Shortly after his brother, John F. Kennedy, came off second best in a Dallas tête-à-tête with a hollow-point rifle round, Robert F. Kennedy began working his way through the ancient Greek tragedies in search of some cut-price therapy. In one copy of Aeschylus, the politician had underlined a single sentence, according to his biographer, Evan Thomas: ‘All arrogance will reap a harvest rich in tears. God calls men to a heavy reckoning for overweening pride.’ From then on, Bobby was convinced ‘the Kennedys were the House of Atreus, noble and doomed,’ writes Thomas. ‘And RFK began to see himself as Agamemnon.’ When, a year after that, his youngest brother Teddy was involved in a gruesome plane crash from which only he emerged intact, Bobby took the opportunity to point out that ‘someone up there doesn’t like us.’ But it wasn’t until five years later – when Bobby himself was shot dead in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles – that anyone paid attention to the elephant in the room. ‘There was now a pattern that could not be ignored.’ Bobby’s son Michael later wrote; ‘It was as if fate had turned against us.’
The further you climb down the family tree, the harder it is to write that sort of hokum off. Reading the Kennedy timeline is a bit like flicking through the skeleton script of the latest Final Destination film, albeit one with a particular reliance on mental illness, plane crashes, assassinations and cocaine. Celebrity sceptic Robert T. Caroll PhD goes on to dismiss the family’s bad luck as not particularly ‘disproportionate’ to their size, but simply ‘disproportionately public’. What the good doctor overlooks, however, is that one might well feed the other. The most fascinating dynasties of the past century are spoken about not just because they are brilliant, but because they are brilliantly unfortunate as well. Might it be the case that somewhere, among the DNA of the deeply successful, there sits a gene for melodrama of truly Grecian proportions?
On paper Prince Rainier III of Monaco lived a charmed life. Handsome, fiercely intelligent, and married to the most beautiful actress in the world, the only thorn in Rainier’s side was that his tiny principality on the French Riviera was failing fast. At the time of his accession to the throne in 1949, Monaco had no resources to speak of, an industry built on a creaking casino or two, and a rapidly ageing population. But Rainier had a canny head for business on his shoulders (locals still remember, with second-hand pride, how ‘he screwed De Gaulle and he screwed Onassis’ while building his business empire) and quickly set about transforming Monaco into an inviting tax-haven for the ultra wealthy. So far, so fairytale.
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