“MY FATHER-IN-LAW AND I BROKE THE WORLD RECORD FOR CROSSING THE ATLANTIC IT TOOK US SIX DAYS.”

His father is the former King of Greece. Her father is the former king of dutyfree shopping. He has his own hedge fund, investing money for, among others, his extended family, which includes the reigning monarchs of Spain and Denmark. She has a line of children’s wear and recently opened her sixth shop, in Southampton, Long Island. They live in an 18th-century mansion in London, decorated by Francois Catroux and hung with paintings by Damien Hirst, Donald Baechler, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. They have four children, with names straight out of Greek history: Olympia, Constantine, Achileas, and Odysseas. And, more than 12 years into what started as an arranged alliance between European nobility and American money, Their Royal Highnesses Crown Prince Pavlos and Crown Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece (as they are known despite the fact that Greece hasn’t been a monarchy since 1974) still seem to be blissfully in love. At a time when many of Marie-Chantal’s contemporaries, including both of her sisters, Pia Getty and Alexandra von Fiirstenberg, have had their seemingly perfect marriages end in early divorces, she and Pavlos continue to rank as one of international society’s most glamorous and popular couples, a position affirmed by the glittering “Angels and Demons” bash she threw last fall for his 40th birthday, which drew everyone from both infantas of Spain to News Corporation heir apparent James Murdoch.

“They’ve been fabulous for one another,” says Pavlos’s cousin Prince Michael of Greece. “As in the case of all our families, we’ve been around for a certain number of centuries, and MarieChantal brought fresh air. Not that we needed it, but it’s always good to have fresh air. She made Pavlos blossom. And he did a lot for her also. It’s a marriage that—touch wood—works beautifully. The fact that they come from totally different backgrounds helps, because they learn from each other.”

“You have to have a partnership,” says Marie-Chantal, when asked why she thinks their marriage has thrived. “You have to have a friendship. You have to have love and understanding. If you don’t have those elements, eventually it will start to fall apart.”

“You’ve got to be comrades,” adds Pavlos.

It all began in 1992 with a blind date, one that had been a year and a half in the making. That’s how long Alecko Papamarkou, a super-social New York investment banker whose father had been an aide to Pavlos’s grandfather King Paul, had been regaling the young prince with talk of Marie-Chantal Miller, the middle daughter of the self-made duty-free billionaire Robert Miller, who just happened to be a Papamarkou client. Miller and his wife, Chantal, a petite Ecuadoran beauty of Spanish and Incan blood, lived in Hong Kong, but they also had houses in Paris, London, and New York, as well as a chalet in Gstaad, a hunting lodge set on 32,000 acres in Yorkshire, and a 140-foot sailing yacht, aboard which Miller had won several prestigious races. Their eldest daughter, Pia, had just married Christopher Getty—a grandson of the oil tycoon J. Paul Getty—to whom she had been introduced by Papamarkou. When the Greek shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos decided to give his son Philip a 40th-birthday party in New Orleans, the wily banker saw his opportunity to make an equally stellar match for Marie-Chantal.

“Alecko arranged to take me as his companion,” she recalls. “I didn’t want to go. I knew it was a big matchup, because Alecko had been telling me for weeks that he knew the perfect person for me. And I didn’t feel comfortable being set up. I tried to get out of it, but Alecko never returned my phone calls and we had arranged to meet at the airport. So I ended up going. I borrowed a navy-blue Chanel couture suit from my mother and looked like a million bucks.”

Pavlos continues the story: “Alecko not only managed to ensure that both of us turned up at the same place, but also actually had us sit next to each other at dinner.”

Marie-Chantal: “And we clicked. It was love at first sight. I knew that he was the person I would marry.”

Pavlos: “I was completely taken. I’m not the kind of person who had girlfriends and then had little affairs on the side. I always had a girlfriend and moved on and went to another one. But the moment I saw Marie-Chantal, I said, Well, this is what I’ve been looking for. Alecko was right.”

“I bring all this energy, and he gives me all this calm,” says Marie-Chantal with a laugh.

Crown Prince Pavlos was born in Athens to King Constantine II and Queen Anne-Marie, a Danish royal princess, on May 20, 1967. One month earlier, right-wing colonels had overthrown the democratically elected government. Constantine, then only 26 and on the throne barely three years, attempted a countercoup in December. When it failed, the royal family fled into exile in Rome. There Pavlos and his older sister, Alexia, and younger brother Nikolaos were educated at home by Greek tutors. When Pavlos was six they moved to Denmark—“because of all the kidnappings in Italy,” he explains. “We lived with my grandmother Queen Ingrid in Copenhagen. That was a wonderful year.”

In 1974, with Turkish troops landing on Cyprus and the colonels’ regime collapsing in Athens, it seemed the moment had come for the royal family to go home. But the newly installed conservative prime minister, Constantine Karamanlis, after persuading King Constantine to wait until the situation stabilized, double-crossed him by holding a referendum on the restoration of the monarchy, which was rejected by a two-to-one margin. Constantine and Anne-Marie moved to London, where they bought a house overlooking Hampstead Heath and established a Hellenic school to educate their children and those of other Greek families living in London. Philippos Stratos, a classmate of Alexia’s and a close family friend, says, “Pavlos was always a very sentimental boy and very clear in his thinking. He was serious about his studies, but he was also very happy to go out and play a game of tennis.”

Pavlos was close to his maternal grandmother, Queen Mother Frederica, who lived part of the time with them and part of the time in Madrid with her son-in-law and daughter, King Juan Carlos and Queen Sophia. A controversial figure, Frederica had been raised at the court of her grandfather Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and had rallied Greek troops against the Communists during the 1946-49 civil war, but Pavlos and his siblings saw a softer side. “She’d go out and camp with us in the middle of nowhere in Spain,” he says. “And we’d go and see her in India, where she lived for a while, studying philosophy in Madras. I still have a letter she wrote to me, about how proud she was of the King of Spain for preventing his country from being taken over by a junta. She said that she felt I would be able to do the same. She always had in her mind that one day we would return. The New Year’s Eve before she passed away, she looked at me and said, ‘We’re going to Greece this year.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, like every year.’ And she said, ‘No, no. I don’t know how, but I’m going back this year.’ ”

“MARIE-CHANTAL MADE PAVLOS BLOSSOM. THEY LEARN FROM EACH OTHER.”

Frederica died in February 1981, and the Greek government allowed the royal family to bury her beside King Paul at Tatoi, the family estate north of Athens. “The government requested we not stay overnight,” recalls Pavlos, who was 13 at the time. “My father agreed, because he didn’t want to create a de-stabilizing situation or look like he was taking advantage of his mother’s death. So we flew in, had the burial ceremony, then flew right out again. But so many people came out to see us. It was a very memorable occasion for me, not having been in Greece since I was seven months old, and suddenly having all these people around us, screaming and yelling and crying, saying that we should be returning for good. And it wasn’t just people coming from the hillsides who were jumping onto our cars. It was also the soldiers who had been lined up in the road to protect us.”

In elections later that year, the conservatives lost their parliamentary majority to the socialists, and the rabble-rousing Andreas Papandreou became prime minister, determined to put King Constantine in his place. The Hellenic school, which was overseen by the Greek Ministry of Education, suddenly found its faculty packed with anti-royalists. “My name on my essays would be crossed out by the teachers,” says Pavlos. “They would cross out the ‘Prince.’ I ignored it, but they created a lot of internal strife within the school. My parents ended up closing it and reopening it as a private school. The [Greek] government then announced it wouldn’t recognize our diplomas.”

Pavlos continued his education at the New Mexico campus of United World Colleges, an institution established by Lord Mountbatten and the German educator Kurt Hahn in 1962 to promote international understanding. “We had about 200 students and 80 nationalities, and we all got on perfectly well,” says Pavlos. “From there, I went into the British Army for four years. I did Sandhurst first, and then I joined the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, a cavalry regiment. That was one of the most magnificent experiences. It was during the Cold War still, so I never actually ended up going into battle. But we were in Germany, positioned to take action if required.”

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Pavlos completed his tour of duty in the spring of 1990 and enrolled in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C. He was one semester shy of his bachelor’s degree when he met Marie-Chantal.

Marie-Chantal Miller was born in London on September 17, 1968, two years after her sister Pia had been born in New York. When Marie-Chantal was 18 months old, her parents moved back to Hong Kong, where the youngest Miller daughter, Alexandra, would be born in 1972. In 1960, along with a partner, Robert Miller, a Korean War veteran and Cornell University graduate, had started the business that would become Duty Free Shoppers Group Limited with a single shop in Hong Kong. By the 1970s the privately held D.F.S., of which Miller owned 40 percent, was raking in more than $1 billion a year from some 100 shops in Asia, the Pacific, and the western United States. The Millers had a swell life in what was still a British Crown Colony, ensconced in a hilltop mansion in the city’s richest section, waited on hand and foot by servants, sailing around the harbor at sunset in the first of Robert’s four boats—all named Mari-Cha (presumably after Marie-Chantal, though Miller has always been vague about it). “Every summer my father gave us this incredible vacation,” MarieChantal recalls, “in the Philippines, Thailand, Europe—wherever.

“I’m a third-culture child,” she continues. “It’s an interesting concept. Having an American father, a South American mother, born in England, grew up in Hong Kong, went to school in Europe—it makes me a third-culture child, which means you take on the culture of the place where you live. So I’m very adaptable.

“I was sent off to boarding school in Switzerland at nine—to Le Rosey, in Gstaad. I was there for five years, and then my parents bought some property in Paris, and they felt it would be good for us to also be exposed to a French education, just to become a little more fluent in French. We were there until Pia graduated and went to Barnard. I went off to join her in America and did my last year of boarding school at the Masters School, in Dobbs Ferry, New York. That’s when I met Andy Warhol. One of my parents’ art dealers, Jeffrey Deitch, introduced me. I was 16 at the time. My school had a thing called senior independent study, where I could go off and work somewhere for six weeks and get credit. So I went to work at the Factory. I did a bit of everything—serve lunch, be a courier, answer phones. And Andy at the time was friendly with Stuart Pivar, who had started the New York Academy of Art. He gave me and Jean-Michel Basquiat scholarships. But Basquiat never showed up. I spent one year there. Then I decided to take some time off to figure out what I wanted to do.”

If the restraints of royal tradition and the vagaries of Greek politics largely determined the direction of Pavlos’s early years, the rapidly burgeoning fortune of MarieChantal’s parents presented her with a cornucopia of options. In 1986, at age 18, she was even allowed to choose her religion. Robert was Protestant and Chantal was Catholic, but they didn’t believe in imposing their faith on their daughters. Marie-Chantal chose Catholicism and was baptized at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York by Cardinal John O’Connor, with Donatella Flick, then the wife of Daimler-Benz heir Muck Flick, as her godmother. Afterward, the Millers gave a dinner at Le Cirque, organized by Alecko Papamarkou, who was eager to show off his wealthy Hong Kong clients to his New York society friends, including then Sotheby’s chairman Alfred Taubman, society columnist Aileen Mehle, and Jerry Zipkin, the so-called First Friend of First Lady Nancy Reagan. “One could see right away that Marie-Chantal was smart and that, somehow, she was the driving force in that family,” recalls Taubman’s wife, Judy. “She had made friends with Donatella Flick, who was their next-door neighbor in Gstaad, and she had encouraged her father to hire Papamarkou. Apparently she told him, ‘We have so much money and no one knows us.’ ”

The following year, Marie-Chantal says, “I went back to school, to Sarah Lawrence, then transferred to N.Y.U. Gallatin. Didn’t finish. I was so damned curious. I went and did things that would satisfy me, and then I would move on to the next. Instead of wasting four years at F.I.T. [Fashion Institute of Technology], after one semester I said, ‘O.K., that wasn’t it. Now I’m going to try singing.’ I knew I was artistic, and I wanted to do something in the arts. I wasn’t soul-searching. I have a huge sense of identity.

“Then I was in Paris for a year. I wanted to breed horses. Got into my whole equestrian look. And I also did the Escoffier School at the Ritz. I went across Italy and did a three-month art-history course. I always did healthy things. I didn’t sit around in nightclubs. Sure, I had my fair share of fun, but no one could ever accuse me of being a dilettante and doing nothing. I was always on this unbelievable quest to go and do. My father worried, I’m sure, but I think he also felt that eventually something would come up. And it did. I met Pavlos.”

Within two months of their meeting in New Orleans, Marie-Chantal had moved from Paris to New York—“to be closer to Pavlos”—and signed up at N.Y.U. for the spring-1993 semester. Pavlos graduated from Georgetown in June of that year and decided to continue his studies at the School of Foreign Service. “I got my cousin Felipe, the Crown Prince of Spain, to come over. He was in the master’s program with me, and we shared a house for two years. That was great fun, especially for him, living the life of a student in America. Later on, as Marie-Chantal and I got closer, she moved to Washington and did courses at the Corcoran College of Art and Design. She took a house close to the Georgetown campus so that we could see a lot of each other.”

Pavlos proposed to Marie-Chantal on a ski lift in Gstaad at Christmastime 1994. They were married six months later, on July 1,1995, in London’s Cathedral of St. Sophia. Pavlos was one of the first European crown princes of his generation to marry a commoner, starting a trend that his Norwegian, Italian, and Spanish counterparts would follow. MarieChantal converted to the Greek Orthodox religion, with Papamarkou as her godfather, and Robert Miller reportedly provided his daughter with a $200 million dowry—as he had for Pia and would for Alexandra. The Millers also hosted what were probably the most extravagant pre-wedding and wedding receptions England had ever seen, the first a dinner dance for 1,300 guests at Wrotham Park, a stately house an hour from London, the second a garden party in a tent that duplicated the Acropolis at Hampton Court Palace. In between, Pavlos’s aunt Queen Margrethe of Denmark gave a lunch for 100 aboard her yacht. Valentino made the bride’s pearl-encrusted gown, said to cost $225,000, as well as those of her mother and sisters.

The wedding brought together the largest group of royals in London since Queen Elizabeth married Prince Philip, in 1947. Almost the entire British royal family, including the Queen and Prince Charles, showed up, as did the Kings and Queens of Spain, Sweden, Belgium, Romania, Bulgaria, and Jordan, the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, and the Prince of Liechtenstein. The great Greek shipping dynasties—the Livanoses, Goulandrises, and Niarchoses—were out in force, too. Rupert Murdoch, John Kluge, and all four Forbes brothers represented the international media aristocracy. One notable absentee: Alecko Papamarkou, who, it was whispered, had had a falling-out with King Constantine when he asked for a commission for his services.

Many saw the large royal turnout as a gesture of support for Constantine, who had been stripped of his Greek citizenship, passport, and properties by the Greek government a year earlier and was planning to bring his case to the European Court of Human Rights. The confrontation had begun in August 1993, when Constantine, believing the moment had come to end his 26-year exile because a somewhat sympathetic conservative, Constantine Mitsotakis, had succeeded Papandreou as prime minister, decided to fly to Greece for a two-week “family holiday,” landing at the Salonika airport in a plane borrowed from King Hussein of Jordan, with a camera crew from Murdoch’s Sky TV in tow. As the royal family cruised around the Aegean, drawing crowds of supporters at every port, socialist politicians called for Pavlos and Nikolaos to be arrested and drafted into the Greek Army, and a leftwing newspaper demanded that the government expel the king “before there’s a bloodbath in the land.” Mitsotakis, caught off guard, warned Constantine to keep his visit strictly private and later had the royal yacht tailed by Greek Navy torpedo boats.

Two months after the king’s ill-advised trip, the Mitsotakis government fell and Papandreou came back with a vengeance, pushing through Parliament a bill authorizing the seizure of the royal family’s 10,000-acre estate, Tatoi, its forestland in central Greece, and its villa on Corfu. It also stipulated that, if Constantine wished to retain his Greek citizenship and passport, he would have to call himself Mr. Glucksburg, after the Danish royal house of SchleswigHolstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg, from which the Greek royal family descended. It would be eight years before the European Court ruled in Constantine’s favor and the royal family could finally set foot in Greece again.

While Constantine was battling Papandreou, Robert Miller found himself fending off a fierce foe of his own: Bernard Arnault, the omnivorous chairman of the LVMH luxurygoods empire, who had decided that the Duty Free Shoppers Group would provide the perfect outlets for his Dom Perignon champagne, Hennessy cognac, Dior perfumes, and Louis Vuitton handbags. In 1996, two of Miller’s partners, Charles Feeney and Alan Parker, agreed to sell their 58.75 percent of the company to LVMH for $2.47 billion. Miller, who controlled the remaining shares with a minor partner, refused to surrender. The wrangling went on for several years before a settlement was worked out, one that left Miller even richer and with a lot more free time for his true passion: racing sailboats across the Atlantic.

The newlyweds bought an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and a weekend place in Connecticut. Pavlos started a hedge fund with his brotherin-law, Alexander von Furstenberg, and Marie-Chantal became pregnant with their first child, Olympia, who was born in July 1996. Pavlos recalls the dream he had of his grandmother Queen Frederica shortly before his daughter’s birth: “It was very, very vivid. She was surrounded by light and saying, ‘You’ll have wonderful children and be very happy together.’ I think she wanted to give her approval and blessing.”

Pavlos turned 30 the following year, and Marie-Chantal gave him a “Roaring 20s” party at the Cotton Club, in Harlem, that went on until four in the morning. Not to be outdone, Pia threw a cross-dressing party for Christopher Getty’s birthday at their house in Southampton. Marie-Chantal, like most of the women, wore a tuxedo and top hat, but Pavlos, like most of the men, went all out, transforming himself into a fetching facsimile of Gina Lollobrigida—banana curls, big boobs, and all. (Chris Getty channeled Anita Ekberg, and Prince Dmitri of Yugoslavia went as Ivana Trump.) Even at the wildest parties, however, Pavlos always seemed to restrain his behavior, to remember where he came from and where he might be going if history should take an unexpected turn. David Seidner’s 1997 portrait of Pavlos in the full-dress regalia of a Greek Army officershoulders back, spine erect, eyes set straight at the camera—seems to say it all.

“Growing up, it was very clear that I was a member of a royal family with a potential function later on,” says Pavlos. “The question was: when and how and if? In those days I guess that there was more of a possibility of things happening that way, and that I’d be going back to Greece with a proper function as a member of the royal family in a constitutional monarchy. Also, having grandparents who had ruled as monarchs, and aunts and uncles who were currently ruling, I didn’t feel any different from my cousins. We were all running around playing like any other kids. As I got older, however, I could see how things changed when they started their official duties, which I didn’t have to do. That’s when my life became a little more realistic, in that I had to invent my own career, as opposed to having it set before me. In some ways I’m lucky to have the opportunity to go out and create my own future. On the other hand, it would be nice to follow the career that I was born to, where I could serve my people the best way I can.”

After a year, Pavlos parted company with Alex von Fiirstenberg and, along with three young partners, started Ivory Capital Group, “which we grew to $1.2 billion in five years’ time.” In 2002 he and his closest associate, Peter DeSorcy, launched Brigantine Capital, a hedge fund, and Ortelius Capital, a fund of funds, though at present Pavlos is involved only in the latter, which has offices on Park Avenue. Pavlos also has an office in London, where he and Marie-Chantal moved in 2002 to be closer to his family and to have their children get a European education.

They d had their second child in 1998 and named him Constantine, after his grandfather. Another boy, Achileas, followed in 2000. “When I was pregnant, I started to get itchy feet again,” says Marie-Chantal. “And I was desperate to do something on my own merit.” She had an idea for a cosmetics line and went to see Sherry Baker, a top executive at Sephora U.S.A., a company LVMH had acquired in 1997. Baker pointed out that the cosmetics industry was highly competitive and overcrowded with new brands. “She told me, ‘Maybe you should tap into a business that is closer to your heart,’ ” Marie-Chantal recalls. “She said there was a baby boom going on and she thought this whole luxury influence was going to trickle down into the children’s area. So I jumped into it. And within two weeks of making that decision, I found a French children s-wear supplier, who helped me set up my company, and within three weeks of meeting him I met a French children’s-wear designer, who also agreed to work with me.”

People assume that Robert Miller provided the financing for his daughter to start her business. Marie-Chantal says it isn’t so. “I needed to show him that I was capable of doing it on my own. I managed to do everything for myself for the first three years. I think that impressed him. Then I set my pride aside and went to him for help as it started to expand. Today it’s a proper business. We sell to small shops and department stores, we have six shops of our own, and we’re launching our catalogue in Europe as well as our e-commerce operation. The plan is to open five more shops in the next two years, starting with Los Angeles and Moscow this fall.

“The business is what makes me me," she goes on. “That’s why I called it Marie-Chantal— with no ‘princess’ or anything. It gives me my independence. It gives me incredible pleasure and focus. And it belongs to me 100 percent.”

Marie-Chantal runs her company out of a building off Kings Road that was originally the studio of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. As creative director, she oversees the design and production of two collections a year for girls and boys, from infants to 12. “It’s conservative with a twist, fashion-forward but not trendy,” she says of her line, which is priced between the high-end Bonpoint and the somewhat less costly Polo for Kids. “It’s for individuals who like their children to look neat and tidy and fresh and healthy and happy and clean.” The brand’s logo is a little prince with a crooked crown, its best-seller a fleece onesie with angel wings.

“I’m impressed,” says Rose Marie Bravo, the retired retailing executive who turned Burberry into one of the world’s leading luxury brands. “I like the stores. I like the product. She has wonderful taste and a tremendous determination to succeed, which I gather she gets from her father. My sense is she wants it to be a big business. I don’t think she’s going to be happy with something boutiquey or niche. She brought her father in to see me one day about two years ago. There’s a strong connection between them—you can see it. He adores her and she adores him. I think it’s all about making him proud.”

“My father-in-law has been a very big influence on me,” says Pavlos. “I can’t think of a better mentor to have in business. He puts his mind to something and gets it done. He built this amazing sailing boat, the Mari-Cha IV, which is currently the fastest monohull in the world. We sailed her in 2003 and broke the world record for crossing the Atlantic—it took us six days. And then two years ago we did a race that hadn’t been done in a few years, the Rolex Atlantic Challenge. This was first run in 1905, so it was 100 years since the record of that particular race had been broken. We did that one in nine days and 16 hours or sounder horrific conditions. The weather went from no wind to 50 knots to breaking sails— everything came down on the boat. And we just worked very hard, with some of the top sailors out there, and pulled everything back up. And we managed to break our record, as we had hoped.”

Two weeks after the $14.5 million, 140-foot, silver-hulled Mari-Cha IV slipped past the finish line at Lizard Point, near Cornwall, England, with the 72-year-old Robert Miller at the helm and his royal son-in-law at his side, Pavlos and Marie-Chantal celebrated another happy occasion in Athens. The christening of their fourth child, Odysseas, in a tiny, 13thcentury Byzantine chapel, was a family—which is to say royal—affair. Pavlos’s aunt Queen Sophia of Spain took pictures with her digital camera, Crown Prince Haakon of Norway videotaped, and Princess Olga of Greece dipped her godchild into the gold baptismal font, while godfather Arki Busson, the king of London hedge-fund operators, looked on approvingly. Outside, a score of paparazzi and a half-dozen TV crews waited in the 95-degree heat. Although no one came out and said it, the ceremony represented another small step forward in the Greek royal family’s four-decade public-relations campaign to regain its throne.

Since a European Court ruling in 2002, which decreed that the Greek government had wrongly seized the family’s property, Constantine and his wife had been spending every summer in Greece. (The former king can now presumably call himself whatever he wants on his passport.) At the lunch after the christening, he explained that the court had given the government the choice of returning his properties or compensating him for them. Private appraisers, he said, had valued the three properties at from $400 million to $600 million. “The government gave us $12 million,” he said with a frown, “which I promptly put into a foundation I’ve started for the welfare of the Greek people.”

That night there was a large dinner dance in Athens at the Yacht Club of Greece, and Pavlos gave a speech. “We would have liked to have this party at my family’s home, Tatoi,” he began, “but somehow you all own it, and we don’t. So we decided to have it at this club, as my grandfather King Paul founded it.” (“We all resigned when Constantine was deposed,” noted the columnist Taki Theodoracopulos, a die-hard royalist.) Pavlos then addressed his wife directly. “Marie-Chantal, you have made my life more wonderful than I could have ever dreamed. You have given me four beautiful children—” He choked up before he could finish.

What only a handful of guests knew was that Marie-Chantal had nearly died giving birth to Odysseas. “It all went wrong,” she told me later. “I lost a lot of blood, and they didn’t have blood, because it was a private clinic, not a proper hospital. It was pretty hairy. I finally got the blood four hours later. It was very difficult, because it was just the two of us. His parents weren’t there. My parents weren’t there. But it was a turning point for us. We both grew up. And since then I think Pavlos has realized that he needs to make his own decisions. It’s not about everybody else. It’s about him.”

I spent a week last August with Pavlos and Marie-Chantal in Porto Heli, the Southampton of Greece, where they had rented a villa next door to the one rented by his parents. One afternoon, sitting with Pavlos on their terrace facing the Aegean, I asked him how it felt to be back in the country of his birth. “We’re really happy to be here, enjoying our holiday—even renting,” he said.

Among friends of Pavlos and MarieChantal’s, there is talk of his going into Greek politics, much as his father’s cousin former King Simeon of Bulgaria did by being elected prime minister. When I asked him about it, he said, “That will always be part of my life. How it pans out is another matter. My real interest, outside of business, is to find ways to better humanity, especially through education and the environment. I’m quite impressed by what Bill Clinton is doing with the Clinton Initiative. In the case of the environment, he has found ways to reduce the carbon footprints of cities and, in doing so, improve the economic standing of individuals. I’m trying to figure out how we can introduce that concept into the city of Athens. It takes time, because I have to be careful not to be seen as trying to push politicians around.”

According to Christos Zampounis, the editor of the upscale Greek magazine Life & Style, the royal family has been received with “respect and affection” since they started making regular visits six years ago, “even by people who are not royalists, which is the majority. But they are not interfering in public life. They’re not aggressive. Don’t forget, for the Greek media the royal family was taboo for decades. We were the first to break with this. We put Pavlos and Marie-Chantal on our second cover, seven years ago. Since then we’ve had them on the cover once or twice a year, and it is always a best-seller.” He adds that “thousands” turned out for the opening of the Marie-Chantal shop in Athens two years ago.

On my next-to-last day in Porto Heli, Pavlos’s parents invited me to join the family for lunch on the kaiki—as the traditional Greek fishing boat is called—that the king had given the queen for her 60th birthday, last year. While Constantine entertained us with an anecdote about how he had persuaded Fidel Castro to allow the construction of a new Greek Orthodox church in Havana— “the first Christian church to be built in Cuba in nearly 50 years”—Princess Alexia’s children’s nanny passed around plastic containers of an assortment of salads that we ate off proper china. Later we sailed to a deserted cove, where Pavlos made a flawless swan dive into the turquoise sea, followed by his four children in their Marie-Chantal bathing suits.

“It looks like the perfect life,” says Rose Marie Bravo. “They look like the perfect couple. I hope it’s all true. Because we want that, we need that—there’s so little of that in the world today.”