Grand Hotel

ATHENE PALACE--Countess Waldeck---McBrlde ($2.75).

The Countess Waldeck takes current history out of the funeral parlor and puts it into the Grand Hotel. Her book is as perversely engrossing, gossipy and gamy as a clandestine conversation in the lobby. Her Grand Hotel is the Athene Palace in Bucharest, "the last cosmopolitan stage on which post-World-War Europe and the new-order Europe made a joint appearance." Theme of her book is the murder of a nation--Rumania.

For this sensational subject the subtle and shrewd Countess Waldeck is almost the ideal reporter. When she was Frau Dr. Ullstein in 1930, she was the storm center of a sensational Berlin spy trial involving the once-great Ullstein publishing house. Later, as plain Rosie Goldschmidt, she wrote (under the initials R.G.) Prelude to the Past, in which she described with unusual candor the Ullstein affair and one or two of her own. Still later she married the Hungarian Count Waldeck, a marriage in which friendship and German passport considerations were deftly blended. She is now in Manhattan.

The Countess checked in at the Athene Palace the day Paris fell. She found the hotel swarming with "spies of every Intelligence Service in the world; the diplomats and military attaches of great and little powers; British and French oil men on their way out, and German and Italian oil men on their way in; Gestapo agents and Ovra agents and OGPU agents, or men who were at least said to be agents; amiable Gauleiters and hardheaded economic experts; distinguished Rumanian appeasers and mink-clad German and Austrian beauties who were paid to keep them happy. ... As the drama of bloodless German conquest later on drew to its bitter end, the old order dropped out of the play. Then wild-eyed greenshirt dignitaries, catapulted into power from a concentration camp, would make their debut in the lobby. Hopeful Axis businessmen would swarm here to buy themselves a Jewish department store or a mine for practically nothing. German generals, quiet and scholarly, would talk here of their old campaigns and think up new ones. At one time or another Franz von Papen, Hitler's ambassador to Ankara . . . would rest in the lobby. . . . Suave Dr. Clodius, Hitler's economic wizard, would recover his breath here after endless discussions with General Antonescu. . . . Even Frau Himmler, wife of the Gestapo chief, looking like Elsa Maxwell, came and ate big portions of whipped cream."

Spats & Monocles. But, for the Countess, the deathbed atmosphere of Rumania was best typified by the "Old Excellencies." There were two of these strange creatures in the lobby of the Athene Palace, "a kind of token force of a large army of some 700 living Rumanian former cabinet ministers, and of innumerable diplomats and generals." Wearing white linen spats and monocles, they sat at their table in the lobby from noon until midnight, studying "women's points." One Old Excellency had "the face of a sick greyhound." The other, "grey-haired and heavy-eyed," had a pointed beard like that of the late Rumanian premier, Ion Bratianu. They were wicked and pornographic old men, who always thought the worst about everybody, "with the distinction that they never thought the worst of the worst.

"That every lady had a price was a foregone conclusion . . . but only from 20,000 leis up did they consider her a lady. It was the same with the politicians . . . if they were expensive enough they could be considered statesmen."

Once the Excellencies introduced the Countess to a deferential man who had "the face of a seal and breathed very loudly through his short nose." The old men were very cordial while the seal kissed the Countess' hand with "very moist lips." But as soon as he moved on, Bratianu-beard said: "Voila le gigolo le phis dangereux de Bucharest." All his friends in high Rumanian society knew, said the Old Excellencies, that "he lived on women and blackmail" and "worked for Moruzov's Secret Police." Nearly everybody in the Athene Palace worked for Moruzov, they said, from waiters and washroom attendants to "the apple-cheeked page boys . . . and, of course, the demimondaines who sat professionally in the lobby." Warned Bratianu-beard, "Watch your step, Madame, and confide in nobody except in us." Said the Grey hound: "Nous sommes les seules personnes discretes a Bucharest."

The Countess wondered what indiscreet Bucharestians were like. But just then the Old Excellencies bowed to an "extraordinary dark beauty" who was slipping off her sables. "That," whispered the Greyhound, "is the friend of the German and the Hungarian and the Italian ministers. They all pay her for telling them what Udareanu [Carol's court chamberlain] does. And Udareanu pays her to tell him what the ministers are up to. The perfect arrangement."

Then there were the Germans. There was Gauleiter Conradi who had the head of a later Antonine on a body paralyzed from the waist down. He seldom got out of bed, but he knew everything and was dreaded by all Germans from the German minister to the charwoman at the legation -"the only difference being that the minister was more afraid than the charwoman."

There was Dr. Neubacher, German minister plenipotentiary for economic affairs in the Balkans. He had been mayor of Vienna when the Nazis made the Jews clean the streets, liked to call himself an old revolutionary. Of Nazi aims in Rumania, Dr. Neubacher told the Countess: "We have only one aim, and that is to keep quiet in the raw-material sphere."

There was also Frau Edit von Coler. She lived at the Athene Palace, but never gave people more than a glimpse as she whisked across the lobby or drove down the Calea Victoriei in her "long grey Mercedes." Rumor said that she was Himmler's sister and a modern Mata Hari. Says the Countess Waldeck: "Mata Hari and her sisters were dumbbells in an era when bare skin was supposed to make generals lose their heads. . . . [Frau von Coler] was not Hitler's spy, but a Hitler propagandist. . . . And to make friends and influence people," adds the Countess authoritatively, "[is] a propagandist's business."

Part of Frau von Coler's business was to "find out trends and moods in influential circles, and the character, beliefs and weak spots of decisive figures in politics." She also opened a chicken farm on the outskirts of Bucharest, a "blood and soil" touch that brought her into earthy contact with agricultural Rumanians. In her spare time ("It certainly seemed no sinecure to be Hitler's agent") she threw parties for the "right" people.

Kultur Cardinal. At one such party the Countess met a Nazi Kultur-attache, "a thin, aristocratic Austrian" with "the face of a young 16th-Century cardinal, who now and then delivered a heretic to the stakes without fanaticism and without pity. ..." The cardinal glanced over at the sofa where Frau von Coler sat between "[a] Rumanian newspaper owner who looked like Haile Selassie, and the former Minister of Finance, who looked like a pasty-faced Rumanian. . . ." Said the cardinal, "Dear Edit has her hands full. . . . Until a few weeks ago all these Rumanians were pro-French, and we know it. Now they want desperately to be on the winning side, but feel embarrassed about switching so rapidly. Dear Edit has to convince them that they have been pro-German all their lives. . . . She is wonderful at such things."

Thereafter the Countess found the Count with the cardinal's face wherever she went. People warned her that he was a Gestapo agent. Once she asked him: "Do you watch me or do you just love me?" "He threw up his long, elegant hands in the exaggerated gesture of Bernini's saints and complained, 'Oh, don't go literal on me!' " They had great talks together. The Count told her the reason why the Graf Spee was scuttled and Captain Landsdorf killed himself. The reason: Landsdorf scuttled the Graf Spee on Hitler's personal order. Later it turned out that the British faked the order.

The Count also talked about the U.S. press ("He would discuss by the hour the relative merits of Mr. Bliven of the New Republic and Miss Kirchwey of the Nation"); about Jews ("Do you know, there is not one of us who has not a Gershwin record in the bottom of a drawer which he plays sometimes late at night?"); about a famous German beauty whose loyalty to Hitler was in question ("One more picture of her for Vogue . . ." said the Count, "then off with her to Dachau for life!").

Then there were the Rumanians. There was tall, dark, mystical Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, founder of the greenshirted Iron Guard. Carol's police had shot Codreanu before the Countess arrived at the Athene Palace, but his influence was everywhere. There was General Ion Antonescu, Rumania's Conducator (fuehrer), for whose incorruptibility the Countess has great respect. There was Ernest Udareanu, all-powerful court chamberlain, who was said to powder and rouge, and whom young Prince Michael used to call "Murdareanu" (filth). There was King Carol, whom his subjects used to call "Mr. Popescu" (Rumanian for Mr. Big) when they discussed kicking him out.

"Popescu must go," the hairdresser at the Athene Palace told the Countess, "and she must be quartered." She was Elena (Magda) Lupescu, who followed Wife No. 1, Zizi Lambrino, and Wife No. 2, Queen Helen, in Carol's diversified domestic life. No matter how often he strayed, Carol always returned to Magda's motherly care. Said the Old Excellencies: "C'est une artiste." Says the Countess: "One is tempted to believe that here was real love." She adds that "any $50-a-week American publicity man could have saved Carol's throne . . . and could have saved Lupescu all along."

The Countess stayed on at the Athene Palace during the seven great crises that completely shattered the "quiet of the Rumanian raw-material sphere," and left the Countess wondering whether the Nazis were as clever as she thought. The seven crises were: 1) the Russian seizure of Bessarabia; 2) the Hungarian seizure of Transylvania; 3) the Bulgarian seizure of the Dobruja; 4) King Carol's abdication; 5) the Iron Guard revolution and blood bath; 6) the earthquake; 7) the German occupation. The Countess has left a vivid picture of that year of Nazi terror, intensified by the terror of the trembling earth itself.

She has also left a picture of a less obvious kind of terror. The Nazis murder states, and the blow is swift and stunning. But the conquered populations survive. The special nightmare quality of their living death, which the Countess catches with unconscious clarity, is that of the captive caterpillar which the wasp stings and numbs but does not kill, so that its larvae may have living tissues on which to feed.

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