Monday, Dec. 13, 1937

Mess

Greater aristocrats even than the Habsburgs in the eyes of many Austrians are the Starhembergs. A few years ago Ernst Ruediger Prince von Starhemberg, the dashing, amiable head of the House of Star-hemberg--whose ancestors helped save Austria from the Turks in 1693--was not only Vice-Chancellor of Austria but favored to become Regent. He had run out of money of his own to pay his immense private army, the Heimwehr, but was receiving more cash regularly from Premier Mussolini. Suddenly the Prince proceeded to make almost as much of a mess as did Edward VIII.

He insisted upon marrying non-Aryan Nora Gregor whom he had made the star of Vienna's official Burg-Theater, and to achieve this has been pestering the Catholic Church for three years to annul his own aristocratic marriage. Austria is deeply Catholic and wise Rome was unwilling to annul the marriage of a Vice-Chancellor of Austria so that he might marry an actress. II Duce esteemed that the Pope was right, shut off the flow of Italian money to the Prince, and Catholic Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg of Austria neatly wangled Starhemberg out of his Vice-Chancellory. After that Rome annulled Starhemberg's marriage (TIME, Dec. 6).

The drama was completed last week as 20 persons, none of importance, witnessed the second marriage of the young man who might have been Regent and perhaps later Emperor celebrated quietly in a small chapel atop the Kahlenberg. Mourned the Jewish-owned New York Times: "By his new marriage the Prince has sealed his fate as a possible leader of a compromise movement between clerico-fascism on the Italian model and pure German Naziism, since his bride is of Jewish descent."

From the church, Prince and new Princess von Starhemberg went directly to file papers on the basis of which an Austrian court immediately declared legitimate the son which the bride bore the bridegroom three years ago. The annulment of the Prince's earlier marriage was on the ground that he and his first Princess made and kept a pre-nuptial pact to have no children. Thus the child which was a bastard for three years now is a legitimate Prince von Starhemberg, aristocratic to his baby fingertips.

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