By Proxy

I'm the toast of Vienna, And most of Vienna Can boast It's been host To the toast of Vienna.

This little ditty, sung in At Home Abroad by Beatrice Lillie in 1935, might well have been sung in earnest by Countess Vera Fugger von Babenhausen any time before the Nazification of Austria. Besides having Kurt von Schuschnigg as fiance, she had as fancy a pair of slanting eyes and as sensitive a pair of musical ears as any blonde in the city. She was 33, a moderately gay divorcee, an intelligent conversationalist--and consequently popular.

But since the Nazi coup, the Countess has had only one quiet amusement--chatting with the former Chancellor while he was "honorably detained" in the Belvedere Palace. One of the things they talked about was getting married. They had been thinking about it for some time, but Chancellor Schuschnigg, a devout Roman Catholic, could not marry a divorced woman. Last December, the Vatican came to their aid by annulling the Countess' previous marriage, without stating grounds. But the Church asked the Chancellor not to marry as long as he was in power. With Anschluss, the Nazis opened up the hymenal way but shut up the former Chancellor.

Last week, day before the bride's birthday, the couple were married. Kurt Schuschnigg was unable to attend his own wedding, for though he had been escorted away from Belvedere, he was being held for questioning in Vienna's former Hotel Metropole, now Nazi secret political police headquarters. By special mandate his brother, Dr. Arthur Schuschnigg, former director of the Austrian Federal Broadcasting Co., went in for him at the altar. The Countess, holding a bouquet of yellow roses sent by her absentee groom, was solemnly married to the proxy, then broke open a note from the real thing: By this time we should be man and wife. This makes me extremely happy. A thousand kisses. Kurt.

After the ceremony, Countess Schuschnigg told friends that the days of toasts were over. She and her husband, she said, were poor. To save a few marks, she had moved her trunks and household chattels in a taxi to their new, modest, downtown apartment. When she would be joined there by her husband, only the Gestapo knew.

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