by Ronald Weber
In memoirs published after the war, Schellenberg declared that he believed Ribbentrop’s project was based on an exaggerated reading of careless remarks made by the Duke together with excessive weight given by the foreign minister—a former German ambassador to London and supremely confident of his knowledge of all things British—to peace sentiment in England. Nonetheless Schellenberg, when he reached Lisbon, loyally set about carrying out his mission. He had an American car brought to Lisbon for his use as well as a faster car for two agents who accompanied him. He procured exact information about the floor plan, servants, and Portuguese and British guards of the villa where the Duke and Duchess were staying. By spreading about ample sums of money, he replaced some of the Portuguese guards with his own people and placed informants among the servants. Within five days of his arrival in Lisbon, he boasted, he “knew of every incident that took place in the house and every word spoken at the dinner-table.”
A prime element of the German plan had been to entice the Windsors to leave Cascais for a hunting-party holiday near the Portuguese border, then have them step over—by mistake or with a push—into Spain. Schellenberg soon determined that the Duke was not interested in the invitation, but he believed his annoyance with close surveillance by the British gave Germany another opening for turning him away from his appointment to Bermuda.
Schellenberg had a Portuguese police official tell the Duke that Portuguese guards at the villa needed to be increased because of information that he was being intensely watched by both British and German intelligence agents. Then the German agent organized an evening of stone throwing at the windows of the villa, which in turn brought about a police search of the interior. He followed up by planting rumors that British agents had started the ruckus in order to make the Windsors uncomfortable in Portugal and eager to leave for Bermuda. Finally, a bouquet was delivered to the villa with a note that read, “Beware of the machinations of the British Secret Service—a Portuguese friend who has your interests at heart.”
“These things were, of course, fairly unimportant,” as Schellenberg rightly acknowledged. But they at least gave him some actions he could report to Berlin, though plainly far more was expected when a telegram from Ribbentrop told him, “The Führer orders than an abduction is to be organized at once.” Schellenberg believed the command was ultimate folly—taking the Duke to Spain against his will would surely reduce or eliminate whatever feeling he had for the German cause—and decided he would not carry it out. He arranged that twenty more Portuguese police were assigned to guard the Duke, which caused the British to increase their security as well, and then conveyed to Berlin the information that a standoff existed in Lisbon and asked for more instructions. Two days later he received an enigmatic telegram: “You are responsible for measures suitable to the situation.” Schellenberg’s interpretation was that Berlin was backing off the kidnapping plot.
But it did not follow that Ribbentrop was admitting failure. Chief among a flurry of last-minute efforts to keep the Windsors in Portugal was a long telegram he sent on July 31 to Baron Hoyningen-Huene in Lisbon. The Duke was informed about it the following morning by his host, Espírito Santo, but shown nothing in writing. He was told only that the source of the message was an authoritative German. In essence the message informed him that Britain would soon be attacked, and if he remained in Europe and cooperated with Germany a happy future would be available for him. On the other hand, if he went to the Bahamas, Churchill would surely hold him there forever, though it still might be possible to maintain some channel of communication with Germany.
Precisely how the Duke responded to this indirect contact is unknown. In a lengthy report back to Ribbentrop the day after the Windsors left Portugal, Hoyningen-Huene took note of the obvious—“every effort made to detain the Duke and Duchess in Europe … was in vain.” Yet he passed along the verbal and perhaps self-serving impressions of Espírito Santo that the Duke had shown interest in the message and was open while in the Bahamas to keeping contact with a secret confidant in Portugal, who would be Espírito Santo himself.
Meanwhile Schellenberg, who had had no role in the final effort to reach the Duke, made a last effort to cover himself with Berlin. He planted a story that the British planned to drive home the danger the Duke was in from Germany by planting a time bomb on the ship that would explode a few hours after departure, causing great alarm though sparing the Windsors. Alerted to the bomb’s existence, Portuguese police searched the ship several times before it sailed, and security measures were strengthened—further evidence that Schellenberg could put forward to persuade Berlin that kidnapping the Duke was an impossibility. Relieved but still aware he must return to Berlin to face Ribbentrop and Hitler, Schellenberg retreated to a tower room in the German legation and peered through binoculars as the Excalibur took the Duke and Duchess down the river to the sea. “The chapter,” he stoically reported in his memoirs, “was closed.”
*
It seemed unlikely that any couple could come near matching the celebrity status of the Windsors, yet less than a year after they departed there appeared in Lisbon another and less decorous combination of royalty and romance whose ongoing lives kept the cable lines humming with news and speculation. Ex-King Carol II of Romania, popularly known as the playboy monarch, and Elena (Magda) Lupescu, his flame-haired Jewish mistress, had begun their flight from war in September 1940 when, in the royal palace in Bucharest and under German pressure, Carol turned over the throne to his eighteen-year-old son Michael and boarded a special eleven-car train headed to Yugoslavia. With him was Lupescu, a royal entourage that included the court chamberlain, Ernest Urdãreanu, and a king’s ransom in paintings and other state valuables.
Eventually the royal cars were coupled to the Orient Express, which wended its way through Switzerland, Italy, France, and into Spain. At Barcelona the royal cars were uncoupled, and Carol was informed he could remain in Spain but not move on as planned to Portugal. In holding him the Franco regime was presumably bowing to the wishes of Berlin, and despite a torrent of letters Carol sent to gain his release—among them, one to President Roosevelt—his confinement in Spain, and close surveillance by armed police, went on for months. Carol and Lupescu were not, though, living rough. They were allowed to move to the Andalusia Palace Hotel in Seville and occupy an entire floor with a dozen servants and—in a typically detailed press inventory of the possessions accompanying the couple’s odyssey—“this property: 152 trunks, a collection of rifles, three automobiles, four Rembrandt paintings, a valuable stamp collection, a big china collection and four dogs.”
As time went on, Ernest Urdãreanu traveled to Lisbon to look into possible future arrangements for Carol—and to draw for correspondents a sympathetic portrait of the ex-monarch. “Had Carol been Hollywood’s latest discovery,” Hugh Muir noted, “he could not have been better served by his Press agent” than he was by the loyal Urdãreanu. The correspondents learned that in food-short Spain Carol existed mainly on cold ham. “I send him a parcel of food each week—tea, coffee, sugar, and sardines,” said Urdãreanu. “I can’t send him anything perishable, and he’s tired of living on ham. Only this morning on the telephone he told me he had asked for chicken, but was told there wasn’t any to be had. Not only is he half-starved, but he has to change dollars at a ruinous rate to pay for everything he has.”
Each time correspondents saw him, Urdãreanu had fresh stories. An especially dire one was that Carol had decided to go on a hunger strike and die rather than stay on in Spain. “Once his Majesty makes up his mind it is difficult to make him change it,” said his spokesman. “I know him intimately, and he is quite capable of carrying out his threat.” Other stories involved Lupescu. One had it that Carol wished her to flee to another country to escape the grasp of the Gestapo, but she had refused. “Not long ago I myself pleaded with her to let me get her away to safe hiding,” Urdãreanu confided, “but she turned on me angrily and said she would share the King’s fate.”
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bsp; The correspondents got wind that Carol’s situation in Spain was soon to change when it was learned that a certain Madame X was making frequent trips from Portugal to Seville, each time returning garbed in one of Lupescu’s fur coats and draped with her jewelry. The change came on the early morning of March 3, 1941, when Carol and Lupescu went out the side door of their hotel and into a limousine packed with luggage. Carol was behind the wheel, and used his experience with racecars to speed along twisting mountain roads toward Portugal in a carefully arranged flight. Just before reaching the frontier the pair changed to the vehicle of a known smuggler, crawled into a space beneath the back seat, and were unceremoniously delivered to Portugal. The next day Lisbon and Madrid correspondents cabled stories of the sensational escape in which, according to Spanish authorities, Carol and Lupescu had been just fifteen minutes ahead of the hotly trailing police when they reached Portuguese soil. The more probable truth was that Spain, fully aware of Carol’s intended escape, had permitted it happily to rid the country of his presence while not openly defying Germany. To rescue from Spain the rest of his luggage, valuables, cars, and dogs, Carol needed only to send an emissary to Seville to pay his $852 hotel bill. Lupescu, so it was said, had phoned Seville to dismiss her chauffeur and maids and tell them their salaries would accompany payment of the bill.
Carol and Lupescu stayed in Lisbon in a home owned by Augusto Lopes Joly, a wealthy Portuguese businessman and friend of the ex-king. Now that Carol was free of Spain, Urdãreanu kept reporters at a distance; not until March 8 did the former monarch give an interview in Joly’s home to the Associated Press, the American wire service presumably chosen because Carol had hopes of ultimately entering the country. He said little during the interview beyond thanking Portugal for granting him asylum and the American public for showing sympathy for what he had gone through. He steered clear of political matters, mentioning only that Salazar’s policies interested him and he meant to read up on them.
Carol was thin and pale when he reached Lisbon, and it was thought he looked forward to a long rest. Lupescu, on the other hand, was said to be fretful and wished to put the Atlantic between the couple and the Germans, though not before taking a turn at the casino in Estoril. Described by one source as a “plump lady in red lace with a diamond-and-ruby brooch pinned above her monumental bosom,” when she won a pile of money at a card game she took no chance of trying to double her gain. Nor did her good luck cause her to linger in Portugal. Fewer than two weeks went by before tickets were bought under assumed names for the Excambion sailing to Bermuda and New York. On the afternoon of departure, Carol and Lupescu, wearing dark glasses, slipped on board along with four dogs and locked themselves into a suite.
Their attempt at secrecy did not extend to their luggage piled on the dock, and the press was soon alerted to full details of their journey. (As apparently were the Germans. André David, a French writer sailing on the vessel, claimed its whole civilian crew was made up of Nazi informants.) The luggage was calculated at “about two railway freight carloads plus a mountain of hand luggage and trunks,” with the pieces clearly labeled “His Majesty King Carol, Cuba via New York.” Ernest Urdãreanu, who was also on board the ship, conveyed to the press a message from Carol thanking Portugal and explaining that he had decided to go to Cuba among other Latin American countries because of its neutrality and favorable climate. “I still need a rest,” Carol added through his spokesmen, “and it goes without saying that there will be no political activity on my part while away from my own country.”
After arriving in Bermuda, where Carol and Lepescu were given red-carpet treatment and spent several restful weeks before going on to Cuba, intense press coverage resumed. The lovers observed appearances of a sort by refusing to pose together in photographs or newsreels, nor was Lepescu present at interviews given by Carol. When they disembarked the Excambion the couple had taken separate carriages to their hotel suite, though later they were seen together in the hotel’s lounge. Close attention was paid to how smartly both were dressed—and to Lepescu’s plump figure, a matter of long-standing public interest. One woman’s reaction upon arrival, “Oh, she’s not fat at all,” seemed to carry the day, though there was some sentiment that Lepescu was heavier than she appeared due to “tricks” of dress. A reporter sidestepped the issue with a remark that she “looked her reputed age of 41, but no more.”
Wisely, Carol in a news conference in Bermuda had waved off any expectation that en route to Cuba he might stop in the Bahamas and pay a call on another former king. The press could only salivate about how an encounter might have gone between the paramour of one and the wife of the other.
*
Hugh Muir observed about Carol that during his time in Lisbon the entire world seemed interested in his fate, but “most of the people [of the city] never knew that he was in their midst.” In the same early period of heavy refugee movement—from the summer of 1940 through the spring of 1941—a similar anonymity shrouded the presence of important artists, writers, and intellectuals sent to Lisbon by Varian Fry’s rescue group in Marseille. The last thing Fry wanted for his charges was attention from the local press corps. Other notable figures reaching the city through their own efforts or with aid of agents other than Fry kept the same diminished profile, leaving Lisbon largely in the dark about the procession of cultural stars who graced it for a time. They boarded ships as refugees, and across the Atlantic emerged as celebrities.
The Lisbon route taken in their car by the French novelist Jules Romains and his wife was so surprisingly trouble free that they gave themselves time leisurely to inspect the cathedral at Burgos. Once quietly installed in Estoril, they took the electric train into Lisbon to be with friends departing on ships. Their own voyage on the Excambion, in the company of such countrymen as the composer Darius Milhaud and the Franco-American writer Julien Green, was uneventful until arrival in New York, where they were set upon by reporters patrolling the docks. “Celebrities Forced to Flee France Arrive Here by Way of Lisbon,” announced a newspaper, and in an accompanying story the new arrivals told of their plans for a new life in America.
When three weeks later the same liner again departed Lisbon, it carried the American photographer Man Ray and the composer Virgil Thomson. When Ray fled Paris by train, he had with him two valises and a small camera loaded with color film; expecting to return in a short time, he had placed his car on blocks to save the tires and had drained the battery. Along the way south he joined up with Thomson, whom he had first met in Paris in the 1920s, and the two traveled together. At the Spanish border German guards were suspicious about the luggage of the men: while Ray had little, Thomson had fourteen pieces, including six trunks filled with musical scores he hoped would be performed in the United States. A suspicious guard thought the scores might be some sort of wartime code, but when an inspired Thomson said they were Mozart sonatas, the guard sighed with appreciation—“Ah, Mozart!”—and waived the pair through.
In Lisbon, waiting for space on a ship, Ray and Thomson spent their time sitting in cafés, looking in at museums, swimming on the beaches, and listening to Portuguese music in nightclubs. One night they came upon a local fair with booths attended by pretty girls in native dress, and Ray pulled out his camera and took pictures. One of the girls could speak French and gave him her address so he could send her a print. When ship tickets came through they were for mattresses on the floor of the Excambion’s library, and Ray and Thomson departed for New York along with Salvador Dalí and his wife, the French film director René Clair, and scores of American students returning home from European universities. In the cramped conditions Ray slept with his camera under his pillow, but it was stolen nonetheless. The ship’s purser thought it might be recovered on landing, but Ray never saw it again. “If the thief had only left me the film,” he later wrote, perhaps with the pretty Portuguese girl who spoke French in mind, “I would have pardoned him.” When the liner reached New York, Dalí was singled out by the press as the celeb
rity most worth questioning.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French writer and aviator, luckily found a hotel room in Estoril after he reached Lisbon. But the nearby casino and the exile throngs within only intensified a feeling of unreality that was rooted in his qualms about leaving France in her darkest hour. The figures at roulette or baccarat—men in stiff shirtfronts, women with glittering pearls—stimulated what he called “a kind of anguish—the same feeling that you experience at a zoo when looking at the survivors of an extinct species.” Just as Lisbon and its ongoing centenary celebration seemed to him to be playing at happiness, the exiles played at clinging to their past identities: “They still pretended to be someone. They clung obstinately to some semblance of meaning. They said, ‘That is who I am… . I come from such and such a town… . I am the friend of so and so… . Do you know him?’”
Despite his glum mood, Saint-Exupéry went public in Lisbon by giving a lecture at the École Française, where he was said to have wept during his emotional remarks yet afterward was in good enough form to sample vintage port at a reception in his honor. He gave a second talk in Lisbon, this at an engineering school, where he again spoke with deep feeling about various personal ordeals out of which he had forged a fresh definition of life: “To live is to be conscious that you are not dead, second by second, as bombs burst around you, which amounts to an extraordinary anguish.” On board the Siboney for New York, Saint-Exupéry’s cabin mate was the French film director Jean Renoir, who had also reached Lisbon via North Africa. Through the efforts of the American documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty, Renior had secured a visa to the United States, and Flaherty was on the docks to greet him when the ship arrived. But it was the aviator-writer reporters flocked to, and through an interpreter he responded to a long list of questions about the collapse of France and military tactics. He had nothing to say about his time in Lisbon. When the interview was finished, the interpreter, a young wire-service reporter in awe of Saint-Exupéry, asked him to autograph his interview notes. Veteran reporters present did the same.