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After the war, Ceausescu rose rapidly toward the top, though he remained aloof from the Pauker group in the process. By 1955, at the precocious age of 37, he was a full-fledged Politburo member, two years later took charge of party organization and cadres—which made him second only to Dej in power and influence. The stocky figure with the curly brown hair and perpetually wrinkled forehead popped up everywhere as Dej's delegate: Moscow in 1959 and 1961, Italy in 1962, Peking in 1964. On his only known Western vacation, Ceausescu checked into Paris' Prince de Galles Hotel in 1963, along with his slim, sloe-eyed wife Elena, herself a chemist and economics writer. Elena Ceausescu won her bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1963, after Gheorghiu-Dej decided education was an asset for his underlings. At the same time, Ceausescu emerged suddenly with a degree in engineering.
Ceausescu did not inherit his predecessor's taste for luxury, dresses modestly, has no penchant for publicity; there are no photographs of him in Bucharest's streets. He keeps his private life so quiet that no one is sure where he lives. Dej had a chain of villas—one in Sinaia, one in Predeal, another in Mamaia, and one replete with private movie theater, a television screen that covered a wall, electronic door openers and infra-red radiators. Hard-working and humorless, clever but cautious, Ceausescu is infra-Red all by himself.
Gaullism East. Ceausescu's Rumania shares few similarities with its Eastern European neighbors—other than a predilection for national dissimilarity, and a profound suspicion of Russia. Rumania is, in many ways, the Gaullist France of Eastern Europe. The label fits not only in Bucharest's relations with its allies but physically and culturally as well. Fully 65% of Rumania's foreign-language students are learning French; Bucharest even boasts an Arc de Triomphe. Berets are de rigueur in Bucharest's working-class bistros, and the nascent Rumanian film industry—a mere 15 years old—has borrowed French New Wave techniques, along with one of French Director René Clair's cameras, left in the country after a recent filming.
Broad boulevards and the vast, empty Piata Republicii contrast sharply with the gleaming new apartments on the city's edge. An Italian influence is felt at Bucharest's Continental Bar, where "Miss Dyna Mit" slithers through a tassel-tossing version of Amore Scusami. The entrance price of 10 lei ($1.60) discourages most Rumanians, but the hordes of Japanese and German, English and French businessmen who haunt Bucharest year round take up the slack. The real life of the city is best seen on a winter morning at 5:30 when the first trolleys grind across the frozen tracks and queues of workers shuffle aboard, carrying packets of bread and sausage, to head for the 23rd of August Heavy-Machinery Building Enterprise or the Snagov Cigarette Works. En route, many workers stop off for a hurried plum brandy, a hot coffee, or a fluffy pastry