MICHAEL OF
By Peter Kurth
[Commissioned but not published by Tina
Brown, 1990 – researched, written and edited with the speed of light (8 whole
days), but the king’s “news window” nevertheless had closed before it could
appear in “Vanity Fair” …Tina thought it was “pretty good.”]
In Versoix: Princess Margareta, Queen Anne, King Michael of
The portrait
behind them is of Michael’s mother, Queen Helen, painted by Philip de Laszlo
Once upon a time
there was a handsome and sorrowful king who lived in a modest, mortgaged,
L-shaped villa on the shores of
"You could
do it," says King Michael of
"Some
people garden," Queen Anne of Romania told me one Sunday at the beginning
of May, as we drove from
"It just happened when I was a child," Michael says -- "just like that. It came and I don't know from where.” It helps that Queen Anne, too, has an automotive bent. "Not as pronounced as mine,” the king explains. “But she can tear a jeep apart and put it back together again quite expertly.” His entourage gets tired of stories that depict him as "a grease monkey,” but it's his own description, and when I met him for the first time in Versoix he was standing, six-foot-three, in grubby green overalls, his massive, working-man's hands streaked with oil and dirt and with a look of friendly bewilderment on his face. There was a gauze bandage taped to his forehead. He had cut himself recently while parking the car -- he had smacked into the back of the queen's Subaru. If I hadn’t known who he was, I might have mistaken him for a distracted, off-duty chauffeur.
We had interrupted the king -- that is, the queen and I had - in his backyard workshop. The queen calls it “the inner sanctum" and does not enter it unless she means business. This is where Michael is most at home, where he spends every day when he isn't traveling, and where he keeps his jeeps, cars, bikes and anything else that might need a buff or a crank. If the jeeps, in particular, should be in museums now, it’s due entirely to Michael's obsessive care. Not a speck of dust is allowed to settle on their freshly painted hoods; the seats are hand-upholstered; the doors are mounted on creakless joints. But “tinkering,” for Michael, isn’t just a hobby. It’s a passion and, one feels, compensation for a life spent largely in shoes that don't fit.
Michael was “the
Baby King" in an era of Balkan boy-rulers, the victim of a famous royal
divorce and parental tug-of-war that kept the tabloids entertained for nearly
two decades. Born in 1921, the only
child of Carol II and Helen, Princess of Greece and
For a long time
after his exile King Michael was written up in the “Where-Are-They-Now?”
newspaper features as a “
"It's funny
about people like that,” he confides, speaking about his forays into
business. "They'll talk about
anything: their love lives, their sex
lives, anything. But as soon as you try
to talk with them about money" -- here the king raises a finger to his
lips and mimics the action of zipping them shut. Before joining Droulia
in the 1960s, he had already worked briefly in
"It's not their money anyhow," Michael protests, as if this were news the world ought to have. "Arid when it is, they're even quieter about it!” He is exasperated, incredulous, when he shares his vision of late-capitalist finance: "Hanging on the phone all day and all night, lunches, dinners -- intolerable. I told them from the start that my first obligation was to my country. Also that I was not going to sit around bars all night with call girls and so on.” Executives at Droulia were quick to assure him that nothing more monstrous than a brokerage license was required for his work, but Michael was still uncomfortable, and, sure enough, once on board he "never heard another word" from anybody. You get the impression that he still isn't sure whether he works for Droulia or not.
He was on a roll
while he talked about Droulia, his voice unusually
energetic, his blue eyes lighted with mischief and relaxed good humor. In the far-flung circles of European royalty,
among clusters of Windsors and Hohenzollerns,
Habsburgs, Wittelsbachs, Romanovs,
Savoys, Bourbons, Braganzas
and the Danish Schleswig-Holsteins, Michael of
Romania is known uniquely for his taciturnity, his "moroseness," his
"almost pathological" shyness and his reluctance, in any social
sense, to put himself forward. "He
is such a strange, introverted character," says a cousin in
He is a tall, broad, sturdy and earnestly good-looking man, with prominent ears and thick, wavy brown hair that was well described (until recently, when he began to let it go gray) as "Reaganesque.” The French, who know their movie stars, think that Michael resembles the late Robert Ryan, and they're right: he is “craggily handsome” in that platoon-commander way. But his smile is charming by the grace of God, not cameras, and his unexpectedly winning, boyish glance owes nothing to public relations.
It's rare enough
in the first place for Michael to smile.
During the whole time I was with him, in
"We have
always lived what we call a double life," the queen insists, taking deep
drags on a string of Marlboro cigarettes.
"A life of family and simplicity and quiet, and a life of mourning. Mourning for
"It wasn't
easy," she says. "it isn't easy. To be trained to do one thing and one thing
only, and then to find oneself surrounded by the sharks of a different
world....” Her voice trails off … the
royal family is used to being misunderstood.
In December 1989, at the time of the Romanian revolution, rumors flew
that Michael, from his exile in
"This is what is commonly called disinformation," he complained, never doubting that the story had its origins in Bucharest, and specifically with the leaders of the National Salvation Front, that badly named assortment of Party bureaucrats, apparatchiks, dissidents and opportunists who wrested power "spontaneously” from the Ceausescu government and subsequently emerged -- much to the surprise of Romanian exiles - as an autonomous and unified political body. Few people, at the beginning, were as suspicious of the Front as everyone later became. But the king was one of the first.
"I don't
know any of the Front leaders," he warned, "but I know where they come
from. They have come through the
Communist ranks.... They were supposed
to be a transition government preparing [for] future elections. Now they say they're taking part in the
elections as candidates.... The
structure of the country has not changed one bit. It's the same people.” On December 18, a week before the murder of
the Ceauçescus, the King issued a call to his people
-- the army, the diplomatic corps, "all generals and all elements" --
to throw off the yoke of communism and form a new government through free
elections. He called on NATO and the
Warsaw Pact nations (not Gorbachev,
and not foreign soldiers) to support
"I am the
King of all Romanians," Michael says, "regardless of their political
affiliation.... I am not the spiritual
leader of the Union of Free Romanians. I
am above organizations.” The king has a
scholar's knowledge of Romanian history and a clear understanding of his role
as a constitutional monarch. There are
those who wish that he would take a more active role in émigré affairs, and
ever since the December revolution he has been overwhelmed with leaflets and
pamphlets and wild manifestos recommending that he "invade the
country," "bomb Romania," “parachute in," and so
forth. ("His ancestors didn't get the
goddamn throne by sitting around in
"Too many
things have been written about me which are not correct," he complained
several years ago in a letter to a friend.
"This is a thing that never stops amazing me. The amount of things that people think they
know about me, or even what I think. A
great deal of this is pure fantasy.”
Events in the East, the fall of the Ceauçescus,
his own re-emergence as "a political wild card in a resurrected, wide-open
“Zing zing!” she says. "Pop pop!” Everything has changed in the last eight months, except for the central fact of her husband's existence. Life at the Villa Serena is still about waiting.
*
I had no idea,
before I met the king, that an office now exists in
Little has changed. In Versoix, Michael's wife does her shopping on a motor scooter. When I called and asked her about “a good time” to meet the family, she laughed.
"Don't ask me," she said, in that unmistakable royal English which, while perfect, is lightly and indefinably accented. “You have to look in the appointment book. There is always something going on. It's impossible to keep track.” She gave me the number of the office downtown ("Tell them you called home," she said), and when a cheerful assistant answered the phone - "Secretariat de Roumanie, Bonjour!” -- I was passed along to Princess Margareta, Michael and Anne's eldest daughter and director of the Princess Margareta Foundation, a registered charity dedicated to the political, social, moral, cultural and economic rehabilitation of the Romanian people.
Until recently
-- up through the summer of 1989 - Princess Margareta
was an officer of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations
in Rome. She is trained as a sociologist,
and, by her own account, she would have been happy to remain one. But the overthrow of the Ceauçescus
and the ostensible re-awakening of democracy in
"If the present regime should one day collapse," Michael told the Associated Press as early as 1956, "I don't believe we should impose a monarchy on the people without consulting the people themselves. Romanians have had enough suffering imposed on them to have a right to be consulted on their future.” This view of "the people" is deeply embedded in the consciousness of the royal family. In January 1990, following the dramatic events of the revolution in Bucharest, Michael repeated his pledge -- he would not "propose" himself -- and insisted that it wasn’t his job to “interfere” in the first free elections Romania was set to enjoy in more than fifty years.
"I am ready
to serve the people and the country any time to guarantee as soon as possible a
democratic constitution," the king told reporters. "If the people want me to come back, of
course, I will come back.” But the
first order of business should be "a moral regeneration.” Michael dismissed reports from
“Bucharest is not the country," he said. "And it seems to me this poll was done rather in haste.” Something like 80 independent political parties, all but two of them formed in the brief weeks since the fall of the Ceauçescus, had been announced as contenders in the national elections; none of them was expected to defeat or even to make a dent in the mandate of the ruling Salvation Front. It’s a matter of "education," Michael says: there hadn't been any. Young Romanians, in particular, "don't exactly know what a constitutional monarchy is, they don't know what democracy is, they don't know what a parliamentary life is. So it might take a little while for them to get into this.”
Danielle Maillefer, the general secretary at the Princess Margareta Foundation and the woman who doubles as King
Michael's "press advisor" (formerly Mme. Maillefer
was Chief Information Officer for the city of
The distinction is not without force. At the beginning of April, Mme. Maillefer announced that the king had plans to visit Romania "privately" at Easter, and the Salvation Front, flush with democratic purpose, rushed to grant him a visa. Michael was "a Romanian citizen like any other," said a government spokesman -- although Ion Iliescu, the leader of the Front who has since become president of the country, felt obliged to point out that the king’s return to Bucharest in no way implied an endorsement of his claim to the throne.
"The king's
visit has nothing to do with Romania becoming a monarchy," said Iliescu, in a statement that appeared oxymoronic only on
the surface. "The monarch is not a
monarch any more.” But the royal family
had been getting good reviews. In London,
the Daily Telegraph rated Michael's
chances for a restoration at an astonishing 25 to 1. He was the only candidate in a veritable soup
of pre-Communist royalty, greatly savored by the Western press, to generate
anything like such favorable odds. (By
contrast, Grand Duke Vladimir of
In March, the king had lunch in Geneva with Laszlo Tokes, the Protestant pastor and ethnic Hungarian activist whose opposition to the Ceauçescus in Timisoara had sparked the Romanian revolution; later, Michael was invited to address an all-Party group of British MPs at the House of Commons and was photographed in Versoix in friendly conversation with Alexander Paléologue, the Romanian chargé d'affaires in Paris. Reports reached England of graffiti on Bucharest walls: "Vrem Malai Si Pe Regele Mihai -- We Want Bread and King Michael.”
Three of Michael's daughters, meanwhile, including Margareta, made widely publicized and apparently triumphant appearances in the capital. Princess Helen, 39, and Princess Sophie, 32, each headed convoys from their homes in Switzerland and England and swept through Romania in a kind of progress of royal relief, bearing food, toys, diapers, candy, syringes, clothes and condoms to the stricken survivors of the Ceauçescus regime (HIV infection, among other disasters, is an immediate problem in Romania).
"The restoration of the monarchy is not an issue at the moment," Princess Helen told reporters. "We are just here to do what we can in a humanitarian sense, and to let Romania meet us.” An old woman who remembered their father brought the princesses a commemorative plate with a portrait of Michael on it. A note was left at the door of their room: "I love you, I adore you, I bless you, my King, I wait for you in Romania.” Wherever they went Michael's daughters were hailed, if not as future rulers, at least as honored guests, and when the Salvation Front, under Iliescu and his Prime Minister, Petre Roman, suddenly yanked the king's visa away, the action made headlines around the world. It was a sensational bit of publicity -- “worth a billion dollars," said a friend of the king -- for a man whom the Front had hoped to characterize as "a relic of history."
“Is it a political decision to go to a country to see the graves of your grandparents?” Michael wondered. “Is it a political decision to go to a country of which I was -- am -- a citizen? ... It isn't my fault that Easter falls in the middle of their election campaign.” There were demonstrations against the Front in downtown Bucharest. Helen and Sophie were called to "show themselves" at the window of their hotel, and when a Romanian television crew turned up in Switzerland not long after, on a purely unrelated matter, two or three of its members broke away without authorization to film an interview with the king. The program was slipped on Romanian television just before the elections, late at night, and in spite of the government's warnings about closet monarchists at Romania's one and only television network. "Obviously, there's a cabal,” says Princess Margareta, who points out further, gleefully, that many people who were indifferent to the monarchy before Easter are committed "Michaelists" now.
"I’ll tell
you what might interest you,” she remarks on the phone, in a voice as
mysteriously "European" as her mother's, though rather more
clipped. There is an echo of
"There's a
sort of a ceremony tomorrow morning," she continues, "at Church, in
honor of May 10th. My father won't be
able to come, but the three of us will be there.” May 10th, Margareta
explains, was "a former national day in
"We never
thought we would live to see it," Queen Anne confides when we meet on
Sunday morning. We are pacing up and
down the rue de Lausanne in front of Margareta's
office, waiting for the princesses to appear; the girls are late, but according
to their mother, "they often are.”
At 66, Queen Anne is still a beautiful woman, brisk, groomed, and
"natural" in a tweed-skirt, weekend-in-the-country way. A friend from childhood explains that "
She fussed over
her daughters when they finally arrived – more exactly, when they poured from a
taxi and ran up the red-carpeted stairs to Margareta's
office. The Princess Margareta
Foundation is housed in a stucco-sided building with unexpected turrets and
oval windows that look as if Rapunzel might be hiding
behind them. "It's a sort of a tiny
castle,” Margareta remarks, giggling. It isn't, in fact, very tiny, unless in
comparison with the royal palace in
"I'm a graphic designer," Sophie declared. "Painting only allowed me to develop my creative side. Graphic design employs my intellect.” She looked down at her shoes -- pumps - while her sister changed her clothes.
"They're scruffy," she complained.
"Haven't you polished them?” asked the queen.
"It doesn't help," said Sophie. I suggested she might need one of those hotel-hallway Schuhputz machines, where I had rather frantically buffed my own loafers earlier that morning.
"I need new shoes," Sophie replied. The stories are well known of her family's financial distress. In 1940, when Sophie's grandfather, King Carol of Romania, abdicated the throne and fled Bucharest in advance of the fascist Iron Guard, he is supposed to have taken with him, along with his mistress, Elena Lupescu, a train full of treasures -- nine carloads, to be exact, $40,000,000 worth of art and gold and family jewels, which, in the years since, have vanished without trace. Carol died in 1953; Madame Lupescu (whom he had married in the meantime) in 1977. Tales are still current (although denied by the royal family) of Michael's efforts to recover his father's loot: he is said to present himself every six months "at a certain bank in Zurich," where he asks for Carol's account and is told that without the proper password he can, with all respect, forget it.
More believable are family reports of hand-me-down clothes, hard-earned scholarships, and "a tiny, tiny little suitcase, only two feet square," into which the king's youngest daughter, Marie, was once observed to be bundling her meager belongings in preparation for a summer holiday.
“It was
pathetic,” says an American relative.
"She was so adorable, and she had nothing -- really nothing!” Thus far, only two of Michael's daughters
have married: Helen, Mrs. Robin Medforth-Mills, lives in
“I did," said Sophie, although it was difficult for her hosts to believe her, and she is known in the family, lovingly, as "a bit of a rebel, a terror, a tomboy -- almost a black sheep," says Margareta.
They get along well enough, or so it seemed when I saw them in action at the ultra contemporary, plate-glass-and-steel-beam Church of the Holy Virgin in the Montbrillant section of Geneva. The princesses walked demurely behind their mother, mounted the steps, kissed the Bible, took their bouquets and were swallowed up in a crowd of about fifty people: businessmen in sunglasses, girls in white lawn, photographers, priests, and an assortment of aged Romanian ladies who looked to me like Second Avenue shopkeepers from another era. These women were radiant in floral prints, rouged to the gills, wearing masses of jewelry, lacquered wigs and, in one case, a leopard-skin pants suit that gave a screwball flavor to repeated cries of "Vive le Roi!” The Romanians treat their royal family with a casualness and a bonhomie that would not go over, say, at Windsor Castle. Generally, one of the first rules in dealing with royalty is that you don't touch them, you don't jostle them, you don't clap them on the back. But there was an almost medieval flavor to the grouping in Geneva -- something atavistic, I thought, some memory of a time when the sovereign and his family ate and slept and conducted their business out in the hall with everyone else.
After the
service, word arrived that "an honored guest” was waiting outdoors, a
Romanian teenager shot and paralyzed during the revolution against Ceauçescu,
who had come to
"Maybe we
made a mistake," she says. “But who
knew? Who could tell?” It was a joke in
*
A story is told
about
"Really!”
she began. "This might be
Romania!” Anyone who had followed the
fortunes of her cousins in
But the House of
Hohenzollern had worries of its own. The
first King Carol proved stable enough, but his wife made up for them both. Queen Elisabeth of
King Ferdinand,
the next to come, a nephew of King Carol I, also married a princess with a
flair for drama and a related taste for turbans and caftans. Queen Marie of
It was Queen
Marie who endeavored to take charge of the young Prince Michael in 1928, when
her husband, King Ferdinand, died of pneumonia and her son and heir, Prince
Carol, "Bad Boy of the Balkans," was living “abroad” with Elena Lupescu, the "Cleopatra of the Near East.” Carol Jr.’s taste normally ran to a rougher cut of woman than was
found in the courts of
Still, no one in the family was prepared for it when Carol, as Crown Prince, gave up his rights to the throne and eloped to Paris with Madame Lupescu, telling his mother in a letter that "one should find a way of declaring that I've been killed in a motor accident.... Say drowned in Lago Maggiore.... I'll know how to disappear without leaving a trace." If he had meant it, the course of Romanian history might have been different. The story is told of young Michael's bewilderment when he first heard himself called "Your Majesty" by the court in mourning for his grandfather, King Ferdinand.
"It's just another nickname, darling," said Helen, his mother. Michael was not yet six. The press took note of his charming dimples, his chubby face, his frightened smile, while the jubilant shouts of the crowds outside the palace scared him more than anything else.
"Why do they all scream so loud?” Michael asked.
"For you, Michael, to show you their love."
"Mummy," he answered, "tell them never to shout so loud for me again.”
His name is "Mihai” in Romanian, and he holds it in honor of Mihai Viteazul, "Michael the Brave," the first prince to unite the territories of Wallachia and Moldavia in the 17th century. Michael's first two years on the throne were marked by incompetence on the part of a three‑man regency (which included his Uncle Nicholas, another prince with an eye for fast women and a penchant for fistfights) and by bitter squabbling at home, where Michael's mother, the long‑suffering Helen, did what she could to protect her son from the predations of his Romanian heritage. Helen was a daughter of the exiled King of Greece -- she was used to trouble around thrones. But she hoped to raise the boy‑king quietly, with dignity and a clear understanding of his duty, and she did everything in her power to isolate him from his father's family in Bucharest. She was successful enough to irritate her mother‑in‑law, Queen Marie, who called Helen "the Hausfrau” and worried that Michael was "fat" and "overeducated."
"I itch to take that boy of hers out for a whole day with me into the country," Marie wrote, "and let him get dirty and wet, let him play with the gardener's child and risk his days climbing over the roof.” No doubt about it, Michael's childhood was lonely. "When I needed a father I had a mother," he said, "and when I had a father I needed a mother.” He was adored, certainly, by his country. Women carried his picture in their handbags and prayed that their own children would be born as handsome as “the Little King." He appeared in Time, Life, Newsweek and the Weekly Reader, as well as on a series of colorful postage stamps and commemorative medals that were collected by children all over the world.
Knowledge of his
parents' marital problems did a lot to rouse sympathy for Michael. In 1930, his father made a sudden and
dramatic return to Bucharest and took the crown for himself. He separated Princess Helen from the rest of
the royal family and from every member of the court; he removed Michael from
his mother’s care and allowed her to see him only at night, at bedtime; he
filled Helen’s house with spies and finally ordered her into exile. Helen responded with an attack on Carol in the
To this day, Michael doesn’t talk much about his father ‑‑ he is reluctant to talk about anything "personal.” I asked him who had exercised the greatest influence on his character and he seemed bewildered. He "really didn't know.” Last winter he told a reporter in London that Carol's selfishness still hurt him deeply: "I had the indignity of sharing my life with that awful woman [Elena Lupescu]. It was forced on me. People knew much more about our private lives than we thought. My mother having to leave, this woman coming to replace her. They had a very special feeling for me and I think that made my father very jealous of me, to put it in a nutshell.”
In 1940, Michael was reunited with his mother -- who would now enjoy the title Queen Helen of Romania -- after Carol, under pressure from the Nazis, the Soviets and the Romanian Iron Guard, was forced to abdicate and left the country. Michael never saw him again. From then until his own abdication, seven years later, he did his best to serve Romania in impossible circumstances. The story of the young king's reign in Bucharest is one of quiet resistance to a series of dictatorships ‑‑ fascist and communist, foreign and local. It’s the story of a puppet king, who every now and then yanked the strings for himself.
Michael's most celebrated act ‑‑ his day of glory ‑‑ came in 1943, on August 23, when he took the lead in a coup against Marshal Ion Antonescu, the strong‑man prime minister who had governed Romania since Carol's departure and who tied the country’s fortunes to Germany in World War II. Michael's bravery brought the country into the Allied camp, and he still says that his purpose in ousting Antonescu was to save Romania from the Soviet Union. He has been much criticized in exile for "delivering" Romania to the communists, but he blames the United States and England, not himself or his advisors, for their failure to stand up to Stalin. He is still bitter about it: Romania was "double‑crossed' and "let down by all sides.”
After the war, Michael was decorated by Harry S Truman with the Legion of Merit, and by Stalin (perversely) with the Soviet Union's Order of Victory. He has also been credited, along with his mother, as the silent power behind the survival of thousands of Romanian Jews during World War II. At this writing, the Queen Mother of Romania, who died in 1982, is about to be designated a Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem. I asked the King to comment on this, but as usual he was monosyllabic.
"We did
what we could," he says. An effort
is underway in Bucharest to rehabilitate the memory of Marshal Antonescu and ‑‑ in line with the government's
fear of the king ‑‑ to downplay Michael's role in the rescue of the
Jews. But it was Michael who threatened
to abdicate in 1942, when orders came from Germany to begin the deportation of
Romania's Jews to Poland. Michael
observes that the only deportations of Jews in
He is
unpretentious in discussing his opposition to Romanian communism and the
abdication it finally required. In 1947,
an article for Life described Michael
as a "young man on a hot seat," but his policy of royal dawdling and
princely obfuscation seems to have briefly hampered Moscow's plans for
Romania. "Stalin likes you,"
Michael was told by the Soviet‑backed government, "and wants us to
respect the Crown. He gave us the order
not to push you too much.” Michael’s
plan to marry Anne of Bourbon‑Parma, which generated a lot of press, is
thought to have been the immediate spur to his removal: a royal wedding in Bucharest would have
strengthened his popularity, while the possibility of their having children raised
the specter of long‑term Soviet commitment to a foreign monarchy. Western papers predicted that Michael would
“sacrifice”
"This act was imposed upon me by force by a government installed and maintained in power by a foreign country," said Michael at a press conference in London, "a government utterly unrepresentative of the will of the Romanian people.” He has never spoken of the abdication without observing that it was accompanied by the threat of genocide: the palace had been surrounded by armed detachments, and the communists promised "reprisals" against the population if Michael did not go. He does not regard the deed as constitutionally binding, and he never has.
"With unshaken faith in our future," he told reporters, "and animated by the same devotion and will to work, I will continue to serve the Romanian people, with whom my destiny is inexorably bound.” Asked how he planned to do this, however, or if he could ever return to Bucharest, Michael answered ‑‑ smiling ‑‑ "I wouldn't know."
*
The King's study at the Villa Serena is crammed with books, stacks of mail, photographs, bric-a-brac, and a couple of inspirational messages framed and mounted on the wall. I noted a copy of Kipling's "If," along with the famous "Footsteps" and something I could only dimly make out in the light of early evening but which was positively headlined: “Don't Quit.” Arriving at the house, I saw a flashy decal at the main entry, a bit of comic relief: "Never Mind the Dog ‑‑ Beware of Owner!"
Queen Anne turned up at the door when I knocked, looked at me sharply, grabbed me by the hand (like Alice, I thought, with the Red Queen) and propelled me into the study. "We are listening to Petre Roman!” she informed.
Petre Roman was ‑‑ is ‑‑ the Romanian
Prime Minister of the Salvation Front. A
week before the national elections, he was giving an interview to discuss the
return of democracy to
"Oh, it makes me so mad, this!” the queen kept saying, smoking and sipping wine: "They don't answer the questions! 'Plans!' 'Programs!' They are always taking about 'programs.' But we never see anything!” There was ceaseless grimacing from her comer, rolling eyes, snorts, and some harder gestures for which she never failed to apologize.
The king was munching crackers, staring straight out, limiting his commentary to a critique of Communism ‑‑ “I've seen it before, I know it well” ‑‑ and an occasional "Hmmm.”
"Politics, politics," said Michael at one point, when I had imagined (to be honest) that he’d fallen asleep: "One gets the impression that they don't care a damn about the Romanian people. They are interested only in keeping their power.” He snapped to full attention only once, when Roman, in Bucharest, became angry at the questions put to him.
Roman soon made the mistake of comparing "the new Romania" to Spain in the years after Franco. There was talk of "reconciliation," "unity," "transition," “forgiveness" (more snorts from the Queen), and of Roman's personal admiration for Felipe Gonzalez, the Spanish socialist prime minister who helped usher Spain to a democratic era.
"They
missed the point there," said Michael quietly. "In
Not long after, they did. The Prime Minister's voice rose as he protested, in a complete reversal, that the situation in Romania was "totally different" from the situation in Spain; that it was “not the Spanish people” who put a king on the throne in Madrid, but Franco himself, who had picked “Juanito” personally and bypassed the direct succession to groom him for the job. Juan Carlos was "a new King,” said Roman emphatically, "untainted" and unspoiled: there was "nothing comparable" in Romania.
“He thinks it's a rotten idea, darling," said the queen as she switched off the radio. Later that evening, at a party in St. Cergue, she took me aside and pointed to her husband across the terrace.
"Look," she said, "you can see: he's upset.” He looked to me the same as always ‑‑ calm, kingly, with his Mona Lisa smile. But Anne knows her husband. They both know that the success of Juan Carlos in Spain is the most obvious and compelling argument in favor of monarchy in our time. The knee-jerk contention that kings are "anachronistic," that "you can't go back" and so on, carries no weight in this milieu.
“You can't go
forward, either," Michael insists, “without an authentic history, an honest
past.” He has no patience with the
assertion, also much repeated, that ordinary Romanians have "no idea” who
he is. It isn't true. My 30‑year‑old driver in
Bucharest not only knew who Michael was, he even knew the name of Princess Margareta, and he supplied it without my asking. Talk about Michael in
I spent the Sunday of the elections at the mountain resort of Sinaia, where the royal family had its summer palaces. When I approached a table of young men and women to talk about the king ‑‑ they were sitting in the cafe of the hotel that used to be reserved for the Party elite ‑- they asked for "time to think" before answering.
"They may be afraid," said my driver, who was acting as interpreter.
"Afraid of the king?” I asked.
"No, afraid of answering questions about the King. They want to know what party you belong to.” The Salvation Front does not hesitate to exploit such antagonism as still exists among classes. In January 1990, when the first protests erupted in Bucharest against the new government, Iliescu's helpers imported truckloads of "workers" and "miners" from the countryside and sent them into the streets ‑‑ not for the last time ‑‑ to strut their stuff.
"Down With the Parties!” the demonstrators cried. "Down With the Intellectuals! We Work ‑ We Don't Think! No King!”
"And this was very interesting," says Andrei Pippidi, the historian and member of the Group for Social Dialogue, one of the few intellectual bodies in Bucharest that still exists and has any influence on public opinion. (The Group for Social Dialogue is officially non‑political, but its members are known to be pro‑Western and anxious to see an honest democracy established in Romania.) "Obviously the demonstrators had been prepared by agents of the government," says Pippidi. "Because at that time nobody had even mentioned the possibility of the king's return.” That came later, after the Easter fiasco and the 11th‑hour withdrawal of Michael's visa. Pippidi adheres to "the psychological explanation" when he talks about the situation in Romania. He believes the country has been traumatized by government terror, devastated by years of "anti‑education," halted in its tracks by the refusal of most Romanians, still, to take responsibility for the crimes of the old regime.
“Romanians are not prepared to be judged," says Pippidi with a certain anguish. "They are suspicious of anyone who would restore the right of free criticism and wants to look all the way down into the heart of society to find out who the guilty are.” It has been estimated that 1 in 4 Romanians, under Ceauçescu, was a spy for the government. There were more than three million active members of the Communist Party in 1989 ‑‑ one‑seventh of the total population. "There's a moral crisis to be overcome.”
It might be the
king himself talking. I met no one in
Bucharest who failed to ascribe the popularity of the Salvation Front to ignorance,
trepidation, torpor, and fear; I met no one who did not expect Iliescu’ s government, in the end, to be anything but a
sorrow for Romania. The king had
expected a solid Front victory in the elections ‑‑ "But 89 per
cent?” he exclaimed when the tally was
in. "You don't get figures like
that even in a true democracy. It's
absurdly ridiculous.” In
Three days
before the elections in Romania Michael was invited to address an open meeting
of MEPs at the European Parliament in Strasbourg and
was hailed from the floor of the assembly by the Italian Radical Marco Panetta,
who lauded him ‑‑ "Michael of Hohenzollern" ‑- as
"one of the few Romanians to deserve the respect of those who care about
democracy and freedom.” It was a
completely unexpected accolade, a really stunning moment, and a sign of the
mounting diversity of support for Michael.
In the United States, from his home in Baltimore, Rabbi Juda Glasner, who before World
War 11 was Chief Rabbi of Transylvania, has become a kind of one‑man Michaelist lobby among Jewish groups. Rabbi Glasner is
anxious in part to acknowledge Michael's wartime heroism on behalf of the Jews,
but he is also, for all practical purposes, a constitutional monarchist. So is Doina Cornea,
the Romanian dissident, one of the few women to have made a mark ‑- and
survived ‑‑ as an opponent of the.
The Ceauçescus Group for Social Dialogue is
understood to sympathize with the principles that Michael represents: Andrei Pippidi
believes that as the Salvation Front continues to show its colors, more and
more intellectuals in
Let's just say
that I don't see how the king could be a danger," Ionesco
wrote in Le Figaro. "The danger
comes from others.” It would be an easy
thing, Ionescu
thinks, "with a little money" and a few "good men," to make
the king known again in the country.
Everyone agrees, no matter what their politics, that next to the memory
of Nicolae Ceauçescu and his bloodthirsty relations
Michael and his family have assumed the hue of angels. On May 19 my Romanian driver and I toured the
Ceauçescus ' villa, along with the indescribably
offensive, socialist‑fantasist wedding‑cake monstrosity that Ceauçescu
erected in the center of
"What were they going to do in here," he wondered, peering through the cavern of a darkened hall in the People's Palace ‑ "play baseball?” He shrugged his shoulders and grinned in my direction. "We've already had our king," he said. "Yours is bound to cost less."
*
Marlene Eilers is a royal genealogist in Washington, the author of Queen Victoria's Descendants and the publisher, in her spare time, of "Royal Book News," a periodic guide to monarchist literature that is unsurpassed both in the range of its listings and the forthrightness of its criticism. There is no one in America who knows more than Ms. Eilers does about births, deaths and trouble in the royal ranks. She has opinions ‑‑ strong ones ‑‑ about every king in history from Herod on down. Michael is one of her favorites.
"He's a person I just ward to give a big hug to," she says (and it isn't the kind of remark that comes often from her mouth). "He's a classic study of a family tug‑of‑war ‑ he's the classic tug‑of‑love baby. By the time he was twenty‑six he'd had to deal with more things than most people do in their lifetimes. And he's turned out all right! He's lived with purpose and with dignity. He's made a love marriage. His children adore him. They aren't on drugs ‑‑ they aren't on “Dynasty”! He can be proud.” When Danielle Maillefer was in New York recently to drum up interest in the Princess Margareta Foundation ‑‑ Yehudi Menuhin has joined the board ‑‑ she met quite a few people who felt the same as Ms. Eilers. They advised her to start thinking in terms of "media."
"Picture it,” says one of Mme. Maillefer’ s New York connections: "Here's this guy who's lived all his life in the shadow of the shame of his father. He's got blue blood, no money, no country, no home. He's an ex‑king ‑‑ he's got every incentive to be a parasite. And what does he turn out to be? A rock. He's a walking symbol of stability and orthodoxy. He's the White Knight!"
Mme. Maillefer was handing out copies of the king's latest
speech, which was broadcast to
I was with him on May 17, in Strasbourg, when he warned the members of the European Parliament that democracy hadn’t arrived in Romania and that elections should be postponed until it did. It was a well‑considered speech, but it earned only a paragraph in Western papers and was no sooner delivered than forgotten by the hundreds of reporters who turned up in Bucharest for the elections. We all read the certifications of the international observers that the voting was "fair” (even if there were “irregularities" in the Front's campaign); we also heard the pleas of the demonstrators in University Square, who had set up a funky, colorful, night‑and day protest against Iliescu and who warned us repeatedly that as soon as we decamped ‑‑ as soon as the eyes of the world were turned away ‑‑ the crackdown would come. They were right. So was the king.
He sat in
Strasbourg quietly, for the most part, impassive, staring ahead. He was curious to know the background and
training of the simultaneous translators in Parliament. At one point, he told me a joke about an
American he had met, a good old boy who smirked and asked him, "Where's
your crown? If you're a king, where's
your crown?” There was a moment when
Michael paused to greet Otto von Habsburg, his wife's cousin and formerly the
heir to the Austro‑Hungarian empire, who long
ago gave up his title and who has made a significant career since then as a
politician and spokesman for a united
“It is with
regret that I often hear
We walked in the
hallway when the speech was over, looking at a documentary exhibition that
chronicled the history of the European Parliament. The king stopped for a moment before a
photograph of Ernest Bevan, and said, "Bevan was the only one who was honest with me. All of the others beat around the bush.” He smiled, shook his head and nodded,
"Socialist" ‑‑ as if to say, "Wouldn't
you know it?' For years after his
abdication he tried to rouse concern for
"I
understand that the main concern in the
He looked out
the window at the swans on the
"Well," she exclaimed when Michael was gone, "that was something.” And when I looked at her she never bothered to hide her emotion. "C'est un roi," she said. "C'est un roi, finalement."