Hannah Pakula wrote a very good biography of the Empress Frederick, so I thought I would give this a read. Marie of Roumania survives today as the punch line in a Dorothy Parker limerick or as a footnote for those of us into the dynasties of the late 19th and early 20th century. She was the descendant of a Romanov (her mother was the only daughter of Alexander II), a Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (her father was Alfred, son of Albert and Victoria) and she married a Hohenzollern. At 17. Her mother despised the English and wanted "Missy" out of the country; the senior branch of the German Imperial Family was sitting on the throne of the new Kingdom of Roumania, so off the pretty, badly-educated teenager went to marry the jug-eared, dull Ferdinand, Crown Prince. Missy duly popped out six children, one of whom died as a toddler. Three of the others grew up to be world-class pests, while the other two wound up . . . not. Shortly after the birth of her last child, World War I broke out.
So far this could have been the life of Marie Antoinette Lite, but despite the similarities, Missy was temperamentally not cut out for the guillotine. While she was a total loss as a nurse (unlike Alexandra and her older daughters), she also (unlike Alexandra and Marie Antoinette) never tried to meddle in military matters. The goal of the war for Marie was to keep Roumania out of it, or at least for her country not to side with the Central Powers. She achieved her goal when Roumania went in on the side of the Entente. Unfortunately for Marie, Russia shortly succumbed to the Bolsheviks (curtains for many of her Romanov cousins) and Roumania was then immediately surrounded by Austria-Hungary, Germany and a Soviet state that declared war upon the hapless country. She was forced into a humiliating peace with Germany, mass starvation descended upon the land, and there was agitation for the overthrow of the dynasty. Despite all of this, Marie seems to have enjoyed the war. She spent every day zooming out and about, laden with whatever she could find. The Queen swept into field hospitals, peasant villages, wherever she could drive the Rolls, and distributed hope as much as anything. And her people loved her for it, as Marie would always girlishly admit. As Pakula presents her, Marie is the weirdest combination of narcissism and self-knowledge imaginable. At the end of the war, Roumania is being trounced at the Versailles Conference when its government comes up with the brilliant idea of sending Queen Marie off to charm everyone into giving her Transylvania. She blows over to Paris and by glory, Roumania gets Transylvania and a fair chunk of Bulgaria. Every morning while they were doing her hair, Marie listened patiently as her handlers fed information into the royal brain. Full to the brim with historical statistics, Marie donned one of the dozens of Parisian frocks she picked up along the way and set off for a different official's conference room. Only Woodrow Wilson was unmoved, although Mrs. Wilson seems to have become a fan.
It was the high point of her life. Ferdinand died in 1927, and her truly awful oldest son Carol seized the throne. Carol had left town earlier in a sort of proto-Harry and Meghan move, although unlike Harry he was simply wanting alone time with his mistress. Carol had renounced the throne in favor of his son by his legitimate wife, but pretty much as soon as Dad cooled he wanted back in. Once he achieved the throne, he made life hell for his entire family. Marie died in 1938, at least in part because Carol insisted upon only Roumanian doctors as diagnosticians.
The book never really takes off as a biography, because unlike the Empress Frederick, Missy was never an important political player. Pakula tries to inflate her subject's relevance, but . . . on the other, Pakula is a good writer who never fails to hold the reader's interest.
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