AUSTRO-HUNGARY: End of K

In his heyday the Emperor Franz Josef liked to do things on schedule. At 4:30 in the morning three times a week, he arose, put on a well-cut uniform and yards of braid, walked across the gardens of Schonbrunn, slipped out through a secret gate, and presented himself at a little yellow cottage at Gloriette Road No. 9. There he was greeted by the beautiful Katharina Schratt, “Käthi” to His Majesty. Dressed in full court costume, she would bow low, say “Good morning, Colonel,” and wave him in. By 6:30 sharp the two were seated at a good bourgeois breakfast, roaring with laughter over some morsel of court gossip.

Käthi was the Emperor’s best friend. She had been an actress, in the old Burgtheater hard by the Palace grounds. Franz Josef liked her histrionics very much. Reports of their first meeting differ (she was 29, he 49), but it was not long before Käthi’s husband, Nikolaus Kiss von Ittebe, had been appointed to a permanent consular post in far-off Morocco, Käthi had been given the not-so-far-off cottage, and wags in the Court guard were referring to their Emperor behind his back as “Herr Schratt.”

He dearly loved to play common man with Käthi. She served him hearty Schnitzels and Muskatellers, gave him little pin wheels and ocarinas and beer mugs, entertained him with folk tales and Tarock—pleasures the stiff castle denied him. The severe Empress Elizabeth, who, as she bluntly put it, “was sick and tired of being brood mare to His Majesty,” openly encouraged the relationship. Soon all Vienna knew of it, and approved. On the Emperor’s birthday, little children would come with flowers to watch the pre-dawn passage of der alte Kaiser from his secret gate to that of “Käthi, the uncrowned Empress.”

After Franz Josef’s death in 1916, Käthi came on hard times. Because she knew so much of the inside story of the Habsburgs, she was plagued by publishers, syndicates, authors’ agents, cinema representatives with fantastic offers. But with wonderful loyalty she refused them all, lived off occasional sales of the Gobelins, pictures, china, and jewels the Emperor had given her (once, after a hunt, he had sent her a boar dressed up in necklaces, earrings, diamond bracelets). She made only one important revelation: in 1931 she made it clear that the mysterious double death of the Archduke Rudolf and his beautiful Baroness Maria Vetsera at the famed hunting lodge at Mayerling was definitely suicide.

In recent years she has been a proper little matron, known to Austrians as Die Gnäddige Frau, “the Gracious Lady.” She has spent most of her time doing complicated 2,000-piece jigsaw puzzles, chatting with priests, walking out (since she got the habit of early rising) before sunup to feed the neighbors’ dogs.

Last week, at 84, the Gracious Lady quietly died. With her, since she never wrote a line of memoirs, she took thousands of secrets, some glorious, some pathetic, some just human, of the fallen House of Habsburg.