Thom Nickels: My lunch with a Habsburg

I’m journeying to the suburbs of New York to meet a real prince, Dominic von Habsburg, member of the Grand Ducal Family of Tuscany and the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, whose grandparents were Queen Marie and King Ferdinand of Romania and his parents, Princess Ileana of Romania and Archduke Anton of Austria. 

Dominic, or “Niki” as he is referred to in books about Queen Marie, was born on July 4, 1937, in Hollabrunn, Austria. He is the sole surviving son of Princess Ileana, who later became Mother Alexandra, an Orthodox nun who founded the Monastery of the Transfiguration in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania. The Habsburg family rose to prominence in the Holy Roman Empire and from Habsburg Castle, built in the 11th century, becoming one of the most influential dynasties in European history. With its vast territorial holdings it wielded immense political power.

It was a bright, sunny fall early afternoon when the train pulled into the station. I’d seen pictures of Dominic on the web so I knew what I was looking for: a tall, lean gentleman with a crown of white hair. 

Dominic smiled when we spotted one another. It was a smile that in some ways spelled “relief,” as I had been a little concerned that we might not get along.

“You look like an old school chum of mine in Austria!” he said, extending his hand.

Once in the car the conversation became casual. He’d just been to the dermatologist — another appointment, he lamented — stemming from all the years he spent in the Caribbean. We drove through beautiful countryside, making small talk, his strong accent never clouding his words. 

Architect, designer, an alumnus of the Brooks School and the Rhode Island School of Design, this totally down-to-earth-grassroots prince has a number of patents for inventions — ten, he says. He would tell me later how he was hoodwinked out of patent royalties because his business helper at the time had the contract drawn up in French. “So I never got royalties although in my life I’ve made plenty of money.” He tells me about a Danish-style piece of furniture he designed, “A couch that turns into a bed with the mechanism made into the parts — not separate — but nobody was interested in the prototype, so it never got made.” He said he later became a sort of clearing house for patents; he had this ability to know whether inventions would work. 

Dominic drives into his gated driveway. He designed the house himself. It’s all on one level, reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson, built around a large garden-atrium in the center. The constant light source electrifies the interior design, especially in the living and dining areas where masterful European portraits of kings, queens and other royal personages in serious museum-style frames greets the visitor.

“These are all family members,” he tells me, pointing to the portraits. 

I notice a large wooden statue on a book shelf. It’s the statue of St. Benedict his mother Princess Ileana writes about in her memoirs. Dominic tells me as a child he used to run his hands up and down the sculpted folds of the saint’s robes when the statue was in Bran Castle. Instinctively I run my hands along the wooden folds; this is no ordinary statue because Benedict is burying his head into his chest. He seems to be mourning the loss of something. 

We head back to the car again. It’s off to lunch at the Farmer and the Fish restaurant located in an 18th-century house. At the restaurant, some heads turn as we enter. 

I ask Dominic whether he can verify a claim made in one biography of his mother that during the toughest times as the Communists were gaining control of the country, Ileana had a stash of secret suicide pills to distribute to herself and her children so that the family wouldn’t suffer unnecessarily. 

“If it’s true, I don’t know where it came from,” he said. “This is the first time I’m hearing this. My mother and suicide: it doesn’t add up. It doesn’t fit her at all. If she had occasional thoughts, I don’t know. I’ve had suicidal thoughts when I was young. Then I thought, well, I’m going to die anyway so why not wait and see how it all turns out. I’ve told that to people and it saved their lives. You’re going to die anyway so why take your life?”

“My mother was an extremely proud woman, very selfish in her own way. She treated her children as if they were extensions of herself. She was very self-assured in her own way. She grew up as an important person among kings and queens. She had an extreme sense of duty. Her religious beliefs were very much like my grandmother’s [Queen Marie]”

We went on to discuss Ileana’s relationship with her mother, Queen Marie.

“Her mother played a great role in her development. They were very close. She was the favorite child. Why did my mother have six children? Because her mother had six children! She admired her mother to that degree. The Queen had a sense of I AM. So did the princess. I am the Princess. I am the Archduchess. I am the Mother Superior.”

I asked Dominic what it was like when his mother announced she was becoming a nun. 

“When she became a nun it didn’t fit into the concept of my mother at all. She was much too independent to go into such a confined atmosphere. She was — ” Dominic hesitates as if trying to find the words. “She was drawn to monastic life. In the end it was her salvation. She was centered in religion as was her mother but my mother probably took it more seriously. We had in the house growing up [in Newton, Massachusetts] a friend of hers who was a Christian Scientist, and she had her there because she was interested in it. She was drawn into religion. 

“When my mother decided to become a nun, I said: ‘I can’t see you on a street corner and asking for donations.’ Of course she would get very mad at me. She would say working for God and Christ is good and what is given is charity. I asked her: what is this monastery going to do? She said we’re going to translate the liturgy and things like that. I said, for that you don’t need a convent, you need a good translator, you don’t need to become a nun. Why do you want to go into this monastery? I was very hard on her. She threw it right back at me.”

He then delved into his parents’ divorce.

“When my parents divorced, I asked the question why? They had six children. They went through all of this hell. Why divorce? Actually, I don’t know why my father didn’t divorce my mother because she treated him terribly.”

This hit me like a small bombshell. Dominic went on to mention Hannah Pakula’s 1984, “The Last Romantic: A Biography of Queen Marie of Romania.” 

“In the book, ‘The Last Romantic,’ I hear my mother speaking; my mother was the major source for this book. She contacted me first after the author contacted her, but when I read her book in the author’s descriptions of my father I hear my mother talking.” He continued, “Both Queen Marie and my mother considered men inferior. Well, my grandfather, King Ferdinand, was a good man but he was boring…very straight and narrow minded. She was bored by her husband. Queen Marie and King Ferdinand had love affairs. Queen Marie married at seventeen and she didn’t know what lovemaking was all about. She even says this in her own book. When she went to bed with King Ferdinand she didn’t know what the hell she was doing.”

Ileana, Dominic says, was deeply affected when her youngest brother, Micea, died at age 3 of typhoid fever. “My mother says she saw angels standing by his bed. Those things I won’t go into because I can tell you experiences of my own. I have no proof: was I hallucinating?”

“I had some good times with my father,” Dominic says of Archduke Anton of Austria. “But there were big differences in character between them. My father mistrusted everybody but when he trusted somebody it was real. So there’s a danger there, too. My mother loved everybody and was deeply hurt. She took two Romanians with her when she left the country in 1949; one fellow was an investor…so the last money that my mother still had outside in trusts, she let him administer it and it all went straight into his pocket. My father at the time was desperate. He told me he tried telling my mother that the man was ruining her. He embezzled everything. This is part of my own research. It’s not in ‘The Last Romantic,’ as to why they separated. Why did they divorce after being together for so long? My mother instigated the divorce proceedings. I have this letter at home regarding this. 

“See, I feel that she becoming a nun in the end was I AM moment. What else could see have done? She lost everything. She lost the kingdom. She lost her marriage. 

“Ask me something more about the mother,” Dominic said. 

“Did she ever spank you?”

“My mother basically lived her own life. I never got a spanking. She did what she had to do, public service, and in Romania she had a hospital [Hospital of the Queen’s Heart] where she worked all day. And we had a nanny who would slam me down on toilets and whip me with a stick — yes, that’s what the nanny did — and she had an assistant who would take my older sister and beat her every night. So the children grew up with nannies or other people.”

“Did you ever tell your mother about the nanny?”

“I don’t think I ever told my mother about the nanny who beat me. The worst story in that sense was when we were in Austria and I was four or five and this man put my brother over a chair and beat him with a riding crop, and then he would ask my sisters how many more times should I hit him? Then he came at me. He asked me for a number. For some reason I said nine. It was the first number that appeared in my head. So my brother was beaten nine times because of my stupidity. My sisters were all saying to me, ‘How could you? How could you?’ But my brother who was beaten stood up for me. The person closest to my mother was my brother. She shared everything with him. To the end, until she died. He was there for her and they were there for each other.”

Princess Ileana’s second husband, Dr. Stefan Nikolas Issarescu, was Romanian. 

“He was Romanian,” Dominic adds. “Another thing with my mother is she trusted everybody, at least if they were Romanian. Romanians could do not wrong. So she trusted this man and she married him. We disliked him. All of us! And I didn’t say anything. My brother said he was the only one who could have said something but she was so happy he didn’t want to take that from her. And the second husband lived off my mother for five years. Because when he came to the States with her all his papers and stuff had been stolen — he was a pathologist — when they separated he said, ‘I don’t even have my papers.’

“The divorce sped up and I caused it. We were in our house in Newton — I was the only child in the house at the time. It was my mother, her husband and a man named George, an old family friend, a close friend to my brother’s. And we were in the house and I had acute appendicitis. So they took me to the hospital. I don’t remember how old I was; late teens, 20 actually. There was friction between my mother and her husband. By the end of the evening, the divorce was there. My brother Stefan didn’t want the divorce to happen so soon. He wanted the pathologist to get his license to practice. So I sped it up. I didn’t cause it, I sped it up. He moved out and remarried. I saw him before he died. His second wife asked me if I wanted some of his things, so some old family things I got back.”

“Still, I don’t know why she went there,” Dominic said, meaning Ellwood City. “The climate is horrible. My mother left all her literary things to the convent. It took a while to get it to the nuns in Pennsylvania because it went through many channels in Romania. I will probably take a diary I have of my mother’s to the convent. It’s a travelogue diary.”

I asked Dominic if he maintains contact with other European royals.

“I didn’t know what my name was until I was thirteen. Until then I was Dominic of Austria, then I became a Habsburg. At thirteen, I didn’t understand, it didn’t make any sense to me. I went back to Austria myself to meet various members of the Habsburg family but after a few years I stopped going back to do this. You know, there’s a Protestant and Italian line of Habsburgs as well as Catholic.”

My meeting with Dominic took place months before he decided to sell Bran Castle. At that time he was experiencing considerable frustration at the way the castle was being presented to the public. He told me he was getting ready for a change in management. 

“I’ve had to hire lawyers to get rid of lawyers,” he said. “The lawyers I used to get the property back invested themselves so heavily in the project that now I have to fight to get them out.” 

These lawyers are American lawyers because Dominic thought American lawyers would keep the Romanians honest. 

“But no!” he says, “The Americans are terrible. They exploited us. All of this is nerve wrecking. I’m not built for this. I stand up for my rights but I don’t go on about lost causes.

The waitress brings us an ice cream dessert. Instead of individual servings — chocolate for Dominic and vanilla for me — she delivers one common bowl containing both scoops and swirls of whipped cream. She blames the shared bowl on the ice cream scooper in the kitchen. We half the dessert as Dominic reminisces about living in Venice for ten years. 

“Well, the canals that do smell are called ‘dead arms’ Dominic says. The prince sitting before me then adds that living in Newton, Massachusetts, was fun. “I basically have no childhood friends,” he adds, “In Romania it was school all day and then weekends with siblings. There were some friends, yes, but hardly any children’s time.      

“I haven’t been to Bran in five years. It now takes four hours to travel to Bran by car from Bucharest when it should only take two. That’s because of the traffic. As I told you, I had a criminal case against the Bran lawyers. Romanians are not known for their honesty. I have no prejudices myself, except gypsies. Stealing is a part of their trade, culture.”

Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.