GRACE KELLY’S LEGACY:
her glamorous grandchildren may return Monaco to glory
It was once a fairytale principality, replete with its own movie star princess, but in recent years Monaco’s air of shiny, untroubled glamour has begun to tarnish. William Langley travels to the “Pink Palace” to find a surprising new generation of royals who just might hold the key to Monaco’s reinvention.
When Greta Thunberg, the teenage Swedish climate activist, sailed into New York harbour on August 28 last year, foghorns hooted and flags flew, but few in the cheering crowd on the quayside noticed the slender young man with the cool blue eyes and blonde stubble at the boat’s helm. Pierre Casiraghi, the 32-year-old son of Princess Caroline of Monaco, prefers to keep a low profile, even on public occasions. Having safely delivered Greta aboard his $8 million zero-carbon racing yacht, Malizia II, after a 14-day transatlantic crossing from England, Pierre stowed his oilskins and slipped quietly away. The clubs and salons of Manhattan held little appeal for him, and he was soon headed back to the tiny, super-rich principality, snuggled into a stretch of Mediterranean coastline, that his family has controlled for 700 years.
Pierre takes care to speak well of Monaco and his family’s tenacious hold on the tiny, sun-kissed playground whose 45,000 residents pay no income tax and enjoy one of the world’s highest standards of living. But behind the enclave’s comic-operatic trappings – toy town soldiers in cockaded hats, candy-striped flag posts and the burlesque sex lives of its often-errant royals – the realm is facing threats to its survival.
France, which supervises many of Monaco’s affairs and has long coveted its riches, is fuming over new allegations of official corruption, and in recent years a number of private banks have closed their operations, apparently sensitive to suggestions of money laundering. Worst of all is the sense that the place is losing its cherished aura of style and glamour.
Many believe the principality needs a completely new image – something more modern, relevant and progressive. As the current ruler, Prince Albert II, a balding, 61-year-old American business school graduate, plods through the second decade of his reign, the dashing Pierre, his exotic sister, Charlotte, and brother, Andrea, are being touted as the faces of the future.
A dark, glamorous past
Like many of the best stories, Monaco’s begins on a dark and stormy night, when a 13th century brigand, François “The Cunning” Grimaldi, disguised himself as a monk and tricked his way into a fortress guarding the headland that is now Monte Carlo. While his hosts slept, François slit their throats and opened the gates to his men waiting in boats below. So began seven centuries of Grimaldi rule over this wild piece of coast.
The family doggedly clung to power, fighting off invasions from France, Italy and Spain,
until securing full sovereignty in the early 19th century.
The creation of today’s Monaco, however, began with the arrival of the glacially gorgeous Hollywood actress Grace Kelly in 1956.
Albert’s late father, Prince Rainier III, met Grace at the nearby Cannes Film Festival, and wooed her with all the aristocratic ardour and charm he could muster. Their wedding was the biggest social event of the decade, packed with Hollywood stars and the cream of international high society. Grace, aged 26, took on 140 new titles, which took 25 minutes to read out, and moved into her husband’s home, the turreted “Pink Palace”, with 58 pieces of luggage.
Grace’s arrival changed everything for Monaco. From a faintly louche Riviera gambling haven, described by author Somerset Maugham as “a sunny place for shady people”, it became the most fashionable destination on earth, drawing big-name stars such as Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor and Cary Grant. High-rollers filled the old, Belle Époque casino and the yachts of the super-rich fought for space in the harbour. As “Graceland”, Monaco was awash with money and teeming with celebrities. But the princess’s shocking death in a still-mysterious car crash 37 years ago left a void that has proved impossible to fill.
The enigmatic new guard
Bathed in Mediterranean sunshine, Monaco may look as alluring as ever. The streets are beautifully kept, packed with designer boutiques and virtually free of litter or graffiti. During a recent three-month period, the only reported crime of violence involved a nightclubber being hit in the eye by a champagne cork. Policemen, dressed in 19th century uniforms, still salute when spoken to, coutureclad blondes in mustard Bentleys swoosh idly between the Beach Club and the bar of the five-star Hôtel de Paris. At its best Monaco is a romantic curio, a throwback to the days of kings in castles, fortune-hunting bounders, raffish dandies and peachycheeked princesses. Its follies and scandals have entertained the world for years, but the tawdry realities of modern life have been slowly catching up, and now the reckoning has begun.
This, according to Monaco-watchers, is where the young Casiraghis come in. Untainted by the trappings of the old royal order, they are viewed as cosmopolitan, clued up and shaped by what their mother once called, “my sense of duty, obedience and guilt”.
Although eighth in the royal line of succession, Pierre, like his brother and sister, declines to use a title and makes few official appearances. He was just three when his father, Italian businessman Stefano Casiraghi, 30, was killed in a freak speedboat accident. Caroline, who had married Stefano seven years earlier against the wishes of her father, plunged into a long period of mourning, which saw her leave Monaco with her children to live in a remote farmhouse in the south of France. When the family returned, the young Casiraghis were carefully shielded from public view, and even today, Monaco’s 7000 citizens know relatively little about their daily lives.
“There are people in Monaco you never stop hearing about,” says Yanou Collart, a flamboyant French showbusiness publicist who lives part-time in the principality, “but the Casiraghi kids give extraordinarily little away.”
Albert is seen in these parts as diligent but dull, and ill-equipped to tackle the realm’s mounting problems. A series of high-society scandals – notably the contract murder of its richest female resident and the arrest of a high-profile Russian oligarch accused of bribery and influence-peddling – has added to the unease gnawing away at Monaco’s carefully honed image of security and hedonism.
“But it goes beyond that,” says Gerard Serrou, a French investigative journalist based across the border in Nice. “There’s a sense that the place isn’t moving with the times, that it’s still just a playground for rich people who want to shut themselves away from the world.”
The only official position Pierre appears to hold is as Vice President of the ultra-exclusive Monaco Yacht Club, headquartered in a glassy, “five deck” building on the seafront, and boasting its own ballroom, designer boutiques and
Maserati dealership. The membership fees are confidential, but an old Monte Carlo hand says the minimum cost of joining would be around $50,000, “and it would help to be a friend of Prince Albert”, who personally vets all applications.
When 17-year-old Greta, who refuses to travel by air, was looking for a ride to New York for a United Nations climate summit, Pierre stepped up as her prince in shining gumboots. His 18-metre monohull is one of the few boats in the world which can claim to be totally carbon zero. “Her team had a lot of questions,” he said later. “They had been exploring various ways to get across. We explained that this is a racing boat, there’s little comfort, but she seemed fine with that.”
Although born into one of the world’s richest royal families (the Grimaldis’ personal worth of $2.5 billion is estimated to be at least three times that of the House of Windsor), Pierre and his siblings went to a local state school, where, he says, “We were like any other kids. You went in the mornings, came home, did your homework. We were conscious that our situation wasn’t exactly the same as everyone else’s, but I don’t think it affected us.”
Four years ago he married filmmaker and journalist Beatrice Borromeo, the daughter of a wealthy Italian nobleman, and the couple now have two small children, Stefano, two, and Francesco, one. Despite the prodigious efforts of the French and Italian gossip sheets, the family has largely managed to dodge controversy and stay out of the spotlight.
“Everyone deserves their privacy,” Pierre told a yachting magazine earlier this year. “I understand that people are curious about our family… but privacy is something that touches you and your immediate circle. Poor William and Harry. I mean, it’s difficult to compare us. Look, Britain is a big place with a lot of people; we come from a small place with different traditions, but they also deserve their privacy.”
Still, there’s only so much glitz-avoidance a Monaco royal can manage, and on his return from New York, Pierre was soon rubbing shoulders with stars including Nicole Kidman, Robert Redford and Andy Garcia at the principality’s Monte-Carlo Gala for the Global Ocean – an event which claims to be the world’s biggest charity fundraiser. The eye-popping auction prizes include the use of the entire Palace of Versailles near Paris for a private dinner party, and a collection of Picasso ceramics.
“This is the third year we’ve done it, and Pierre has been very active in helping,” says an aide to the event’s chief
organiser, Milutin Gatsby. “As a yachtsman he has seen first-hand what is happening to the seas, and he wants to do everything possible to help.”
Not that Pierre has escaped allegations of hypocrisy. It has emerged in Monaco that one of his main business interests is a company called Monacair, which runs a helicopter shuttle service, flying well-heeled visitors from nearby Nice airport into the principality at $200 a time for the sevenminute trip. “Fifty flights a day,” sniffed the French business magazine, Valeurs. “How much carbon emission does that add up to?”
In Grace’s footsteps
If anyone echoes Grace’s vanished presence in Monaco, it is Pierre’s 33-year-old sister, Charlotte, the most accomplished and intriguing of all the younger royals. Her June wedding to Dimitri Rassam, son of renowned French film actress Carole Bouquet, was considered the most stylish since Grace’s own spectacular nuptials 63 years ago.
The civil ceremony was held in the glittering grand salon of the “Pink Palace”, with Charlotte wearing an Yves Saint Laurent brocade dress and her grandmother’s three-string Cartier diamond necklace, changing for the evening reception at a villa overlooking the Mediterranean into an old-Hollywood style cream dress by Chanel. “Everything about her look said ‘Grace’,” according to Point de Vue magazine. “It was unmissable.”
For the religious service a few weeks later, guests were ferried to the 12th century Abbey de Pierredon, a few kilometres from the Provençal village where Princess Caroline raised her children after Stefano’s death. This time she wore a white bridal gown designed by Italian couturier Giambattista Valli.
Charlotte grew up around famous designers – the late Karl Lagerfeld was a lifelong friend of her mother’s – and by her mid-20s she was on the cover of French
Vogue, photographed by Mario Testino. Every outfit she wears and hairstyle she adopts is minutely scrutinised by the European glossies, which will pay tens of thousands of dollars for an exclusive photograph of her. None of which would be so surprising, if she wasn’t trying to make a career as a philosopher.
Her first book, Archipelago of Passions, co-authored by Robert Maggioro, one of France’s most fashionable intellectuals, argues that our lives are controlled by our emotions rather than our circumstances, and has been well reviewed in the heavyweight French press. She has since become president of a group called Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco, which holds discussion workshops on such topics as “Time, Age and Death” and “The Irreversibility of Nostalgia”.
She has two children, Balthazar, one, with Dimitri, and six-year-old Raphael from an earlier relationship with a Moroccan comedian, Gad Elmaleh.
“She’s seen as a kind of rebel, but she’s still very much part of the Grimaldi family elite which controls everything down there,” says Ophélie Renouard, one of Paris’s top social organisers, and founder of France’s annual Debutantes Ball. “It’s a smart thing for her, because elitism is out of fashion at the moment, so she has the best of both worlds.”
The least visible of the Casiraghis is 35-year-old Andrea, who lives mostly in London with his wife
Tatiana Santo Domingo, an exotic South American heiress who is even richer than the Grimaldis. Andrea was six when his father died and went through a troubled adolescence, which led to him being labelled the “wild angel”. Caroline packed him off to a boarding school near Paris, where he first met Tatiana, the daughter of Julio Santo Domingo, a Colombian business tycoon. Upon Julio’s death from cancer in 2009, Tatiana inherited a reported fortune of over $3 billion. After a lengthy engagement, they were married in 2013, and now have three children.
Tatiana, 36, co-runs Muzungu Sisters, a London-based ethical fashion company which sells handmade clothes, bags and accessories from around the world. Andrea is said to keep a close watch on his own business interests in Monaco, although he is rarely spotted there. “He used to be much more chilled,” says a long-time resident.
“You’d see him at parties, and he even did an advertising campaign for an Italian menswear company, but we don’t see him much now. He’s supposed to be close to Albert, though, which means he has influence.”
Grace and Rainier may have seemed like a figurehead couple, but they fought ferociously for their fiefdom, and as recently as 10 years ago, Albert fought off an attempt by France to curtail his powers. The actual heirs to Monaco’s throne are Prince Albert and Princess Charlene’s twins, Jacques and Gabriella who, at just five years old, are a long way off assuming that responsibility. In the meantime, should they step out of Albert’s shadow, no one doubts that the young Casiraghis’ intriguing combination of intellect, idealism, style and unimaginable wealth could provide a little of the generational change that Monaco needs.