Vanity Press

ANITIES

'Dynastie'

WHO sank the Rainbow Warrior? In theoretically socialist France, readers are affames for the answers to such life-and-death questions as: Why doesn't ex-empress Farah of Iran want her daughter to marry the young American millionaire William Conover? Or: What's the latest on how the King of Sweden's uncle Prince Bertil is doing with his brandnew heart valve? Or: Why was Crown Prince Felipe of Spain named an honorary astrophysicist in the Canary Islands? Such, at any rate, is the judgment of two left-wing journalists who have recently launched Dynastie, "Le Magazine des Grandes Families," a glossy new Parisian monthly crammed with color photos of the titled families of Europe and the world, and written in a decorously flattering prose which guarantees that its subjects' oh-so-blue blood will never boil over in anger but merely gurgle with pleasure.

In a country where nominally rose-red President Francois Mitterrand is lauded on national television by Marguerite Duras because "he knows how to wear his power like a grand duke," where the most inconsequential comings and goings of the royal family of Monaco are chronicled on the front pages of the popular press in loving detail, and where TV viewers made such hits out of the American series Dallas and Dynasty that they spawned a (soporific) French imitation, Chateauvallon, there's already a tabloid weekly, Point de Vue: Images du Monde, with a 400,000 circulation, devoted exclusively to the soap-opera lives of the aristocrats. But the modishly gauchiste Nouvel Observateur's Guy Sitbon, who put up the money for Dynastie, and the magazine's editor in chief, Nicole Guez—a stylish brunette in her late thirties who used to work for Jeune Afrique (a magazine with links to most of the revolutionary regimes in Africa)—figured the climate and the market were ripe for a more tasteful and refined product.

Recent issues of Dynastie, which has upped its pressrun to 150,000 copies since it started publishing in the summer, have featured an article on the "alarming rumors" circulating about trouble between Monaco's Princess Caroline and her husband, businessman Stefano Casiraghi (we are assured that, "like all clouds, those hovering over the young couple will soon dissipate"); a profile of the heir to France's throne, Henri d'Or16ans, Count of Paris, and the quarrel over the succession provoked when Henri disinherited his son (for marrying a divorced woman in a civil ceremony) in favor of his grandson Jean; and an admiring piece on Prince Johannes von Thurn und Taxis ("probably the richest man in Germany").

"Of course, we capitalized on the return of interest in the family symbolized by all these TV series," says Nicole Guez, "but you have to understand that the aristocracy have a special place in our collective memory, they are part of our patrimoine national." Mme. Guez finds her current job just as exciting as her former employ unraveling the Dark Continent's Marxism-Leninisms. Why, each issue of Dynastie contains a genealogical chart of one of the royal houses prepared by specialists to accompany what she breathlessly calls "these sensitive subjects—if you write that someone is the heir when he's only the pretender, the readers don't forgive you, and the mail comes pouring in!" And a survey of reader mail, she adds, shows "lots of letters from young people' '—part of that legion of yuppies who have made of France the most pro-Reagan country in Western Europe. This winter, Dynastie goes transatlantic with a series of articles on the Mayflower descendants; truly, the fifties are back with a vengeance. Can David and Julie be far behind?

Doug Ireland