August Annotations

IN THE HOUSE OF GRIMALDI - by Peter Kurth

The subject on everyone’s mind in Monaco these days is marriage: Stephanie’s marriage, Caroline’s marriage, Albert’s marriage, even Rainier’s marriage. Since none of the ruling Grimaldi family is married at the moment, and since the only point in having royalty (even teeny-tiny royalty like Monaco’s) is to see them behaving just like everyone else (only more so, or less so, depending on the state of their public relations) — well, after ten years of bad press, bad luck, and illegitimate babies, you can imagine it’s time for some domestic tranquility. Someone in Monaco has to get married, and fast, if only to prove that they’re still in the game.

It was a wedding that first put Monaco on the map, don’t forget, in 1956, when Grace Kelly left her role as a Hollywood princess for a new career as Europe’s most visible and dazzling Catholic grande dame. Her death in an auto accident in 1982 left a void in Monte Carlo that nothing and no one seems able to fill. Ask anyone: Grace’s tomb is the major tourist attraction in Monaco after the palace and the casino, which pretty much sums up her role in history and the principality at large.

“She was superior in the same way that Peter Pan was superior,” says Jeffrey Robinson, a friend of Princess Caroline who serves as the Grimaldi family’s official biographer. Rainier himself speaks of the memory of Princess Grace as “the motivation, true and deep, that keeps us all going.” Friends remember how “sweet” she was before her marriage, how “lovely” and “enchanting,” and how “royal” she became with the passage of time. If, today, Rainier and his children are mentioned in the same breath with the Queen of England as the world’s most glamorous figureheads, it is thanks to Grace and to Grace alone.

I’d better clarify that: it’s really only the children who are glamorous. Rainier himself is a Mediterranean capitalist, the descendant of pirates, if truth be told, who would rather watch television and eat pizza in his underwear than attend the parties, galas, balls, and fêtes that traditionally make up the Monaco season. Periodically, since Grace’s death, he has been linked romantically with one or another hard-bitten socialite on the razzle-dazzle circuit (most notably the “Business Princess,” Ira von Fürstenberg), but no one doubts that his first devotion is to the principality — “Monaco, Inc.,” 485.87 acres of porous rock and priceless sunshine and the most valuable real estate on the French Riviera. Apart from that, the aging Prince hasn’t got a lot of “interests.”

“Let’s face it,” a woman I know is frank in admitting, “if Caroline, Albert and Stephanie were to be killed in a plane crash, which God forbid, nobody would give a damn ever again about Rainier. His face wouldn’t sell two magazines on its own.” And don’t let anyone kid you: selling magazines — selling Monaco — is what it’s all about. Nothing in the country would function at all without the Prince’s family to promote it, open it, close it, bless it, and be photographed with it. In 1982, when Grace died, the National Enquirer sent 16 reporters to Monte Carlo to cover her funeral. Earlier, when Princess Caroline married Phillipe Junot, the Enquirer offered $5,000 to anyone who would sell his ticket to the ball that preceded the wedding. (No one did.) There are only a handful of people in the world who get this kind of media attention. The Kennedys, the Windsors, Elizabeth Taylor — and the Grimaldis, whose problems make the lives of the others look like fun-time in comparison. Basically what you’ve got in the line of succession are a Bad Girl, a Good Widow, and a Nice Boy on a Bobsled.

Taking the Bad Girl first: Stephanie of Monaco — rock star, swimsuit designer, wannabe actress and full-time brat — is the Problem Child of Europe, a girl the French papers call “princesse rockeuse” not just on account of her up-and-down career as a pop singer. Karl Lagerfeld once described Stephanie as “a sporty version of Madonna.” She had made Earl Blackwell’s worst-dressed list by the time she was twenty-one. She chews her nails and likes to tell jokes — the dirtier the better.

“What did the elephant say to the naked man?” Stephanie once asked a friend of her mother’s at dinner, and when he grinned and said he didn’t know, she answered brightly, “Do you really eat out of that thing?” She is deliberately provocative, even outrageous, in her public appearances, and she hopes to come back in some future life reincarnated as a dolphin.

“I hate being a princess,” Stephanie says — but she relies on it, too, just as often, and usually at the top of her voice. She is one of those unfortunate celebrities whose garbage cans are stolen by journalists and sifted for clues. She throws out unused plane tickets, spare change, sedatives, and pictures of herself; it’s hard to get at the truth, of course, if you’re picking through hair mousse and globs of pasta. One of the nicest things I’ve heard anybody say about Stephanie is that “she has a lot of anger.” She’s made a lot of headlines, too, since surviving the accident that killed Princess Grace. She was only seventeen in 1982, when her mother’s Rover, with the two of them in it, plunged off the mountain road from La Turbie on its way down to Monaco. Many believe that Stephanie was actually driving the car, or that she and Grace were having “a raging, slapping fight,” and that one or the other of them drove deliberately over the edge. There is some horrible chatter indeed on the Riviera about Princess Grace’s final hours. The tabloids, when they aren’t making a case for Mafia or PLO involvement in Grace’s death, slyly point to suicide.

“The curve they went over is directly above a cemetery,” a reporter in Paris once told me in all seriousness. “Grace would have known that. We think she wanted to fly off to join the angels.” Stephanie has “had help” in dealing with the trauma, but it’s the kind of thing, obviously, she won’t ever get over. A couple of years ago, she had a tattoo removed from an unspecified part of her body, because it bore the name (also unspecified) of one or the other of her former boyfriends. Now she’s playing at unwed motherhood, shacking up — what else can I call it? — with Daniel Ducruet, who regularly makes headlines himself by attacking photographers, personal enemies, rival suitors, total strangers, and beating them to a pulp.

“He’s bad news,” anyone in Monaco can tell you — and they will, provided you swear not to quote them by name. “Gossip was invented in Monaco,” Prince Rainier has said, but so was the happy dictatorship, “the last oasis of peace and dreams.” If you want to live in the principality, you have to play by the rules. There’s no other way. “And when you live here,” a friend of mine observes, “you really believe that you’re protected.”

As a matter of fact, you are. There are 450 openly acknowledged policemen in the principality, serving an official population that never quite exceeds 30,000 souls. Half of these, at any given moment, are probably somewhere else, since an awful lot of them are millionaires, businessmen, rock stars, and socialites. Of the roughly 5000 people who are actual Monégasques (born there, and engaged in picturesque occupations for the sake of the tourists), most earn their living from one or another component of Prince Rainier’s hugely profitable gambling, real-estate, advertising, and corporate-convention empire. There is no crime to speak of — no street crime, anyway — and no unemployment. The principality is an industry in the exact sense. It’s a theme park, a playground, a triumph of marketing, and a model of design. It’s also a police state, where you can be thrown out for insulting the Prince and his family when you walk down the street in your diamonds.

“We have video cameras in key locations around the principality,” Rainier admits, “on street corners, in passageways and in public lifts. It’s proven very dissuasive so we’re extending the system. Let’s face it, if a fellow sees a camera on a corner he’s not going to do much because he knows the police are watching.”

They’re listening, too. Every journalist in Monaco learns before long that his phone has been tapped. Old hands tell stories about operators bursting into conversations between writers and editors, shouting, “That isn’t true!” and, “How can you say such things about the Princess!” I went to dinner with a young man who recently opened a business in Monte Carlo, and he prefaced our conversation with the most extraordinary warnings — caveats I thought had gone out with the Cold War.

“Shhhhhhh!” he kept saying, glancing shiftily around the Café de Paris. “When you talk, talk quietly!” I was not to identify him by profession or even nationality, because if I did, he told me, he would be “expelled.” He was serious: “I will be out of here — like that!” Prince Rainier has an agreement with the French government that permits him, as an absolute monarch, to exile anyone he pleases not just from Monaco, but, if necessary, from all four départements of the French Riviera. Magazines and books with a “pessimistic” view of the Grimaldis, furthermore, are banned from the principality.

“You don’t hear a negative word about any of them,” says Irish writer Genevieve Lyons, who spends part of every summer in nearby Antibes. “People on the Riviera — not just Monaco — all want Caroline or Albert or Rainier at their parties. They want their patronage, they want to lie in their sun. And the gossip mill functions so smoothly here that if you did say anything nasty about them they’d hear about it before breakfast.” So nobody’s saying anything nasty about Princess Stephanie’s new career as a mother. She and Daniel Ducruet have been giving a lot of interviews lately to say how happy they are with the baby, and how happy Prince Rainier is to have another grandson, and how happy they’re all going to be when she and Daniel finally get married, which they will, only why rush, and besides (this is Daniel talking), “Marriage is a beautiful ceremony which shouldn’t be overshadowed by any sense of obligation.” (Tell that to the ghost of Princess Grace.)

“It’s so sad, so sad,” says a friend of Grace’s in New York. People’s eyes tend to widen when you ask about Stephanie, and royalty, in general, smacks its collective brow at the mention of her name. She is such an easy target for the tabloid press that it’s tempting to overlook her very real accomplishments and her winning sense of humor. It’s also a fact that her lovers and paramours, as a rule, do not discuss her when she’s finished with them. They like her. They are loyal in that sense.

“I think there’s a sort of a myth at work here,” says the doorman of an ultra-hot nightclub in Paris where Stephanie sometimes appears. “Every girl in France dreams of being a princess who hangs out with hoodlums. All of the movies are about that, all the commercials. That’s their dream. And Stephanie lives it.”

Caroline, meanwhile, is on to something else, slowly recovering from the terrible sorrow occasioned by the death of her husband, Italian businessman Stefano Casiraghi, in a speedboat accident in 1990. (Take it from me that everyone in Monte Carlo is described as a businessman sooner or later. They’re in “real estate,” or “development,” or “import-export,” and it all means money — preferably untraceable.) For most of her life before she married Casiraghi, Caroline played the same kind of circus-princess role that Stephanie acts out now. She was petulant, unruly, sometimes stupidly defiant and shocking. Her transformation, as one of her admirers puts it in a shimmering image, “from slut to saint,” is one of the most interesting of our times, and she doesn’t mind at all anymore when she’s compared to Princess Grace.

“I can’t stand to carry the burden of her unrealized ambition,” Caroline griped about her mother in 1978, at the ripe old age of 21. She said many superior things in the first flush of her independence, when she appeared as the toast of jet-set society and quite brazenly smashed her way into marriage with the much older, cavalier, epicurean Phillipe Junot. “He works with banks,” Grace remarked (frostily, we can imagine.) Caroline tells a story now — and it’s worth pointing out that she reveres her mother’s memory — of finding Grace one day bent over a copy of the Almanach de Gotha, hunting for suitable sons-in-law among the European nobility.

“Drop him or marry him,” she advised her daughter when it came to Junot, and Caroline married him, “out of naivety,” she supposes, “or maybe in the spirit of rebellion.” Grace was appalled at Caroline’s choice of men, but she summoned enough of her accustomed generosity to give her one of the all-time glamorous weddings of the 1970s — an unforgettable occasion, to hear the guests tell it, when a great deal of cocaine went up a lot of famous noses.

“Look at my little girl,” Grace cooed as Caroline tied what proved to be the loosest of knots. “She looks just like a princess!” (Friends, befuddled, were obliged to answer, “She is, Gracie. She is a princess.”) By the time the Vatican, late last year, finally got around to granting Caroline an annulment from Junot, everyone agreed that she had paid her debt to society. Tragedy — sudden death — had sobered her twice.

“Caroline is fantastic,” says Prince Dmitri of Yugoslavia, whose own family has known the Grimaldis for years. “She’s highly intelligent, highly cultivated. She’s brilliant. She can talk about anything: politics and art and metaphysics. She really is the kind of person you’d want to have next to you at dinner.” She is notoriously more exciting, at least in public, than her unmarried brother, Albert, whose gifts lie more in the line of administration and ribbon-cutting. After Grace’s death, rumors were rife that a grieving Rainier wanted to abdicate, and that Caroline (with or without her father’s consent) would “seize the throne” from Albert. These stories, denied by the palace as “ridiculous and completely without foundation,” were rather more dramatic than the situation warranted, but there’s truth to the suspicion that Caroline’s fingers will need prying loose if and when her brother takes a wife. There is nothing false about her devotion to the duties she inherited from Princess Grace, nor was there anything “sham” about her second marriage to Stefano Casiraghi. She was heartbroken when Stefano died, pulverized with grief, and there was real concern among her friends that she might crack under the strain of her loss.

She hasn’t — she won’t. She’s taken the time to recover for real, and all of a sudden she’s smiling again, to the intense satisfaction of the tabloids and the lace-tatting Monégasques. Caroline has had a lot of help in her bereavement from French actor Vincent Lindon, her boyfriend of record, who is “shadowy” in a way that differs substantially from most of the lizards you meet in Monte Carlo. He is private. He’s actually shy, and he’s completely devoted to Caroline’s three children by Casiraghi, Andrea, Charlotte, and Pierre. Lindon is also Jewish, and would presumably need to convert to Catholicism if he wants to marry Caroline — though why the Grimaldis, looking at the record of royalty over the last ten years, would need to be sticklers for protocol is beyond the ken. It has something to do with the laws of succession, obviously: Monaco enjoys a treaty of independence with its gaping neighbor, France, which stipulates that the Prince’s family has to produce a legitimate (i.e., a Catholic) heir, otherwise Monaco becomes French territory.

This is the upshot of “the Albert Problem,” the confusion that exists in the public mind about the man who is frequently described as the most eligible bachelor in Europe. At 35, Albert of Monaco is handsome, athletic (he’s an Olympic bobsledder), a wee bit nervous, and as nice as the day is long — “the dictionary definition of nice,” says a friend of the family. “He is nice, nice, nice.” Albert is the “sweetest” of all the Grimaldis, the most like his mother, with Grace’s tact and her well-known concern for the feelings of other people. (There is a marvelous story about Princess Grace and Diana Spencer, when they met for the first time on the eve of Diana’s marriage to the Prince of Wales. Grace found her crying in the ladies’ room at a party and folded her in her arms. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’ll get worse.”) For a number of years after Grace died, Prince Rainier kept insisting he would give up his throne as soon as Albert was “settled and confident. It will also have to do with when Albert gets married,” Rainier explained. Albert knows that the heat is on in this regard, but so far he’s refused to succumb to the pressure. He’ll take a wife when he’s ready, he says. Or not.

“Have you talked to any of his girlfriends?” a friend of Grace’s asked me when I called. “Is he a homosexual?” She thinks he isn’t. She thinks that people just think he is. “Every time I’ve seen him, God knows,” she says, “he’s surrounded by bimbos.” There is a fierce protectiveness toward Albert on the part of all his family and friends, and while everybody wants to tell you what a nice guy he is, he remains a blurry figure, not as thrilling, somehow, as you think he might be. He’s cautious, undeveloped, out of focus.

“He wants to make you feel comfortable,” says an American woman who dated Albert in Monte Carlo. She is very pretty, a leggy blonde, like most of his former sweethearts.

“When I went out with him,” she confides, “at nightclubs, or on his yacht, wherever, there were lots of — well, it’s not that I think I’m lower-class, but … there were lots of rich people. I was never made to feel that I was less than they were.” She was also never encouraged to think that she might become the next Princess of Monaco: “I didn’t think that anything `serious’ was going to come out of it. He didn’t try to kid me, and I respect him for that. I feel that he will always be a good friend of mine. He will always be there for me if I need him.” The girl explains that she “lost it” with Albert only once, when she complained that he was hard to reach (in the actual sense).

“I never see you,” she cried. “You’re always busy!” And Albert replied with perfect sincerity, “But you see me more than anyone else I’m dating.”

“And you know what?” says his friend. “I believed him. I’d probably seen him all of twice that month. But this is the thing: he never pretended with me.” She gently rejects the suggestion that Albert might be gay. She’s a professional dancer, and she knows from homosexuals: she “would have noticed.” Albert himself has publicly denied the rumors about his sexuality, but he’s smart enough to realize that no denial he can make would satisfy the press or his eager legion of gay male fans. His photograph appears in the newspapers with astonishing regularity as he frolics in boats and on sunlit beaches with a wide assortment of bare-breasted girls. He’s been seen on the slopes, so to speak, in the company of Brooke Shields, Donna Rice, Catherine Oxenberg, and, most recently, Claudia Schiffer, but again, so far as anyone knows, there’s “nobody serious” in the picture.

“And why should there be?” asks a friend of Albert’s in New York? Albert is only 35, a little older than Rainier was when he met Grace Kelly. I asked his pal to tell me “what makes Albert tick,” and the answer came without a beat: “Girls. Girls and sports and good friends.”

Is Albert gay? I blurted out (hang the consequences!).

“I’m not going to give you any details,” his friend replied. “Let’s just say I’ve been out with him at night.” He added something I couldn’t catch about “bringing them home,” then said: “Do you think it would be easy for Albert to find a bride? It’s one thing to marry a bimbo, it’s another thing to marry someone like his mother. She was superb. She was the best thing that ever happened to the principality.” There remains the possibility that Albert is just too boring and too nice for the shark-infested waters of Monaco, but this, as so much else, remains to be seen.

Will Albert marry? Will Rainier abdicate? Will Caroline seize the throne? (Let’s leave Daniel and Stephanie out of it.)

“It isn’t a joke!” cried a well-known film producer with a house in Monte Carlo, when I ventured that none of it mattered a damn. “I mean” — he was getting a bit misty — “God bless the principality! It’s a jewel! It’s a paradise! And the more the rest of the world deteriorates, the more I realize how lucky we are. I go to church every day to pray for the health of the Prince and his family. I really pray that God will keep them safe and sane. Because that is my security.”

And you know what? I believed him.

Reproduced exactly as published by “Cosmopolitan” in July 1993. Reprinted here by gracious permission of Peter Kurth. http://www.peterkurth.com

Charlotte Casiraghi: Monte Carlo’s Girl Next Door

She isn’t a royal princess, but Charlotte Casiraghi has proven that she doesn’t need a title to capture the hearts and minds of the public. Charlotte’s looks are exotic and her pedigree is legendary, making her one of the most admired aristocratic women in the world.

The New Grimaldi Generation

Charlotte Casiraghi was born August 3, 1986 to Princess Caroline of Monaco and Stefano Casiraghi. Charlotte is their second child and only daughter, born between elder brother Andrea and younger brother Pierre. Charlotte is currently fourth in line to the throne of Monaco after her mother and brothers. Charlotte’s uncle, Prince Albert, is the current ruler of the principality.

Charlotte and her brothers grew up surrounded by the history of their mother’s Grimaldi roots in Monaco. She was close to her grandfather Prince Rainier, but sadly never knew her grandmother Princess Grace. The “All American Girl” who became a Monegasque royal upon her marriage to Rainier had died in a car accident in 1982, a few years before Charlotte was born.

Charlotte is beloved by fans who fondly remember Grace, whose glamour they say she has inherited. With her father Stefano’s shimmering aqua eyes, Caroline’s pouty lips, and Grace’s finely chiseled features, Charlotte is a photographer’s dream come true.

“She makes me think of Brigitte Bardot,” says Karl Lagerfeld, an old friend of the family.

The Drama Unfolds

Charlotte’s family roots are just as dramatic as her sultry looks.

On January 8, 1297, cunning ancestor Francois Grimaldi disguised himself as a Franciscan monk, sneaking into Monaco’s fortress - now the Prince’s Palace - and overtaking the guards. Grimaldi seized both the fortress and the port of Hercules which was situated right on the Mediterranean. Thus began the 700-year reign of the infamous family in Monaco.

Grimaldi was medieval nobility who boasted both a French and Italian bloodline. For the most part, his family were loyal to their overlords, many of whom the Grimaldis owed their survival. Whenever trouble came rolling through, it was a different matter: the family had no qualms about switching sides when it suited them. They were certainly no strangers to the term “kill or be killed”, and supported whoever was on the winning side of a battle.

Two hundred years after Francois Grimaldi’s takeover, letters patent were written on February 10th, 1512 to establish Monaco’s independence from France. Though Monaco was now independent, the responsibility for its protection bounced between France, Spain, and Italy.

The annexation of the fortress and port by Francois Grimaldi was not the only notorious deed within the dynasty. According to one 13th century legend, Prince Rainier I kidnapped and raped an innocent girl. The girl became a witch in order to exact her revenge upon the Prince, and she cursed him and his family for generations to come: “Never will a Grimaldi find true happiness in marriage”.

It certainly seemed to come true in the eyes of many for Prince Rainier III. He lost Grace in the car accident, and none of his children had or kept a marriage. Princess Stephanie, the youngest, is twice divorced with a history of failed relationships; Princess Caroline, who was already divorced from Phillipe Junot and then lost Stefano; and Prince Albert, who is still unmarried but with two children from former girlfriends.

Happily, Princess Caroline is in fact the current exception. Though she lost her beloved Stefano, her third marriage to HRH Prince Ernst August of Hanover is still going strong. Her marriage to Ernst, a direct descendant of Britain’s King George III, also made Caroline a Royal Highness.

Brilliance and Tragedy

Prince Albert II, the latest princely sovereign in the 700-year old Grimaldi line, lives in the pink “Prince’s Palace”, a far more placid place than in the days of his forebears. Albert’s father, Prince Rainier, left behind him a successful Monaco created with the help of his elegant wife Grace Kelly and eventually his son-in-law Stefano’s business sense.

Along with Princess Grace, the Casiraghis were also the best public relations the dynasty ever had.

Monaco’s national day was a time for the family to be viewed by the people and celebrate their independence. They would gather on the balcony and wave to the people. Stefano would hold Charlotte, and Caroline would hold baby Pierre while a little Andrea would peek through the rails. In every photo of Stefano and his children, he was seen to be gazing lovingly at Charlotte or with immense pride at his sons. The young family brought a cozy yet glamorous aura to the ruling family of Monaco.

Stefano was tall, blond, and often referred to as Caroline’s “Prince Charming”. He was said to be devoted to her and their children, never straying from the marriage nor bringing scandal to the family. He helped Rainier with his vision of the principality being a key location for tourists and an avenue of wealth through legitimate casinos and hotels. Up to that point its reputation was infamous for being “a sunny place for shady people”.* Monaco, though only the size of Central Park in New York, became the glamour capital of Europe.

The happy family of Casiraghi and Grimaldi alike was shattered when Stefano, an avid speed-boat racer, perished in an accident. This dangerous sport was Stefano’s favorite, and he had already experienced several narrow escapes that had set Caroline’s teeth on edge. She begged him to end his racing and to consider the children if something were to happen to him. It was reported that this particular race in October 1990 would lead into his retirement, but instead it cost him his life. Princess Caroline was devastated. The accident perpetuated the myth that the Grimaldis were doomed to never find or keep true love.

“What am I going to do?” cried Caroline. “What am I going to do?”

The Princess leaned on her father to get her through these difficult times. When she regained her bearings, Caroline moved Charlotte and her brothers to a quiet village in France away from the spotlight of Monte Carlo and the press. There, the little family struggled to come to terms with Stefano’s death. Charlotte was only four years old.

Moving Ahead

Charlotte’s characteristic earthiness was instilled in her by her mother. Princess Caroline wanted her children to have a more normal life by giving them their father’s surname rather than a title. Caroline was much like Britain’s Princess Anne in this sense. She was a private person when it came to her family, and wanted her children left alone as much as possible.

Then, they moved to Remy Saint Provence to escape paparazzi and other prying eyes after Stefano’s death. It was in this quaint enclave in France that Charlotte grew up and formed her solidly commonsense personality.

It has been said that Charlotte’s biggest fear was that she would end up being seen as a socialite with no real interests. So, Charlotte studied hard and also began to take up equestrian sports. She excelled in her competitions, determined to be taken seriously as a keen sportswoman right from the start. Her skill and energy in show-jumping placed Charlotte right up in the professional ranks with her contemporaries Zara Phillips and Athina Onassis de Miranda.

Horses are not the only area of expertise for Charlotte Casiraghi; the beautiful Monegasque inherited a lot of her father’s sporty genes and is a regular on the wintry slopes with her skis or snowboard. She can often be seen in the Alps with her family, zipping down the mountains like a pro.

Charlotte is also very serious about her schoolwork, passing her baccalaureate exam with “excellent” marks and studying philosophy. She is also multi-lingual with French, Italian, English, and German under her belt. Any fears she had about being perceived as a “spoiled little rich girl” have certainly be laid to rest.

Charlotte is never one to dress or behave lavishly, either. You could never mistake her for a bed-hopping socialite so often seen in these times. Her level-headed cool manifested itself in her wardrobe as well as on the show-jumping circuit. She was always casual yet quality, sexy yet refined. She is a truly down-to-earth European girl that females everywhere sought to emulate and whom males adored, even when Charlotte was still only in her teens.

Breaking The Curse?

Nearly a decade after Stefano’s passing, Charlotte obtained a father-figure in her mother’s third husband, Prince Ernst August of Hanover. Charlotte was now related by marriage to the British Royal Family.

Caroline gave birth to her youngest child Alexandra shortly after her marriage to Ernst. Charlotte, Pierre, and Andrea all get along well with their stepfather and their step brothers, and all three of Caroline’s children love their little sister Alexandra to pieces.

It seems that this branch of the Grimaldi family is finally successful in the world of matrimony, and with such a firm head on her shoulders, the royal watchers of the world wait with baited breath to see who Charlotte will choose as a husband. We will wait in anticipation as the newest Grimaldi generation asserts itself and steers the legendary family into the 21st century.

Thanks to:
http://www.style.com/beauty/icon/041207
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Casiraghi
http://www.riviera-magazine.com/tourisme/monaco/MonacoGrimaldi-us.html
http://www.heraldica.org/topics/national/monaco.htm

* This quote is attributed to Somerset Maugham.

Andrea Casiraghi
Monaco’s Prince William

Andrea Albert Pierre Casiraghi was born June 8, 1984. He is the eldest child of HRH Princess Caroline of Hanover (nee Princess of Monaco) and her second husband, Stefano Casiraghi. His maternal grandparents are the late Prince Rainier III and Princess Grace, the Irish-American Oscar winning actress.

Thanks to his grandfather Rainier’s amendment to the constitution in 2002, Andrea will most likely be the reigning Prince of Monaco if his uncle, Prince Albert II, dies without legitimate children. Andrea is currently second in line to the throne after his mother, Caroline.

He has two younger siblings, Charlotte and Pierre, and a younger half-sister, Princess Alexandra of Hanover.

Family Tragedy

One of the greatest tragedies in the Grimaldi Family was the death of Princess Grace, the grandmother Andrea never knew. In September of 1982, Grace, along with her younger daughter Stephanie, were driving home to Monaco from France. Their car went over a cliff, killing Grace and seriously injuring Princess Stephanie. It is widely rumored that Stephanie was driving the car when the accident happened, and has carried much guilt over the death of her mother.

Things began to look up when Princess Caroline married second husband Stefano Casiraghi. They were married on December 29, 1983. Caroline had found the love of her life with Stefano, something that she desparately needed after the death of her mother and her first disasterous marriage to Phillipe Junot. Caroline and Stefano had Andrea in 1984, Charlotte in 1986 and Pierre in 1987.

Caroline and Stefano only had one particular bout of marital discord - his dangerous hobby of speed boat racing. She feared he would be killed or seriously injured, and pleaded with him to end the sport. But Stefano was not afraid. It was what he loved doing, and would continue to race. On October 3, 1990, the Princess’ worst nightmare came true. Stefano was killed in a speed boating accident. Andrea moved with his mother and his siblings to France, and the family remained there for many years recuperating from Stefano’s death.

Another Chapter

After their father’s death, Andrea and his brother and sister grew up far from the spotlight and glamour of Monte Carlo. His sister Charlotte became a notable equestrian, Pierre is said to be keen on the saxophone, and Andrea himself skis and plays guitar. Andrea and Pierre are also big sport fans. This year’s World Cup in Germany has inspired the lads to take it to their own fields in the Luis II Stadium in Monaco. They ran out onto the pitch alongside the other members of the “Star Team For Children”, an effort to raise money for the children’s charity Amade.

In 1999, Andrea gained a stepfather when his mother married Prince Ernst August of Hanover. Caroline’s brood expanded when she gave birth to Princess Alexandra of Hanover in July of that year.
The family all have a good relationship with one another, and the siblings dote on Alexandra.

Andrea met with one final family loss - the death of his grandfather, Prince Rainier in 2005. In his last years, Rainier had several bouts of ill health and been hospitalized on numerous occasions with heart and respiratory problems. It seemed for a time that Rainier was improving a bit, but after a grievously short time at home, he was whisked back to the hospital with a chest infection. He took a turn for the worst in intensive care, and he passed away quietly on April 6, 2005, just four days after the death of Pope John Paul II.

Star Status

Andrea is said to be giving Prince William a run for his money with his tall frame, long blond hair and chiseled cheekbones. He doesn’t try to lay claim to any heartthrob status, and is more shy than glamourous ‘hunk’. Sister Charlotte is considered to be the most beautiful royal in Europe, with her stunning looks being compared to her mother’s. Neither Andrea nor his siblings are styled as ‘prince’ or ‘princess’, but they are certainly dazzling stars on the European royal and social scenes. Hopefully there will be more from Andrea and his stunning siblings in the years to come.

Written by: Mandy
© 2006 MandysRoyalty.org