A Perfect Golfer

(See Cover)

There is a descendant of Charlemagne, Lucrezia Borgia, Mary Queen of Scots, William the Silent, Vladimir of Russia, Geoffrey Chaucer, Pierre de Ronsard, Diane de Poitiers, Agnes Sorel and 1,048,567 other traceable ancestors, who frequently breaks 70 on the golf links. Three years ago he donated a silver cup--La Coupe du Roi des Beiges, for a tournament at Onex, Switzerland--and last year he won the cup himself. This year he reached the quarter finals of the amateur championship in Paris. Other members of the Onex club hail Leopold III, King of the Belgians, as "a perfect golfer."

To many of the King's subjects the King's golf is something to groan over rather than cheer about. It opens a revealing little window on the controversial, headstrong personality whose possible return to the throne has put the Kingdom of the Belgians in a constitutional dither and a cabinet deadlock.

Leopold the golfer acts with his own mind, chooses his own partners, and arranges his own schedule. Leopold the monarch behaved in the same independent way. This, as every student of constitutional monarchy knows, can be dangerous for the state. Certainly, it is not good for a king's popularity. Leopold, for example, just before the Belgian parliamentary elections in which the "royal question" of his return was the prime issue (TIME, July 4), decided without consulting anyone to play in the French international golf tournament. Staunch monarchists winced; the King, they said, ought not to compete with just "anybody." In New York former Belgian Premier Georges Theunis peevishly grumbled: "Ce gamin . . ."

Other political oldtimers brooded over the comedown of the royal line. Said one who had served both Leopold and his beloved father, mountain-climbing Albert I: "Leopold has the same passion for golf that Albert had for Alpinism. The big difference is that Albert would not dream of indulging in his favorite sport when there was state business to be transacted, while Leopold simply will not forgo a game of golf."

Those who do not care for blue blood mixed with ordinary red remember dourly how the King's golf led him to his second wife, the commoner Mary Liliane Baels. She used to wait for Leopold at the 18th hole at Le Zoute on the North Sea, a tony resort, but not too tony for nouveaux riC,hes. Like her royal husband, she is a topnotch golfer, plays the Onex course under 80, has twice held the Club de Geneve women's championship. Though she is merely the daughter of a newly rich fish merchant, the King has bestowed on her the title Princess de Rethy.

A Practical Kingdom. The argument over Leopold's return, his taste in wives and golf partners, has nothing to do with the kingship as such. Belgians overwhelmingly want their monarch. A practical people, they know that he serves a very practical purpose--the symbolic link binding them together as a nation.

Belgians have again & again come together to fight foreign oppressors--French, Spanish, Dutch, Austrian, German. This week, for instance, Belgium commemorates in its great national holiday (July n) the Battle of the Golden Spurs, fought victoriously in 1302 outside Courtrai by a rabble of Belgian artisans and peasants against the French nobility. Seven hundred golden spurs, from slain French knights, were carried from the battlefield to Courtrai Cathedral as a thank offering.

Such intermittent unity against oppressors, however, did not burgeon into nationhood. Belgium did not become an independent state until 1830, and then it was more as a result of British policy than because of internal cohesion. Today the Belgian population is divided into two very different parts: the Flemish-speaking people (51%) who live in the north, and the French-speaking Walloons (43%) in the south. The King of the Belgians is supposed to stand above the social-political, north-south tug. He is the constitutional mortar without which the two parts of the Belgian house might fall apart.

A Commonsensical Crisis. A calm, commonsensical people, the Belgians last week took their constitutional crisis in characteristic stride. In Brussels, the pro-Leopold Catholic, or Social Christian, party had failed to form a cabinet after a fortnight of dickering with the Liberals and Socialists.The two lesser parties would not accept the Catholic plan for a national advisory plebiscite on the King's return.

At week's end everybody agreed that the crisis could not be resolved immediately. So everybody sensibly packed up for a weekend out of town. Half a dozen top

Catholics and Liberals went to Paris for a holiday. Armed with overnight bags, Socialist leaders gulped down a quick Saturday morning breakfast of coffee and hot buns in the Patisserie du Peuple (a party cooperative restaurant, cafeteria-style), then hurried through an executive meeting. By noon they were off to the seaside. Regent Charles, who is acting King until the issue of elder brother Leopold is settled, drove to the Ardennes Forest.

A Healthy Economy. One reason for Belgian calm, even if there is no cabinet at the helm, is the relatively healthy state of the country's economy. True, the boom of 1945-48 has vanished. Some industry, notably leather goods, is falling off sharply. Yet total production is still 22.7% above the 1936-38 average.

Unemployment numbers 200,000, or about 14% of the total potential working force. But one of the world's most generous social-security systems cushions the jobless--in fact, even encourages them. A worker need be on the job only six weeks to qualify for up to 50% of pay benefits for an indefinite period. As a result, many women have been taking six-week jobs, then getting themselves fired to enjoy the benefits of unemployment. Some on the insurance rolls are known to have full-time jobs across the border in France.

In Brussels, that solid center of bourgeois comfort, a goodly number of Rolls-Royces, Bugattis and Delahayes swing up before the swank shops on the Rue Royale. Department stores are jammed. All classes eat hearty and live well. Workmen's wages buy almost as much as in 1939.

So sound and sensible is Belgium that only the complex personalities of Leopold and his family could have led the nation into its present intense, but not panicky, concern with the "royal question."

Father's Curriculum. A proper constitutional monarch is the product of infinitely painstaking grooming and conditioning. To Albert I, a model of Belgian commonsense,* it seemed that a bourgeois nation ought to have bourgeois princes. He instructed the tutors of his three children (Leopold, Charles and Marie-Jose) accordingly:

"I do not wish that my children shall love horses or hunting. Fishing, if they must [Charles is the family's fisherman]. They must do sports, gymnastics, swimming, tennis. They should have a practical knowledge of all things and be brought up as sons of the bourgeois, children of the people [only Charles even remotely qualifies; he is fond of working over broken-down automobiles and has earned the popular title 'Prince in Overalls'].

"Develop in them a sense of observation. Give them each day lessons on things that they may come to know, plants, animals and, above all, people [Leopold singularly failed here]. They must be courageous [all are]. They must remember many names. I do not wish that their memories should fail them. This pains people and it must not happen.

"Demand of them strict punctuality [Charles once bawled out officials who were late opening a voting booth] . . . They must work hard [Leopold does; Charles, after a lighthearted beginning, turned more diligent]. They must bring to me personally their weekly reports and speak to me of them. They will be rewarded or punished accordingly."

Sons' Natures. Despite father Albert's memorable instructions, the tutors could not control human temperament. Leopold and Charles were two different natures, reacting differently to the roles history and birth thrust upon them.

From the beginning, Leopold was the strong individualist rather than the submissive figurehead to which a constitutional monarch must aspire. When the Germans invaded Belgium in 1914, his father packed him and Charles off to England. Leopold spent his winters at Eton. During the summers he served as a private with the 12th Infantry Regiment in a reserve sector of the Western Front.

A Brussels tobacco-shop clerk, Pierre Mouillard, who was also a private in the 12th, recalls: "He wasn't a bad little soldier, lots less stiff and proud than he later became. His best friend, I remember, was a Corporal Loriot, a Charleroi miner, who was a pretty extreme Socialist for those days. They got to be friends one day when the petit prince forgot his canteen and Loriot let him drink out of his. After that Loriot was always pulling him out of holes he fell into or teaching him how to swear the way they do in the Charleroi pits."

After the war, Leopold continued his military education. A fellow officer of those days remembers: "He was always very cool and reserved. We would get into discussions about anything from a bridge hand to the value of a certain weapon over a given terrain. We'd all hotly advance our opinions and rather expect to be hotly contradicted. Not Leopold. He would listen awhile, then suddenly hand down his judgment, and that was that. He would turn on his heel and walk away."

The officer continued: "Later on, when he was a colonel, I watched senior generals grind their teeth over the same kind of show. I'm not saying that Leopold's judgments were stupid; some, in fact, were very clever. But if you are an under-age colonel on war games and a general objects to your line of reasoning, you really ought to pay some attention. Lord knows Leopold has proved over & over again that he can, with the most precise logic, reason himself into some very stupid situations."

The same officer remembered Charles as a convivial comrade who expressed his opinions tentatively. In the messes he invented new drinks, accompanied by learned lectures on the glorious history of the various ingredients put into them. The morning after a late night of too many inventions, he would not only apologize to the officer of the guard but also to the palace concierge.

Dynastic Reasons. With father Albert and mother Elisabeth, Leopold went abroad on extensive travels. U.S. newsmen dubbed him "King Pokerface," noted his serious curiosity (sample: "Why do they call Ford cars Tin Lizzies?"). In the Sudan, Congo and East Indies, he studied colonial administration, wrote painstaking reports. He courted and won as bride the beautiful Princess Astrid of Sweden. He would pack a small bag, take a third-class coach from Brussels, suddenly pop up on the Swedish coast and head for the home of his blonde princess.

When Astrid docked at Antwerp aboard a Swedish warship, she raced down the gangway plank. Leopold charged up from the pier. They met in a wild embrace that sent a hundred thousand onlookers into a roar of approval. Within six months of the wedding, Astrid's popularity in the country rivaled that of her father-in-law, the King. She loved people and had a warm human touch. Leopold had chosen as wisely as any bourgeois nation could wish.

Charles, meanwhile, was in the shade. His easy way of taking a drink before lunch drew sniffs from Leopold, who still refuses even coffee, and sips wine only to be sociable. Charles' failure to take the royal business too seriously brought frowns from his father. He was sent, for example, to Paris to represent Belgium at the funeral of Poincare. He got to Paris, but somehow missed the funeral.

In his bachelor quarters at the Royal Palace in Brussels, the younger brother installed a small machine shop as a hobby. He kept fast sport cars, played the organ, collected modern paintings ("What I look for is the human quality").

More Responsibilities. One day in 1934, father Albert, an ardent mountain-climber, fell to his death from a cliff near Namur. A year and a half later the new King Leopold was motoring with Queen Astrid near Lucerne, he at the wheel and she with a map in her lap. When his wife asked a question, the monarch leaned over and the car swerved. It plunged down a grassy slope, hit two trees and fell into the lake. The Queen fractured her skull, died 20 minutes later. The King hurtled through the car's windshield. To the first policeman who came by asking his identity, he answered in a dazed voice: "Rethy, Mr. & Mrs. Rethy" (the name often used by the royal family when traveling).

Without his father's counsel and his Queen's popular touch, Leopold began to get himself into stupid situations. He insisted on writing his own speeches about colonial policy and economic affairs. Politicians groused that in England the constitutional monarch left speeches to his ministers. Leopold antagonized Parliament by refusing to grant its members the customary honors and titles.

He dressed down his ministers publicly and created a serious cabinet crisis by talking of firing them for a group of "technicians" who would carry out the royal policy. "Responsibilities are in wrong places," he complained. "The head of state is often obliged to sanction decisions in which he has no part."

He even made his own foreign policy. After Germany's remilitarization of the Rhineland, he led in scrapping the old alliance with Britain and France for a new policy of neutrality.

To Rule or Reign. Leopold's biggest mistake was his conviction about the outcome of World War II. In March 1940 he told a visitor: "I am as anti-Hitler as you are. But keep in mind that Germany will win the war." The King seemed right when the German army engulfed Belgium after 18 hopeless days of resistance. He refused to follow his government to exile in England. He surrendered his army. In both these actions he showed his stubborn will to rule rather than reign.

Leopold's case has been summed up by wartime Premier Hubert Pierlot. "The King is not a traitor," he wrote in 1947. "We have never doubted his good intentions. There is nothing unconstitutional in a King's being wrong, provided he follows the advice of his government. In this case, his ministers take the responsibility for his acts. But the King has acted on his own against the advice of his government . . . What is even more serious, he refrained from informing his ministers of his intentions ... A minister who bears the responsibility has a right to know the intentions of his King."

Private Affair. The Germans interned Leopold in the royal chateau at Laeken. He regarded himself as a prisoner of war, refused to exercise royal functions. He visited Hitler at Berchtesgaden; his purpose, he later said, was to get better treatment for the Belgians. It was at Laeken, in September 1941, that he married Mary Liliane Baels.

Unlike Britain's Edward VIII, Leopold did not discuss with his ministers the question of his marriage to a commoner. He called it a "private" affair. The marriage was morganatic; i.e., neither Mary Liliane nor any of her children could aspire to royal standing. Leopold had the church's blessing; his good friend Joseph Cardinal van Roey performed the ceremony.

The Baels were of humble Flemish fisherfolk stock right up to the time of Mary Liliane's father. A self-made man, Henri Baels won a scholarship at Louvain University, became a lawyer and Ostend politician. His big break occurred in World War I. He was assigned to ferry prominent Ostend citizens to England lest the Germans seize them as hostages. He did so, stayed on in England (where Mary Liliane was born), took charge of the refugee Ostend fishing fleet, spent a profitable war. Afterward, he stood off lawsuits by fishing fleet owners, bought boats of his own, branched lucratively into resort real estate, re-entered politics and eventually became governor of West Flanders.

Henri Baels built himself an estate at elegant Le Zoute. Since Leopold and Astrid had also bought land there, it was inevitable that the two families should meet. For a time the King's three children played with the Baelses' Mary Liliane.

When Astrid died, the Baels girl was 23 and maturing into a tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty. She was fun-loving and flirtatious. She had the complexion of a rose, said one admirer, and the build of a Venus. People spoke of her as "a woman who has a gift for stirring men up and who is perfectly aware of it." Says one who knew her in those days: "There were many roosters always around that chick, each, vigilantly eyeing the other. Naturally, they all beat a hasty retreat when the big rooster entered the game."

The lonely widower King began noticing Mary Liliane at Le Zoute. She played golf with him;, was always around to congratulate him or condole over his score. The King asked her to be governess to his children, installed her at Laeken. She was waiting for him there when he came home from the wars in 1940.

Obedient Regent. Like Leopold, brother Charles stayed in Belgium. He was silent when Mary Liliane's sister Lydie gushed over Naziism's "beautiful aspects." He dismissed a music teacher who had broadcast for the Germans. He refused to see his sister, Princess Marie-Jose, who had married Italy's Crown Prince Umberto, when she came to visit. She had stopped off to see the ruins of Fort Eben-Emael, still sickly sweet with the smell of rotting Belgian bodies killed by the Germans. (Marie-Jose is now going blind--a curse, Belgians say, for looking on Eben-Emael out of curiosity.)

When the exile cabinet in London ordered him underground, Charles obeyed. He disappeared, hiding out as an itinerant charcoal vendor until the Allied liberators arrived. Since the Nazis had taken Leopold into captivity in Germany, Charles was elected Regent. He loyally proclaimed: "I am awaiting the hour when [King Leopold] will again take over the high constitutional powers that belong to him."

That was almost five years ago, and Charles is still waiting. Pro-Leopoldists have accused him again & again of usurping his brother's power. Charles has answered by going into virtual seclusion. Such tasks of royalty as the laying of cornerstones have fallen into the hands of Queen Mother Elisabeth, now 72, an eccentric patron of Communist art exhibits.

Hill of the Highnesses. Leopold and Mary Liliane are waiting, too. Four years ago, after a nonstop drive from Austria, they arrived at Le Reposoir, a greystone mansion near Geneva, Switzerland. (The upkeep is $7,500 a year rent, plus wages for six servants, two secretaries.) They dream of a return to Brussels, and Le Reposoir lends itself to such dreams. Built in the 18th Century, it is nicknamed le coteau des altesses--the hill of the highnesses. Among others who have lived there and dreamed of lost diadems were Louis Bonaparte's Queen Hortense and Napoleon's Empress Josephine.

Leopold's household includes the three children of Astrid--Princess Josephine-Charlotte, 21, Crown Prince Baudouin, 18, Prince Albert, 15--and Mary Liliane's son, Alexandre, 7. It is an affectionate family circle. To the stepchildren, Mary Liliane is a gay, smiling maman.

Leopold generally gets up before 8, takes a short walk around the estate, or a quick dip in the lake. Then he reads his mail, confers with his secretaries. His meals are moderate; he takes little meat, likes vegetables and fruit, drinks mineral water or fruit juices.

Delegations from Belgium drop in to see him quite often. Word reached Brussels last week that the King was telling callers he now felt dubious about a plebiscite on his return. It might divide his people, politically and geographically, by deepening the division between Flemings (who tend to support the King) and Walloons (who distrust his alleged pro-Flemish sympathies). Leopold, said one report, favored a solution that would allow him to return to Brussels with honor vindicated and constitution upheld, then abdicate in favor of his son Baudouin.

Sounding the Parties. At home in Belgium, the Catholics' sharp Paul van Zeeland, as Premier-designate after the recent election, sounded out the other parties for a coalition whose foremost task would be to hold a plebiscite on the royal question. The Socialists, led by able Paul-Henri Spaak, rejected Van Zeeland's proposals, ordered their powerful trade unions to prepare for a general strike. Led by Roger Motz, the Liberals also rejected the Catholic proposal. The Communists and their bosses such as Edgard Lalmand were not consulted. They have been steadily fading as a factor in Belgian politics, and nobody consults them these days.

Stopped cold, Van Zeeland stepped out. Regent Charles next asked a less ardent Leopoldist Catholic, Frans van Cauwelaert, to sound out the parties. This time the Socialists cautiously thought they might accept if certain stiff conditions were met: 1) a public statement of charges against the King and his defense; 2) requirement of a 70-75% majority in the plebiscite before the King could return; 3) if the King fails of this majority, he must abdicate.

Reading Histories. While this bargaining over his royal personality was going on, Leopold was catching up on some reading. One day last week, his tall blond figure clad in grey jacket, flannel trousers and narrow-brimmed green felt hat, he motored in his Bugatti sport car to a big Geneva bookstore. He came away with Nehru's Glimpses of World History, Churchill's Their Finest Hour and Laski's American Democracy.

What he would have liked best was a game of golf. Neither the King nor Mary Liliane has played the fine 18-hole course at Onex in recent weeks. "Undoubtedly," says the regretful club secretary, "the political situation in Belgium keeps them away."

* Of his role as warrior-king in World War I, Albert once wrote to France's famed Marshal Joffre: "I listened to the generals and it seemed to me a great responsibility to decide between their different plans, so I would just pick out the one that I thought made the most sense."

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