An hour before the big meeting we were allowed into the royal greeting room to check for light and seating. Satisfied with the room, I had half an hour to kill so I thought I’d take a rest. Maybe I am a royal, but I naturally went to sit on the chair that can only be used by you-know-who. It wasn’t covered in jewels or anything, in fact it looked pretty ordinary to me, as ordinary as a gold chair covered in yellow silk can look. But apparently I was about to soil The Inexplicable’s favourite, and before my commoner bum hit the royal cushion, our very nervous but charming young Swazi minder, Sihle Damini, hurled himself forward to stop my already off-balance non-royal arse from committing a huge faux pas. He grabbed me and swung me away from the chair, absolute horror in his eyes. Who knows what would have happened if I’d landed. Probably not a lot to me, but poor Sihle was so shaken I suspect there would be no more palace visits for him.
We were ushered out of the room to wait for the grand entrance of His Royal Highness. A short time later, word somehow reached Sihle that the time had come, so down on his knees he went and with his eyes firmly on the floor he crawled into the room with us walking upright closely behind.
And there he was, the king himself, sitting in my chair wearing a bright red sari-type outfit pinned over his right shoulder, leaving his left shoulder bare, a thin moustache going down the sides of his chin à la 1974, a very expensive looking watch on his right wrist and his left hand gripping the ubiquitous stick. We were all introduced to him and as I shook his hand I couldn’t help but notice his necklace. It looked like two playing cards hanging off it. Court cards, of course, both had crowns on them. I was desperate to tell him he had a damn good blackjack hand there, but decided against it.
The reporter, Tara Brown, sat in her designated chair while I frantically ran around getting shots of her making small talk with the king. Then Tara hit him with, ‘It has been said you are one of the ten worst dictators in the world.’
Not thrown at all by the question, the king said, ‘I was surprised when I saw that and asked myself what is a dictator in the world. I don’t know if people know the definition of dictator. I don’t consider myself a dictator.’
Tara: ‘You’ve been accused of lavish excess while 70 per cent of the population is destitute.’
‘It’s speculation,’ he said. ‘I am not a big spender.’
Mswati III, cool as a cucumber and still wearing a huge smile, was totally unfazed by any of the questions. On that note I decided to tell him that Micky and I had been there twenty years ago to film his coronation. He was amazed, and said he was a very young man then, and very nervous. I told him I was pretty young myself. He laughed and I don’t think he believed me. He then told us he’d never seen any footage of his coronation.
In stepped our producer, Stephen Taylor. He told the king he’d arrange for a copy of the story to be sent over immediately. Two days later we showed the footage to the king. He was mesmerised. We interviewed him as he stared at the screen. A wonderful sequence. He couldn’t believe how young he looked, and when Tara made a comment about how nervous he appeared, he told us he had been totally overwhelmed by the day, and really didn’t know what was going on.
Now though, twenty years later, he sure did. He was full of confidence with a super-charming soft mellow laugh, the type of laugh that makes you think he has to be a good bloke. But he needed to be more than a good bloke if he was to tackle the HIV problem. There were now 100,000 orphans in Swaziland. Ten per cent of the population.
In one of the many overcrowded orphanages we watched scores of kids running and playing happily, it could have been any schoolyard anywhere in the world. The kids sang for us, their happy faces and thick African accents sucked us all in as they sang ‘Jesus Loves the Little Children’. Great pictures for us, but they were going to need a hell of a lot more than just Jesus loving them to get them to the ripe old age of 32. Their parents, if not dead, were either slowly dying at home or in one of the unbelievably overcrowded Swazi hospitals.
Swaziland’s hospitals were overflowing with HIV and AIDS sufferers. At the biggest and most sophisticated hospital, I filmed rows and rows of double bunks with yet more patients lying, dying, on the floor under the bottom bunk, and this was the best hospital in the country. Most patients stared straight through us, not concerned or interested in what we were doing. The healthier ones could slightly move their eyes, the really sick had no movement or life in theirs. To take a sip of water, their frail skeletal bodies would move agonisingly slowly. The doctor in charge told us the fear of the stigma attached to being HIV positive stopped them seeking medical attention until it was too late, and who knows how many people they may have infected along the way.
But the traditional festivities still went on and the biggy was the annual reed festival when all the virgins got to celebrate their chastity. Certainly a smart thing to celebrate given the circumstances. Part of the tradition was the girls must cut a reed for their king then, waving the reeds and singing, walk many miles from the riverbanks to the king’s kraal. Their singing was so beautiful, as if they’d been rehearsing with some amazing choirmaster for years. And the rhythm of their voices seemed to swing perfectly with the swaying of the reeds. Not to mention the breasts.
Outside the royal kraal, the reed-swaying continued, with every young virgin hoping their reed would attract the king’s attention and possibly a marriage proposal.
Though not all the reed carriers had marriage in mind: the leading breasts this year belonged to the king’s nineteen-year-old daughter who lived and studied in California. She looked and sounded like a native Californian surfie chick with braids down to her waist, a white-toothed smile, and all of dad’s charm. She was awash with American confidence. A far cry from her dad at that age, she even sang us a rap song and told us she was trying to teach her dad to rap but he wasn’t too good at it.
But he did appear to be good at being king. And he sure knew how to rule.
•
Not like the French royal family. If they were allowed to rule, they’d show the world a thing or two. Who’d have thought 50 years and a couple of revolutions after the big one when Louis XVI lost his head there’d still be a French king. When King Louis Philippe was eventually forced out in 1848, the French finally celebrated the end of the royals. But there’s no stopping royal blood. Like a giant golden staph it’s happy to keep breeding while it sits and waits for an opportunity to rule.
The golden staph who would be king was His Royal Highness, the Count of Paris, or the Comte de Paris, for we French speakers. For some unknown reason he was happy for us to do a story on his dysfunctional and feuding family. His Royal Highness, already in his 80s, didn’t have a huge chance of becoming king. But he was still hoping.
‘I don’t say I will be king, it might be possible’—yeah sure, I thought, as I zoomed in for a close-up—‘but that is quite sufficient for me.’ He then added, ‘Anything is possible if it comes from the people.’
The comte and his mob were lucky to be alive, yet they still believed they were born to rule. They just couldn’t take the hint, so continued to swan around France genuinely believing the Revolution was all a big mistake and that one day all that was rightfully theirs would be restored. The comte and his would-be queen spent the first twenty years of their marriage in exile. But somehow the comte managed to persuade the government of the day to let them back into France to live as ordinary citizens.
But though they couldn’t rule, having royal blood meandering through their veins meant that even today there’s no shortage of sycophantic royalists or, as my schoolboy French would have it, ‘des lickers de arse royalists’. Faded aristocrats with nothing but pretence in their lives. They just loved to crawl and bow to the pretenders, who lapped it up with royal aplomb.
The comte certainly had a royal air about him. He was suave, with piercing grey eyes, a neatly trimmed moustache, large teeth and a penchant for V-neck woollen jumpers. His wife, Isabella, the Countess of Paris, had spent her w
hole life as queen-in-waiting and would hang on to that hope till her dying breath. Her petite house was filled with portraits of all the kings of France, including the Sun King, Louis XIV. It was his extravagance and excess that started the ball rolling for the French royals to lose everything, including their heads. These descendants had nothing but their heads and hope. They should be grateful. You’d think they’d lie low and keep their mouths shut. Yet here they were airing their dirty laundry, socks, undies et al. to the world.
The royal son and heir, Henri, had recently brought shame on the family by divorcing and remarrying. ‘It is forbidden in the family,’ said the old comte. ‘I asked him not to marry. Live with her is fine.’
So it wasn’t only the divorce that was the problem in this very Catholic family. Marriage outside the Catholic Church was just not on. If the marriage is not celebrated in the Catholic Church, it’s not recognised by French royalists, so dad had no choice but to disinherit Henri and strip him of all his titles. This, they hoped, would scare off the new wife who everyone had labelled a gold-digger, or due to the lack of gold, a title-digger. Still, the much maligned, overly made-up woman had some class; it wasn’t obvious to the naked eye, but Micaëla Anna Maria Cousiño y Quiñones de Léon sure looked classy in print. What with accents not only over her vowels but also her n’s she was a shoo-in to become a royal. But the sight of all those squiggly lines still didn’t impress the in-laws.
Henri d’Orléans was the dead spit of his dad, except for the teeth. If we thought dad had a mouthful, this boy looked like the entrance to Luna Park. He told us, ‘I’m not a hypocrite, I chose to have a divorce because I didn’t want to live like that. And now I have another wife. The only thing my father was not happy about was not that I divorced, but that I got married again. It has always been like that. It is the history of France. Before, there used to be killings as well. Now the killings are finished. When my father dies I will become the Count of Paris.’
Brave man, I thought. If he wasn’t careful the killing may just start all over again. But the old comte, obviously knowing murder might make an already weird family look even loopier, seized the moment and held his own coronation ceremony, handing his son’s title to his grandson Prince Jean d’Orléans. Touché!
When we met the girl with the classy n’s, we wondered whether they and half a dozen of her names might have been added just to seduce the wannabe king. She looked like a faded 1940s film star with a heavy fake tan, huge confidence and an equally huge cigarette holder.
When asked if she would be happy to be the next Queen of France, she said, ‘I think I would be anguished by the responsibility, but I suppose there’s a grace that allows people to do what they should do.’
Boy, she’s good, I thought. If the queen thing fell through she could always run for president.
She then told us she had been offered money to leave the family. When later we hit the old comte with that bit of info, he said it was rubbish, he had never offered anyone money. Most probably because he didn’t have any.
Meanwhile, having never seen the old comte and his wife together, we found the twist in the story. Days of Our Lives eat your heart out. The comte had left his wife years ago. No divorce, of course, but they lived completely separate lives, each with their own set of sycophants. We met her sitting regally amongst her antiques, with a triple-strand pearl necklace harnessing all the wrinkles, and she told us she missed the comte but her life was so full she had no time to think of the past. I presumed she meant the cohabiting part. She was still desperately hanging on to becoming queen.
The more time we spent with the old comte, the more I liked him. Due to his age the highlight of his day was an afternoon siesta, which suited me just fine, after all I have Spanish blood and, if I threw a few quaint little accents over some of my consonants, I might have scored one of his daughters and a title or two.
We arranged to do a horse riding sequence with HRH after his siesta, and Micky, worried that the comte may change his clothes for the horse riding, asked if he’d mind continuing to wear the woollen jumper because it was perfect for the radio microphone. Micky needn’t have worried. It was all we’d ever seen him wearing.
Later that afternoon at his stables, in front of a throng of minders, the comte said to Micky, ‘See Micky, I did as you asked, I have on the same jumper.’
Micky slapped him on the back and said, ‘You’re my kind of king.’
There was a sudden deathly silence from the minders. A major breach of protocol had occurred. But the would-be-if-he-could-be king responded with a toothy laugh and a big pat on Micky’s shoulder. Micky had a new friend, but in fact the comte had won all of us over. It was impossible to dislike him.
Wearing an impeccably tailored suit over the perfect-for-the-radio-mic jumper, he looked twenty years younger than his age. His horse was a beautiful grey with a high-stepping canter and that tortured-looking curve in its neck that only perfectly trained horses have. As I pulled back from a tight shot of his boot in the stirrup, the wannabe king youthfully swung his leg over the back of his magnificent horse, gave a small kick and they were away. The octogenarian, obviously having ridden all his life, looked like he was glued to the saddle.
He never made it to the throne. He died in 1999 and his son Henri is now the king in waiting. And waiting.
•
But who needs glue to cling to power when you’ve got corruption, authoritarianism, despotism, nepotism, and a suspension of civil law, civil rights and habeas corpus, plus a wife with one pair of feet but a trillion pairs of shoes.
After declaring martial law, Ferdinand E. Marcos did and said whatever he wanted. Turned out he wanted heaps, and by the end of his term as Philippines president he had billions stashed away in Swiss bank accounts. All earned legitimately, of course, as Ferdinand did a lot of overtime and sometimes even worked weekends. This was obviously true because when I met him he looked very tired.
On our arrival in Manila we were told only white shirts were to be worn in the presence of the president. None of us owned one so we rushed out and bought the cheapest and nastiest white shirts we could find. I suspect Ferdy owned all the shirt factories, hence the dictum.
Years after his death, his wife Imelda, known as the Steel Butterfly, was still telling the world how hard he had worked to gain all that wealth, that none of it was gained illegally and the people of the Philippines (the great majority existing on two dollars a day) were entitled to none of it.
Looking like schoolboys in our brand new white shirts, we were ushered into an office for the interview. An office! Palaces and Swiss bank accounts abound and we had to do the main interview in an office. And it looked like shit. Smart, I guess. Marcos could now look like an ordinary politician. Billions? What billions?
We were told the president would sit behind the desk and reporter Ian Leslie would sit opposite. Ian’s chair was indeed opposite the president’s desk, but it was also a good metre lower. It would look really stupid, I protested, but was told that’s the way it is. When you’re a billionaire dictator you dictate, and we’d been dictated to. It was impossible to disguise the eye line of the dictator looking down on our reporter, but rather than give him the added satisfaction of the camera also looking up to him, I extended the tripod legs as high as they would go so the camera was at least level with his eyes.
I suspect that had Ian asked if Marcos saw himself as a megalomaniacal tyrant like the rest of the world did, he wouldn’t have cared less. Dictators don’t worry about a thing. He owned the army and he’d got rid of his political opponents. His main rival, leader of the opposition, Benigno Aquino, was in jail on trumped-up charges.
So when Ian asked him, ‘Do you see yourself as a dictator?’ it was like water off a duck’s back.
‘No! A forceful leader, yes. We’ve re-established public order, the classical purpose of martial law.’
Why this tyrannical ruler had agreed to the story was a mystery. But it meant I got to experience a
nother interesting culture with interesting food. And the producer, Warren McStoker, and I experienced some really interesting cuisine. So interesting that for me it was a rerun of the Cairo chicken livers. Of course I hadn’t eaten chicken livers again, I’m not that dumb. But whatever I ate brought the same unpleasant results.
That night we were summoned to the palace to shoot the president’s 62nd birthday bash. With my most recent dash to the toilet being just 30 seconds earlier, I met the others in the foyer of the hotel to tell them of my dilemma. Then I saw Warren, who actually looked like what I had just deposited into the toilet bowl. But Warren, one of the best and most conscientious producers at 60 Minutes, was not going to let a small thing like shit in his pants or vomit on his shirt interfere with what would probably be the best sequence of the story. He asked me if I was okay and I told him no, but if he could get on with it looking like he did, so could I. To most other producers I would have said, ‘I’m sick, piss off,’ but somehow with him it was different.
When we reached the palace I was desperate and walking very carefully, especially since I was carrying the camera and a 25-kilo case of lights. Warren, carrying the tripod and rolls of film, was also walking very delicately, and he was so pale. Inside the palace we deposited all the gear and took off to deposit a few more kilos of our own, something neither of us could afford.
Pale and sweaty we ventured back into the birthday room where it was all happening. I picked up the camera that had somehow put on all the weight I had lost and began to shoot the handpicked senators gushing and kissing their beloved tyrant. They put all other sycophants to shame.
Then those same senators had to do it all over again as Imelda entered the room. I hate to admit it but she did look beautiful, not overly done up and with two huge pearls hanging off each ear. After much applause, the top of her list was to be introduced to the nice film crew from Australia. Still very pale and sweaty in our white shirts that no longer looked new, we stood ramrod straight, not through deference to the Steel Butterfly but as a result of deft sphincter control. She walked over with a huge welcoming smile to shake our hands and welcome us to her country. First Ian, then Warren, who gingerly reached out to greet her. But before contact he rapidly retracted his clammy hand, clutched his bum and took off. Poor form, I thought, obviously no self-control. What would Madame Dictator think?
All This in 60 Minutes Page 23