"Queen of Sorrows"

After decades of crocodile groans by celebrities arriving in Manhattan harbor about how impossible it is to avoid "unwelcome American publicity and the terrible New York reporters." there finally came in last week on the Italian liner Conte di Savoia a regal lady who in fact did not want what the rest secretly crave, and who found no difficulty whatever in avoiding it. A granddaughter of British Queen Victoria is gracious ousted Spanish Queen Victoria Eugenie whose loose-lipped, loose-living husband Alfonso XIII never abdicated and stands a chance of being restored in Madrid as King should the White armies win Spain's present civil war (see p. 20). Last week Her Majesty, traveling as "the Duchess of Toledo," arrived on the tragic errand of rushing to the bedside of her eldest son Alfonso. He renounced his rights as Spanish Crown Prince to marry a rich Cuban commoner (TIME, July 3, 1933), is now the Count of Covadonga, and as his mother landed he had just undergone the eleventh of a series of blood transfusions at Manhattan's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.

As the Conte di Savoia dropped anchor and ravening reporters in their cutter drew along the starboard side, away from the port side slipped the 75-foot Long Island commuter yacht Nepenthe carrying the Duchess of Toledo and personal maid. The 1,000 h. p. engines of the commuter were just turning over but ready to open up with a roar should reporters give chase. Thus neatly great Victoria's granddaughter slipped away, with the U. S. State Department honoring her Queen's prerogative to travel without a passport, and the U. S. Treasury Department speeding through the Customs her royal luggage which she had left aboard the liner.

Meanwhile the ravening reporters were handled on the Conte di Savoia with the utmost neatness by Victoria Eugenie's son-in-law, Italian Prince Alessandro TorIonia, and his wife the Spanish Infanta Beatriz. Nothing of a nature detrimental to the Duchess of Toledo was discovered and the Press considered it of "human interest" that on the voyage the Infanta Beatriz had played privately on the musical saw and Queen Victoria Eugenie had permitted herself to be publicly amused at the ship's concert by long-nosed Buffoon Jimmy Durante. Passengers told how a contingent of Spanish Monarchist youths sailed on the Conte di Savoia from the French Riviera to Gibraltar to enlist and tight with the Spanish Whites. To them Victoria Eugenie was "Our Queen." They knelt to Her Majesty and kissed her hand while the Italian band played the Spanish royal anthem. Thus in pathetic dignity Victoria Eugenie steamed past and saw at close range the Spain in which her life was dogged by so many betrayals and disasters that even on the throne she was called the "Queen of Sorrows."

In Manhattan the Duchess of Toledo found her son, the Count of Covadonga, simultaneously in almost every kind of mess. His rich Cuban commoner wife was behaving most commonly indeed. On top of her suit for alimony she piled another seeking to restrain Queen Victoria Eugenie from taking her son home to Europe and outside the jurisdiction of U. S. courts. In the offing was another pretty Cuban commoner whose friendship with the ailing young Count caused her more robust friend Mr. Moe Solinsky, 56, a prosperous haberdasher, to buy tickets for her to sail with him aboard the Queen Mary ''to forget."* In addition, some salesmen of a British motor car and their lawyers had involved the Count in a legal tangle at the bottom of which were some of the Spanish crown jewels locked up in a Manhattan vault as security for a note. So nasty a mess was enough to bring any mother across the Atlantic to the rescue of her weak son, but Victoria Eugenie had the added motive that it was partly her Victorian blood which gave him his dread disease hemophilia. This is transmissible only through females, whom it does not harm, to certain of their male offspring, skipping others unaccountably. When the sufferer from hemophilia chances to be cut, pricked or scratched his blood fails to clot, the wound-refuses to heal, and he continues bleeding, perhaps to death. Only real remedy is transfusions. Yet new blood becomes contaminated within 24 hours in the Count of Covadonga's veins, and it was desperate touch & go last week whether healing could be induced and his life saved. A twelfth transfusion had the veins of Queen Victoria Eugenie's son three-fifths full of other people's blood as Her Majesty hovered over him this week.

With supreme bumptiousness, a female Manhattan reporter claimed to have stuck her head in the window of the Duchess of Toledo's limousine at the hospital, cried ''How did you find your son?" and elicited from British-born & British-bred Victoria Eugenie the response "Fine!"

--Soon afterward Mr. Solinsky died of acute appendicitis.

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