RUMANIA: Plush & Panic

On a structure more like an archiepiscopal throne than an office chair, on the 50th floor of Manhattan’s RCA Building, sat dapper, pudging Russell Birdwell, press-agent extraordinary. Mr. Birdwell had been persuaded, without difficulty, to discuss his newest, lushest client: ex-King Carol of Rumania and Mexico City.

“The King,” said Mr. Birdwell, “is brilliant, a man with great poise and fine judgment. . . . He was the first ruler in Europe to take a stand against Naziism. . . . Madam Lupescu is a very great lady. . . . It is a beautiful romance. . . . We believe that even a king has a right to a private life and we do not handle private lives. . . . This office is run on the principle that we cannot make any product better than it naturally is.”

An energetic barrage of handouts from Birdwell and Associates assured U.S. editors that the 50-year-old, perfumed Rumanian playboy was rosy-cheeked and wholesome, a true democrat who wishes only to enter the U.S., serve the Allies, and help form a “Free Rumania” movement. For these representations, Birdwell charges Carol $35,000.

But the real news of Rumania did not come from Mr. Birdwell’s mimeograph mills.

Fear & Flight. In the eastern marshes of Bessarabia frightened people clogged the roads and jammed the trains. The Red Army was coming, they heard, and they fled toward Bucharest. In the west, in the bleak potato fields of Transylvania and through the rolling hills of the Banat, Rumanians looked at one another and started east. The Hungarians were coming, they heard, to regain the lands acquired by Rumania after World War I.

In Bucharest, Ploesti and other centers, rattled authorities feared Allied bombers, ordered the people out. Turmoil developed where the streams from the cities met the flood from the border provinces. The well-to-do crowded neutral consulates, seeking visas for Switzerland, Turkey, Spain.

Scores to Pay. Behind a big desk and in front of his own portrait sat old Marshal Ion Antonescu, called “Red Dog.” Dictator in name only, he still spoke of himself in the third person, waited for suggestions from Deputy Premier Mihai Antonescu (no relation) and his German “advisers.” But he had heard no plans that promised to save his overblown, patchwork country from drastic shrinkage, perhaps obliteration. Rumania was a better guesser in World War I and grew accordingly. Now her neighbors, Allied and Axis alike, were preparing to settle old scores. Bemused officials just looked on.

Wealthy Rumanians, spending the war at fashionable Sinaia in the Transylvanian Alps, entertained wounded U.S. flyers who had been shot down over Ploesti. But they could not hope that the gesture would help them much. If they had heard rumors of Carol’s new plans, they could only weigh their chances with the indefatigable strutter against the equally uncertain prospects of presenting his son, 22-year-old King Mihai, as an unwilling puppet of the Nazis. Moreover, with the Red Army’s advent, the question was likely to become academic.

The men who run Rumania saw one ray of hope: perhaps the victors would not carve Rumania right off the map if doing so meant rewarding Hungary and Bulgaria. But professional Rumanians could no longer be sure that the patient peasantry would remember the lessons their betters had long sought to drive home: cling to your king and fear the Red Russians like the plague.