Posting to say that I’m temporarily suspending billing for paid subscriptions on this site. Many of you have been kind enough to support my work financially but I feel right now that you aren’t getting “value for money,” as they say in the UK. I work as a simulated patient – before you ask, yes, it’s a terrific job – at the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont, and we’re in one of our busiest seasons as another semester comes to a close and we test out the next generation of your doctors and nurses. I haven’t been able to write much – rather, I haven’t been able to publish much, and I don’t feel right receiving payment for silence.

The pieces I’ve posted here over the last few years – many of them, not all – I hope to turn into a book, a “memoir,” I suppose, of the worst days of the AIDS crisis and my life at that time. This will require a lot of editing; also, an ending of some kind. So far I’ve brought the narrative to the point of my collapse and near-death in 1994. Since, obviously, I survived that, I need to find a way to round out the story. This I hope to accomplish over the summer and will be back posting here, D.V., as soon as I can.

All postings on the site are still available to everyone. Thank you all so much for being readers.

My sister Gillian Randall has been digitizing old slides that our parents took of us many decades ago and this one reminded me of a short piece I did for Vermont’s Seven Days in 1996 (https://www.sevendaysvt.com/). The editors asked us all to write a little something about Thanksgiving dinner, each of us taking a separate item on the menu. This was mine.

They asked me to write about the pumpkin pie and I said I would because I know all about pumpkins. Pumpkins and I go way back. You can’t trust them. When I was eight years old, I won first prize at the Champlain Valley Fair for a pumpkin I grew in my backyard. It was very beautiful, round and perfect. Everybody said I had a green thumb. But nobody told me about crop rotation, so when I tried it again the next year I only got a pathetic stunted thing that looked more like a gourd with warts. I felt betrayed, yes, violated. I turned my back on pumpkins for many years.

Then one day when I was getting a divorce -- this was also some time ago -- I was depressed and decided I’d make a pumpkin pie from scratch. God knows what I was thinking of. I really needed some TLC. What I hadn’t counted on was the heartlessness of the pumpkin. Pumpkins are very selfish fruits -- they don’t forget. It took me six hours to steam it, peel it, mash it and so forth, and by the time I was done I had drunk three bottles of wine and couldn’t taste the pie at all. I called the woman I was still married to and yelled at her over the phone. She said I was a jerk and hung up.

The moral of this story: It’s just as good out of a can. Pumpkins will let you down.

Key West, 1994. Photo by Gillian Randall.

When I went to therapy after my mother died I was asked to draw a picture of my life. The counselor had pencils, pens, crayons, and watercolors, and invited me to use any combination of these to depict my world on a sheet of paper. I have no artistic talent and react with alarm to pop-up assignments like this. I tried to be cool about it, although giving me the opportunity to release my true feelings must have been the point of the exercise.

“I’m really no good at this,” I said before I started, hedging my bets. Eventually there emerged multicolored shapes and figures that showed me sitting solo in the corner of a long room, looking across toward a doorway lit by sunshine. The therapist asked why I sat so far away from the light and I answered, “I do go out sometimes.” And then, more honestly, “But I prefer the indoors. I need a wall at my back or I lose my bearings.”

Later I reflected on the loneliness this picture displayed. The therapist said soothingly that I was “a witness, an observer,” and on good days I’m happy to think of it that way. I am not gloomy by nature. But there I sit, alone, despite the many people who’ve been with me in and out. It’s how I want it, plainly, and statistics will confirm that I’m not the only one: more than a quarter of the U.S. population now lives in a single condition, as they used to say. Half the population reports being lonely anyway, single or not, and I don’t suppose that’s where any of us thought we were headed when we began. “But we all start out as grazing land,” said the writer Rebecca West, “and end up as ploughed fields.”

***

Journal entry, 1994:

It seems to me that my life is, if not a joke, a triviality -- a small substitution for the real thing. The American painter I met in Paris last summer -- what was his name? – he had heard I was “a biographer” and asked on introduction, “Why do you feel the need to live your life vicariously through other people?” What an asshole. I very wittily replied, “C’est mieux qu’être garagiste.” Why we were speaking in French I don’t know, undoubtedly to impress each other. But then I started wondering about it, since I’m inclined to believe anything anyone says to me the first time. And these days I’m pretty shaky in the head.

Grim reporting on the AIDS front. “No scientific breakthrough is apt to wipe this scourge from the earth any time soon,” says The New York Times. “Indeed, the existing medical weapons against AIDS are less successful than once believed.” I remind myself frequently that the media hypes in both directions, that the British press is more upbeat, that I only need to stay alive until better treatments come along. New drugs are “in the pipeline,” everyone says, the trick is to stay upright a while longer. They’re trying Thalidomide on it now which is kind of funny.

I have never looked past this point. It isn’t a question of “allowing” it or not. It’s just not possible. My eyes are always on the ground.

My therapist has lymphoma.

I went mad that year, 1994, hopped up on cocaine and dead asleep between binges. Somehow I managed to teach a graduate seminar in biography at a university in Florida that won nothing but praise from students and administrators. I had endeared myself on the first day by walking into the Dean’s office with the words, “Let me see if I’ve got this right. I’m not supposed to sleep with the students if they’re in my class? Or what? Ha ha ha ha.” I assumed they all knew I was joking. We were at the start of what was then called political correctness, the outwardly caring but nihilistic spawn of deconstructionism that later morphed into “woke.” One night I gave a talk about Isadora and when I described her as “a seminal figure in the history of art” a woman assailed me from the floor.

“Generative!” she cried.

“What?”

“We say generative, not seminal.”

“Oh.” I was honestly confused. “As I was saying ... Wait a minute -- you say generative. I said seminal.”

“You’re writing about a woman! It has to be generative!”

I looked it up later of course and discovered I was right, that the word seminal, apart from any association with seed, means to have had a strong and enduring influence on something. Generative has to do with reproduction, an area in which Isadora, to her sorrow, notably failed. All three of her children died. She never saw her dancing reproduced so much as imitated, but sowed the seeds of artistic freedom in all directions while waiting for her work to flower and evolve. Seminal was the word I wanted and I made sure that people knew it, mocking the whole experience in The New York Observer and inflating my reputation as a snarky social critic. Sometime that spring I was turned away from a lecture on Eleanor Roosevelt, given by what I called “the Lesbian Alternative Something-or-Other.”

I’m sorry to be vague but I think my mind has been clouded by the experience. I arrived at the hall and was met by three gorgons, the snakes unaccountably shaved from their heads, who blocked my way to the talk.

“Women only,” they growled as I mounted the stairs -- and I swear they pronounced the word exactly as it’s spelled: Wimmin.

“I’m a lesbian alternative myself,” I answered stoutly, pulling myself up to my full height and feeling as if I could snap a pencil in half with my bare hands.

The gorgons were unmoved.

“Don’t you think lesbianism is an inside job?” I pleaded. Apparently they didn’t, and since no one was laughing I wandered home, shocked, stumped, flabbergasted to think that my humiliation as a scholar and a man had been sparked by the memory of Eleanor Roosevelt, our first ambassador to the United Nations, toleration in the flesh, a woman whose reputation for fair-mindedness will live forever in national pride and whose highly developed sense of community service, I dare to suggest, would not have allowed her to endorse the dreary, over-argued, carping, harping, whining, whingeing, rights-of-victims thing that currently passes for a social agenda in America.

I had taken on too much, teaching, working on Isadora, writing for magazines, and further signing on as the author of Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra, a handsome picture book meant to coincide with a National Geographic film about the recovery of the Romanov bones in Ekaterinburg. A year previously, in 1993, word had come from England that the Ekaterinburg skeletons, the nine femurs sent from Russia for analysis to the Forensic Science Service at Aldermaston, had been positively identified through DNA comparison. They were in fact the remains of the Russian imperial family – at least the women’s were, Empress Alexandra and three of her daughters, their mitochondrial DNA matching directly to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, the grandson of Alexandra’s sister. Some genetic mutation temporarily delayed the identification of Nicholas II, and certainly at that stage small attention was paid to the four retainers who had died with the family in 1918. But the world was now certain. Infallibility ruled.

Did I know or suspect that “Anna Anderson“ would turn out to be a fake? Was some fear of that behind my utter breakdown in 1994? I can’t be sure. A small segment of her intestine, preserved in paraffin after a surgery in 1979, had been found at a Charlottesville hospital and brought to England to see if her chemistry matched the royal line. Madcap struggles broke out beforehand concerning ownership of the remains, Jack Manahan having died in the meantime and no one being clear about rights to the flesh. The matter went to court, where different parties sued for custody of the intestinal sample, including the Russian Nobility Association in New York, which wanted the DNA to be analyzed not just in England but elsewhere to guarantee the results. I took no active role in “this mess,” as Mrs. Anderson would have called it, although I was consulted for my opinion and certainly lobbied for what I considered my rightful place in the revival of the Anastasia drama. The intestine finally reached England in June 1994, as I prepared to crack up completely.

Women who argue with aardvarks.

Women who bat with the bears.

Women who coast with the critters.

Women who drift with the dogs.

Women who pester the penguins.

Women who eat with the eels.

Women who flirt with the farm animals.

Women who gad with the geese.

There was more, but I’ll skip it. The glitter of the Romanovs still caught whatever light I had to shed and through it, in Florida, I became friendly with the writer John Knowles, author of A Separate Peace. Years before, he had been a friend of Princess Nina on Cape Cod and had written a novel, little read, that peeked at the Anastasia controversy without clamping down on either side. We met at fancy restaurants in Fort Lauderdale to talk about our mutual interests. Jack told me that A Separate Peace, because it was assigned in schools, still sold upward of 500,000 copies a year and that he employed a secretary whose only job was to handle all the mail about “Phineas and that goddamned tree.” Apparently a form response was sent, advising readers to “look into your heart” for the answer.

“Did he mean to do it?” I asked solemnly, knowing it was the question Knowles hated most. I meant Gene, the character in A Separate Peace who shakes the tree limb that causes Phineas to fall and break his leg, ruining his athletic career.

“Of course he meant to do it, for Christ’s sake!” said Jack. He almost shouted: “There wouldn’t be a book if he hadn’t done it! Christ! But if you tell anybody -- I’ll kill you!”

I had a feeling Knowles said this to every man he took out to dinner.

And Florida! It was no good place for mother’s child to be. I had been warned before I went that I should “stick to the coastal side of I-95 and stay away from the interior. Always turn left when you’re driving south. Never turn right.” So, naturally, almost immediately, I turned right into drug dens and sex parlors and wound up with a man whom I cruelly called “Sergeant Bilko,” a former hairdresser who once, 20 years earlier, had sat next to Faye Dunaway at a dinner party. He looked like a prettier version of Phil Silvers and I used him without emotion, knowing he was in love with me and that being with me, as he put it, was “like a breath of spring.” More and more I felt like Dorian Gray, steering to the most obvious analogy. I had quickly cottoned on to the ways of academia, where the pretension was so thick you could spread it on crackers. “It’s all about dinner parties and plotting against your enemies,” I wrote to a friend in Vermont. “The lower the stakes, the bigger the fuss.” I did get some sunshine in those weeks:

The women here are all either thin as rails, with deep dark tans, beaten skin and huge (but mostly sparse) hair, or fat and floppy and constantly poking their husbands in the stomach, ordering them around, telling them to “Look out!”, shouting and grousing and carrying on. The men are bored to death, which explains the golf, but why the Cadillacs? And that in-your-face attitude they all have, which says, more or less, “I worked hard all my life, they’ve got nothing on ME, I’ve paid my dues, aren’t we lucky to be living in America, this neighborhood has gone to hell, the blacks and the Haitians and the gays,” etc. At Faculty Shrimp Throw the other night — can you stand it? can you picture me there? — when I went to the street for a cigarette, an old man walked by wearing a hat and bumping into garbage cans. He shouted out: “I used to smoke! God I loved it!” And waddled on.

Were the celebrities less brilliant that year, or was it just because I was so tired that their glow for me had faded? I remember a dinner in New York with Margaret Whiting and Jack Wrangler – it was hard not to think of them each in performance -- a party with Patty Hearst, an evening with Patti Davis, Reagan’s daughter, talking about dysfunctional families, and the strange hush that fell over New York on the last day of Jackie Onassis’s life, when it became known that she was dying. This was a real thing, a sort of muffle over the city, not confined to the area outside her building on Fifth Avenue. Everyone was waiting, it seemed, or had I merely transferred my own anxieties onto acres of concrete? I was about to throw it all away, heading for depths I hadn’t known before, imagining that if I fell far enough I would land softly, like Alice, dozing off, and just starting to dream.

For several summers I led a non-fiction writing workshop in Paris. I’d say I “taught” it but you don’t teach writing – it can only be learned. My students were mostly American women, seriously wealthy, corporate and diplomatic wives hoping to extend themselves and redeem their time abroad. Each year they turned up with impenetrable essays about their gardens and their grandfathers and that summer in Maine, jumbled all together and looking for a point. I asked them to pick just one topic – garden, grandfather, Maine -- and to start over from the top. “Just start writing it,” I directed. “Don’t explain what you’re doing.” For a week, we worked only on first paragraphs.

“The start of any piece of writing is everything about it,” I went on. “Your first lines contain all that will follow and nothing coming later can oppose or contradict them.” When the course was finished everyone had a clearer idea of where they were going and they certainly knew, better than they had, how hard it is to get a story moving.

“Stories are like houseplants,” I suggested. “You just need a cutting to get them started. Then you water them with tears.”

Well, I had to say that. I was paid to be clever, and in those last summers before HIV caught up with me it was something I could still pretend to do.

How should I detail further the story of my pitch into darkness? How can I make it instructive? I’m not a writer like others are, enrapt with language and deepness and poetry. In my career, believe me, I was only ever hanging on. I’m amazed by people who say that they need to write, that they can’t help themselves; they’re mesmerized, too soulful and sensitive for anything else. I feel like Pia Zadora next to them. I have a small talent, as some artist said, and that’s harder than a large one. It should be my epitaph.

But I did leave a mark. I even made it onto Page 6. My book reviews especially were a hit in New York, where I was known for my “sharpness” and “wit.” I took down Georgette Mosbacher for The New York Observer:

I’ve got to admit I’m of two minds (if mind is the word I’m looking for) about Feminine Force: Release the Power Within to Create the Life You Deserve, Georgette Mosbacher’s bubbly foray into the world of self-improvement. On the one hand, I can’t believe I’ve finished reading a book as gushy, imperturbable, hastily written, and retro-bimbo as this. On the other, it’s a relief to spend time with an author who isn’t complaining, hasn’t got an ax to grind, doesn’t hate anyone, wasn’t molested as a child, and never went to a treatment center for drug addiction, co-dependency, or low self-esteem. I feel Georgette should be rewarded for her success. I feel, indeed, that she deserves the life she has. She’s earned every one of those power lunches, every one of those houses and gowns, those cars, those jewels, those shiny incisors, and that big red hair.

Then JFK, Jr., before his marriage and untimely death:

John F. Kennedy, Jr., the hero of Wendy Leigh’s brain-dead Prince Charming, has never done anything in his life to deserve a biography. He has especially done nothing to deserve this biography, and I like to think that if he ever reads it he’ll be laughing his handsome head off. Ms. Leigh’s portrait of the Handsome Hunk, one of People magazine’s “Sexiest Men Alive,” the boy who saluted the coffin, threw food at his classmates at Andover, was allergic to horses, wore a Beatles haircut, “found himself” in India, chipped his ankle once, flunked his bar exams twice, may or may not go into politics, or dream of being an actor, or marry Daryl Hannah, but who anyway is “too straight” for Madonna -- where was I?

And it went on – the snarky essays and columns, the dates with dowagers, Park Avenue dinners, and sex in the shadows. One night with Gloria Vanderbilt we were talking about hot tubs -- yes, intellectual conversation -- and she said she never liked to use them, at spas and so forth, because she was sure they all had “sperm wiggling around in them.” Before I could say anything she asked if I thought she should change her literary agent. He had only got her a half million dollars for her new novel, the one about Starr Faithfull and her infamous sex diary, now greatly reimagined and tarted-up by Gloria. She talked about sex all the time, one night bursting out at the dinner table, in reference to black men, “But their asses are built higher than ours! Their ASSES are higher!” I don’t know why I never asked her outright, “Is it true that you and Nancy Reagan gave a blowjob together to Frank Sinatra? Because that’s what people say.”

But I liked Gloria. She wasn’t a fool or a flibbertigibbet, not just “a lunatic who paints,” as one of her (former) lawyers described her in a magazine article. When we met she was still heartbroken over the death of her son Carter Cooper, a suicide and the twin brother of Anderson. She told the story of Carter’s death over and over, wrote about it, consulted a swarm of shrinks and psychics, and channeled her grief into numberless projects of a creative nature: painting, sculpture, novels, memoirs, and drawn-out letters to her friends, page after page of reminiscence about the day that Carter had died. She had been reaching for his hand when he fell, or jumped, from the 14th-story terrace of her apartment in Gracie Square and that moment, when she imagined she might have saved him, propelled her forward in her work. I don’t know how she found the time to do all she did. She had an assistant, Nora Marley, who answered whenever I called — this was before cell phones — and roundly called out, “Hang on, Mr. Kurth, I’m searching the rooms!” I met bunches of people at Gloria’s parties, some of them greatly famous but most of a more local celebrity, people like Ned Rorem, Jule Styne, Phyllis Newman, and always the Eberstadts, Freddie and Isabel, she the daughter of Ogden Nash and he a Long Island socialite, the two of them ever game and amusing in the way you might expect it from peripheral characters in a novel by Muriel Spark. I confess to some nostalgia for Gloria’s dinners. They were like no other and I was at many, up and down the East Side.

From a letter to a friend, 1993:

If you were going to a party tomorrow night at Harry Winston (jewelers) on Fifth Avenue, with a man who designs clothes (privately) for the wealthiest ladies in New York (only he doesn’t call them “ladies”), and he says that a friend of his is going to be there who “really wants to meet you” and she’s a “Princess Fürstenberg,” what would you wear? Inviter says “jacket and tie” but jacket and noose sounds more like it. Everyone else who’s going is named Bonky and Maisie and Pooh, etc.

It turned out that Princess Fürstenberg was from Texas, an oil heiress, nicknamed “Titi,” and like most richissimes she never stopped talking:

“Who are you?” she says (more or less), and before I can answer she moves on: “What are you doing here? Do you really think she was Anastasia? How exciting! I was in Russia once. Do you think they’ll make it or will they all just kill each other? My favorite story when I was a girl was `The Little Mermaid.’ Did you buy any of those divine lacquer boxes while you were in Moscow? Icons? Have you met my friend Mr. Drexel? Mrs. Drexel was in a production of Hair, isn’t that sweet? But she didn’t take her clothes off. Right now I’m reading a book about King Arthur. Well, it’s all royalty.”

So it was a relief to get to Harry Winston and just look at the diamonds.

PS: Arriving at Beekman Place I got chewing gum on my shoe....

Sartorially, I often came to grief at these affairs. I had dinner with Tammy Grimes and her husband Richard Bell and came home covered in cat hair, white against my dark jacket. Hope Cooke, the former Queen of Sikkim, knocked her drink in my lap, and so forth. I had no heartfelt or intimate connection with any of these people. I was ever just a guest, a walker on my own:

October 29, 1993: Holed up writing -- living the life of a mole -- enjoying isolation for a few days. Went out after lunch to buy a color monitor for the new laptop computer and ran into a Hispanic-looking woman in the elevator around the 28th floor.

“Ay, ay, ay!” she suddenly cried. “I have forgotten my keys!”

“I do that all the time,” I said.

“Twelve years I have been in this country,” she went on, “and I feel that I am 120 years old! Every day I look into the mirror -- “

“Stop!” I said. “You don’t look 120!”

“Inside,” she said, beating her bosom, “inside!!”

And that was my story. I had turned 40 in July, in Paris, where I fell in love with the man I consider to be my last Big Crush. He was younger than I, but not grotesquely so, just enough for me to picture him as an innocent in the world. Please understand this was mostly imaginary because our union never came to be. I have endless journal entries recording my distress over this person, who was already coupled and otherwise too occupied to follow me around. On our last morning:

I’m drinking him in, his smell and look and eyes and hair, but we don’t touch, just stand at the window and talk ... we’re close and don’t touch, but I know what I know, I know when someone’s excited -- he was -- and when the air is charged with closeness and longing. So at one point, as I’m getting my things ready and winding things down, I come up behind him and take him by the shoulders and say, “You’ll keep in touch with me, won’t you?” And he answers without any hesitation, “Yes.” I say: “You will?” He says: “Yes.” And I leaned down and kissed his neck, and would live forever in that moment if I could, in the memory of that closeness -- but so quick!

It would be four or five months before I unraveled completely. Still, I count that trip to Paris as my point of collapse.

From The Observer (London) 2005; reprinted by request

In Monaco right now, the talk is all about shoes. Not the shoes that people actually wear - which would be Gucci or Fendi - but the shoes that need to be 'filled' since the death of Prince Rainier III in April this year. Rainier was the longest-reigning western monarch of modern times. He spent 56 years on the throne of Monaco, outstripping even Queen Elizabeth II. In monarchist circles, this is called 'continuity'.

When Prince Rainier came to the throne in 1949, Monaco was nothing but a Rivieran backwater, famous for its casino, its trail of impecunious and exiled royalty, and the presence of Aristotle Onassis, who, for many years, held the lion's share of Monaco's state-sponsored gambling franchise. Rainier finally forced Onassis out, as he also stood up to Charles de Gaulle and made France understand that Monaco's independence would be defended, if necessary. He would have lost the battle, had it come to that, but it never did. A 'deal' was worked out, by which Monaco retains its sovereignty at the sufferance of Paris.

'The principality is independent only by agreement between France and the family,' says a friend of the Grimaldis (the family name of the royals). 'The independence is given to the prince, not to the people and not to the country, and this is why the prince is so important.'

The current prince is Rainier's son, Albert II, Marquis des Beaux, who has a string of other titles: Duc de Valentinois, Duc de Mazarin, Comte de Farette, Sire de Matignon et de Marchais, and so on. He is of course half-American, the son of Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly, Princess Grace - one of Hollywood's brightest stars. His mother's marriage is, to this day, a source of great American pride, while her death, in a car accident in 1982, is something from which neither the Grimaldis nor Monaco have ever quite recovered.

Rainier's death last spring might have received wider coverage if the Pope hadn't expired at exactly the same time.

'The death of the Sovereign Pontiff wounds our souls, my Sisters' and mine,' Prince Albert declared in an official message on 3 April, while his father lay dying. 'This news marks us with profound emotion.'

During Rainier's final illness, Albert had already assumed the duties of Regent, and, like everyone else in Monaco, He uses capital letters when He writes about His Family. Rainier died just four days after the Pope and was buried with suitable pomp. Now, the suspicion is strong in Monaco that the Son isn't up to the Father's job. Shy and retiring, purported to have a stutter, Albert surprised everyone, however, not just by the force and dignity with which he took the throne, but by the fact that he, too, now has a son.

'Gossip was invented in Monaco,' Prince Rainier once said, and he was right. Besides the accession, the other hot topic in the cafes of Monte Carlo is a little boy called Alexandre Eric Stephane. Known only half-accurately as 'the Black Prince', he is the son of Prince Albert and a former airline hostess from Togo called Nicole Coste. Last May, against Albert's wishes and barely a month after his accession to the throne, Coste broke the news of the child's existence in a 10-page spread in Paris Match, the French tabloid magazine and gushing bible of Monaco lore. In legal (albeit private) documents, Albert had in fact already acknowledged Alexandre as his son and guaranteed the boy's financial security, asking only that Coste keep quiet about it until Monaco had observed the first three months of its official, year-long mourning for Rainier. But with Albert suddenly established as the absolute ruler of the Grimaldis' Rivieran Shangri-la, Coste evidently had second thoughts. Insisting she had 'no financial interest' in the matter, that she merely wanted 'an end to the lies', she asked Albert only to 'assume some of his responsibilities'. 'I'm appealing to his heart,' she said. ' I think he'll understand the interests of his son.'

Albert, by all accounts, was outraged. According to reports, he won more than 50,000 euros in damages from Paris Match for 'invasion of privacy' - the magazine had also published Coste's pictures of Albert and the baby - but he had never denied the fact of his paternity. In July, with the first three months of mourning ended, and on the eve of his investiture as Sovereign of Monaco, he acknowledged Alexandre publicly on French television, adding cryptically that there might soon be further similar revelations.

'I know that there are other people out there who are in more or less the same situation,' Albert declared (whatever 'more or less' might mean in the circumstances). It was a remark that left every newspaper editor in Europe gasping to know how many other children the perennially unmarried prince might have. But in September, he confessed that he was still 'coming to terms' with the ordeal, and that he knew of no other such paternity claims that might be true - in particular, the case of Tamara Rotolo, a woman in California who has insisted for years that her daughter, Jazmin, now 13, is Albert's child.

I asked the prince about all this when I saw him at his palace office in Monaco a few weeks ago. I arrived an hour early, and he turned up an hour late. He had been up at Rocagel, his family's 'farm' in the mountains near La Turbie, where he goes to relax, when he can, and from where Princess Grace took her last car ride. It is to Rocagel that Albert returns when he wants to be himself - to see his friends, play football or volleyball, hang out, work out, sing in the shower, cook his own breakfast or simply get some rest. At the palace, even so, he was impeccably dressed - dark suit, red tie - in clothes he says he buys 'off the rack' (as his mother was inclined to do, frequently at Marks & Spencer). I first ask him if we could just talk about the baby and then move on.

'Yes,' says Prince Albert, with a faint hint of a smile. 'Let's do that.' He is much better looking in person than he appears in his photographs - balding and bespectacled, to be sure, but with more of a chin and no trace of a stutter. The expressions on his face are surprisingly varied; he laughs easily, and, in conversation, like other princes, he has perfected an attitude of detached fascination. But in fact he didn't have much to say about l'affaire Coste that hasn't been said already. He repeated that Alexandre is well looked-after, that he will want for nothing, that, under law, he will one day share in the Grimaldi family fortune, but that he will never become Prince of Monaco: 'It's out of the question,' he insisted. 'The succession is secure.'

And it is. In 2002, with Albert still single and apparently childless, Prince Rainier changed the Monaco constitution to allow the throne to pass to his daughters, Caroline and Stephanie, and through them to their children, of which Caroline has four and Stephanie three. Dynastically speaking, there is no want of heirs in Monte Carlo, and no truth to the story, endlessly repeated, that if Albert dies without 'legitimate' issue, ownership of Monaco will revert to the jaws of France. At the moment, anyway, marriage seems the farthest thing from his mind.

'I'll get married when Rainier dies,' Albert once said, somewhat cold-bloodedly. In his new role as sovereign, he has what he calls 'a whole slew of concerns', from the ratification of the Kyoto protocol to new regulations of banking and industry in the principality and the ongoing maintenance of Monaco as 'a safe place, where quality of life is paramount'.

I mention that he is frequently described as the 'reluctant prince', that his relations with his late father were rumoured to be 'difficult', that he is said to have been inadequately trained for the seat he now occupies. He answers coolly. 'I have never said or done anything to give that impression.'

The story of Monaco is divided into two distinct and lopsided parts, corresponding roughly to the bulk of recorded history through to the end of the Second World War, and from there to the present day, a period of unparalleled expansion and prosperity that elder residents of the principality still describe wistfully as 'the years of Grace'.

It was in 1956 that Grace Kelly, star of High Noon and Rear Window, married Prince Rainier in the Cathedral of St Nicholas, not far from the palace, on top of 'the Rock' in Monaco-Ville. It is generally acknowledged that, in the quarter of a century that followed, Grace Kelly rescued Monaco from the Andorran - or anyway, Liechtensteinian - obscurity it might have enjoyed had Prince Rainier reigned alone. It was Grace who insisted on establishing a press office in the palace, she who hired the artisans, chose the colors, set the levels and raised the tone of the social to-and-fro. When she arrived in Monaco, the palace was still painted yellow - a shabby, imperial yellow that spoke of triumphs in the past tense. Grace thought it clashed with the tone of the Rock, and so (while it is usually described as 'pink') the official residence is now a kind of sugar-peach in color, with a creamy veneer that makes you think of Easter chocolate, or frozen yogurt.

It's more suited to a princess, certainly, than to pirates, which is what the Grimaldis originally were - part of a Mediterranean nobility who owed their survival to a succession of overlords, sometimes sheltering under the wing of France, sometimes signing up with Italy, or Spain.

When I meet Albert, I notice his tie bears an insignia, and I ask what it is. He looks down as if he's never seen it before.

Oh!' he suddenly exclaims. 'It's the monk!'

I look puzzled.

'You know, Francis I,' he continues, 'the first Grimaldi' - who, in 1297, disguised himself as a Franciscan friar and, with a band of cohorts, also disguised, captured the rock of Monaco, along with its invaluable port, for himself and his descendants. In 1966, Prince Rainier had the bodies of a whole mass of his ancestors exhumed from different graves and re-interred inside the cathedral; Rainier now lies reassuringly next to Grace, who died long before her time, but not before she became the pre-eminent Catholic princess of Europe: 'Gracia Patricia. Rainierus III Principis Uxor.' A movement for Grace's beatification currently sits on the far side of the Vatican's business, but can't be dismissed out of hand, because there have been reports of miracles from people who pray at her tomb. When I mention this to one of her nephews in Philadelphia, I expect a rolling of the eyes, but that's not what I get.

'Oh, yes,' he says, 'but these miracles often take place after the person dies, in prayer, through intervention - you know?'

I mention it to Prince Albert, too, and he assumes his most neutral gaze, telling me only that the issue of his mother's canonization isn't something the Grimaldi family is agitating for. 'It would have to be real,' the prince remarks; it would have to come 'from the people'.

'The people' of Monaco amount to roughly 33,000 souls. Of these, only about 7,000 are actually Monégasques - that is, people born there and making a living from one or other component of the Grimaldis' hugely profitable banking, property, advertising, sporting, yachting, dining, drinking, gambling, corporate-convention empire. The rest are expatriates, résidents priviligiés - millionaires, rock stars, tennis stars, socialites, etc - who are allowed to live in Monaco tax-free, provided they bring money with them, behave themselves and aren't French. (French residents of Monaco do pay taxes, through some ancient arrangement between Rainier and the Elysée, but this revenue goes to Paris.)

The Grimaldi family enterprise is an industry in the exact sense. It's a triumph of marketing and a model of design. Historically, too, it's been a well-feathered nest of crooks and impostors, in Somerset Maugham's famous description, 'a sunny place for shady people'.

In life, Rainier was known in Monte Carlo as Le Patron - the boss - with all the associations that term implies. 'Everybody's in it together here,' a Monaco stockbroker tells me, with obvious sincerity. 'We all have an interest in keeping the principality exactly the way it is.' And what it is, or at least has been up till now, is a haven for 'suspicious' business deals, tax evasion, money laundering and concealed bank accounts. Currently, Monaco remains one of a handful of places on a list of 'uncooperative tax havens' maintained by the European Union's Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

In his accession speech last July, following a tribute to his father, Prince Albert announced that he wanted to 'clean up' his country's image. He will encounter fierce opposition. But the prince is a well-known liberal, a democrat, a serious environmentalist, who declared from the steps of St Nicholas that 'morality, honesty and ethics' would guide his rule; that 'to produce wealth is essential', but that 'our role is also to promote social justice ... Creating wealth is not an end in itself. It needs to be shared by all.' Many laughed, but perhaps not for long. If Albert doesn't yet rule with his father's iron fist, he hasn't found his Princess Grace yet either. In truth, he has always been surrounded by women, most of them pretty and blonde, like his mother. But he isn't comfortable talking about himself in a 'personal' sense. A cousin of mine who knew him in the Seventies, when he was a student at Amherst College in the United States, remembers the night they first met at a party. She had no idea who he was and asked his name.

'Al,' he said.

'Oh,' said Veronique. 'Is it from Alan or Albert?'

'Albert,' said Albert.

'And where are you from?'

'France.' 'Really? Which part?' (Veronique's mother is French.)

'Monaco,' Albert replied.

'With hindsight,' she writes to me now, 'I think he'd been cornered there by the girls. I saw and heard them talking about him like a piece of meat, and who would get the biggest chunk. God, it must be horrible. He seemed so unroyal, and I mean that as the highest compliment.'

If Albert seems 'unroyal', it needs saying that Monaco isn't a kingdom - it has no 'royal' family. Of all Prince Rainier's children, only the eldest, Princess Caroline, thanks to her third marriage to Ernst August of Hanover (a relative of Queen Elizabeth and very distantly in line to the British throne), is actually a 'Royal Highness'. Albert and Stephanie are merely 'Serene'.

Caroline is to many the most beautiful and elegant of the Grimaldis - smart, chic, sophisticated, educated and believed to have been her father's favorite. After the death of Grace, it was thought by some that Rainier might abdicate and that Caroline would 'seize the throne' from Albert. These rumors were denied by the palace as 'ridiculous and completely without foundation' and, indeed, since the death of her second husband, the Italian entrepreneur Stefano Casiraghi, in a speedboat accident in 1990, Caroline has lived mainly outside the principality, turning up to fulfil her duties, when necessary. I asked Albert if there was such a thing, formally, in the absence of the sovereign's wife, as First Lady of Monaco. 'No,' he said. 'The role does not exist.' There was no rancor in his reply, no suggestion of any rift between himself and his sister. And yet if such a role does exist, if only in the popular imagination, it belongs to Princess Caroline.

The three children of Caroline's marriage to Stefano Casiraghi - Andrea, Pierre and Charlotte, next in line to the throne after their mother - had been carefully shielded from the press, until recently. But now they are approaching adulthood they are followed around by the paparazzi of Europe, just as Caroline, Albert and Stephanie were in their late teens. When I was in Monaco, a simple service was held at the Church of Ste Devote in Monte Carlo to commemorate the 15th anniversary of Stefano's death. Only the Casiraghi family were present - no photographers, and no reporters, beside myself, that I could see. Such is the extent of security and privacy in Monaco. But Stefano, plainly, is not forgotten.

Caroline's fourth child, from her current marriage to Ernst of Hanover, is Alexandra, Duchess of Brunswick-Lűneburg, Princess of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. She has so far escaped much media attention, but she is only six. However, her father has admitted to the German press something that everyone in Monaco knows - that he has 'a problem with drink'. At the time of Rainier's final illness last spring, Ernst was in a coma at Princess Grace Hospital in Monte Carlo, thought to be suffering from pancreatitis. The tabloids took a few extra pictures of Caroline to see if she would crack. She didn't, and neither did Ernst. He recovered, and has rallied to say, 'My problem is that I just can't say no. If someone calls me up and suggests going out and getting drunk, then I go. Now I will have to learn to make myself hard to find. Then no one will call me and I won't be tempted any more.'

Ernst now declares that he's taking it 'step by step', and, no matter what his problems are, not a bad word about him passes anyone's lips in Monaco - a tribute both to him and to his wife, whom grief has sobered several times.

I was reluctant to ask Albert about Stephanie, because the two of them are rumored to be very close and because she, at 17, was the only other person in their mother's car when it plunged down the mountain from La Turbie. 'I know she went through a lot because of the accident,' Albert has said. 'It affected her more than people can imagine.' Stephanie herself confesses to 'survivor guilt', remarking that 'everyone wanted [Grace] to survive, and instead I did'. Her 'chaotic lifestyle', as Albert puts it, serves as a shield for her genuine accomplishments. No one in Monaco has done more for the fight against AIDS, for example. There was a time, the prince tells me, not long ago, when Monaco had the highest per capita incidence of HIV infection in Europe: 'Naturally this was so because everyone is always passing through here.' Stephanie took on the problem as her mission, when almost everyone else looked the other way.

It was Stephanie, too, who took Albert's hand at the end of his 'accession' ceremony in July and led him solemnly out of the Cathedral where their parents are buried, and gave him to the crowd.

But though she isn't entirely the wild, bratty heiress the world supposes, her life has indeed been 'chaotic'. In 1995, she married her former bodyguard, Daniel Ducruet, already the father of her two children, who was photographed not long after cavorting along the Riviera with 'Miss Bare Breasts Belgium'. Stephanie immediately divorced him and re-emerged a little later in the company of a circus-elephant trainer. She then dumped him and married a Portuguese acrobat whom she may or may not, by now, also have shed. Somewhere along the line, Stephanie also had a third child, whose father's identity she hasn't revealed. Recently, it was said she wanted to remarry Ducruet, but no sooner did that news surface than Ducruet was caught cavorting again, this time with a Miss France. Stephanie, now 40 and 'terribly wounded', was herself spotted 'canoodling' at a football match in Monte Carlo with a man half her age, described as a barman and identified only as 'Mathieu'.

'So, now what?' I ask the prince. 'Where do you go from here?' The question is rhetorical, but his answers aren't. At the end of October he was in New York for the annual Princess Grace Foundation Awards. There's a trek to the North Pole scheduled for April - dog-teams and all - where Albert intends both to study the effects of climate change and retrace the footsteps of his ancestor and namesake, Prince Albert I, who made the same trip 100 years ago. 'It's a way of closing the circle,' the prince explains. And on 19 November, in Monaco, there's another ceremony of accession, hard to distinguish from the one in July, except that this time foreign heads of state are invited (the first event was for Monegasques only). You might call it a coronation if Monaco had a crown; in any case, says the prince, it's later this month that 'the oath of loyalty' will be given.

Does this oath go from you to the people,' I ask, 'or the people to you?'

'It goes from them to me,' he says. The nervous tapping of his foot leads me to think he is getting tired of questions.

As I leave I ask him about the so-called Grimaldi Curse, ostensibly inflicted by a medieval sorceress, which stipulates that no member of the sovereign's family will ever enjoy a happy marriage. Albert says he'd never heard a word about it until he read it in the papers.

I also mention that, the night before, I'd been out on the town. I'd been to Le Texan, a fabulous, if somewhat incongruous Tex-Mex joint that was established at the suggestion of Princess Grace, who evidently missed the kind of food she used to get in LA. I'd moved on from there to its hipper sister hangout, Stars'n'Bars, before winding up at the casino, from which the principality no longer derives the bulk of its annual revenue - only about four per cent - and which I'd been told has now been taken over by Russian 'businessmen' in shiny suits. But when I got there, no Russians could be found. Not one.

'So what did you find?' Albert enquires.

'A bunch of American girls drinking champagne,' I say, 'fresh off a cruise ship in the harbor. And, oh, yes, three young Italian men in the corner, arms folded, gazing at them with a certain ... erm ... look in their eyes.'

The prince jumps to his feet, throws his head back, bursts out laughing and says, 'Oh, let's go! Let's go right now!'

“How to make sense of this immense, complicated, beautiful and grotesque life? Many have tried: the Isadora Duncan literature is a tidal wave of loving reminiscence, obfuscation, self-glorification, infighting and supposition by those who knew her... And now there is Peter Kurth, sardonic yet appreciative, neither adoring nor denigrating... He has stylishly synthesized the literature to give us the fullest and most coherent account of the life to date.” — Robert Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review

“Peter Kurth has done a heroic job recreating this charismatic, complicated and ultimately deeply tragic figure, born in the heyday of the railroads and dead before the Great Depression. Isadora: A Sensational Life will likely become the standard biography. Kurth seems to have read everything that has been written about her; and while he lets critics, scholars and (most valuably) those who saw her dance sum up the evanescent Duncan artistry, he gives us the woman herself.” — Tim Page, Washington Post Book World

“Peter Kurth has written the best biography we have of an astonishing and often underrated woman. He writes so well that only the weight of paper will occasionally remind you of his subject’s amplitude... Working from an assembly of sources vast enough to make you dizzy, he succeeds in making you love, hate and honor America’s greatest dancer, sometimes all at once. Earlier biographies have tended to focus on her, just as Isadora herself did. Kurth does better by giving vivid portraits of the lovers, friends and pupils whose voices make up a diverse chorus... Shrewdly, he gives space not only to Isadora’s wonderfully feckless chum, Mary Desti, the creator of the scarf that throttled her, but to Preston Sturges, Desti’s film-making son. Preston’s amused, slightly spiky voice is, you will find, the one closest to Kurth’s own in this marvelously rich and well-told book. Isadora deserves to be taught as well as read; this is how biography should be written.” — Sunday Times (London)

“[A] luminous portrait, aglow with the details of Duncan’s life and times. Mining the rich lode of Duncan sources — her own writings, recollections of her contemporaries and press coverage of the day — Kurth presents as complete a picture of the dance pioneer and proto-feminist as is possible. Although only a few minutes of Duncan’s dancing have been preserved on film, the vivid descriptions found here will conjure up moving images of one of the most original figures in dance history.” — Library Journal

“Kurth... tracks Duncan’s every triumph and tragedy, skillfully excerpts her writings and other invaluable sources, and sets her entire complex milieu in motion. In awe, he wisely restricts himself to precision reporting, leaving aesthetic and psychological interpretations for other scholars, who, like all of Kurth’s fascinated readers, will be grateful for his herculean effort and abiding respect.” — Booklist

“Mr. Kurth has... absorbed the material, like a dancer lodging choreography in muscle memory, and distilled the considerable detail into an immensely readable and poignant evocation of Duncan’s tumultuous life... Even sophisticated dance readers are likely to find their own revelations about Duncan’s art in the minutiae of her life and career, reported by Mr. Kurth at a discreet, sometimes amused distance from a subject he clearly admires in spite of himself.” — Jennifer Dunning, The New York Times

“There was a purity and seriousness to Duncan, and it’s one of Kurth’s virtues that — while he hasn’t stinted on the juicy gossip — he pays real attention to this... with the pitch-perfect narrative voice that makes this hefty book a lightning page-turner.” — Amanda Vaill, Chicago Tribune

“Kurth takes care to place Duncan’s dancing in its social and artistic context but this isn’t a dance book. Kurth’s real interest is in the make-up of this ‘absurd genius’ and he rides the running-board of Isadora’s vagabond life with great aplomb.” — Sunday Telegraph (London)

“There is never a dull moment in Peter Kurth’s action-packed biography... Kurth has done her proud with his excellent biography.” — Daily Mail

“I would read anything written by Peter Kurth — his Anastasia had me walking round the house all day deep in the book until it was finished. Now at last we have a thorough study of Isadora Duncan which is compelling all the way to its terrifying conclusion.” — Hugo Vickers, author of Vivien Leigh, Cecil Beaton, Loving Garbo, and The Private World of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor

“From the opening words, explaining her eccentric Christian name in 1877, to the closing words describing her auto-strangulation fifty years and many pages later, this depiction of Isadora Duncan... is continually revealing, instructive, and captivating.” — Ned Rorem

“We may never know whether ‘one must have seen Isadora Duncan to die happy,’ as one of her contemporaries claimed, but one way to live happily, at least for a few days, is to read Peter Kurth’s Isadora. Exhaustively researched, intelligently rendered, it becomes, in its lovingly judicious and ultimately explosive unfurling, the definitive portrait of this — in the words of one of the few men not her lover — ‘figure of mourning and flame.’” — J. D. Landis

“A delightful read, a riveting account, written with grace and style, of a fascinating and extraordinary life.” — Gerald Clarke, author of Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland and Capote: A Biography

$9.99 on Kindle, Nook, Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play

Want everyone to know that I'm still here. School has started so I'm ultra-busy with new students and the heavy fall schedule; also working on edits of the Dorothy Thompson film script -- cross your fingers, hold your breath -- and a new Kindle edition of my book about Isadora Duncan. More about that when it appears. You might say it's a fertile time. Many thanks to all subscribers and I'll be back here as soon as I can swing it. Thanks for your patience.

Princess Xenia of Russia with her daughter, Nancy Leeds, 1925

In May 1993 I drove through England with Nancy Leeds Wynkoop, my great friend from “Anastasia” days, daughter of Princess Xenia of Russia and a bona fide Romanov on her mother’s side. We started in Oxford and headed west to the Cotswolds, north through the Midlands to the Lake District, southeast through Yorkshire, and north again to Scotland, where we wound up in Pitlochry at the home of Major Sir David and Lady Myra Butter. Major Butter, whose military record included action in Italy and at El Alamein, had been Lord Lieutenant of Perthshire and Chieftain of the Pitlochry Highland Games. Myra, his wife, was the daughter of Sir Harold and Lady Anastasia (“Zia”) Wehrner, close friends of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. She was Nancy’s second cousin through Romanov descent. Both were granddaughters of Russian grand dukes, brothers, Michael and George Mikhailovitch, one of them shot by the Bolsheviks in 1919 and the other – Michael, Myra’s grandfather – banished from Russia already before the Revolution after his marriage to an “unsuitable” bride, Countess Sophie von Merenberg, later de Torby, the child of a prince of Nassau and his unsuitable bride, Alexandra Pushkin, daughter of the poet.

Whew. I never had trouble keeping genealogical connections straight. I don’t know why – many people find it difficult. I had read all nine volumes of Queen Victoria’s published journals and letters by the age of 14 and learned too about the fortunes of her nine children, all but one of whom “had issue,” as the phrasing is, giving her 42 grandchildren and 87 great-grandchildren, most of whose names I still know, along with their wives’ and husbands’ and many of their descendants’. I’ve said before that a royal family tree is no more complicated than any other and it isn’t. But I had no answer when a therapist asked me why it mattered to know how a princess of Hesse might be related to the Duke of Fife.

“It doesn’t matter, I suppose.” said I. “Maybe it keeps the mind sharp, like crossword puzzles.” Driving with Nancy I heard family stories of a more intimate kind than I was used to, about her mother’s depressions and her father’s alcoholism, her husband’s drinking too, which had almost ended their marriage before he finally quit. Nancy’s mother, Princess Xenia, had died young, at just 62, following a series of strokes brought on in part, Nancy thought, by the strain of testifying for “Anna Anderson” in her suit to be recognized as Nicholas II’s daughter. There was no bitterness in Nancy’s voice when she remarked on this, for Xenia had “believed in her, and continued to believe in her,” despite all the pressure put upon her to recant. In Mrs. Anderson’s papers, left behind in Germany when she moved to the United States, I found a letter from Xenia addressed to “Dearest Anastasia,” dated 1958 and putting paid to assertions, mainly from Romanov cousins who never met the claimant, that Xenia had “changed her mind” on the identity question. She had not, dragging herself from a sickbed to testify formally and dying shortly thereafter. She might have been in error but her integrity isn’t in doubt.

Nancy was sad on our trip around England, solemn and wistful, saying that it would be her last visit to the British Isles and directing us toward places she was adamant to see while she could: Beatrix Potter’s cottage at Ambleside; the parsonage in Haworth, where the Brontës wrote their novels; Warwick Castle, and so on. She swept through these houses as if inspecting them for dust, with a briskness I had noted before when we went out in public. She was commanding but not arrogant; her ways were inherited. I remember a moment, early on, when she expressed herself horrified that her American daughter hadn’t curtsied to “Sitta,” Queen Helen of Romania, the mother of King Michael, when they met in Geneva. Queen Helen was Nancy’s godmother.

“I don’t know,” Nancy sighed. “I don’t know.” She demanded that we drive to Birdsall House in Yorkshire to meet the chatelaine, Janet Willoughby, Lady Middleton. She wanted to see the Middleton estate, an Elizabethan pile greatly extended and improved over four or five centuries. We had tea in the front room, Lady Middleton somewhat confused by the purpose of the visit but nodding eagerly when Nancy repeated that she was the daughter of a Russian princess who had lived in the area during World War I. In fact Princess Xenia had sat out the war as a teenager in Harrogate, while her own mother, Grand Duchess Maria Georgievna, used the hostilities as a means to separate from her Russian husband, Grand Duke George, without causing a stir. Their marriage had never been happy: George was besotted but Maria was not. She claimed to be trapped in Britain when the war broke out, unable to return home, although it would have been simple enough to find a way back through diplomatic channels had she really wanted to go. Xenia and her sister, Nina, never saw their father again. He was shot in St. Petersburg in the Fortress of Peter and Paul, leaving a deep resentment in his daughters against their mother.

“Mama hated England,” Nancy remarked several times as we whizzed around the isle. I was driving a stick shift and she had an annoying habit of tapping my hand whenever she thought I should change gears; over ten days I almost got used to it. She talked a lot about this grandmother, Maria, a Greek princess by birth, who seems to have been everyone’s favorite cousin and niece in the vast Greek and Danish line. In relaxed family photographs Maria is seen romping and laughing with the Tsar’s sisters, Xenia and Olga; with his mother, the Dowager Empress, and father, Alexander III; with her Aunt Alexandra, Queen of England, and Alexandra’s daughter Victoria and son, King George V. There are even pictures of Maria coaxing laughter from the last Tsarina, a near impossibility for anyone. In the family Maria was “Greek Minny,” so called to distinguish her from the Dowager Empress, also Maria, also “Minny” to anyone given rights of intimacy. Royal nicknames were definitive: Princess Xenia was “Tommy” to her relatives.

Grand Duchess Maria Georgievna (left) with her cousin Xenia Alexandrovna, sister of the Tsar. (Credit: @royaltyincolour)

After World War I and her husband’s execution in Russia, while returning home to Greece, Grand Duchess Maria fell in love with the commander of the ship that carried her, Admiral Perikles Ioannidis, quickly nicknamed “Percules” by astonished royalty. In 1922 she married him, much against the wishes of her family. It deepened the rift between herself and her daughters, both of whom had now found husbands of their own. Nancy met her grandmother only once, when Maria came to the United States from her final exile in Rome.

How good she was to me – Nancy, who had never needed to bother with an inquisitive boy amazed by her background. I had turned up on her doorstep in Vermont at age 17, wearing a tie and blazer and carrying a briefcase as a sign of my resolve. There were treasures in the house, not just linens, china, and silver, but Fabergé things and portraits of Romanovs going back generations. A photograph of Empress Alexandra, softly framed, was signed to Nancy’s mother, and the first time I stayed the night I slept under pictures of the Tsar. The décor, while not ostentatious, was nonetheless deliberate; I would learn that Nancy’s neighbors in Woodstock, a town not unused to social pretension, were never sure what to make of her, debating her authenticity while envying her heirlooms. Ed Wynkoop, Nancy’s husband, was “in finance,” and the family had moved to Vermont from Connecticut just a few years before I appeared. She told me later that over the years she had had many letters from people absorbed in the “Anastasia” case and had ignored them completely. Why she treated me differently she couldn’t say, except that I had seen her Aunt Nina on Cape Cod and “must have learned a little bit already.” Brien Horan and I – at the same age, coming forward at the same time – would be her “horses in the race,” as she put it, at a time when Anna Anderson was still living and the matter of her identity still sometimes seemed urgent.

In Nancy’s front rooms hung large canvases by Philip de László, the Hungarian royal portraitist and society painter. Two were of her mother, Princess Xenia, and the other of her second grandmother, Princess Anastasia of Greece and Denmark, formerly Mrs. William B. Leeds and before that Miss Stewart and Mrs. Worthington, the only American woman in history to have been made a royal highness “in her own right” – that is, independently of marriage, her prerogatives belonging solely to her, as if she had been born the daughter of a king. This was the bargain she had struck with the exiled King of Greece, Constantine I, when, in 1920, she married his younger brother, Prince Christopher, and used her great fortune to buy back the throne.

Princess Anastasia of Greece and Denmark by Philip de László, ca. 1920

Here it gets a little complicated. In 1917 King Constantine had been forced to leave Greece owing to his opposition to Greek involvement in World War I. A first cousin of both the Tsar of Russia and the King of England, masters of the Triple Entente, he was simultaneously married to the Kaiser’s sister and was suspected, probably correctly, of “German sympathies.” A schism arose in the Greek government and more broadly throughout the country, with Allied pressure bearing down to propel Greece into the conflict. Constantine remained firm in his stand for neutrality but was mooted finally by an Allied occupation of Macedonia. Under the virtual dictatorship of Prime Minister Eleuthérios Venizélos, he agreed to step down, without, however, surrendering his sovereign rights. His son Alexander, fully unprepared, assumed the throne as a kind of placeholder while Constantine and the rest of the Greek royal family removed themselves to Switzerland to wait out events. This is where Mrs. Leeds stepped in.

Nonnie May Stewart Worthington Leeds, the original “Nancy,” had been born in Ohio as the daughter of a wealthy businessman – a miner, banker, and real estate tycoon, from whom she seems to have learned important lessons in negotiation and money management. Homeschooled, she was sent for “finishing” to Miss Porter’s in Connecticut and in 1894, at age 16, contracted her first marriage, to George Ely Worthington, a Cleveland industrialist and luminary much like her father. There is confusion about how long this marriage lasted, or if it was even legal, an Ohio law mandating that women be at least 18 before entering matrimony. Whatever the case, as the press reported, “it was not long before the Worthington marital bark struck rough waters,” and the union was either dissolved by divorce or annulled on a technicality – probably the latter, for no hint of scandal or misbehavior followed Nonnie as she moved into high society. By 1900 she was free to marry the “Tin Plate King,” William Bateman Leeds, a former florist and railroad engineer who had subsequently earned an enormous fortune in the tinning industry. As a wedding present, he gave his bride a yacht, a million dollars in jewelry, and a mansion on Fifth Avenue, from where Nonnie, now known more formally as Nancy, began her rise to social prominence. In 1902 she had a son, William B. Leeds, Jr., instantly named “the world’s richest boy” by a slobbering press.

In the first decade of the 20^th century, as its era waned, William B. and Nancy Leeds were the archetypal couple of the Gilded Age, sublimely wealthy and determined to enter the upper tier of New York society. This was mostly down to Nancy, whose gifts included charm and beauty as well as bottomless pots of cash. In 1903 newspapers reported that she had conquered “the Long Island set” – the Leeds’s had built a second home in Oyster Bay – and Palm Beach, where money alone was normally sufficient to open doors: “Her husband is said to be worth $30,000,000 [there is no way to calculate the actual value of this sum today] and this was her passport." It took longer to sway the old guard at Newport, where Leeds purchased “Rough Point” on Bellevue Avenue, later the home of tobacco heiress Doris Duke, and where Nancy sat out two seasons as a parvenue, waiting, until Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, one of the three deciding dames of Newport society, threw a ball in her honor and marked her with the legitimacy she craved.

“Two years ago she did not exist,” a columnist noted. “Now she is seen motoring with Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, Jr. and coaching with the Whitneys." She entertained royally, traveled constantly, organized charities and committees, and made the news just by leaving the house. A famous court case revolved around her jewelry. In 1906 Leeds had bought her a pearl necklace in Paris and paid American import duties only on the pearls, not the assembled piece, which would have been taxed at a higher rate. The United States government sued for the full amount and the case wound on for six years, being settled finally in 1912 in favor of a now widowed Nancy Leeds. William B., Sr. had died of a stroke in 1908, drunk, after trashing his room at the Ritz Hotel in Paris and tossing furniture out the window into Place Vendôme. The cost was simply added to the bill.

After Leeds’s death, Nancy sold her New York townhouse and moved to England, sending her son to another Leeds property in Montclair, New Jersey, where he was looked after by “a governess, a housekeeper, and 15 servants to meet his slightest wish,” according to a 1912 report. Two detectives accompanied him wherever he went. He had no playmates: “Mrs. Leeds keeps in touch with the lad almost daily through cable messages and is kept constantly posted as to his physical condition and progress in school.” Waited on hand and foot, his every whim indulged, he grew up to be a shining playboy, a sportsman, and a severe alcoholic. His mother brought him to London as he reached his teens and enrolled him at Eton, saying it would be good for his character. “Of course,” she remarked, “the young men in the social life of England [i.e., the wealthy] do not work, but they go in for sports and are healthy, strong and normal – and they do not drink as much as the idle young men of America.” She deluded herself. From her new domain in St. James’s Square, entertaining bankers and royalty, she may only have seen a small part of London.

In 1914 Nancy Leeds met Prince Christopher of Greece through the Countess de Torby, Myra Butter’s mother, and quickly determined to marry him. “Many a dented title has sought her hand,” the press reported, but royalty was her aim and she achieved it. Her engagement to Christopher was announced against opposition from the whole Greek royal family and especially its queen, Sophia, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and sister of the Kaiser. When war broke out in August 1914 the matter landed on a back burner, although newsmen still occasionally asked questions and wondered about the status of this unusual romance. Prince Christopher, a “bachelor” of long standing, turned up amusingly in the newspapers as “a fair, rather fat and very pleasant young man … with the finest tenor voice among European royalties.” Nancy seemed content to remain in a state of engagement until the end of the war, when the revolutions in Russia, Germany, and suddenly Greece threw most of her royal friends into penury.

A monkey decided the matter. In 1920 the surrogate Greek king, Alexander, died of sepsis after trying to rescue a roaming macaque from his dogs while walking on the grounds of his palace at Tatoi. In the scuffle the monkey bit him on the leg and within three weeks he was dead. Alexander had been the more or less willing puppet of the prime minister, Venizélos, now embroiled in a war with the Turks, and his death stirred Greek monarchists to new heights of sentiment. When Venizélos was defeated in parliamentary elections at the end of 1920 a plebiscite called King Constantine back from Switzerland. Both votes had been heavily influenced by Nancy Leeds’s millions, which paid for anti-Venizélos and monarchist propaganda up and down the Greek mainland and were presumed to have “bought off” oppositional challenges. That her marriage to Prince Christopher went ahead at just this time – “the $40 million which the American widow possessed contrasting rather shockingly with the flat purse of the ruling Greek family” – and that she was given all the rights and prerogatives of royalty in the bargain virtually screamed of a backstairs deal.

But that was the last of Nancy’s victories. Not long after her royal marriage she was diagnosed with cancer and died in 1923 at the age of 50, having lived to see the marriage of her son, William Leeds, Jr., to her husband’s niece, Princess Xenia. The story is that Nancy Sr. wept for three days on hearing of this engagement, thinking that both her son and Xenia were too young for it, at 19 and 17 respectively. It can be inferred that both were trying to get away from their mothers. The marriage would last for nine years, heavily chronicled in society columns and severed finally by Leeds’s compulsive drinking, gambling, and “adventuring” in all parts of the world. In the meantime, neither his mother nor Xenia’s, neither Nancy Sr. or Grand Duchess Maria, before their deaths, renounced their rights of inheritance to the crown of Greece. This left Leeds’s and Xenia’s only child, my friend Nancy Wynkoop, directly in line to the throne after the children of the last king, Constantine II, who kept a sly eye on her movements until her death in 2006. “And how is my cousin … Nancy?” he would ask, as if trying to remember who she was. But he knew very well, and so did she.

Princess Xenia and William B. Leeds, Jr. on their wedding day in Paris, 1921

That night she couldn’t sleep. Her suite at the Beau-Rivage faced the water, where the lighthouse kept her awake with its pulsing colors – she refused to have the curtains drawn. “First I had to listen to an Italian singer bawling his songs in the night,” Elisabeth complained, “and then the moon …” It was waning, high over the city, and it shone through the window directly on her face, flooding the room with “a mystic light.” Elisabeth was always alert to portents and omens. One night at Montreux, earlier in the week, she had summoned Irma to say that “the moon bore the countenance of a weeping woman” and that “a lady in white” was trespassing in the garden: “But though every path on the grounds was searched, and every bush was beaten, no woman in white could be found.” Then there were the ravens, a bird associated in Habsburg lore with calamity and disaster. Elisabeth had been picnicking, eating a peach: “At that very moment, a raven flew towards her and struck the fruit out of her hands by the force of its wings.” That she was also reading Corleone, Marion Crawford’s popular romance about the Sicilian Mafia, in which a number of victims are dispatched with stilettos, seemed pertinent only later. Irma saw her glance from her bedroom to the parlor at the Beau-Rivage, where “masses of asters, mauve and white in color, had been grouped for her appreciation.” Elisabeth shook her head.

“They’re lovely, aren’t they?” she said. “But I don’t like them. Asters are for funerals.”

“Will we be leaving?” Irma asked. She had felt “a sudden dread.”

“Yes,” said Elisabeth, “the boat leaves at 1:40. Send the others on ahead. You know I don’t like parades.”

At eleven she decided to go out. She walked to Bäcker’s, a music shop in the Rue Bonivard, where she wanted to hear the Orchestrion. This was “a new sort of musical machine,” as Irma described it, “a large music box that reproduced the sounds of an orchestra by means of percussion and pipes. We heard selections from Aïda, Carmen, Rigoletto, and Tannhäuser. Tannhäuser was Her Majesty’s favorite opera.” Elisabeth looked through the shop while Irma dealt with “the public” -- “an elegant lady,” in this case, “who introduced herself as a Belgian countess and stared obtrusively at Her Majesty. She begged to be presented, saying she was a great friend of Her Majesty’s sisters, the Queen of Naples and the Countess Trani. I answered that I could not oblige her and, wounded, she walked away.” As they were leaving, Bäcker himself, the proprietor, asked Elisabeth to sign his guest-book. Irma looked for permission.

“Just write ‘Erzébet Királyné [Queen Elisabeth],’” Elisabeth answered in Hungarian. “He won’t know what it means, and by the time someone explains it to him I’ll be miles away.”

Sisi (left) with Irma Sztáray in Geneva on the day before her death (1898)

At the hotel, she retired to change her clothes. She was moving slowly, Irma thought, “without a trace of anxiety, and I was very nervous. If we missed the boat, we’d be left in Geneva alone, since the servants had already gone ahead with the trunks. I didn’t wait for her to come out. I went straight into her room and asked her if I could send the hotel porter to hold the ferry in case we were late. The captain didn’t know we were coming.”

Elisabeth shrugged. She was drinking a glass of milk.

“Majesty,” said Irma, “it’s 1:25. The boat …”

“But Irma, first you must taste this delicious milk.” She watched as Irma drained the glass. “But perhaps you don’t like it?” she said.

“No, Majesty, I’m only worried. The time … the boat …” Elisabeth looked around her, gathered her umbrella and fan, and at 1:30 precisely they left.

It was just a hundred yards from the hotel entrance to the landing dock, a short walk through gardens and a terraced square along the Quai du Mont Blanc, separated from the water by an iron balustrade. The Quai was dotted with statues, patches of lawn and “many-colored carpets of flowers, with trees planted in profusion.” Halfway along was the Brunswick monument, a neo-Gothic replica of the Scaligeri family tomb in Verona, built as a mausoleum for Charles II, Duke of Brunswick, and fronted by two stone lions, “looking dreamily out on the waters of Lac Léman.” Elisabeth seemed to follow their gaze, scanning the lake toward the mountains in France: “And now the bell on the boat rang, and we hastened our steps, but the Empress said: ‘We shall still be in time. See how slowly and quietly the people are walking on board.’” It was then that she noticed the chestnuts in their second bloom – “Irma, look!” -- and then that Irma saw “a strange, small figure” approaching in the distance, “zigzagging through the trees as though chased by somebody, flitting from one to the other until he finally reached the sidewalk and the railing, whereupon he rushed toward us.”

Irma stepped forward instinctively. “Now what?” she wondered: “We’re already late!” A few feet away, the intruder seemed to stumble, but gathered himself, rose, turned and lunged at Elisabeth, peering beneath her umbrella to make sure of his target. “He sprang like a tiger,” Irma said, “and struck Her Majesty full in the chest. She fell backward to the ground, like a felled tree; her head hit the pavement, and only her luxuriant hair broke the force of the blow.”

Irma screamed. The street was suddenly alive with motion. Two hotel porters had seen the attack; a cabdriver stopped and a small crowd gave chase to the assailant, who fled up the Rue des Alpes toward the central station. Elisabeth, “crimson with agitation,” sat up and began dusting her clothes. “She was fully conscious,” Irma said. “Neither she nor I were then aware that the killer held a dagger in his hand.” Irma helped her to her feet.

“Is everything all right? Is Your Majesty hurt?”

“No, no, it is nothing,” said Elisabeth.

A porter ran up from the Beau-Rivage: Would Her Majesty return to the hotel?

“But why?” she said. “Nothing has happened to me. Let us hurry to the ship.”

“But Your Majesty must have been frightened.”

“Oh, yes, I was certainly frightened.” But she wanted to move on.

“Straight as a ramrod and smiling she stood again before us,” said Irma. “Her eyes were shining, and her hair had fallen loose around her face. She was unspeakably beautiful. She put on her hat, which was lost in the fall, accepted with thanks the fan and the parasol the bystanders handed to her, and we moved along. She walked to the steamer with her usual elastic step, arranging her hair as she went.” At the gangway she stopped.

“Tell me,” she said, “what did that man want?”

“Who?” said Irma. “The porter?”

“No, the other one. That awful man.”

“I don’t know, Majesty. He is a hopeless miscreant.”

Elisabeth nodded: “Perhaps he wanted to steal my watch.”

From the Quai a cry rose up: “The villain is caught! He is taken to jail!” Elisabeth seemed not to hear.

“Is Your Majesty really not hurt?” said Irma.

“No. But tell me – am I quite pale?”

“Yes, Majesty, probably from shock. Your Majesty feels no pain?”

“I think my chest hurts a little, but I am not sure.” They had just crossed the gangplank when she turned to Irma, stricken: “Your arm now, but quickly!” Then she fell to her knees.

“I threw my arms around her,” Irma wrote, “but I couldn’t hold her up. With her head on my breast, we both sank to the floor. ‘A doctor!’ I cried. ‘A doctor! And water!’” A steward rushed up, and “a kindly nun.” Together they splashed water on Elisabeth’s face.

“She opened her eyes,” said Irma. “I thought she’d had a heart attack. We were outside the engine room, it was very hot, and a gentleman suggested we bring Her Majesty to the upper deck, where she might recover more quickly in the open air.”

Three men carried Elisabeth up the stairs and laid her on a bench, Irma still crying for assistance: “Is there no doctor on board?” The ship was ready to leave and the captain appeared, hearing that a woman had collapsed on deck “and suggesting that she be taken to shore at once. I answered that it was only a fainting fit brought on by shock,” said Irma. “He offered us a cabin, but I thought it better to remain outdoors. And so the ship pulled out into the lake.”

Elisabeth was trying to sit up, opening and closing her eyes “as if emerging from a deep sleep.” Irma pressed a candied mint between her teeth: “A ray of hope shot through me as I heard her bite down on it two or three times.”

“Thank you,” said Elisabeth. She sat up now and looked carefully at the gathered crowd. “Thank you, thank you,” she said.

“Does Your Majesty feel any better?” asked Irma.

“Oh yes, thank you.”

“Your Majesty has been unwell, but you are better now, are you not?”

“Oh yes, yes.”

But she was “broken,” Irma thought: “Her eyes were clouded and her gaze uncertain as she looked sadly around. The passengers drew back. I knelt before her and anxiously searched her face, praying Heaven for mercy.”

Elisabeth turned to the sky, her eyes fixing again on the distant Alps before settling on Irma “with a look I will never forget.” She took a deep breath, sighed and said, “What has happened to me?” Then she fell backward, unconscious, her arm falling limp to the ground.

“Rub her chest!” someone cried. Irma snapped the laces of Elisabeth’s corset: “As I tore the ribbons, I saw on her chemise a dark spot, about the size of a silver gulden. I pushed the chemise aside and discovered near her heart a tiny wound, almost imperceptible, and a single drop of dried blood.” Only then did the truth occur to her.

“Oh, my God!” Irma cried. “She has been murdered!”

In seconds the captain returned with a crowd behind him. “Sir, we must land at once!” Irma pleaded. “The woman you see here is the Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary -- she has been stabbed! I cannot let her die without a doctor and a priest! Please, we must turn back!”

The ship had gone as far as Bellevue, about a mile east of port. Irma suggested that they take Elisabeth to Pregny, where she had lunched the day before with Baroness Rothschild. The captain shook his head: “You won’t find much of a doctor there.” He gave orders for the ship to turn about. A litter was improvised from oars and a deck chair: “They laid Her Majesty on it, covering her with a cloak, and six people lifted her, while a gentleman held her parasol over her head.” Irma stroked her face, listening to her breathing and wiping sweat from her brow: “I watched how she lay with eyes closed, turning her head restlessly from side to side. But still she lived, so some hope remained.”

Hope was gone by the time they docked -- Elisabeth died along the way. She was taken back to the Beau-Rivage, to the same room she had occupied the night before. A doctor came, and a priest: “All those present fell to their knees and prayed, but this was the end. Then another doctor came, but he could do no more than confirm the death. A slight incision was made in the artery of the right arm, but not a drop of blood appeared. The Empress lay there peaceful and happy, looking lovely and youthful, with a faint flush on her cheeks and a slight smile, her face as subtle and charming as it had been in her lifetime.”

Autopsy would reveal that Elisabeth died of a single wound from a narrow file, “not much more than a needle,” just two millimeters at its widest circumference but thrust so deeply and with such force that “it cracked the fourth rib, pierced the anterior wall of the left lung, tore the pericardium, and entered the left ventricle of the heart.” Had the weapon been left in place Elisabeth might have lived to see a doctor; as it was, she bled internally, beat by beat, not knowing what had hit her.

“And so it has happened as she always wished it to happen,” Irma reflected, “quickly, painlessly, without doctors and long, fearful days of worry.” At Geneva’s Palais de Justice, where he was taken after his capture by local gendarmes, Elisabeth’s assassin sat smiling, humming to himself, giving his name – “Lucheni” – and his occupation – “Anarchist” – and boasting that “he had made a good job of it.”

“It will be King Umberto [of Italy’s] turn next,” he cautioned. “All the other sovereigns will follow. Long live Anarchy! Long live the Revolution!” Police would learn that Lucheni had worked variously as a stonecutter, a street sweeper, a dustman and a footman. He had served in the Italian army and as a lineman on national railroads. Now he was jobless, homeless, penniless and “infected with the principles of revolutionary anarchism -- an unmistakable Italian,” said the American consul at Geneva. Newspapers reported on his “dark, restless eyes” and “sinister smile.” All were struck by the “revolting stoicism” with which he talked about his crime.

“I’m only sorry there’s no death penalty in Geneva,” said Lucheni. “I did my duty and my comrades will do theirs. The great of the world had better believe it. Long live Anarchism!” His weapon was found the next day in an alley, where he had tossed it after the attack -- just a stitching awl that he had sharpened and fixed to a block of wood, small enough to be closed in his hand and hidden from his victim: “Not a very impressive-looking weapon, but sufficiently deadly to strike at some famous person, preferably some reigning monarch, whose murder would make him notorious overnight.” For that was all Lucheni wanted – “propaganda of the deed.” In prison, he was questioned by Charles Léchet, Geneva’s examining magistrate for special crimes:

LÉCHET: Your name?

LUCHENI: Lucheni.

LÉCHET: First name?

LUCHENI: Luigi.

LÉCHET: Born when?

LUCHENI: April 23, 1873.

LÉCHET: Where?

LUCHENI: In Paris.

LÉCHET: But you are Italian.

LUCHENI: Yes.

LÉCHET: First name of father?

LUCHENI: I don’t know.

LÉCHET: Illegitimate?

LUCHENI: Yes.

LÉCHET: Why did you come to Geneva?

[No answer.]

LÉCHET: Well? You surely know why you came to Geneva?

LUCHENI: That I know exactly. I read in the papers that the Duke of Orléans was staying in Geneva.

LÉCHET: And?

LUCHENI: I came here to kill him.

LÉCHET: You mean, the pretender to the French throne?

LUCHENI: Yes. But I did not find him. I had sworn to kill some high-placed person or other, prince, king, or president of a republic—it’s all the same. They’re all made of the same stuff.

So Elisabeth entered his sights. Lucheni had learned where she was staying (it was reported as “Society News” in the Journal de Genève) and followed her when she left the hotel. He had seen her once in Budapest, while working there at some transient job. Otherwise he had no association with the Habsburg monarchy, nor any special grievance with its queen. He spoke in slogans: “Down with society!”, “Long live Anarchism!” and – a favorite – “Chi non lavora non mangia!" (He who doesn’t work doesn’t eat!). The questioning went on:

LÉCHET: How did you know where she would be?

LUCHENI: How did I know? Because since yesterday I have spied on her and the lady-in-waiting. How else? Everything went as I had planned.

LÉCHET: It wasn’t you who planned it.

LUCHENI: What?

LÉCHET: You executed a command. You acted under orders.

LUCHENI: You can believe what you want. Everything went as I planned. I alone. I ran toward her and barred her way. I bent down and looked under the parasol. I didn’t want to catch the wrong one. They were both dressed in black. She wasn’t very beautiful. Quite old already. Anybody who says otherwise doesn’t know what he is talking about. Or he’s lying.

LÉCHET: And then? What happened then?

LUCHENI: Nothing. I stabbed. That was all.

LÉCHET: And then you fled. Where did you hope to go?

LUCHENI: I had no intention of fleeing.

LÉCHET: No intention of fleeing? You ran as fast as you could just for exercise?

LUCHENI: I was going to the police. That was my intention from the start. I wanted to declare openly why I did it.

LÉCHET: Then why didn’t you simply stay where you were? That would have been more logical.

LUCHENI: I had no wish to be lynched.

LÉCHET: Have you anything to add?

LUCHENI: I confess that it was my deliberate intention to kill the Empress of Austria. I am glad of her death. I am an Anarchist.

LÉCHET: Do you practice this creed all by yourself?

LUCHENI: Nothing to practice. The great Bakunin showed us how to break our chains.

LÉCHET: What chains?

LUCHENI: The chains with which a degenerate aristocracy and a capitalist bourgeoisie have bound us.

That was all there was to it. At his trial, Lucheni’s public defender sought to portray him as the victim of circumstance – born in dire poverty, abandoned at birth, pushed into orphanages, workhouses and miserable labor until wretchedness drove him to murder: “How can society expect such a being to have the least moral perception? How can the law hold him responsible? An illegitimate child, left in one of those orphanages which are nests of crime, then consigned to poor families of mendicant habits, having learned nothing except to beg and to wander? He found such modes of subsistence as he could -- he found, we might say, infelicity in every quarter.”

But Lucheni’s case wasn’t helped by his behavior in court, where he grinned, winked and blew kisses at the crowd: “He liked above all to boast. It came out during the proceedings that he was of fairly industrious habits, and that he had constantly obtained work as a navvy or something similar. This drew from the judge a remark that he had never really known penury and the sufferings it entailed. ‘What! I have never known suffering?’ Lucheni retorted. ‘My mother deserted me when I was a baby! Was that not suffering enough to wreck my whole life?’”

The verdict, in any case, was foreordained – it wouldn’t have helped for Lucheni to repent. “The infra-human character of the assassin of Empress Elisabeth of Austria is at once demonstrated by the fact that his victim was a woman,” said The New York Times in a gruff editorial. “Even in the disordered minds of Anarchists and assassins the universal sentiment that prompts male humanity to exempt woman from the consequences of ferocious passion has commonly held sway. Consorting with Anarchists and brooding over their doctrines of violence may have unhinged Lucheni’s mind. But when he murdered the Austrian Empress he was merely a wild beast.” The jury found him guilty “without extenuating circumstances” and the court condemned him to life in prison. He was led away chanting, “Death to society!” Over time he settled down, dropped the rhetoric and adjusted to a life that, though harsh, was more secure than any he had known. In prison, Lucheni made shoes, read books and perfected his French, filling five long notebooks with his memoirs and begging posterity to consider that he had never been loved.

“I invite all judges to read this book,” Lucheni wrote, “if they want to know how a man can be changed, how criminals are made and not born. Before you add lyres to your hymns of social progress, think carefully of me, deprived from birth of that precious gift Providence bestows on every creature – the kisses, smiles, and embraces of a mother!” In 1910 he hanged himself in his cell, having claimed to see visions of Death. “For he doesn’t only visit royalty,” Lucheni said, “he doesn’t shrink from poverty and filth. We are all the same in the face of Death. And, as he always does and always will, he chooses his moment wisely.” Her friends were convinced that Elisabeth, had she somehow known as she walked to the boat, would have nodded her assent.

GENEVA: 1898

Elisabeth of Austria, “Sisi,” depicted by Winterhalter in 1864

“I asked myself — ‘Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?’ Death — was the obvious reply. ‘And when,’ I said, ‘is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?’ … The answer, here also, is obvious — ‘When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.’” – Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846)

The dagger that killed Empress Elisabeth of Austria was just a sharpened file, a shoemaker’s awl with a crude wooden handle, honed to a point so fine that the Empress bled to death internally without knowing she’d been stabbed. She was walking on the Quai du Mont Blanc in Geneva on September 10, 1898, headed for a ferry that would take her to Montreux, dressed in black and shielding her face with the ebony fan and leather parasol that proclaimed her incognito – in Geneva, the Empress traveled as the “Countess Hohenembs.” It was a hot afternoon, unusually sunny and warm for September. The chestnut trees had bloomed out of season, and Elisabeth’s last words before meeting her killer remarked on the beauty of the scene.

“I have never seen the mountains look so clear,” she said, gazing from the harbor to the spires of the Old Town and the Savoyan Alps in the distance. The lake of Geneva is the largest in Switzerland, forty miles long and studded with landmarks. From her place on the embankment Elisabeth could see the ancient lighthouse and the hydraulic Jet d’Eau, spewing its geyser three hundred feet in the air in celebration of the city. Closer by were the Niton Rocks and the statues of “Helvetia” and “Genève” that mark the entrance to the English Garden. On the hills above the lake the vineyards had turned from green to gold in the summer sun; swans glided and gulls swooped and everywhere were roses – forty thousand bushes in the park at the Mont Blanc bridge. But it was the rebirth of the chestnuts that brought smiles to Elisabeth’s face.

“The Emperor writes that the same has happened at Schönbrunn,” she said. “The chestnut trees have bloomed again.” She was “as carefree as an innocent child who cannot keep the news to herself,” said Irma Sztáray, her lady-in-waiting and lone companion at the fatal hour.

“Majesty,” Irma stammered, “it’s very beautiful. But the bell … the boat is leaving.” Elisabeth almost missed her own death. She had been in Geneva for less than a day, arriving on the evening of September 9 and annexing two floors of the Hotel Beau-Rivage, directly on the water, for herself and her attendants. Since August she had lived at Montreux, on the far side of the lake, where doctors recommended mountain air for the relief of neuralgia and fatigue. But a visit to Baroness Julie Rothschild at the Chateau de Pregny, where she enjoyed a five-course lunch and paused to admire the greenhouse and the aviary, left Elisabeth nearer to Geneva at the end of a tiring day; she preferred to stay the night in town, making plans to return to Montreux the next afternoon. Elisabeth loved Geneva, where the lake, she said, was “the color of the ocean, altogether like the ocean,” and an urban population helped provide her with the cover she desired: “It’s my favorite place to stay, because there I am quite lost among the cosmopolites. It gives a true picture of the human condition” – a subject on which Elisabeth, at the end of her life, was always ready to comment negatively.

“People think they control the world around them,” she said, “with their engines and ships, but they don’t. On the contrary, nature has now conquered man. Once we lived in tiny hollows and thought we were gods. Now we’re just globetrotters, rolling around like drops in the ocean, and one day we’ll realize that’s all we are.” Her restlessness was legendary. For years she had lived as a nomad, wandering through Europe with no destination and making no secret of her contempt for appearances. As “Countess Hohenembs,” a pseudonym drawn from her lesser titles, she could travel unrestricted, freed from the burdens of protocol and etiquette. Otherwise the alias fooled no one, being only a means for Elisabeth to avoid ceremonial duties as mistress of the Austro-Hungarian empire. “Empress of Austria, Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, Princess and Duchess in Bavaria, Dalmatia, Silesia and Istria”—Elisabeth’s titles as consort of Franz Joseph I, head of the House of Habsburg, spread to several pages and mirrored the breadth of the Habsburg domain, a monarchy, not a country, that stretched from the western Alps to modern-day Ukraine, from Poland and Bohemia to the kingdom of the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs at the tip of the Adriatic. With its twin capitals at Vienna and Budapest, the Habsburg monarchy transcended borders, uniting under a common banner 40 million Germans, Magyars, Slovaks, Poles, Turks, Italians, Czechs and Slavs. The empire itself was “a map of Middle Europe,” as Winston Churchill put it, “a microcosm of a continent, with a mélange of peoples and tongues and traditions, whose problems foreshadowed the problems of all Europe.” To Elisabeth it was only a prison. At sixty, she was stripped of her illusions.

“What’s inside us is more valuable than honors and titles,” she declared. “What is the meaning of titles? Gaily colored rags with which people bedeck themselves to hide their misery.” So determined was Elisabeth to evade the glamour of royalty that, during her drawn-out lunch with Julie Rothschild in Pregny, on the day before her death, she demanded that the Habsburg standard be hauled down from above the chateau, where it had been raised in her honor as a matter of form. Elisabeth had no use for “trifles” – her safety was not on her mind. With something like enjoyment, she rejected the offer of plainclothes protection while traveling in Switzerland, whose democratic tradition made it “a haven for the worst class of anarchists -- dangerous men,” as they were soon described, “who find too ready a home on the soil of the Confederation.” Elisabeth took no extra precautions.

“Set your minds at rest,” she told the police. “Nothing will happen to me: what would you have them do to a poor woman? Besides, not one of us is more than the petal of a poppy or a ripple on the water.” To her entourage she was franker: “I am always on the march to meet my fate. Sooner or later we all come up against it. For a long time destiny shuts its eyes, then suddenly it sees us. Every step we take to avoid that moment brings us one step closer to it. And I’ve taken those steps since time began.”

“It was after five o’clock when we left Baroness Rothschild,” Irma Sztáray remembered, and after seven when they arrived at the Beau-Rivage. Elisabeth had been a guest before, and the hotel staff outdid itself to provide her with the accommodation she required: three bedrooms, two sitting-rooms and a large parlor, stripped of furniture, covered with a tarp and transformed into a giant bathroom – “for Her Majesty was a great believer in hydrotherapy,” said Irma, “and normally began her day with a warm bath in distilled water, followed by electric massage.” Already that year Elisabeth had been to three German spas—Kissingen, Nauheim and Brückenau – after lengthy stays at Biarritz (for “salt breezes”), San Remo (for sunshine), Amsterdam, Paris and Ischl, the Habsburg retreat in Upper Austria. Here, in 1853, as a girl of fifteen, she was betrothed to Franz Joseph, “the boy emperor,” then twenty-three and just embarked on a reign that would last for seven decades. A bride had been required, children and heirs – “You don’t show a Kaiser the door,” Elisabeth’s mother had said. For Franz Joseph, it was love at first sight.

“How sweet Sisi is!” he exclaimed in his diary, using the family nickname Elisabeth never lost. “As fresh as an almond blossom, and what a magnificent head of hair frames her face! Such beautiful, soft eyes, and lips like strawberries!” After forty-five years he was still enchanted by a woman whose remoteness only added to his passion. On the wall of his study in the Vienna Hofburg, where he spent his days toiling over papers, granting audiences and petitions, administering every detail of the Habsburg inheritance, the Emperor kept a portrait of his wife by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, painted at the height of her beauty in 1864 – not the famous state portrait of Elisabeth in party regalia, gowned by Worth and with diamonds in her hair, but an intimate vision of “Sisi” in her nightgown, opened at the neck and throat, her thick, dark hair tumbling loose around her shoulders. The image was erotic, daring for the time, and for months on end, while she scoured the continent, it was as close as Franz Joseph now came to his wife. When she traveled he wrote to her every day, addressing her as “Beloved Angel, dear, dear, my only Angel,” and signing himself “Your Little Man … Come back to me. Don’t leave me alone here, Sisi. Don’t let me languish here without you. Come home.”

But the days were gone when Elisabeth felt bound by any counsel but her own. Her love for Franz Joseph had muted with time, tempered by sorrows great and small into something resembling an idea, a reminiscence of shared affection. Every now and then a telegram arrived in Vienna from somewhere on her travels: “In Gedanken vereint” (United in thoughts), and the Emperor had to be happy with that.

“The thought of being pinned to one place would turn paradise into hell,” Elisabeth confided. She had not appeared in Vienna since 1896, when, after much pleading, she assisted her husband at a state banquet honoring the visiting Tsar of Russia and upset the whole court by sporting a tattoo on her shoulder, a seaman’s anchor she wore “like a postmark” to signify that “her only harbor was herself.” Her beauty was such that it still brought gapes from onlookers, who greeted her entrance in the Hofburg, on the arm of the Tsar, “with a sort of hushed reverence. She not only gave the impression of belonging to the same generation as the young tsarina, but was so transcendently beautiful as to put the other women completely in the shade.” That night the table was laid with edelweiss, and it was said that two men had died in a climbing accident gathering the alpine flowers at Elisabeth’s command. It was the kind of story that followed her around, though she gave no heed to talk: “The Empress Elisabeth, notwithstanding her wish to be seductive, yawned a great deal behind her fan.” Now, in the last summer of her life, she let it be known that “for reasons of health” she would not participate in the upcoming celebrations of Franz Joseph’s jubilee—fifty years on the throne in 1898.

“Her Majesty the Empress and Queen has been suffering for some long time past from anemia,” said the official bulletin, “which became worse in consequence of severe neuritis in the course of last winter, following on insomnia of many weeks’ standing, in addition to which there is enlargement of the heart. Under conditions of absolute rest, her illness need not give rise to serious apprehension, but the doctors earnestly advise Her Majesty to submit to treatment at the baths.” It would have surprised the average Austrian to know that Elisabeth’s idea of rest included mountaineering, calisthenics and daily walks – more like forced marches – that sometimes lasted for eight or ten hours and left her attendants in despair: “It is recorded that one day she walked the whole way from Cap Martin to Monte Carlo and back—a distance of no less than sixteen miles.” Xavier Paoli, of the French Sûreté, whose job it was “to shadow royalties in France” and protect them from assassins, also trailed Elisabeth when she visited the Riviera and found her the most recalcitrant of targets, “a special type among the royal and imperial majesties to whose persons I was attached.” They had met for the first time in Elisabeth’s private railway car as she traveled to Aix-les-Bains from her palace at Miramar, outside Trieste on the Adriatic. Paoli wrote:

I confess that, when I stepped into the train, I experienced a keen sense of curiosity at the thought that I was soon to find myself in the presence of a lady who was already surrounded by an atmosphere of legend, and who was known as “the wandering Empress.” I had been told numerous stories of her restless and romantic life; I had heard that she talked little, that she smiled but rarely, and that she always seemed to be pursuing a distant dream.

My first impression, however, was very different from that which I was prepared to receive. The Empress, at that time, was fifty-eight years of age. She looked like a girl; she had the figure of a girl, with a girl’s lightness and grace of movement. Tall and slender, she had a fresh-colored face, deep, dark and extraordinarily lustrous eyes, and a wealth of chestnut hair. Her hair was a glory, a wonder of texture and sheen. I realized later that she owed her vivacious coloring to the long walks she was in the habit of taking. She wore a smartly-cut tailor-made dress, all in black, which accentuated the slimness of her waist. I was also struck by the smallness of her hands, the musical intonation of her voice, and the purity with which she expressed herself in French.

One disappointment, however, awaited me: my reception was icy cold. On reaching Aix-les-Bains, the Empress, whom I had asked for an interview in order to arrange for the organization of my department, answered, curtly: “We shan’t want anybody.” These four words, beyond a doubt, constituted a formal dismissal, an invitation both clear and concise to take the first train back to Paris. But I would not be turned away. I organized my service without the participation of our illustrious guest.

It was Elisabeth’s obsession – to be always in motion and never denied. “I mean to roam the whole world,” she warned, “the Wandering Jew will have nothing on me. I’ll crisscross the oceans, a female Flying Dutchman, till I sink through the waves and disappear.” Even incognito this could scarcely be done – apart from ladies-in-waiting, Elisabeth’s traveling retinue included a chamberlain, a doctor, a secretary, a hairdresser, butlers, porters, lackeys, maids, a chef, waiters and sixty-three trunks, by Paoli’s count. Most of her staff never saw her, busy with various tasks while she wandered the country from morning to night.

“She led an active and solitary existence,” Paoli remembered. “Rising, winter and summer, at five o’clock, she would go out into the air, without informing her suite, with a book and the fan she invariably carried as a defense against the tribe of tourists and snap-shotters who were always on the lookout for her. She would seek some hidden spot far away in the hills, and there sit for hours in company with some favorite author and her own thoughts. She never mentioned the destination or the direction of her excursions, a thing which troubled me greatly, notwithstanding that I had had the whole district searched and explored beforehand. How was I to look after her?” Over time, at least in France, Elisabeth grew accustomed to seeing Paoli and his agents lurking in the distance, their noses buried in newspapers or travel guides while she walked, read, climbed, spread picnics and gave coins to the villagers and farmers whose paths she used to avoid the beaten track: “On the Riviera she was known as ‘the lady in black,’ who went about with a full purse, succoring the poor when the fit came upon her.” Repeatedly she dismissed Paoli’s warnings about her safety, closing her fan over her face when he protested, “until nothing was visible but her great, wide, never-to-be-forgotten eyes.” Paoli had heard reports of Italian anarchists in Nice, “who spoke in threatening terms about the crowned heads who are wont to frequent this part of France.”

Elisabeth laughed: “What! Still more of your fears! I repeat, I am not afraid; and, mind, I make no promise.” Her first act on arriving in Geneva, outside Paoli’s jurisdiction, was to leave her hotel in search of ice cream.

“The Empress could be playful and full of fun,” said Irma Sztáray, who traveled with her that last year and left a statement for the Swiss police. “She had many brilliant days, but none so clear and cloudless as this, the 9^th of September.” Their lunch with Julie Rothschild had been such a success that Elisabeth asked Irma to send the printed menu to Franz Joseph in Vienna, highlighting the timbale de volaille and the crème glacée à l’Hongroise and urging him to bring them to the attention of the imperial chefs. “The agreeable impressions of the day had a great effect on her spirits,” Irma recalled. “She kept talking about it,” laughing and saying that she regretted not allowing herself to be photographed when Baroness Rothschild requested it. “But I haven’t sat for a camera in thirty years,” Elisabeth said, “and I believe if you have principles you have to stick to them, even if they’re just for self-protection.” At the Beau-Rivage she watered the orchids the Baroness had given her, then walked with Irma from the hotel to the Old Town, its streets so busy and crowded at night “that we could move only slowly. We were looking for a particular café,” said Irma, “a patisserie in the Boulevard du Théâtre. By the time we got there it was already late and we sat with our ice cream at the outdoor tables and enjoyed the lovely warm evening.” Elisabeth was glowing.

“Really, Irma, I don’t know why you don’t like this town,” she remarked. “It’s so beautiful, how can you not like it? I love Geneva.” Her experience of crowds could be harrowing. In Italy, not long before, on a boat tour of Lago di Garda, she had docked at Peschiera and was recognized by the size of her entourage, “greeted by hisses and hideous howls” and followed through the streets by an angry mob: “So menacing indeed did their attitude become, and so vile and outrageous were the insulting epithets addressed to the imperial lady, that she was forced to beat a hasty retreat with her party to the boat. As it steamed away from the landing, volleys of stones were hurled after it by the people on the shore.” Elisabeth put it down to her unavoidable association with “politics,” a topic she deplored: “I consider them of no importance. Every government totters to its fall from the day of its creation, and all politics can do is wrest some temporary advantage from the other side. Whatever happens is of necessity, because its time has come.” In Geneva, over ice cream, she could affect a real disinterest. She seemed content to watch the world go by until Irma, for some reason, mentioned God—“I don’t know why,” Irma protested. “But I’m very devout and, with me, everything leads to that.”

“I’m a believer, too,” said Elisabeth. “Well, not so much as you, perhaps, but I know myself and it’s not out of the question that one day you’ll find me extremely pious.” From here it was just a step into talk about death, with Irma insisting that she was “ready for eternity, that I looked forward to it with unwavering faith, and that I had no fear of death.”

“Oh, but I do,” Elisabeth said. “It’s the moment of passing, the uncertainty, that makes me tremble, and above all the terrific struggle you have to go through to get there.” She had seen death close-up and was struck by people’s unwillingness to let go, their sheer tenacity in animal torment. Many times in recent years she had uttered a prayer: “Möge der Tod mich überraschen” (May death take me by surprise). But she wasn’t thinking about assassination. She had expected to drown on one of her voyages – “The sea is longing to have me, I belong to it” – or to break her neck on a horse. If it came to that she might take her own life, as her son had done at Mayerling in 1889 – Crown Prince Rudolph, the empire’s hope, dead at the age of thirty. Ever since, Elisabeth had worn black, in mourning not just for Rudolph but a host of vanished companions. Her cousin and soul-mate, Ludwig of Bavaria, died in a drowning accident, probably murdered, after “eccentricity” cost him his throne. Her sister Sophie burned to death in a fire at a charity bazaar in Paris. The Emperor’s brother Maximilian, “fairest of the Archdukes” and Elisabeth’s favorite among the Habsburgs, lost a throne and his life in Mexico, leaving behind him a quixotic legend and a deranged wife, Carlota, now locked up in a Belgian castle and still crying to her attendants, “We will not abdicate! We will never abdicate!” Wherever she looked in the history of her house Elisabeth saw madness, betrayal and doom of a kind guaranteed to appeal to the penny-dreadfuls. Not one of her obituaries would fail to mention “the Habsburg curse.”

“I didn’t like where this conversation was going,” said Irma Sztáray, “and to change the subject I simply said, ‘In Heaven there is peace and bliss.’”

“How do you know that?” Elisabeth’s voice was suddenly sharp: “No one who has taken that journey has ever returned to tell us what he found.”

I was in Russia twice in 1993, the second time working on a piece for Conde Nast Traveler about St. Petersburg’s renaissance. The editor said I might as well not have left New York because I wrote more about Petersburg’s history and ethos than I did about restaurants and nightclubs. This pleased me, although it proved again how unsuited I was to factory journalism. The feature was hacked to pieces by someone I’d never met and ultimately published in a sequence I didn’t recognize. It amazed me how magazines could take anything you gave them and feed it through some processor until it sounded like every story they’d ever run. Even then, before the internet, before AI, I wondered why they needed writers at all. The highest compliment I received in those days came from an editor at Vanity Fair, who said, “The problem with your writing is, if you cut a line, the whole paragraph falls down.”

“I should hope so,” I said, trying to be smart. My nerves were frayed to the limit. My T-cell count had plunged, despite excellent medical care and enrollment in ACTG 175, the clinical trial that proved the efficacy of combination therapy for HIV infection and went on to save numberless lives. I was a guinea pig, gulping handfuls of pills, horrible stuff that left me with headaches, nausea, heartburn, muscle wasting, lipodystrophy, and chronic fatigue. My arms and legs were stripped of meat while my belly grew round and soft. I had sores in my mouth and leukoplakia, thickened, white patches on the sides of my tongue. Looking ahead I saw nothing but disintegration. I remember a morning in June 1993 when, on the inside, I seemed to fall off a shelf. I don’t know how else to describe it. It happened quickly, as if I had tumbled from a ledge and hit the ground, or if an elevator, out of control, had suddenly plummeted ten floors. I soldiered on regardless. I didn’t know how to give up.

"No one with HIV should allow the virus to thwart their ambitions, to fog their future, to derail their dreams," wrote someone in The Body, one of the few AIDS-information magazines in print at the time. (POZ, for which I later wrote features and columns, didn’t start publishing until 1994.) There was The New York Native, of course, circling the drain with paranoid theories about “African Swine Fever” and government plots, and, in the mainstream, New York and The Village Voice, both of which worked hard to bring HIV to public awareness. My sister-in-law’s brother had died of AIDS in 1992 and together we attended some support groups in New York. I found them utterly disheartening and, as ever in that world, teeming with posers, drama queens seeking some imaginary top spot in the awful circumstances. Being a poser myself I tried to keep up but I was dealing with professionals and really had nothing to offer. It didn’t seem to matter who was drinking spirulina and who wasn’t. The message seemed to be that you should keep up your gym membership, always keep dancing, swallow smoothies with bee pollen, and leap from your sickbed to kick some ass. I wondered if these people knew how much it could hurt to be directed in this way, how much worse some patients might feel to be exhorted beyond their capacity. This was around the time that the supposed trauma of gay men not infected with HIV began to be taken seriously; whole evenings were spent indulging the tears of those who felt “left out” and sought admission to our dwindling club through “breeding,” i.e., repeated acts of unsafe sex. I understand and did then that my cynicism is a defense, but this particular form of narcissism left me seething. By 1993 AIDS was the leading cause of death for American men in my age bracket, 25 to forty-four.

Did I mention the awful side-effects of the drugs? Of course I did: “Drowsiness or insomnia; dizziness; vivid dreams and nightmares; confusion; abnormal thinking; impaired concentration; loss of memory; agitation; feeling 'out-of-sorts' or `stoned’; hallucinations; delusions; euphoria, and depression” – this is from just one of the pharmacy handouts. The pills I took wreaked havoc in the gut, where AZT had been lighting fires already for two years. Every three months I had bloodwork done and picked up my meds at Bellevue Hospital, watching my numbers fall, cheered on by a terrific nurse practitioner, Vicky Rosenwald, whose laughter and support made these check-ups easier to bear. But it didn’t carry out into the street:

Psychological disease is very common in people with HIV. Analysis shows that 50 percent have a psychiatric disorder, 40 percent use an illicit drug other than marijuana and 12 percent are drug dependent. Compared to the general population, depression in people with HIV is five times more common, anxiety eight times, panic four times and substance abuse much higher. Incidence of depression is 36 percent in the HIV population compared to 14 percent in the general population.

Two passages from the New Testament stayed with me, both from Jesus. Matthew 6:34: “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” which I used as a ballast when my thinking got too dark. And John 14:2: “In my father’s house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you.” These are the King James translations, of course. Modern versions render them differently, and to me less soothingly. “Live one day at a time,” for example, and “Each day has enough trouble of its own.” “Many mansions” become just “rooms” or “places of rest” and the statement of divine reassurance is less elegant: “Would I otherwise have told you that I am going to make a place ready for you?” But I held to the promise, deep within, while dipping my toe occasionally into other spiritual pools. I did some sort of Hindu breathing thing but usually fell asleep on the mat and got tired of being scolded for it. A New Age acupuncturist one day left me determined never to go back. I confessed to her that I had been smoking, drinking a lot of coffee, taking antihistamines, and lying in sunbeds twice a week. I didn’t mention the occasional snort of ketamine and cocaine.

"That's the glory of Chinese medicine,” she replied. “It doesn’t matter what you’re doing. We fix it!" Then, when poking me with needles: "Isn't it wonderful the way gay men are learning to relate to one another without sex?"

I hadn’t said anything about it. I wasn’t talking at all.

"Your liver's down,” she went on. "Oops, that one bled a little. That means it's released a lot of tension!" She sent me home with more pills, enormous distillations of Chinese herbs. "I don't know where the HIV community would be without the lesbians," she remarked as she closed the door to her office. “Next time we’ll do some reiki!” But I noticed no change at all in how I felt and decided to leave the lesbians to their own devices. At home I listened to motivational tapes from Louise Hay, the great AIDS activist, whose magically soothing voice allowed me to overlook her sillier recommendations, such as thanking my refrigerator for its service. “Although,” I thought too, “why not?”

At my therapist’s suggestion I went to hear Marianne Williamson and found her sharp and to the point, charming, dynamic, and often hilarious. She worked wonders for people with AIDS and HIV, conveying the message of A Course in Miracles without proselytizing or asking us to read it, thank God. She is a true prophet, I think, because she makes you aware, she helps you remember what you already know. She is revelatory. During the Q&A a woman complained from the floor that her family hated her and had tried to thwart her every dream, but here, tonight, she felt loved and accepted.

“Why is that?” she wailed. “How is it that I can come into a room full of strangers and feel so loved and supported?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” said Marianne. “We don’t know you. It isn’t hard for us to care.” I followed her around for a while, hoping to absorb her energy, but we never became friends because my writing turned her off. “Too cynical,” she said. “What are you afraid of?” I had given a bad review to Women Who Run With The Wolves, an incomprehensible mess of a book, running to 600 pages, which became a giant bestseller despite my opinion of it. Its author, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, had emerged from some misty territory in Indiana and redrawn the map of women’s psyche. “Howl often,” she advised – it was Rule #10 on her list of "General Wolf Rules For Life," which further instructed that grown women should "Cavil in moonlight," "Attend to the bones," "Tune [their] ears," and so forth. I found it utterly ridiculous and still do, but no more so than the sweating, "questing," armpit-sniffing brothers of Robert Bly’s Iron John, another smash hit of that time. When I ventured to support groups men were holding teddy bears and blaming their parents for everything wrong in their lives. Marianne told me that what I really feared was knowing myself and, by knowing, forgiving. Forgiveness was the key to it all, she said. “Go to work on that.”

I was everywhere at once, all over the city. One night at a party I saw William F. Buckley holding court in a puffy armchair, acolytes at his feet, drunk, or anyway lit, his lips sneering in the way they always did. As I walked by I heard him say, verbatim, "Scripture is adamant on this point: It's God the Father. But I see no reason that the Holy Spirit couldn’t be ... feminine?” I quite liked his wife, Pat, who walked around with a little dog in her arms, smoked constantly, and blabbered about nothing. She reminded me of the Queen of Romania, Anne, my favorite royal, whose outer air-headedness concealed a shrewd mind and caring heart. Steve Martin turned up at an art show I attended with Gloria Vanderbilt. He was still married then to Victoria Tennant and as people began to paw at him Gloria noticed and asked me who he was.

“It’s Steve Martin,” I said.

“Yes, but who is he?”

I couldn’t believe it. “It’s Steve Martin! He’s a great actor and comedian.”

“Well,” said Gloria as she crossed the room, “I must go tell him how much I admire him.”

The weeks went on like that, a mix of celebrities and dissociation. I may be the only person who came out of a K-hole babbling about Celeste Holm, whom I had interviewed for American Cassandra. She had played in Dorothy Thompson’s anti-fascist melodrama, Another Sun, which ran on Broadway for a total of nine performances in 1941. It was her first role on the main stage. Now I kept running into her on the street. Each time she affected not to know who I was, although we had first met in Vermont 20 years earlier. I wrote to a friend about it:

April 13, 1993: Bumped into Celeste Holm outside the Elite Cafe. "Oh, Miss Holm," said I -- what was I thinking? -- "it’s Peter Kurth."

(Blank.)

"Who wrote the book about Dorothy Thompson."

(Blank.)

Trying again: "I was so interested to read about your Oklahoma cast reunion."

(Blank.) (But it was Celeste Holm, because she batted her eyes when I recognized her.)

Desperate now: "It must be incredible to get together like that, after fifty years."

She springs to life: "To us, it seems like twenty minutes!" And she turned the corner toward the park.

I got used to this kind of treatment: in New York, you’re either A-list or you’re not. Two nights later I was at Lincoln Center at a dance event, where I discovered that Isadora Duncan’s distaste for ballet had invaded me completely:

So I was out till 1:00 in the morning with Jane Gunther, working on my (low) self-esteem at a performance by recent graduates of George Balanchine's School of American Ballet. First, my tie kept climbing over my head. I don't know how — I thought Endora might be in the room. Every time I brushed it away it worked harder to strangle me. I was sitting three seats away from Lincoln Kirstein, who founded NYC Ballet with Balanchine. It was now or never, I thought.

"Mr. Kirstein. I'm Peter Kurth. I'm writing a new biography of Isadora Duncan."

"Oh." It was not a question.

At that very moment Jerome Robbins leaped across eight or nine rows of seats and ended our conversation. He'd choreographed some new Jets and Sharks thing set to Bach Inventions and had dressed all the boys in simulated t-shirts, jeans and Reeboks, while the girls all looked like they were still at summer camp: pink tutus, that idiotic fluttering, feet turned around backward and bun-heads more pointed than usual, perfectly accentuating that none of them had chins. There is something different about men dancing ballet -- it isn't just their bodies. It’s a different sort of energy and it doesn't look so stupid.

At dinner afterward, at the President's table (the flowers alone must have cost $100,000), I mentioned this in the politest way possible to the woman on my right -- picture a Park Avenue matron who once went to ballet school but gave it up for marriage and family -- and she said, "Well, I don't know. It doesn't matter what they try to do with the men, it's like Mr. B. always said: “Ballet is Woman!”

“Ballet is hating Woman,” I thought, but kept it to myself. I looked down at my place card and saw that they'd spelled my name "Kruth." Every time the waiter came around he asked me to hold something: "Could you hold this for a minute while I serve?" Mustard sauce, béarnaise, raspberry coulis, which he finally managed to dump in my lap.

In desperation, I tried the woman on my left, who turned out to be Hortense Callisher. I'm certain she's a writer, but if you asked me what she’s written I couldn't tell you. She’s married to the C.E.O. of the New York City Ballet and we didn't have a lot to talk about.

"It's the first time I've been married to a C.E.O.," she said at one point. I thought this might be an opening but it wasn't. "Well," she said, turning away, "I won't keep you from your enchanting neighbor."

After dessert I went looking for Suki Schorer, who teaches at the school and whose father, Mark Schorer, wrote the definitive biography of Sinclair Lewis.

"I just wanted to introduce myself. I did a book about Dorothy Thompson."

(Blank)

"Well, I feel I know your father even though we never met. He was the only person -- before me, ha-ha! -- who understood how great Dorothy was. I was really glad to get hold of his correspondence at Berkeley. It was a big help. It gave the book a kind of beauty at the end."

"Who are you?"

For the first time in my life I hoped that Celeste Holm would walk in the room. Instead I saw one of the wonderful boys who had danced in Robbins' piece. "You were great," I said. "Keep doing what you're doing."

He said: "Who are you?"

On the way home I was almost hit by lightning.

That year I had my teeth fixed and got regular facials from a Romanian woman on the Upper West Side. When I wrote about it in The New York Observer, she phoned me, horrified, certain, even though I had disguised her identity, that the Romanian secret police would hunt her down and eliminate her finally. I could only apologize and try to reassure her. Who knew? Who cared? And when the TV crews came around to talk about the Romanov bones – NBC, BBC, NOVA, Biography, Discovery, and National Geographic – I spoke like a professional, calm and composed, open, curious, hiding nothing but my mortal condition.

The Alexander Palace, now restored.

St. Petersburg, May 1993

Earlier, heart pounding, I had gone to Tsarskoye Selo, the "Tsar's Village," about twenty miles south of St. Petersburg. This was the primary residence of the last imperial family and a place I seem to have known all my life, although I had never been there before today. This is where Anastasia grew up, cocooned by her mother, the Empress, whose paranoia was such as to keep her daughters tragically isolated at the smaller of two palaces in town, the Alexander, designed by Quarenghi at the end of the 18th century in neoclassical style. It’s a simple place as palaces go, with a center and two wings, erected in a park that abuts on the more imperial, majestic, and gaudier Catherine Palace, a blue-and-white Rococo insistence of a building with gilded Orthodox domes, built on the site of an old farm gifted by Peter the Great to his wife in 1710.

These details are alive in my mind. In 1918, after the Revolution and the Bolshevik takeover, Tsarskoye Selo was renamed Detskoye Selo – “Children’s Village” – reflecting the Soviet government’s purported commitment to the welfare of its citizens. The town became a center for orphanages and children’s sanatoria and later, in the Stalin period, a rest spot for the secret police. In 1937 the name changed again, this time to “Pushkin,” who had studied there at the Imperial Lyceum and whose death a century earlier needed some recognizing. Russian writers had long assembled in Tsarskoye Selo -- Alexander Blok, Alexei Tolstoy, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova -- but these days, if tourists come, they come for just one reason: the last tsar and his murdered family.

On the train from town, a noticeably short ride, we pass scores of little farm and garden plots, where people are tilling the soil and digging out remnants from last season’s crop. The area is quiet; not “pretty,” if you ask me, the way they all say, but a relief from city life if that’s what you’re looking for. I breathe deeply on disembarking. I’m excited, astonished to be here, and start walking, as if sure of myself, toward the palace I think is just down the road. I have no map, no idea where I’m headed, but I’m convinced that my long association with the Romanovs, with Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children, will guide me instinctively to their door.

It doesn’t. I go completely in the wrong direction and walk half a mile away from the Alexander Palace into a wooded area concealing Soviet-era housing developments. This is not and never was an imperial park, I can tell. I see a man hoeing his plot and stop to ask for help. “Dvorets,” I say, pleading. “Gosudar … Aleksandrovsky.” He must be used to it, because he turns me around without a word and points me back toward the train station. I gather from his gestures that the palace is on the other side of that. His face, resigned, telegraphs plainly, “You can’t miss it,” even though I have.

Walking back, I can’t decide if it’s lucky or embarrassing that my Romanov impulses fail me on their own turf. The idea that I have some sort of mystical connection with the doomed imperial family has to be put away. Stoutly, I remind myself that “Anna Anderson” was my muse, not necessarily these unfortunate royalties, and I walk on until I catch a glimpse of faded yellow stone among the trees, the building I’m looking for, dormant, standing just as it was when the tsar’s family left it for Siberia in 1917.

Of course, I can’t go in; this I knew beforehand. No one enters the Alexander Palace without a permit and a lot of palaver. In the early 1970s my aunt was here, seeing Leningrad with Intourist, and asked to view the place where Anastasia and her family spent most of their time. There came a firm “Nyet!” and the lofty reply, “If we came to New York would you show us the Bowery?” It being my aunt, she protested, “Yes! Yes we would! That’s exactly the difference between our country and yours!” But even now, with the fall of the Soviets, all that any visitor to Tsarskoye Selo can expect to see in the Romanov home-and-hearth division are the palace grounds and the building from the outside.

There are other reasons for this besides a hatred of tsarism and the Soviet smothering of history. During the Leningrad siege, for two years, the German army occupied the palace and when it was over the Russian Navy commandeered it as a military research station, closed to outsiders. Hundreds of Nazi soldiers are still buried under the lawns, and in the underground corridors of the palace itself giant computer banks, laboratories, and "progressive technologies" have led to a high level of radiation on the premises. “It isn’t dangerous,” I heard in St. Petersburg, but I expect no one knows if that’s true. The front drive is intact but the entrance is shut, forbidding access to any of the former State rooms. With smiles and some dollars I am ushered through a side door and down a short hallway, briefly, from where I can see nothing but the usual rows of Soviet desks and dingy office enclosures. But I have been inside, at least.

Plans for restoring the Alexander Palace right now are in a muddle. I’m told the Navy would be glad to go elsewhere if there were anywhere else to go. But there are no funds for anything yet and no certainties about how to proceed: the military takes its orders only from Moscow, which so far has been stumm. Apparently a German firm has offered to renovate the place in exchange for the rights to run a casino on the grounds, but even at a time when palaces are selling cheap this idea shocks the locals. There is an exorbitant sense of history here. The metal gates where Empress Alexandra appeared in 1917 to plead for the loyalty of the troops still stand where they were, and so does the house of Anna Viroubova on the edge of the park. Viroubova was Alexandra’s closest friend and chief liaison with Rasputin, the Siberian mouzhik whose influence contributed so greatly to the fall of the Romanov dynasty. Viroubova’s villa has been converted now into a kind of registry office and lots of people turn up there to get married, not knowing, for the most part, that it was once the most notorious building in Russia. This is where the Empress normally went to meet “Our Friend” and where she unfortunately listened to his calamitous advice. Often, she brought her daughters along: despite Soviet propaganda depicting her as a modern Messalina, Alexandra’s encounters with Rasputin were entirely chaste.

The Feodorovsky Gorodok

I wander north from the palace to the Feodorovsky Cathedral, built on the instructions of Nicholas II between 1909 and 1912 to provide his family with a parish church, a “cozy” place of the kind Alexandra preferred. They had only a few years to enjoy it. It’s in terrible shape now, damaged by the Nazis and by Soviet neglect, but there are plans for a full restoration and masses inside are again being sung. Nearby is the Feodorovsky Gorodok, a small monastery complex built in “New Russian Style,” harkening back to an imagined Muscovy that Russian artists and architects sought to represent in the years just prior to the Revolution. Nicholas II loved everything Russian and simplicity was the goal of his design; with its cupolas, walkways, and turquoise-green roofs, the style of the Gorodok might better be called Nouveau Novgorod, reflecting the Tsar and Empress’s desperate efforts to conceal the real world from themselves and their children. This building too is in ruins. It was here that Anastasia and her sister Maria, too young to be trained as nurses, became patronesses of a small hospital in World War I – a “lazaret” -- doing their best to lift the spirits of wounded soldiers as they came and went, reading to them, telling stories, and playing cards over long afternoons. I’m glad to see there is already a plaque commemorating their service: “Maria and Anastasia Nikolayevny, 1914-1917.”

I have particularly wanted to see this place – the lazaret -- because it features now in two of my books: Anastasia, of course, and Isadora, the one I’m currently working on. A patient from Anastasia’s hospital, Captain Felix Dassel, an officer of Grand Duchess Maria’s Dragoons, recognized Anna Anderson later in exile; she had revealed precise details of his sojourn there. And the lyric poet Sergei Yesenin, attached to the hospital as an orderly, went on to marry Isadora, when, in 1922, she established a school of dance in Moscow. In the war, Yesenin was invited to the Alexander Palace to read his poetry privately to the Empress and her daughters and even composed an ode to the four grand duchesses, praising “the youthful softness of their affectionate hearts.” A madman, he hanged himself in 1925, setting off a slew of imitative suicides around Russia, mainly of women who adored him from afar.

“He had youth, beauty, genius,” said Isadora, just one of his wives and multiple lovers, male and female. “Not content with all these gifts, his audacious spirit sought the unattainable, and he wished to lay low the Philistines.” Isadora herself wound up in Ekaterinburg in 1924, six years after the murder of the imperial family, on a long and grueling tour of the Russian provinces. “You have no idea what is a living nightmare until you see this town,” she wrote. “Perhaps the killing here of a certain family has cast an Edgar Allan Poe gloom over the place, or perhaps it was always like that. … You can’t imagine anything more fearful.” An enemy of monarchy, a staunch believer in the Bolshevik paradise, she must still have felt remorse over the slaughter of what were, in the end, victims of circumstance, the Tsar’s unlucky children. As do I today. More than usually, I should say. Deeper than usually.

Grand Duchesses Anastasia and Maria at the entrance to their “lazaret,” Tsarskoye Selo, 1916. Captain Felix Dassel in the back row, left.

I love how these tales intersect, the Romanovs and Isadora. Pure coincidence, and yet for me there’s a kind of magic in it. It is spooky here. Lately, stories about miracles worked by the Tsar’s family have been making the rounds in Russia, while old women in Siberia are said to be having a field day impersonating one or another of the Tsar's daughters. The Anastasia legend is fast becoming a blanket myth for the rebirth of the nation -- the name Anastasia, after all, means "Resurrection." According to one account, she escaped the murder of her family at Ekaterinburg disguised as a monk: "Thus she was able to be man or woman, young or old." Next thing you know she'll be turning into a river, like the daughter of the Sea-Tsar in Sadko, an opera I saw last night at the Kirov. Alternatively, the whole imperial family is said to have fled Ekaterinburg to live out their lives on an island in the Arctic Sea, where Stalin sometimes went to visit them. The writer Tatyana Tolstaya, whom I know from New York, attributes this intense resurgence of interest in the Romanovs to the simplest of motives: greed.

"It's because they were beautiful, stylish, and wealthy," she affirms. "I am sure that's what attracts people. The reasons are always vulgar." At the cathedral in Tsarskoye Selo, prayers are said daily for the soul of the Tsar, and where five oak trees once stood to represent Nicholas and Alexandra's children, one of them has died, or anyway vanished, which gives the omen-watchers a lot to think about. It’s the hope of many in St. Petersburg that the family’s bones, still lying in the Ekaterinburg morgue, will ultimately be buried here, in the church they built for themselves, but the new government seems intent on atoning in a bigger way and they’ll probably end up in the city with their forbears at the Cathedral of Peter and Paul. Walking back to the station I pass a fat mother duck, trailed by six or seven of her obedient children, and see two huge cats sitting patiently in the trees, ready to jump.

May 1993, St. Petersburg. My first time here.

There are no customs stations at the airport; rather, they’re unmanned. I stand and wait and look around and finally just walk through to the taxi rank. You don’t need to join a line – the drivers come straight up to you, offering perks and deals and special services. They will want to be your chauffeur for the length of your stay in the city.

On the very straight road that leads into town – Moskovsky Avenue, hewn from the swamp, like all of St. Petersburg -- I see multiple billboards for computers and cars, alternating trees and ads, ads and trees: Volvo, Ford, GM, Mazda. A Soviet-era neon sign says "FRUIT!" next to a photo of Isabella Rossellini, posing for Lancôme.

The city starts abruptly. There is no build-up to it, just a sudden collection of gray and dingy apartment blocks on a landscape so flat you feel like you’re riding in the air above it. The driver swerves frequently to avoid potholes. This accounts for a lot of what I thought at first was just recklessness. He’s driving a Mercedes and takes pains to tell me how many different words there are in Russian for “pothole” (yama, treshchina, zaplatka, and so on). Smoke-stacks, factories, open ditches, wheelbarrows, curling wires -- I wonder what it reminds me of, then think: parts of Route 9 around Yonkers. That dirty jumbling of roadway, scraps, and warehouses. You see the lack of manicuring everywhere. The whole city needs a good weeding. The driver has a "J'aime Paris" sticker on the dash, next to a photo of Madonna and the Double Eagle, without the crown. An imperial Russia with no tsar as yet.

Note: There is always a blazing racket from the radio in Russian cabs.

I’m staying at the "Oktyabrskaya," at the unfashionable end of Nevsky Prospect, one of the ghastly last of the old-style Soviet hotels, which apparently hasn’t been told about the collapse of communism. In a way it’s a needed experience: I’m doing my duty to history. There are hookers in the elevators, hoods and gun-molls, advertisements for “Erotic Shows” in the lobby, and dried shit in a corner of my room. Everything is faded, with battered doorframes, exposed pipes, and windows that don’t open. Is it a message? Am I supposed to end it all here, like Isadora’s Russian husband at the Angleterre? Yesenin hanged himself from pipes that weren't covered. I’m told that many Russians don’t accept that death as a suicide — they think Yesenin was murdered — but staying too long in one of these rooms could get you thinking darkly pretty fast.

The women who sit all day in the hallways to supervise the guests – dezhurnayas, they are called, “floor ladies” – take my key whenever I leave and give it back on return for a couple of worthless rubles, shooting grim looks that say, “I remember the Siege.” They are angry. Why wouldn’t they be? They know there is no better place for them in Yeltsin’s Russia, that nothing “new” will happen for them. On the way from the airport we stopped at “Victory Square” (Ploschad Pobedy) to see the “Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad,” where Shostakovich's 7th Symphony, composed during the Nazi bombardment in 1942 and broadcast live to the country, plays eternally to the accompaniment of a beating heart: Thump thump. Thump thump. Shostakovich's violin is also there on display, along with a collection of photographs and artifacts from the most traumatic experience in the city's history. ("You could tell the cannibals by their glowing pink faces," said a woman who survived the Siege, 872 days of terror and starvation.)

Atop the hotel, giant neon letters cast their legend on the square: LENINGRAD -- CITY OF HEROES. The monument to Alexander III that sits out front in “Uprising Square” (Ploschad Vosstaniya) has somehow survived the Soviet era. For years, until Stalin's paranoia took it down, a plaque was affixed to warn off revisionists: “My son [Nicholas II] and my father [Alexander II] were shot down in their prime, but I have attained posthumous glory; I stand as an iron scarecrow for the country which has forever thrown off the yoke of autocracy.” Autocracy’s future here now is still undecided, of course. The bust of Lenin that long stood across the street at Moscow Station was recently removed, snatched from its pedestal by municipal authorities and replaced with a statue of Peter the Great. Russia loves strongmen and there’s no way around it.

In the hotel bar is an American businessman. A perfect asshole. Woody Allen should put him in a movie. He’s shouting at some poor mouse sitting opposite: "That's what I'm saying! You people don't want to make sacrifices! You've been spoiled! You're suffering from a disease! A disease called Socialism! You’re like that old woman I saw on the street today, holding a dress out in front of her, all day long, like this" -- here he spreads his own fat fingers and affects an expression of pained supplication -- "just holding it there and waiting for someone to come along and buy it, for Christ's sake! That's what happens under Socialism! That's what comes from 70 years on the government tit!"

I buy a bottle of water at the Beryozka, which still operates, and my change is offered back to me in chewing gum. The clerk holds no coins of any worth. I feel a sudden compassion and tenderness for these people, who seem so valiant as they struggle to accomplish the most ordinary things. Is that racist? They're like children, country cousins, trying to give you their best but slipping sometimes and falling down at crucial moments. I had asked if fresh towels could be brought to the room and when none were delivered I spoke to the desk clerk to remind her.

“I am sorry,” she said. And then, about the neglectful staff: “They will be punished!”

I’m here for the world premiere of a play about Anastasia, Beyond Recognition, written by my friend James Mackenzie and very much based on my book. It will be performed, in Russian, at Great Catherine’s theatre in the Hermitage. Jamie is busy dealing with official odds and ends and has forgotten to deliver my ticket, so I walk up Nevsky Prospect to Palace Square, hoping for the best. The distance looks short on the map, but to walk from Moscow Station, where I am, to the Admiralty and the Palace is a good long trek. Nevsky Prospect is more than three miles long, and there's no such thing in Russia, despite the guidebooks' cheerful lies, as "a short walk” to anywhere.

I’m amazed by the grandeur of this city. Nothing I’d read or heard about St. Petersburg has prepared me for its scope -- the acres and mountains of granite and marble; the arrow-straight lines of the roads; the soaring facades of palaces built in exact alignment with the width of the streets; the combination of elegance and submission, beauty and power, that has left more than one new visitor quivering in place. “Petersburg streets possess one indubitable quality," says Andrei Bely in his Symbolist masterpiece, Petersburg (1914). "They transform passersby into shadows." Everywhere you look you see columns and arches, pilasters and domes, bridges, embankments, cathedrals, and spires. The buildings appear to be gliding somehow, while anchored to the ground; you can easily imagine they’re pursuing you. In a certain light they look like the prows of ships -- big ships -- and in others they seem nearly translucent, an impossibility, you would think, in structures so massive.

“An enormous crimson sun raced above the Neva,” wrote Bely, “and the buildings of Petersburg seemed to be melting away, turning into the lightest of smoky amethyst lace. The windowpanes sent off cutting flame-gold reflections and from the tall spires flashed rubies.”

This is Peter's City, capital of Russia from 1712 until 1918 -- artificial, sui generis, willed to exist on a fumy, fetid, mosquito-ridden swamp where the Neva meets the Gulf of Finland and no one ever thought to put down roots until Peter said they had to. The Neva is just 73 kilometers long, a fat, squat worm of a river that surrounds the city's central island, grabs it by the neck and squeezes it a little. (More than forty islands actually make up the St. Petersburg archipelago. Guides stress "more than" rather than any specific number, because from time to time in the city's history floods and aristocrats have washed them over or dug them out, and no one is certain, oddly enough, exactly how many there are). Peter needed a port city for his expanding trade with Europe and as a citadel in Russia's "Great Northern War" with the Swedes; the first stone of what is now the Peter and Paul Fortress was laid on May 16, 1703, and within a decade St. Petersburg was born -- "Sankt Pieter Burkh," it was called at first, a tribute both to Peter's patron saint and to the Dutch seafarers and shipbuilders whose industry and knack for commerce he so admired. It's not easy to forget, walking around the city, that "Peter" is the Greek word for rock. You've never seen so much of it in a swamp before. You can't imagine where it all came from.

"St. Petersburg is a Russian pyramid," says the poet Yevtushenko, by which he means that it was built on the backs of servants and that none of the materials required for its construction are to be found anywhere in the natural environment of the city. The story is told of workers from the countryside bearing loads of dirt on their pummeled backs (there being no solid earth on which to build in Petersburg itself) and then being buried in the ground they carried when at length they died from exhaustion. Tens of thousands of people, possibly hundreds of thousands, are supposed to have perished during the raising of the city. Floods and fires were an everyday menace, and if you weren't carried off by scurvy or malaria, there were wolves in the streets to make you wish you'd stayed in Moscow. So many people died to give Peter his "Window on the West" ("Venice of the North," it's also called, "Northern Palmyra" and "Babylon of the Snows") that St. Petersburg is still referred to darkly as a city "built on bones." Russians regard it as an unlucky place -- men and women of the heartland, that is, whom Petersburg's own snappy residents are prone to dismiss as hicks and malcontents. The tsarist capital was founded "in principle," says Dostoyevsky, "in contrast with Moscow and its entire concept," and the important thing to remember about the "Window" idea is that it looked in only one direction: out. It was the face, the mind, the brain and the European style of the Russian empire, until the Soviets, during the civil war in 1918, moved the capital back to Moscow and banished Petersburg to an incongruous, Vienna-like existence on the fringes of national life. Like Austria after the fall of the Habsburgs, Peter's creation was suddenly irrelevant, all head and no rump, a "City of Palaces" with nothing to rule.

In Palace Square, the Alexander Column, nearly 50 meters high and weighing more than 700 tons, isn't anchored to its pedestal; it stands where it is thanks only to gravity, and a lot of Russians still skirt around it while walking past in the belief that it might topple over and kill them. Palace Square is traditionally the site of demonstrations and revolutions in St. Petersburg, “the most attractive place for violent people," according to local report. Terrible things have happened in this space; Bloody Sunday, for one, which put paid to tsarism in 1905, even if it took a few more years to finish the job and oust the Romanovs. It’s early evening when I get there, maybe seven o’clock, and not quite the white nights, so dusk is falling. The square is so vast and so empty, the palace dimly lit. A ghost palace. No glitz. And I can’t find the way to get in. I’m a guest of honor at a theatrical premiere, one of the first performances in the Hermitage since 1917, but there’s not a sign of life anywhere around, no placard marking the event, no billboards, no ropes – nothing. I wind up finally on the Palace Quai, on the Neva, as if alighting from a barge, and simply knock at the main entrance. Can you imagine? The Winter Palace, where someone has sprayed the name "Lenin!" on the front door.

I can’t say how long it took for anyone to hear me and let me in; I am too stunned by the moment. An attendant of some kind, undefined, eventually appears, swinging the great door open slowly and with the suspicion they all have that something forbidden is happening. But he speaks some English and, to my relief, knows what I’m there for. I’m a long way from the theatre, he says, and will need to walk the whole length of the complex to get to it, through the palace itself, the “Small Hermitage,” the “Old Hermitage,” and then a hallway over the “Winter Canal” to the auditorium. So I set off, alone and unescorted, through the rooms of the Romanovs, passing crates and ladders and priceless treasures in a museum desperately in need of repair. There is no security. No one is watching me. Guidebooks tell me that at any given time the Hermitage displays only 5 percent of its holdings and I think how easy it would be to nick a Fabergé snuffbox or a minor Rembrandt on my way to see the life of Anna Anderson depicted by Russian actors. A large box sits in front of a hallway stamped with the words, "Catherine the Great, Fragile." Again I am dazed by my surroundings, by this moment in time.

I’ve invited my friend C. to join me tonight, a sweet, passionate man who reminds me of myself when I was younger. We met last year on the plane from Ekaterinburg to Moscow when I was writing my piece about the Romanov bones. I could easily be in love with him but I’m not. I stop myself. He is straight and married and I am finished, I hope, with crushes on fantasy men. It also isn’t fair to him. He is authentic, real, and I won’t push to know if he is innocent. After the show we walk along the Moika canal, past the former stables area, over little foot-bridges that make me think of Venice, and see handsomely apportioned apartments in the buildings above, tall ceilings, windows, lots of space. Who lives in these palaces now? To whom do they belong? Will the whole city look like this again one day, bright and strong and so sweepingly elegant?

PETER KURTH is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Incidentally, I do think American Cassandra should be brought back between covers — actual ones — now that the United States has chosen to embark on the anti-democratic authoritarian path. So I’ll put Dorothy first.

"It was Miss Thompson's great personal tragedy that she never met a man who understood her or knew how to handle her - until now. Peter Kurth, author of the haunting "Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson," proves once again that he is the equal of Stefan Zweig as a biographer of women…. His fairness, his control of his material and his eye for the revealing quotation are such that he makes us empathize with Miss Thompson even when we feel like strangling her." – Florence King

Those who remember Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961) at all know she was once married to Sinclair Lewis, and was a journalist of high influence and repute in her own time. As Peter Kurth's sensationally good biography reveals, Thompson was much more: an opinion-maker, international celebrity and very real power behind several thrones - pushing and nagging the great, the near-great and the inept to ensure the survival of those humanitarian ideals for which she tirelessly campaigned and more than once risked her life…. Kurth's vividly detailed and dramatic portrayal of her life fully compensates for the memoirs she planned but never lived to write. He shows her at her best and worst and, without insisting, leaves us persuaded that here was a one-of-a-kind incarnation of energy, honesty and commitment; a woman we must not forget." – USA Today

"Kurth has set out to make "American Cassandra" the definitive life of Miss Thompson, as she was widely known. And what a life it was! Her trials and triumphs larger than ordinary reality, Thompson seemed to live in Technicolor…. As the story moves along … the reader is drawn into her passions and private tribulations. In the end, her death becomes a personal loss." – Chicago Tribune

"If you’re old enough to remember Dorothy Thompson, you know she was an Inescapable Fact…. Her output was like some vast and relentless torrent with a dozen tributaries feeding into the main stream and back out again. Kurth beats a path through all this without fear or pause. He somehow imposes a sense of order on things, despite the odds, and guides us through the tumultuous complexities of the time-the rise of Nazism in Germany; isolationism in America; the Second World War; the establishment of Israel and other issues that Thompson took over as her personal battleground. His daunting task is to show us a mind at work, and he pulls it off." – Washington Post

"An important asset of this big, solid book … is author Kurth's prolific use of Thompson's own words. She left 150 file cases of published and unpublished writings, her ideas, notes and voluminous letters -- chunks of private thoughts and musings on her three husbands and her own sexuality one would have expected her to burn, except that the conflagration, in a more reticent time, might have required a fire company on hand to douse it. Kurth has battled through this paper blizzard and emerged with a clear-as-ice-water picture of a turbulent, complex personality." – Baltimore Sun

Next, Anastasia, who started it all.

"A marvelous, thoroughly engrossing and gripping sifting of the facts…. A spellbinder." -- King Features

"One reads the story through to the bitter end, absolutely mesmerized." – Chicago Sun-Times

"Splendid ... absorbing, it gives the first full picture…. This dispassionate, admirably researched biography will surely persuade most sensible readers that Anna Anderson was indeed the Grand Duchess Anastasia." – D. M. Thomas, PEN Silver Pen winner and author of The White Hotel

And Isadora, who somehow got lost.

"The most famous woman of the first quarter of the 20th century may have been Mary Pickford, but the most influential, and the most notorious, was Isadora Duncan. She was the progenitor and soul of a new art form, modern dance. She was the prototype of the uninhibited young American whose freshness and originality charmed jaded old Europe. And for decades she startled respectable society -- even as she helped transform it -- with her flouting of conventions, both onstage and off. You would have to go back to George Sand or Byron to find a comparably galvanizing figure." – Robert Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review

“Peter Kurth has done a heroic job re-creating this charismatic, complicated and deeply tragic figure, born in the heyday of the railroads and dead before the Great Depression. Isadora - evocative, authoritative and sumptuously detailed - will likely become the standard biography.” — Tim Page, Washington Post

"Miss Duncan has learned by heart the tale that the Greeks have left us, and she has followed the Attic dance from statue to bas-relief, from bas-relief to urn, from tragedy to comedy, from history to commentary…. She has strung her beads of learning, cut and polished, on the thread of this wise-child soul of hers, so bubbling with vehement life, and every bead is a prayer, and every prayer a song." -- The New Age (London), July 1908

Then: more Romanovs.

"A page-turner packaged as a coffee-table book." - Entertainment Weekly

"Dazzling...gorgeously illustrated....Mr. Kurth's narrative is amply documented and compellingly written, and offers as fine a portrait of Nicholas and Alexandra's complex characters as any book since Robert K. Massie's biography of nearly three decades ago...Peter Christopher's color photographs of the traditional Romanov sites are as beautiful as any pictures I've seen of Russia. But the modest snapshots, patiently exhumed from archives, taken by members of the imperial family and their entourage, are even more affecting." - New York Times Book Review

"Hauntingly beautiful....The author's lively text touches all the historical bases: wedding, coronation, Bloody Sunday, Rasputin, World War I, revolution, execution, and subsequent exhumation. It is rendered more powerful by the wealth of visual images arranged with loving care." - Los Angeles Times

So. Now you know.

Olivia de Havilland in “Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna” (1986)

Olivia de Havilland told me once that I had “just the right kind of fame. You aren’t famous,” she remarked, “but your subjects are. So you get their light with none of the burden.”

See how I did that? Very clever. Miss de Havilland and I became friendly through the TV version of Anastasia, in which she played the Dowager Empress, Anastasia’s grandmother, and did it so well, with such eerie detachment and abstractedness, that I broke my own rule about chasing celebrities and virtually mashed her with my admiration for her work. She was the only actor I’ve ever seen who understood that royalty – at least, royalty of the older school – never strives to impress, never mugs for the audience, and doesn’t pay attention to three-quarters of what’s going on around them. How she learned this I don’t know, but after Anastasia I was able to see her whenever I landed in Paris. “Come for tea,” she would say, “or a glass of champagne in the garden.” She was very nice to me.

Are movie stars royalty? I still dream about them routinely – the immortals, I mean, the divas of the golden age: Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, Claudette Colbert. I’ll see a great star and slide up to her, saying, as I did to Barbara Stanwyck in a dream, “Oh, it’s you! My Aunt Mary did your husband’s laundry in Santa Monica.” Which is true, incidentally. In a dream, just like that, Greer Garson might invite me to visit her in Dallas. Judy Garland turns up a lot, always sober, glowing with health, super-friendly. She gives me her phone number but I lose it, or, when I try to call, I can’t see the numbers on the screen. There is always some frustration at the end. Katharine Hepburn got a page in my journal in 1987:

Dream last night: B. and I stopping dead in our tracks as Katharine Hepburn walks by on the street. B. gasps and cries out: "It's Katharine Hepburn!" I say: "Hush, no!" My idea is not to be gauche, to keep cool, but B. ignores me. She chases Katharine Hepburn into a small clothing boutique down the block. I hold back, so inwardly agitated that I need to get my breath. Finally, I poke my head into the shop and see no B. and no Katharine Hepburn, just a saleswoman, maybe Joan Blondell, the kind who’d trail you around in movie versions of Lord & Taylor, saying, “Yes, Madam, no Madam, shall I fetch it for you, Madam?” I greet her in my cheerful, isn't-he-natural way, saying, “I am the author of `Anastasia,’” and the next thing I know I'm ushered into a back room, behind thick black curtains, where Katharine Hepburn is sitting in a rocking chair, humming to herself and paying no attention to anyone. She’s a young Katharine Hepburn, with a marvelous figure, but old too, very old, with gobs of rouge on her face and her hair piled up under a hat that rises two feet in the air. On the street, she wore a loden cape. Now she’s dressed in a bright pink tracksuit and sneakers. And no matter how casual I pretend to be, how familiar with movie stars and their ways, I can’t get her to look at me.

For the record, I never knew Katharine Hepburn. I sat near her once at a memorial for Irene Selznick in New York and should leave it there in honor of the way she answered me, three times, when I wrote to ask her about one thing or another. First, Dorothy Thompson. In 1942 Katharine Hepburn had played the role of “Tess Harding” in George Stevens’ Woman of the Year, her first screen pairing with her enduring partner, Spencer Tracy. In this film, a comedy, Tess is a hugely successful reporter and globetrotting newspaper columnist, plainly modeled on Dorothy Thompson, who falls in love with Tracy as a sports-writing know-it-all and ends up frying eggs for him in an effort at domesticity. Going a little too far, Dorothy had pronounced it a “sickening travesty,” and I wanted to know what Hepburn thought, if she and Dorothy had ever met, and what ordeals she herself might have undergone in an earlier time as a professional woman at the top of her game.

The answer came back, typed on cheap white note paper that was nevertheless embossed at the top: “Katharine Houghton Hepburn.” She wrote:

Sinclair Lewis was a friend of mine. I did not know Dorothy Thompson. I’m sorry.

Next, it was Dorothy Parker, Algonquin wit and weepy poetess, with whom Dorothy Thompson is now forever mixed up. Vanity Fair had asked for a Parker retrospective in 1993 in honor of her centenary and I wanted as many live voices for the piece as might be found with the passage of time. Dorothy Parker had once famously remarked of a Hepburn performance that “she runs the gamut of emotions from A to B” and I wanted to know if Miss Hepburn had any comment on that. Maybe she’d like to get a little of her own back. But no: there came the typed response on the same dime-store stationery:

I did not know Dorothy Parker. Just laugh, that’s what’s important.

Finally, Isadora Duncan. Katharine Hepburn was old enough to have seen Isadora onstage on one of her late American tours and on the chance that she had I wrote to ask her about it. The typewriter replied:

I never saw Isadora Duncan. You seem to be interested in people completely unknown to me.

For a moment, I thought of publishing a book, The Complete Short Sentences of Katharine Hepburn, assuming that other people had more of them to share. But I gave her a pass finally as an old lady who was undoubtedly besieged with requests and had nevertheless taken the time to peck out a few words to me. I disliked her instinctively, knowing that I could never pass her rigid tests of character, never stand up to her impatient gaze. She was notoriously sharp and irascible, as everyone knew, filled with “no-nonsense” advice about life and the world that was basically rudeness disguised as New England “grit.” In 1991 she had produced a memoir, not surprisingly called Me, and explained how she did it in words that would aggravate any writer.

“I wrote in bed every morning,” she said. “Whatever came into my head. Someone types it up, and you have a book. I have no idea what it says. I’ve never read it.”

Humbug. “Someone types it up.” As my mother would say, “Phooey McPhoo!”

Katharine Hepburn writing something.

Quite other was my experience of Lillian Gish, one of the nicest women ever, who bent over backwards to thank me for sending her a copy of Anastasia. She too had played the Dowager Empress of Russia in Anya, a little-known musical version of the Anastasia story, directed by George Abbott, which flopped on Broadway in 1965 after 16 performances. Billed as “The Musical Musical,” it was based on the first staged version of the tale, Marcelle-Maurette’s Anastasia, now set to the music of Rachmaninoff and choreographed by Hanya Holm, whose expressionist style proved not enough to counter critical opinion that the production was “old-fashioned” and hellishly sentimental. “One wonders if one has not stumbled on a turn-of-the-century operetta,” said The New York Times. The song writers, Robert Wright and George Forrest, had had success with their earlier works, among them Kismet and Song of Norway, and flogged Anya for years after its initial failure, reworking the scenes and continually changing the title. It became A Song for Anastasia, The Anastasia Game, The Anastasia Affaire, and lastly Anastasia, the Musical, just before Forrest’s death in 1999. But nothing could ignite it and it died with its creators. Miss Gish remembered it fondly, praising her director, George Abbott, and her co-star, Constance Towers, with whom she had shared what she called “a charming duet” in the second act – “even though,” she confided, “I am not a singer.”

All roads led back to Anastasia, then, to the lost princess, no matter what else I did. She was like a magnet for me, or a swamp -- after a point I couldn’t tell. In the early spring of 1993 I went to Lillian Gish’s memorial service in Manhattan and even there the story managed to insert itself. Miss Gish had died at the age of 99, having taken part in the whole history of commercial motion pictures, from her debut in D. W. Griffith two-reelers to her last performance opposite Bette Davis in Lindsay Anderson’s Whales of August (1987), an ordeal of which she spoke, as usual, with full discretion.

“That face!” she exclaimed of her difficult co-star. Bette Davis had had several strokes before filming began: “Have you ever seen such a tragic face?!” A great raft of film and theatre celebrities turned out for Gish’s memorial at St. Bartholomew's on Park Avenue, among them Malcolm McDowell, who berated me on the steps of the church for having written Anastasia and “falling for that cock-and-bull story.” He had recently starred in a Russian film, The Assassin of the Tsar, in which he played Yakov Yurovsky, commander of the Romanov family’s final prison in Ekaterinburg and the leader of the execution squad.

“Believe me,” he said, a Hollywood expert, “they all died. No one came out of that room alive.” I didn’t want to argue about it so I only shrugged and smiled at Mary Steenburgen, McDowell’s ex-wife, standing next to him on the stairs. Inside, beautiful eulogies for Miss Gish poured out from famous throats: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Irene Worth, and James MacArthur, the son of Helen Hayes, Lillian Gish’s closest friend, who was too ill to attend the memorial and who would die herself in a matter of days. She too had played the Dowager Empress, the first of them I ever saw, in the Ingrid Bergman Anastasia, and as I remembered their famous “recognition scene,” the moment when the proud old empress and the traumatized “Anastasia” collapse in tears in each other’s arms, I found myself shaking my head briskly, as if trying to get rid of a forbidden thought. I was sitting next to James Frasher, Lillian Gish’s “personal manager” and factotum, who wept throughout the service, shaking with grief, tears falling like rivers from his eyes. I put my arm around his shoulders in an effort to console him but the shaking and the weeping never stopped.

Lillian Gish and Bette Davis in “The Whales of August” (1987)

Why am I writing this? Why do I see haunting connections in what were plainly coincidences? I’m sure I was the only guest at Lillian Gish’s memorial who knew that her friend Helen Hayes had been cast in Anastasia by mistake. In London, during the first West End mounting of the Marcelle-Maurette drama that inspired the Bergman film, the part of the empress had been taken by Helen Haye, a well-known actor in England who was a favorite of Alexander Korda. Casting directors in Paris, where Anastasia was filmed, had cabled Buddy Adler, its producer at 20^th Century Fox, “Get Helen Haye,” and the rest is Hollywood history.

Nevertheless, Helen Hayes sent me a charming letter while I worked on Anastasia, as did Bette Davis later. I had praised her perhaps embarrassingly in an article or book review and she told me she hoped she could live up to my “high compliments.” She had been the first choice to play the Dowager Empress in the TV version of Anastasia but withdrew on account of illness, thus ceding the part to Olivia de Havilland, who did it so perfectly.

Looking back, it just seems gay. These stars, these women, blended for me into one great figure – an empress? a mother? an angel I was seeking? But my mission was clear: I needed to please them, to persuade them, to be acknowledged and admitted to the chamber. In this respect I was Anastasia. My problems fell away. There was no AIDS, no dwindling health, no love life mixed with awful darkness. In that room I disappeared and reemerged a different person. “But, oh, please,” as Helen Hayes implored the now legitimized Ingrid Bergman, “if it is not you, don’t ever tell me.”

Helen Hayes and Ingrid Bergman in “Anastasia” (1956)

There was a crazy man in the apartment across from me in my building in New York, a small man, as I saw in the elevator, maybe in his sixties, who periodically shouted so loudly at someone inside with him that I wondered if I should call the police or an ambulance for the object of his abuse.

“You miserable, goddamned, lousy piece of SHIT!” I heard him scream. If there really are such things as bloodcurdling shrieks this man was producing them. We were on the 33^rd floor and he was just across the way.

“I’m going to KILL you! Do you HEAR me? I am going to KILL you and cut you into PIECES! These are your LAST DAYS! You fucking CRIMINAL!”

I was so bewildered the first time I heard one of these tirades that I stood frozen in front of my door. Was he yelling at his wife? A lover? His mother? It was certainly someone he blamed for all the troubles of his life: “If you EVER want my forgiveness you’ll have to get on your KNEES and BEG for it! You goddamned ANIMAL!”

This went on relentlessly, not every day, but often enough that I slowly recognized it as a ritual. No medics arrived to remove any bodies; no smells leaked out from across the hall. And I knew it would make a good story one day, a good New York story: “YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT! This is your LAST DAY! I’m going to KILL you!”

I was living on West 66^th Street across from Lincoln Center, doing preliminary research on Isadora Duncan in the archives of the New York Public Library’s Dance Collection. There had been a publishing auction for the new book, a most exciting few days when I was lunched and courted by top editors in New York: Michael Korda, Harry Evans, Jacqueline Onassis, that sort of thing. Little, Brown got the rights in the end by repeatedly raising the bid. I didn’t mind staying with them after all, despite their sorry promotional record. I loved and trusted my editor there and for a writer that is no small thing. And for once the advance was sufficient for the work.

As with Dorothy Thompson, Isadora came about by accident. I had no background in modern dance and no interest in it either, which in an odd way became the motive for the book. Isadora wasn’t about dance: she was about art. She was the modern goddess of self-expression. Balletomanes despised her, as they mostly still do, seeing a lack of training and discipline in her emotional performances. George Balanchine, founder of the New York City Ballet, described her as “a drunken fat woman rolling around the floor like a pig,” to which Isadora, had she lived to hear Balanchine’s tirade, would have answered simply that the ballet itself was “a false and preposterous art,” “outside the pale of all art,” an extension of acrobatics that elevated women only to punish them through the distortion of their bodies. She wrote in 1903, before the Ballets Russes had revolutionized classical dancing:

To those who nevertheless still enjoy the movements [of ballet], for historical or choreographic, or whatever other reasons, to those I answer: they see no farther than the skirts and tricots. But look -- under the skirts, under the tricots are dancing deformed muscles. Look still farther -- underneath the muscles are deformed bones. A deformed skeleton is dancing before you. ... The ballet condemns itself by enforcing the deformation of the beautiful woman’s body. No historical, no choreographic reasons can prevail against that!

This is a quarrel that can scarcely be resolved outside the parameters of personal taste. Isadora’s first appearances in St. Petersburg in 1904 are widely credited for giving the ballet “a shock from which it never recovered,” opening the doors for a new and vital expression of emotion, flexibility, and sensuality in classical dance. The Ballets Russes would never have existed without Isadora Duncan. Nothing like her had been seen before, a lone figure on a bare stage, inspired to movement by the world’s great music: Beethoven, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Strauss.

“She dances and fills the universe,” said Ruth St. Denis, Isadora’s exact contemporary and a teacher of Martha Graham. “She exceeds all ordinary measure. … In one arm's movement is all the grace of the world. In one backward flying of the head is all the nobility.” While her dances are notated and reproduced faithfully by contemporary performers, there is no means of recapturing the experience of seeing Isadora herself in performance. My job was to summon the impression of her dancing through the movement of her story. “I have only danced my life,” she said, and I took her at her word. No one had done that before.

Now I was swimming in Duncan material and listening to a maniac screaming at the walls of his apartment. It turned out he was in there alone, shrieking only at memories and fervid resentments. On the elevator he smelled strongly of alcohol, which, to me at least, explained his lack of restraint. But his cries and screams were as disturbing as anything I had ever heard. They haunted me even when he was silent, because I was alone too, my T-cells plummeting and my health collapsing across the hall.

I can barely recall the sequence of things after the Phantom died in 1991. Isadora began sometime in the summer, when I had lunch with an editor who suggested it. “I don’t think we’ve heard enough about her,” he said, and I simply agreed, knowing nothing. Notorious as she was – for her chaotic love life, her personal tragedies, and her astonishing death by strangulation in a speeding automobile – I was mostly in the dark. I had seen Vanessa Redgrave play her in the movies and also Vivian Pickles, who took the part in Ken Russell’s madcap Isadora: The Biggest Dancer in the World (1966), which in the U.S. had aired on public television. But I couldn’t connect with her at first, couldn’t find her in the mass of papers I was seeing. She seemed so strange to me, almost deranged, a California “free spirit” with a colossal ego and messianic tendencies. I wrote the book proposal three times, I remember, my agent virtually whipping me to make it better. Then I closed up my place in Vermont and moved to New York City, I thought permanently, choosing my apartment the way I chose everything, with a snap of the fingers and my eyes shut tight.

I was hiding my HIV status from everyone in publishing and what might be called my social circle, which split fairly between a monied East Side crowd and the men I hung with late at night in bare and unlit places. The incongruity wasn’t lost on me as I scooted from dinners on Sutton Place to uptown bathhouses and shooting galleries. Quickly my apartment became a kind of refuge for the troubled and bereft. I was glad to offer them showers and meals and other services as needed; I preferred the company of men who were open in their desperation if not entirely clear in their minds. I was a fool, obviously, and a danger to myself, in a low-rent search for a death of my own design. A friend in Paris couldn’t stand it anymore and tossed himself from a 14^th-story window. He was a beautiful writer and poet, half English, half French, and I loved him very much. Had he lived, he would have lived with me. I went on a medical trial at Bellevue but it was too late for Charles:

My flesh began unto my soul in pain,

"Sicknesses cleave my bones;

Consuming agues dwell in ev'ry vein,

And tune my breath to groans."

Sorrow was all my soul; I scarce believ'd,

Till grief did tell me roundly, that I liv'd.

– George Herbert, 'Affliction (I)'

I lost so many parts of myself in that year, 1991. I had friends and plenty of them, people who cared about me and wanted to help. But I couldn’t feel what they tried to give me; I couldn’t find the place in myself that responded to any but an empty touch. My journals in the 1980’s were all about anxiety over writing and foolishness with boyfriends. Now they were more observational, reflecting, I liked to think, some maturity, but probably also my increasing distance from myself:

September 14, 1991: Two French sentences, one seen in a manuscript over somebody’s shoulder at a coffee shop on Columbus Avenue, the other heard yesterday on the downtown train:

"Et puis, il y avait l'affaire du sac."

And:

"Jean-Paul!" – someone shouting, as the doors close on the train -- "À quelle heure vous fermez la cuisine?" Whole books could be written from these.

September 15: My driver on the way to Newark airport is very talkative. "I’m half-Jewish,” he says, “from Ukraine." Then he praises the virtues of New Jersey as opposed to New York: "It is like another planet. And the people are so much more friendly and polite! It must have to do with the lifestyle."

I’m wondering what this could possibly mean. We emerge from the tunnel and he takes a deep breath, relishing the air, as if he'd just arrived at the beach.

At the terminal, Continental's logo is strung up everywhere on the walls: "One Airline Can Make a Difference." I think of all the conferences, the memos, the faxes and phones, the paperwork and pep talks, parties, charts, graphs, and never-ending jargon that went into the creation of this.

[Undated]: In New York, the commentary is always passing you by on its way somewhere. You breeze past pronouncements, summation statements, apocalyptic remarks, such as: "So he says he's gonna take a knife and stab me in the fucking head and I say, `Hey, what the fuck's the matta with you?'"

Or: Two black matrons in their Sunday finery, having an early dinner at Wolfe's: "All I know is, nothing stays the same. Everything changes."

"You're right about that."

"Don't fight it."

"Amen."

Or: Two businessmen walking, gesticulating, one says to the other: "Here's the problem, okay? Management's saying, `Make me a salad,' but they won't cut the carrots."

In November 1991 I was in London and saw Vanessa Redgrave play Isadora Duncan for the second time, now onstage in Martin Sherman’s When She Danced, a play about Duncan in her final years, after her children had died in a car accident and she was married to a madman, the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin. It was her last attempt at love before she settled for any good-looker with wheels and it was the way I found my passage to her heart. In Vanessa’s performance, in Martin’s play, I saw the loneliness of grief, the stillness that one’s lunacies are meant to relieve. Vanessa’s face lit up backstage when I told her I was writing Isadora’s biography and she burst out, as if singing, “Oh, you will have a rich reward!” That I could still hope she was right impressed me in the moment. It seemed so doubtful on other fronts.

I went to Morocco that year to join my father for Thanksgiving, where he tried to set me up with a friend of his wife’s who was turning 30 and rapidly losing her value on the marriage market. At that point, I had never spoken with him about my sexual identity, never mind my HIV status, and the visit for me was cramped and uncomfortable:

I feel terrible, constricted, wanting to tell them about myself and my situation. But I can’t. It just won’t come. It was bad enough with Mother when I confessed about my status and saw her nearly collapse in front of me, actually stumble where she stood, as if she was losing consciousness. She had asked me about it directly after [the Phantom’s] death and I couldn’t brush it off. But I don’t have the kind of relation with Dad that would allow for an open conversation. It is way too late for that. Where would I start?

One day there’s a pounding at the door and it’s the police, demanding to know, “Where is Peter Kurth?” I feel like I’m in a movie and the Gestapo is here. My stepmother handles everything, thank God. Coming to Morocco, I’ve said on my entry card that I’m a writer, and the King, Hassan II, isn’t sure he wants writers in his realm. Western writers, I suppose. What am I up to? Why am I here? Finally it’s worked out, although apparently I’ll be watched: this is a police state. Najat closes the door, shakes her head, and says, “Stupid old man.” She means the King. Her English is perfect now.

I go home. I am dying inside and out.

I wrote these things in a journal -- more of a commonplace, really, filled not just with my own words but with thoughts and scraps I wanted to save, things that impressed me or helped me feel better as I sank further into illness and dissolution. Undoubtedly I was looking for forgiveness as well as solace. At the top of page two is a quote from C. S. Lewis, which I found after a particularly grungy weekend with the boys: "I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God's will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness." And then another, from Mary McCarthy in The Company She Keeps:

Now for the first time she saw her own extremity, saw that it was some failure in self-love that obliged her to snatch blindly at the love of others, hoping to love herself through them, borrowing their feelings, as the moon borrowed light. She herself was a dead planet. … And yet, she thought, walking on, she could still detect her own frauds. At the end of the dream, her eyes were closed, but the inner eye had remained alert. ... “Oh my God,” she said, “do not let them take this away from me. If the flesh must be blind, let the spirit see. Preserve me in disunity. …”

I found some comfort in AIDS obituaries. No day passed without a slew of them in the Times and to me they were never depressing. They were beautiful, heartfelt, although I sometimes used them against myself as a way to imagine that love and redemption were the preserve of nicer people than I:

B. S.: Forever missed. Forever remembered by us all. For his passionate intensity, joyful skepticism and elasticity of intellect. For his loyalty, so freely given. For his confident sense of personal uniqueness. For his fierce desire to control destiny until destiny, on this earth, had the final word.

L.P: 1957 to 1994, of AIDS. `But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.’

G. H.: On Feb. 16th. He lived a life of breadth and depth, if not of length. He was loved deeply by many people, and admired most for what he gave to others, always with humor, sensitivity, and the elegance of a human spirit unconstrained.

S. S.: You felt the world deeply and met its suffering with indignation and love. You left us too quickly, though your death is not an end. You live in our grief and inconsolable memory. You remain: novelist, beloved son, brother and friend.

J.J.T. 39, of New York City. He died with perfect clarity, dignity and courage and with such compassion and love for those he left behind that we, his family and friends, have been enriched and ennobled by the eloquence of his passing.

I knew I wasn’t worthy of such accolades. I imagined my own, although I doubted I would have one:

P. K.: 40-something, had no courage at all. He kicked and screamed, stamped his feet and lost his nerve. He lied, he ran, he loathed himself. Dignity and clarity were unknown to him. He had no breadth, no depth. He hid away, betraying his promise and squandering his estate. RIP. Nothing could be done to reclaim him.

This is where I stood in 1991, the lost year, when Isadora flew into my life and the Anastasia case suddenly cracked open again. I would spend the next three years smothered in Romanovs, back and forth from Russia, sinking, confused, preparing to shed the dead skin I was wearing.

Out of 44 institutions that might have applied for the Koestler grant, only two of them did; of these, because it already had some experience in the field, the University of Edinburgh won.

"Edinburgh got it because it clearly wanted it," says John Beloff, a former senior lecturer at Edinburgh's department of psychology, a friend of Koestler's and one of four executors of the Koestler estate. For fifteen years, long before Koestler died, Beloff had overseen the occasional production at Edinburgh of postgraduate theses with "psychical" themes. He is a onetime president of the Parapsychological Association, the editor of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, and (if there is such a thing) the Grand Old Man of psi. He regards the Koestler bequest as "a Trojan horse," a wilful retaliation against scientism and a deliberate irritant in the academic body.

"Koestler was always a bit odd man out," Beloff tells me, "always a bit at loggerheads with academics and authorities. We never thought it would be an easy thing to find a Chair." Negotiations with Oxford and Cambridge (where Koestler's legacy might normally have been expected to bear lustrous fruit) broke down quickly -- in the first case, because Oxford took the view that the study of parapsychology was a complete waste of time; and, in the case of Cambridge, because Koestler's executors were worried his money would be used for purposes other than the one he intended. Arthur Ellison, at that time president of the Society for Psychical Research and now emeritus professor of electrical engineering at City University in London, remembers that his own efforts to obtain the grant ended when his colleagues "got cold feet."

"We set up a small working body of academics from different disciplines," Ellison recalls. "We included skeptics. We made jolly sure the project was scientific," but the motion died anyway in the larger councils of the university. It was a bad time generally for parapsychology, the era of Uri Geller and the metal-benders, the moment, more or less, when mediums became "channelers" and "past lives" got popular among boosters of the occult. In 1976 Paul Kurtz, a professor of philosophy at SUNY Buffalo, had founded the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) and persuaded a veritable battalion of phenomenal thinkers (Carl Sagan, B. F. Skinner, and Stephen Jay Gould among them) to join him in debunking the supernatural. Not long after, "the Amazing Randi" -- James Randi, the American conjuror -- disrupted an experiment in psychokinesis at the McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research in St. Louis by planting two professional magicians among the other (honest) subjects; Randi's claims to have discredited psi were somewhat exaggerated (the experiment never got beyond the initial exploratory stages), but his antics won him a MacArthur "genius" award and left parapsychologists with egg on their faces. The days were over when simple card-guessing experiments, or randomly generated tests such as flourished for years at Dr. J. B. Rhine's parapsychology lab at Duke University, were enough to convince anyone of the reality of ESP. Arthur Ellison remembers that the case against the adoption of the Koestler Chair at City University was argued by "a young behaviorist" in the psychology department. Ellison is unhesitating in his condemnation of the "intolerance" he perceives among distinguished scientists.

"They're as prejudiced as anyone else," he insists. "What possible objection could there be to an objective, scientific investigation of unexplained phenomena? On the contrary, universities ought to be looking into these things." No less a personage than Charles, Prince of Wales, felt exactly the same way, and in 1983, in his capacity as Chancellor of the University of Wales at Cardiff, the Prince lobbied actively for adoption of the Koestler grant.

"Why don't we have a go at taking up this scheme?" Charles inquired with his accustomed earnestness, in a letter to the senate at Cardiff. He was thought at the time to be conducting ouija-board seances at Kensington Palace and took a lot of flack already as "the Man Who Talks to Plants." The most strenuous encouragement of royalty, however, could not conceal the wavering spirits at Cardiff. If Koestler's executors opted rather suddenly to award the grant to Edinburgh, under John Beloff's supervision, their explanation couldn't be faulted: Edinburgh seemed like a safe place to go. Beloff is still despondent when he talks about the problems he faces in his chosen field. A hundred years after the founding of the Society for Psychical Research in London, there is no consensus among scientists about the nature, or even the existence, of psi. There is never likely to be one.

"It's always been private individuals like Koestler who've kept it going," Beloff remarks. He is retired now -- white-haired, classic-featured, almost preternaturally urbane.

"It's very difficult for government or other public organizations, spending taxpayers' money, to get into it, because they'll always have advisors around to tell them it's nonsense," Beloff says. "This has meant, of course, that parapsychologists have had a very hazardous life. The people who are in it are really very dedicated individuals. They are prepared to take great risks with their lives." I asked Beloff what the purpose was -- "Why do you bother?" -- and he answered wistfully, "To try and persuade the scientific community and the educated public that there are phenomena which are not recognized by official science, and for which we have no theoretical explanation. It's a step toward keeping people's minds open. That's the legacy of Koestler."

This is not quite the same response I got from Robert L. Morris, Koestler Professor of Parapsychology, who came to Edinburgh from Syracuse in 1986 and took up his post amid a welter of smart-aleck headlines ("Psychical Research: Ghost of Validity," "Professor's Specialty Is Out of This World," etc.). Born in Pittsburgh in 1942, married with twin daughters, Morris was one of 32 candidates for the new position. He has a Ph.D. from Duke (where he studied with J. B. Rhine) and is recognized by believers and skeptics alike as probably the most level-headed and "science"-minded parapsychologist on the face of the globe. Morris is an expert in avian social behavior, out-of-body lore, the psychic connections, if there are any, between people and machines. He is cold to what Koestler called "parapornography" (mediumship, divination, Tarot cards and the like) but is reported to keep "an open mind about God." He says that the goal of psychical research is "to understand as much as possible the full range of human communication."

"There's a whole set of experiences here that seems hard to explain completely by established means," Morris affirms. He regards himself as "over 90% persuaded" that psi phenomena are "real." He won't commit himself further. "I doubt strong statements of any sort," he says.

He is sitting at a reassuringly cluttered desk, looking just like a scientist, a taller, stronger, handsomer version of Wally Cox. The Koestler Chair forms part of the larger psychology department at Edinburgh and is housed in what used to be a girls' school in George Square, far from the wynds and closes of the Royal Mile. The Scottish capital is often called the Athens of the North; it definitely has a reputation for ghosts, but there is nothing even remotely unworldly about Dr. Morris's lab. The inside looks like any battered academy you can think of -- all landings, stairwells, notice-boards, and rest rooms. Every now and then as I wandered through the halls I passed a closed door with a sign that said, "Experiment in progress." No sounds emerged. After talking with Dr. Morris, I doubt they ever do. He speaks dryly, even-handedly, about "apparent anomalies of behavior and experience," "currently known explanatory mechanisms," "organism-environment and organism-organism information and influence flow."

"It's a research chair," Dr. Morris reminds me. One of his students (there are six at the moment, all at the postgraduate level) has completed a doctoral study of "the psychology of magic." Another is investigating the links between "prior beliefs and the observation of reality" -- that is, the ability of people to report accurately and without prejudice on their own experience. A lot of Morris's time is spent wading through the anecdotal material that floods his office, and he is especially interested, like many of his colleagues, in the possibility of fostering psychic ability. There is a notion, gaining ground, of the psi faculty as "a weak signal," either constantly or intermittently present in human affairs, but unable normally to filter through the noise -- the "exteroceptive stimulation," as Dr. Morris calls it, giving me as well a departmental hand-out with some mind-bending examples of what psi is up against: "Somatic and muscular activity; excessive autonomic activity; excessive analytical activity; excessive general mental activity; excessive egocentric striving; and interference by target-irrelevant imagery and mentation." The lack of psychic ability, in this arduous scenario, could even be regarded as an evolutionary protective mechanism.

"Certainly you don't need to know what's going on in the minds of all your friends in New York City," Dr. Morris observes. The Koestler lab is interested in finding out what happens in the brain of a person who's "really tuned in."

"If I sit you down at a computer and ask you to try to direct targets with your mind," Morris asks, "what's going on? What do you do when you do that?" He wants to know about "volitional competence," about will power, about "people who are good at wishing for things." He speaks about personality types: "the passive, laid-back one who doesn't care very much, who won't get excited," and the others, not unknown to ordinary psychology, "who just want all day long." The Koestler lab conducts training sessions in free-response ESP (the cards and dice of J. B. Rhine were long ago replaced by computer generators) along with courses in "relaxation enhancement," visual imagery, and "focusing techniques" (a term Morris much prefers to "meditation," with its suggestion of mysticism and religion). As far as psi is concerned, Morris cites the challenge of maintaining methodological rigor and still designing a study that has "ecological validity" -- a study, in other words, that bears some relation to events as they might normally take place in the outside world. This is one of the central problems of psychical research: how to recreate in the lab anything resembling the conditions under which a so-called psychic event might really occur.

"It's like asking somebody to come in and be charming," says Morris. "How do you study it? How do you pin it down?" In The Roots of Coincidence, Koestler compared the problem to getting an erection "in the presence of skeptical observers." Morris laughs when I mention it.

"It's complicated," he agrees. "A lot of the criticism that comes our way is methodological. A lot of it has to do with the problem of replicability. If there is something going on here, it's obviously hard to get, or we would have gotten it a long time ago." He has spent the better part of five years just trying to eliminate the possibilities for fraud. One project under his supervision, still in the incubation stage, is concerned with "the mode and content of discourse between psychic and client."

"You mean a professional psychic?" I ask, and Morris says he does.

"The most common area of fraud is undoubtedly to be found between client and reader, and not, as you might imagine, in the performance of the more flamboyant magicians." It is the experience of the overwhelming majority of parapsychologists that anyone who brings a psychic talent to public notice is going to cheat sooner or later; Morris defends what seems like a preoccupation with the technique of hoax on the grounds that this one fact has been sufficient to discredit psychical research more or less forever in the eyes of established science. He adds for the record that the Koestler lab has excellent relations with "the magic community."

"You need a good rapport with the people you're working with," he argues. "If one of the main tasks of your work is to try to rule out all known means of deception, each and every alternative explanation, it's going to be hard. You're up against a lot." The Koestler lab is extremely wary of "media-attractive people" and has a fixed policy of never employing them in experiments; Dr. Morris, according to Dr. Beloff, "is prepared to settle for the slow grind and modest results." Beloff himself has a taste for "the exceptionals," and, you can tell, he wouldn't mind seeing a few of them in the seat.

"There's rather a dearth of gifted subjects right now," Beloff informs me. It's almost an apology. He is at work on a history of parapsychology and is "more and more convinced," after a lifetime of study, that there are examples of psi which are "absolutely conclusive."

"At the present time, the only place where there seems to be anything really strong happening is mainland China," Beloff says. "I get letters and reports. There are absolutely unbelievable things happening there by western standards. Either they're deluding themselves in a spectacular way, or there's something really extraordinary going on." Beloff's research persuades him that psychic ability is best observed not on the J. B. Rhine model -- that is to say, through random and repeated sampling of subjects in the lab -- but precisely in those people with "powerful gifts" who are also the most difficult, and frequently the most dubious, to work with. Brian Inglis, a co-founder with Koestler of the K.I.B. Foundation -- "K" for Koestler, "I" for Inglis, and "B" for Instone Bloomfield, the City banker and committed Spiritualist who initially funded the project -- told me that parapsychology has gone "way off the track" in its yearning to be accepted by the scientific establishment. Skepticism had been allowed to dictate policy rather than criticize it.

"It's only recently that people within the study of parapsychology have begun to conclude that the scientific approach isn't working," Inglis protested at our last conversation. "Not for the reasons the scientists give. It's just becoming more and more obvious that psi doesn't operate according to the laws of science. It's not within the scientific canon." After Koestler's death, the K.I.B. Foundation was renamed directly in his honor, and it functions now, independently of the lab at Edinburgh, as a research center and clearinghouse for ideas that lie "just outside the boundaries of orthodox science": holism, psychic healing, UFOs -- all the things Dr. Morris can't touch for various reasons. Ruth West, Koestler's protegee and the Koestler Foundation's director in London ("We're the radicals," she says) agrees with Brian Inglis that too much science is bad for psi.

"Scientists are really going to have to think again when they talk about the nature of reality," West affirms. She is nicely dressed, fortyish, handsome and vivacious, with red-brown hair she clips in the back and keeps in a small tail.

"Science is wedded to the notion that the only reality is physical reality," says West. "In the face of psychic or paranormal phenomena, they can say just one of two things. They can say the phenomena don't really exist, which is the most common explanation; or they can say the phenomena are, or will be, ultimately explainable in physical terms. They can't get it through their heads that the reality of psychic phenomena may be other than that." West is proud to report that she found a metal-bender a while back who's "better than Geller."

"He's a healer, too," she proclaims. "He produces oil on his palms when he heals. He has the ability to appear transparent to certain people." She whoops in delight when she thinks about it.

*

The day I talked to Ruth West she was dressed to have lunch with the Princess of Wales. Diana is honorary chairman of the CORE Trust, a registered charity that deals with addiction treatment "in a holistic context." West wants me to know that the interests of the Koestler Foundation (as distinct from the Koestler lab at Edinburgh) range far beyond the bounds of the paranormal.

"Corn circles," she says -- "that's my thing." She is talking about the huge, perfectly formed indentations that have appeared inexplicably in wheat fields around England.

"Scratch even the most psychic-minded people and you'll find the same old materialists underneath," West complains. "They keep trying to explain how UFOs `come down to earth' and `form' the corn circles, instead of thinking that it may have to do with a completely different kind of energy, a different way of affecting the environment. People need to think differently," she repeats. The explanations of science are never more than material descriptions: "They don't actually tell us how objects move on their own, how statues weep, or people read minds, or levitate, or bend metal, or dematerialize." West admits that her work is often frustrating, and she wonders if one day she won't just say to herself, "Oh, hang it up. There are other problems that need looking at."

One of them, at the moment, is AIDS. The Koestler Foundation has been working closely with the Immune Development Trust, a non-profit organization concerned with holism and alternative medicine. Over the past year, the Immune Development Trust has opened six clinics to provide alternative care and education on holistic therapies for people with immune disorders, mainly (but not limited to) AIDS. They provide training sessions and support in London hospitals. They are keen on "aromatherapy." They hope to get Princess Diana involved in their scheme.

"It's all right for Diana to be seen to favor alternative medicine," West confides. "She's young, she's with it -- she's a `fresher' member of the royal family. But Charles has had to back away. He's learned the hard way that he can't afford to endorse what might be called a `leftist' approach to the meaning of life." Since Koestler's money all went to Edinburgh, and Instone Bloomfield, whom West describes as "our shy retiring banker," died a few years ago, the Foundation relies for its support entirely on private contributions. West herself has been director since 1980. She read Koestler in school, and was impressed by his attack on materialist and reductionist values.

"I lived in his basement flat," she recalls, "trying to teach people how to levitate. Arthur really twinkled when he talked about that. Whenever I get the opportunity I try to persuade people around the Dalai Lama to help us get to Lhasa, where the strongest and most convincing reports regarding levitation are coming from." Tibet is "the kind of place you would find levitators, anyway," West thinks, "in their natural environment, so to speak." It's a place that still has some tradition of "thinking differently," although Koestler himself rejected the East (and specifically the path of Eastern mysticism) as a panacea for anything.

"Western thought cannot return to a pre-conceptualized state," he warned, "a vertebrate cannot evolve into an invertebrate." Having spurned the lure of dogmatic thinking, in science, life and art, he refused to chase warm fuzzies in its stead. He dropped acid once with Timothy Leary, and rejected that as a solution, too.

"I had what is called a very bad trip," Koestler explained. "A trip can be frightening or gratifying, but in either case, it is a confidence trick played on one's own nervous system."

His estate, through royalties and investments, still generates something like forty thousand pounds a year, which is fed directly to the lab at Edinburgh. A full-length biography is due this year (commissioned from Cornell's Michael Scammell, the biographer of Solzhenitsyn) and "masses" of Koestler's books, as Harold Harris tells me, are now being published in Eastern Europe. The God That Failed is a particular favorite in what used to be the communist bloc; parts of The Sleepwalkers have recently reappeared as a straightforward biography of Johannes Kepler, while Darkness at Noon and The Roots of Coincidence are always in print. They sell thousands of copies a year around the world.

"I wish he could be here now to see what's happening," Pat Kavanagh says, "to see his work rehabilitated in places we never expected." Kavanagh has a reputation as the toughest literary agent in London, but there's love in her voice when she talks about Koestler: "To see Darkness at Noon published in places where it was banned before, and where Koestler himself stood under sentence of death . ..." Her voice trails off: "It's wonderful. He was a truly, truly marvelous man." Neither Kavanagh nor Harold Harris will admit to any interest in the paranormal, but they both like to think that Koestler would approve of the way they've handled his estate. Edinburgh's Dr. Morris was invited recently to address the British Psychological Society convention in Bournemouth, a sign that the Koestler Chair of Parapsychology, in Morris's words, isn't being "tittered at."

"It's really the dressing on the salad, isn't it," Morris remarks, "rather than the lettuce." He sometimes wishes that Koestler had spelled out more specifically the direction the Chair should take, and he thinks that part of his job now is "to establish guidelines" for his successor.

"Are you thinking of leaving?" I ask.

"No, but as they say in Edinburgh, you can disappear under the bus at any time." He is learning to operate -- as Koestler predicted, as all of us do -- "in a universe of non-causal interactions, a fuzzy world of wavering contours, replete with little bubbles of indeterminacy."

"Does there come a point when one has to stop doubting?" Koestler was asked. It was the last interview he gave.

"Yes, death," he said. "But not until.”

The maid found the bodies in the upstairs sitting-room when she got to work at the house in Montpelier Square, on the morning of March 3, 1983 -- the writer Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon and thirty other volumes of fiction, polemic, inquiry and reportage; and his wife, Cynthia, both of them slumped in comfortable chairs, both of them dead from massive doses of whiskey and Tuinol. "Please do not go upstairs," a note on the front door warned, but there were "no suspicious circumstances," according to police, and no sign of injuries on the day-old corpses: "It was a scene of calmness." The curtains had been drawn to screen the light of an early London spring. Two wine glasses sat on a coffee table next to a jar of honey and a note, dated the previous June and addressed "To Whom It May Concern."

"The purpose of this note is to make it unmistakably clear that I intend to commit suicide by taking an overdose of drugs without the knowledge or aid of any other person," Koestler had written. "The drugs have been legally obtained and hoarded over a considerable period." Why Koestler had waited eight months to put his plan into action was a matter of conjecture, but to anyone who knew him his death was no surprise. For years he had suffered from Parkinson's disease, and, more recently, from a particularly debilitating form of leukemia. He was "very ill," according to Pat Kavanagh, his agent at Peters, Fraser and Dunlop in London, "and I should think he found it intolerable." In the last interview of his life, at the age of 77, Koestler remarked that he meant to die "in harness."

"No one who knew him anticipated that he would quietly submit to the final removal of his physical and mental faculties," said Harold Harris, Koestler's literary executor and probably his closest friend in the months before his death. "Indeed, on the last occasion on which I saw him I felt that he might have left it too late. He was unable to stand, his speech was disjointed, and he clearly found it difficult to concentrate on what was being said to him." At no time had Koestler made any secret of his feelings when it came to the right to die. In 1981, in his capacity as Vice-president of "EXIT," Britain's Voluntary Euthanasia Society, he penned a witty and characteristically provocative introduction to the Society's Guide to Self-Deliverance.

"We tend to be guided by first impressions," Koestler observed. "An unknown country" -- death -- "to which the only access leads through a torture chamber is frightening. And vice versa, the prospect of falling peacefully, blissfully asleep is not only soothing but can make it positively desirable to quit this pain-racked mortal frame and become unborn again. For after all, reason tells us -- when not choked by panic -- that before we were born we were all dead, and that our post-mortem condition is no more frightening than the pre-natal twilight. Only the process of getting un-born makes cowards of us all."

It was typical of Koestler that his thoughts on the nature of death and dying were advanced as lectures in science. He had trained as a scientist in Vienna in the early 1920s, and science, to the end, remained his deep and truest passion.

"Animals in the wild," he went on, "unless killed by a predator, seem to die peacefully and without fuss, from old age -- I cannot remember a single description to the contrary by a naturalist, ethologist or explorer. The conclusion is inescapable: we need midwives to aid us to be unborn -- or at least the assurance that such aid is available. Euthanasia, like obstetrics, is the natural corrective to a biological handicap."

But what about Cynthia, Koestler's wife -- 55 years old when she died at his side, free of illness and unracked by pain, presumably, of any but the psychic variety. "It is to her that I owe the relative peace and happiness that I enjoyed in the last period of my life," Koestler had said in his suicide note, "and never before." They had been at work on a joint autobiography, a His-and-Hers account of Koestler's post-Darkness career, and in a typed addendum to her husband's farewell, Cynthia regretted that the book would not be completed.

"I should have liked to finish my account of working for Arthur," she wrote with a terseness and self-effacement that were typical of her character, "a story which began when our paths happened to cross in 1949. However, I cannot live without Arthur, despite certain inner resources." In the shock of discovery, word spread that Cynthia, too, had been mortally ill, but there is no evidence to support it. There was no reason at all to doubt her word: she couldn't live if Koestler died. On the Monday morning of their last week on earth she took their dog, David, a much-loved Lhasa Apso, to the vet's to have him put down. Her husband needed all of her care, she explained; she had no time for the dog. Harold Harris thinks Cynthia probably did not make up her mind to kill herself until "late in the day." He rejects the idea -- all their friends do -- that the Koestlers died in a suicide "pact."

"We were amazed," says Harris. "I'd always imagined Cynthia getting rid of the house in Montpelier Square and being happy in the country with the garden and the dogs." Pat Kavanagh, who, with her husband, the writer Julian Barnes, spent peaceful days with the Koestlers at Denston, their country place in Sussex, agrees that any pact they may have had was concluded at the last moment, "when it was just a question of exactly when, and exactly how."

"I am absolutely sure that Arthur didn't want her to die," says Kavanagh, "that he wanted her to stick around and look after his intellectual legacy, at least. But she wasn't having it. She'd been through it before, and she'd been left with a rather thin existence. She just wasn't having it." In 1937 Cynthia's father, an Irish surgeon who had emigrated to South Africa, where Cynthia was born, slashed his wrists "during a storm." His daughter was 10. She was quoted as saying once that her father's death was "like the end of the world," and indeed, after the Koestlers' suicide, much was made of the difference in their ages. All their friends were troubled by what Julian Barnes calls "the unmentionable, half-spoken question" of Koestler's responsibility for Cynthia's actions.

"Did he bully her into it?" asks Barnes. And "if he didn't bully her into it, why didn't he bully her out of it?" Because, with hindsight, the evidence that Cynthia's life had been ebbing with her husband's was all too apparent.

"She was very helpful to me as an aspirant gardener," Pat Kavanagh offers by way of example. "And people who are gardeners, I find, remain gardeners forever. It's in you. And I was sort of surprised, about six months before they died, when she said something that implied she'd lost interest in it. `Oh,' she said, `I don't care about it if Arthur's not going to be here to enjoy it.' And one wanted to kick oneself afterward. It was such an obvious sign of ... what? ... her letting go, I suppose."

Not that a disproportionate concern for Arthur on Cynthia's part would have struck her friends, in itself, as evidence of something amiss. Koestler called her "Slavey" (when he wasn't calling her "Angel"), and journalists who passed through London to interview the Great Man were bewildered, to say the least, when he sometimes stopped the conversation in mid-sentence and began to wail in a ludicrous, drawn-out falsetto: "Hoo-ooo-oo! Hoo-oo-ooooo!" This was Cynthia's summons to appear. Neither she nor her husband found anything peculiar, much less demeaning, about the paging system. The phone might even be ringing in Koestler's ear; rather than answer it, he would yodel for his wife, and she would materialize in the doorway. She seemed to spend her life permanently on tiptoe.

"Telephone, angel," Koestler would say.

She was "a shy, nervous, birdlike" woman, in Julian Barnes's recollection, "capable of seeming in the same day both twenty-five and fifty-five. She moved awkwardly, like an adolescent unhappy with her body, who expects at any moment to knock over a coffee table and be sent to her room for doing so." The Koestlers had met in Paris after the war, when Arthur was living with Mamaine Paget, the second of his three wives. Cynthia, at 22, had answered an ad in the Herald Tribune calling for secretarial help, and later explained the evaporation of her autonomous existence with the guileless remark that "it had long been my ambition to work for a writer." For sixteen years until he married her, before and after his divorce from Mamaine, in and out of her own love affairs and travels and jobs and disappointments, Cynthia served as Koestler's secretary, lover, procurer, cook and only hope of equilibrium.

"Cynthia," Koestler wrote in his diary one day, " -- toujours là." She took his name for social purposes before she won his hand in marriage, though to the end of her life, in a true indication of her view of herself, she signed official correspondence with her maiden name: "Cynthia Jefferies, Secretary to Arthur Koestler." She lived in terror of being "dropped from his lists" and considered suicide at least once, in 1952, when it looked as though Koestler might be tiring of her. She saw him through all the ups and downs of writing books; nursed him through illness; stood by him in feuds; and while it clearly pained her that her husband suffered from a "persistent and well-nigh pathological streak of promiscuity" -- these are Koestler's own words -- she tolerated his love affairs and his incessant cruising with a grace that passes comprehension. Cynthia was friendly, indeed, with most of Koestler's mistresses. She was the modern feminist's nightmare, though as with her suicide, so with her character: the surface was deceptive, the pop psychology is way too easy.

"She was absolutely vital to Arthur's life," says Ruth West, a protegee of the Koestlers who, for a while, lived in the basement flat of their house in Montpelier Square. "He adored her. And that was that. She had a sort of female thing that she'd worked out in the interest of her own fulfillment. It was a revealed dedication -- a way of finding and realizing herself. And without him, she had no purpose in living. They were vital to each other." West is still bothered by gossip about the Koestlers, and joins a large number of their friends in defending Cynthia's life as "a kind of a mission," a step up from secretarial work, surely, even a contribution to literature.

"I should say that her life was actually elevated by her association with Koestler," Jane Gunther observes with an almost forgotten social refinement, and notwithstanding the predictable shrieks of the "Hers"-column feminists (notably Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, who ranted in Mademoiselle after Cynthia's death that Koestler had made her his "creature" -- "I think it's fair to say he killed her"). Even imagining that the Koestlers' union was the ultimate co-dependent trip, we're stuck with the fact that Cynthia liked it that way, and that she was spared the "acute or chronic misère en deux" Koestler had long seen at work in the lives of his friends: "Their marriages were like parcels that had burst open in the mail van, and were precariously held together by bits of string." Cynthia might have been happy to know (inasmuch as her action furthered one of Koestler's causes) that her much-publicized decision to end her life resulted in a significant rise in the rate of inquiries and membership applications at EXIT, the Voluntary Euthanasia Society in London.

"In fact," wrote Mary Stott, the Society's chairman, in her 1983 annual report, "we have had almost twice as many new members this year as last." Mrs. Stott was one of the speakers at the Koestlers' memorial service at Burlington House in April 1983.

"It is not `requiescat in pace' that one wants to say to Arthur and Cynthia Koestler," she concluded, in a line that would have done the Koestlers proud, "but `Greetings, comrade voyagers among the stars.'" In his introduction to the Euthanasia Society's advisory pamphlet (it has since been withdrawn in England for legal reasons) Koestler made the distinction between the fear of death and the fear of dying; now, in his suicide note, read out to the crowd at Burlington House, he wanted his friends to know that he was leaving "in a peaceful frame of mind, with some timid hopes for a depersonalized after-life beyond due confines of space, time and matter and beyond the limits of our comprehension. This `oceanic feeling' has often sustained me at difficult moments, and does so now, while I am writing this."

*

If the suicides were a shock, if Cynthia's death had to be counted a grisly pre-feminist tragedy, the terms of her husband's will and testament left 'em laughing in the aisles, for Koestler (the genius of Darkness at Noon, scourge of Stalin, lion of anti-communism and self-appointed gadfly of Europe's postwar intellectual elite) left all of his money to "psychical research" -- "the scientific study of paranormal phenomena," as he carefully spelled it out, "in particular the capacity attributed to some individuals to interact with the external environment by means other than the recognized sensory or motor channels." In parapsychology this capacity, for lack of a better name, is called "psi" (after the 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet and the symbol for the unknown). Psi is the term the experts use when they want to speak generally, without imputation, about telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, ESP -- those "preposterous subjects" that occupied the final years of Koestler's working life and made him, finally, a "reluctant convert" to the reality of the paranormal.

"He was very, very good about taking up things and, when he'd got to the bottom of them, letting them go," Pat Kavanagh reflects. As Koestler's literary agent, Kavanagh had reason to keep up with her client's eclectic pursuits.

"People offered him huge sums of money to keep writing about things he'd done so well before -- books about biology, capital punishment, anti-communism, and so on. But when he was done, he was done. I mean, he retained an interest in everything generally. But his mind was always searching down a new path." Koestler was "a prince among journalists," in Bernard Crick's opinion, "a cosmic reporter ... one of the greatest intellectual popularizers of our time." Anthony Burgess credits him with having "virtually invented" the political novel through Darkness at Noon, his earth-shattering account of the Stalinist purges, probably the finest portrait ever painted of the Bolshevik mind.

"His gift to English literature was a horse's-mouth authenticity that no one would dream of looking into," Burgess has written. Koestler himself, for all that Darkness at Noon changed the intellectual outlook of a whole generation and simultaneously made him famous, very much resented being chained to the book. He would go to his grave, he complained, as a People item in the news magazines: "Arthur (`Darkness at Noon') Koestler."

He was born in Budapest in 1905, the only child of an ill-matched, stressed-out couple he described as "typical Central European Jewish middle middle." An unhappy childhood, Koestler observed -- "and mine was a very unhappy one" -- was a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for a life of creativity. Obsessive by nature, emphatic by temperament, hard-drinking and prone to fits of "depression rock-bottom," in 1931 he was propelled into the ranks of the German Communist Party by the rise of the Nazis and by a profound distrust (which he never abandoned) of "exacerbated capitalism," American-style: Koestler spent seven years, rough-and-tumble, in the service of Stalin.

"I became converted because I was ripe for it and lived in a disintegrating society thirsting for faith," he wrote in The God That Failed, his splendid contribution to the history of the Pink Decade. "To say that one had `seen the light' is a poor description of the mental rapture which only the convert knows. ... The new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke. There is now an answer to every question, doubts and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past -- a past already remote, when one had lived in dismal ignorance in the tasteless, colorless world of those who don't know." But life, from the outset, had a way of throwing curves at Arthur: the cosmos failed to conform to the utopian dialectic.

He had his first experience with the psi-effect as a boy in Vienna, around 1915, when a can of beans blew up behind him for no apparent reason and knocked him unconscious to the floor. "The elaborately far-fetched nature" of this event earned Koestler a reputation for "awe-inspiring potentialities" among his parents' friends, and in the fading age of Spiritualism he was in great demand as a table-lifter and amateur clairvoyant. During the communist years, of course, his duty to the Party effectively put the kibosh on any curiosity he might have had about the metaphysical dimensions of the Other World, but he was already collecting and even soliciting "authentic reports on occult experiences -- telepathy, clairvoyance, levitation, etc.," in his capacity as science editor for the House of Ullstein in Berlin. An early attempt at suicide in 1934 -- Koestler was despondent about his writing career and unconsciously antipathetic to Stalin -- failed spectacularly when a book, a Soviet account of the Reichstag Trial, toppled from a shelf and crashed on his head just as he prepared to enter eternity. Was it coincidence? Koestler wondered, or just "a case of the Dialectic producing a miracle?" He was never able to write about his encounters with the paranormal without lapsing into a diffident, self-mocking tone. His good friend Brian Inglis, onetime editor of The Spectator and himself the author of numerous books on psychical research, thinks that Koestler was "embarrassed" by psychic phenomena and that he preferred to confine his studies, wherever possible, to the experience of other people.

"He wanted it to be scientific," Inglis explains. "His goal was simply to establish parapsychology as a scientific discipline." Despite spooky-silly stories at the time of his death, and more concerted efforts since then to downplay the importance of his work (Martin Gardner, the American science writer and professional skeptic, describes Koestler unscientifically as an "active promoter of the paranormal"), his interest in psychical research, like his interest in everything else, was sober-minded to a fault -- hard-headed, relentless, typically acute.

"I am still skeptical," Koestler declared in a television interview in 1966. "I know from personal experience, intuition, whatever you call it, I know that these phenomena do exist; at the same time my rational mind -- my scientific mind, if you want -- rejects them. ... I wouldn't accept ESP if my nose hadn't been pushed into it, you see what I mean?" During the Spanish Civil War, as a correspondent for leftist newspapers, Koestler had been captured by the forces of General Franco and sentenced to death as a spy. He sat in jail in Seville for nearly a hundred days, in total isolation, listening to the sobs and screams of his fellow prisoners as they were led away to be shot, not knowing from one minute to the next when his own time would come or what his reaction would be when it did.

"The lesson taught by this kind of experience, when put into words, always appears under the dowdy guise of perennial commonplaces," he wrote in The God That Failed: "That man is a reality, mankind an abstraction; that men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic; ... that the end justifies the means only within very narrow limits; that ethics is not a function of social utility, and charity not a petty-bourgeois sentiment but the gravitational force which keeps civilization in its orbit." To protect his own sanity, the imprisoned Koestler took to scribbling mathematical formulae on the walls of his cell, and shortly worked out for himself the Euclidean proof that the number of primes is infinite. Numbers were real, Koestler discovered (like Helen Keller at the water-well). They were pre-existing, "already there" -- they did not depend on anyone's ideas about them. It was "an absolute catharsis," proof, for Koestler, "that a higher order of reality existed and that it alone invested existence with meaning." He called it "the reality of the third order" (after the first, which was physical, and the second, conceptual), and believed it held the key to the riddle of the universe:

It contained `occult' phenomena which could not be apprehended or explained either on the sensory or on the conceptual level, and yet occasionally invaded them like spiritual meteors piercing the primitive's vaulted sky. ... It was a text written in invisible ink; and though one could not read it, the knowledge that it existed was sufficient to alter the texture of one's existence, and make one's actions conform to the text.

Koestler resigned his membership in the Communist Party in 1938, at the height of the purges and the Moscow show trials. Rescued from Franco in a trade of prisoners, he went to Paris, and, later, to London, where Darkness at Noon was published in 1940 to a thundering success. As anti-communist man-of-the-minute, the cantankerous darling of the postwar Right, Koestler worked with George Orwell in the League for the Rights of Man, helped found the Congress of Cultural Freedom in Berlin, lectured at Carnegie Hall, and probably did more than anyone else to ensure the success, during the 1950s, of the campaign to abolish capital punishment in England. But in 1954, after the publication of the first two volumes of his autobiography, his divorce from Mamaine Paget and his settling down with Cynthia, he abruptly swore off political writing in favor of an ongoing critique of science and psychology and their joint relation to the "glory and predicament" of man.

"The errors are atoned for," Koestler proclaimed, "the bitter passion has burnt itself out; Cassandra has gone hoarse, and is due for a vocational change." What looked on the surface to be a complete and untenable switch of direction -- from "politics" to "science" -- was, in reality, only a shift of gears, a step upward, really, on the evolutionary scale of moral thinking.

"We have heard a whole chorus of Nobel laureates assert that matter is merely energy in disguise," Koestler protested, "that causality is dead, determinism is dead. If that is so, they should be given a public funeral in the olive groves of Academe, with a requiem of electronic music. ... Modern physics has destroyed materialism. Matter evaporates, it runs through the fingers like sand. We have holes in space into which matter vanishes. We have a particle, the tachyon, which appears to travel backwards in time for a brief moment. It's an Alice-in-Wonderland universe."

Insight and Outlook (1947) was Koestler's initial foray into the wilderness of psychology and the creative impulse, an adventure that led him, over the rest of his working life, through studies of the history of cosmology (in The Sleepwalkers), Eastern philosophy (The Lotus and the Robot), the interconnectedness of science and art (The Act of Creation), and the invigorating theory of the Holon (Beyond Reductionism, The Ghost in the Machine). Two of his last four books dealt directly with paranormal investigation, while in Janus: A Summing Up (1978) he put the finishing touches on a career-defining analysis of "the rationalist illusion" -- the idea that the human brain, on its own steam, assisted by nothing but technology of its own devising, could solve the riddle of its own existence and give meaning to human endeavor.

"You know," said Koestler, "if you keep telling man that he is nothing but an overgrown rat, he will start growing whiskers and bite your finger." Where once he had appeared as the unrelenting bête noire of totalitarian ideology, he now emerged as a sort of Humanist Avenger, the diehard champion of scientific method but implacable enemy of "scientism," behaviorism, "ratomorphism," "nothing-but-ism," "the crude reductionist maxim that what cannot be explained cannot exist." More and more as he grew older Koestler turned to radical formulations for his answers -- the philosopher Stephen Toulmin describes his contribution to the history of science as "the capacity (one might say) to put 2 and 1 together and get vingt-et-un" -- but when, in The Roots of Coincidence, he came out squarely in favor of the reality of ESP, he stepped into a critical hornet's nest more furiously hostile than any he had encountered before.

"Even close friends and admirers found the resulting brew of psychosomatic inference, mystic biology and murky parlor-tricks hard to swallow," said George Steiner in a tribute to Koestler after his death. "His public stance cut him off from all but an eccentric handful in the very community which he most prized: that of the working scientists, of the Fellows of the Royal Academy whose respect, if not agreement, he ached for." Koestler had dedicated The Roots of Coincidence to Rosalind Heywood, "catalyst-in-chief," one of Britain's psychic grandes dames, former president of the Society for Psychical Research and a particular friend of his own. Normally he had no use for professional or even affectional "psychics." Gossip was common at the S. P. R., and too much attention was paid there for Koestler's taste to the issue of "survival" -- life after death. He was, above all, never goofy about the afterworld. In 1976 Arnold Toynbee persuaded Koestler to give his thoughts on survival in a collection of afterlife essays, and he wrote rather torturously about "de-individualization" at the moment of death, a "merging into the cosmic consciousness -- the island vanishing below the surface to join the sunken continent -- or Athman joining Brahman -- whichever image you choose."

Had they known that Koestler was also conducting experiments in levitation in the basement of his house (he called it "Project Daedalus," and bought a second-hand weighing machine from a London railway station to see if his friends couldn't "think themselves, or abstract themselves," into shedding a few pounds), scientists in Britain might have proved even more recalcitrant than they did when he died and left his estate to psi research. Under the terms of his last will, and with Cynthia's income to bolster the fund, close to a million dollars was set aside to establish a Koestler Chair in Parapsychology, the first of its kind, at a university in Great Britain.

At the Hôtel de Paris, Monte Carlo

I need some redeeming here. This story is too down, too sorry and shameful. And the main character is always alone, I notice, always by himself. Where is everybody? God knows there were plenty of people around. I had good, close friends, lovers, confidants. But as the plague went on I fell aside, shutting down almost without noticing, unable to communicate through the swell of fear that came over me each day and the darkening paths I took to assuage it.

I lost my first sobriety – eleven years without a drink – in 1993, after I had my appendix out in New York and gladly accepted painkillers for an incision that didn’t hurt. I stayed at St. Luke’s for at least three days, a luxury unimaginable now for an operation so ordinary, and was given Demerol every night. The nurses had a list of patients who were eligible for opiate relief and on the last night of my stay I asked if I was still on it. “Yes,” came the answer and out I went. No pain, pure bliss. Then, when I left the hospital, I went looking for more. I remember not caring what kind of drugs I would find on the street: uppers, downers, it didn’t matter. At an East Side bathhouse – they continued to operate throughout the AIDS pandemic and were filled to the rafters whenever I went – I took cocaine and set off on the road to total breakdown, the road, thankfully, that brought me to my knees.

More shame: to be so frightened of dying when so many around me already were. So many were going through it while I stood wobbling on the edge of the crater, neither in nor out. My best friend from childhood, now stricken with AIDS dementia, called me often, asking where he had put his shoes, his keys, his piano, often just leaving incoherent messages on my answering machine. Sometimes he forgot to hang up the phone and I would come home to hour-long recordings, hearing him talk to himself as he puttered around his apartment; his shoes might be in the refrigerator. I’ve said many times that the reason I didn’t succumb is because I couldn’t. I was unqualified for it, unequipped. There had been a mistake. I refused.

How insulting must that sound to anyone who lost friends and family in the AIDS mortality. And yet somehow I still believe it, deep down. I survived by refusing to go. I took no part at first in the protests and activism, never joined ACT-UP, never bothered with the show-off queens screaming about “murder” at the hands of the medical establishment. Medical science was moving as fast as it could and I knew that. My doctors were exemplary. Only after my crash in 1994, when I had nearly perished from pneumonia, did I step up to the plate, as it were, joining the fight for medicines and justice, speaking at rallies and in newspapers and confronting also, by opening up, an interior rage that left me as rude and obnoxious as any Larry Kramer or bucket of blood tossed on a congressman’s desk.

But that’s how it was with me – I lived outside the frame. To say I’m not a joiner is putting it cutely. I’d had the same problem always with what was then simply called the gay community. I blanked on its most familiar presentations: all that dancing, the disco, the drag shows, the constant changing of clothes and long sessions at the mirror, the whole gaudy business of preening and fluffing and hissing and jerking around – God how I loathed it! Intermittently I did try to fit in, to embrace the trivialities, which led finally to one of my unhappier published lines: “I’m only in it for the sex.” I was too gay for the straight ones, I said, too straight for the gay ones. At the advent of the trans craze a pack of lesbians labeled me a “bad queer” because I thought the ideology, never mind the science, was mostly horseshit, deconstructionist balderdash, but by then my reputation didn’t matter. I was aging and out of the scene.

And then, of course, the quiet descended, when effective treatments came along for HIV and people stopped dropping dead in their tracks; when the burden of the pandemic shifted away from homosexual men and fell on the shoulders of the impoverished, mainly needle addicts and women of color. Then we were left to ponder our experience, to decide what it had meant, to get on with our lives as best we could. This sudden lack of urgency, the disappearance of dread, left an awful gap in many lives. I was working on Isadora, my last book, and grew attached to the medical world, which had saved me from the fate I wouldn’t accept. It would turn later into a surprise career as a simulated patient, a medical actor and instructor of students, as a way to return whatever I could – can – of dedication and compassion, of caring for the sick, surely the most fulfilling role I have played in my life.

And isn’t that what readers want, a raw retelling of desperate days that leads to some seeing of the light and a happy interpretation of past mistakes? That would take a while longer, though, if I’m honest. It would take a good while still.

*

In 1990 I became a “Monaco expert,” when I suggested to Vanity Fair that a portrait of Prince Albert, then the heir apparent, might interest its unslakable readership. In Hollywood, I had spent time with Bill Allyn, a producer who wanted the rights to American Cassandra. He had been a friend of Grace Kelly – “I was her best male friend,” he insisted – and complained now that journalists and paparazzi paid attention only to Monaco’s wayward princesses, Caroline and Stéphanie, leaving poor Albert to gather dust in some back stairwell of the pink palace in Monte Carlo. This was years before Albert was revealed to be a serious player on the hook-up scene and the father of at least two out-of-wedlock children. At that time the joke was that if you called the palace and asked to “speak to the princess” the reply would come, “Which one? Caroline, Stéphanie, or Albert?” So there was a different atmosphere.

“But he really is a solid guy,” Bill Allyn remarked. “He’s more interesting than you’d think.” So, I pitched it to VF and, somewhat to my surprise, got the green light. It would be an easy and relaxed undertaking, I thought. There was no urgency, because if anyone, anywhere, was not in the news at that time it was Albert Alexandre Louis Pierre Grimaldi, first in line to the throne of a hereditary amusement park on the French Riviera.

But suddenly, in an ugly coincidence, tragedy struck the Grimaldis’ sunshine paradise. Stefano Casiraghi, the second husband of Princess Caroline, died in a speedboat accident, a risky sport he had pursued to championship despite Caroline’s worries and pleas for his safety. And within hours of the news breaking I had a phone call from Vanity Fair: “Peter Kurth? Hold for Tina Brown.”

These words are now framed and hung over my desk: “Peter Kurth? Hold for Tina Brown.” I keep them there to remind myself of what I never want to do again. When she came on the line she said, exactly: “Can you get to Monaco tonight? I want you to tell me everything, everything about all of them. I want you inside the palace, I want you looking up their skirts and under their beds, tell me who’s sleeping with whom, who’s gay, who’s not, what’s what with them all. Can you do that?”

Now, Tina is a brilliant editor, none better, in her ruthless, soulless way, and for a brief moment, having just written for her about King Michael of Romania, I was her royalty guy. She had long wanted a Monaco story, I would learn. She wanted the Monaco story and had assigned the task to many writers over time. None of them had pleased her. She had even gone to Monaco herself, hiding behind potted plants, I was told, during a tour of the palace, in the hope of breaking away to snoop the premises unobserved. But no one yet had been able to raise the curtain on the Grimaldi family in the way she wanted it done. No one could get up those skirts.

When I got to Monaco, I couldn’t do it either. It was October and raining. The Principality was drenched in gloom – everyone who lives there calls it “the Principality” -- and right away, ensconced at the Hôtel de Paris, I felt that I was something other than an overpaid hack, sniffing seats for Tina Brown. My contacts with European royalty weren’t the kind to be exploited for gossip, even if the details Tina wanted could be obtained, which, at that moment, they could not. Four hundred reporters had converged on Monaco for Casiraghi's funeral, greatly aggravating the population in mourning. The Monégasqes were stunned, silent, moving through the small city like ghosts from a Dior runway show. Friends of the Grimaldi family slammed down phones and barked their chagrin when pressed for news. "You know as much as I do," one of them snapped when I arrived. "You've read the papers. And what a time to be asking questions!"

In fact, it’s never a good time to ask questions in Monte Carlo. No one there will talk on the record about the secrets of the Grimaldi family, knowing that if they do they’ll be booted from the territory. The reigning prince has an agreement with the French government that permits him, as an absolute monarch, to ban anyone he pleases not just from Monaco, but, if he chooses, from all four départements of the French Riviera. The principality is an industry in the exact sense. It's a theme park, a triumph of marketing, and a model of design. It's also a police state, where you can be thrown out for insulting the sovereign and his family while you walk down the street in your diamonds. I went to dinner with a man who had recently opened a business in Monte Carlo — he was from Arolo in Italy and had known the Sheeans there, Jimmy and Dinah — and he prefaced our conversation with the most extraordinary warnings, caveats I thought had gone out with the Cold War.

"When you talk," he said, glancing shiftily around the Café de Paris, "talk quietly." I was not to identify him by profession or nationality because, if I did, he would be "expelled." He was serious. "I will be out of here,” he said, snapping his fingers -- “like that!” He had no gossip about the Prince’s family anyway, explaining that "unless they're very high up" people in Monaco generally knew less about Albert, Caroline, and the others than people outside it, because it's so risky to chatter openly about their darker side. A well-known actor on the Riviera never bothered to ask for my credentials when I called for information.

"Is the story positive or negative?" he wanted to know. "Because if it's negative, I'm not saying anything."

In the meantime, Princess Caroline’s grief over the loss of her husband was visible and frankly horrendous. At Casiraghi’s funeral, she was choking on her sobs, dismaying even hard-core reporters and photographers with the depth of her feeling. She sat buttressed by her father, Prince Rainier, who hugged and propped her up, much as she had supported him at the funeral of Princess Grace in 1982 – “eight years ago,” as I kept hearing. “It’s just like eight years ago.”

It wasn’t, though, quite. Four times as many reporters had swarmed over Monaco when Grace Kelly died. She was the star of the enterprise, irreplaceable by any measurement, the woman who "put Monaco on the map" and elevated the Grimaldi family from their original status as Mafia-connected, Mediterranean pirates. It was well understood in aristocratic circles that when Prince Rainier married Grace, daughter of a Philadelphia bricklayer, the Grimaldis married up. Friends remember how "sweet" she was before her marriage, how lovely and "enchanting," and how "royal" she became over time. Today, her grave is the major tourist attraction in Monaco after the palace and the casino, which pretty much sums up her role in history. And just as the true details of her death in a car accident in 1982 have been carefully hidden and guarded, no information about her children’s intimate lives was on offer eight years later, as Caroline battled a complete collapse. Even Princess Stéphanie, “Wild Child of Europe” and normally the one to make waves with her antics, had been stunned into silence. To think of intruding on their obvious sorrow struck me as a violation of decency, even if it were possible to achieve, which, I repeat, it was not. I wrote:

I went to Le Texan, the Riviera's answer to "Cheers," where visiting celebrities and ordinary tourists mix with die-hard regulars in an atmosphere of perfectly recreated American bonhomie. The Texan is the place to go in Monaco if you're chic but not stuffy, and if you're looking for a place to eat dinner for less than two hundred dollars. Michael Douglas is a client, and Boris Becker, and members of the Prince's family, who are confident enough to appear without reservations. ("What was the name again?" the staff will joke.) The Texan is famous not just for its Margaritas ("the best on the Cote D'Azur") but for its affectionate, fun-loving, gather-ye-rosebuds atmosphere. It's the casual extension, the blue-jeans version, of the larger Monaco experience: fashionable, predictable, dependable, and -- because it's really just a Tex-Mex joint -- incongruous.

"You've come to Monaco at a sad time," said Kate Taylor, who runs the Texan with her brother, Mike Powers. Kate is a beautiful woman, glowing, blonde, who greeted me, an unknown, with all the friendliness I had been told to expect. She kept apologizing for "the slow night," though when I looked around, I saw that every table was filled. "Normally the place is hopping," said Kate, "but with this -- "

Her voice trailed off as she waved her hand loosely "up there," in the direction of the palace. It doesn't take long in Monaco to find that all life, all activity, all thought of past and future is divided into two: "Up There" and "Down Here." "They" are the Prince's family. "We" are the rest of the world. "They," even among expatriates from Houston, are "our" sovereign family. Kate bit her lip when she thought about Casiraghi.

"Well," she said at last, "it was what he wanted. It's hard not to believe in Destiny when you think that speedboating was what he loved the most. And it was supposed to be his last race." She paused, then gulped and grinned, as if she had realized something for the first time: "It's going to happen to us all one day. So you'd better enjoy yourself. That's what he was doing."

Tina kept me on the Monaco story for nearly two months, spent more than $35,000 on my expenses, and paid me a handsome sum for the elegant, in-depth piece I did write about the principality and its workings, which looked up no one’s skirt and under no one’s bed and was thus unfit for her pages. “Pay him and thank him,” she instructed her staff, before immediately reassigning the project to Dominick Dunne, her go-to reporter for “inside” poop on the rich and notorious. But Dunne did no better than I. He arrived in Monaco and found all doors closed to him, official and unofficial, on the order of the Société des Bains de Mer, the private company that holds a monopoly on Monaco’s hotel, tourism, and gambling activities. The SBM is, like everything in the principality, an extension of the palace, in this case disguised as “the Government of Monaco,” which holds a 60 per cent stake in its proceedings. Word went out to Monaco residents that Dominick Dunne was not to be indulged.

Immediately I had a call from Vanity Fair, not a “Hold for Tina Brown” moment but a desperate inquisition from a senior editor at the magazine, begging to know why I had “scuppered Tina’s Monaco project.” Nick Dunne had failed absolutely and apparently I was to blame.

“What have you done?” this editor cried. “Tina’s in a towering rage. She wants heads. She’s got her bullwhip out and she’s going to use it. What did you do over there? No one is talking. What did you say to them?”

I had to think for a minute because, to my knowledge, I hadn’t “done” anything. Before leaving Monte Carlo I had lunch with Nadia Lacoste, at that time head of publicity for the SBM, a close friend of Princess Grace and former director of the palace press office, a woman so “inside” the Grimaldi enterprise as to put paid to any pretenders. She was warm, welcoming, and the dictionary definition of discreet, but only laughed when I told her what Tina wanted for her story.

“She won’t publish anything you write,” Nadia said.

“Oh no,” I protested, “when she sees it, she’s assured me …”

“No,” said Nadia, “it won’t be nasty enough. I promise you she won’t publish it.” And when she didn’t publish it I called Nadia to thank her for her help. I guess no top-flight reporter does this.

“You were right,” I said. “Not enough dirt.” She laughed and invited me to come to Monaco anytime and “enjoy myself.”

And that was my crime. Talking with me had apparently persuaded the Principality of Monaco not to cooperate with Vanity Fair. Who knew I had the power? I am not superior to anything Tina Brown has ever done or wanted to do in her magazines. I wasn’t morally outraged by her desire for a juicy Monaco story. But to be accused of making it impossible for her went beyond the pale. On the phone now with Vanity Fair I found my voice.

“You can tell her to hold for me in the future,” I said. I was shaking. “It’s not her reputation that’s on the line, not her friends and contacts whose trust she wants betrayed. No one in Monaco trusts her to begin with — they don’t need me to confirm it. Tell her to go fry ice.” It was an old expression of my mother’s and I’m glad I used it, but I nearly fainted when I hung up the phone.

Two days later, it rang again: “Peter Kurth? Hold for Tina Brown.”

It was too late to say I wasn’t at home.

“I’ve decided I don’t want to do a story about Monaco after all,” she said. “Really, they’re not very interesting, just silly girls going to parties and pretending to be bad, they’re not interesting at all. Can you get here this week? I want to find something for you to do.”

Thus in a matter of days I found myself in Edinburgh at the psychic research lab that the writer Arthur Koestler had endowed when he died. I was learning about crop circles and experiments with ESP. “I’d read that anywhere,” Tina said. For once, sulking in my tent got results.