- Interview.Ira de Fürstenberg: "I like the French, they respect women"
Heating the 8,000-square-meter palace on the El Quexigal estate near Ávila in winter - the current owners are the owners of Vega Sicilia - cost a real fortune after the Civil War. Ricardo Soriano , Marquis of Ivanrey, told his owners that with what they spent on firewood they could buy another house in the Mediterranean. The marquis was a carnal cousin of María de la Piedad Yturbe , II Marchioness of Belvís de las Navas, who donated this immense 1,800-hectare property to marry Prince Max von und zu Hohenlohe-Lagenburg.
His son, Prince Alfonso de Hohenlohe , was fated to be the demiurge of tourism in its version high , more jet and society . In 1947, the Hohenlohe bought a huge estate full of pine and fig trees called Santa Margarita , "and since my father was bored he built a motel - it had 20 rooms - so that people who went from Malaga to Gibraltar stopped to eat or sleep", confess exclusively to LOC his son Hubertus . That was the seed of the elite Marbella Club, inaugurated in 1954 .
At that time, the chronicler of society Cholly Knickerbocker (Igor Cassini) included him in the list of the golden singles along with Rainier III of Monaco, with whom he studied in Le Rosey (Switzerland). In 1955 she married in Venice at age 31 to Ira von Fürstenberg (15 years old), daughter of Prince Tassilo von Fürstenberg and Clara Agnelli. They were the first princes to star on the cover of Time magazine .
"As the Americans were excited to be with some princes, when they went to Los Angeles they were invited to all the parties . There, my father began to have a range of contacts," says Hubertus, born in 1958, two years after his brother Kiko , died in 2006 under strange circumstances in a Thai jail . As a gossip, he assures: "When they fought, my father had a flirtation with Ava Gardner , which caused him to meet more people to attract to come to the Costa del Sol."
After the separation, Ira went to Brazil with her second husband, the playboy Baby Pignatari, and Alfonso settled in Marbella to dedicate himself fully to the hotel with his cousin, Count Rudi. As more visitors and friends arrived, the venue expanded.
In Santa Margarita houses began to be built with views of the sea and La Concha - the mountain that provides Marbella with a unique microclimate -, so the prince "tried to convince people to buy a house. And he was having trouble persuading them The first Hollywood stars to invest were Stewart Granger, Gina Lollobrigida , director Jean Negulesco - he had directed Marilyn Monroe in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) - and, of course, Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer.
Their only son in common, Sean, remembers: "My parents built Villa Santa Catalina in 1962 in the pine forest between the houses of the Count de Meran and the Barons of Rothschild . In Santa Margarita there was only a beautiful garden and a beach club where a man fried fritters and fried eggs with a carboy. And to drink there was only orange and lemon Fanta ". Everything as rustic as it is magical.
Don Alfonso, whom they affectionately called prince olé-olé because many did not know how to pronounce a surname with so many hatchets, was the emblem of Marbella . Brigitte Bardot, Henry Ford or Elizabeth Taylor , who photographed topless , stayed overnight in their five-star establishment .
As a good visionary, while working as head of the Volkswagen subsidiary in Mexico, he noticed a new sport. "In front of his house he set up the first paddle tennis court in Spain . I played with Luis Larisch for eight hours a day," says Sean, "and the old men who drank too much at night, because they wanted movement, paid us 1,000 pesetas an hour . It was a lot of money. and we both lived like kings. "
Of all the VIPs that swarmed around Marbella, Alfonso de Hohenlohe got intimate with Heini Thyssen, Ann-Mari (Gunilla's mother), Audrey and Mel, Arthur Rubinstein and, of course, Count Rudi , advisor and honorary president of the Marbella Club: "Great support from my father with a clean and honest conscience," says Hubertus.
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