Out to Lunch

With Prince Michael of Greece—JOHN HEILPERN breaks bread with a prince of a prince

PRINCE Michael of Greece, a XT prince of great charm and a bestselling novelist in France, arrived for lunch at Les Pleiades, a discreet French restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan, which is frequented, it seems, by comfortable antique dealers and favorite aunts.

“It’s extremely quiet and probably extremely boring, but they’re very nice,” he had told me over the phone. “I live close by.”

Prince Michael’s historical novel, Sultana, will be published in paperback here next month by Avon. He is also the author of a popular coffee-table book, Crown Jewels of Europe. He looked cheerful and was dressed in gray slacks, a dark blue blazer, a pink shirt, and a maroon tie. As is the Greek custom, he was playing with worry beads, which were not the traditional amber, however, but pragmatic plastic. His Royal Highness is in his mid-forties, a slight figure, most courteous, birdlike and quite distinguished with graying hair and the distinctive Bourbon nose— the same nose, he was to tell me, which can be viewed at the Louvre on Rigaud’s painting of Louis XIV, who is a distant relative of his.

Prince Michael came to live in America three years ago, and he spends parts of each year in New York, Paris, and Athens.

“Do you like living here?” I asked.

“Well, I tell you—Americans have a very sincere, very simple approach to royalty. Basically, they couldn’t care less about it. There’s a lack of prejudice either for or against, and I like that very much. I like the neutrality. Americans are interested in what you do rather than in who you are, whereas in Europe it’s the reverse. Do you see what I mean?”

A plain eater, Prince Michael ordered salami, swordfish, and a modest bottle of Pouilly-Fuisse. He spoke to the French waiter in perfect French. His English, though fluent, had a slight French accent.

“Shouldn’t your English have a Greek accent?” I asked.

“It’s a little complicated,” he explained. “I was bom in Italy just before the Second World War, for the simple reason that my parents lived there at the time. Why? Because during one of the exiles of my family from Greece, my father, who was the youngest son of King George I of Greece, had settled in Rome. Bon! Then when my father died, I lived in Spanish Morocco. Why? My mother, Francoise of France, the daughter of the French pretender to the throne, had a mother, the Duchess de Guise, who lived in Spanish Morocco.”

“Go on.”

“Then I went to live in the south of Spain with my mother, whose grandmother on the French side was the Infanta Isabella of Spain. My first language was Spanish. When my mother died, I went to live with my uncle, the Count of Paris, and I was educated at school in Paris and at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques, which is why I probably speak English with a French accent. I didn’t go to Greece until I was twenty years old, when I went to live with my first cousin, King Paul, and his wife, Queen Frederika. I lived with their children, the future King Constantine, now living in London, and his sisters, Queen Sophie of Spain and Princess Irene of Greece.”

“Thank you. Did you enjoy life at the court?”

“Frankly speaking, no. Well, at first it was incense to my vanity, I must say. But after a few months, I realized the intense bore of it. When I didn’t marry royalty, my family asked me to renounce all rights to the throne, and I did so. I wanted to marry a private citizen and do something for myself. I wanted to become a writer.”

“You didn’t renounce your title?”

⅞ “No, because it isn’t a title.

It’s my name. Prince Michael of | Greece is actually my name. Aristocrats are given a title by a king, but with us it’s not the same thing. Our ancestors took a country by force, and sometimes by piracy, and ruled it. We were therefore named after the country. We didn’t need a family name. We were ruling. And when we needed one because we were, let’s say, kicked out of the country, it was too late!”

“You didn’t want to change your name?”

“Why? We’ve had the same name for a thousand years. I should renounce my name for practical reasons, yes. It’s always rather awkward on my credit card. A little more wine?”

“Well,” I said as a hovering waiter poured the Pouilly-Fuisse, “here you are, a royal prince, a successful writer, homes in three countries, without, it seems, a care in the world. How wonderful your life must be!”

“It might be,” he replied, leaning forward over the table for the first time. “And I enjoy it. But what I can tell you is that it isn’t given. It is built. If it’s wonderful, it’s because I built it for myself. It is not something I receive.”

“Your Royal Highness,” I replied, “nicely said.”

At which he laughed good-naturedly, and finished lunch before returning home to work on his next historical novel, which concerns the Indian Mutiny.