Rasputin & the Record

A London courtroom. On the bench, pale and dignified in a black gown and white wig, last week sat 82-year-old Justice Sir Horace Avory. Before him, also gowned and wigged, were two of the greatest trial barristers in all Britain--Sir Patrick Hastings for the prosecution, Sir William Jowitt for the defense. Handsome, hollow-eyed Princess Irina Alexandrovna Youssoupov was suing Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, Ltd. for damages. She charged that she had been libeled and her character defamed by a rape episode in MGM's cinema Rasputin, the Mad Monk. The courtroom was jampacked by a curious crowd which knew that for the first time the true story of how Rasputin met his death was to be told under oath.

So theatrical was his appearance, so unbelievable was his career that simple domestic folk are apt to think that Gregory Rasputin never really existed. He did. There are many people living who knew him well.

In 1904, after giving birth to four very handsome daughters, Russia's German-born Tsarina produced an heir to the throne. The boy, a haemophile, was in constant danger of bleeding to death. Honest doctors did all they could for him. Finally the distracted Empress turned to spiritualists, mediums and quacks. She was abetted in this by the Montenegran Princesses, Militza and Anastasia. superstitious daughters of the pot-bellied King Nicholas of Montenegro and sisters of Queen Elena of Italy. The Montenegran Princesses introduced into the palace a series of strange conjurers including the famed Philippe Nizier-Vachot, a onetime butcher's assistant from Lyons who claimed to be the reincarnation of the Prophet Elijah. Elijah fell from favor, died and his successors were swept out when the Princesses went to

Kiev and discovered a black-bearded peasant chopping wood in the monastery garden, who claimed that he could cure the Tsarevitch.

Gregory Rasputin was never really a monk. Born in Western Siberia, he was ordered banished to Eastern Siberia for persistent immorality, escaped before the sentence could be executed, worked as a bellboy in a bawdy house, later traveled from monastery to monastery doing odd jobs for the monks. He learned to read and quote the Bible and he developed an uncanny faculty for working on the sympathies of women. His beard, his matted hair and peasant blouse are familiar to the world, but those who knew him best remember most his pale, dark-circled eyes. Rasputin was definitely hypnotic.

His influence with the Tsar and Tsarina was due to the fact that he was able to keep the Tsarevitch amused, to quiet his tantrums and occasionally to stop his bleeding. He ran an elaborate spy service of his own through which he was able to keep the Little Father advised on court intrigues. He gave extraordinary breakfast parties at which his handsome hobble-skirted admirers were permitted to lick the fingers that Rasputin had just dunked in his fish soup. During the War he was strongly suspected of being a German agent.

On Dec. 16, 1916, Prince Felix Youssoupov, a delicate young man who had inherited a fortune estimated at $300,000,000, invited Rasputin to his palace after dinner to meet some women. Rasputin went. Three days later his body, badly battered about the head and bearing eleven bullet wounds, was found under the ice of the Neva.

What happened in that interval has been written about and told many times, with many variations. Two years ago M-G-M decided that a story based on Rasputin and the Russian court would be ideal material to exhibit the varied talents of the Barrymore family. Ethel could be regal and throaty as the Tsarina. Lionel could leer and spit as Rasputin. John could push his delicate profile through a series of love scenes as a Prince Chegodiev. There was also a Princess Natasha with whom Chegodiev was in love. When Rasputin seduces Princess Natasha, Chegodiev proceeds to murder the monk in accord with history.

Film executives forgot that Prince Youssoupov, widely known as the killer of Rasputin, is very much alive and no stranger to the courts. Spurred by a shrewd woman lawyer in Manhattan, named Fanny Holtzman, Princess Youssoupov brought suit against M-G-M claiming that the character of Princess Natasha was supposedly patterned after her own and that she had suffered grievous wrong at the suggestion that she had been seduced or raped by Rasputin.

"Do you understand what rape means?" asked Sir Patrick Hastings of his client as the London trial got under way.

"I am not sure I do," replied the Princess.

What everyone waited for was Prince Youssoupov's sworn story of the killing of Rasputin. MGM's counsel, ponderous Sir William Jowitt, pieced it together by leading questions and quotations from Prince Youssoupov's book, Rasputin.

The plot to murder Rasputin originated in a Guards regiment in which Prince Youssoupov and the Grand Duke Dmitri were serving. They enlisted the aid of Vladimir Purishkevitch, a member of the Duma. When lecherous Rasputin reached the Youssoupov palace on the night of Dec. 16, servants were kept at the head of the stairs, talking, playing the phonograph, acting as if a party were still in progress. Downstairs used plates and half-filled glasses were scattered about as if a formal supper had just ended. Some little cakes and a few glasses of wine were packed with enough potassium cyanide to fell a span of oxen. Rasputin wolfed these whole.

For a full half hour Felix Youssoupov played the guitar and sang gypsy songs while Rasputin calmly licked his fingers and showed no ill effects. Finally he let out a great roar and tumbled over backward.

"I cannot explain why," said Prince Youssoupov, "but I suddenly seized him by both arms and violently shook him. As I did that his eyes trembled and lifted."

Frightened, Youssoupov pulled a pistol from his pocket and fired into the monk's greasy soutane. Rasputin, foaming at the mouth, kept whispering "Felix, Felix." Youssoupov rushed upstairs where Grand Duke Dmitri. Deputy Purishkevitch and another conspirator named Sukhotin were waiting. "He's alive! He's alive!" cried the Prince. They could hear Rasputin bellowing as he crawled upstairs on hands and knees. Purishkevitch fired three more shots, and Rasputin was pushed out on the sidewalk.

"Ahem," said Sir William ruffling the leaves of the Prince's book, "what did you mean by saying 'I rushed at the body and battered it with a loaded stick?' "

'"I did that because 1 saw he was moving."

"Is it not true that you were suffering from a nervous strain so that you hardly knew what you were doing?"

"Of course, of course," snapped Prince Youssoupov, "I am not a professional murderer."

What M-G-M was paying Sir William Jowitt's large fee for was not to get this story made a matter of oath but to try to show that the cinema characters of Prince Chegodiev and Princess Natasha were not drawn from the Youssoupovs. Very quickly he made the following points:

1) The murder in the cinema was the work of one man, thus differing in detail from the actuality.

2) At the time of the murder of Rasputin, Princess Irina, instead of being a young girl at court in Petrograd, was married and a mother and visiting relatives in the Caucasus.

3) The character of Prince Chegodiev resembles Grand Duke Dmitri* quite as much as it does Prince Youssoupov.

Next came a file of potent witnesses who testified that they could find no connection between the character of the cinema's Princess Natasha and Princess Youssoupov. Most impressive was Commander Oliver Stillingfleet Locker-Lampson. Now a Conservative M. P. for Birmingham, he is the son of famed Poet Frederick Locker-Lampson. During the War he went to Russia in command of a squadron of armored cars. Last week in London he testified:

"I have an interest in fair play and right. I was actually acquainted not only with Rasputin himself, but with Purish-kevitch and the others. I was actually invited by Purishkevitch to murder Rasputin. . . . We had a plot on foot to save the Tsar, but nothing came of it. Chegodiev in the film seemed more like Grand Duke Dmitri. It never occurred to me Natasha was Princess Irina."

Relaxing, Sir William delivered himself of a few thoughts on libel law in general:

"I feel talking pictures will provide a new branch of the law, being capable of producing both slander and libel at one and the same time. For instance if when Rasputin says 'Natasha, we are going to punish Paul, you and I,' she advances with a simpering smile one inference can be drawn, but if she shrinks back in obvious horror you might draw another inference altogether. I doubt if it is libel to say a woman was raped, because the usual definition of libel is something holding a person up to ridicule, hatred or contempt."

Nevertheless, after viewing the movie several times, the jury decided that, libel or slander, Princess Youssoupov deserved -L-25,000 ($126,800) in damages.

*Now a champagne salesman living in Palm Beach with his wife, the onetime Audrey Emery (,f Cincinnati and New York, Grand Duke Dmitri has never written about, described or discussed his part in the murder of Rasputin. Last week he refused to be interviewed about the London trial.

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