Love and Marriage in Monaco

Rainier loses a daughter but gains a son who "works with banks "

MONACO is FOR LOVERS say the T shirts hawked on the boulevards of Monte Carlo. But this week the tiny principality on France's Mediterranean coast was strictly for the paparazzi. While Princess Caroline, 21, prepared to wed Philippe Junot, 38, in the chapel of the Grimaldi family palace, reporters from all over the world were feverishly plotting their assault on a ceremony that the parents of the bride had vowed to keep private. The National Enquirer, the Florida-based tabloid, dispatched ten reporters and photographers to scour the Riviera in quest of informants on the courtship. There was talk that helicopters would be hired to hover above the walled-in palace garden. A Paris paper engaged a motorboat to give chase should the newlyweds depart by sea for their honeymoon.

Even if the press failed to penetrate the security surrounding the most controversial affaire de coeur in Monaco since Grace Kelly forsook Hollywood to marry Prince Rainier 26 years ago, there were other subjects to pursue. The guest list, first intended to include family friends only, read like a compendium of the Almanack de Gotha and Variety. Among those invited: two ex-Kings (Umberto II of Italy and Michael of Rumania), the Aga Khan, Grand Duke Vladimir of Russia and Frank Sinatra, David Niven and Cary Grant. (Britain's Prince Charles, otherwise engaged, sent regrets.)

Remembering those who happen to be untitled or obscure, Prince Rainier invited Monaco's 4,000 citizens over the age of 21 to a champagne reception--a magnanimous gesture for a father who continued to hope that his daughter would change her mind.

Rainier himself broke off a six-year liaison with a French actress named Gisele Pascal to marry Grace--a wedding boycotted by European royalty, who disapproved of the bricklayer's daughter from Philadelphia. And Caroline's grandmother Princess Charlotte--known long ago as the "Madcap Princess of Monaco"--made headlines when she ran off with an Italian physician.

Not long after Caroline was born, Grace expressed the hope that her second child would be a son, so that her daughter would be spared the public life demanded of an heiress to a throne and "grow up to be anything she likes--even an actress." That wish came true when Albert was born a few months later, but Caroline grew up to be rather too independent--at least for her father's taste. At the Catholic school she attended she was considered "bright, outgoing, terribly inquisitive." Later, a former secretary to Princess Grace remembered a somewhat older Caroline at school in England, who was "very, very coolly precocious."

By the time she went off to Paris at 17 to study at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques, Caroline's rebellion was in full swing. Recalls a friend: "She smoked in public, drank more than was good for her and always seemed to have a pop star handy when the photographers arrived." Her worried parents, ambitious to uphold a dynastic tradition that dates back seven centuries, scanned Europe for suitably aristocratic suitors. Prince Charles was rumored to be a favorite, and Prince Henri of Luxembourg would have made an ideal son-in-law. Neither seemed interested, and in any case, Caroline was more intrigued with a Parisian boulevardier 17 years her senior.

Philippe Junot, who "works with banks," as Princess Grace puts it, is the son of a wealthy deputy mayor of Paris and onetime chairman of the French division of Westinghouse. Junot junior's various entrepreneurial activities included a stint in California with a fast-food drive-in establishment called Jack in the Box and vague doings as a financial adviser to clients in Paris and Montreal. He has a fondness for fast cars and racehorses, soccer and tennis, and--until he met Caroline --women. The list of his girlfriends, claims Vogue Journalist Gerald Asaria. "would fill several volumes" in the libraries of society magazines.

Once he met Caroline, at a party in 1975, Junot became a tenacious suitor. When Caroline was whisked off to the U.S. two summers ago, Junot followed. Finally, during a visit to the remote Galapagos Islands, Rainier grudgingly agreed to the marriage. But it was not until after London's Daily Express published a shot of a topless Caroline with Junot on a yacht that the palace issued a terse engagement announcement.

Caroline and Philippe eventually won over the bride's parents. Whether they would vanquish the press was another matter. Caroline's 42-ft. catamaran, a wedding gift from her father, was ostentatiously brought to the harbor last week, and Rainier's motor yacht was given a fresh coat of paint. Perhaps these were diversionary tactics. Friends hinted that the couple might return to the Galapagos. If so, the archipelago that inspired Darwin will no doubt be overrun by one of the most curious creatures of all: genus scriptorum.

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