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The Playboy. At first the British treated the new King as a boy and expected him to go play. He dashed around the country in his fast cars, went on gazelle shoots, where servants pitched tents and spread rich Oriental carpets on the desert floor. Hussein organized a Royal Jordanian Automobile Club, outdrove 28 competitors around the hairpin turns of a hill-climbing course. One day he raced his light grey Mercedes-Benz 300-SL at 150 m.p.h. down the Amman airfield's best runway. "I think she could have done better," he grinned, "but the runway isn't quite long enough." At the auto club's Amman garage, Hussein spent days helping mount a Cadillac engine in a racing car chassis. "We call it the flying bedstead," he told a friend. After the British colonel commanding the Royal Jordanian air force taught him to fly, Amman learned to listen for the afternoon roar of the King's Vampire jet buzzing his mother's palace on his way back from a high altitude joy ride. He delighted in sambas and rumbas, danced late at Amman parties, practically never with his wife.
Hussein was content to let others run the government. Glubb Pasha, trusted and devoted servant of old King Abdullah, kept the Israeli border quiet and the Legion hotheads in check. Elderly politicians left over from Abdullah's day swapped ministerial posts like musical chairs, and one ministerial clique won the name in Jordan of "the Mau Mau" for the rapacity of their treasury raids. Young Hussein exercised his royal functions unpredictably, showed up at his office erratically, was royally late for appointments with distinguished visitors. Once he encouraged a "purging committee" to clean up the government, paid surprise visits to ministerial offices. "I saw coffee, newspapers, piled official papers and dirt, but I did not see work and efficient officials. I shall not allow this thing to go on," he declared.
But the purge did not take place, and the King found other interests. He disliked formalities, pleased his subjects by driving through the streets unguarded, in the evenings dropped in on commoner friends without ceremony. He toured frontier villages, listened with tears in his eyes to refugees' stories, told them that his palace was always open to them. His gestures were sometimes generous but misguided. He presented a royal tract to a Bedouin tribe, only to discover the land was already occupied by several hundred Palestinian refugees. What ideas he had were more grandiose than practical. He wanted Jordan, which has not enough money to build its own roads, to equip itself with a first-class jet air force. Once he turned to senior officers and asked: "Why can't we attack? If there's a war, let's march on Tel Aviv." General Glubb patiently took him on a tour of the 350-mile Israeli frontier to show him how much the Legion's 20,000 men had to defend against Israel's 250,000-man army.