ALBANIA: Zog’s Choice

Suddenly informed last week that they are going to have a half-American Queen, the Albanian people remained comparatively calm. None of the objections raised by Britons when they were afraid they might get a full American were heard in Tirana. Mother and father of Albania’s future Queen are the onetime Gladys Virginia Stewart of Manhattan and Count

Julius Nagy-Apponyi of Budapest. Through the jagged mountains of Albania their daughter Geraldine was taken to Tirana, a typically odorous, turbulent Balkan capital.

Zog means “Bird” in Albanian and King Zog I met his fiancée in his brightest gold-lace plumage. Apart from the facts that many a prominent Albanian family has sworn a blood feud against King Zog, that he has almost ruined his throat by oversmoking, until at one time he could talk only in guttural wheezes, His Majesty is a highly eligible bachelor.

All week members of the Albanian congress jogged into Tirana on asses or jumped off clattering busses, as they arrived to hear King Zog, 42, formally announce that he will soon take Geraldine, 22, as his Queen. She once won a beauty contest, recently has worked in the Hungarian National Museum, selling postcards, but in Albanian eyes her chief attraction is that her grandfather was once Court Chamberlain to Kaiser Franz Josef for whose hoary whiskers and mighty Habsburg name they had if little love, at least an ominous respect.