Happy as a Milkman

"If to be king means not to live one's own life as one wishes," said Carol, Prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen,"! prefer life to a throne. I have the same right to happiness as the milkman has." He was the first son of the reigning dynasty to be born on Rumanian soil and 101 guns had been fired at his birth in 1893. When his dominating mother, Queen Marie, conspired with Czar Nicholas II to marry him off at 20 to the Czar's eldest daughter, Olga, his reply was that he liked the Czar's second daughter, Tatiana, better. Cracked Nicholas Romanov, as he called off the match: "Rumania, bah! It is neither a state nor a nation, but a profession." Four years later, Carol eloped with a commoner named Zizi Lambrino. The queen was furious. The Rumanian High Court declared the marriage null & void, but Carol lived with Zizi until his money ran out; when a son was born and the registrar refused to enter the prince's name as father, Carol wrote a letter to Zizi acknowledging his parenthood and vowing undying love. The vow lasted one year, until Queen Marie found her impoverished son a royal match: cool, blonde Princess Helen of Greece. In due course Prince Michael was born.

Enter Magda. Carol was a restless 30 when he met Elena Lupescu, divorced wife of a Rumanian army officer. A flaming redhead with a camellia-white complexion and green eyes, Magda, as she was known, became Carol's mistress. King Ferdinand ordered her out of the country. Carol joined her in Paris, wrote his father: "I not only renounce the throne, but I renounce all rights that I have ... my child ... and my wealth." When Ferdinand died two years later, Carol's son, the six-year-old Michael, became King.

For five years Carol and Magda played the Gold Coast--Paris, Deauville, Venice --until, in 1928, a new government came to power in Rumania and began dickering with Carol. Carol promised to drop Magda. "What man would renounce a throne because of a woman?" he asked a newsman. "She [Magda] did not take me from my country, and she will not stand in my way if I want to return." Said Magda: "Although Carol is dearer to me than life ... I have always been prepared to make any sacrifice for him." In 1930, Parliament proclaimed him King, dating his reign back to his father's death.

The Other Half. Two months later, Magda was back in Bucharest. In a quiet villa on the Alea Elisa Filipescu, she raised white turkeys; in the palace, she raised hell. "The rope for this vampire who stands between the crown and the country!" read a clandestine manifesto. For Rumania, Magda was wrong from every point of view. Her mother had been a Viennese dancer; she herself had been baptized in the Catholic Church and, if that was not enough in a non-Catholic and anti-Semitic country, her father had been a Jewish apothecary. But Carol would not give her up. Said he: "She is the other half of my being, the other half of my brain." When peasants and fascists rioted, Carol took the government into his own hands. He appointed anti-Semitic Premiers, hoping to appease Hitler, but announced "there shall be no violence to Jews."

In 1940 Carol and Magda fled Rumania under a hail of Nazi bullets. They lived quietly in Mexico for a while, then went to Brazil. There Magda took ill with pernicious anemia, and doctors thought she was dying. In their Copacabana Palace suite in 1947, Carol at long last married Elena Lupescu, whom he proclaimed Princess Elena. When Magda recovered, they went to live, a portly, aging couple in Estoril in Portugal, haven of exiled royalties. There last week, with Magda beside him and few to mourn him, Carol, 59, died of a stroke.

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