"Mystery Woman"

In the high-vaulted, dark-paneled, Victorian-Gothic gloom of King's Bench Court No. 5 last week, heavily bewigged Honorable Mr. Justice Tucker opened in his kindly, dawdling fashion the most sensational trial London has seen since World War II broke: "Her Serene Highness Princess Stephanie Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfuerst versus Viscount Rothermere."

In recent years ardent anti-Semite Adolf Hitler and his then leading British admirer, potent London Daily Mail Press Tycoon Viscount Rothermere, conducted their somewhat confused and often ludicrous relations through "Princess Steffi, the Mystery Woman of Europe" (as tabloids tag her), despite the fact that she is a Viennese Jewess. In court, Princess Steffi was able to show that Lord Rothermere has paid her some $185,000 in a period of over five years to be his "foreign political representative." She was now suing to force him to fulfill an alleged promise to pay her $20,000 yearly for the rest of her life.

It appeared that the approach of World War II caused the press lord to decide belatedly that European politics ought to be handled through the Foreign Offices only, and this cost the Mystery Woman her job with him. The Paris weekly Aux Ecoutes charged in 1933, when she was reported expelled from France, that she was a Nazi spy. She now claims that Lord Rothermere persuaded her not to sue the Paris paper for damages, promising to defend her honor in his newspapers. She charges that he failed to do so, and was thus doubly guilty of breach of contract.

Stout, heavy-jawed, small-eyed Viscount Rothermere sat on a front bench at the justice's left while his attorneys, headed by tall, beak-nosed King's Counsel Sir William Jowitt, vigorously charged that the plaintiff had no moral right to bring into court as evidence confidential letters, some of which they say she took off her employer's desk without his knowledge. Counsel added feelingly that Lord Rothermere had no idea that she kept photostats of highly confidential material at any time.

Snitching letters and keeping photostats are what every Mystery Woman does and "Toffi," as she is also called, sat looking pleased with herself, on a front bench at the justice's right. A stumpy, determined, middle-aged woman, she wisely wore a quiet black dress and small black hat with large black velvet snood into which she tucked her mouse-brown hair. Her attorney, King's Counsel Mr. Gilbert Beyfus, opened cautiously by tracing events back twelve years to his client's first meeting with Lord Rothermere. The Viscount, he declared, "told the Princess in 1927 that he had decided to work for the restoration of the Hohenzollern and Habsburg dynasties. He wanted to be a modern Warwick-the-King-Maker and work on the European rather than the English field."

Under direct examination, Toffi said that when she first knew Lord Rothermere, "he told me there was very little news in his paper (the Daily Mail) and he would be very grateful for any original ideas." She claimed that she suggested that the Rothermere press begin its subsequently famed campaign to restore lost territory to Hungary. In London on the eve of the present trial Lord Rothermere had just authored a book called My Campaign for Hungary. In it he denies that he ever encouraged the Hungarian movement which for a time proposed that he be made King of Hungary by a national plebiscite. Toffi had a rebuttal for that one. She testified that the Viscount wanted her to try to get not him but his son, the Hon. Esmond Harmsworth, made Hungarian king, whereat she said she balked. Under cross examination, she said that when she first brought up the Hungarian question Lord Rothermere "did not know the difference between Bucharest and Budapest."

In later years, according to Mr. Beyfus, the press lord sent his political representative on secret missions to former Kaiser Wilhelm II and to former Austrian Empress Zita, to whom she was instructed to offer $100,000 yearly for five years from Rothermere for some unspecified purpose. Neither of these missions came to anything, but according to Lawyer Beyfus his client did in 1934 succeed in arranging a meeting in Berlin between the Viscount and the Fuehrer.

A later meeting between the two was the ludicrous occasion on which Herr Hitler, although he consented to dine as Lord Rothermere's guest in a hotel, refused to take anything except a glass of water, harangued his host in a torrent of German which the Viscount did not understand and finally, after someone accidentally knocked over a vase, abruptly departed with Storm Troop guards who burst in with drawn revolvers at the sound of the crash. In January 1938, said Mr. Beyfus, Lord Rothermere sent the Princess to discuss with Herr Hitler "the return of colonies to Germany" and "shortly afterward she was dropped without explanation."

So Toffi sued. She had acted in London as the social sponsor of Captain Fritz Wiedemann, then Adolf Hitler's personal envoy in negotiations with the British Foreign Office, today German Consul General in San Francisco. In defending Lord Rothermere vigorous Sir William Jowitt charged that Captain and Princess were in cahoots to put "pressure" on the Viscount for a settlement out of court. Sir William put in evidence a letter to Lord Rothermere from Wiedemann which warned: "There is no doubt in my mind that he [Hitler] will grant to her any help he can in her fight to re-establish her personal honor and financial status. . . . [Hitler] greatly appreciates the work the Princess did to strengthen relations between our two countries. . . . It was her groundwork which made the Munich agreement possible."

"Is that statement true?" Sir William asked the plaintiff, and she proudly replied, "Yes." In San Francisco next day Consul General Wiedemann cheerfully assented: "As far as I can remember at this time, the letter is correct."

As the court recessed, Mayfair recalled that Toffi is technically no princess. Morganatic and never recognized by the ancient Hungarian House of Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfuerst was her marriage to one of its scions, from whom she has been divorced for years. In London she was accepted socially by a few, including Margot, Countess of Oxford and Asquith; later clung on the fringes of Lady Astor's so-called "Cliveden Set." An active intrigante, during the mission to Prague of Viscount Runciman, busy Toffi was present at at least one tea party at which she and an assortment of Germans and Sudetens explained to Lord Runciman the Nazi point of view. That she is now in need of Viscount Rothermere's funds suggests, however, that if she was in the pay of Hitler she was not paid well.

Unpredictable Lord Rothermere, who took the stand this week, used to be known as "The Mystery Man of Fleet Street" in the years when he was a super-silent business manager and steadying influence on his late elder brother Lord Northcliffe, most brilliant and potent press tycoon the Empire has ever had. In recent years Lord Rothermere, who controls the London Daily Mail, Evening News and Sunday Dispatch, together with a string of prominent provincial papers, has stopped just short of yellow journalism. He was once reported ready to bet some $1,000,000 that his reporters could encircle the globe faster than U. S. newshawks; in 1934 he gave British Fascist Sir Oswald Mosley a brief but dizzy journalistic whirl; possibly his worst fiasco was the Daily Mail campaign "Baldwin Must Go!"

In court this week Lord Rothermere complained that Toffi has treated him "with an utter lack of chivalry," said he has paid her over $250,000. "There was no opportunity of 'giving' her money because she was always asking for it," he boomed. "She was always pestering and badgering me, so I sent her away to Budapest and Berlin."

"But it surely was a little tough on Hitler," sarcastically interrupted Toffi's lawyer. "Oh, I'm not sorry," rumbled Rothermere, "Hitler richly deserved it!"

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