When Prince Andrew was besotted with an actress who was 21 years younger - who ended up stealing all his money!
She was the daughter of a train driver. Her grandmother was a notorious prostitute. And although 21 years younger, she held the besotted Prince Andrew in a vice-like grip.
Film star Andrée Godard wormed her way into the prince's affections, became his long-time mistress - and ended up stealing all his money.
We're not talking the current Prince Andrew here, but his grandfather - Prince Andrew of Greece.
He had none of the sterling qualities of his son, Philip. Prince of the royal blood he may have been - his father was King George I of Greece - but he was little more than a spendthrift and failed army officer whose negligent battlefield conduct, where he disobeyed orders, had cost lives.
His subsequent court martial left his life in grave danger, and he was hastily evacuated from Greece on a British warship at the end of 1922.
He'd married Earl Mountbatten's sister Alice, and they went to live in exile in France.
Though they had five children, Andrew was no family man. The moment they settled in Paris his eye started to wander.
Princess Alice's nerves had been slowly crumbling for years. The night she declared herself to be a saint and announced she'd be having dinner with Jesus Christ, it was realised something had to be done. Shortly afterwards she was packed off to a Swiss sanatorium and her son, the future husband of Queen Elizabeth II, did not see her again for five years.
Philip's father chose that moment to quit the family home, leaving behind his eight-year-old son to fend for himself. He met Andrée - described by one film director as 'the most beautiful woman in the world' - and together they fled south to start a new life on the Cote d'Azur.
Andree Lafayette, previously Andree Godard, was whisked away to Hollywood to film the George du Maurier tale Trilby
Prince Andrew of Greece with his wife Princess Alice of Battenberg
Prince Philip aged five - by the time he was eight his father had left the family home, which meant Philip had to fend for himself as he didn't see his mother for five years
From that moment, until his death in 1944 when Philip was 23, Andrée never left Andrew's side. She'd become, in effect, Prince Philip's stepmother - and was there to greet him whenever he turned up to see his father during the school holidays.
Meantime, taking a leaf from her grandmother Louise 'Valtesse' Delabigne's book, she taught Andrew how to hang around rich men and use his royal title to sponge off them.
Valtesse was the most famous prostitute in 19th-century Paris, who counted the composer Jacques Offenbach, the painter Édouard Manet, and even Napoleon III among her conquests, amassing a vast fortune from the rich clientele who shared her bed.
Using each conquest as a springboard to the next level, Valtesse counted writers, painters, statesmen, generals, and even princes among her lovers. Soon she was a celebrity - Emile Zola came to call, and based his best-selling novel Nana on her - and just as quickly she became fabulously rich.
Despite this gold-plated existence her daughter married a train driver, and Andrée grew up as a member of the French working class. But the young girl hungered for the glamour attached to her notorious grandmother, and – using her looks, just as granny had done - found fame through the burgeoning French film industry.
She took the name Andrée Lafayette, and early on was whisked away to Hollywood to film the George du Maurier tale Trilby, about a young innocent who falls under the spell of an evil Svengali.
Back in France she filmed a further dozen movies before – life imitating art - she bumped into Prince Andrew in Paris.
And overnight, he became her sugar daddy.
One of his Prince Andrew's patrons was Gilbert Beale, a rich bachelor living off hefty profits from the sale of his family business, Carters Tested Seeds
When Prince Philip would visit from Gordonstoun with a borrowed suitcase, he would find his father loafing around the Riviera at others' expense
Prince Andrew of Greece with his wife Princess Alice and their daughters, Princess Theodora and Princess Margarita
Prince Philip with his mother Princess Alice, when they attended the marriage of Princess Margarita of Baden and Prince Tomislav of Yugoslavia at Salem Castle near Lake Constance
Thinking she'd now be moving in royal circles, Andrée invented a title for herself - Comtesse de la Bigne.
Thereafter the couple loafed around the Riviera at other people's expense. Andrew had discovered, as many princelings from failed European royal houses did during the inter-war years, just how to sing for his supper.
One of his early patrons was Gilbert Beale, a rich bachelor living off hefty profits from the sale of his family business, Carters Tested Seeds. Gilbert happily dipped in his pocket and paid all the bills.
Other dupes were equally ready to open their wallets to the freeloading prince and his popsy - including British society's most notorious gambler Olive, Lady Baillie ('she couldn't get rid of her money quick enough'); the lush-living American alimony queen Peggy Hopkins Joyce; and theatre impresario Sir Walter de Frece, whose wife was the male impersonator Vesta Tilley.
The word Eurotrash had yet to be coined, but these were the people young Prince Philip – who truly loved his father despite all his weaknesses - would find surrounding Andrew when he turned up, borrowed suitcase in hand, at the latest hotel, yacht, or villa the couple had moved on to.
What the Gordonstoun schoolboy didn't know was that the woman who greeted him so warmly on these occasions was slowly bleeding his father dry.
When war came in 1939 and Prince Philip set off as a young Royal Navy officer to fight the enemy, Andrew and Andrée sat it out in the Riviera sunshine, happily oblivious to a nearby world that was tearing itself apart.
Princess Alice, who'd bravely hauled herself back to sanity and tried but failed to effect a reconciliation with her husband, endured the war in occupied Greece, sheltering Jewish refugees and later founding a Russian Orthodox nursing order of nuns known as the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary. Later she was honoured by the State of Israel for her work.
What Prince Philip didn't know, when he was visiting from school, was that the woman who greeted him so warmly on these occasions was slowly bleeding his father dry
Princess Alice with her grandchildren Prince Charles and Princess Anne returning from Scotland
No such honours for Andrew, who died aged 62 of heart failure in Monte Carlo's swanky Metropole Hotel in 1944. When Philip turned up to collect his father's possessions, all that was left was a signet ring and a shaving brush.
Andrée had nabbed Prince Philip's inheritance - worth £700,000 today – and vanished.
Later, shorn of the financial protection of her sugar daddy, she went back to making films - but after three attempts realised that, since the war, the world had moved on while she had not.
She used what was left of Philip's inheritance to live in a swanky apartment in Paris until the money ran out, then moved to the Calvados region in northern France.
Having ditched her fake title and reverted to her real name of Andrée Godard, she died there alone and unmourned in the Chemin de la Plane hospital at Equemauville on October 3, 1989. She was 86.
