“I Was the Last King-Emperor, You Know”, Palimpsest

“I Was the Last King-Emperor, You Know”

AT SOME POINT in the summer of 1948 I met Eddie Bismarck. He was the youngest son of the youngest son of the chancellor, and he must have been about forty-five. Although his brother Otto more or less served Hitler, Eddie took after his mother, who detested the Germans; Eddie ended up interned by Italian Fascists on Capri. He told me that as a child, during the First War, “One morning I was sitting on Mother’s bed in the house in Berlin when her maid came rushing in to say that the empress was downstairs and was asking for her, and Mother said, ‘Tell her to go away. And then count the spoons.’”

Eddie looked exactly like the chancellor’s pictures, but he had been born too late to have known his grandfather. Eddie was a talented decorator as well as an expert on the eighteenth century, and he was often called in by antiquarians to identify this or that object. Penniless, he had been taken up by the beautiful Mrs. Harrison Williams, who had, before the war, bought a place on Capri. Now that the war was over, she intended to settle there, despite a house on New York’s Central Park, a place in New Jersey, and a Paris flat in the Hôtel Lambert. Harrison Williams had been, for a moment at the start of the Depression, the richest man in the United States. He had wanted to be the first billionaire in history and so he held on a bit too long to his portfolio as the economy came apart. In any case, he was worth about a tenth of a billion dollars, quite enough to keep the beautiful Mona and her decorator-companion in comfort. The three of them were the envy of the grand world, although I’m not so sure how happy Eddie was at being a sort of superior servant; but when, in due course, Harrison died, Mona became Countess Bismarck and all was as it should have been.

Mona proved as good a friend to me as Eddie, and when I came to live in Ravello, down the coast from Capri, I used to visit them from time to time. She had remarkable blue eyes and hair—supposedly, the first woman to handle gray hair by dying it blue. The result should have been like Halloween but was not. Dali painted her, blue hair and all, standing barefoot on a sheaf of newspapers. She was often referred to in the press as “the best-dressed woman in the world.” Then she set out, with Eddie’s help, to make her houses and her life into works of art in every detail. I cannot say that this was perhaps the most useful sort of life, but for the rest of us it was a fine spectacle to see her seated beneath a Goya in the Paris house or working by the hour in the acres of garden that she had created on Capri, with water shipped in from the mainland.

Eddie’s Austrian-Bohemian cousin Cecilia Sternberg came to stay in the New York house in 1948, shortly after the Russians had taken away the Sternberg lands in Czechoslovakia, land recovered from the Nazis only three years earlier. Now they were again in exile, with their young daughter, Diana, who was to make her way in New York and London as a decorator. To everyone’s amazement, after Havel’s “velvet revolution,” Diana got back several castles (but no money) and so she has vanished into her native Bohemia—the country, not the state of mind—and I only hear reports of her, armed with staple gun, attaching fabric to castle walls.

That summer in New York at the Harrison Williamses’ house, Diana sat on the marble stairs one night, watching the grown-ups arrive for dinner. Mona, in a sudden bohemian mood, placed Tennessee on her right and me on her left. On the Bird’s right was Cecilia. After dinner, Eddie asked Cecilia just how she’d managed to ruffle the Bird’s plumage. In her memoir The Journey, Cecilia quotes Eddie:

“He asked me who that unpleasant foreign woman was who’d made fun of him. When I told him you were my cousin he nearly fainted. What on earth did you say to offend him?”

“I can’t imagine, but he was most unfriendly. I asked him what business he was in and he said he wrote—does he?”

“Do you mean to say you’ve never heard of Tennessee Williams?”

“No, should I have?”

“But, darling, he’s only the most famous young American playwright we have—and his A Streetcar Named Desire is the greatest hit ever. It’s playing in every theater all over the world by now,” Mona said.

“Though obviously not known in Czechoslovakia. It doesn’t matter,” Eddie added kindly. “I explained to him how shut away you’ve been for years from everything of importance and made him understand that it was just ignorance, not malice. He’s very sensitive, and plagued by self-doubts like all artists, in spite of his success.

“You’ll like Gore Vidal much better. He’s well on his way to fame too. I must give you his novels to read and I’ll bring him to talk to you later. He’s brilliant, but in a way more like us. Suffered as much from family tradition as we did in our youth. These things still exist in this country in isolated patches and since things grow bigger here, if not better, than anywhere else, so does family pride, and eccentricity, but he’s certainly risen above it.”

“Is he by any chance the boy who looks like an archaic Apollo?”

“Why, so he does, rather,” Eddie laughed, “though his wits are far from archaic.”

. . . Eddie came to introduce Gore Vidal to me. His face was indeed curiously of the antique world, like a Greek mask, but by no means a tragic one. The wide eyes were alive with humour and so was a smiling mouth. We talked for a while and I thought him as charming and amusing as Eddie had told me I would.

I have always liked Apollo and so, of course, I liked Cecilia. I last saw her at Diana’s London house. Cecilia had taken to her bed out of boredom. On one side of the bed was a parrot. On the other, a spaniel. Nearby, a bottle of some fiery liquid. Fully clothed, I got into bed with her and we passed bottle back and forth, and spoke blithely of the dead.

I used to spend Easters with Eddie and Mona on Capri, a cold season in those parts. I spent two successive Christmas Eves with the Bismarcks and their edgy friends the Windsors in Paris. I liked Wallis. She had a flapper’s wisecracking charm. As for the duke—well, Hughdie had made me permanently susceptible to the charms of the born bore, to which time had added to this peculiar lust of mine an equal passion for the deeply stupid. David, as Wallis called him, always had something of such riveting stupidity to say on any subject that I clung to his words like the most avid courtier of the ancien régime. The duke described coronations—not that he had ever seen one, either: He had missed his own. I remarked that much of Westminster Abbey’s ritual was Byzantine in origin. The word Byzantine was not seared in his memory. I quickly moved on to the sic transit gloria mundi moment, when two masons appear and ask the newly crowned king for instructions as to his tomb. “Masons? Masons! Yes. You one? I’m one. But I’ve forgotten all the odds and ends. Dull, really.”

As a French accordion player did his best to play “Stille Nacht”—(the duke only knew the German lyrics for Christmas hymns), he suddenly said, “British Empire. First trip to India. Glorious. Never would have believed that it would all be gone in my lifetime. Not possible, I’d’ve thought. I am the last king-emperor, you know. My brother was, for a time, but had to give it up. I didn’t.”

Mona said, “Did you see Gore’s play The Best Man when you were in New York?”

“Of course not,” said the duke, genially. “Don’t like plays, only shows.” He meant musical comedies.

I got the duchess in a reminiscent mood. “I never wanted to get married. This was all his idea. They act as if I were some sort of idiot, not knowing the rules about who can be queen and who can’t. But he insisted.” She took a long drink of vodka. She had square ugly hands covered with large jewels.

“I remember like yesterday the morning after we were married and I woke up and there was David standing beside the bed with this innocent smile, saying, ‘And now what do we do?’ My heart sank. Here was someone whose every day had been arranged for him all his life and now I was the one who was going to take the place of the entire British government, trying to think up things for him to do. My life’s not important. But I think his was. Such a waste, really, for everyone. Of course, it’s all a woman’s show over there now . . .” Then the denunciation of the royal ladies would begin, and very entertaining it was. Actually, Wallis would have made a very successful consort, but he was clearly no one’s idea of even a figurehead monarch.

I used occasionally to go to their house in the Bois de Bologne, filled with loot from the royal family, or so the family claimed. Like Mona, Wallis lived a “perfect” life. Everything was exactly right. The two ladies liked each other to a point, though I did catch the Windsors standing in a corner of the Bismarcks’ drawing room; the duchess had just turned over a plate to see what its marking was; then a loud whisper: “They must be living on capital, too.”

I’ve just finished reading Caroline Blackwood’s book about Wallis’s last days, the prisoner of a French lady lawyer. Caroline describes the duchess as non compos mentis, the result of age. Actually, it was the result of a fourth or fifth face-lift. After a certain age, few people can take much anesthetic. Wallis was warned that she might die during the operation, but she went ahead: The result was splendid, but of course, she died on the operating table for several minutes, quite long enough to scramble her oxygen-denied brain.

My last dinner with her was in New York after the operation. We were four at a French restaurant. Most of the time she was her old self. But then she would lose her train of thought. Suddenly, she announced, “I did learn one sentence of Chinese after all those years out there.” She clapped her hands. The waiter came over. “Champagne, chop chop!” she said. When he looked at her blankly, she frowned. “They do that deliberately, you know. Pretend they don’t understand perfect Chinese.” I tried to point out to her that as the waiter was Puerto Rican, he could not understand her elegant Mandarin. But she was already on another subject; and in another world.

The only thing of a “historic” nature that I learned from the duke was apropos Mona’s current reading about the czar and his family. “I was there,” said the duke, somewhat portentously. “In Russia?” I asked. After all, the prince regent had convinced himself that he had fought side by side with Wellington at Waterloo. “No. No.” The duke was irritable. “I was there at breakfast.” “Ah,” we all said, and Eddie, I think, reprised the key word breakfast.

“Yes. With the king . . . and the queen. Just the three of us. Suddenly an equerry comes in. I meant this was breakfast, for heaven’s sake!” We looked, I hope, suitably horrified at this breach. “Not done, you know, ever. The king was furious, but the man went straight up to him with this note, which the king read and gave my mother, and she read it and gave it back and said, ‘No.’ The king gave it to the equerry and said, ‘No.’ Later that day I asked my mother what that was all about and she said the government was willing to send a ship to rescue the czar and his family but she did not think it would be good for us to have them in England and so the Bolsheviks shot the lot of them.”

One suspects that the present princess of Wales, in a recently published private telephone conversation, may have got the mot juste when she referred to the family into which she has so unhappily married as “this fucking family.” They are certainly tough as nails when it comes to survival. On the other hand, I suspect that Princess Margaret would think Queen Mary’s decision typical of someone resentful of real royalty, like the czar. When she was reading Nicholas and Alexandra, the princess said, with a shudder, “They’re so perfectly ordinary. I mean, it could be us.”

The last time that I saw the Windsors together was at a screening of a documentary about their lives, shown at a theater in the Champs-Elysées. I sat across from them and watched them as they watched their lives unfold. He had certainly been a beautiful youth. In fact, the audience, chilly, grand Parisians, gasped when they saw him at the front in the First World War, hair gleaming gold.

When the picture ended and the lights came up, the two small people rose in their seats and responded to an ovation for . . . what? Survival, I suppose. To my surprise, he was weeping and she was dry-eyed and hard-looking.

As I passed them, I heard him say, “I’d like to do it all over again.” I am convinced that she said, “Well, I wouldn’t.” But I was by then too far away to hear what she said. Caroline Blackwood reports that in Wallis’s last days she turned black.

Eddie told me that Wallis’s sexual hold over the duke was that only she knew how to control his premature ejaculation.

“How is it done?”

“I don’t have a clue.”

“She should open a school . . .”

“I do know,” said Eddie, somewhat precise and Prussian in these matters, “that before they were married, he could never keep a valet. Afterward, he had a very good one.”

IN THE COURSE of one year, from January 10, 1948, when my third book was published, to year’s end, I had met most of my life’s cast of characters. There were to be later additions, but the principals are now all in place.