IN THE HOUSE OF GRIMALDI

It was raining in Monte Carlo the morning Stefano Casiraghi died, of a broken neck, in a speedboat accident during a race to defend his title as World Offshore Champion. The 30-year-old husband of Princess Caroline of Monaco had won twelve out of eighty races since entering competition in 1984, and had already escaped death once, just weeks earlier, when the engine of his boat blew up off the Isle of Guernsey. Accounts would differ later about the exact circumstances of the fatal accident on October 3 -- that is, whether Casiraghi was speeding at 80, 90, or even 100 miles an hour -- but no one disputes that his boat was going too fast, that it hit a wave in choppy water, somersaulted backward, and killed him on the spot. The tabloid newspapers, always on the look-out for a scandal involving Monaco, were quick with stories of a Mafia murder, but nothing so sinister, or for that matter even unexpected, could be spied in Casiraghi's death. Offshore racers are the kamikazes of the sea. More than a dozen drivers have died in competition in the last several years, including friends of Casiraghi and Caroline. They were both aware of the risk he was taking -- so much so that a free-lance journalist on the Riviera liked to joke with her editors, when asked what was doing in Monaco, "Well, Casiraghi hasn't killed himself yet. Maybe that's for next year." The only thing even remotely mysterious about the accident was Casiraghi's widely reported intention to give up racing after the 1990 trials in Monaco. At the end of September, visiting New York with his wife and her family, he acknowledged that he was ready to surrender to Caroline's fears for his safety and retire from offshore, because (as he told a Manhattan socialite) "it was the only thing he and Caroline were always fighting about."

"It was bullshit, of course," says Joel Stratte-McClure, an American reporter based in Cannes who sometimes covers the Monaco beat. "He was always about to give up racing -- he told me the same thing last year. It's like the alcoholic who's going to give up drinking the day before he dies. It's bullshit." Four hundred reporters had converged on the principality for Casiraghi's funeral, enough to aggravate the population in mourning, but nothing like the three thousand cameramen, anchors, writers and hangers-on who invaded Monaco "eight years ago," when Grace Kelly died. I heard this same phrase repeated endlessly, euphemistically -- "It's just like eight years ago" -- in Paris, Monte Carlo, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles; wherever the memory of the death of Princess Grace, in an automobile accident in the hills above Monaco, had blended with the news of another misfortune for the Grimaldi family. During the rites for Grace in 1982, in Monaco's neo-Roman, Disney-style Cathedral of St. Nicholas, it was Caroline whose strength had sustained her father, Prince Rainier, in his loss. At Casiraghi's service, in the same cathedral, in the same front row before the altar, it was Rainier -- heavier now, tired, and rumored to be ill -- whose arm and shoulder kept his daughter from collapsing.

"We learned something at Princess Grace's funeral," says Nadia Lacoste, who for many years was director of the palace press office in Monaco. "We learned not to allow the cameras to be positioned in such a way that they were filming the family head-on, throughout the service." Caroline was literally choking on her grief -- there is no other way to describe it. In ordinary circumstances, she is the darling of the fashion and society pages, glamour personified, the epitome, for journalists, of youth, health, beauty, wealth.

"To see her like that," one reporter exclaimed, " -- we were embarrassed to be taking her picture. I'm talking about some hard-core press. We all turned our heads away. We couldn't look at her." Caroline was joined in her bereavement by her brother, Albert, the heir to throne, whose normally friendly gaze had turned to iron, or ice, as he mounted the steps of the Cathedral; and by Stephanie, the Grimaldi family's troubled youngest child, who was rumored (on no particular authority) to have emerged from the Betty Ford Clinic for Casiraghi's funeral. In back of the family were row upon row of weeping servants and friends, visiting royalty and high officials of the principality, only slightly more somber in manner and dress than the actors, models, designers and fashion photographers who make up what is known as the Caroline Set: Alain Delon, Ines de la Fressange, Helmut Newton, Marc Bohan, Karl Lagerfeld. It was Lagerfeld, the Swedish-born star of Fendi and Chanel couture, Caroline's favorite "left-wing" designer, who had been meant to accompany her to the Opera in Paris when the news of Casiraghi's death reached her. She was having her hair done at Carita.

"At first I thought it was a bad joke," Lagerfeld remembered, "but then when I heard the maid crying, I realized it was true." In those fleeting moments after the accident when he was still talking to reporters, Lagerfeld gave vent to his feelings for Stefano: "He had everything: beauty, intelligence, glory, everything.... Physically, he was perfect: the ideal blend of a well-developed man and a veritable archangel." There were reports that Prince Rainier, when he heard about the accident, had started screaming in his palace office, and that then, having made the necessary arrangements for the viewing of Stefano's body, he broke into sobs. Caroline herself returned to Monaco in a plane loaned to her by Christina Onassis's last and wealthiest husband, Thierry Roussel. She went directly to the morgue where Casiraghi's body lay, still dressed in the red-and-white racing suit he was wearing when he died. She kissed him, placed an orchid in his coffin, then sped to the Clos St. Pierre, her house not far from the palace, where her children were waiting. The oldest, Andrea, is six; Charlotte is four, and Pierre is three. For the time being, the children were told nothing about their father's death.

Residents of Monaco, meanwhile -- and only they: no reporters or tourists were allowed inside -- filed past Casiraghi's body in the mortuary. The Italian press reported that Stefano's parents, who divide their time between a villa on Lake Como and an apartment in the South of France, had been "deeply irritated" by the decision of Caroline and Rainier not to permit a lying-in-state in the palace itself. There was talk of further strain when it came to Stefano's final resting place, though Giancarlo Casiraghi, after the funeral, sought to downplay any idea of a conflict with his daughter-in-law.

"She is shattered," he remarked. "How could we set ourselves in opposition to her wishes? How could we take Stefano away from his children, who live in Monaco and have the right to mourn at the grave of their father?" Grisly rumors that Caroline was pregnant at the time of her husband's death -- and these flew fast -- were squashed by the senior Casiraghi ("I think we can rule it out") and by the frigid "No comment" of Judith Mann, Caroline's secretary. The princess allowed no catafalque at the funeral, no crowns, no guard of honor, nothing to suggest that Stefano Casiraghi, though married to a Grimaldi, was anything but an ordinary husband, father and Monaco sports-and-business tycoon. In her only public statement at the time of the accident, Caroline urged that the offshore championships continue in Stefano's honor -- "That was his love and feeling for the sport" -- but the crews of all 41 boats in competition declined, and instead dropped a simple wreath into the bay at the spot where Stefano died. (It was the opinion of more than one observer that they were "scared shitless.") Burial took place in the small graveyard at the Chapelle de la Paix, where in-laws and other morganatic relations of the Prince's family are interred, followed by a luncheon at the palace, where seventy or more intimate friends of the Grimaldis had gathered in bereavement.

"What am I going to do?" Caroline cried. "What am I going to do?" Her decorator, Jacques Grange, reported that she had "stopped eating" from the moment of the tragedy, that she was "totally traumatized" and desperate that her children be spared, somehow, the knowledge of their father's death. (Rainier finally took it upon himself to break the news to the oldest boy, Andrea, who is reported at this writing to be suffering from nightmares.) In France, where a cover story about Caroline of Monaco can increase circulation by tens of thousands of copies, newspapers pondered "The Curse of the Grimaldis," "Le Bonheur Brisé," and waited for an answer to the only question anyone really cared about: "Will she crack?" She was photographed within days of the funeral (thanks to a helicopter and a zoom lens), walking with Andrea in the garden of the palace, looking thin, grim, and far from recovered. A month later, she was in Italy for a memorial service in Stefano's hometown. The crowd that turned up to witness her grief actually applauded when she appeared. Caroline burst into tears. She was still crying at the Te Deum mass on November 19, the day of Monaco's fete nationale and traditionally the occasion for a vast jubilee in the principality. This year, the football games were canceled, the fireworks, the gala at the Opera.

"Monaco is in shock," said Radio Monte-Carlo. "We have lost our Prince Charming." Friends of the family were slamming down phones -- I can attest to this -- and barking their chagrin when reporters pressed them for news. "You know as much as I do," one Monte Carlo resident snapped when I arrived. "You've read the papers. And what a time to be asking questions!" Outdoor celebrations were banned in the principality for a period of three months, which meant that an enormous party of visiting Goodyear Tire representatives, on the night after Stefano's funeral, were deprived of the rousing, open-air finale that had been planned for their amusement at the Summer Sporting club; while the Goodyear show's American dancers, that same evening, were hushed more sternly than usual as they left Pinocchio's restaurant, on top of the Rock in Monaco-Ville. They were walking down the road near Caroline's house, somewhat the worse for champagne.

I myself went to "Le Texan," the Riviera's answer to "Cheers," where visiting celebrities and ordinary tourists mix with some die-hard regulars in an atmosphere of perfectly recreated American bonhomie. The Texan is “the” place to go in Monaco, if you're chic but not stuffy, and if you're looking for a place to eat dinner for less than two hundred dollars. Michael Douglas is a client, and Boris Becker, and members of the Prince's family, who are confident enough to appear without reservations if they have to. ("What was the name again?" the staff likes to joke.) The Texan is famous not only for its Margaritas ("the best on the Cote D'Azur") but for its affectionate, fun-loving, gather-ye-rosebuds atmosphere. It's the casual extension, the blue-jeans version, of the larger Monaco experience: fashionable, predictable, dependable, and -- because it's really just a Tex-Mex joint -- incongruous.

"You've come to Monaco at a sad time," said Kate Taylor, who runs the Texan with her brother, Mike Powers. Kate is a beautiful woman, glowing, blonde, who greeted me, a complete unknown, with all the friendliness I had been told to expect. She kept apologizing for "the slow night," though when I looked around, I saw that every table was filled. "Normally the place is hopping," said Kate, "but with this -- "

Her voice trailed off as she waved her hand loosely "up there," in the direction of the palace. It doesn't take long in Monaco to find that all life, all activity, all thought of past and future is divided into two: "Up There" and "Down Here." "They" are the Prince's family. "We" are the rest of the world. "They," even among expatriates from Houston, are "our" sovereign family. Kate bit her lip while she thought about Casiraghi.

"Well," she said at last, "it was what he wanted. It's hard not to believe in Destiny when you think it was what he loved the most. And it was supposed to be his last race." She paused, then gulped and grinned, as if she had realized something for the first time: "It's going to happen to us all one day. So you'd better enjoy yourself. That's what he was doing."

***

The story of the Principality of Monaco, for all purposes, is divided into two distinct and lopsided parts, corresponding roughly to the bulk of recorded history (from ancient times to the end of the Second World War), and from 1956 to the present day, a period of unparalleled expansion and prosperity that the people of Monaco call "the Years of Grace." There is a funny anecdote about Grace's mother, the strict and unglamorous "Ma" Kelly, who went “all breathless” in Philadelphia when she heard about her daughter's engagement to Rainier III.

"Grace is going to marry the Prince of Morocco!" Mrs. Kelly exclaimed, while her children froze and coughed discreetly: "Monaco, Ma." It is generally acknowledged that Grace Kelly "put Monaco on the map," "saved the country" and rescued it from the Andorran, or anyway Liechtensteinian, obscurity it might have enjoyed had her husband reigned alone. It was Grace who insisted on establishing a press office in the palace, she who hired the artisans, chose the colors, set the levels and raised the tone of the social to and fro. If, today, Prince Rainier and his children are mentioned in the same breath with the Queen of England as the world's most glamorous royalty, it is thanks to Grace and to Grace alone. Jane Gunther remembers how "sweet" she was before her marriage, how lovely, how "enchanting," and how "royal" she became with the passage of time. When she arrived in Monaco, the Prince's palace was still painted yellow -- a shabby, imperial yellow that spoke of triumphs only in the past tense. Grace thought it clashed with the tone of the Rock, and so (although it's usually described as "pink") the official residence is now a kind of sugar-peach in color, with a creamy veneer that makes you think of Easter candy, or frozen yoghurt. It's more suited to a princess, certainly, than to pirates, which is what the Grimaldis originally were -- part of a vast and irrelevant Mediterranean nobility who owed their survival to a succession of overlords, sometimes sheltering under the wing of France, sometimes signing up with Italy, or Spain, or anyone else on the winning side. In 1966, Rainier had the bodies of a whole mass of his ancestors exhumed from different graves and reinterred inside the Cathedral; Grace lies reassuringly near the chapel of St. Nicholas: "Gracia Patricia. Rainierus III Principis Uxor." Her grave 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. A movement for her beatification sits on the far side of the Vatican's business, but can't be dismissed out of hand, because there have already been reports of miracles from people who pray at her tomb.

You aren't going to learn a lot about the Grimaldis and their empire just by showing up in Monaco and nosing around the grounds. The loyalty of the natives is too careful for that. "Gossip was invented in Monaco," Prince Rainier has said, but so was the happy dictatorship, the definitive Paradise, "the last oasis of peace and dreams." A film producer who divides his time between New York, Rome and Monte Carlo gives me to understand that Monaco, on the eve of the 21st century, is the only place left on earth where the wealthy, famous, and with-it -- people like him -- can live the way they want to.

"Everybody's crazy," he exclaims, reflecting a not uncommon view of life in the United States these days. "New York is falling apart. You can't leave your house without a weapon. Everyone's moving away. I have to pretend I have a limp when I go outdoors, just so I can carry a cane." He lives in Monaco four months of the year, and he's thinking about increasing the time he spends there. When I ask him what a minuscule, overcrowded, overdeveloped "country" of 481.85 acres, squeezed like a crab between Italy and France, has to recommend it against the Big Apple, the New Jerusalem, the greatest city in the world, he starts with "cleanliness" and goes from there.

"There's the fact that you're not walking around in fear for your life. The fact that you're not stepping over bodies all the time. You're not dealing with lunatics. You're not dealing with anyone you don't expect to see. It's a jewel. It's a paradise. And the more the world deteriorates, the more I realize what we've got. The best theater, the best opera, music, art. Gorgeous weather all year round. You can say, `It's boring,' and I'll say: `Wonderful. Go back to 42nd Street where you belong.'" Nobody in Monaco minds, of course, when an outsider goes back anywhere, so long as he leaves. It's almost as hard to get resident status in Monte Carlo as it is in Switzerland, and for the same reason: the principality exists for the convenience of its citizens and the maintenance of the status quo. It has no other reason for being. It needs none. "And when you're here," says my producer friend, "you really believe that you're protected."

As a matter of fact, you are. There are 450 openly acknowledged policemen in the principality, serving a population that never quite exceeds 30,000 souls (excluding tourists). Half of these, at any 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 (the rest of the population is comprised of foreign-born pensioners, tax exiles, résidents privilegiés), most earn their living from one or another component of Prince Rainier's hugely profitable tourism, gambling, real-estate, advertising and corporate-convention empire. There is no crime to speak of (no street crime, anyway), and no unemployment. When all is functioning smoothly in Monaco, there is hardly a moment's distress. The principality is an industry in the exact sense. It's a theme park -- a triumph of marketing and a model of design. It's also a police state, where you can be thrown out for insulting the sovereign and his family while you walk down the street in your diamonds.

"We have video cameras in key locations around the principality," Prince Rainier explains, "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 also listening. Every journalist in Monaco learns before long that his phone is 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 nasty things about the Princess!" Rainier has an agreement with the French government that permits him, as an absolute monarch, to ban anyone he pleases not just from Monaco, but, if necessary, from all four départements of the French Riviera. ("The police are lovely here," says a long-time resident: "They salute before they arrest you.") Rainier is careful with this prerogative, to be sure. Everybody in Monaco is careful about something. I went to dinner with a man who recently opened a business on the Larvotto, and he prefaced our conversation with the most extraordinary warnings -- caveats I thought had gone out with the Cold War.

"When you talk," he said, glancing shiftily around the Café de Paris, "talk quietly." I was not to identify him by profession or nationality, he told me, because, if I did, he would be "expelled." He was serious: "I will be out of here -- like that!" He is young, exceptionally handsome, and in ordinary circumstances gifted with a certain sublime nonchalance, what we might call Monaco Cool. There is a casual attitude in Monaco toward money and fame that I have encountered nowhere else but Beverly Hills. It's the sure sign of a parvenu, if not a total renegade, to make a fuss, or even to signal that you've noticed, when somebody famous, or historical, or criminal, walks in the room.

"Everybody's in it together here," a Monaco stockbroker tells me with obvious sincerity. "We all have an interest in keeping the principality exactly the way it is. It's a place where people can come and be comfortable, can be themselves, can be all right." A recent exception, according to tales at the "Texan" bar, was Madonna, who arrived at the Hotel de Paris on the assurance of friends that she would not be molested by the press or anyone. She was stormed on arrival, nevertheless, and departed in a huff.

"Of course she came right in the middle of August," my stockbroker points out, "when the Riviera is crawling with tourists. What did she expect?" He is funny, cynical, but loyal, too, like everyone else in the Grimaldis' Shangri-la. "If you run into any particular trouble," he remarks when I leave, "don't call me." He has no gossip about the Prince's family. He explains that "unless they're very high up" people in Monaco generally know less about what's going on with Albert, Caroline, et al. than people outside it, because it's so risky, or at any rate taken as such bad form, to chatter openly. 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 with friends in 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 that if you did say anything nasty about them they'd hear about it before breakfast." Ms. Lyons adds for the record that "if I want to make sure something gets around, all I do is mention it casually in Antibes." In the wake of Casiraghi's death, there were rumors that Princess Caroline was entertaining her ex-husband, Phillipe Junot, in the Clos St. Pierre; that the Vatican, at the very moment Stefano was killed, had been persuaded to grant her an annulment at last from the marriage to Junot ("What terrible irony," said Aileen Mehle, better known as "Suzy" of the New York Post); that Casiraghi had left Caroline saddled with as much as $15,000,000 in business debts (this from Ms. Mehle's rival, William Norwich of the Daily News). Prince Rainier is reported to be "completely fed up" with the stories about his children, and friends of the family, if they know what's good for them, are tight-lipped with the press. "They have a private life that is almost non-existent," says Nadia Lacoste, the Grimaldis' former press spokesman. "Should their friends help destroy what little remains?"

"Oh, I've sort of lost touch with them," said Vera Maxwell on the phone, when I called to ask her if she knew how Caroline was doing. (Miss Maxwell, the designer, was a great friend of Princess Grace. She made a mistake several years back, when she cooperated with the authors of Caroline and Stephanie, a cut-and-paste biography of Rainier's daughters that couldn't have taken much longer to write than the twenty minutes it took me to read.) "But how can I help you?" another socialite exclaimed -- Mrs. Oscar Wyatt, the party-going Lynn -- as if, over years of friendship with Grace and her children, she had learned nothing that wasn't printed in the Celebrity Register. A third social fixture, a playboy on the Riviera, never bothered to ask for my credentials when I called for information.

"Is the story positive or negative?" he wanted to know. "Because if it's negative, I'm not saying anything." Even Nadia Lacoste, when she received me in Monte Carlo, didn't trouble to deny a lot of what I told her about the current run of Grimaldi Poop. She only encouraged me, over lunch in the Salle d'Empire, to consider the family's position. Did I realize that the National Enquirer had sent 16 reporters to Monaco at the time of Princess Grace's death? "Sixteen!" Nadia exclaimed. Earlier, when Caroline married Junot, they had offered $5000 to anyone who would sell his ticket to the ball that preceded the wedding. At one point, the Enquirer tried to get Nadia to write a book herself; she "went along with the talk," she says, "because I wanted to see how much they were prepared to offer.

"First they said five-hundred thousand dollars. Then they got up to a million. `You know,' I answered, before I hung up, `a million dollars isn't what it used to be.'" It's an established tenet of the enquiring mind, even so, that almost anyone can be bought. Patrick Wilkins, who is the National Enquirer's man in Paris, takes it on himself to remind authorities in Monaco that "the press is free," and furthermore, "that we're not responsible for proving the truth of everything everyone tells us." Wilkins is also obliged to point out -- "more than you'd think" -- that people aren't knocking down his doors with stories about the Grand Duke of Luxembourg. In 1989, Nadia Lacoste left Prince Rainier's personal service to become head of publicity for the S.B.M. (the ubiquitous Société des Bains de Mer, which holds the monopoly on the principality's hotel, tourism and gambling franchise), and the palace's public relations operation was transferred to town, "down there," to Monaco's all-purpose, awe-stricken Centre de Presse. When I showed up after Casiraghi's death, the center's staff was operating in pure pandemonium, like Keystone cops. Janice Gregory, a reporter who strings on the Riviera for a variety of American tabloids, puts it mildly when she says that "the folks at the press center have gone a bit weird" trying to cope with the tragedy. Gregory has the distinction of having been expelled from the principality more than thirty times.

"They're amateurs," she remarks of Prince Rainier's press machine. "They've got the kind of expertise you find among people promoting trade shows. They go along fine for a while, then something awful happens and they don't know what to do. They panic. They're so afraid of saying the wrong thing. It was the same when Grace died. I'm sure it'll take them another eight years to calm down." In the week after the accident, when reporters called on Jacqueline Berti, head of the press center, to talk about Princess Caroline's future, she endeavored to steer the conversation away from Caroline and toward the principality's undoubted "accomplishments" -- specifically, the development of Monaco's modern sewage treatment plant. There was an experimental floating fish farm, too, off the coast, that Berti wanted to discuss, "and several important land reclamation projects." But it was only a matter of time before she was forced to haul out a stack of newspaper clippings, four inches thick and containing nearly a hundred articles about Rainier, Caroline, Albert and Stephanie from a single month of 1990.

This is the problem the Prince's family faces: nothing in Monaco functions at all -- no one would even know it exists -- without them to promote it, open it, close it, bless it and be photographed with it. The Grimaldis haven't got the same high remoteness of British royalty, who are (or at least were) protected by history and law from the more annoying encroachments of tabloid journalism. Modern Monaco is Rainier's own flashy baby. It's a family operation from start to finish. And one of the most important functions of the Prince's children, as it was of Grace, his sorely missed wife, is to set the rules of behavior for the courtiers and servants -- "the people," as Monégasques insist on calling themselves.

"They are used to protocol," says Janice Gregory, who admits that she writes for the tabloids primarily because "it's so much fun. They are so pretentious up there, and the reality is so different." Gregory is a cheerful Englishwoman of thirty-something, happily pregnant for the first time when I met her over coffee -- in Nice, "away from prying eyes."

"People in Monaco are used to form," she continues, "regulations, spying, and so on. `Don't gossip, don't make waves, be discreet' -- you know the story. They can congratulate themselves on this way of living because they think it's being done for the sake of the Family. What it really means is that they're used to keeping their mouths shut while all sorts of high-level shit goes on above them. The family are thrown as a kind of stardust in their eyes. And mine, and yours." According to Gregory, the sparkle of the Grimaldis' glamour machine has a seasonal flow. Ratings go up and down depending on the plot. Last summer, says Gregory, "with Caroline happily married and the whole world sick of Stephanie, you couldn't give the Grimaldis away. People were bored with them." She is speaking professionally, one hopes, when she declares that Casiraghi's death was "good for business. It's got them a lot of sympathy," she says. "It'll be two years at least before I can file a negative story on Caroline again."

"I hate to be the one to point this out," adds Cathy Nolan, the bureau chief in Paris for People magazine, "but in a horrible way Casiraghi's death was necessary so the soap opera could go forward. I mean, he represented calm in Caroline's life. Stability. He turned her into a bore. Now we've got suspense. What's going to happen? What kind of widow is Caroline going to make?" I found this question echoed in some unlikely places, notably Philadelphia, where Grace Kelly's family remains as dependent as anyone else on the gossip columns if they want to know what's going on with the Grimaldis. The Kellys are welcome in Monaco, and always have been, but they seem not to be privy to any unusual confidences. The loss of Grace was a loss to the family as a whole.

"She kept people in touch," her nephew J. B. Kelly explains. "She arranged things. She kept tabs." When I casually mentioned over lunch in Philadelphia the extraordinary degree of support that seems to exist for Grace's canonization by the Catholic church, I expected some kind of American chuckle from her nephew, but he was honest in answering, "Oh, yes, but often the miracles take place after the person dies, in prayer, through intervention -- you know? I can't tell you the number of sermons I've heard -- and it wasn't because they knew I was in the congregation -- that speak of Aunt Grace as the ideal of womanhood, as a wife and mother, not just a princess." Princess Grace is known to have had a concern bordering on obsession about her own role in the Kelly family, fearing, according to people who knew her, that her career as an Oscar-winning actress and later as Europe's preeminent Catholic princess wasn't taken seriously in a family where blue ribbons and Olympic medals were the order of the day.

"Royalty doesn't mean a thing to us," Jack Kelly, Grace's bricklayer father, boomed from his guest-room in the palace of Monaco (further observing that he himself was the Commissioner of Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, and that Fairmount was twice the size of "Rainier's rock"). Most people feel -- many will insist -- that Grace's own children were raised with her disappointments in mind, that she was the victim of certain idées fixes about family life and that she pushed Caroline, Albert and Stephanie toward a "normality" that was plainly impossible, even schizophrenic, under the circumstances. Life in the palace of Monaco seems to have been carried on as a weird combination of "Leave It to Beaver," "Pygmalion" and "The Berkeleys of Broadway." No one denies that Grace's last years were difficult and frustrating, as she sought to redefine her role in middle age and watched her daughters, especially, grow up in their hell-bent ways.

"I can't stand to carry the burden of her unrealized ambition," Princess Caroline was frank in remarking at the ripe age of 21. Caroline said many superior things about her mother in the first flush of her independence, when she appeared as the toast of Paris jet-set society and brazenly smashed her way into marriage with the much older, cavalier, epicurean Phillipe Junot. ("He works with banks," Grace remarked, frostily, we may 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," Grace advised when it came to Junot, and Caroline married him, "out of naivety," she says, "or maybe in the spirit of rebellion." The mother was appalled at the daughter's choice of men, but she summoned enough of her accustomed generosity to give Caroline 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 Kelly 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.")

For most of the 1970s, Caroline played much the same circus-princess role that her sister Stephanie acts out now. She was petulant, rebellious, sometimes stupidly defiant and shocking. Her eventual transformation, as one of her honest admirers puts it in a shimmering image, "from slut to saint," is one of the most interesting of our times, and she is frequently compared to Jacqueline Kennedy (after Dallas, but before Onassis). There is nothing phony about Caroline's devotion to the duties she inherited from Grace, nor was there ever anything "sham" about her second marriage to Stefano Casiraghi. Rumors abounded in the earliest days that the Princess and Casiraghi were united only in order to conceal the actual paternity of the baby Caroline was carrying. A joke went around Paris: "Junot who the father is?" Some said it was Francesco Caltegirone, the Italian "real-estate agent" who introduced Caroline to Stefano; others, that it was Robertino Rossellini, Ingrid Bergman's son, who is one of Caroline's closest friends and who was thought, at one point, to be her fiancé. (Rossellini, too, is described in Monte Carlo as "a real-estate advisor." Practically everyone is.) As all the world knows, Andrea Casiraghi was born "prematurely," but looking at him now you don't need to ask these questions, and the many published photographs of Caroline and Stefano -- kissing, snuggling, pinching buns and nibbling ears -- ought to have been enough to put an end forever to the more idiotic stories about their relationship.

"We never could catch her out," Janice Gregory admits; Gregory has hidden herself in some tight corners during her decade of snooping around Monaco. "Caroline really loved him. If you followed Rainier and Grace around, you could always catch them in a row." During their visit to New York the week before Stefano died -- the Grimaldis were presiding over a series of fund-raisers to benefit the Princess Grace Foundation -- people remarked on Stefano's obvious contentment and the sheer magnificence of his wife's performance as First Lady of Monaco. Photographs alone reveal the pleasure that Caroline takes in her job -- her ease of manner, her savoir faire, her sense of humor and the deep affection, the almost telepathic complicity, that exists between herself and her father as they go about their duties.

"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 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, but whose dedication is no less sincere. After Grace's death, rumors were rife that the heartbroken 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 her brother takes a wife. So long as Albert is single, Monaco needs a hostess, and the only other woman on the scene is Stephanie -- the Problem Child of Europe, Rainier and Grace's enfant terrible, a girl the French papers call "princesse rockeuse" not just in the light of her career as a pop star. Karl Lagerfeld describes the youngest Grimaldi 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?" Princess Stephanie asked a friend of her mother's one evening 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, willfully outrée, at public appearances, and she hopes to come back in some future life reincarnated as a dolphin. "I hate being a princess," Stephanie has said, many times -- 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 heard anybody say about Stephanie, in California lingo, was that "she has a lot of anger." She's made a lot of headlines, too, since surviving the accident that killed Princess Grace.

"I know that people say terrible things about me," Stephanie confessed during the Grimaldis' fund-raising excursion last autumn in New York. "It hurts me a lot. To see my life exposed like this ... ever since I was born ... I can't take it any more."

She was sitting behind a folding screen in the lobby of the Regency Hotel, nibbling on cheese and grapes, baby-sitting her four-year-old niece, Charlotte Casiraghi, and confiding her joys and woes to Paris-Match, the magazine that introduced Grace Kelly to the Prince of Monaco in 1955 and ever since has regarded itself as responsible for the consequences. Hardly a week goes by without a Monaco story in Match; a month never does. Princess Stephanie is widely rumored to have turned the magazine's obsession with her face and her love life into a lucrative business enterprise. There are allegations, impossible to confirm, that she has licensed her image to the highest bidder (Frédéric Meylan, her personal photographer, who sells his pictures of Stephanie through Sygma) and that she effectively controls the publicity she gets; business cards are floating around Paris, in this scenario, with the legend "Stéphanie, Inc." In 1986, Stephanie formed a fashion-design company with Alix de la Comble, a friend she had met while working for Marc Bohan at Dior, and later emerged as its CEO, the modern matriarch of a booming swimsuit-and-perfume empire. She topped the charts in Europe that year with a rock hit, "Irresistible," and was embarked on a promising career as a fashion model when her father put his foot down (reportedly at the instigation of Caroline, who was alarmed by tales of drug abuse on the Rue Cambon). The mutinous Stephanie is still reputed to receive a stipend whenever her features appear on the cover of Match -- something in the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars. In return, Match gets to promote itself as the gushing bible of Grimaldi lore.

"Look, it is our `Dallas,' our serial, and they are our Kennedys," Match's editor-in-chief, Roger Thérond, explained to The New York Times a while back, after a particularly strenuous lap around the Monaco course. "The public has invested in this story. It participates, it judges, it condemns, it pities. It's a second life for a lot of people. And then the Palace says we're invading their privacy. Hah!" Sometime last year, according to Match, Stephanie 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. It might have been "Bad Boy" Anthony Delon, or nightclub-owner Mario Oliver, her most scandalous escort to date, who, in the wake of their affair and cohabitation in Los Angeles, was described in People as a "sex offender." ("Nobody's perfect," said Stephanie.) Friends agree that the incriminating tattoo probably did not memorialize the Princess's well-publicized liaisons with pretty Paul Belmondo, or pretty-pretty Rob Lowe, or hunky-pretty Christopher Lambert, or plain old Ron Bloom, the producer of her latest rock album and the man who is credited with having "patched up" her relations with her family in Monaco. It is well known that Stephanie's antics, in the past, have driven her father to despair. Rainier has a violent temper -- this is also known -- and there are rumors of screaming matches, confiscated passports, actual banishments from Monaco.

"It's so sad, so sad," a friend in New York reports. 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. "I think there's a sort of a myth at work here," says the doorman of an ultra-hot nightclub in Paris where Stephanie often 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." 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. In 1989, while she was still living in California with the pony-tailed Bloom, Stephanie was asked by Paris-Match to describe her road to happiness in Burbank.

"Do you have a big house?" Match inquired.

"No," said Stephanie. "I have a little house with a little pool and a little car. But I have a big dog." She also has a well-grounded penchant for telling reporters (and a lot of other people) to "Fuck off," and she has won the profound admiration of her renegade cousin, Christian de Massy, who reports that she once poured a bucket of ice over the head of a girl who was out to steal her boyfriend. (Baron de Massy is Prince Rainier's nephew, the son of his sister, Antoinette; he describes himself as "Rainier's royal pain in the ass" and was effectively banned from Monaco in 1986, when he teamed up with Charles Higham to write Palace, a sleazy, peek-a-boo book about Rainier and Grace.)

Lately, there has been some effort in Monaco to counter the impression that Stephanie is perceived as a liability. She was only seventeen, on September 13, 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 concerning Grace Kelly'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," says the Enquirer's Patrick Wilkins. "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, at some level, she'll never get over.

"I know she went through a lot because of the accident," her brother Albert told Jeffrey Robinson, a friend of Princess Caroline's whose Rainier and Grace might be taken as a palace-stamped apology for Stephanie's behavior. "It affected her more than most people can imagine, maybe even more than we think. She had a very difficult time adjusting afterwards, simply in terms of relating to other people. Hence her chaotic life style. Although I think everything is starting to fall into place now." Certainly there was a strong atmosphere of reconciliation last April at Le Télégraphe, the trendy Paris restaurant on the Rue de Lille, where Caroline, Albert and Stephanie all gathered (without Rainier, the papers noted) to celebrate Stephanie's engagement to Paris club-hopper Jean-Yves LeFur.

"His love has cured her!" Match proclaimed, but Jean-Yves, who was described like everybody else as a real-estate agent, turned out to be involved in more sordid business than that -- "indiscretions" that nobody in Paris will take the risk of publicizing. A rumored criminal record and a more easily verifiable sideline in "models" became a major humiliation for Stephanie, who broke with LeFur and turned up in Monte Carlo for the summer season, "wild," according to witnesses who saw her at Jimmy'z, and "dressed like a pirate." She was caught smooching at the Beach Club with a "family friend," Jerome Lasseure, and (at least when reporters were present) seemed to take a defiant pleasure in kissing anyone at hand, man or woman, young or old. By the time the summer ended she was carrying on like the New Garbo.

"I am completely alone," she declared. "I am at the end of my rope.... The next time I fall in love, I guarantee you I'll keep him a secret." The papers were already betting on Roger Kluh, a stunningly handsome young German in Stephanie's entourage, when Casiraghi's death shattered the principality and blew the Rock Princess right out of the headlines.

"I shudder to think what the family will have to endure now," Nadia Lacoste told me quietly. "Not just in the matter of their loss and their grief, but when Caroline tries to begin her life again. When she goes out for the first time, with somebody who will undoubtedly be -- I can almost promise you this -- nothing but an escort. They'll be lying in wait for her. You'll see."

***

Joel Douglas is Kirk Douglas's second son, Michael Douglas's younger brother, and the head of the European arm of Stone Group Limited, Michael's production company. I went to see him at the Studios de la Victorine, where Stone Group has its headquarters and where, coincidentally, the interiors of To Catch a Thief were filmed, with Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in the starring roles. The Victorine is one of the oldest working film studios in Europe, dating from around 1912. Douglas thinks it has "soul," and says that soul is fading in the movies, as everywhere else. He works in Nice, but he lives in Monaco.

"When you cross that imaginary border at night...," he tells me, practically whistling with relief and satisfaction. He breaks off: "It's just a wonderful place to live." We were talking about the principality's broad appeal, which Douglas insists goes well beyond "the tax thing." He rejects out of hand the idea that Monaco is merely a haven for the useless rich. He mentions a host of charities in Monte Carlo; the leading role Monaco has played in the field of world health programs; the Red Cross; the Princess Grace Foundation; the Oceanographic Institute founded by Rainier's grandfather and currently administered by Jacques Cousteau. From a commercial point of view, says Douglas, "there are pluses and minuses." Tax breaks for corporations that conduct a significant part of their business outside Monaco are not so great that they can't be equalled elsewhere, "and frankly," Douglas admits, "I'm still considering. But what a place to live! The world economic crisis has no effect on it. The dollar falls, the pound surges, the Gulf's about to blow and Monaco keeps on growing. There's a tremendous amount of development here. The young people are coming in from all over the world. Everybody's coming here at the top of their profession. They're the best in the business, always." I ask Douglas about the role the Prince's family plays in all this, and he doesn't hide his admiration.

"I respect this family immensely," he says. "Anyone in this day and age who can hold on to certain values -- my hat's off to them." He comes himself "from a similar background of high press profile," and he well appreciates "the nasty position" the Grimaldis are in: "It tough on Stephanie and on all of them, wanting what everyone wants, constantly having to be in the public eye and constantly disappointed. I think that's something to write about. The very real losses this family has sustained. It's no bed of roses up there. But look -- the rifts are superficial. Stephanie's here. Caroline's here. Nothing has weakened the power of that family. It's a constant: themselves and Monaco and the running of the country."

Driving back to Monaco, I took the High Corniche, not out of some morbid preoccupation with Princess Grace's final journey (I have been up and down the road where she lost her life a hundred times before), but because the mountain highways really do provide the most astonishing views of the principality, the Mediterranean, and the peaks of the Maritime Alps. Looking down as you approach, you can just catch sight of Monte Carlo's soaring banks and penthouse towers as they shoot up from the port -- totally out of place in the Odyssean setting, cramped and straining and giving the principality an odd resemblance to Athens, or San Francisco, or Ocean City, Maryland (I'm never sure which). There are people who remember Monaco in its pre-developed state, who talk of "rape" and "trash" and "greed" while charging that Prince Rainier, in his mania for building, has completely destroyed the contours of the Riviera. A woman I know complains about "180,000 square feet of recent development," "more and more shitty highrises," "tunnels under the Rock" and an apparent plan to raise islands from the sea in an effort to increase the principality's living and production space. In the industrial sector of Fontvieille, which itself was raised from the Bay of Hercules nearly twenty years ago, huge cranes are standing at development sites with "ENGECO" written on them. This was Stefano Casiraghi's construction firm, and the development of the principality was his special domain.

"I'm a born businessman," Casiraghi once said. "I'm involved in business in all sectors, from exporting footwear to building and investment." He owned garages, used car lots, restaurants, boutiques, heliports, apartment houses, factories and souvenir shops. He had interests in North Africa and the Middle East, in Rome, Milan, Paris, New York. He came from one of those incalculable Northern Italian business families ("wealthy Milanese," they are usually called) whose affairs can be sorted out, if at all, only by other members of the same clan. No one doubts that Casiraghi was headed for power in Monaco -- not as the future sovereign, obviously, but as the business and bargaining brain of the Prince's family, the man who played hardball while the others pressed flowers. Rainier, by all accounts, was suspicious of his future son-in-law when he first came on the scene. Most people were. The Italian papers called him "Carolino," and imagined him to be a mere plaything for his wife, who was supposed to be miffed at the failure of her marriage to Junot. But Casiraghi surprised them all. Over seven years, he emerged as Rainier's shadow, a kind of viceroy and a real power in a town where the walls of privilege and nepotism are as thick as the Cosa Nostra's. The comparison, of course, is exact. When I mentioned to a group of hung-over reporters in Cannes that Casiraghi was supposed to have been killed by agents of the Mafia in Nice, one of them answered back: "But Stefano was working with the Mafia. Besides, he hit a wave. Can the Mafia make waves?" There was laughter all around.

"He was arrogant," says a fellow Italian in Monte Carlo, who remembers the night Casiraghi arrived at the Hotel de Paris and decided that the valet at the door hadn't jumped up to greet him quickly enough. "The fellow was sacked on the spot. You would never find a member of the Family acting that way, not even Stephanie. Casiraghi had a lot of power in a very short time. He stepped on a lot of toes. There are people in Monaco, I can tell you, who popped champagne when he died." I asked a man familiar with the Grimaldis and their empire whether Caroline would have known a great deal about her husband's business enterprise, and he looked at me as if I were crazy.

"Well, of course," he said. "But she has no interest in it. She is not a business princess like Ira von Fuerstenberg. Everyone in Monaco looks the other way. Nobody knows anything -- capisce?" When the National Enquirer published its article about the Mafia's presumed role in Casiraghi's death, Patrick Wilkins, in Paris, demanded that his name be taken off the story -- "because it was stupid," he told me: "There's no evidence to support it." But the notion remains, in all circles and at all levels, that Casiraghi's demise has been "catastrophic" for the family. He was of value to Rainier as much on account of his discretion as his business sense. No word of gossip ever passed his lips. There were no reports of philandering, or drunkenness, or dissipation of any kind. "He could be counted on not to talk about where all the money comes from," says Janice Gregory dryly. And he was the father of three healthy children -- little Casiraghis who, if Rainier were to wave his dynastic wand, might become Grimaldis, too.

This is the upshot of "the Albert Problem," the doubts that persist and the confusion in the public mind about the man who is frequently described as the most eligible bachelor in Europe. At 32, Albert of Monaco is handsome, athletic, confident, rich, and nice as the day is long -- "the dictionary definition of nice," says Nadia Lacoste. "He is nice, nice, nice." He is the "sweetest" of all the Grimaldis, the most like his mother, with Grace's tact and her real concern for the feelings of other people. (There is a marvelous story about Princess Grace and Lady Diana Spencer, 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.") Friends of the family are unanimous in their opinion that Albert is "the most darling boy alive," "a divine boy," in Franco Rossellini's words, "bright and charming."

"One can only write lovely things about him," says Rossellini. "He is such a square-cut boy, and of course he is a great help to Monseigneur." People magazine's Logan Bentley spotted Albert one night chatting with the young man who parks cars outside the Casino ("Not my car, obviously," Bentley affirms: "the Rolls Royces"), and when she met him again in Venice, during a tribute to Ingrid Bergman, she mentioned it to him.

"Oh, yes," said Albert. "I always check in after I've been away. That's where I get the gossip." He has his own apartment in Monte Carlo, works out at the gym, sings in the shower and is "nuts" about movies, but his heart and his duties are with his father, "up there" on the Rock. At the palace, Albert and Rainier work in separate offices -- the young Prince now occupies his mother's rooms -- but they lunch together nearly every day and according to Albert they "talk about everything." The Prince advises his son that he needs to "choose where to be seen," otherwise his presence anywhere, in Monte Carlo or out of it, "doesn't mean as much." Once a week Albert attends cabinet meetings, and he has learned to speak in the same non-committal but somehow deeply fascinated voice that characterizes Britain's Prince Charles, with whom he has a lot in common.

"I think banking and marketing are part of what my job is all about," Albert has said, in one of the most boring sentences ever uttered by modern royalty, "although it's hard for me to give a clear-cut program or to express my ideas and tell you what I'll do when I take over." For a number of years after Grace died, Rainier kept insisting he would give up his throne as soon as Albert seemed "settled and confident. It will also have to do with when Albert gets married," said the elder Prince. Albert knows that the heat is on in this regard (it's been turned up full blast since Casiraghi died) but so far he has refused to succumb to 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 merely assume he is. "Every time I've seen him, God knows," she says, "at Régine's or anywhere, he's surrounded by bimbos." There is a certain protectiveness toward Albert on the part of all of his friends, and while everybody wants to tell you what a nice guy he is, he remains a shadowy figure, not as thrilling, somehow, as you think he might be. He's cautious, underdeveloped, out of focus.

"He wants to make you feel comfortable," says an American woman who dated Albert in Monte Carlo. She is pretty, a leggy blonde, like most of his former sweethearts. "When I went out with him, at Jimmy'z, or Freakie's, 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." This woman 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," 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 is a dancer, and she thinks she "would have noticed." Albert himself has publicly denied the rumors of his homosexuality, but as the tabloid writers all squeal in unison, "He would!" Janice Gregory reports that she "gave up checking on Albert and his girlfriends a long time ago, since he was never with the same one twice. Now all we get are the nutters who claim to be carrying his spiritual child -- impregnated from afar." Lately, the Prince's photograph has appeared in the newspapers with astonishing regularity, as he frolics in boats and on beaches with a wide assortment of bare-breasted girls, most of them nameless, all of them looking exactly alike. He has been linked at different times with actresses in Europe and California -- Brooke Shields, Donna Rice, Catherine Alric, Catherine Oxenberg -- but again, so far as anyone knows, there is no one "serious" in the picture.

"And why should there be?" asks his friend Dmitri of Yugoslavia. Albert is 32, the same age Rainier was when he met Grace Kelly. I had asked Dmitri to tell me "what makes Albert tick," and he answered without a beat: "Girls. Girls and sports and good friends."

Is he gay? I asked. Dmitri laughed: "I'm not going to give you any details. 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." Albert doesn't talk very much about Grace, or the succession ("You can't imagine what that entails"), or his thoughts on much of anything except bobsledding. A man who interviewed him in New York several years ago remarked that "it was like pulling hippo's teeth with a kite string," though I have to say the Prince was unexpectedly cooperative when I approached him about this story; he wrote me a letter, exceptional in its friendliness, explaining that his duties kept him busy and that he would be glad to grant me an interview in March, if we could wait that long. (We couldn't). I'm not convinced, after much research, that Albert is nearly so "unready," so "wimpish" and so ineffectual as gossip supposes. The idea that he is uninterested in the future of the principality and not equipped to do the job of ruling as well as (say) Caroline, is "complete nonsense" according to most of their friends. Joel Douglas speaks of "the combination of intelligence and compassion" that Albert projects, and this is echoed by everyone in the inner circle. He doesn't "read" well, it's true; he is an unknown entity when compared to his sisters, but this is due, in large part, to his position as heir. It's delicate. As Douglas says, "He isn't the sovereign of Monaco yet. Everything he says can be taken amiss."

"He can't comment about his life, or his family, or his future plans for the principality," adds Nadia Lacoste, "without seeming to pose a challenge to his father. Of course he seems boring." There remains the possibility that Albert is just too nice for the shark-infested waters of Monaco, but this -- as so much else -- remains to be seen. Albert shrugs his shoulders when people tell him that Caroline might make the better sovereign, adding with a mischievous smile that "there's no coup d'état in sight." The question of the succession wouldn't come up at all were it not for Monaco's treaty of independence with her gaping neighbor, France, which stipulates that the Prince's family has to produce an heir, otherwise Monaco reverts to the Elysée. After Casiraghi's death, the Centre de Presse in Monte Carlo issued a statement affirming that "in the unlikely event" that Albert did not succeed his father, "for whatever reason," Rainier had the authority to name Caroline's son, Andrea, as his successor, with Caroline herself acting as regent until Andrea came of age. Caroline's annulment from Phillipe Junot is still pending in the Vatican courts (it was Princess Grace's fondest wish), and though she is no longer in a position to marry Casiraghi and give her children legitimacy in the eyes of the church, I am assured by the highest sources at the Roman Rota that the Pope, "in the interest of harmony in the civil state," can legitimate anyone he wants. The Monaco succession, in other words, is guaranteed. The rest is soap opera. The Enquirer's Patrick Wilkins remembers a morning in Monaco when he looked out his hotel window (he was at Loew's) and saw Albert and Rainier, in the middle of winter, standing on the roof of a building nearby, talking heatedly and apparently in a hurry about a matter of some importance. In line with the Enquirer's whole view of the world, Wilkins concluded there was "something to hide," though it's difficult to guess where Rainier and his son might have gone to drum up some privacy.

"Christmas Miracle!" read a December headline in the Star. "PRINCESS CAROLINE SAVED FROM SUICIDE. Rescued by Sister Stephanie. Shattered Young Widow Starts Anew." James Spada, who wrote a book about Grace a few years back that the palace thinks is "nasty," argues that the Grimaldis are "going to need something positive, and soon," to balance the current atmosphere of accident and unhappiness. After all, Spada observes, "Monaco depends on the fairy tale, on tourism, on glamour and public relations. They need something big and colorful and forward-looking, like a coronation, or a wedding."

Will Albert marry? Will Stephanie come to her senses? Will Rainier give up the throne? Will Caroline -- but better not make light of Caroline's tragedy. "It isn't a joke," says Franco Rossellini, a family friend with a house in Monte Carlo and a life he doesn't want to lose. "I mean, God bless this country! I want to keep my sovereign in his right mind. I go to church every day and pray for the Prince and his family. I really pray that God will keep them safe and sane. Because that is my security.”