The Grimaldis of Monaco, page 23
Louis’s loyalties were undeniably pro-French. He had watched with “anguished horror” as the beloved army of his youth crumbled so swiftly beneath the German Army. With France and Monaco’s occupation he was torn as to what position he should take. Throughout their history the Grimaldis had survived the many wars fought on their borders and the periods of foreign occupation by carefully balancing their allegiances. Louis was not a particularly smart or clever man, but he did know that if Germany and Italy won the war, Monaco would fall to Italy, a country that he did not hold in high esteem. He allied himself with the Vichy government, a German tool in the hands of French collaborationists, and thus placed himself at cross-purposes with the Allies, which, since the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, had included the United States. His thinking appears to have been that if the Germans won, Monaco might have some leverage against being taken over by the Italians. Constantly at Louis’s side during this difficult period was his Minister of State, Émile Roblôt, who was affiliated with the pro-Fascist elements in Vichy. Both French and Monégasque segments of the population petitioned for Louis to dismiss Roblôt, but he was adamant that his minister remain.
A coup to remove Louis from the throne was discovered and the Italian pro-Mussolini organizers were arrested before any damage was done. Louis released the guilty men after receiving Mussolini’s personal assurances that he would remain as Prince de Monaco and that no one in his Principality, including resident Jews, would be forcibly removed. This last was not true, for Raoul Gunsbourg was compelled to resign his post at the Opéra and go into hiding when he was warned by a member of the Resistance that he was to be arrested and “transferred for trial” as a spy. Gunsbourg was not involved in anything of that nature and managed to escape to a friend’s house nearby the morning of his planned arrest. With the help of the Resistance he finally made his way to Switzerland. Louis had always respected Gunsbourg and appreciated the cultural atmosphere he had brought to Monaco. But he had not attempted to help Gunsbourg in his plight. Louis was now a puppet prince whose strings could be yanked anytime Mussolini or Hitler wished to do so.
Rainier remained in Montpellier. The brief exhilaration he had felt at the start of his university life had been replaced by a sense of constant anxiety. The coastline was rimmed with armed defenses; barbed wire stretched along the beaches, and a blackout and a curfew were rigidly kept. Every day there were stories of the deaths and arrests of students. A professor would suddenly disappear, and there would be whispers that he had been a Jew or connected with the Resistance. Rainier lived in a twilight state in which his mind and heart were caught up in the war, and he went through his daily life by rote. Always there was fear for his family and for his own safety should anything happen to his grandfather, who, he had recently learned, had fallen in love at the age of sixty-nine with Ghislaine Dommanget (also known as Ghislaine Brullé), an actress thirty-five years younger than he. Ghislaine had moved into the Palace, to Mamou’s disgust, Antoinette’s fury and Nanny Wanstall’s loathing.
As Rainier had matured, so had his differences with Louis. He felt his mother, who had become more and more eccentric, and his grandfather had conspired to rob him of his father’s presence. Forbidden contact with de Polignac, Rainier had secretly corresponded with him and found him to be a far more compassionate man than the picture given by Mamou and his grandfather. But as the war progressed, he was not sure where de Polignac was, or if he was safe, for he could no longer be reached at his Paris address. He was, in fact, in the country, and was said to have been helping the Free French, a story which later proved to be true.
Antoinette was in Monaco, engaged in war work: rolling bandages, visiting the injured Italian and German soldiers who had been sent to Monaco’s hospital for medical help. Her letters served only to irritate Rainier. They did not get on much better than they had as children, and she had inherited their mother’s mercurial nature. (Her son would later say that she shifted “radically from pro-German to pro-American to pro-British sentiments with little pause between.”) She fought constantly with Mamou and clung to Nanny Wanstall, who now ran the domestic life of the Palace for Louis with an iron hand.
Rainier went home for Easter, 1942. Traveling was a hardship. Trains did not run on schedule, and they were packed with German soldiers who demanded to see identity cards at every stop. Monaco was dismal. Mussolini’s Blackshirts were everywhere. Shop windows displayed very little merchandise. The yachts were gone from the harbors. Food was rationed and many restaurants and hotels had closed. Streets were dark at night. Nonetheless, the Casino remained open; and during the month Rainier was home, Edith Piaf, Max Régnier and Maurice Chevalier gave concert performances in the Salle Garnier, and Claude Dauphin and the gamine actress Gisèle Pascal appeared in the comedy Vive le Théâtre, which Rainier attended.
Until this time, Rainier had not had a serious relationship with a woman. He was, after all, not quite nineteen. But from the moment he met Gisèle after the performance, he knew he was in love. She had dancing blue eyes, a bewitching smile, golden hair and a funny little catch in her voice that turned her laughter into music. She was a divorcée, born in Cannes (Gisèle Tallone was her real name) to a French mother and an Italian father. A few years older than Rainier (although she claimed to be younger), she had just played her first starring film role, in L’Artésienne, and did not take his attentions seriously. She gave him her address in Paris, and once he had returned to Montpellier he began a correspondence with her. He received his B.A. in June 1943, and then headed straight for Paris for additional studies at the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques and to look her up. She was now quite favorably inclined toward his attentions, the war having temporarily put an end to her brief film career.
In the summer of 1943, the Allies followed up their victory in Tunisia with the conquest of Sicily and the invasion of Italy, which surrendered on September 8. However, the German Army in Italy fought bloody rearguard actions and now occupied the Principality, the Nazi High Command using the Hôtel de Paris as its headquarters. There is a story (claimed to be true) that the hotel management, upon learning of the Germans’ approach, gathered all its vintage wines and sealed them inside walls and the Nazis never found out they were there.
Louis might have thought of himself as a military man, but he did nothing during either the Italian or the Nazi occupation that would reveal an astute military mind. Monaco’s ruling family saved its skin and its fortune by collaboration. Over three hundred Monégasque holding companies were created. They had to have the Prince de Monaco’s approval, and through them Goring, Himmler and many other top Nazis and French collaborationists laundered money.
The Germans decided to turn Monaco into a furlough base, a scheme that neither Louis nor the S.B.M. opposed. Money began to stream into the Casino and the S.B.M. as German soldiers squandered their paychecks, not knowing if they would live to receive many more. Antoinette took a more active role as the war dragged on. She formed the Committee for the Assistance to Prisoners of War (Allied and Axis) and dragged food and blankets from the Palace to give to the people gathered in shelters during air attacks. Monaco had several Allied air assaults, but there were no direct hits on major buildings. Rome fell to the Allies on June 4, 1944, and the last attack on the Principality was on August 2, 1944, when Allied planes bombed the harbor, destroying several German minesweepers. On August 25, Paris was liberated and the Germans left Monaco. For a week Louis and his subjects were in limbo, not sure if the Germans would return. Then, on September 3, a scaldingly hot day, an American jeep with a squawking horn and two GIs shouting unintelligibly entered Monte Carlo from the Menton road and screeched to a halt outside an open bar. One of the soldiers was American writer Irwin Shaw, who would always claim he had liberated Monte Carlo’s Tip Top Bar, just as the author he most admired, Ernest Hemingway, always claimed he liberated the bar in the Ritz Hotel in Paris at the end of World War I. In the short time that it took Shaw and his companion to be served their drinks, the street outside became crowded with Monégasques who had heard the Americans had finally arrived.
Rainier returned home a few days later. The Germans were gone from Monaco and France, but the war was not yet over. His sympathies since the fall of France had been anti-Vichy, and he was infuriated that Roblôt remained as Minister of State. Roblôt had not only shown hostile indifference to the Allies after the final withdrawal of the Germans, he had forbidden all anti-Nazi or pro-Allied public demonstrations. Rainier confronted his grandfather about Roblôt’s attitudes and begged him to dismiss the man. Louis refused. Monégasques who had accepted Roblôt’s position without protest during the years of occupation (although in all fairness, they had little choice) now wanted him to leave. A petition with over three hundred names was sent to Louis asking him to remove Roblôt from office. Louis held fast to his authority in keeping Roblôt on his staff. Louis’s popularity, never high, was at its lowest ebb.
Roblôt eventually left of his own accord in 1945, a little less than a year later. He returned to France, but was not tried as a collaborationist. There were no war trials in the Principality, a decision of Louis’s but one that met with popular approval from his subjects. Rainier was officially made direct heir to the throne on June 2, 1944, a few days after he had celebrated his twenty-first birthday. At that time Princesse Charlotte, in full agreement with her father, renounced her rights to the succession. He enlisted in the Free French Army as a foreign volunteer under General de Monsabert the following month and was made a second lieutenant, seeing action in the Alsatian campaign that winter during the Nazi counteroffensive. Cited for bravery under fire, he was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Bronze Star, and then, because he spoke English, he was sent to Strasbourg (which had been a stronghold for the Germans, and was the first major French city to have fallen to them), where he acted as a liaison on the general staff of the 36th Infantry Division of the Texas Rangers. He was transferred to Berlin in the Economic Section of the French Military Mission with the rank of colonel. The unconditional surrender of Germany was signed at Rheims on May 7, 1945, and was ratified at Berlin on May 8. Rainier was not decommissioned from the French Army until January 1947, when he returned home to Monaco.
The time had come for him to embark upon a career. He still had no definite aim. Cars interested him and he thought he might like to try his hand at racing. He was still very much in love with Gisèle and convinced her to join him on the Riviera.
He took a villa in Petite Afrique, a small, exclusive colony on a narrow strip of seafront extending from the port of Beaulieu-sur-Mer, about twenty miles up the coast of the French Riviera from Monaco. During the German occupation, refugees from Nazi persecution had hidden in the dozens of natural caves in the steep cliffside of the Corniche that rose sharply above Petite Afrique. There they waited until members of the Resistance felt it was safe to attempt a nighttime escape over the top of the precipitous Corniche, through a dangerous patch of enemy-infested terrain to Switzerland. This was a mode of escape that Raoul Gunsbourg, now back as director of the Monte Carlo Opéra, had taken. Rainier’s villa on the water was directly below these caves.
In 1948 Gisèle made two romantic comedies, Après l’amour and Mademoiselle s’amuse. The slightly risqué tone of the films and Gisèle’s humble background as the daughter of Nice flower vendors did not endear her to the women in Rainier’s family.
Rainier had developed into a complex young man, forged by the bitter battles of his childhood, a family bonded by ill feeling, the loneliness of the boarding schools he had attended and his sense of always being regarded as an outsider. The war and his own part in it had greatly affected him. He was an introspective man who had learned all the superficial social refinements, but had few close friends.
Despite the fact that Antoinette had a neighboring villa in Petite Afrique, Rainier remained distanced from his sister, who was now married to Aleco Noghes, a handsome, athletic man descended from the first Spanish commander of the Monaco Garrison (which made Antoinette the first Grimaldi to marry a Monégasque). Noghes, who had a reputation as a playboy, was a lawyer and former tennis champion, and he had been previously married. When Antoinette entered into an affair with him at the end of the war, his divorce was not yet final. This upset everyone in the family, including Rainier. The couple was married in Monaco in a civil ceremony in October 1946. Only three months earlier, on July 24, Antoinette had refused to attend the marriage of Louis to his buxom mistress, Ghislaine Dommanget, the first Grimaldi bride without a dowry. To her fury, her grandfather returned the slight.
Intense internecine rivalries enveloped the family. Neither Louis nor Rainier could abide Noghes and all family members other than her loving husband disliked Ghislaine and suspected her motives, certain that she would persuade Louis to change his will in her favor. To complicate matters further, Gisèle received the same exclusion from the family as Noghes had and was never included in their scheduled social events, which obliged Rainier to attend them without her.
Antoinette’s son, Baron Christian de Massey, born in 1949, would later write in his autobiography: “I entered this bizarre family . . . inheriting a legacy of father hating son, mother hating daughter, children hating parents, sisters hating brothers, a tradition in the blood of our family of constant conflict.”
For stability, Rainier turned to Gisèle. Although she tried desperately hard to help him find himself, taking an interest in animals (zoology was one of his preoccupations), the sports he enjoyed (boats, cars and spearfishing) and in his family problems, she refused to give up her career. She appeared in La Femme Nue (The Naked Woman),2 La Chocolatière, Véronique and Bel Amour over the next two years, choosing films that were made at the studio in nearby Nice and not in Paris. Rainier, never able to accept the easygoing nature of her theatrical friends, tried to persuade her to abandon her career.
Rainier was restless. He suffered from the same ailment that had afflicted both Edward VII and Edward VIII when they were Princes of Wales. To be heir to a throne often meant years of waiting before you could take over the job that you were born to fill. During that time there seemed to be no useful position within the monarchy that the ruling sovereign was willing to give his or her heir, and since they received an income from the civil list, the heirs were restricted from pursuing an occupation in the commercial workplace. As a result, there was little for them to do that was not of a purely social nature: appearing at charity galas, cutting ribbons as a new road or building was opened, or visiting hospitals and schools.
Rainier filled his days with challenging and often dangerous sports. He turned with the seasons from downhill skiing at Saint-Moritz to spearfishing in the shark-infested Red Sea (where several times he nearly drowned as he doggedly remained underwater to retrieve his arrow from the ocean bed after a missed kill) to automobile racing around the steep, curving roads of the Corniche. Gisèle was usually there to cheer him on, and since her great love remained the theater, they attended most of the productions at the Salle Garnier (one of the few public places they were seen together).
By now Louis was a sick man, which did not alter the difficult relationship between him and his grandson. Their conflicts centered on two issues: Rainier’s continuing affair with Gisèle, and the ban that remained in effect on de Polignac ever crossing the border into Monaco. De Polignac and Rainier had found each other again after the war, and theirs appears to have been the one loving father-son relationship in the Grimaldi family.
Antoinette did not help to ease Gisèle’s position. She spread a rumor that Gisèle could never have children and so the Grimaldi-Matignon line would end and Monaco become French. She also made much of Gisèle’s “lowly” background—which was ironic, as hers and Rainier’s was even less grand: their mother had been illegitimate, their grandmother Marie a Montmartre dancer, and their great-grandmother a laundress. Nonetheless, Antoinette’s rumors about Gisèle made their rounds of the various social circles in Monaco with much injury to Gisèle. To Rainier’s credit, he confronted his sister about her insidious gossip (although this did not stop Antoinette) and his love for Gisèle was open and supportive. He was never seen in public with another woman, nor she with another man.
Louis took fatally ill in April 1949. His reign was not one of any achievement and his attachment to the Vichy government during the war had lost him whatever small regard his subjects might have had for him because of his father. Now, too infirm to administer the Principality, he delegated power to Rainier. He died on May 9, 1949, three weeks before Rainier’s twenty-sixth birthday. Rainier was now Prince de Monaco with all the responsibility the title brought with it, including being the new head of a warring family.
