The Fond Collector

The singsong chant of an auctioneer rang through the gilded, tapestried halls of Cairo's Kubbeh Palace last week, sounding the end of one of the most expensive and generally useless collections of gimcrackery ever assembled. Like a royal pack rat, ex-King Farouk had cached everything he could beg, buy and demand--tiny telescopes with diamond sprays, priceless relics of Pharaonic culture, a 100blade knife, an outstanding coin collection, a Nazi marshal's gaudy baton. Egypt's revolutionary regime was putting all of it--treasure and trash--on the block in a six-week sale. It was the biggest mass merchandising of such bric-a-brac in nearly two centuries. Egypt needs the money for a hydroelectric dam and for land reform.

The auctioneer began by offering Farouk's mountain of stamps, one of the most important collections ever sold publicly. Sixty expert philatelists from all over the world bid briskly with a jerk of the thumb, a murmur in any of half a dozen languages, which the auctioneer swiftly understood. Said the buyer for America's Gimbels department-store chain: "The early part of the collection of Farouk's father shows the care and feeling that marks the collector. But Farouk's contribution is just a mixed-up accumulation." Added a European dealer who used to sell to Farouk: "He was a very good customer. But he was a sucker. He often paid too much."

Thousands of Egyptians paid 50 piasters ($1.40) apiece to gawk at the other items of the King's ransom displayed in the palace library. They saw a solid gold, 11-in. replica of the Suez lighthouse, a diamond-encrusted fly-whisk handle. An 18-carat gold bottleholder (still holding a bottle of Pepsi-Cola) stood near one of

Faberge's famed intricate Easter eggs, which Russia's Czar Nicholas II used to present to his czarina. A 3-in.-long golden magician box asked questions at the press of a button, answered them to music. Q. "What lasts for too short a time?" A. "Love." The last time such a collection went on the block, so had the head of its owner, Louis XVI of France.

John Synge (of London's Sotheby & Co., the Egyptian government's appraisers), who spent eleven months evaluating Farouk's mound of gimmicks, had wound up making an amateur's psychoanalysis of the King himself, whom he had never met. "Farouk had an absolute passion for completion," he said. "He loved costly little machines that would work. He preferred small objects he could carry and fondle. He was a child in many ways."

In exile, Playboy Farouk last week gave a royal brushoff to a bill collector who wanted to collect on a $5,000 underwear bill, and drove off to Monte Carlo in a station wagon with his latest collector's item, brunette Irma Capece Minutolo, aged 18.

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