Lupescu: The Story of a Royal Love Affair

By Alice-Leone Moats

In 2003, the coffins of King Carol II and Princess Elena of Romania were repatriated to their native Romania from the resting place in exile in Portugal. This book recounts the story of Magda Lupescu, the red haired courtesan, who would become the wife of King Carol and future princess of Romania. Their affair had rocked the monarchy and all of Europe after the tumult of the First World War. The reign of King Carol was mired in intrigue and subterfuge amid the right wing surge in Germany and Central Europe, he was forced to abdicate and flee as the Second World War began. Elena and Carol travelled to South America in exile, before returning to Europe and settling in Portugal after World War Two ended.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Release date: May 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839745362

Alice-Leone Moats

Born in Mexico in 1915 as the only child of wealthy and prominent American parents, Alice-Leone Moats was educated at Manhattan’s Brearley School and the Fermata School for Girls in Aiken, South Carolina, and was admitted to Oxford University, where she spent three days. As a young woman, Moats, fluent in five languages, danced in debutante balls and mingled with high society. Moats was commissioned to author No Nice Girl Swears in 1933, which met great acclaim and marked the beginning of her illustrious writing career. She later published prolifically as a foreign correspondent for Collier’s magazine in Japan, China, and the former Soviet Union, and was a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Over her lifetime, Moats authored nine books. She died in Philadelphia in 1989 at the age of eighty-one.

Book preview

© Barakaldo Books 2020, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

LUPESCU

BY

ALICE-LEONE MOATS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

FOREWORD 5

1 8

2 11

3 14

4 18

5 21

6 24

7 28

8 32

9 35

10 48

11 52

12 56

13 61

14 65

15 69

16 73

17 77

18 81

19 86

20 90

21 94

22 98

23 103

24 107

25 110

26 115

27 119

28 122

29 127

30 130

31 133

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 137

FOREWORD

My first meeting with Madame Lupescu took place in 1942 when she and King Carol of Rumania were living as exiles in Mexico City. The meeting has remained vivid in my memory because of an incident that shed a most revealing light on the celebrated royal mistress and her methods of operation.

We happened to be fellow guests at a small luncheon party where a man who had just arrived from New York that morning handed Lupescu a letter entrusted to him by her cousin, Madame Voronoff, the wife of the monkey-gland specialist. In those war years mail was held up by censorship and I assumed the letter must contain urgent news since the effort had been made to save a delay of several days by persuading an ordinarily law-abiding American to smuggle it out of the United States. The eager expression on Madame Lupescu’s face confirmed this supposition and I expected her to excuse herself and retire into the garden to read what her cousin had written. Instead, she remained with the rest of us through the half-hour cocktail interval, laughing and chatting, but her manner was absent-minded and she kept twisting the envelope in nervous fingers.

The moment we sat down at table, she leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes, and announced in a weak voice that she was about to faint. King Carol and my father leaped to their feet and gallantly carried the swooning lady into the sitting room where they deposited her inert form on a sofa. By the time they returned from this errand of mercy, our hostess was staring sadly at the cheese soufflé which had fallen too flat to be worth serving.

There had been something about the fainting fit that struck me as unconvincing and while the others were listening to Carol’s account of how his delicate Elena often frightened him by keeling over for no apparent reason, I slipped off to peek into the next room. Madame Lupescu was sitting up on the sofa, avidly reading her letter.

After that, I saw her and the King very often, at their house or mine, at the houses of members of the British and American colonies, at diplomatic functions and charity affairs. I remember one occasion in particular when she arrived at a formal dinner looking breathtakingly lovely. She was very thin just then and the white satin dress she wore clung in all the right places; her red hair gave off golden glints where the light struck it, and her pale skin reflected the iridescent gleam of the enormous pear-shaped pearls that hung from her ears. That night it was possible to understand why she had gained a reputation as a great beauty.

She and Carol left Mexico in 1944. I did not see them again until 1949, after they had taken up residence in Portugal. By then they were married and she had been elevated to the rank of Princess. As I was writing a newspaper article about the King, I concentrated my attention on him, going off into corners for long private conversations in which he gave me his version of adventures in the roles of ruling monarch and hero of a highly publicized love affair. However, I also spent several hours in Princess Elena’s company—at a concert, at her villa, where I was invited to a dinner party that included the former King of Italy, at my hotel where she and Carol lunched with me and she told stories of an obscenity that left my other guest, an elderly French newspaperman, gasping for breath.

Carol died four years later. His widow set up such a lament about her poverty that it seemed probable she would consider writing her memoirs in order to escape utter penury. I made another trip to Portugal to discuss the possibility of ghosting the book. Under normal circumstances, ghosting is work that I refuse, but these were not normal circumstances: the job promised to be too entertaining and too lucrative to pass up.

For two months the Princess and I talked over the project without reaching an accord as to the modus operandi of our collaboration. Whenever an issue of any kind arose, she would evade it on the plea that she could make no decisions without the consent of Ernesto Urdareanu, the late King’s Chamberlain. He, on the other hand, repeatedly assured me that he could do nothing at all with the Princess who had definite and unshakable views on every subject.

The New York editor who was interested in buying the Lupescu memoirs had stated quite firmly that he would consider nothing less than the whole story, and as soon as I tried to gather enough material for an outline, it became evident that the whole story was precisely what the Princess would never be prepared to tell. Interviewing her was like interviewing Trilby, for Urdareanu was always present and she wouldn’t answer a question until she had glanced over at him and received his signal of approval. Some questions she simply refused to answer, arguing, We don’t want to give an editor too much information, or he will steal it and write the book himself. Any attempt to make her understand that such editorial practices are not common in the United States only produced a weary shrug of the shoulders and a pitying shake of the head that expressed how sorry she felt for me as a poor, innocent lamb, silly enough to trust wolves. Other questions—particularly those having to do with politics—sent a visible thrill of alarm through her and the Chamberlain. They were both set in their determination that the book should contain no mention whatsoever of politics.

Finally I came to the conclusion that I was wasting time and I left Portugal. At the end of two months I knew no more about Madame Lupescu’s past than before our numerous conferences, but I had gained a greater insight into her character than would ever have been possible in a purely social relationship. Still, I couldn’t fathom the reasons for her indecision, her evasiveness, and her uneasiness when certain aspects of her career were touched upon. Most reporters have a Pinkerton man’s determination to follow a trail to the very end and I am no exception. My instincts and training made it unthinkable to put Madame Lupescu away in the unsolved file and forget her.

Purely to satisfy my own curiosity, I began looking up Rumanians. I made it a point to get in touch with Rumanians wherever I went on my travels around Europe. Gradually I was able to fill in the background and when I realized that I could get all the details necessary for a factual biography, I decided to set to work in earnest. For eighteen months I haunted newspaper morgues in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and England. I read every book I could lay hands on that dealt with Rumanian history or politics. I interviewed nearly two hundred people—Rumanians who had been friends or enemies of Madame Lupescu in her youth and during the period when she reigned in Bucharest as the King’s mistress, diplomats who were stationed there between 1923 and 1940, Rumanian and foreign journalists who had seen Carol and Lupescu in action and could tell me what went on backstage.

What I learned from all these sources seemed worth putting down, not only as a sensational story about a famous courtesan, but also as a sidelight on the important events that led to the destruction of Rumania as a free nation.

Alice-Leone Moats

October, 1955

1

Dressed in deep mourning, her beauty fading while her celebrated red hair grows redder, Elena Lupescu, the last of the great courtesans, leads a quiet, lonely existence in a big white villa at Estoril, in Portugal. Once famous, she now merely wants to be considered socially acceptable, and is determined to obliterate her past under a thick coat of whitewash, or preferably, of gold paint.

What kind of a woman is she? What was her background? How did she meet King Carol? are the three questions that have been asked most often about Madame Lupescu ever since Carol, as Crown Prince, rendezvoused with her in 1925. These same questions are still being asked, not because there haven’t been any answers, but because there have been too many different answers.

At no period in her life has she shown herself eager to tell all, and she long ago evolved an effective cover-up technique of her own. The average person who has something to hide concocts a lie to fit the circumstances, then sticks to it; Madame Lupescu is not the average person. She believes in complicating any issue beyond recognition and would mistrust a mathematician who tried to convince her that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. The system she has worked out consists in burying the truth under a mass of conflicting stories.

During the twenties and the thirties, when she was constantly in the headlines, she tried to avoid publicity and seldom let herself be trapped into giving an interview. However, the people in her entourage were kept busy planting whatever version of an incident she thought appropriate; at the same time, Carol’s opponents attacked him through her by spreading rumors that suited their purposes. Her unwillingness to talk for publication, combined with the gossip of friend and foe and the West’s hazy conception of Rumania as a Near Eastern never-never land, resulted in articles about the central figure in the greatest royal romance of all time that indicated the authors were more gifted with fantasy than with any skill at digging out facts.

The earliest error committed by the press was its use of Magda, a name pinned on her by a reporter who saw her in Milan just as the Carol-Lupescu affair exploded into an international scandal, and stubbornly insisted that she was a circus rider called Magda who had toured Italy a few years previously. Magda was somehow such a suitable name for the girlfriend of a Balkan prince that newspapers all over the world took it up and never dropped it.

After King Carol finally got around to marrying the woman who had been his inseparable companion for nearly a quarter of a century, the announcement that she was in future to be addressed as Her Royal Highness Princess Elena of Rumania let him in for a great deal of criticism, since this was assumed to be a deliberate affront to his former wife, Princess Helen of Rumania. For once, criticism of Carol’s behavior toward the mother of his son was unjustified: it wasn’t he who decided what his bride should be called, but the Court of Appeals of Brazil, the country where the marriage took place. And, as Madame Lupescu was baptized Elena, if she was to be a princess she had to be Princess Elena.

All the confusion surrounding her name is wonderfully typical of the sort of thing that happens to Lupescu. Just as some people are accident-prone, she is absurdity-prone, and only she could have become notorious under an alias borrowed from a bareback rider by a careless newspaperman, then achieved respectability with a royal title conferred by the law courts of a South American republic.

Her Royal Highness Princess Elena of Rumania is a glittering title, but it has less glamour for the public than the name King Carol’s widow went by when she was a commoner, and however much she would prefer to be remembered as a princess, it is as Madame Lupescu that the most fatal of the femmes fatales of our period will go down in history.

By definition, a femme fatale is destructive, and therefore merits a much lower place in the Hall of Fame than, for instance, a Florence Nightingale. Yet, she fascinates the world as the worthy Florence Nightingales never can, partly because she embodies the mystery of sexual attraction, mainly because she possesses the secret of enchanting a lover into the belief that she is worth the sacrifice of everything that most men value. It is this secret that makes her the subject of endless talk and speculation during her lifetime and even long afterward; that sets other women to asking themselves, What has she got that I haven’t? and men to wondering, What has she got that I have never found in a wife or mistress?

When it is a king who falls under the spell of a siren, the force of her charm becomes even more difficult to understand. He casts aside not only family, duty, and honor for the delight of lying in her arms: he also relinquishes his country, his crown, and the respect of his subjects. He rehearses his kingly traditions, sensing he will flout them in the end; he casts envious glances at his reputation, suspecting he will abandon it; he ponders his country’s stability, half-realizing he will jeopardize it; he resists the woman, yet he seems helpless to resist himself.

History’s fallen monarchs have been men of varying backgrounds and temperaments—good rulers and bad, statesmen and philanderers, strong men and weaklings. Similarly, the women who have pulled them off their thrones reveal no common characteristic deadly to kings. They have differed completely in looks and personality motives and mentality; and their peculiar talent for playing ducks and drakes with crowns remains a puzzle.

Each femme fatale has been interesting for her effect on history, but the most interesting in her own right is unquestionably Elena Lupescu. In the first place, she started far down on the social ladder and had a long climb before reaching the palace. She was only one generation removed from the ghetto in a rabidly anti-Semitic country; and even a gypsy fortune-teller might have hesitated to predict that she would one day marry her country’s ruler. But Elena, the hardiest flower of the old-fashioned genus, thrived on barren soil, in an unfriendly climate.

Carol II was among the last of the autocratic kings, and the woman who controlled him might theoretically control the government. So when Elena finally reached a position of influence, her presence was directly and dramatically manifest throughout the land. She kept Rumania in a constant state of turmoil for nearly fifteen years. From 1925 to 1940 she was the center of every storm that shook the nation, and her flamboyant career is made up of episodes that would fit nicely into a Puritanian novel—plots, counterplots, hairbreadth escapes, assassinations, court intrigues, revolutions, royal scandals.

As the temperamental darling of a Balkan king, the heroine of a romance that is a preposterous pastiche of operetta, tragedy, and farce, she has offered an irresistible temptation to professional and amateur weavers of myths. When the imaginations of newspapermen, novelists, friends, and enemies faltered, her own flights of fancy added to the legend. Of the hundreds of stories that have been told and written about her, very few are accurate and, oddly enough, the inventions have seldom been as sensational as the facts. Lupescu’s life is a striking example of just how much stranger truth can be than fiction.

2

Princess Elena of Rumania is very insistent upon receiving the full treatment due to a highness—low bows from men, curtsies from women, the place of honor at dinner tables, and so forth. In assuming her new role, she has taken on many regal mannerisms and even her writing has changed from a square, schoolgirlish hand to the spiky, outsized script affected by queens and opera stars.

Her conversation is studded with references to My dear cousin, Don Juan of Spain, My charming nephew, Prince Hohenzollern. Although Carol was also related to the British royal family, his widow has not yet been heard to speak of My pretty little cousin, Queen Elizabeth. Still, the day may come.

It is apparently not enough that she has acquired so many noble in-laws. She is now beginning to adopt a few countesses and princes as her own aunts and cousins, as well as to pour blue blood into the veins of her real family. Once in a while she grows confused as to their names and present whereabouts, but these lapses of memory don’t seem to trouble her. Whatever she forgets, she expects others to forget, and she would no doubt be very surprised to learn that her memoirs, published in 1927 in the London Sunday News are still in existence, available to anyone who has access to a newspaper morgue.

The autobiography marks one of the few occasions when she broke her rule of having no dealings with the press. In this case it was done because Carol was planning to return to Rumania and it seemed expedient to vindicate the behavior that led to his losing his crown. Obviously ghosted by someone who had trained for the job by seeing how many clichés could be written on the head of a pin, it leads off with, In most cases of true love in false circumstances, it is the woman who pays. I, Hélène Lupescu, am regarded by the world as a common courtesan, an unscrupulous, selfish siren for whose cheap caresses a Prince of the Royal Blood has renounced a throne. For the sake of this man, Carol of Rumania, as well as for my own heart’s justification, I shall write the truth about it.

An editor’s note at the head of the first installment likewise promised the reader that this human document of unforgettable emotion would lay bare the truth about the love and passion that shook a throne and drove a prince into exile. As often happens, the editor’s claims were slightly exaggerated and the truth, far from being laid bare, shows through only occasionally, like brief glimpses of skin through a beggar’s tatters. There are even mistakes in dates that are matters of historical record.

Because of the deep-rooted anti-Semitism that existed in Rumania, people who could easily have forgiven Carol for breaking his marriage vows couldn’t forgive him for selecting a Jewess as his partner