Sex with the Queen (57 page)

M a r i e o f B r i t a i n , Q u e e n o f R o m a n i a

“I Rejoice in My Beauty. Men Have Taught Me To”

Marie, princess of Edinburgh, was Queen Victoria’s grand-daughter by a younger son. When the seventeen-year-old mar-2 6 2

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ried the bumbling heir to the Romanian throne in 1893, Marie soon found herself in a kind of prison with grouchy King Carol I, her husband’s uncle, as her jailer. He forbade her to form friendships with anyone, to attend parties and balls, even to leave her rooms for days on end. Her husband, Prince Ferdinand, was too weak to stand up for his wife and visibly trembled when even thinking about the king. “When he spoke of him something like anxiety and not far removed from dread came into his eyes,”

Marie wrote. “One felt that a shiver ran down his spine.”4

King Carol did permit Marie to attend the festivities cele-brating the coronation of Nicholas and Alexandra in Moscow in 1896 as Romania’s representative. Clad in gorgeous new gowns and dazzling jewels, the princess suddenly came alive, a magnifi-cent butterfly bursting forth from her drab cocoon. Her large blue eyes sparkled with greater intensity than her glistening sap-phires as princes, prime ministers, and generals, their strong hands tight against the back of her slender waist, took turns sweeping her around the ballroom. For twenty-one-year-old Marie this was a moment of sexual awakening, a sudden aware-ness of her power over powerful men. “Russians catch fire eas-ily,” she wrote years later in her autobiography, “and Slav tongues are soft.”5

No longer the shy and awkward girl who had married the crown prince, after her success in Moscow she told an admirer,

“I rejoice in my beauty. Men have taught me to.”6 Tall and slim, with a dazzling fair complexion and blond hair, Marie was de-scribed by many as the most beautiful woman they had ever seen.

Suddenly empowered with her sensuality, Marie embarked on numerous love affairs, often arranging for her lovers to work in the palace for easy access to her rooms, or meeting them while visiting health spas in Germany on trips to see her mother.

Hearing the rumors, Marie’s English relatives were worried sick that her scandalous lifestyle would result in divorce. In between his stern lectures to her on the subject, King Carol must have considered the possibility. After all, by 1903 the crown prince of Saxony had divorced his adulterous Louisa. But Romania’s dy-nasty, founded in 1866, was new and fragile, whereas the house t h e t u r n o f t h e t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y 2 6 3

of Wettin had sat solidly on the Saxon throne for a thousand years. Moreover, while Louisa’s family were dispossessed dukes of Tuscany now living on the charity of the Austro-Hungarian emperor, Marie’s close relatives were the British royal family.

If her family looked with horror at her love affairs, the Roma-nian people admired her for them. They pointed with pride to their crown princess as the most sensual woman in Europe. And indeed, early-twentieth-century Romania reveled in a sexual equality among the aristocracy that was unheard of in other na-tions. A beautiful married woman who took handsome lovers was admired for her panache and sense of style, not chastised for im-morality. Marie’s reputation was enhanced by her amours, much as that of a virile king was gilded by his numerous fragrant mistresses.

In 1907 Marie began a love affair that would last until her death thirty years later. Two years older than Marie, Barbo Stir-bey came from an ancient aristocratic family and was one of the richest men in Romania. A dapper dresser, Stirbey had a noble brow, intense brown eyes, Slavic cheekbones, and a full dark moustache that almost hid his sensual lips. Sophisticated, tall, and slender, Stirbey carried himself with quiet confidence. De-spite his loving wife and four children, he was reputed to be quite a lady-killer, and many Bucharest socialites spoke dreamily of the “strange hypnotic quality” of his eyes.7

Stirbey was forever cool and unruffled. “No one had ever guessed what passions lay beneath his unbendable pride,” Marie wrote later.8 “His manner was unassuming, yet full of charm,”

Princess Anne-Marie Callimachi wrote. “He spoke little, but a gift of persuasion and instinctive psychological insight made him rarely miss his aim whenever he set himself one. Extraordinary was the way he always struck the right note.”9

Marie visited Stirbey’s estate at Buftea often, going on horse-back rides with him. In 1913 King Carol, well aware of the love affair, unofficially gave it his blessing by appointing Stirbey su-perintendent of the royal estates. This gave the lovers an excuse to work together every day. It was rumored that Marie’s fourth child, Ileana, born in 1909, was fathered by Stirbey. It was fairly certain that her last child, Mircea, born in 1913, was his.

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But Stirbey was not simply her lover. It was through him that Marie first developed a serious interest in politics; from him she learned of defense, agriculture, foreign affairs, and trade. He became her chief political adviser, and even poor doddering Fer-dinand grew to rely heavily on Stirbey’s wisdom. Although Stirbey was one of the most powerful political figures in Romania during the first three decades of the century, he was not one to seek the limelight, preferring to play the role of gray eminence.

In October 1914 old King Carol died and Marie, who had been crown princess for over twenty years, was finally queen of Romania. She had just inherited World War I. After two years of uneasy neutrality, Romania finally sided with the Allies; within hours of the declaration, the German Kaiser sent warplanes to bomb Bucharest. Throughout the war, stammering King Ferdi-nand wrung his hands while Marie ran the show with Stirbey’s political advice. “There is only one man in Roumania and that is the Queen,” said one French nobleman.10

When Communists deposed and murdered Marie’s cousin Czar Nicholas II of Russia in 1918, many Romanians feared the revolution would swoop down upon them. One reason it did not was because of Queen Marie’s popularity; unlike the frivolous and haughty Marie Antoinette of France, unlike the stiff and stubborn Empress Alexandra of Russia, Marie wisely guided her country through the shoals of the war. Moreover, she was always available to her people; a farmer seeking justice had only to walk into the palace and ask for her.

One young guest at the palace in the 1920s carefully observed the queen and her lover, both in their early fifties. “She had a dress, a very long dress with a train in black velvet with all her magnificent pearls. She was in a corner of the throne room, and Barbo Stirbey was next to her discussing something. They were not looking at each other, they were looking at the crowd. It was an extraordinary sight. . . . They were such a magnificent pair.

She was so beautiful and he was so handsome. They had such ex-traordinary allure and grandeur and distinction. . . . The best proof is that after more than fifty years I can still see them as if it happened last night.”11

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In the 1920s Romania’s economy was booming. Bucharest be-came known as the Paris of the East. In 1925 Marie’s oldest son, the erratic Crown Prince Carol, abdicated his rights to the throne and moved to Paris with his mistress. His father, who had been ailing, was devastated; his death eighteen months later was probably hastened by the scandal. Carol’s five-year-old son, Michael, became king with Stirbey as his prime minister.

But in 1930 Carol, bored with stewing in France on little money, swooped back to Romania and proclaimed himself King Carol II. He marginalized his mother, whom he had resented for her affair with Stirbey since he first learned of it at the age of thirteen. Suddenly Marie found herself transported back forty years to the time of her imprisonment under King Carol I, re-stricted in her communication, her freedom of movement, and her finances. Her servants were spies who opened her mail and listened in on her telephone calls.

Stirbey, ever discreet and dignified, retired to his estates and out of Marie’s life. When Carol banished him from Romania in 1934, he took his family to Switzerland. At the end of Marie’s life, the loss of Stirbey afflicted her most. Since her first step onto Romanian soil in 1893 she had endured ups and downs; but since 1907 Stirbey had always been there to advise her, to help her make it through. Now he was gone.

Years earlier, Stirbey had predicted that Romania would fall to wrack and ruin under King Carol II. Casting her glance into the near future, Marie sadly agreed and saw a lifetime of work coming undone. She began to suffer from internal hemorrhag-ing, perhaps from a liver ailment. In 1938, her condition dete-riorating, her son refused her permission to visit the world’s leading expert in Dresden.

Hearing of her serious illness, Stirbey managed to smuggle a letter to her. “My thoughts are always near you,” he assured her.

“I am inconsolable at being so far, incapable of being any help whatsoever to you, living in the memory of the past with no hope for the future. . . . Never doubt the boundlessness of my devo-tion.”12

Dying, Marie wrote one last letter to her lover. She deeply re-2 6 6

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