Yikes! Princess Stephanie Weds a Circus Performer

Forget the horse-drawn carriages, the dozen attendants, the sumptuous reception. For Princess Stephanie’s wedding to Adans Lopez Peres, the groom didn’t even get the night off. Within hours of the Sept. 12 civil service, the Portuguese acrobat was back at work under the big top, balancing his brother Ivan above his head in the 8:15 p.m. performance of the Knie National Circus in Geneva, Switzerland. Royal wedding or not, “the show must go on,” says a circus member. “Stephanie is one of us. In the circus we’re all one big family.”

Her own clan, the reigning leaders of Monaco, haven’t exactly rolled out the red carpet for the newlyweds. When Stephanie, 38, and Peres, 29, tied the knot at a Geneva town hall, the only relatives in attendance were her children Louis, 10, Pauline, 9, and Camille, 5; neither her father, Prince Rainier, nor siblings Prince Albert and Princess Caroline were there. The palace tried damage control: “There is no problem,” insists a spokesman. “Prince Rainier blesses this marriage.”

But that seems unlikely. Peres, a fifth-generation circus performer, is the latest in a string of Stephanie’s proletarian paramours, which have included first husband (and father of her first two kids), former bodyguard Daniel Ducruet; the owner of Peres’s circus, elephant trainer Franco Knie; followed by her father’s butler. Since her relationship with Peres made news last April, it has become a steady source of public fascination—and palace embarrassment. In August paparazzi caught Stephanie outside the 40-ft. circus trailer she calls home looking decidedly unroyal in purple underwear, puffing on a cigarette in full view of passers-by. Monaco watchers only shrug and wait for the next round: “If this makes her happy,” says Jeffrey Robinson, author of Rainier and Grace, “then long may it last.”