Clown Prince

Six days after the death in 1922 of his father--Karl I, last of the ruling Habsburgs--little Franz Josef Otto Robert Maria Anton Karl Maximilian Heinrich Sixtus Xavier Felix Renatus Ludwig Gaetano Pius Ignaz, known to the world by his third name, lay ill of a fever in the tiny, damp-walled, smoky house of exile in Madeira to which the family had been banished. He called for his "Treasure Box"--a stationery case in which he kept pictures of his family, pressed Hungarian flowers, a lump of his native soil, a silver coin his father had given him, and several "secret" manuscripts. To the family priest he handed the coin, with instructions to give it to the poor. Then he unfolded and read over one of the papers: a daring plan which nine-year-old Archduke Otto had devised to restore the Habsburgs to the Austro-Hungarian throne.

For 18 years since that day, Archduke Otto has devoted his life, with the sober zeal of a Gilbert & Sullivan clown prince, to the cause of Restoration outlined in that childish paper. From Madeira the impoverished family moved to Spain, where 40 Spanish grandees bought them a villa.

There they lived in pathetic fake grandeur on a bourgeois $40,000 a year--eating more fish than meat, traveling in state in a motorbus, scrimping so as to surround themselves with a bevy of hair-combers and coat-holders--always playing at monarchy with Otto. They addressed him "Your Imperial Highness." In the nursery his seven little brothers and sisters bowed and curtsied to him.

His shrewd, ambitious mother kept telling Otto that he would one day be Emperor. Fanatically religious, she went to church five times a day, and entrusted Otto's education to three Benedictine monks. Because he might one day rule over many lands, she made him learn many tongues: Hungarian, German, French, English, Spanish, Basque, Croatian, Czech, and "300 words of Finnish." When Otto was ready for a university, his whole family moved to Belgium so he could attend Louvain. Otto learned to live with the austerity of his great granduncle Franz Josef--in a two-room suite like Franz Josef's at Schoenbrunn, with books, a table, chairs, an iron bed, a washstand. He drove to his studies in a second-hand car. When it broke down he gladly crawled under to fix it, but because royalty could never appear in lowly shirtsleeves, had to leave his coat on. When faithful Hungarian legitimists heard about this, 101 of them passed the hat and bought Otto a snappy new Steyr.

An old Habsburg custom is that the King-Emperor does not sully himself with money (convenient since Otto's family never had much); so someone had to accompany him wherever he went, and dig down into unregal jeans whenever the Emperor wanted some cigarets. Under the Schuschnigg regime, Austria restored a few estates to the family, but the Nazis took them away again and gave them to war veterans.

His mother made Otto be good. He says he has never been in a nightclub. He certainly would never behave like his wild Archducal cousins, one of whom kept the terrified occupants of an entire hotel shut in their rooms one night as he roared up and down the corridors clad only in a sabre belt and sabre.

One Imperial tradition in the fulfillment of which Otto has disappointed his family is that a ruling Habsburg should marry royal blood. His backers begin to despair of his ever marrying. Once he was exposed to a young, pretty Hungarian Countess. The courtiers left the two pointedly alone in the family's Belgian garden. Shyly and silently Otto walked. Finally he looked at the Countess with his big, soulful brown eyes, relaxed his sullen Habsburg mouth into a smile, asked: "Have you ever considered how industrious ants are?" Industrious but not quite as systematic as an ant, Otto has worked out a plan of restoration. The present war, he says, will end with revolution in Austria, which will spread to Bohemia-Moravia, Slovakia, Poland, the rest of Greater Germany. Then he will form a Danubian Federation--a democratic super-monarchy patterned after Great Britain, embracing Austria, Hungary, Bohemia-Moravia, Poland, Rumania (blithely overlooking well-intrenched Carol II) and Yugoslavia (overlooking the Habsburg-hating Serbs, who touched off World War I by murdering Otto's granduncle Archduke Franz Ferdinand). Otto places great hopes for backing in the U. S., where his unimposing brother Archduke Felix has been propagandizing his cause since last November.

Last week Otto, as the "Duc de Bar," flew from Lisbon to the U. S. on "a pleasure tour." He was reported to have made only one business appointment (J. P. Morgan) and to have accepted only one invitation (from the refugee Legitimist Austro-American League). He rather hopes to meet Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He said all he wanted was some sober fun, but his sympathizers, consisting principally of a few threadbare exiles who hang out in a Manhattan restaurant with a zither for Habsburg atmosphere, thought he would: 1) drum up sentiment for his Danubian Federation; 2) go to Canada to form the nucleus of an Austrian Legion at whose head he would some day ride to Imperial glory.

Far more self-conscious than the Austro-Hungarian colony in the U. S. are the White Russians. Some 12,000 of them pine for restoration of a Tsar in the person of Grand Duke Vladimir, son of Grand Duke Cyril. The Whites boast a few great and a few notorious names--Sergei Koussevitzky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Igor Sikorsky, Prince Matchabelli, Vadim Makaroff, the marrying Mdivanis. Mostly they have spent the last 22 years toasting the old days. Though White legitimists protest that they would support a Tsar only if he were called back by the people of Russia, and though the Soviet's muzhiks and rabotniks (peasants and workers) have so far given no hint that such an invitation might be forthcoming, Russia's war against Finland has given Whites all over the world new hope. In January tall, hawk-faced Boris Sergievsky, Russian aviator in World War I and now one of the best test pilots in the U. S., sounded the Whites' battle cry: "We who did not flee from Russia but only retreated, our weapons in our hands, are ready now to return." Up to last week the challenge had had only two results: White Russians everywhere lifted champagne to their lips and drank to the challenge, and in Paris last week the price of pre-Soviet Russian bonds jumped 300% in value--from 5.6-c- to 20-c-. They still had quite a way to go to reach their pre-Soviet par value: $100.

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