Tender Parting

On a Lausanne railway station platform last week there was a tender parting. The goodbyes were perhaps not forever. Teddybear-tall (6 ft. 2 in.), shy King Michael of Rumania kissed his girl goodbye. The girl was long-legged Princess Anne of Bourbon-Parma.

Cousins (both are great-grandchildren of Denmark's King Christian IX), they had met in London at the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip. Since then, for 28 days they had dallied in London and Lausanne under the sympathetic eye of Michael's Mama, Queen Helen, while Michael shyly pursued his quest. At 24, Nan, as her family calls her, is a gay, humorous girl who dislikes big social functions, wears flat heels, likes to mimic people. During the war's early years she had studied commercial art in New York, where her mother, Princess Margrethe of Bourbon-Parma and Denmark, clerked in a swank hat shop.

But, for Michael, it was a cluttered courtship. When he left London he had decided not to return to his Communist-dominated country. In Lausanne, and in love, his throne assumed a new look. Reports said that he had requested his Communist-run government's permission to marry; his request had been approved in principle, but turned down as untimely. Michael's future as history's only Communist-dominated king still had to be decided.

But, though his courtship may have been plagued with political doubts, there was nothing doubtful about his parting embrace. When Nan held up her cheek he seized her fervidly, planted a lingering kiss which was repeated when she turned the other cheek. Less enthusiastic, Nan replied with a light brush of her lips on his jaw, and patted his shoulder. Then, his face frozen like that of a small boy who wants to weep but will not, he watched her climb into the train for Paris.

Three days later Michael and Mama arrived in Bucharest. If there was to be a royal Rumanian wedding, the marriage would be made in Moscow.

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