Other Grandmama

The famed grandmama of Baby King Mihai of Rumania was reported, last week, to be planning for next Fall a second triumphal tour of the U. S.

If only the report had concerned King Mihai's other grandmama it would have been news.

The Other Grandmama does not endorse face creams, hair nets, whatnots. She is not photographed. Obscure and lonely, she lives in a small villa near Florence, forgotten, poor, and seldom addressed as "Your Majesty."

Once the Other Grandmama's eldest brother was called King, Kaiser and All Highest War Lord. She has been wife to one king and mother to two; but now, when she rides out in Florence, no one cries, "Look! There goes the Dowager Queen Sophie of Greece. The Kaiser's sister!"

No one remembers her husband, the late King Constantine of Greece, he who guessed wrong in siding with his brother-in-law, Wilhelm II, during the War. No one would remember her second and favorite son, King Alexander of Greece, had he not died sensationally of a monkey bite. Today her eldest son, the deposed King George II of Greece, is a charming though impecunious guest at the Rumanian and British Courts, being especially favored by his royal & imperial second cousin once removed, George V.

Latest of the sorrows of Dowager Queen Sophie is the desertion of her daughter, Princess Helen (mother of Baby King

Mihai) by the abdicated onetime Crown Prince Carol of Rumania.

Last week the tragic Other Grandmama was reported to spend most of her days reclining and dozing in her small, sunny Florentine garden and most of her evenings with a faithful lady-in-waiting who reads and rereads the New Testament.

When the Rumanian Government of Prime Minister Vintila Bratiano had had two days, last week, in which to dissuade Dowager Queen Marie of Rumania from a second U. S. tour, the Famed Grandmama announced, through a lady-in-waiting, that: "Certain premature reports of Her Majesty's plans are totally unfounded."