Stephane Groueff, who died May 2 at 83, was a Bulgarian-born journalist and author who became the New York editor of Paris Match magazine and reported from exotic spots around the globe before being welcomed home after the fall of communism.

He wrote eight books, including several on natural history and one on the Manhattan Project, and claimed to have been the first Bulgarian ever to visit the South Pole.

Groueff was raised in Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital, where his father, Pavel Gruev, was King Boris III’s chief of cabinet. His father was executed in 1944 by a “people’s court,” as Bulgaria went communist. In 1993, Groueff wrote a sympathetic biography of King Boris, “Crown of Thorns.”

Groueff was studying law at the University of Geneva at the time of his father’s death, and spent the next 46 years living in exile.

As a correspondent and then New York bureau chief for Paris Match, Groueff visited Cape Canaveral for space shots, refugee camps during the mass killings by Khmer Rouge, and interviewed such diverse personalities as Fidel Castro, Werner von Braun, and Marilyn Monroe. He also worked for Radio Free Europe and contributed to the Bulgarian Service of the BBC.

Groueff was for many years among the best-known Bulgarians in America, and was involved with expatriate groups. Well-connected and suave, Groueff moved in international social circles, skiing in the Alps, fox hunting in Ireland, and visiting fashionable watering holes in the world’s capitals, from Maxim’s to El Morocco.

In 1958, Groueff managed to get his mother out of Bulgaria. Four years later he apparently managed an even greater coup when he pressured the Bulgarian government into releasing his brother and his family. The story, which involved plumping a Black Sea resort travel story in Paris Match, appears in Groueff’s autobiography, “My Odyssey” (2003).

In 1966, Groueff published “The Manhattan Project,” the most comprehensive account of the nuclear project to that date, and which was praised by many of its key players still living at that time, including General Leslie Groves, Glen Seaborg, Hans Bethe, and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Vannevar Bush called it “a swell book.”

After two decades as a New York editor, Groueff took a job as director of information for the Embassy of Oman in the late 1970s. He was welcomed back to Bulgaria in 1990, where the president of the republic awarded him the Madara Horseman Medal for contributions to Bulgarian culture and education.

In 1957, he married Lillian Fox, a fashion model of the 1940s who became well-known as an interior decorator. They died within a day of each other, each of natural causes.

Stephane Groueff
Born May 26, 1922 in Sofia, Bulgaria; died May 2 at his home in Southampton; survived by his son, Paul Groueff, as well as Lillian’s children by a previous marriage, Jill Blanchard, Tina Barney, and Philip Isles Jr.; nine grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and his sister, Radka Groueva.