Kings

World War II has brushed Europe's handful of surviving kings off their thrones like flies off a carcass. Some of them are in exile from countries that show less & less enthusiasm for taking them back. One, Belgium's Leopold III, is a prisoner of the Nazis. Another, Italy's Vittorio Emanuele III, is a somewhat down-at-the-heel cobelligerent of the United Nations. Only a choice few can do more than twiddle their royal thumbs or try on their more & more meaningless crowns for size.

But last week the royal grapevine was abuzz with a dramatic whisper. Royalty had a new champion--the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. From Washington came a report that Moscow had sounded out London on the subject of restoring Rumania's ex-King Carol to his throne. The Russians believed that Carol, now in Mexico with his mistress, Magda Lupescu, might be just the man to establish a Rumanian government "very friendly" to Moscow.

'Chuckled one high U.S. official: "The U.S. Government was not consulted. I am sure, however, that the British were flattered by the mere fact that the Russians cared to ask them for comment on this matter."

Officially We Know Nothing. Another Balkan monarch, Bulgaria's seven-year-old King Simeon II, may also owe his tottery throne to the Soviet Union. Said the same official: "Moscow should have informed us of an understanding with Bulgaria. It did not. So, officially, we do not know anything about it. But several indications have come to us, mainly from Ankara, pointing to the probability of the existence of a Soviet-Bulgarian understanding. . . ."

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