‌Chapter 8

‌In Search of the New Princess Grace

It was a turnout worthy of one of the greatest style icons of the twentieth century. When the Victoria & Albert Museum in London held a reception in April 2010 to mark the opening of an exhibition showcasing the fashion of the late Princess Grace of Monaco, the guests were an appropriate mixture of show business and royalty. The Hollywood actress Joan Collins, the model Erin O’Connor and the former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr were there; so, too, were Prince Edward, third son of Queen Elizabeth, and his wife the Countess of Wessex.

On show was an extraordinary collection of forty dresses that charted the journey of the woman born Grace Patricia Kelly from Philadelphia socialite and Hollywood star to princess, via a fairy-tale marriage to Prince Rainier III of Monaco. There was the satin number that Grace wore when she collected her Oscar for The Country Girl in 1955, and across the aisle a black chiffon evening dress in which she appeared in Rear Window. There was the rather modest “easy to sew” floral outfit from a McCall’s pattern book she wore when she first met the Prince (a power outage at her hotel prevented her ironing any of her other more formal gowns) and a gorgeous cream frock she sported that December when her engagement was announced. And an emerald-green wool dress by Givenchy in which Grace met that other fashion icon of the age, Jackie Kennedy, at the White House. There were accessories, too, such as the Hermès bag that was so closely identified with Grace that its designers nicknamed it “the Kelly bag”.

Unfortunately, her wedding dress – with its twenty-inch waist (a result of understandable nerves) – was not on display. It was deemed too fragile to travel from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it is by far the most popular attraction. As part of the show, scheduled to run for five months, there were film clips, posters and photographs – including one of Grace in a stunning pink ball gown, caught halfway up the marble staircase of Monaco’s Princely Palace, almost as if she were in flight.

More than a quarter of a century after her premature death, Grace was on the cover of magazines again. “At a time when it can be difficult to find that rare quality known as class, it is refreshing to see Grace Kelly back in the limelight,” ‌observed the New York Times.1 Reviews of the exhibition itself were mixed, but there was no doubting the enduring appeal of its subject. “She’s one of the few people who deserves this title of style icon,” said Jenny Lister, who curated the exhibition for the V&A. “It’s very hard to find anyone else today who can be remembered in the same way fifty years from now.”

Guest of honour at the reception was Grace’s son, Prince Albert II, head of the royal house of Grimaldi since his father’s death in 2005, who spoke of his mother’s “exquisite taste”, which had remained timeless since her death. Long seen by the media as a confirmed bachelor, the Prince, now balding and with his fiftieth birthday behind him, had been linked over the years with a series of glamorous actresses and models – most of them many years his junior, including Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer, Gwyneth Paltrow and Brooke Shields.

At his side on this occasion, however, was a glamorous thirty-two-year-old woman, who some said looked uncannily like his mother. Her name was Charlene Wittstock and she used to be a teacher and Olympic swimmer. They had first met almost a decade earlier when Charlene had been swimming for her native South Africa at a competition in Monaco; since the couple appeared side by side at the Turin Winter Olympics in 2006, she had been his permanent companion. In contrast to Albert’s many previous relationships, this one seemed serious.

The name of Grace Kelly, star of films such as Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief and High Society, has been synonymous with Monaco since April 1956, when she turned her back on a glittering Hollywood career to marry Rainier, who had become ruler of the pocket-sized Mediterranean principality on the death of his grandfather seven years earlier.

But it was a royal wedding quite unlike any other. The ceremony in the Cathedral of St Nicholas was attended, among others, by the actors David Niven, Gloria Swanson and Ava Gardner – but not by members of any of Europe’s reigning royal families, who were unwilling to be seen at the marriage of a prince of a country associated with sleaze and gambling to the actress daughter of a self-made millionaire who had begun his professional life as a bricklayer. The closest among the guests to “real” monarchy were the Aga Khan and ex-King Farouk of Egypt. Aristotle Onassis arranged for fifteen thousand carnations to be dumped on Rainier’s yacht from a plane.

Grace, born on 12th November 1929, grew up in a Philadelphia mansion; her family were wealthy and broadly middle-class, but they were also Irish and Catholic, which meant they were scorned by the east-coast Wasp establishment. The third of four children, Grace struggled for acceptance at home too: her father, a triple Olympic-gold-medal-winning sculler and man of enormous ambition, never expected her acting to come to much.

After starting as a stage actress at the age of eighteen, Grace appeared in her first film, Fourteen Hours, which was released in April 1951. It was a tiny role – she appeared on screen for just two minutes and fourteen seconds – but it was long enough for her to be spotted by Gary Cooper. It was only after she appeared alongside him the following year in Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon that her career really took off. In January 1955, she made it to the cover of Time. In a profile the magazine described how Kelly, still only twenty-five, had within eighteen months been paired with six of Hollywood’s biggest male stars – Clark Gable, Ray Milland, James Stewart, William Holden, Bing Crosby and Cary Grant – and had been transformed in the process from a promising newcomer (generally thought to be English) to the ‌“acknowledged ‘hottest property’ in Hollywood”.2

“From the day in 1951 when she walked into Director Fred Zinnemann’s office wearing prim white gloves (‘Nobody came to see me before wearing white gloves’), the well-bred Miss Grace Kelly of Philadelphia has baffled Hollywood,” Time noted. “She is a rich girl who has struck it rich. She was not discovered behind a soda fountain or at a drive-in. She is a star who was never a starlet, who never worked up from B pictures, never posed for cheesecake, was never elected, with a press agent’s help, Miss Anti-aircraft Battery C. She did not gush or twitter or desperately pull wires for a chance to get in the movies. Twice she turned down good Hollywood contracts. When she finally signed on the line, she forced mighty MGM itself to grant her special terms.”

Rainier, like many a royal prince, had a penchant for actresses, and for several years during his twenties had lived openly with Gisèle Pascal, a French performer, in his villa in Cap Ferrat – prompting complaints among some of his subjects that he was neglecting his official duties. Pascal had caught the Prince’s eye when he was a student at Montpellier University during the Second World War and she was appearing in boulevard plays. Pascal was not marriage material, however, and was reported (erroneously, it subsequently emerged) to be infertile – a major drawback for a royal bride. When Rainer succeeded to the throne in 1949, it became clear he had ‌to find himself a wife.3

Rainer met Grace in May 1955 at the Cannes Film Festival. An executive of Paris Match had thought up a new angle for photographing the Prince’s palace at Monaco: he asked the actress to pose in the foreground. Grace did so only on condition that she be granted an audience with its owner – who was only too happy to oblige.

After a whirlwind romance conducted largely by letter, Rainier flew to New York that December and proposed. Grace accepted and went back to Hollywood to finish The Swan, a film, appropriately enough, about a princess from the minor branch of a European royal family whose mother is trying to set her up with the heir to the throne, played by Alec Guinness. Rainier went to Florida to take a rest. The American press went wild at this union of Hollywood royalty with the real thing. There were some notes of humorous dissent, though. “He’s not good enough for a Kelly,” claimed the Chicago Tribune. “She is too well bred a girl to marry the silent partner in a gambling parlour.” A columnist for the United Press news agency claimed executives at MGM were worried “she will fly off to Monte Carlo and be seen ‌henceforth only on postage stamps”.4

However unlikely a pair, the couple seemed genuinely in love. Like many marriages, though, theirs was also underpinned by some rational calculations on both sides. Grace was not just beautiful, she would also bring a much needed dose of glamour to Monaco and bear Rainier, now in his early thirties, the heir he needed. For Grace, marriage would turn her from screen goddess to real-life princess. She had been determined not to marry a man who would be belittled by her screen success and turned into a mere “Mr Kelly” – there was no danger of this happening with Rainier.

There was a price to pay, however: at her husband’s insistence, Grace had to give up her film career; he even banned any screening of her films in the principality. The new first lady of Monaco, ensconced in her two-hundred-room pink palace overlooking the Mediterranean, instead confined her energies to charitable works, garden clubs and the narration of inoffensive child-friendly documentaries, as well as to bringing up her own three children, Caroline, Albert and Stéphanie.

The fairy tale came to an abrupt end on the morning of 13th September 1982. Grace suffered a stroke while driving her ten-year-old Rover down a winding road. The car tumbled a hundred feet down a ravine, turning over several times before coming to rest in a garden. Grace died of her injuries the next day after the life-support system was turned off. Stéphanie, who was with her in the car, escaped with only minor injuries.

Tens of thousands of people from around the world sent cards and letter of condolence; the funeral was watched by an estimated one hundred million people across the world. “Grace brought into my life, as she brought into yours, a soft, warm light every time I saw her, and every time I saw her was a holiday of its own,” declared the actor James Stewart in his eulogy.

The funeral was held, as her wedding had been, in the cathedral. But this time Europe’s other royal families were out in force, a reflection of the transformation not just of Grace herself but of the principality over the previous twenty-six years. Among the mourners was Diana, Princess of Wales, whose life – and premature death – was to have so many parallels with that of Grace. The two women had met in London in March the previous year just after Diana’s engagement had been announced; Grace gave her advice on how to cope with all the media attention that was already beginning to overwhelm her.

Rainier, who lived for another twenty-three years, never got over the loss of Grace, filling his principality with reminders of her. “Twenty years after her disappearance, Princess Grace is always present in our hearts and in our thoughts,” he wrote in the preface to a book published by the palace in 2002 filled with pictures of the couple, praising her for “carrying out to perfection her role as spouse and mother”.

Long before Rainier, the tiny principality of Monaco was already proving a glorious exception to the stuffy rules that have governed the love lives of the members of other European royal families. For several generations members of the princely family have married and divorced – or more often, as good Catholics, managed to have their marriages annulled – with apparent abandon, prompting talk of a “curse of Grimaldi” said to hang over their relationships.

Rainier’s great-grandfather, Albert I, who reigned from 1889 to 1922, was married twice: his first union with the British-born Lady Mary Douglas-Hamilton was annulled, while his second, with the Dowager Duchess de Richelieu, born Marie Alice Heine, the daughter of a New Orleans building contractor of German-Jewish descent, ended in separation: the Princess was having an affair with Isidore de Lara, a British composer and singer, while her husband, like Léopold II of Belgium, enjoyed the ‌favours of “La Belle Otéro”.5

The turbulence of Albert’s own love life did not make him any more tolerant of his son Louis’s peccadilloes. Louis was not deterred: after his father made clear he could not marry Marie Juliette Louvet, the cabaret singer he met in Algeria in the 1890s (and by whom he had an illegitimate daughter, Charlotte), Louis remained single for several more decades before marrying Ghislaine Dommanget, an actress, in 1946, when he was seventy-six and she was just forty-five.

In the meantime Louis had arranged for Charlotte – who had been turned into a legitimate heir – to be married to a French count, Pierre de Polignac, by whom she had two children: Antoinette and Rainier. It was an unsuccessful match: Charlotte, a headstrong character, found her husband too formal and pompous. “To make love he needs to put a crown ‌on his head,” she complained.6 Soon after her son’s birth Charlotte ran off with Del Masso, an Italian doctor, whom she later tried to shoot during one of their many heated arguments – leading the media to brand her the “Madcap Princess of Monaco”. She and her husband divorced in 1933 and the unfortunate Pierre was banned by his former father-in-law from the principality.

In later life, after renouncing the throne in favour of her son, Charlotte retired to the family estate at Le Marchais outside Paris, which she turned into a rehabilitation centre for ex-convicts. The rest of the family was not impressed – especially not by suggestions Charlotte had become rather too close to one of her “patients”, a legendary gentleman jewel thief named René Girier or “René la Canne” (“René the Cane”).

Girier caused something of a sensation by turning up at Rainier and Grace’s wedding dressed in a tight-fitting white uniform in the guise of her chauffeur. When Matthew McCloskey, an old friend of Grace’s father and publisher of the Philadelphia Daily Inquirer, announced that $50,000 of his wife’s jewellery had disappeared from their rooms at the Hotel de Paris, and Maree Frisby, a bridesmaid, also claimed $8,000 of her jewels had gone missing, fingers immediately pointed at Girier, who was out on parole from a jail sentence for robbery. For the countless American newspaper men gathered there, the parallels were just too good to be true with To Catch a Thief, in which Grace had played alongside Cary Grant, who was cast in the role of a retired cat burglar living on the French Riviera. To the fury of his mother, Rainier ordered her “chauffeur” out of his realm.

Rainier and Grace’s two daughters Caroline and Stéphanie made even more colourful marital choices. Caroline, born in January 1957, was just twenty-one when she married Philippe Junot, a Parisian banker seventeen years her senior. They divorced after just over two years, however, and after a brief relationship with Robertino Rossellini, the son of the film director Roberto Rossellini and his actress wife Ingrid Bergman, Caroline married Stefano Casiraghi, the sportsman heir to an Italian industrial fortune. The couple had three children, but Casiraghi was killed in a powerboat accident in 1990, aged just thirty.

After a long affair with Vincent Lindon, a French actor, Caroline was married for a third time in January 1999, this time to Prince Ernst August of Hanover, a third cousin of Queen Elizabeth. Despite Ernst August’s royal parentage, his behaviour has, on occasion, been anything but regal: over the years he has been involved in a variety of legal disputes ranging from issues over privacy and assault charges to allegedly being drunk and urinating in public. In the autumn of 2009, media reports began to appear suggesting that the couple had split up. The Princely Palace released a statement dismissing such stories as untrue and saying the couple had no plans to divorce, but Ernst August’s absence during key public appearances appeared a further sign that all was not well.

Stéphanie, younger than Caroline by eight years, has provided the glossy magazines with even more material. After an alleged affair with Miguel Bosé, a Spanish singer, when she was just thirteen, she went on to become involved with a string of well-known men including Paul Belmondo, son of the actor Jean-Paul, Anthony Delon, son of the actor Alain, and, later, the record producer Ron Bloom and the actor Rob Lowe.

In 1992 she embarked on an affair with Daniel Ducruet, her bodyguard, bearing him two children before they married in July 1995. The marriage proved short-lived: after photographs were published of Ducruet in a naked embrace with Muriel Houtteman, Miss Topless Belgium, Ducruet was banished from the Monégasque court – despite his insistence it had been a drunken set-up. Stéphanie was awarded a “quickie” divorce in October 1996, although the couple seemed to remain on friendly terms and from time to time were photographed on holiday with their children.

In the months that followed, Stéphanie’s love life appeared to become even more complicated: she was romantically linked with several men, including Fabien Barthez, the footballer, Jean-Claude Van Damme, the action-movie star, and Jean Raymond Gottlieb, a former French gendarme and ski instructor who had became her head of security. Then it was announced she was pregnant: Camille Marie Kelly was born in July 1998. The identity of the baby’s father was never revealed, but there was widespread speculation it was Gottlieb.

In any case, Stéphanie had moved on, reportedly romancing, among others, Pierre Pinelli, a Corsican barman, whom she met at a the ski resort of Auron, Richard Lucas, her father’s butler, and even Junot, her elder sister’s first husband. Most unusual of all was her relationship with Franco Knie, the Swiss owner of Cirque Knie, whom she first met in 1999 at the International Circus Festival of Monte Carlo while presenting him with the award for Best Animal Trainer. Their affair became public two years later when Knie, who worked with elephants, announced he was leaving his wife, Claudine, for the Princess. Stéphanie spent several months touring Europe with the circus and apparently loved the elephants so much that she was included in one of the acts.

They parted in 2002, and more equally colourful romances followed; then in September 2003 Stéphanie announced she had got married again, this time to Adans Lopez Peres, a Portuguese-Spanish trapeze artist. At the time of writing, she is going out with Merwan Rim, a French actor and musician.

In stark contrast to his sisters, Albert, who became sovereign prince of Monaco in April 2005, had for a long time failed to give the paparazzi anything much to get their teeth into – so little that at one stage he felt himself obliged to deny persistent rumours that he was gay. “At first it was amusing,” he declared in an interview published in 1994, “but it becomes very irritating in the long term to hear people ‌say that I am homosexual.”7

As it turned out, the statement was somewhat superfluous. In 1992 Tamara Rotolo, a divorced Californian real-estate agent, had filed a paternity suit against the Prince, claiming he was the father of her daughter, whom she named Jazmin Grace Grimaldi and who had been born in March that year. It was not until May 2006, after DNA tests confirmed the child’s parentage, that Albert admitted, in a statement from his lawyer, that he was the girl’s father. He also extended an invitation for the girl to study and live in Monaco.

A hereditary monarchy requires a legitimate heir, however. With Albert well into his forties and apparently a confirmed bachelor, this was beginning to look increasingly unlikely. The simplest solution would have been to recognize one of Albert’s two illegitimate children – effectively a repetition of what had happened with his grandmother Charlotte. Indeed, unusually for a monarchy based on the principle of heredity, the rules of the Monégasque royal house explicitly allowed the reigning prince to adopt an heir to succeed him if he died without legitimate heirs – in his case, this could have been one of his nephews or someone completely unrelated.

In 2002, however, amid mounting concerns over the future of the dynasty, the rules were changed to allow the throne to pass to his elder sister, Caroline, if he died without a legitimate heir and then on to her eldest son, Andrea. The law came into effect in October 2005 after it was ratified by France.

Albert claimed his reluctance to settle down was due in large part to the press intrusion he suffered. “Life will not be easy for my future wife,” he declared. “I became accustomed at an early age to the incessant presence of photographers. Some of my girlfriends who have been exposed, even for a very brief time, to this sort of life ‌were not at all pleased.”8

The arrival of Charlene Wittstock raised hopes that there would be no need to change the succession law. Charlene was born in January 1978 to South African parents in the southern Zimbabwean city of Bulawayo. Her father, Michael, was a computer-business operator; her mother, Lynette, had been a competitive diver.

Charlene inherited her mother’s prowess in water sports, and at the age of sixteen gave up her studies to devote herself full-time to swimming. At eighteen she won South Africa’s junior championships, and was selected to represent her country at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. She reached her peak at the World Cup in 2002, when she won three gold medals, but her career ended in disappointment; a shoulder injury kept her out of the sport for eighteen months and she was unable to realize her dream of swimming for her country at the 2008 Beijing Games.

Charlene met Albert in May 2000, when she went to Monaco to take part in a swimming competition; she won the fifty-metre breaststroke and the Prince presented her with a bunch of flowers. According to an account that appeared in South Africa’s Sunday Times, they met again in June the following year when she was back in the principality for the Mare Nostrum championships. Charlene was queuing for food in the Tulip Hotel along with swimmers from Sweden and Canada when the Prince saw her and, apparently remembering her from the previous years, asked her to go out with him.

“I wasn’t exactly sure what I should say,” she told the newspaper. “I was more worried about my curfew and whether I would be allowed to go out so late at night. So I said he should ask the team management for permission. He said he wouldn’t take no for an answer and proceeded to escort me to the table where the rest of our team was enjoying their lunch. Of course, when I introduced the Prince there was a frozen silence. He had no problem getting permission to take me out and promised ‌to bring me back himself.”9 This left Charlene, who had been travelling light, to embark on a frantic search with a teammate for something suitably glamorous to wear for a date with a prince.

At the agreed hour, Albert, accompanied by bodyguards, knocked on Charlene’s hotel door and escorted her to a waiting stretched Rolls-Royce, whereupon they set off for a nightclub and then a tour of Monaco. Along the way, according to her account, he told her of his love of sport – and how he had once almost married a swimmer – and also mentioned his concern that if he didn’t soon marry and produce a legitimate heir he would have to adopt his nephew.

Rather than take Charlene back to her hotel, Albert brought her instead to his three-bedroom apartment overlooking Monte Carlo. “I knew it was a date, but I didn’t expect much,” she said. “We were not entirely alone. One of his assistants made us coffee as we stared out into the night. I think he liked me because I made him laugh.” Around five o’clock that morning, the playboy Prince escorted his date back to her hotel as promised. “He gave me his phone number and said when I’m ever in Monaco again I should give him a call. I was so exhausted that I fell onto my bed.”

How their relationship progressed from there was not clear. In the interview, Charlene expressed the hope she would see Albert again during the competition the following year. The Prince appeared keen to see her too, even though a woman who gave an interview with such explicit details of a date would have been anathema to most of his royal counterparts.

In the meantime, Albert was continuing to see other women: in May 2005, the principality was rocked by claims by Nicole Coste, a former Air France flight attendant from Togo, that her youngest son, Alexandre, born two years earlier, had been fathered by Albert. The French weekly Paris Match published a ten-page interview with Coste, which included photographs of the Prince holding and feeding the child. Coste also told the magazine that she was living in the Prince’s Paris apartment and receiving an allowance from him while pretending to be the girlfriend of one of his friends in order to maintain privacy. The palace initially declined to comment, but on 6th July – six days before Albert was due to be enthroned – his lawyer Thierry Lacoste confirmed the boy was indeed his. In what must have been a small consolation for the Prince, a third paternity suit, brought against him by a German topless model, had failed.

In February the following year Albert and Charlene went public: they were photographed laughing and snuggling up together at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Turin. In the eyes of the world they were now a couple – an impression that appeared to be confirmed when Charlene moved later that year to the Principality. She kept her own apartment, but also began to appear increasingly at Albert’s side.

Back in South Africa, Charlene had the image of a gawky, tomboyish “girl next door” – an outgoing figure who was always cracking jokes. After a few gaffes, she also acquired something of a reputation as a dumb blonde. David Isaacson, a sports writer for South Africa’s Sunday Times, who met Charlene on several occasions, described her as always bubbly, smiling and down to earth. “She told me in an interview once that it was important to treat everyone with respect,” he wrote in a profile. “She had already met Albert by that time – though she hadn’t started going out with him – but she made it clear that she wouldn’t tolerate even him talking down to people.” In the same interview, Charlene admitted to relishing her dumb-blonde role: “Anyway, I think you have to be really clever to be a dumb blonde,” she told him – but, according to Isaacson, she promptly burst into tears the next day when she saw ‌the headline on his article.10

Gradually, however, the dumb blonde was evolving into a polished, sophisticated princess-to-be, as she made an increasing number of public appearances at Albert’s side at events such as the Red Cross Ball, the Rose Ball and the Cannes Film Festival, where she was photographed by Paris Match in a designer dress alongside famous actresses. Although clearly warming to life with one of the world’s most eligible bachelors, Charlene could be forgiven for being frustrated with the role of “fiancée non-officielle”.

According to those who know the Prince, however, the transition from girlfriend to fiancée and wife could not be hurried. Given the inevitable comparisons with his mother, Albert knew he had to make sure Charlene would be able to withstand the huge media attention to which she would be subjected. In the meantime, she had been preparing for her new role, including taking an accelerated course to improve her French.

By the time Charlene joined Albert for the exhibition dedicated to his mother in London, it was clear she had passed the test, even though the palace repeatedly denied reports by what the French call the “presse people” that an engagement was about to be announced. In June 2010, in the ultimate sign of acceptance, Charlene accompanied Albert to the wedding of Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, which gave him the chance to introduce her to prominent members of Europe’s other royal families.

Three days later her engagement to Albert was announced – but only after the Prince had telephoned her father in Johannesburg to break the news. Michael Wittstock, who described the Prince as a “nice chap”, said he received the call just as he was settling to watch South Africa’s World Cup football match against France. “He phoned me so that I could give him the blessing to put the ring on her finger,” he joked. “I wanted to get the whole thing over and done with before the game.”

The ring in question was clearly visible in an engagement photograph released by the palace that showed Albert in a dark-blue suit and Charlene in an elegant halter-neck dress. Supplied by the jeweller Alberto Repossi, who was summoned specially to the palace, it was in white gold, with a pear-shaped diamond in the centre, paved with brilliant-cut diamonds. “If she takes up swimming again, she won’t be able to wear her engagement ring in the pool – she’d surely ‌sink,” quipped Britain’s Daily Mail.11

The wedding, set for the weekend of 1st July 2011, was to be a suitably grand affair. A civil ceremony on the Friday in the throne room of the Prince’s palace in Monaco was to be followed on the Saturday by a religious service in the palace courtyard. Yet signs began to emerge in the days before the ceremony that all was not well with the couple.

Albert, it was claimed, was facing allegations that he had fathered a third illegitimate child and, understandably, Charlene was said to be having second thoughts about marrying him. According to reports in the French media, she had tried to flee to her native South Africa three times: the first attempt had been in May when she went to Paris to try on her wedding dress and allegedly attempted to “take refuge” in the South African embassy; the second was supposedly during the Monaco Grand Prix later the same month; the third had been a few days before the wedding, when royal officials were said to have confiscated her passport as she took the helicopter shuttle to Nice airport with a one-way ticket home to South Africa in her handbag.

Albert described the stories as “completely fabricated” and an attempt to destabilize his forthcoming wedding. Charlene’s father, Mike, told a South African radio station that the only time his daughter had come close to an aircraft over the previous weeks had been to fly to Paris to buy a hat and shoes for her wedding. Royal officials nevertheless confirmed that the Prince would face a paternity test.

Fears that Albert would be left alone at the altar proved to be unfounded. Charlene turned up on the day, looking stunning in an off-the-shoulder Armani silk dress, covered with 40,000 Swarovski crystals and with a sixteen-foot train. The groom was smart in the cream summer uniform of Monaco’s palace guards. Giorgio Armani himself was among the 850 guests, who also included Nicolas Sarkozy, Karl Lagerfeld, Naomi Campbell, Roger Moore and senior members of Europe’s royal families. Dinner was prepared by Alain Ducasse, the celebrated French-born chef. Although Charlene laughed as she placed the ring on her husband’s finger, the tears she shed after the ceremony seemed to be of despair rather than joy.

The couple left as planned on honeymoon to South Africa, but much of their time seemed taken up with official meetings, including a conference of the International Olympic Committee, of which Albert is a member. Although the Prince tried hard to appear affectionate towards his bride, the South African media claimed they stayed in separate hotel suites.

Yet even if Charlene really had attempted to escape, she did not try a second time. In the months that followed the couple was seen repeatedly by each other’s side, both within Monaco and on visits abroad. So had Charlene forgiven her husband his sexual indiscretions? Not necessarily. The couple, it was said, had drawn up a pact: they would stay together for as long as it took Charlene to produce the legitimate heir that Albert needed, and then they would go their separate ways. Had the curse of the Grimaldi family struck again?