Hohenzollern Hegira

It took a hurricane to get Carol Hohen zollern and Magda Lupescu out of Spain. Since the ex-King and his plump Pompa dour fled from Rumania amid a hail of brickbats and the spat of lead against their armored train (TIME. Nov. 25), the Spanish Government has given them asylum but refused to let them push on to Portugal. "I am desperate!" chain-smoking Carol told a London Daily Express reporter. "If I do not get a favorable reply to my application to leave Spain tomorrow, I will go on a hunger strike!" Carol and Magda continued to eat heartily in the luxurious Andalusia Palace Hotel, onetime Mecca of wealthy tourists who used to pack-jam Seville each year for Easter. Madame Lupescu continued to stroll in the gardens with her four dogs while Carol showed the same roving eye as ever for beauteous female barflies. No longer a great romance but the tie-up of a weak man and a strong woman, the Carol & Lupescu combine was again in a crisis which required all of her notable resource fulness.

Madame Lupescu had sent on ahead to Portugal three trunks full of her furs and most of the enormous treasure with which she and Carol fled Rumania. Last week she simply sent her servants out of the Andalusia Palace, gathered up a purse containing her jewelry, and with Carol at the wheel stepped into his Mercedes "for a drive." They were soon bowling along in the suburbs of Seville, trailed as usual by a police car. Then Carol tramped full down on the accelerator. Over the Andalusian and Estremaduran plains they tore madly for 100 miles. The police were left far behind and, since most telephone and telegraph lines in southwestern Spain were still out of business due to last month's hurricane, there was no way to intercept the fugitive pair. They abandoned the automobile near the frontier, proffered faked passports and entered Portugal.

Spanish police authorities took the whole escape most calmly.

Waiting on the Portuguese side of the frontier for Carol and Magda was the ex-King's Portuguese business agent, Augusto Lopez Joly. In Lisbon waited the foppish, oily, hand-kissing familiar of Madame Lupescu, M. Ernest Urdarianu who served Carol in Bucharest as Grand Chamberlain. Out of rebuilding Bucharest the King, Lupescu and Urdarianu reputedly cleaned up a king's ransom, and in Bucha rest there is some demand that at least Lupescu and Urdarianu be hanged.

In Lisbon this week the exiles went to Senhor Joly's villa. Carol telephoned to Seville, promised to "pay in full" his $852 Andalusia Palace Hotel bill. Madame Lupescu asked that her two Pekingese and two fox terriers be cared for by the Infanta Beatriz de Bourbon y Orleans, Carol's aunt. Meanwhile Seville police broke open such hand baggage as Carol and Magda had left behind, found mostly tinned foodstuffs which in Spain today are precious luxuries. Missing was any trace of the fat manuscript of memoirs upon which Carol Hohenzollern has been working for months.

There were reports that Carol and Magda had received offers of asylum from Cuba, where it was figured he and Magda would be tourist drawing cards, and from Germany. Herr Hitler was said to suggest that Carol and his Jewish mistress reside not in the Reich proper but in Belgium or Holland. Meanwhile much of Carol's fortune is already banked in Manhattan, and most friends of the couple expect them to turn up sooner or later in its cafe society.

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