For her third husband, Princess Caroline of Monaco chose a man with lineage even more exalted than her own: Ernst August, Prince of Hanover, Great Britain, and Ireland, whose title, castle, and $150 million net worth had won him an easy berth in London society. But Ernst’s violent temper and public misbehavior—including a famed outdoor pee at Expo 2000—have led Buckingham Palace to declare him persona non grata. As aristocrats from Monaco to his native Germany worry that he'll spark an anti-royal backlash, JUDY BACHRACH wonders whether Ernst can come to terms with the downsides of princely privilege

THE IMPORTANCE OF PEEING, ERNST

Josef Brunlehner says he had never talked to Ernst August, Prince of Hanover, Great Britain, and Ireland, before he was beaten up by those royal fists. He knew him by sight—who didn’t? Ernst is, as a friend suggests, “one of the few European monarchs who have kept the lolly and the power and the land.”

The athletic 4 6-year-old prince with the famously bad temper owns a $3 million villa on Lamu, a relatively unspoiled island off the coast of Kenya. This is where Brunlehner owns a discotheque, and, as his lawyer puts it, he is “one of the biggest German investors in Kenya.”

The Prince of Hanover has more august connections. A direct descendant of both George III and the kaiser, he is a distant cousin of the Queen of England. These days, however, he is best known as the husband of the dashing Princess Caroline of Monaco, for whom he left his first wife, a blonde commoner with an excellent figure—and a wealthy Swiss father.

Ernst likes to holiday in this remote and enchanted East African spot with Princess Caroline and their various children. Brunlehner, 52, had seen him drinking at his bar, “but I avoided meeting him, because his behavior was known to me. He screams, he shouts.”

Like the prince, Brunlehner is not an inconspicuous figure locally.

“Everyone knows Big Joe,” says Ekkehart Reinelt, Brunlehner’s lawyer. “He’s the John Wayne of Kenya.” Indeed, Big Joe, as the Munich lawyer acknowledges, had acquired development rights to build villas close by Ernst’s own property: “When he builds these villas, the residents will have a wonderful site from which to view Caroline. And the prince will have to open some roads for their use, which he used to use only for himself.”

“I knew he was angry with me,” concedes Big Joe. This did not augur well for his safety.

The prince, as several interested parties around the world have reason to know, guards his privacy more vigorously than most. Two years ago, returning with Caroline and a bodyguard to his Hanover estate from a charity party—one of their first big public events as a couple—he encountered Karsten Thiirnau, a television cameraman, waiting patiently outside the prince’s property line:

“Good evening,” said the 28-year-old cameraman (the audio portion was captured for posterity). “I just want to take two, three pictures.” Speechless with fury, Ernst stormed out of his car and began hitting his greeter for seven minutes with his umbrella. According to Thiirnau, Princess Caroline looked on, wordless and motionless. “He broke my nose in two places, he hit me on my arms and legs—I said, ‘Please,’” Thiirnau recently recalled. “He called me iSchwein,~pig—many times.”

'"Grace was quite ambitious. She said, "Ernst would be good tor Earolme.

The prince tried in vain to summon a backup. “Hit him, bite him!” he ordered his chauffeur. After the event made headlines, a music-video producer in Hamburg brought out a rap song in its honor, including relevant parts of the soundtrack.

“T~ onetheless, Brunlehner in East Africa was quite unprepared for what happened this past January. Shortly before midnight he had an unexpected encounter with the head of the House of Hanover. “He ran on the beach with 12 to 15 I ¶ African men—suddenly they were holding me. At that moment, he knocked me down. Three times. Then he kneeled on me, and still he punched me. Then the group pulled him away. He punched them too.” The prince was yelling something odd, says Brunlehner, while he was attacking him: “Du Zuhalter!”—meaning “You pimp!” And also: “Deutsches Schwein, deutsches Schwein. ”

“I was vomiting blood,” recalls Brunlehner. “If they had not pulled him away from me I would be dead.” Caroline, he observed, even at that painful point, “saw what was happening. When I left ... she came running down to him.” The victim was swiftly flown off to a hospital in Mombasa, where, says Reinelt, he was diagnosed with “a big hematoma that is pressing on his lungs.” According to Reinelt, the Kenyan doctor who examined him said that some of the wounds must have been caused by a blunt object, perhaps a set of brass knuckles.

As for the prince, Caroline’s husband: “He was not put under arrest,” says the lawyer. First he reportedly flew off to Nairobi. Then “he took a plane to London the next evening. If he would have been arrested in Kenya, there would have been another punishment. Jail and strokes with a cane. Five to eight strokes with a cane.” He laughs shortly. “Schade, ja.” A pity.

In the aftermath of the attack, the prince seemed fairly lighthearted about it. “I had the great pleasure of giving the man a left and a right,” said Ernst to the press. The disco owner was a nuisance, after all, he explained: “Every night there was music until five in the morning. And every night between Christmas and New Year he trained a laser beam on my house.” (Later, Ernst would admit in full-page ads to a “minor confrontation,” but said that Brunlehner “was not injured as reported.”)

But why shouldn’t Ernst do as he wishes? After he had experienced his “great pleasure,” a German court in Hanover fined the Thrasher Prince, as he is now known across the Continent, about $500,000—an amount Ernst is actually appealing.

“No, he will not get jail. Ja, because in Germany for a thing like this, you don’t go to jail,” explains Reinelt.

Nor was this the end of Prince Ernst’s forays into the danger zone of recklessness. This past summer, in the midst of Expo 2000, Hanover’s longplanned world’s fair and its biggest attempt ever at attracting tourists and international renown (an attempt which, on first count anyway, fell grievously short of expectations), its leading citizen was snapped in an awkward posture, relieving himself on the orange fence of the beautiful, tile-studded Turkish pavilion. Ernst couldn’t have selected a worse site. Many of Germany’s two million Turks feel themselves to be a beleaguered minority. “What an affront,” declared Zeynel Yesilay, private secretary to Turkish prime minister Bulent Ecevit. “Every five-year-old knows you cannot do this,” said Yasar Bilgin, president of the Turkish Council in Germany. Ernst’s amazing display was captured for all time on-camera. This became evident when a photo of it was speedily published in the Bild Zeitung, a deeply impertinent populist newspaper with no love for the Hanovers, a circulation of 4.5 million, and a fondness for imaginative compound nouns executed in bold type: PIPI-PRUGEL-PRINZ (Peepee-Thrasher-Prince) and PINKELATTACKE, for example.

Ernst phoned Anne-Kathrin Berger, the tall, attractive head of the newspaper’s Hanover office—seven times. He had known her for 25 years; they had been distant friends. In a rage, the prince launched a vulgar critique of Berger’s figure and then offered some advice: “Keep your ass together. You’ll get fucked from the side_Listen, we’ll put it to the test tomorrow, then we’ll see what happens. You will get one in your cunt.”

“Do you talk to all people this way, Your Royal Highness?” asked the stunned editor.

“No. Only with assholes like journalists.”

Berger eventually managed to rally: “Aren’t you ashamed to use that kind of filthy language in front of your wife?”

“My wife,” said the prince, with evident satisfaction, “would use even filthier language.”

Thiirnau, the battered cameraman, tries to explain the prince to me in class-conscious terms. He notes, for instance, that his royal assailant paid a mere $52,500 for breaking his nose. “No, it wasn’t enough. But the highest people in society don’t live like other people. None of them lives in shame in Germany.”

But the lowing of the herd is really the least of Ernst’s concerns. The prince has become the laughingstock of Europe and an object of exasperation even among some of his own friends. “He isn’t even being considered for inclusion at Buckingham Palace garden parties, he is completely persona non grata," explains Harold Brooks-Baker, the publishing director of Burke’s Peerage. “They did feel and do feel that his relationship [with Caroline] would hurt Princess Caroline and the Grimaldi family.”

Equally sobering: he has imperiled the delightful existence of the German aristocracy. “For aristocracies to survive in popular culture you have to play up noblesse oblige—and play down oldfashioned autocracy and authoritarianism and erratic behavior,” says Robert Lacey, a biographer of Princess Grace.

Prince Ernst knows exactly who is to blame for all the pain in his life. “The media ... does not grant anyone a private life,” he once complained to a German newspaper. “[They are] stalking and spying on us, [and] must ultimately be held accountable for the abduction of children and the breaking up of marriages.”

To hear his good friends in England tell it, Ernst August Albert Paul Otto Rupprecht Oskar Berthold Friedrich-Ferdinand Christian-Ludwig, Prince of Hanover, Great Britain, and Ireland, could have easily figured out what was going to happen to him the moment he—a relatively obscure but tempestu-

ous high liver with three huge properties (the family Schloss in Marienburg, outside Hanover, plus an estate in Gut Calenberg and a hunting lodge in Gmunden, Austria), an extraordinary collection of vintage cars, and two teenage sons—decided to launch a very public affair in 1996 with the dark and lovely Caroline of Monaco. She was no stranger to media attention: the daughter of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier, she had grown up in Monaco in a pretty pink palace with rooms named after British and French royalty and filled with portraits of her ancestors, descendants of the 13th-century Genoese scoundrel Lanfranco Grimaldi—known as “the Spiteful.”

“Living life in a goldfish bowl is what the Grimaldis have always done,” explains Sir David Llewellyn, who knew Caroline (and Ernst too, but separately) during her earlier days. “He could not have found, outside the Princess of Wales, anybody who lives life more in a goldfish bowl if he tried.”

Once divorced (from the playboy Philippe Junot after 28 months of marriage), once widOWed (by the Italian businessman Stefano Casiraghi, who died in a powerboat accident a decade ago), Caroline was 39 and a mother of three at the time she surreptitiously took up with her future third husband. She is by all accounts highly intelligent, knowing, and very purposeful.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 161

1 find Caroline She is so direct, she certainly knows what she wants. Knows how to get it, too.”

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 114

“Other people like her, but I find Caroline frightening, really frightening,” declares one of her London social friends, who often sees her at parties. “She is so direct, she certainly knows what she wants. Knows how to get it, too.”

What she needed, evidently, after her second husband’s death was a good father for her young children: “And too bad if he drinks a bit,” as a friend of the princess’s puts it. Ernst knew Caroline from way back. She was very close to Chantal, the blonde heiress who was his wife. At Saint-Moritz, Caroline often socialized with the couple in a group that included the Venetian aristocrats Cristiana and Brando Brandolini d’Adda, and Milana and Heinrich von Furstenberg—“the rich von Furstenbergs,” as they are known. More to the point, she was aware that her late mother had seriously considered Ernst (as well as Prince Charles, for that matter) a suitable future son-in-law: “Grace had her eye on Ernst way back, when Caroline was about 18, making the rounds,” explains Gwen Robyns, an old friend and confidante of the late movie star’s. “Caroline thought Charles dreary and dull. But Grace was quite ambitious for her daughter. She said, ‘Ernst would be good for Caroline.’ But Caroline wouldn’t look at him, because he was not very good-looking.”

Ernst, in fact, was—to hear Llewellyn tell it—plump and unprepossessing, “quite sort of puddingy,” during his early days, with “a sweetness to him that doesn’t seem to be there anymore.” He wasn’t social, and he certainly didn’t make a lot of headlines. Many of his friends were minor rock musicians. But he had everything he needed to get ahead in London: a name, a title, a castle, and, it was estimated, a net worth of between $130 and $150 million.

He was the eldest son of yet another Ernst August. (The name endures generation after generation: “It saves on monogrammed linen, silver, and suitcases,” Caroline’s husband explained once in his more sparkling years.) Indeed, it is said that today’s Ernst would be King of England if Salic law, which limits the crown to male heirs, were operative in contemporary Britain. The Hanover line, although German in origin, produced many a British monarch: George III, who periodically went mad from the inherited disease porphyria, Queen Victoria, and George V, among them. It was only during World War I that the German branch of the family found itself suddenly at odds with its British royal cousins, who swiftly divested Ernst August’s great-grandfather of his British dukedom of Cumberland, his title—Prince of Great Britain and Ireland— and his Garter.

All things considered, this was probably just as well. “I had a stepfather who was a German prince, and they wouldn’t even touch that family, speak to that family,” says Harold Brooks-Baker. Indeed, Ernst’s grandfather, as the prince discovered recently via the German press, to his displeasure and disbelief, exhorted his countrymen to support Hitler, “whom God and our beloved Fatherland will protect.” He also profited from the forced sale of a Jewishowned bank in Munich, in which he became a partner after its original owner was sent to Dachau, and from the Nazi expropriation of a Viennese construction company-over 40 percent of the shares owned by Jews passed to the Hanovers.

His son, the father of the current Ernst August, was a former SS officer ultimately jailed by Hitler. His first wife, Ortrud, brought up six children, three boys and three girls, in a fashion of which some of their friends heartily disapproved: “They were like animals, they just did what they wanted,” Juliana von Uslar-Gleichen, who knew the family, says of the children, young Ernst included. Her husband, Hans, says: “They were brought up like untrained dogs. The father was very strict, and the mother didn’t bother about too much.” Ortrud had her own interests: it was she who restored Schloss Marienburg, a 19th-century jumble of Grimm-fairy-tale turrets, dummy battlements, suits of armor, and portraits of British and Hanoverian royalty.

The family lived mostly in the nearby and far more habitable Gut Calenberg estate. There the historian John Rohl, who stayed overnight in a bedroom that had last bepn slept in by King Constantine of Greece, dined 15 years ago: “What I remember most is there was a huge boar, three times the size of a normal pig—a massive, great boar he’d obviously just shot, hanging by its feet. And blood was dripping into a metal bucket. This was in the house.”

There was at least one other distinguished scholar eager to meet the father of the current Prince Ernst—the British-German psychiatrist Ida Macalpine, who was researching the terrible genetic illness porphyria. The disease, according to Rohl, has ravaged certain branches of the British royal family, as well as their relatives in other countries. It can produce in up to 10 percent of those affected not only madness but also temporary lameness, violent aggression, red blotches on the skin, and, oddly, purplish urine (which is why Rohl’s 1998 book on the subject is called Purple Secret). In order to test for the disease among George Ill’s descendants, Macalpine asked for a urine and feces sample from the current prince’s father.

“Ernst August did do so. He gave Ida Macalpine a urine sample and a feces sample,” says Rohl. This sample, which the psychiatrist assumed to be genuine, proved mildly positive for porphyria. “But years later he said to me, ‘It actually wasn’t mine.’ He said, ‘It was my first wife’s.’” To this day, Rohl doesn’t know what the old prince was up to. “It might have been his.”

But one thing Rohl does know: if a single parent is afflicted with the mutated gene, some of whose victims are asymptomatic, the offspring stand a 50 percent chance of acquiring it. “Once it gets into the royal family, given that they interbreed,” he says, “you’d expect a huge number of royals to be affected with it. They never outbreed, so to speak. They always stay within the same gene pool.”

The historian is quick to say he has no reason to believe that the current Prince Ernst has the disease. (Indeed, Ernst’s chainsmoking London family physician told me he didn’t, “because I would have known that.”) But if by chance he carries the mutated gene, says Rohl, it could well have “come down the main line from George III directly to him. But even if he missed it that way, we know the kaiser’s mother, Vicky, had the disorder. We know that the kaiser’s sister had the same mutation, because we proved that with DNA. And, incidentally, her daughter [Feodora] too!” Feodora was in and out of sanatoria until she committed suicide in 1945.

One of the indications of the disease, manifested by George III himself and reported by his doctors at the time, is foul language. “He attacked almost everybody verbally,” says Rohl. And not only verbally. The British monarch was famous for “attacking women, jumping on them. And addressing trees.” One of his sons, the future George IV, who apparently also had the disease, was a drug-addicted, alcoholic, womanizing glutton who talked about grabbing power from his father.

Symptoms vary with the sufferer. But one thing is certain, says Rohl: alcohol, barbiturates, and smoking intensify the illness.

Young Ernst August, living in swinging London in his early 20s, was intensely proud of his royal heritage—so much so that he had absolutely no interest in meeting lesser German aristocrats. Indeed, he had to be pushed initially into an encounter with Leopold “Bolla” Bismarck, a London resident who is the great-grandson of the brilliant unifier of Germany. “[Ernst] said basically the Bismarcks were arrivistes, and he had a much older title,” explains Sir David Llewellyn.

As a teenager Ernst went to the littleknown Box Hill School in Surrey; within a week he had reportedly received a six-stroke caning after going AWOL. Five months later, the 15-year-old was removed from Box Hill— “by mutual agreement between me and his father,” as Roy McComish, the headmaster of the period, delicately put it, citing the young man’s long hair and smoking habits as divisional issues.

The young prince enrolled at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester, a British haven for, among others, heirs to large estates. “He took our one-year farming course, from October ’71 to July ’72,” explains a spokeswoman for the college. “And that should normally have been the end of it, but I’m afraid he failed.”

More to his taste than agrarian pursuits was bachelor life in London in the mid70s. Living in a small house among the mews of the higgledy-piggledy streets near the Old Brompton Road cemetery, he dabbled in film, having unearthed some letters that yet another ancestor—Princess Sophia, Electress of Hanover (and mother of George I)—had written to a sister-in-law of Louis XIV’s. Ernst decided this had the makings of a great movie.

“He was quite rock ’n’ roll-y,” says Sir David.

By Ernst’s side during this period was Clare Faller, very pretty, with dark slanted brows swooping over almond-shaped eyes, but devoid of the sort of lineage that suited Ernst’s family—she was the daughter of a Lloyd’s underwriter. By 1978 the long affair was, as the heartsick girlfriend realized, completely over. His parents had disapproved of the match.

Within a year a replacement—a long-haired blonde from Switzerland, new to Londonhad emerged. Her name was Chantal Hochuli. She was the opposite of Ernst in almost every way—unworldly, unassuming, and, according to one of her early lovers, “very, very sweet”—which is the English way of saying, “She was not sort of the Claudia Schiffer type ... wasn’t standard glam at all.” On the other hand, as one suitor discovered when he took her around town, she had, apart from her excellent figure, a decided appeal—namely, a rich architect father. Friends would nudge him, saying, “You know what that is, don’t you? That’s a walking cash register.”

Certainly, Ernst’s social group decided, she was very agreeable, and evidently tolerant of her new boyfriend’s worrisome behavior. Ernst’s parties were famously obstreperous, and the host inordinately proud of them: “He told me about a party he threw at his Schloss in Germany where everyone was dressed in nappies, drank cocktails from bottles with teats, and was served by personal liveried footmen,” a friend told Tatler. One Christmas, Ernst sent out cards showing him and his film partner, David Vaughan, beside a nude model.

In short order, according to a newspaper report of the time, Prince Ernst would find himself involved in a beach-bar brawl in Thailand after being overcharged for a few drinks. “A few fisticuffs, that’s all” was how one witness described it. By his side on this exotic and memorable jaunt was sweet Chantal. “A match made in heaven,” a friend decided. “Because he was quite wild.”

In August 1981, the couple rode up in a horse-drawn carriage to the turreted castle of Marienburg, where they were married in front of hundreds of guests, flown in from all over the world by Ernst. There were three parties during the wedding weekend, two hotels reserved just for Ernst’s guests. One of these hotels was given over entirely to the British contingent. Anthony Greenburgh, a Belgravia doctor, observed firsthand the behavior of his compatriots that weekend. “When the Brits go away, they do go rather crazy,” he explains. Rowdy? “Very,” he agrees. “And the owner of one of the hotels phoned up Ernst and said, ‘I’m very worried about all your British friends.’

“Ernst said, ‘Did you triple your insurance? ... Then don’t worry me!”’

f I "ihe Hanovers became famous for giving A huge surprise parties for assorted friends, planned down to the smallest detail by Ernst, who was a stickler for lavish perfection: bowls filled with caviar, large marquees, magnums of champagne.

“The kindest, gentlest man there is,” insists Dr. Greenburgh, who was the beneficiary of one of these festivities, complete with a West Indian band and 150 guests, on the occasion of his 60th birthday. A few years later Greenburgh would receive, just on some whim of the prince’s, a white-gold, diamante replica of a stethoscope bisected by a diamond, and fashioned by the innovative society jeweler Theo Fennell. (He had become famous for providing Sarah Ferguson with a few of her trinkets—a gold cover for her Marmite jar, for example.)

Ernst was a smoker, once attempting, without success, according to a friend, to unseat Disney chairman Michael Eisner’s children from the first-class smoking section of a flight to New York. (“Your children don’t even smoke!” Ernst protested indignantly.) And Ernst drank, everyone knew that. But his own doctor, now 68, never found this particularly alarming: “It depends on what one calls excess, you see,” Dr. Greenburgh says, sipping a lunchtime vodka between puffs of his cigarette. “My definition of an alcoholic is someone who drinks more than his doctor.” Besides, “the Germans—they’re all fairly heavy drinkers.”

The German aristocracy in London certainly tended to be exuberant, as Nicholas Monson, a baron’s son, discovered at the wedding of his pretty cousin Debonair to Leopold Bismarck in 1987. Scarcely had the festivities begun than poor Monson found himself assailed: “You are a British homosexual cowardly pig”—this remark sprang from a particularly wealthy heir to a German fortune, who had grabbed him from behind. A scuffle ensued, after which Monson was congratulated by a complete stranger, another wedding guest, also German.

“I really respect you,” said the guest. “You have shown yourself to be a real man. u must visit me sometime at one of my Schlosses.”

“How many do you have?” asked Monson.

“Oh, about 12 or 13,” said the hospitable guest, who, it turned out, was Prince Ernst. At a stretch he had six great houses, but two of these (along with works of art, 10,000 hectares of land, woods, agricultural fields, and a Cistercian monastery) were in SaxonyAnhalt, then part of East Germany and therefore unavailable to the prince. The properties, worth about $46.4 million, had been expropriated by the Communists after World War II.

“I personally regard this as robbery,” said Ernst.

Despite criticism (he was rich enough already, many Germans thought), the prince was hungry for his lost possessions. His grandfather—the Hitler supporter—was, Ernst insisted to the courts, actually a British subject when his properties were expropriated, and his heir was therefore entitled, under Allied law, to their return. Ernst was adamant about the expropriated art, especially: “The law says the artworks are mine,” he insisted, although the law had, in fact, said no such thing. “I don’t see why people are getting so annoyed about them. If they were nice about them I might donate them; if they become stroppy, I won’t.”

ile Ernst was a young husband, his existence seemed quite blameless for a time. Although they had two sons of their own, the Hanovers attempted, without success, to adopt a third— Ernst’s infant nephew, left orphaned in 1988 after the baby’s mother overdosed on cocaine and his drug-addicted father, Ludwig (Ernst’s younger brother), shot himself in despair.

Gone, apparently, were Ernst’s cinematic aspirations. He busied himself with his hobby, collecting and repairing old luggage. He went shooting at Ripley, the Surrey estate of Lord Forte, the hotel magnate. He became a partner in the Watch Gallery, a tiny Fulham shop fitted out in black lacquer and granite, which sells intricately worked timepieces.

By February 1994, however, this hardwon stability seemed to crumble. Ernst was fined £500 for crashing his Mercedes into barriers near Buckingham Palace. He was banned from driving for a year.

There were other changes, equally troubling. One morning, the prince woke up with severe chest pains—no one could quite figure out why, even after an angiogram. His party tricks became more vivid and memorable: “Three or four years ago, it was at a dinner party one night, we were all discussing men’s anatomies, well, their legs and so on,” recalls one guest at the London event. “And Ernst just dropped his trousers.”

“Chantal didn’t take to his excesses too well,” this friend continues, “but I think she loved him. She was exceedingly loyal.”

That loyalty, say acquaintances, was sorely tried. Ernst was very fond of women. His appearance altered markedly. “He suddenly slimmed down and became a lot betterlooking, and then he started getting a roving eye,” explains Sir David Llewellyn.

On the other hand, Ernst genuinely liked Chantal, who was very popular within London social circles, and he seemed to have no intention of separating. In 1994, the couple bought the enormous 11-bedroom Hurlingham Lodge, which had been the home of the Earl of March. Ernst deftly set about giving it princely accoutrements: a swimming pool, a servants’ snack bar, and an underground garage for Ernst’s collection of vintage and new cars, which complemented a half-acre garden, hard by some former polo grounds in Fulham.

And just five years ago Ernst threw his wife another of his famous birthday surprises—she emerged from her room with unwashed hair in a simple dress, expecting to go to a restaurant. Arrayed before the astonished Chantal were 160 of their dearest friends and relations: among them the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, King Constantine II of Greece, and ... the breathtaking Princess Caroline of Monaco.

“At least Ernst is one of us,” Prince Rainier was said to have remarked upon learning, soon after Chantal’s birthday party, of Caroline’s latest selection. But very likely he had his reservations. “Rainier doesn’t like Germans,” says Patrick Middleton, the deputy editor of The Riviera Reporter. During World War II, he explains, when Rainier’s grandfather Louis II turned Monaco into “the financial-management center of the SS,” the tiny principality was crawling with Nazis. Rainier, he says, “was disgusted by this attitude.” In 1944, barely 21, he joined the French Army.

For all Caroline’s considerable intelligence and drive, her taste in men has often been problematic. Grace herself was in despair over her daughter’s choice of a first husband, the perpetually tanned and tighttrousered boulevardier Philippe Junot.

“But Caroline was willful, terribly willful—it was a great big sex thing for her,” explains Gwen Robyns, who was staying near Roc Agel, the family’s country home, when Caroline got engaged “to that ghastly man, Junot.” All about the place were enormous floral tributes in honor of the couple, sent by well-wishers: “And Caroline put them all on the black and white tiles of the floor, and she lay down on them and Junot lay down on those flowers,” says Robyns. “Grace shuddered.”

The marriage ended after 28 months.

Stefano Casiraghi met with greater approval—but not by much, according to John Glatt, who points out in his 1998 book, The Royal House of Monaco, that in Casiraghi’s younger years his Italian friends gave him the nickname “Fancazzista,” meaning “He doesn’t do a fucking thing.”

In other areas, however, Casiraghi was busy. Like Junot, he enjoyed great success with women. In the fall of 1983—a year after her mother’s terrible death in a car crash—Caroline realized she was pregnant, and the couple told Rainier they wanted to get married.

“By March, ten weeks after the wedding, there were reports that the fun-loving Italian was beginning to stray in the manner of Philippe Junot,” writes Glatt.

But despite all sorts of news stories and conjecture (there were troubling questions raised, after his marriage, about the source of Casiraghi’s newly acquired millions; some of his closest business associates in a suddenly profitable construction business were arrested), the marriage lasted nearly seven years. After her mother’s death, Caroline stepped into Grace’s shoes, serving essentially as First Lady of Monaco.

Her ambitions didn’t stop there. When the press speculated darkly on Monaco’s future, noting that her brother, Prince Albert, remained persistently single, Caroline had her private secretary send a note to The Riviera Reporter. It was remarkable for its selfassurance, the sly staking of territory in defiance of conventional wisdom: “The [princely] line can be continued through the female descendants,” meaning Caroline had determined that she could make up for any possible deficiencies of her brother. And she probably could.

Her second husband was not averse to such a scenario. “If Prince Albert failed to succeed Prince Rainier for some reason, then my wife would rule the principality and I would become Prince Stefano of Monaco,” an unabashed Casiraghi informed the press in 1989. A year later he was dead, after a powerboat accident. Six years thereafter Caroline took up with Ernst of Hanover.

Prince Ernst, whose press had been mainly local, deferential, curious only about the christenings of his sons and the pedigreed guests at his parties, couldn’t believe what was happening as his affair became bolder and more public. In January 1996 the couple were spied in Bangkok, in a $5,000-a-night penthouse suite at the Oriental Hotel. They then moved on to Rangoon, where they were spotted by the press, which was then informed by the Grimaldi palace that it was a “cultural trip, but there is nothing between the Princess Caroline and the Prince of Hanover.”

A few months later, they were seen dining together in London at L’Escargot Dore, before heading for a deluxe local hotel, and then they were snapped holding hands in Paris. In the fall, Ernst was once again by her side—after Caroline became newly but temporarily bald (from a scalp disease, claimed her friends; from shaving her head, her odd way of provoking Ernst into leaving his wife, claimed the gossip columnists).

“I always thought you liked big busty blondes with long hair,” Chantal was quoted in London newspapers, “not a woman who’s as bald as an ironing board.”

It was Chantal who absorbed the results of this media frenzy. Flicking through Paris Match, she would chance on a charming close-up of her old friend Caroline and her husband. “A woman can take only so much humiliation,” said her friend Taki Theodoracopulos, the gossip columnist. In September 1997, citing her husband’s adultery, she obtained a divorce with a settlement of less than $10 million, a $6 million house in Kensington (where Dustin Hoffman was a neighbor), a temporary boyfriend, joint custody of her sons, and a certain amount of sympathy: “What he did to Chantal was terrible, just terrible,” reports an old friend. “Everyone liked her.”

But she had few weapons at her disposal.

“Caroline grew up fully briefed on the whole business of P.R., manipulating the press,” explains Robert Lacey. Her mother, the former Hollywood star, went so far as to acquire her own public-relations man once she became Princess of Monaco. Twice a year, Lacey adds, a Look-magazine photographer would come, and “Caroline and the other kids would have to go on parade.” The captions below these pictures were always flattering.

But the rabble press was no longer as tame as it had been in Grace’s day. “It makes me crazy,” the prince complained bitterly to an old acquaintance, Hans von Uslar-Gleichen, once the onslaught began.

With no fanfare at all, Caroline married Ernst on her 42nd birthday—January 23, 1999—thereby acquiring a string of titles far more regal than the ones she had previously held. Because of his kinship with Queen Elizabeth, Ernst had to receive permission from the British monarch to marry her, but that pretty well summed up any royal participation in the union. There were about a dozen guests in attendance at the private ceremony. The bride’s younger sister, Stephanie, remained at home in the Alps.

Not for the first time, Caroline was pregnant at her wedding.

For some reason, Ernst couldn’t understand that once he had decided to wed the world’s most famous princess he might attract even more coverage: “It’s like people who buy houses next door to airports,” says Llewellyn. “And then as soon as they move in they write letters all the time complaining about the noise of aircraft overhead. Very odd.”

Odder still were Ernst’s outbursts, which increased in vehemence and number as time went on. Last year, when he was stopped in Austria by Christian Hartwagner, the prince berated the uniformed policeman as a “pig” and a “cow,” according to the press. On board a British Airways flight last March, with his new wife and baby daughter beside him, Ernst was said to have leapt from his first-class seat, shouting and swearing because the captain’s voice had interrupted the showing of a movie.

But about his increasingly loutish behavior, none of his friends says anything—to Ernst. His tempests, his private habits: these go unremarked, says Sir David. “Other friends of my age have become sycophantic towards Ernst—he’s got lots of money.”

On the other hand, among themselves these friends are more forthcoming, suggesting that excessive indulgence may be responsible for his irrational behavior.

Just last June, after urinating in public, Ernst suffered another strange attack of chest pains. He checked into a 60-room private clinic on the river Mosel which specializes in detoxification and stress relief. Photographed by his side was Caroline, weary, drawn, and pale, in a white terry-cloth robe.

“We’re going to calm down, be a little less frenetic,” the prince assured his doctor. The next day the press had the story, and worse: a series of photographs shot through telephoto lenses, showing the prince alternately smoking and picking his nose. The prince fled.

There was yet more bad news awaiting him in August. The Federal Administrative Court in Berlin decided Ernst was not entitled to the vast properties that had been confiscated from his grandfather, despite his contention that his ancestor was actually British. The court pointed out that the old Ernst August himself had claimed German citizenship on a 1946 questionnaire for the Allied denazification program—and, moreover, he had voted for a local party that advocated restoring him to his throne.

“Has Caroline perhaps once again married the wrong man?” asked a German newspaper. It is by no means alone in wondering.

“She doesn’t seem happy—I swear she doesn’t,” says a social friend. “Glum. Glum.”