The Lisbon Route

by Ronald Weber

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  In many ways Portugal was in an enviable position among European nations at the war’s end. Its cities were unscathed, its young men were alive, its war-related business had enriched it with private and public capital, and its colonial possessions remained intact. The wolfram trade would never be the same, but now Portuguese agricultural products and fish were in demand by war-ravaged populations. In the area of diplomatic activity, the end of the war stimulated increased American engagement with Portugal—in part because of the drawn-out negotiations over German repatriation and the recovery of looted German gold, but also due to the cold war need for continued military use of the Azores, Salazar’s unrelenting opposition to the Soviet Union (which Moscow met by blocking, until 1955, Portugal’s admission to the United Nations), and the country’s eventual integration into NATO.

  The appointment in 1945 of Herman Baruch, the brother of the financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch, as ambassador was considered strong evidence of a new level of American-Portuguese relations. Another indication was a dramatic display of U.S. military might put on before Baruch, Salazar, and Carmona in August 1946 during air-and-sea exercises off the mouth of the Tagus. More than a hundred planes from the new aircraft carrier Franklin Roosevelt staged a mock attack on the ship and its escorting destroyers, the vessels responding with simulated gunfire.

  Yet despite these and other areas of good fortune, Portugal had some reason for apprehension about the future. No glory clung to it as a victorious nation, nor had it experienced a joyous release from occupation. With the war’s end it slipped back to its unassuming stature as a small European nation with a heavily illiterate population, a vast gulf between the few rich and the many poor, and a magnificent port city now no longer the hub of the Western universe. That the country remained under the thumb of an authoritarian government, still censoring what citizens could read, see, and hear, still enforcing order with the secret police, set it strikingly apart from the democratic thrust of a new Europe. Rumblings of discord appeared—demonstrations by workers, strikes organized by the banned Communist party of Portugal, unrest in the universities and the military. Salazar responded with such cosmetic gestures as characterizing his country as an “organic democracy” and holding elections, yet fundamentally his repressive regime would carry on unchanged for the next two decades.

  Time magazine in 1946 fastened on the outmoded character of the government in a hugely unflattering cover story about the Portuguese leader. “The real news from Portugal,” said the report, “was that another European dictatorship had failed, though it might hang on for years… . Not only was Portugal at a new low point, it showed every sign of changing for the worse, perhaps slowly, perhaps by violent upheaval.” The regime reacted to the story as the magazine in effect predicted it would (“… Salazar distrusted news. He suppressed and distorted it for the good of the Portuguese who, he believed, were unfit for facts”): Time’s Lisbon correspondent was expelled from the country; distribution and sale of the offending issue was halted; police were told to confiscate copies in private hands and record names of those possessing them (black market copies were said to be selling for up to twelve dollars); and the magazine was temporarily added to a list of forbidden foreign publications.

  As early as the autumn of 1943 the Anglo-Portuguese News, anticipating a spectrum of unnamed postwar problems “which will give grounds for anxiety,” had looked ahead for a new role for the country. What it envisioned in an article called “After the War” was an adaptation of Portugal’s wartime position as a refuge from the conflict: now the country could promote itself as a rest cure for the worn and weary survivors. Since APN was directed to the local British community, the visitors the newspaper had mostly in mind were countrymen back home. With ships, planes, and trains again ready to serve them, what better destination for holidaymakers than the ancient ally? France, which had once claimed many of them, would not be in shape for some time to serve as host, while Portugal—with “dream-like beauty” yet also “clean, spic and span”—was ready and willing. The British tourist would find much in the country to remind him of England, especially if he lingered in Lisbon before heading out to the provinces, yet even more that was distinctive. He would, in any case, return home feeling “that he really has had a holiday away from the beaten track.”

  Portugal as a postwar tourist destination was not a fresh idea. Ronald Bodley had had something of the sort in mind in his 1941 book Flight into Portugal, as a reviewer in London’s Times Literary Supplement noted when mildly praising the work as a “token of gratitude to Portugal and a lure to visitors after the war.” Four months before APN glimpsed the future, the paper had carried Rose Macaulay’s short article “Lisbon Day, London Day.” Promoting tourism was not Macaulay’s intent, nor was she thinking ahead to the war’s end; but her clear implication was that any Londoner able to get there should not miss Lisbon.

  You would know blindfold [she opened the article], at any hour of the day or night, which of these two capitals you were in: the voice is different, the smell, the whole rhythm. Open your eyes, and the cities might be two planets. The one has light, colour, radiance, pale luminousness, a precipitous slant, a lilting jangle and blare of noise; the other darkly and impersonally hums, waves of sound swell and die, as if winds beat on a forest.

  In 1947 Macaulay became a tourist herself, though of Spain more than Portugal. “I think when the war is over,” she had told her Lisbon friend David Ley in 1943, “I shall try and visit Spain… . I will get the ancient Morris that is mouldering in a garage, and fling it across the Channel.” The journey became possible when a London publishing house proposed a travel book as part of a series treating lesser-known cities of the world. Macaulay drove by herself the length of the Spanish coast from the Pyrenees to Portugal, a journey of some four thousand miles, skipping familiar inland cities in favor of coastal communities and finally ending her account in Sagres on the southwestern tip of Portugal.

  The same year her Fabled Shore: From the Pyrenees to Portugal was published, 1949, saw the appearance of The Selective Traveller in Portugal by Ann Bridge and Susan Lowndes, a thickly detailed hardbound guide to both remote and familiar regions of the country. The two women had strong backgrounds for the task. Lowndes, as previously mentioned, lived in Lisbon and was married to the editor of APN. Mary Sanders O’Malley—Ann Bridge was her writing name—was a popular novelist (the year before the guidebook came out she published The Portuguese Escape, her sixteenth book and a novel dense with information about Lisbon and aristocratic country life in Portugal) and the wife of Owen O’Malley, who in 1945 had taken over as the British ambassador to Portugal.

  The Bridge-Lowndes guidebook made prominent mention of the Catholic shrine of Our Lady of Fatima, located in remote hill terrain some eighty-five miles north of Lisbon, where in 1917 the Virgin Mary had appeared to three peasant children. Over the years the site had developed into a center of international pilgrimage—the Lourdes of Portugal. Although the war interrupted the flow of visitors from abroad, the Portuguese had continued to flock to the shrine, especially in May and October of the year, and typically going on foot the entire distance from their homes. News reports in May 1941 said that despite unusually bad weather in the country there had never been larger crowds of Portuguese pilgrims at the shrine. In April 1942 the statue of Our Lady of Fatima was for the first time removed from the shrine and carried through the streets of Lisbon for a week of prayer devoted to keeping the country free of the war and to future world peace. In May, the statue back in Fatima, a hundred thousand pilgrims gathered to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the apparitions. Portuguese bishops holding a retreat at Fatima and cut off from world events when the war ended were startled when they emerged to find thousands from throughout the country gathered in gratitude for peace.

  In March 1946 Cardinal Francis Spellman, on his way home from Rome, where Pope Pius XII had just elevated the Archbishop of New York to the College of
Cardinals, stopped in Lisbon for local sightseeing and a visit to Fatima. At a luncheon afterward, arranged at the Aviz Hotel by Ambassador Baruch and with Salazar among the guests, Spellman, in remarks quoted in press stories, said: “I was really touched when the choir sang in our own language ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ when I said mass in Our Lady of Fatima Church this morning and I must say that Fatima is a real inspiration to us.” For American and other Catholics uncertain about the authenticity of Fatima, the cardinal’s favorable comment was presumably a boost for including Portugal in their travel plans.

  APN’s “After the War” had not mentioned pious believers as candidates for peacetime tourism, though presumably they were as welcome, as were the escudos they would leave behind, as ordinary holidaymakers. Nor had the paper taken into account transients who had passed through wartime Portugal and, for one reason or another, might choose to come back. Spellman was in fact a former transient who returned. In the fall of 1943 he had come to Lisbon from New York on the first leg of an overseas tour in his role as military vicar of the American armed forces. He had a whirlwind of meetings with the American minister Bert Fish, various clerical figures, and Portuguese officials. One of the officials left him with a sense that, despite neutrality, the country was tense with worry. In his office they spoke in person and had nothing important to share, but the official had taken the precaution of disconnecting his telephone from the wall socket.

  Spellman recalled his time in Lisbon as short but concentrated, and his postwar visit was the same. Other wartime figures lengthened their stays, as Rose Macaulay had when she came back to write a travel book. And at least two former transients, ex-King Carol II of Romania and Elena Lupescu, stretched their returns into permanent residency.

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  VE-Day found the famed couple in Brazil, where they had come after long exile in Mexico and where they had recently been married in a civil ceremony. At once they applied for Portuguese visas, which were quickly granted, and booked ship passage to Lisbon. But at this point the American and British governments intervened, and Portugal agreed to a request to cancel the visas. The Allies’ concern was that Carol, back on the Continent, might meddle in a current Romanian crisis involving the Communist-controlled government and the slim possibility that Carol could be restored to the throne. With events in Romania smoothed over, the visas were restored, and Carol and his wife reached Lisbon in October 1947 with their usual mountain of belongings—“112 pieces of baggage, six dogs and a canary,” said a press report—and settled into a spacious villa in Estoril among a circle of deposed royalty and their retinues. Living close by was Ernest Urdãreanu, still seeing to it that court protocol was maintained.

  The Portuguese government allowed Carol to have diplomatic plates on his cars, though the diplomatic community kept a cautious distance from him. His local activity was largely limited to dining out, going to movies, the opera, and the casino, and playing an occasional round of golf. At the villa he occupied himself with his valuable stamp collection and was now and then seen puttering about the garden. He and Lupescu—with their marriage Carol had given her the title of Princess Elena of Romania—took trips to Paris and London, often to meetings of stamp collectors. Although the press no longer hotly trailed them, in 1949 rumors began appearing in the tabloids that the couple was getting a divorce. Perhaps to put them to rest, an Orthodox priest was brought from Paris to conduct a religious ceremony in the villa before only a few friends, Princess Elena draped in white silk and Carol in white tie and tails.

  In 1953 Carol died of a sudden heart attack at age fifty-nine. Urdãreanu saw to the funeral arrangements, which had Carol lying in state for several days in the villa. Since a distant grandmother of his had been a member of the Portuguese royal family and there was no Orthodox priest or church in Portugal, the government permitted him to be buried in the Royal Pantheon of the Monastery of São Vicente, the interment place of Portuguese kings, and a military escort was provided for the long procession of funeral cars. Princess Elena, so distraught at the service that she was nearly carried from the monastery, would live almost a quarter-century before she was buried beside Carol.

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  Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian had no need to return to Lisbon because, after reaching it as one of the war’s exiles, he never left.

  Born in Armenia to a prosperous trading family and educated in engineering at King’s College, London, Gulbenkian had become a naturalized British citizen in 1902. Shortly thereafter he helped arrange the merger that created the petroleum giant Royal Dutch Shell, the start of a career in oil exploration and development, primarily in the Middle East and Latin America, that made him one of the world’s richest men—and gained him the nickname “Mr. Five Percent” for the stake he typically retained in oil companies he organized. At the same time he was amassing a fortune, he was acquiring a private art collection of high quality.

  When the war began Gulbenkian was living in Paris, partly with his wife, Nevarte, and his art collection in an elegant home in the Avenue d’Iéna, partly by himself in the Ritz Hotel, a pattern of dual residence he had also followed in London with a suite at the Ritz. When France fell he followed the government to Vichy. While still in Paris he had used his connections in the Middle East to become Iran’s (Persia) commercial counselor in Paris, a diplomatic position he later held in Vichy—at a cost of losing his British citizenship as an enemy alien and the confiscation of his interest in Britain’s oil ventures in the Middle East.

  After Iran was occupied by British and Russian troops and declared war on Germany in late 1942, Iranian ministers left Vichy, and the Gulbenkians departed with them. They first considered going to Switzerland but finally determined that Portugal, with Lisbon’s open port and access to the United States, was the wiser choice. While Calouste Gulbenkian took a suite in the gold-filigree luxury of the Aviz Hotel, with another suite in the hotel for his secretary of long standing and a room for his valet, Nevarte Gulbenkian chose to live with her maid in the Palácio in Estoril. The couple, it is said, often journeyed back and forth for visits, and they appeared together at social events along with Portuguese officials and members of the American and British embassies.

  Although Calouste Gulbenkian’s British citizenship was restored after he left Vichy, he never returned to England. He conducted his oil business entirely in Lisbon, and without need of an office beyond his rooms in the Aviz. Even in the heat of summer, when most of Lisbon’s rich moved to places outside the city, he remained in the hotel. When it was necessary to go out, he went by hired car, seeing no reason to maintain a limousine and chauffeur. The war curtailed but did not halt his art collecting. In 1943 he was approached by Baron Henri de Rothschild, living in exile in Estoril, about buying some of his collection. Long negotiations followed, with Gulbenkian drawing on professional advice from Kenneth Clark, at the time director of the National Gallery in London, before the sale was completed.

  For the British, Gulbenkian was considered a key source of intelligence information. Before Philip Johns left London to take command of MI6’s Lisbon station, he was told to develop an association with the new resident of Aviz, and brought with him a letter of introduction. The two men met frequently, at times over lunch at Gulbenkian’s reserved corner table in the hotel’s dining room. Johns thought him far from imposing—“a small, grey, wizened and stooping individual, completely unremarkable except for his bird-like piercing eyes”—but there was no question of his deep knowledge of the oil business. What the British especially wanted from him was all he knew about Russian and Romanian oil production that might be available to Germany, and this Gulbenkian willingly supplied.

  With the end of the war Gulbenkian made frequent trips to France to revisit his Paris house and collection, both of which had survived the occupation. But he continued to keep his home in Lisbon. (Nevarte Gulbenkian eventually returned to the Paris house and died there in 1952.) When the popular Armenian-American writer William Saroyan stayed at the Aviz in the s
pring of 1949, Gulbenkian invited him to lunch, and they spoke at length in Armenian, though Gulbenkian was fluent in English. Saroyan found his host wholly agreeable, though meeting him was not the reason for his Lisbon stay. During a European swing Saroyan, a veteran gambler, had tried his luck in Venice, Monte Carlo, and Aix-en-Provence before reaching Lisbon. At the Estoril casino his fortunes swung up and down, but finally completely down. He was broke when he finished and had to sell a gold coin purchased in Marseille to settle his hotel bill. “A very high-tone hotel,” he wrote in the Aviz’s visitor book. “There are flies in the room. They are very plain and apparently do not know they are at the Aviz. Bravo.” On his way to Paris, Saroyan paused briefly in Biarritz, and at the casino, using what was left of the sale of the coin, lifted his stake to $125.

  According to a source who knew Gulbenkian well during his Lisbon period, it was Portugal’s benign climate and stable social order that held him in the country. His art collection, however, he considered shifting to permanent quarters in London or Washington, though finally he decided to keep what was an eclectic accumulation of paintings, sculpture, books, coins, carpets, and tapestry together in Lisbon. After his death in the Aviz in 1955 at age eighty-six, much of his vast fortune went to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, based in Lisbon, which funded an array of cultural, educational, and social programs in Portugal and elsewhere. In 1969 his art collection found a permanent home in Lisbon’s Museum of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

  As APN had ardently hoped in 1943, a flow of holidaymakers would eventually help fill the economic void of the war’s end. But in the enduring value it brought to Portugal, nothing would overshadow the bountiful legacy of the oil king who came during the fighting and stayed into the peace.