Down Habsburg, Up Lipton

Peddling strings of Wienerwurst on the sidewalks of Vienna, selling life insurance, and finally keeping a grocery store, have been the occupations since 1918 of His Royal Highness the Archduke Leopold of Habsburg,* second cousin of Emperor Franz Josef.

Incorrigibly cheerful, commendably self supporting, the imperially blooded grocer calls himself merely "Herr Leopold Wolfling." Last week he admitted that as a grocer he is practically a bankrupt, has saved the situation only by writing his memoirs, with the tragicomic title From Archduke to Grocer.

Reviewers, flipping through advance galley proofs, found much inevitable court gossip, but dug out one sprightly passage of present and international interest. "It diverts me, after the flight of years," writes cheerful Leopold of Habsburg, "to contrast the career of Sir Thomas Lipton with mine. While he shot up the social ladder I shot down. He, the one time grocer, was soon to mix in royal circles on flattering, if not on almost equal, terms, whereas I, the one time royal personage, ultimately became a grocer."

Warmly, without a trace of sour grapes or jealousy, Grocer Habsburg goes on to praise the self made Tea Tycoon: "Just how his personality could break down all barriers was shown at a dinner party, given during Kiel Regatta shortly before the great war by Kaiser Wilhelm II, aboard his imperial yacht to Sir Thomas Lipton and Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan. The Kaiser was in a bad humor and inclined to be coldly polite. Mr. Morgan, sensing the frigidity, became frigid too. But not so the genial Sir Thomas! His joviality and high spirits soon thawed everything and everybody, most of all the Kaiser himself, whom he all but patted on the back. Wilhelm rocked with laughter as Sir Thomas regaled him with a long stream of anecdotes, including one of how he tried in vain to get a rise in his salary of half a crown a week when he was a shop boy of ten.

"I remember a highly pleased, stiff necked Austrian aristocrat saying on his return to Vienna after the regatta, 'The secret of Lipton's success is that he makes every one round him feel so much at home. He made even the Kaiser feel at home aboard his own imperial yacht.' "

If Grocer Habsburg's memoirs contain a moral it is his insistence that since the War society's morals have not grown worse, as is often charged, but improved. Writes the Emperor's nephew: "The Emperor, and nearly every Archduke and Duke, had a mistress as well as a wife. As often as not the infidelity of each royal husband started almost immediately after his honeymoon."

* Not to be confused with his second cousin, Archduke Leopold, Manhattan sausage salesman, onetime Hollywood cinemactor, who figured in the recent furore over the sale of a Habsburg diamond necklace to a U. S. jeweler at considerably less than its official price.

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