ATHENE PALACE—Countess Waldeck—-McBrlde .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 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.
