first part of the article.....
Dispatch #26: A Profile of Monaco
By Alex Shoumatoff
I wrote this back in l997, when the Grimaldis were celebrating their 700th anniversary on the Rock. It is being published here, now, for the first time. Prince Ranier's death a few weeks ago reminded me of its existence. He was a lovely man, and we really hit it off. His eccentric family-- his sister with her stray cats, the Victorian interest in natural history, the grandfather the oceanographer-- reminded me of my own, and indeed we discovered that we were distantly related, through the Beauharnais. Plus Igor Markevitch, a closer cousin, had been the conductor of the Monaco Philharmonic for many years, so Ranier recognized that I was not another trash-seeking paraparazzo and introduced me to some of his oldest and closest friends. This is another unexpected turn on the dance floor of loss-- the death of a prince, the resurrection of a lost piece from a different kind of oblivion, the tenacious struggle for survival of a family and of the culture it invented, "a sunny place for shady people," in Maugham's famous description.
-AS
“Monaco c’est le top,” gushed the gorgeous, young masseuse in fetching Franglais. She worked at The Thermes Marins de Monte Carlo, a futuristic spa adjacent to the Hotel de Paris. Her job was to administer “thalassotherapy,” slathering warm, brown, ground seaweed all over her wealthy clients’ bodies and wrapping them in plastic sheets. It was not hard to imagine James Bond on her table. The entire 482-acre principality of Monaco resembles a set for a James Bond movie, which it has been, in fact, three times--movie titles tk. The Hotel de Paris, where I was staying, is the grande dame of Old World luxury hotels. Built in 1864, it is a white Belle Epoch confection of cupolas, porthole windows and caryatids resembling ship figureheads. There are 250,000 bottles, on a kilometer of racks, in the wine cellar. In the restaurant you can order up a bottle of Petrus Pomerol l945 for a mere 49,000 francs ($10,000). Every time I went up the grand staircase to the hotel’s front door I imagined myself colliding with Winston Churchill or Jacques Offenbach, Jules Verne or Marlene Dietrich, or perhaps Edward, Prince of Wales, incognito with his latest paramour. While I was staying there, one of King Fayed’s sons had taken an entire floor for the month, and many of the 41 deluxe suites were rented to the new Russian rich (we will avoid the loaded term Mafia).
My fifth-floor balcony looked down on the harbor bristling with yachts, including the 335-foot Atlantis II, which had once belonged to Stavros Niarchos, the Greek shipping magnate. Prince Rainier, Monaco’s head of state, told me it was currently being chartered out by Niarchos’s three sons and daughter. The Van Gogh, Renoir, and other Impressionist paintings that had made the boat a floating museum were stashed in a bank vault, he had heard, and replaced with copies. Niarchos had been a frequent visitor to this elegant little country on the Cote d’azur, but unlike his rival, Aristotle Onassis, he never invested in it.
*****
Early in the morning, from my balcony, I watched the sun rise out of the sea, bathing the harbor and small thicket of high-rises behind it in a rose wash that slowly ascended up the corniche--the limestone crags that loom two thousand feet above. Monaco consists almost entirely of this small, perfectly scalloped, intensely built-up bay, enclosed by two points: the Rock, where the prince’s palace is, and Monte Carlo, with the casino and the Hotel de Paris. On the other side of the Rock is Fontvielle, the new sixty-three-acre residential and light-industrial district that Rainier built out into the sea in the early eighties, increasing the principality’s size by 14%; on the other side of Monte Carlo are the artificial beaches whose gravel he trucked in date tk. The beautiful pastel villas and gardens with needle cypresses that one sees on vintage travel posters have largely disappeared. In their place tower glass-and-steel apartment canisters containing the pieds de terre of “people who have made a pisspot of money elsewhere,” as one woman characterized the more than 20,000 foreigners who have established residence here. The draw: no income, property, or inheritance taxes since 1869.
Among “Rainier’s guests” have been thirty-five tennis stars, including Boris Becker, Bjorn Borg, and Vitas Gerulaitis (who moved out in the late ‘80s after the acrimonious end of his affair with Ranier’s eldest daughter, Princess Caroline). To obtain citizenship as a foreigner you have to open a $100,000 bank account and pass muster with the selective Rainier. The Shah of Iran was not welcomed after he lost his throne, even though, during his glory days, he had helped add luster to Rainier’s royal reputation by including him in his circle. But Placido Domingo is here, as are Ringo Starr, Julian Lennon, Claudia Schiffer, Karen Mulder, Karl Lagerfeld, and Helmut Newton. The Duke and Dutchess of Bedford come for two months of the year, go to the galas, spend a lot of money, and are well-liked.
The casino and what Prince Rainier described to me as “a certain confidentiality” practiced by Monagasque banks have attracted some unsavory types over the years. Arms-dealers, money-launderers for the Colombian cartels and the Italian Mafia (the businessman Enrico Baggiotti, who is wanted by the Italian government for money laundering, is still at liberty here) have slipped through the screening process, lending credence to Somerset Maugham’s famous description of Monaco as “a sunny place for shady people.” Maugham himself lived for many years in a villa on nearby Cap Ferat. The principality has also been a haven for artists: Ravel, Picasso, Cocteau, Balanchine, Bakst, and Anthony Burgess all produced important work here. Colette was a longtime resident of “this little country whose borders are flowers.”
Some years back Prince Rainier explained that his goal, when he inherited the throne 48 years ago, was to transform a sleepy colony of overwintering British and White Russian emigres into “a reduced model of perfection.” To a remarkable degree he has succeeded. Monaco’s economy, measured in terms of annual turnover, rather than g.n.p., is currently about five billion dollars and though it is impossible to verify (no one has to declare his earnings), the per capita income may well be the world’s highest. The streets of Monaco are purged of all malodorous funkiness. Policemen, in uniforms designed by Karl Lagerfeld, and closed-circuit cameras are ubiquitous. There is one carabinier for every 67 residents. If you are going to be run over here, it is probably going to be by a Mercedes.....
Stefano was more of a lapdog than anything, and Caroline... I find her to be a bit, no, very arrogant. Sorry to all of those who disagree, and who think I'm being "mean." But I don't think I'm being as mean as Caroline has been with Princess Stéphanie and HRH Prince Albert and their "illegitimate" children. 
Her neck must be so cramped from always looking down on people. 
