The Orient Express still carries two baggage cars. Only the contents of these cars are now different. Ten years ago, there would have been an exotic assortment of trunks bearing brightly colored labels, at least one bantam automobile such as a German Opel or an Italian Fiat, crates of gold being transferred from a French bank to a Serbian bank, and poking out above all this, like porcupine quills, dozens of skis and alpenstocks. Once, at the time when the late dictator of Turkey, blond Kemal Ataturk—who had converted mosques into granaries and put an end to polygamy—decided to westernize his country further by abolishing the traditional fez, the Orient Express was called upon to transport its strangest cargo. Ataturk was deadly serious about his ban on the fez; he even slapped the Egyptian minister for daring to wear one. Consequently, all males in Turkey were desperate for some kind of substitute headgear. The clothing stores and bazaars of Istanbul and Ankara put out a hurried SOS to the clothiers all over Europe. Overnight, the Orient Express baggage vans were loaded down with the most improbable, high-priority shipment they ever carried—London bowlers, German homburgs, Basque berets, Polish visor caps—all for the unprotected pates of Turkey.
Today, the luggage reflects the times. One baggage car will carry hundreds of food packages, secondhand bicycles, several baby carriages, endless bundles of clothes. The few trunks, with the remnants of their Monte Carlo and St. Moritz stickers, have seen better days. The second baggage car is devoted entirely to mail, delivering the bulk of land communications from Western Europe to the Near and Far East. In this car, all the postal clerks, by international agreement, are Frenchmen.
However, for the American tourist, the most unusual thing about the Orient Express will be the minor ways in which it differs from his own deluxe streamliners at home. While almost all first-class American trains have green- or rust-curtained sleeping berths lining both sides of a center aisle, the Orient Express has none. Every cushioned seat on the Orient Express, when converted into a berth at night, is enclosed in a private room, similar to the bedrooms and compartments on American Pullmans. Today, the officials on the Express are embarrassed by a temporary exception to this advertised privacy. Due to the acute European transport shortage, the train has been forced to drag along, at its rear, six ordinary day coaches. This appendage for the peasantry, regarded as a sort of steerage class, is not discussed openly by the officials of the train.
While the Express now has central heating, its windows are not hermetically sealed as they are in similarly expensive American trains, but may be pulled down at will by passengers. Once, the Express experimented with a single coach, equipped with sealed windows, but the idea was quickly abandoned when the Continental fresh-air fiends complained they were being suffocated. The individual compartments, with directions printed usually in French, German, and English, lack the individual concealed toilets of the American streamliner. Nor do the coaches have separate lavatories for men and women. Instead, there is one community water closet at the end of each car. And while there is usually a pitcher of drinking water above the washbasin in each compartment, this is regarded as an American barbarism, and travelers are expected to have wine served in their rooms by the conductor when they are thirsty. Most surprising of all, perhaps, for the American traveler is the absence of Pullman porters. The brown-uniformed conductor doubles as the ticket collector and the attendant who makes up berths.
The private car, so often attached to the Orient Express, is an institution that will provide further amazement for the traveling American. Of course, Americans know all about private cars and can brag about building some of the world’s best. Many Americans will cite how Death Valley Scotty came out of the California desert, hired a luxurious private Pullman coach, and rode to New York in it, flinging gold pieces and greenbacks to the populace all along the way. Others will relate the extravagances of Mrs. Marjorie Post Davies, largest stockholder in the General Foods Corporation and wife of Joseph E. Davies, ex-Ambassador to Russia, who bought her own railroad Pullman, hired herself a private porter, and had the car fumigated before each trip. And almost every American knows about the highly advertised Presidential Pullman, so often used by F.D.R. and to a lesser extent by President Truman. But the use of the private car in the United States is still the exception, whereas in Europe, on the Orient Express, it is a routine thing.
The private car most frequently attached to the Orient Express is a special gray salon coach built for the Presidents of France and for foreigners of equally high station. The most recent personage to travel in it was Farida Zulfikar. Queen of Egypt, the wife of King Farouk I. Her government applied for its use through the protocol section of the Élysée Palace, and it was promptly offered, along with a staff of police from the Sûreté Nationale, by the French government and the Wagons-Lits company. The queen was astonished by its luxury. She discovered the coach interior was paneled with mahogany, inlaid with exquisite Lalique glass, and the car illuminated by indirect lighting. The entire car was divided into only four rooms—a large bedroom, with a real bed instead of a berth, for the queen’s use; a private bathroom; a tiny room for her maid or secretary; and the remainder a comfortable living room furnished with deep sofa, bureau, and easy chairs.
Run-of-the-mill celebrities and millionaires, however, are not permitted to use this car, but instead must hire a first-class coach of their own. The stunning Marina, Greek widow of the late Duke of Kent, always hired a private coach when she journeyed from London to Athens. The most frequent users of private cars have been Indian maharajas who cross over from India to Turkey and take the Orient Express to Paris. Once a particularly wealthy maharaja even hired a private restaurant car to trail his sleeper.
Another rich Indian potentate bought out an entire Wagons-Lits coach, all twenty-four berths, at a cost of around $3,500, to take, in complete privacy, the most curious collection of passengers the Orient Express ever carried from Istanbul to Paris. M. Bortolotti, a Frenchman and twenty-year veteran of the Express, was chef de train on that trip, and he recalls it with relish. “This Indian, a maharaja, or whatever he was, hired the private coach with the provision that all other passengers and Express personnel be barred from entering it except myself. I couldn’t wait to get in, to see what he was hiding. And then when I went in for the tickets and passports, I saw. What a sight! He had his whole harem on the Orient Express! There they were, seven of them, and don’t let anyone tell you modem harems aren’t pretty. All seven girls were young and beautiful, Indo-European types, gorgeous figures. Each wore a veil, but the veils were thin and you could see right through them. Each girl had a tiny diamond set on the right side of her nose and one in her right ear lobe, as beauty marks, I imagine. These diamonds didn’t look grotesque at all, but shone from behind the veils and were very exciting. I tried to act nonchalant. After all, we on the Orient Express are supposed to be used to everything. But I couldn’t help staring, and the girls kept giggling at me until I finished my business with their husband and left.”
The personnel of the Orient Express, men like M. Bortolotti, with their stock of fantastic stories, form the most unchanging part of the train. Of those who worked on it before Hitler, most are back on their old jobs again. Only the German conductors are now missing. The boss of the Orient Express, on each journey, is the blue-uniformed chef de train, whose position is like that of a purser on a ship but whose authority is greater. He is in charge of the conductors, solves special problems for passengers, keeps in contact with various stations en route, and at trip’s end hands in a log of the journey to the Paris office. He often knows six languages. Bortolotti, for example, besides speaking his native French, has taught himself German, Dutch, Italian, Yugoslav, and English.
The conductors who are under the chef de train, one in each coach, are predominantly French and Swiss, and each must, as a minimum, know three languages. The service language of the train is French; all must speak it. The other two tongues are optional, but are usually German and English.
Constant
travel between two worlds has made sophisticates of the Orient Express conductors, and surprise is an emotion they rarely feel. The conductors assigned to the subsidiary Orient Express, traveling only to Vienna and back, must guide their flock through four military zones. Conductors state that American MP’s, who invariably come on the train singing, create the greatest consternation. They usually chew gum, and since many Balkan passengers have never seen gum, conductors must patiently explain the ingredients. On this same trip, farther down the line, across the river Enns, bearish Russian soldiers emerge from wooden barracks to inspect military passes. According to the Express conductors, the Russian soldiers from Leningrad and other big cities are bright boys, but those from Asia often hold passengers’ military permits upside down as they pretend to read them, and then approve them if they are colored red. These Russians are rotated weekly, probably so that their thinking may not be sullied by the decadence in evidence on the Orient Express.
Conductors are expected to fulfill almost all passenger requests without batting an eye. Sometimes a conductor will be asked by a prominent Frenchman in Paris to deliver personally champagne or caviar to someone in Sofia. Once, Fritz Kreisler absently left one of his priceless violins in the Austrian Embassy in Warsaw. He remembered the oversight after boarding the Orient Express, and asked the conductor to take care of the matter. The violin reached Kreisler safely a week later. Another time, when there was plenty of space available, a millionaire from Bucharest came on the train and asked the conductor to sell him three compartments so that he might have one for sleeping, one for working with his secretary, and one in which to smoke. And there was the occasion, according to the story, when Josephine Baker—the renowned colored entertainer, who left St. Louis to thrill Paris with her dance performed in a G-string of bananas—woke hungry at two in the morning on the Orient Express, and demanded cheese sandwiches and beer. When she was told by the conductor that this request was somewhat unreasonable, she asked to be taken to the sleepy-eyed chef and then proceeded to promise him that if he would go to work at this hour in the kitchen for her, she in turn would perform for him. The chef eagerly agreed, delivered the repast, and la Bakhair danced for it in her nightie, in the diner aisle, as the Orient Express rolled into the dawn.
Because they extend such special services, the personnel of the train is able to supplement its salary with generous tips. In fact, the subject of tips is the topic most thoroughly discussed and debated by the conductors when, after each journey, they meet amid the oyster baskets and wine bottles of the railroad cafe, Au Depart, across from the Gare de Lyon. As a result, the subject of tipping on the Orient Express has a thoroughly documented history. The conductors enjoy breaking down tipping into categories. For instance, they classify tippers according to nationality. Most conductors seem to agree that, before the war, the highest tippers were the German travelers, not only industrialists but officials like von Papen and Funk. On the other hand, conductors regard South Americans, particularly Argentinians, as the most tight-fisted of all passengers. “Perhaps the rich men from Argentina don’t know any better,” said one conductor, “or perhaps they are just stingy.” Most conductors feel that, as a class, pre-1914 royalty like the Grand Dukes of Russia or the Queen of Austria or a random Esterhazy tipped most handsomely.
All personnel on the Orient Express, from the highest operational official to the youngest conductor, unanimously agree that the best modern tipper among the bluebloods and, in fact, the most colorful character ever to travel the Orient Express, was King Boris III of Bulgaria. Before the war, King Boris, a gentle, charming man in his late forties, who once listed as his pet hobby “locomotive driving,” would invite train personnel into his compartment for tea and discuss every aspect of the Orient Express as if it were his very own toy. He was, in truth, in love with the train. For years, on every trip between Sofia and Paris, after becoming bored reading his stack of newspapers in six languages, he would leave his wife. Queen Giovanna, the Italian Princess of Savoy, knitting in their compartment. He would work his way forward, through car after car, to the engine, and at the first stop, crawl in beside the two French engineers and take over the throttle. This went on for countless trips, over many years, until the word got around that the Orient Express was being driven by the King of Bulgaria. When various diplomats heard this, and then authenticated the fact, they raised a furor. The governments of France and Italy formally advised King Boris that he must not drive the train through their territories, endangering both train passengers and the citizenry. On his first Orient Express excursion after the ban, King Boris sat glumly and slept restlessly through France, Switzerland, Italy, and Yugoslavia, but when the Express reached the Bulgarian border where his own word was law, he left his compartment, pulled on a pair of clean overalls, walked to the engine and took over the throttle to Sofia. More than any other passenger lost in the war, the conductors miss Boris. They insist that he did not die naturally in 1943, that they have inside information he was poisoned by the Gestapo when he refused to turn the Bulgarian Army over to Hitler.
Among plebeians, the most fabulous tipper ever to ride the Orient Express was a Mr. Capile, an Italian shipbuilding millionaire from Genoa. “He was a wonderful man,” recalls one conductor. “He enjoyed the train. At the end of each trip, he would go into the kitchen, among the kettles, compliment the chef, tip him and his assistants, and then he would tip the chef de train and then the conductor. One time, in two days on the train, he tipped a thousand dollars.”
Some of the Orient Express conductors have become celebrities in their own right. Perhaps the most famous is seventy-three-year-old Jean Bonnefoy who, in his thirty-five years on the train, hobnobbed with the world’s greats. Today, in his anecdotage, he remembers that Queen Amelia of Portugal would always inquire first if he were on the Orient Express before making her reservations. He recalls, too, how once he stopped the train to rescue the Duke of Windsor when, as a lad, he was left stranded on a platform in Dijon. Bonnefoy’s fame grew as a result of poetry he wrote during long, lonely nights on the Express. One volume, Visions of Rome, brought him a personal letter from Benito Mussolini and he was made a Knight of the Crown of Italy. Thereafter, he was the only decorated conductor on the Orient Express.
Today, on pension, Bonnefoy longs for the good old days. “Before the First World War,” he says, “the Orient Express was really luxurious, the upper halves of the compartments painted white, the lower halves built of teakwood. And all personnel, conductors as well as waiters, had to wear white gloves. Things have gone downhill since.” Sometimes, just before ten-fifteen in the evening, Bonnefoy will walk from his flat down into the Gare de Lyon to watch the great train pull out. He will stand in the drafty station and snort at the lack of festivities. As recently as 1939, when the Orient Express took off, it was like a ship embarking on an ocean crossing—great, gay parties to see friends off, singing from compartments, champagne corks popping, all the high bustle and excitement of a bon-voyage celebration. Today, the departure is quiet and efficient. Most people aren’t traveling in Europe for fun. They are going about their business, and there’s usually nothing to toot tin horns about.
When the train pulls out slowly—it will later clip along at 80 kilometers an hour (it used to go 100 an hour, but now there are weak bridges and poor rails)—Jean Bonnefoy will remark, “Ah well, so it is not the same, but there are two things that are the same as ever—the scenery, the glorious sights in all those countries—and the organization that makes seeing the sights and the whole trip itself possible.”
Most of the Wagons-Lits personnel, either for political reasons or because they are genuine converts, like to extol the unseen organization which they serve. However, except for recognizing their immediate superiors, most know little about who owns and runs the Orient Express. For that matter, outsiders know even less. Yet this organization, like an enormous hidden perpetual-motion machine, has sent the Orient Express catapulting from Paris to Istanbul and back again,
with precision and without a hitch, for exactly sixty-four years. Actually, the Orient Express is owned by Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, located in Brussels, and operated out of a large branch building in Paris, where the messenger boys are outfitted as train conductors. The Orient Express is under the complete authority of a wealthy Frenchman, René Margot-Noblemaire, whose father is manager of the French National Railways. The Noblemaire family has dominated French railroading since the late nineteenth century.
The Wagons-Lits company was conceived in 1872 by a Belgian engineer named Georges Nagelmackers, who had visited the United States, seen the world’s first sleeping cars, and wanted to set up facsimiles of the Pullman in Europe. Nagelmackers’ idea of luxurious sleeping cars was met with derision throughout Europe, and he had almost abandoned the idea when he was summoned by King Leopold II of Belgium to discuss it. The king was enthusiastic and within a year the first Wagons-Lits sleeper—carrying a dozen bunks, heated by burning briquettes, and lit by oil—was placed on the run from Ostend to Berlin. The sleeper was a success, and in 1876, the Wagons-Lits company was organized into its present form. King Leopold was one of the first stockholders, and with the prestige of his name, the company was capitalized to the sum of 4 million Belgian francs.
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