5 People Who Died During Sex: And 100 Other Terribly Tasteless Lists Paperback (19 page)

6

QUEEN MARIA I “THE MAD” OF PORTUGAL

(C. 1777–1816) In 1788, a smallpox epidemic carried away several members of Maria’s immediate family, including her son José. According to legend, the combined shock of these deaths made her violently unstable; she also took to wearing children’s clothes.

7

EMPEROR FERDINAND I OF AUSTRIA

(C. 1835–48) Born hydrocephalic (with water on the brain), he grew up to be a violent epileptic who could barely sign his own name and was otherwise incapable.

His tongue was too big for his mouth—an inherited Habsburg defect—and he found it difficult to string a sentence together. His idea of a good time was to wedge his backside into a wastebasket and roll around the floor in it. In 1848, he was persuaded to abdicate in favor of his eighteen-year-old nephew Franz Joseph and was spirited away from Vienna to a mental institution at Olmutz in Moravia, where he died in his eighty-third year.

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[Ten Monarchs Madder than King George III]

8

KING LUDWIG II OF BAVARIA (C. 1863–86) The most famous son of the House of Wittelsbach, a German royal family with a long tradition of mental instability, Ludwig had two obsessions: an expensive patronage of the composer Richard Wagner and an even more expensive hobby of erecting fantastic mock-medieval castles, which he called his “sick children.” Ludwig tried to fund his building program by sending begging letters to the crowned heads of Europe, then by planning a series of major bank robberies; neither attempt was successful, so in 1873 he tried to “sell” Bavaria. With the treasury in a state of near bankruptcy, the government pronounced the king incurably insane and placed him under house arrest. Ludwig eluded permanent internment by drowning himself in Lake Stern.

9

SULTAN MURAD V (C. 1876) His reign was the briefest of all the Ottoman sultans. Just three months after his accession, Murad, who was alcoholic, obviously unbalanced, and incapable of performing any sort of official function, was quietly locked away after an Austrian doctor and a Turkish court physician jointly signed a document declaring that he was incurably insane.

10

KING OTTO I OF BAVARIA (1848–1916) He

became king when his elder brother Ludwig II (see above) was pronounced insane and removed from the throne. Ironically, Otto was even crazier than the king he replaced, but whereas his older brother had earned notoriety by organizing pan-European bank robberies
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[Ten Monarchs Madder than King George III]

and the undying gratitude of the German tourist industry by building fantastic castles, Otto’s mental illness manifested itself in the less-notable activities of barking like a dog, shouting abuse, and occasionally taking potshots at people through his bedroom window with a rifle. Otto reigned in name only from his cell in Castle Fürstenried, guarded by a few medical attendants for twenty-seven years while his uncle Luitpold took charge of Bavaria as prince-regent.

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10

Uneasy Lies the Head:

Ten Paranoid Rulers

1

EMPEROR QIN SHI HUANGDI (C. 246–210 b.c.) China’s first emperor maintained his rule with a combination of enthusiastic wall-building to keep out his external enemies and removal of the tongues, hands, feet, and genitalia of his enemies within. To ensure that no unfavorable comparisons were made between his own and earlier regimes, he ordered the mass burning of all of China’s history books and decapitated the region’s top 160 academics. The emperor took his paranoia with him to his grave; his giant mausoleum was guarded by eight thousand life-sized terra cotta soldiers to ward off the ghosts of the thousands of people he had wronged in his lifetime.

2

CZAR PAUL I (1796–1801) Morbidly suspicious of democracy and of anything Western European, Paul banned the import of books and censored correspondence with foreigners. He closed down private printing presses and deleted from the Russian dictionary the words

“citizen,” “club,” “society,” and “revolution.” In 1797, he made a law banning modern dress including round hats, top boots, long pants, and shoes with laces, then sent a couple of hundred armed troops onto the streets of St.

Petersburg with orders to attack anyone who didn’t conform to his dress code. He was strangled in a palace coup.

3

KING HENRI CHRISTOPHE OF HAITI (1811–18)

He insisted on drawing attention to his country’s chief export by having himself anointed with chocolate syrup.

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[Ten Paranoid Rulers]

He became obsessed with his personal security and ordered all his bodyguards to prove their loyalty by marching over the edge of a two-hundred-foot cliff to certain death: Those who disobeyed were tortured and executed.

4

JOSÉ GASPAR RODRÍGUEZ DE FRANCIA Y

VELASCO (C. 1818–40) The first of a long line of Paraguayan dictators was constantly haunted by the fear of assassination and created a vast network of spies.

Whenever he went out, no one else was allowed on the streets, and doors and windows of houses had to be shuttered: Anyone caught on the street when he passed had to prostrate himself or risk being put to the sword by his escort of armed cavalry. He had every tree and shrub in Ascuncion removed in case they hid assassins.

Eventually, Francia, as he preferred to be called, became a total recluse, hiding in his palace and attended by just four servants, employing his sister to unroll his cigars to see if they had been tampered with, and communicating with the outside world only through his barber.

5

SULTAN ABDUL HAMID II (C. 1876–1909)

Although protected by a steel-lined fez and a personal bodyguard of several thousand tall Albanians, Abdul “the Damned” considered security at his palaces far too lax and set about building a new, impregnable palace from scratch, with every wall mirrored so that he could see the people around him from any angle, every door lined with steel, and all the rooms connected by secret underground
209

[Ten Paranoid Rulers]

passages that only Abdul Hamid knew about. The sultan always carried a pearl-handled revolver with him. A nervous, jumpy little man, he was a crack shot—a lethal combination. When one of his gardeners made too sudden a bowing movement, Abdul Hamid shot him in the head. The sultan’s greatest phobia was fear of poisoning—his was the only dairy herd in the world with a twenty-four-hour bodyguard. Whenever news reached him of assassination attempts elsewhere in Europe, he banned all mention of them in the press: When the king and queen of Serbia were butchered and then tossed out of a bedroom window in 1903, the Turkish press solemnly reported that they had both died of indigestion.

6

JOSEPH STALIN (C. 1924–53) Stalin ensured his survival by removing all political rivals—in a single day in December 1938, “Uncle Joe” signed 3,182 death warrants. He once became depressed and called on the famous Russian neurologist and psychiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev. The doctor diagnosed “grave paranoia” and advised Stalin to retire immediately. It was the last advice Bekhterev ever gave; arrangements for his funeral were made soon afterward. Stalin was about to launch his biggest leadership purge yet when he was felled by a terminal stroke.

7

KING ZOG OF ALBANIA (1928–39) Having survived an estimated fifty-five assassination attempts, Zog made a point of never appearing in public except on national holidays; as he was well over six feet tall and had red hair,
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[Ten Paranoid Rulers]

he made a conspicuous target in a country where most men were dark and under five feet six. On the very rare occasions when he ventured outside, his mother acted as chaperon, because according to the strict rules of the Albanian blood feud, no man could be harmed if accompanied in public by a woman. His nerves were so frayed that on his wedding day he banned photographers’

flashbulbs, and not once during the ten days of commanded public rejoicing did he or his bride, the Hungarian countess Geraldine Apponyi, dare to appear at the palace window to acknowledge their subjects.

8

ENVER HOXHA, PRESIDENT OF ALBANIA

(1945–85) He lived in fear of joint invasion by “Anglo-American imperialists” and “Russo-Bulgar revisionists.”

In 1950, he ordered the construction of a prototype concrete bunker, complete with a sniper’s gun slit with 360-degree visibility. When the small, mushroom-shaped edifice was complete, he asked the chief engineer if he was confident that it could withstand a full assault from a tank. The man replied in the affirmative. Hoxha then insisted that the engineer stand inside his creation while it was bombarded by a tank. After fifteen minutes the shell-shocked engineer emerged, shaken and deaf, but unscathed. Hoxha was impressed and immediately ordered mass construction of the bunkers. From 1950

until his death in 1985, he built about 800,000 of them, one for every four Albanians, covering the entire countryside and costing from one-third to one-half of his
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[Ten Paranoid Rulers]

nation’s pitifully small resources. No one invaded, but the bunkers remain Hoxha’s legacy to this day.

9

PRESIDENT MACIS NGUEMA, RULER OF

EQUATORIAL GUINEA (1968–79) Nguema wiped

out real or imagined enemies, which turned out to be more than 10 percent of his country’s 350,000

population, including ten of his original twelve cabinet members, averaging about one political killing per week.

He ordered the assassination of the ambassador to the United Nations, had a priest frozen to death in a refrigeration truck, and amputated the fingers of his government statistician because “he couldn’t count.”

10

NICOLAE CEAU¸SESCU, PRESIDENT OF

ROMANIA (1965–89) He operated the world’s most pervasive surveillance system: Every Romanian telephone manufactured during his dictatorship was fitted with a bugging device. After receiving an anonymous death threat through the mail, he ordered his secret police to secure handwriting samples from the entire Romanian population. In 1978, Ceau¸sescu and his wife Elena stayed at Buckingham Palace; the queen was baffled when her guests brought with them their own bed linen (both had a germ phobia) plus a host of bodyguards, including a personal food-taster. She was also alarmed by Nicolae’s habit of washing his hands afterward every time he shook hands with anyone, a trick he repeated after shaking hands with the queen herself.

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10

Leaders at Leisure:

Ten Hobbies of Dictators

1

JOSEPH STALIN, LEADER OF THE SOVIET

UNION, 1941–53 Watching American movies. He saw his favorite, the 1938
Boys Town
starring Spencer Tracy, at least twenty-five times.

2

ADOLF HITLER, CHANCELLOR OF GERMANY,

1933–45 Reading cheap cowboy-Western novels. His favorite author was Karl May.

3

NICOLAE CEAU¸SESCU, PRESIDENT OF

ROMANIA, 1965–89 Bear hunting.

4

IDI AMIN: PRESIDENT OF UGANDA, 1971–79

Watching cartoons. When police searched his home in 1979, they found a large case full of old film reels of

“Tom & Jerry.”

5

KIM JONG-IL, LEADER OF NORTH KOREA

FROM 1997 Watching videos. He owns more than twenty thousand. He is also believed to be Asia’s biggest collector of pornography.

6

JOSEPH MOBUTU, PRESIDENT OF ZAIRE,

1965–97 Shopaholic. His garden had a runway big enough to land the Air France Concorde that he regularly took to buy his groceries from Paris and Brussels.

7

SAPARMURAT NIYAZOV, PRESIDENT OF

TURKMENISTAN FROM 1991 Writing poetry. His literary works include the epic
White Wheat
, dedicated to Turkmenistan’s harvest, and
Mother
, dedicated to his late mother, with whom he is said to be obsessed.

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[Ten Hobbies of Dictators]

8

BENITO MUSSOLINI Creative writing. Mussolini published more than fourteen volumes in and out of office, including a bodice-ripper,
The Cardinal’s Mistress
, and a critique of the Russian novel. In his final idle moments, before he was strung upside down by piano wire, Il Duce was translating Giosuè Carducci’s
Odi
Barbare
into German.

9

MUAMMAR GADDAFI, PRESIDENT OF LIBYA

FROM 1969 Surfing the Internet.

10

SADDAM HUSSEIN, PRESIDENT OF IRAQ,

1979–2003 Fishing. He had little time for the subtleties of angling, preferring to lob hand grenades into the water and then have someone pick up the dead fish.

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10

Bark at the Moon:

Ten Canine Cosmonauts

1

LAIKA (RUSSIAN FOR “BARKER”) The first

living creature to go into space was a mongrel stray plucked from obscurity on the streets of Moscow and rocketed to international fame aboard
Sputnik 2
, the space satellite launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on November 3, 1957.

There was never any intention of bringing her back safely down to earth. Laika died in a state of panic and agony when the capsule overheated just a few hours after
Sputnik 2
was launched.