Remembering Philippe Junot: Princess Caroline of Monaco's First Husband

Now, she was eager to lead an independent life and abandoned plans to study at Princeton, instead reading philosophy at the Sorbonne to stay close to Junot. The Grimaldis were said to have hoped she would marry the then Prince of Wales. Instead, they were appalled when she became engaged to Junot. Their main concern was what this homme d’affaires actually did for a living. Junot had been at Paris’s prestigious Lycée Carnot and had studied law, but thereafter there were only shadowy allusions to banking and property investment. Rainier described him as “a man who lives on everything, and nothing”. For Junot was known best as a playboy. The breed’s heyday may have passed — Porfirio Rubirosa replaced by Dai Llewellyn — but Junot was still living the life of the eternal bachelor, his undoubted charm opening the doors of clubs such as Castel and the hearts of a string of well-born young women. Hoping to put him off, Princess Grace whisked Caroline to the Galapagos Islands, only for her ardent suitor to follow. More scandal ensued when Junot was photographed kissing a topless Caroline on a yacht. Defying the legend of a witch’s curse on marriages by the Grimaldis, the principality put on its best face and the couple were married in June 1978. Things began to go wrong on the honeymoon in Tahiti, when Junot invited a photographer to shoot the pair for the Spanish magazine ¡Hola!. Although seen enjoying themselves on a skiing trip in Courchevel, there were stories of rows, not least when Junot was reportedly snapped dancing with another woman at Studio 54, the New York disco. For his part, Junot discovered the disadvantages of having a wife with plenty of money and power of her own. Both, perhaps, realised they had married for the wrong reasons. They separated and by the autumn of 1980 were divorced. The press chased after an actress, Giannina Facio (who later married Ridley Scott), while Caroline was seen around with Robertino Rossellini, son of the Italian director Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman. Caroline applied for the marriage to be annulled by the Vatican and two years later had to confront tragedy with the death of Princess Grace after a car accident. More followed in 1990, when the father of Caroline’s three children, Stefano Casiraghi, was killed while powerboat racing. She had never married him because the Church had not recognised her divorce from Junot; it only granted her an annulment in 1992. Philippe Junot was born in Paris in 1940. His father Michel was a public official turned politician. During the German occupation, he was a sub-prefect in the Loiret. He was subsequently deputy mayor of Paris under Jacques Chirac. Lydia, Philippe’s mother, was the daughter of a Danish industrialist. Philippe had a sister and, by his father’s later marriage, two half-brothers. A consequence of Philippe’s engagement to Caroline was that the Duke of Abrantès, the heir of one of Napoleon’s generals, Jean-Andoche Junot, was moved to legal action to dispute Michel Junot’s claim in Who’s Who that he too was a descendant. Rainier regarded this as a black mark. More grave was the later allegation that Michel Junot had approved the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz during the occupation. He won defamation actions against multiple media organisations in 1998. Philippe Junot fell back into his old ways in the 1980s, squiring a pair of Austrian aristocrats and then the model Marcy Schlobohm, who later married the Formula 1 boss Flavio Briatore. In 1987, now 47, he married again, to a 24-year-old Danish model, Nina Wendelboe-Larsen. They had three children: Victoria works in finance in Miami; Isabelle is married to a Spanish nobleman; and Alexis is in business in London. They divorced in 1997, and in 2005 Junot had a daughter with another model, Helén Wendel. Chloé is involved in her mother’s jewellery business. Investing, for instance, in upmarket property in Spain, Junot moved between the Marbella Club, Cannes and New York. In 2008, however, a firm in which he was a partner, Access International Advisors Group, was revealed to have lost $1.4 billion of clients’ money to Bernie Madoff’s fraud. Its founder, Thierry Magon de La Villehuchet, committed suicide. While divorcing, Junot had a brief romance with the Spanish socialite Marta Chávarri (obituary, August 17, 2023). In 2022 they were reunited at Spain’s society wedding of the year when his daughter, Isabelle, married her son, Álvaro Falcó, now Marquess of Cubas. Quizzed about how his own nuptials had been on magazine covers years before, Junot smiled and said: “It was a long time ago.”