Tailor's Death

RUDOLPH: THE TRAGEDY OF MAYERLING (244 pp.) --Count Carl Lonyay #151; Scribner ($5).

Most biographers begin their books with a bow to Mr. Smith and Mrs. Brown, without whose patience and generosity this book would never . . . etc., etc. Hungarian Count Carl Lonyay, who was brought up a cavalryman in the reign of Franz Joseph of Austria, includes a jab of the rowel: "I wish to express my admiration for the courage of those who thrust upon me their uninvited advice on a subject of which they had no knowledge, and which ... I avoided accepting."

The subject in question was one of the 19th Century's standard true-life romantic mysteries--the deaths of Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria and his mistress, Mary Vetsera, in the royal hunting lodge at Mayerling, in 1889. But Author Lonyay (whose princely uncle later married Rudolph's widow) has had access to family accounts never published before; and by the time he has cut his brash trooper's path through the great romance, not all the Charles Boyers, Danielle Darrieuxs and Hollywood directors could put it together again.

Habsburg Horrors. Mayerling, in Author Lonyay's account, was merely the last act in a psychopathic melodrama peopled, in its main roles, by deeply inbred Central European royalty. Rudolph's mother's cousin and his dearest friend was the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, who drowned himself. Another dear cousin was an Archduke Otto who once scandalized a fashionable restaurant by turning up dressed only in a sword and the necklace of the Order of the Golden Fleece.

Rudolph's father, Emperor Franz Joseph, had only two interests as Author Lonyay sees it: 1) to design new buttons for his army's uniforms; 2) to design new agreements he had no great intention of keeping ("I cannot get the All-highest gentleman out of the habit of telling lies," his comptroller complained).

When Rudolph came into the world, in 1858, his father promptly made him a colonel of Hungarian Light Infantry, and before he was six years old, put him in the care of a senior army officer. Sickly, timid Colonel Rudolph was toughened by being awakened at midnight with a fusillade of revolver shots; then he would be dragged outdoors in early morning and put through a drill. When he seemed to be growing interested in science and politics, he was turned over to a new "tutor" who introduced him to night life and sex. After he had thus contracted "a venereal complaint," he was married to Belgian King Leopold's daughter Stephanie, who described herself as "the rose of Brabant," but of whom her uncle remarked: "Poor Rudolph! His bride has the daintiness of a dragoon."

Signatures & Suicides. Husky Stephanie soon began to devote her life to running the Austrian navy ("Every officer and every man," she said gravely, "realized how much I ... knew . . . about life on board ship"). But wretched Rudolph was soon too far gone to devote himself for long to anything. Out of a mouselike hatred for his father's regime, he wrote a number of anonymous leading articles for the liberal Neues Wiener Tagblatt; but when a radical stood up in Parliament and denounced the House of Habsburg, Rudolph reverted to type and had the man horsewhipped. He spent hours updating his "Register of Conquests"; if the lady was wellborn, she got a silver cigarette box engraved with his signature--if she was a commoner, it bore only his coat of arms.

After his friend King Ludwig committed suicide, Rudolph longed to do the same. He pored over newspaper reports of suicide, discussed the subject endlessly with his friends. But the turning point in his miserable, pompous life came when he heard that the daughter of a cantor, out of love for him, had stood outside his window to see him, and died of exposure. Fascinated by the notion that he might have died in her arms, Rudolph-begged an army officer to perform a double suicide with him. When the officer refused, he made the same plea to his favorite mistress, but she, too, declined the honor. The reader has Author Lonyay's full assurance that another mistress, Mary Vetsera, was delighted to accept. She was thrilled at the thought of being found dead in bed with the heir to the throne.

Cheerio! A whistling cab driver drove them to the lodge at Mayerling, where they spent their last evening writing chummy notes to their friends and relatives. Rudolph signed one note with the

German equivalent of "Cheerio!" Mary bequeathed a fur-piece to one of her former lovers, the Duke of Braganza, and suggested that he hang it over his bed. Then (as Lonyay reconstructs the police and medical evidence) Rudolph blew the top of her head off with his revolver and, after some ten hours, summoned the courage to shoot himself.

Father Franz Joseph was more furious than grief-stricken when he heard the news. Years before, a tailor had tried to kill him, and ever since he had used the word "tailor" to describe anything that he considered utterly contemptible. So now he shrieked: "My son died like a tailor!" --and proceeded to suppress the story. Mary Vetsera was buried secretly. As for Rudolph: "His Imperial and Royal Highness [has] died suddenly of heart failure," said the Court communique.

Later, Franz Joseph admitted that Rudolph had committed suicide. But he continued to hush up all evidence of the circumstances. He put what he said were the documents relating to the case in a large leather bag, which was solemnly handed on, unopened, from one Prime Minister to the next, until 1917. When at last the bag was opened a bundle of old newspapers fell out.

Author Lonyay's book is obviously intended as the final word on the whole gruesome story; in a case where the patchwork evidence has been so dispersed among the noble attics of Europe, that is probably top much to hope.

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