How Monaco Became A Glamour Powerhouse

The other major player set to yank Monaco’s story arc in an upward direction was an old friend of Rainier’s, Greek shipping billionaire Aristotle Onassis, who became de facto second ruler of the Principality – and would-be éminence grise to Rainier – in 1951, when he became the majority share holder of the SBM. Onassis’s vision for future Monegasque prosperity clashed with his old friend’s. Sailing into Port Hercules a few years earlier aboard his yacht Olympic Winner, Onassis had pictured a future Monaco as a kind of Vegas-Sur-Mer for the highest echelons of international society (it was he who’d come up with the Hollywood starlet plan), packed with prohibitively expensive resorts, extravagant villas and a harbour capable of handling super-sized yachts and luxury cruise liners. Rainier, on the other hand – a man bought up by a scholarly, faintly prudish father who found gambling distasteful – saw it as more of an international tourist attraction and tax haven.

Each man battling the other for a tighter grip on the tiller, Rainier still managed to secure Onassis’s all-important funds via compromises made through gritted teeth, and set about turning a place Somerset Maugham had once described as “a sunny place for shady people” into one devoid of riff-raff. One of his major achievements in the course of this mission was reviving the Grand Prix de Monaco. But his reputation for being the most truculent monarch in Europe was well deserved. In 1959, he suspended the Constitution for what he perceived to be an encroachment on his powers. Two years later he ditched the National Council and replaced it with a national assembly.

Another confrontation, which saw Charles De Gaulle threaten economic sanctions on Monaco if Rainier didn’t take measures to curb French tax avoidance, was settled with a compromise, but no such cessations would ever heal the increasingly fractious relationship between Rainier and Onassis. In the mid-1960s, Rainier – so incensed was he over Onassis’s increasing influence by now, he’d started referring to Monte Carlo sardonically as “Monte Greco” - thwarted an attempt by Onassis to buy the casino. But it was in 1967 that things came to a head when Rainier sneakily issued new shares in the SBM, enabling him to buy out his Greek former friend. It wasn’t long before a gaping void yawned in the harbour where Onassis’s yacht had once been moored.

Any post-war history of Monaco tends to be dominated by the tragic incident of September 1982, when a fatal accident saw Princess Grace’s car somersault over a precipice close to the municipality. But the modern visitor drinking in this Lilliputian gem on France’s south-eastern extremity should, in order to glean a richer appreciation of its status essendi today, ponder a fascinating 15-year period during which fervid cooperation and bitter stand-off were reluctant bedfellows.