Monaco Blues

At the Hôtel de Paris, Monte Carlo

I need some redeeming here. This story is too down, too sorry and shameful. And the main character is always alone, I notice, always by himself. Where is everybody? God knows there were plenty of people around. I had good, close friends, lovers, confidants. But as the plague went on I fell aside, shutting down almost without noticing, unable to communicate through the swell of fear that came over me each day and the darkening paths I took to assuage it.

I lost my first sobriety – eleven years without a drink – in 1993, after I had my appendix out in New York and gladly accepted painkillers for an incision that didn’t hurt. I stayed at St. Luke’s for at least three days, a luxury unimaginable now for an operation so ordinary, and was given Demerol every night. The nurses had a list of patients who were eligible for opiate relief and on the last night of my stay I asked if I was still on it. “Yes,” came the answer and out I went. No pain, pure bliss. Then, when I left the hospital, I went looking for more. I remember not caring what kind of drugs I would find on the street: uppers, downers, it didn’t matter. At an East Side bathhouse – they continued to operate throughout the AIDS pandemic and were filled to the rafters whenever I went – I took cocaine and set off on the road to total breakdown, the road, thankfully, that brought me to my knees.

More shame: to be so frightened of dying when so many around me already were. So many were going through it while I stood wobbling on the edge of the crater, neither in nor out. My best friend from childhood, now stricken with AIDS dementia, called me often, asking where he had put his shoes, his keys, his piano, often just leaving incoherent messages on my answering machine. Sometimes he forgot to hang up the phone and I would come home to hour-long recordings, hearing him talk to himself as he puttered around his apartment; his shoes might be in the refrigerator. I’ve said many times that the reason I didn’t succumb is because I couldn’t. I was unqualified for it, unequipped. There had been a mistake. I refused.

How insulting must that sound to anyone who lost friends and family in the AIDS mortality. And yet somehow I still believe it, deep down. I survived by refusing to go. I took no part at first in the protests and activism, never joined ACT-UP, never bothered with the show-off queens screaming about “murder” at the hands of the medical establishment. Medical science was moving as fast as it could and I knew that. My doctors were exemplary. Only after my crash in 1994, when I had nearly perished from pneumonia, did I step up to the plate, as it were, joining the fight for medicines and justice, speaking at rallies and in newspapers and confronting also, by opening up, an interior rage that left me as rude and obnoxious as any Larry Kramer or bucket of blood tossed on a congressman’s desk.

But that’s how it was with me – I lived outside the frame. To say I’m not a joiner is putting it cutely. I’d had the same problem always with what was then simply called the gay community. I blanked on its most familiar presentations: all that dancing, the disco, the drag shows, the constant changing of clothes and long sessions at the mirror, the whole gaudy business of preening and fluffing and hissing and jerking around – God how I loathed it! Intermittently I did try to fit in, to embrace the trivialities, which led finally to one of my unhappier published lines: “I’m only in it for the sex.” I was too gay for the straight ones, I said, too straight for the gay ones. At the advent of the trans craze a pack of lesbians labeled me a “bad queer” because I thought the ideology, never mind the science, was mostly horseshit, deconstructionist balderdash, but by then my reputation didn’t matter. I was aging and out of the scene.

And then, of course, the quiet descended, when effective treatments came along for HIV and people stopped dropping dead in their tracks; when the burden of the pandemic shifted away from homosexual men and fell on the shoulders of the impoverished, mainly needle addicts and women of color. Then we were left to ponder our experience, to decide what it had meant, to get on with our lives as best we could. This sudden lack of urgency, the disappearance of dread, left an awful gap in many lives. I was working on Isadora, my last book, and grew attached to the medical world, which had saved me from the fate I wouldn’t accept. It would turn later into a surprise career as a simulated patient, a medical actor and instructor of students, as a way to return whatever I could – can – of dedication and compassion, of caring for the sick, surely the most fulfilling role I have played in my life.

And isn’t that what readers want, a raw retelling of desperate days that leads to some seeing of the light and a happy interpretation of past mistakes? That would take a while longer, though, if I’m honest. It would take a good while still.

*

In 1990 I became a “Monaco expert,” when I suggested to Vanity Fair that a portrait of Prince Albert, then the heir apparent, might interest its unslakable readership. In Hollywood, I had spent time with Bill Allyn, a producer who wanted the rights to American Cassandra. He had been a friend of Grace Kelly – “I was her best male friend,” he insisted – and complained now that journalists and paparazzi paid attention only to Monaco’s wayward princesses, Caroline and Stéphanie, leaving poor Albert to gather dust in some back stairwell of the pink palace in Monte Carlo. This was years before Albert was revealed to be a serious player on the hook-up scene and the father of at least two out-of-wedlock children. At that time the joke was that if you called the palace and asked to “speak to the princess” the reply would come, “Which one? Caroline, Stéphanie, or Albert?” So there was a different atmosphere.

“But he really is a solid guy,” Bill Allyn remarked. “He’s more interesting than you’d think.” So, I pitched it to VF and, somewhat to my surprise, got the green light. It would be an easy and relaxed undertaking, I thought. There was no urgency, because if anyone, anywhere, was not in the news at that time it was Albert Alexandre Louis Pierre Grimaldi, first in line to the throne of a hereditary amusement park on the French Riviera.

But suddenly, in an ugly coincidence, tragedy struck the Grimaldis’ sunshine paradise. Stefano Casiraghi, the second husband of Princess Caroline, died in a speedboat accident, a risky sport he had pursued to championship despite Caroline’s worries and pleas for his safety. And within hours of the news breaking I had a phone call from Vanity Fair: “Peter Kurth? Hold for Tina Brown.”

These words are now framed and hung over my desk: “Peter Kurth? Hold for Tina Brown.” I keep them there to remind myself of what I never want to do again. When she came on the line she said, exactly: “Can you get to Monaco tonight? I want you to tell me everything, everything about all of them. I want you inside the palace, I want you looking up their skirts and under their beds, tell me who’s sleeping with whom, who’s gay, who’s not, what’s what with them all. Can you do that?”

Now, Tina is a brilliant editor, none better, in her ruthless, soulless way, and for a brief moment, having just written for her about King Michael of Romania, I was her royalty guy. She had long wanted a Monaco story, I would learn. She wanted the Monaco story and had assigned the task to many writers over time. None of them had pleased her. She had even gone to Monaco herself, hiding behind potted plants, I was told, during a tour of the palace, in the hope of breaking away to snoop the premises unobserved. But no one yet had been able to raise the curtain on the Grimaldi family in the way she wanted it done. No one could get up those skirts.

When I got to Monaco, I couldn’t do it either. It was October and raining. The Principality was drenched in gloom – everyone who lives there calls it “the Principality” -- and right away, ensconced at the Hôtel de Paris, I felt that I was something other than an overpaid hack, sniffing seats for Tina Brown. My contacts with European royalty weren’t the kind to be exploited for gossip, even if the details Tina wanted could be obtained, which, at that moment, they could not. Four hundred reporters had converged on Monaco for Casiraghi's funeral, greatly aggravating the population in mourning. The Monégasqes were stunned, silent, moving through the small city like ghosts from a Dior runway show. Friends of the Grimaldi family slammed down phones and barked their chagrin when pressed for news. "You know as much as I do," one of them snapped when I arrived. "You've read the papers. And what a time to be asking questions!"

In fact, it’s never a good time to ask questions in Monte Carlo. No one there will talk on the record about the secrets of the Grimaldi family, knowing that if they do they’ll be booted from the territory. The reigning prince 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 he chooses, from all four départements of the French Riviera. 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. I went to dinner with a man who had recently opened a business in Monte Carlo — he was from Arolo in Italy and had known the Sheeans there, Jimmy and Dinah — 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 because, if I did, he would be "expelled." He was serious. "I will be out of here,” he said, snapping his fingers -- “like that!” He had no gossip about the Prince’s family anyway, explaining that "unless they're very high up" people in Monaco generally knew less about Albert, Caroline, and the others than people outside it, because it's so risky to chatter openly about their darker side. A well-known actor 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."

In the meantime, Princess Caroline’s grief over the loss of her husband was visible and frankly horrendous. At Casiraghi’s funeral, she was choking on her sobs, dismaying even hard-core reporters and photographers with the depth of her feeling. She sat buttressed by her father, Prince Rainier, who hugged and propped her up, much as she had supported him at the funeral of Princess Grace in 1982 – “eight years ago,” as I kept hearing. “It’s just like eight years ago.”

It wasn’t, though, quite. Four times as many reporters had swarmed over Monaco when Grace Kelly died. She was the star of the enterprise, irreplaceable by any measurement, the woman who "put Monaco on the map" and elevated the Grimaldi family from their original status as Mafia-connected, Mediterranean pirates. It was well understood in aristocratic circles that when Prince Rainier married Grace, daughter of a Philadelphia bricklayer, the Grimaldis married up. Friends remember how "sweet" she was before her marriage, how lovely and "enchanting," and how "royal" she became over time. Today, 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 just as the true details of her death in a car accident in 1982 have been carefully hidden and guarded, no information about her children’s intimate lives was on offer eight years later, as Caroline battled a complete collapse. Even Princess Stéphanie, “Wild Child of Europe” and normally the one to make waves with her antics, had been stunned into silence. To think of intruding on their obvious sorrow struck me as a violation of decency, even if it were possible to achieve, which, I repeat, it was not. I wrote:

I went to Le Texan, the Riviera's answer to "Cheers," where visiting celebrities and ordinary tourists mix with 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. ("What was the name again?" the staff will joke.) The Texan is famous not just 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, an 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 when 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 that speedboating 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."

Tina kept me on the Monaco story for nearly two months, spent more than $35,000 on my expenses, and paid me a handsome sum for the elegant, in-depth piece I did write about the principality and its workings, which looked up no one’s skirt and under no one’s bed and was thus unfit for her pages. “Pay him and thank him,” she instructed her staff, before immediately reassigning the project to Dominick Dunne, her go-to reporter for “inside” poop on the rich and notorious. But Dunne did no better than I. He arrived in Monaco and found all doors closed to him, official and unofficial, on the order of the Société des Bains de Mer, the private company that holds a monopoly on Monaco’s hotel, tourism, and gambling activities. The SBM is, like everything in the principality, an extension of the palace, in this case disguised as “the Government of Monaco,” which holds a 60 per cent stake in its proceedings. Word went out to Monaco residents that Dominick Dunne was not to be indulged.

Immediately I had a call from Vanity Fair, not a “Hold for Tina Brown” moment but a desperate inquisition from a senior editor at the magazine, begging to know why I had “scuppered Tina’s Monaco project.” Nick Dunne had failed absolutely and apparently I was to blame.

“What have you done?” this editor cried. “Tina’s in a towering rage. She wants heads. She’s got her bullwhip out and she’s going to use it. What did you do over there? No one is talking. What did you say to them?”

I had to think for a minute because, to my knowledge, I hadn’t “done” anything. Before leaving Monte Carlo I had lunch with Nadia Lacoste, at that time head of publicity for the SBM, a close friend of Princess Grace and former director of the palace press office, a woman so “inside” the Grimaldi enterprise as to put paid to any pretenders. She was warm, welcoming, and the dictionary definition of discreet, but only laughed when I told her what Tina wanted for her story.

“She won’t publish anything you write,” Nadia said.

“Oh no,” I protested, “when she sees it, she’s assured me …”

“No,” said Nadia, “it won’t be nasty enough. I promise you she won’t publish it.” And when she didn’t publish it I called Nadia to thank her for her help. I guess no top-flight reporter does this.

“You were right,” I said. “Not enough dirt.” She laughed and invited me to come to Monaco anytime and “enjoy myself.”

And that was my crime. Talking with me had apparently persuaded the Principality of Monaco not to cooperate with Vanity Fair. Who knew I had the power? I am not superior to anything Tina Brown has ever done or wanted to do in her magazines. I wasn’t morally outraged by her desire for a juicy Monaco story. But to be accused of making it impossible for her went beyond the pale. On the phone now with Vanity Fair I found my voice.

“You can tell her to hold for me in the future,” I said. I was shaking. “It’s not her reputation that’s on the line, not her friends and contacts whose trust she wants betrayed. No one in Monaco trusts her to begin with — they don’t need me to confirm it. Tell her to go fry ice.” It was an old expression of my mother’s and I’m glad I used it, but I nearly fainted when I hung up the phone.

Two days later, it rang again: “Peter Kurth? Hold for Tina Brown.”

It was too late to say I wasn’t at home.

“I’ve decided I don’t want to do a story about Monaco after all,” she said. “Really, they’re not very interesting, just silly girls going to parties and pretending to be bad, they’re not interesting at all. Can you get here this week? I want to find something for you to do.”

Thus in a matter of days I found myself in Edinburgh at the psychic research lab that the writer Arthur Koestler had endowed when he died. I was learning about crop circles and experiments with ESP. “I’d read that anywhere,” Tina said. For once, sulking in my tent got results.