Jess Anderson: If that wasn't smug, I'm Marie of Roumania.
Robert McGee: This must be the third time I've
seen this retort in the past week, and though the question has no
obvious motss relevance I'm forced to delurk and ask it:
Who the hell is this Marie chick, anyway? Was she an actual
historical figure, and if so, was she noteworthy for anything other
than hailing from a country whose name rhymes with
"extemporania?"
Michael:
Here are the bare-bones facts; Arne is far better qualified than I to explain Marie's critical position in gay culture.
Marie of R[[o][u]]mania. Born HRH Maria Alexandra Victoria, Princess of Great Britain and Duchess of Saxony, at Eastwell Park, Kent, on 29 October 1875, the eldest daughter of Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh (1844-1900), second son of Queen Victoria, by his wife, Maria Alexandrowna (1853-1920), only daughter of Czar Alexander II. Her father succeeded his uncle, Ernst II. (brother of Victoria's husband, Albert), as Duke of Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha in 1893. On 10 January 1893, in Sigmaringen, Germany, Marie married Ferdinand Victor Albert Mainrad, Prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, who in March 1889 had been declared Crown Prince of Rumania and heir presumptive to his paternal uncle, King Carol I. Ferdinand succeeded his uncle on 11 October 1914, but owing to the war he and Marie were not crowed at Alba Julia until 15 October 1922. Marie was instrumental in bringing Rumania into the Allied camp in WWI, and she followed the Rumanian armies as a Red Cross nurse. She traveled widely, and her visit to the United States in 1926 was, as my source puts it, "a triumph of publicity rather than of good taste." Ferdinand died at Sinaia, Rumania, on 20 July 1927, and as dowager queen Marie was prominent during the first reign (1927-1930) of her grandson Michael. Marie wrote several novels and collections of fairy tales in English, among them, The Lily of My Life (1913), My Country (1916), Stealers of Light (1916), The Voice on the Mountain (1923), The Country That I Love (1925), Ilderim (1925), and Masks (1937). Her autobiography, The Story of My Life (1934), was continued by Ordeal (1935). She died at Sinaia on 18 July 1938.
Marie was very popular in the United States in the 1920's, most probably because, in an era fascinated both with royalty (this was a time when every self-respecting movie starlet was out to bag herself a British peer or soi-disant Georgian princeling) and with the "exotic" Balkans (cf. Prisoner of Zenda), she was the genuine article; in addition, behind the title and the trappings she was an Englishwoman, and consequently needed no translation. Her prose is of the Barbara Cartland school, and her character was in some ways similarly over-the-top. Both of these factors, combined with the almost circus-like nature of her 1926 tour of the United States, are what most probably earned her the savaging by Dorothy Parker -- I don't have a copy of Parker's works at hand, but Arne can almost certainly supply the appropriate passages if he chances upon this thread -- that ensured her inclusion in the gay canon of camp goddesses.
Arne:
Gee, Michael and I didn't even compare notes beforehand and we both compared Marie of Roumania to Barbara Cartland!
She was a true vulgarian -- someone with absolutely no taste and all the money in the world to indulge herself.
Dorothy Parker's "Comment" (from memory so the punctuation may be off):
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong,
And I am Marie of Roumania.
