ATHENE PALACE—Countess Waldeck—-McBrlde ($2.75).
The Countess Waldeck takes current history out of the funeral parlor and puts it into the Grand Hotel. Her book is as perversely engrossing, gossipy and gamy as a clandestine conversation in the lobby. Her Grand Hotel is the Athene Palace in Bucharest, "the last cosmopolitan stage on which post-World-War Europe and the new-order Europe made a joint appearance." Theme of her book is the murder of a nation—Rumania.
For this sensational subject the subtle and shrewd Countess Waldeck is almost the ideal reporter. When she was Frau Dr. Ullstein in 1930, she was the storm center of a sensational Berlin spy trial involving the once-great Ullstein publishing house. Later, as plain Rosie Goldschmidt, she wrote (under the initials R.G.) Prelude to the Past, in which she described with unusual candor the Ullstein affair and one or two of her own. Still later she married the Hungarian Count Waldeck, a marriage in which friendship and German passport considerations were deftly blended. She is now in Manhattan.
The Countess checked in at the Athene Palace the day Paris fell. She found the hotel swarming with "spies of every Intelligence Service in the world; the diplomats and military attaches of great and little powers; British and French oil men on their way out, and German and Italian oil men on their way in; Gestapo agents and Ovra agents and OGPU agents, or men who were at least said to be agents; amiable Gauleiters and hardheaded economic experts; distinguished Rumanian appeasers and mink-clad German and Austrian beauties who were paid to keep them happy. ... As the drama of bloodless German conquest later on drew to its bitter end, the old order dropped out of the play. Then wild-eyed greenshirt dignitaries, catapulted into power from a concentration camp, would make their debut in the lobby. Hopeful Axis businessmen would swarm here to buy themselves a Jewish department store or a mine for practically nothing. German generals, quiet and scholarly, would talk here of their old campaigns and think up new ones. At one time or another Franz von Papen, Hitler's ambassador to Ankara . . . would rest in the lobby. . . . Suave Dr. Clodius, Hitler's economic wizard, would recover his breath here after endless discussions with General Antonescu. . . . Even Frau Himmler, wife of the Gestapo chief, looking like Elsa Maxwell, came and ate big portions of whipped cream."
Spats & Monocles. But, for the Countess, the deathbed atmosphere of Rumania was best typified by the "Old Excellencies." There were two of these strange creatures in the lobby of the Athene Palace, "a kind of token force of a large army of some 700 living Rumanian former cabinet ministers, and of innumerable diplomats and generals." Wearing white linen spats and monocles, they sat at their table in the lobby from noon until midnight, studying "women's points." One Old Excellency had "the face of a sick greyhound." The other, "grey-haired and heavy-eyed," had a pointed beard like that of the late Rumanian premier, Ion Bratianu. They were wicked and pornographic old men, who always thought the worst about everybody, "with the distinction that they never thought the worst of the worst.