values and roots. He’s someone who’s been raised with family values and that’s important to both of us. After my breakup with my previous boyfriend, when I might not have been on the best of terms with my father, Ron was the one who helped me realize how important it was to get back on good terms with my dad. He helped me a lot with that. He told me, ‘The most important thing you have is your family. They love you and will always love you so don’t close yourself off from them. Show them that you love them, too.’ That was very important to me.”
Bloom was the catalyst in patching up her relationship with her father.
Stephanie and Rainier spoke two or three times a week by phone talking about all sorts of things and telling each other the latest jokes. “We’re very close,” she said, “all four of us. At one point or another I guess one of us might have drifted off for a while to do his or her own thing but we always come back home. A family is a family and that’s the best thing in the world.”
Before she and Bloom were romantically involved, while she was trying to get her life straightened out, he kept saying to her that he wanted them to have a real relationship but that he also wanted them to take their time. “He said he didn’t want me falling into his arms because I was under some sort of emotional stress. He kept saying, ‘I’ll be your friend until you’re ready for something more.’ That was the best form of respect anyone’s shown me in many years.”
When they both felt the time was right, they decided to look for a house together. “We lived together for four months in a hotel while we tried to find a place. That’s the toughest test I can think of for a relationship. Four months in a hotel room. If you can survive that, you can survive anything.”
They eventually found a house in the Valley, with a domestic who came in twice a week to help with the housework and a gardener who stopped by a couple of times a week to work on the shrubs. But otherwise they had no staff. Stephanie did the shopping and most of the cooking—just for the record she is probably the best cook in the Grimaldi clan.
When Rainier visited Stephanie in Los Angeles, he was happy enough with what he saw of her life there to sta
y an extra five days.
Although he stayed in a hotel, he arrived at her house every morning at 10:30 and, just like so many dads everywhere, showered his little girl with gifts. The very first day he got there he walked around the house, took note of what she needed and promptly went with some of his friends to a local shopping mall to buy her, among other things, a microwave oven.
Her first album was released in the United States in spring 1989. The songs on it were written by her and Bloom. “It was tough work but it was good work. I love performing. It’s weird, I can’t stand up and make a speech to people because I get so nervous but when I get up on a stage and sing I’m not nervous at all. And then there’s the applause. It sends shivers up my spine. It’s really a high. It’s the most beautiful thing to have a contact with your audience, especially when you’re singing a ballad and everybody in the audience holds up their lighters. It’s like a huge birthday cake.”
Singing was now more important than just about anything else, but she deliberately made a point of showing her father that it was not at the expense of her responsibilities back home in Monaco. “I have always done whatever I’m asked to do and, among other things, I’m on the organizing committee for the Circus Festival. The thing is that people tend to forget how young I am. People tend to say, Stephanie doesn’t do anything and refuses responsibilities. But it’s only been a couple of years that anybody’s asked me to do anything and when they’ve asked I’ve accepted.”
The romance with Bloom came to an end in early 1990. The two broke up quite suddenly, and the next anyone knew, Stephanie was being escorted all over Paris by a young French real estate developer, Jean-Yves Le Fur.
She was also being reliably quoted as saying, this is the real thing.
Le Fur apparently won her father’s approval and in April of that year, the Palace officially announced Stephanie’s engagement. She never hid the fact that what she wanted most in life was to find the right man, to settle down, and to have a family of her own.
For a while, it seemed as if she’d finally found it. But by mid-summer, the wedding date was still not fixed and some of her friends were beginning to say it wouldn’t happen.
GqH
Stephanie returned to California to finish recording her album. Her father accompanied her. Talk of marriage was abandoned.
To get her singing career off the ground, she embarked on what she hoped would turn out to be a world tour. Because Prince Rainier understood the security implications involved in a prolonged series of public appearances, part of her entourage included a young Monegasque policeman named Daniel Ducruet. By the time she returned from that tour, she and Ducruet were an item.
A local fellow, born in 1964 just across the Monaco border, on the French side, in Beausoleil, Ducruet came to their relationship with a bit more baggage than Rainier appreciated. Described by one reporter as, “Gold chains, tattoos, and a coppery tan,” Ducruet was divorced when he met Stephanie, but living with another woman with whom he’d only just had a son. But none of that mattered to Stephanie who, typically headstrong, moved into a small apartment in Monte Carlo with him.
Their first child, Louis, was born in November 1992. Their second, Pauline Grace, followed in May 1994. That they still hadn’t bothered to marry shocked a lot of people.
But Stephanie couldn’t have cared less. “If I shock people,” she said, “tough luck.”
With motherhood, a radiant new Stephanie emerged.
She and Ducruet set about making a life for themselves. He left the police and started some small businesses, among them a private protection agency. He also took up rally car racing.
Rainier’s health was not good and doctors ordered a double bypass. When he came out of the hospital, still smoking cigarettes against the strict orders of his physicians, Stephanie went to her father and secured his permission to marry Ducruet.
It was probably not by coincidence that it happened when it did.
Rainier’s heart problems presented his three children with his immortality.
Perhaps the illness had mellowed him a bit, too. Although, at his insistence, the prenuptial agreement stripped Ducruet of any claims on Stephanie and also of custody rights to their children.
Stephanie and Daniel Ducruet were married in a private ceremony at the Palace in July 1995. Both their children were there, as was Ducruet’s son.
So, too, Albert, Caroline, her children and, of course, Rainier.
A mere one year and eight weeks later, Ducruet proved Rainier right in having demanded a prenuptial agreement. On a trip to Belgium, Ducruet met a stripper whose claim to fame was that she’d been Miss Nude Belgium. Several weeks later, the two ended up cavorting nude on the edge of a swimming pool at a private villa just down the beach from Monaco in Villefranche.
No fewer than 40 pages of photos suddenly appeared in Italian magazines.
Such massive publicity didn’t do any harm to Stephanie’s career, but it was enough to ruin her marriage.
Ducruet’s excuse was that he’d been set up.
Stephanie’s reaction was to ring for her lawyers and within a few months, the Palace announced that she’d finalized her divorce.
Privately she began telling friends, “I see men in a very different way now.”
Publicly she admitted, “The best way I’ve found to deal with it was just to look at it straight on, facing people’s looks and their remarks. I don’t know if you gain wisdom by suffering, but at one point you just say, now, enough is enough.”
To raise some money and, at the same time, in a vain attempt to get back into his ex-wife’s good graces—he would tell anybody who asked that he was still the perfect match for her—Ducruet published a book in France called, Letter to Stephanie. It was marketed by the publisher as, “An apology.”
But, in lieu of serious contrition, he filled the book with gossip, explaining for example, how the first time he and Stephanie met, they took one look at each other and knew they were meant to be. A few days later, he said, she summoned him to a 2 a.m. hotel suite rendezvous. He justified the pillow talk nature of the book by noting that it was in the best of taste because he did not go into any graphic detail about their lovemaking.
This, from the same man who justified his having been caught with a stripper by saying, “I was trapped.” He was now claiming that there was some sort of drug in the glass of champagne the stripper had given him. Although he eventually admitted that he had no proof of drugs being present.
His rationalization was, “If I had had all my mental capacities, I would never have done what I did.”
Seizing on the story, one French newspaper claimed that Ducruet had been set up by the Italian Mafia. Another insisted that the divorce settlement included $3,000 a month alimony which Stephanie would pay to Ducruet. A third reported that not only had the photographs been widely sold, there was also a video of Ducruet and the stripper on sale just across the Italian border in the market town of Ventimiglia.
A columnist for the prestigious French newspaper Le Monde actually blamed the whole mess on the Grimaldis themselves. He wrote that they had been, “caught in a trap of its own making, having systematically auctioned off photo albums on any and every occasion.”
As far as Ducruet was concerned—at least, according to what he told Britain’s Telegraph newspaper—he’d made just one mistake with the stripper. “My only fault was to go to that villa out of stupidity. But I was sorry for her. She sounded sad when she phoned me. And you know, I had no female friends because I couldn’t risk being pictured even taking coffee with a girl, so for me it was nice to have female company for once.”
He said he’d offered up to $2 million to get the photos back, and could have raised the money from friends, but whoever had them refused, reinforcing his theory that, because money was not the issue, character assassination was. “Everything would have been different. I would have paid and it would have saved my marriage from divorce. But they didn’t want my money. It
’s really too bad.”
Commented the Telegraph, “His words betray him as much as any photographs. Where a better actor would stick to the script of repentant humbug, he veers off into a description of his ideal world, where the eleventh commandment—Thou Shalt Not Get Caught—is worth all the others rolled together.”
GqH
Following her divorce, Stephanie remained low key, dividing her time between her main priority—two children—and the business she’d set up some years before, the Replay Cafe and Store. It was a bistro and boutique where she tended to work every day, sometimes in the restaurant, sometimes selling in the boutique, taking the venture seriously. She stubbornly molded out a normal life for herself and her two children.
As she told Diane Sawyer in an American television interview just after her divorce, “I think the main thing is I learned a lot about myself. And the best way I found to deal with it was just to look at it straight on, look at the problem straight on. And so I did it that way by being in my store and my restaurant right after everything happened and facing the people’s look and their remarks. And that’s what helped me. I don’t know if you really gain wisdom by suffering, but you know, at one point, you just say, enough. You know, stop pointing at me. It’s just, enough is enough.”
To that she added, “I’d like people to try and put themselves in my skin.”
Rumors that she was pregnant for the third time began circulating in February 1998, when the ever-present paparazzi decided she’d started taking on weight.
At Monaco’s Rose Ball, a month later, they watched her every move, and confirmed her pregnancy when they decided she was carrying a bouquet of flowers in such a way as to hide her bulging tummy. That Caroline was also carrying a bouquet of flowers did not change their opinion.
Questions from the media went unanswered. Neither Stephanie, nor the Palace—at Stephanie’s express request—would confirm her pregnancy. Nor would anyone reveal the name of the baby’s father. The press was left to conclude that the baby’s father was her latest boyfriend, a 30-year-old French ski instructor named Jean-Raymond Gottlieb.
Grace of Monaco Page 25