Sex with the Queen (59 page)

Many felt that the appearance of the white-eyed holy man marked the end of their world. The czar’s mother, who detested Alexandra, said, “My unhappy daughter-in-law does not under-stand that she is destroying the dynasty and herself. She truly be-lieves in the saintliness of this rogue and we are powerless to stave off this disaster.”30 A Russian lady wrote of Rasputin’s increasing power, “It became a dusk enveloping all our world, eclipsing the t h e t u r n o f t h e t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y 2 7 1

sun. How could so pitiful a wretch throw so vast a shadow.”31

Alarmed by Rasputin’s closeness to the imperial family, the se-cret police followed him. The czar waved away their reports of drunken brawls and orgies. Lies and slander, he said. The em-press sniffed, “How true it is that a prophet is always without honor in his own country.”32

Premier Vladimir Kokovtsov tried to tell the czar that Rasputin was threatening the security of the throne as popular resentment focused on him as the cause of all public grievances.

But Nicholas was contemptuous of the press and public opinion.

“The public does not run the country,” he fumed. “It is run for their benefit, and I am the one who decides what is best for them.”33

Casting his burning white eyes toward the future, Rasputin seemed to foresee World War I. He begged Nicholas not to join the war, for he could see Russia “drowned in her own blood,” and the deaths of the imperial family soon after. But in the one in-stance when the czar should have listened to Rasputin, he did not. As Russia lay wounded and bleeding in the First World War, revolutionary murmurs grew to a groundswell. The czar decided to fire his efficient commander in chief and lead his forces him-self. The indecisive monarch, pale and trembling astride a horse, was not an inspiring sight.

Meanwhile, Rasputin was up to his old tricks. One evening in 1915 he arrived already drunk at a Moscow nightclub. When waiters heard shrieks, breaking glass, and curses coming from the private dining room, they rushed in. A woman had refused to have sex with Rasputin, and in his frustration he had smashed the mirrors. Asked to prove he was indeed Rasputin, he unbut-toned his pants, took out his penis, and waved it in the air.

Called to the scene, the police reported his behavior as “sexually psychopathic.” Although he cried repeatedly that he was pro-tected by the czar, the police dragged him away “snarling and vowing vengeance.”34

A group of conspirators led by a cousin of the imperial fam-ily, Prince Felix Yusupov, finally had enough. The prince used his wife, Irina, as a decoy for Rasputin, who had been panting 2 7 2

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after her. In the early hours of December 16, 1916, Rasputin went to Yusupov’s palace, expecting Irina to be available for sex.

Rasputin was ushered into the basement, which had been fit-ted up as a comfortable party room with a crackling fire, a bearskin rug, and overstuffed easy chairs. He spoke jovially with the conspirators. Prince Yusupov offered Rasputin cakes poi-soned with cyanide. Rasputin greedily gulped down two and washed them down with cyanide wine. According to the conspir-ators, after consuming enough poison to kill an elephant on the spot, Rasputin merely cleared his throat and complained of a tickling sensation. Some historians, reading details of the at-tempted poisoning, believe that Rasputin had steeled himself against poison by ingesting a few grains of cyanide every day, to build up resistance. Others believe the murderers exaggerated Rasputin’s demonic resistance to death to justify their foul deed.

According to their story, Rasputin began to breathe with diffi-culty and complained of a burning in his stomach. Yet he was suddenly eager to take his friends to sing and dance with Gypsies.

Felix Yusupov suddenly said, “You’d far better look at the cruci-fix and say a prayer.” Rasputin seemed to know what was going to happen; he looked almost kindly at the prince. Rasputin started to make the sign of the cross. When Yusupov shot him in the heart, Rasputin screamed and fell on the bearskin rug.

He was examined and declared dead. Then the eyes opened up, “green viper eyes.” The bloody body stood up and rushed at Yusupov. “He sank his fingers into my shoulder like steel claws,”

Yusupov later recalled. “His eyes were bursting from their sock-ets, blood oozed from his lips.” The hands reached out to stran-gle him, the lips crying “Felix, Felix.” Yusupov raced upstairs to the others, ashen faced, eyes bulging, followed by Rasputin who had climbed the stairs and was racing across the snowy courtyard.

One witness said Rasputin was shouting, “I will tell everything to the empress.”35

Vladimir Purishkevich took out his gun and fired, hitting Rasputin in the shoulder, and then in the head. Rasputin fell to his knees, but still he was not dead, and tried to rise again.

Yusupov started beating him with a blackjack until he fell over.

t h e t u r n o f t h e t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y 2 7 3

They wrapped the body in a rug or drape, threw it in a car and drove it to a bend in the river, and dropped it in. But in their haste the conspirators had forgotten to attach weights to it that they had brought along in the car. The following day workmen found bloodstains on the parapet of the bridge, a boot on the ice below, and peering into the frigid waters, they saw the corpse.

The autopsy revealed water in the lungs. Rasputin had still been alive when he had plunged into the river.

There was no trial for Rasputin’s murderers; they were not the only ones who saw their bloody deed as a patriotic act, liber-ating their country from the clutches of a vile lunatic. Popular opinion was decidedly in favor of the assassination. But the em-press suffered a nervous collapse, sitting silently in her mauve-colored rooms, contemplating a picture of the doomed Marie Antoinette. She used opium to calm her nerves and prayed at Rasputin’s grave. “He died to save us,” she wrote, as if Rasputin had been Christ. As the country slipped into anarchy, the em-press wandered about the palace looking for Rasputin’s spirit, while the czar concentrated on thrilling games of dominoes.

The unhappy Russian people began to think that if a man as all-powerful as Rasputin could so easily be removed, so could the detested imperial family. When thousands of strikers and pro-testers demonstrated against the government, imperial soldiers were ordered to shoot them. But they shot their commanding officers instead and joined the mob. On March 2, 1917, Czar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate; the entire imperial family was taken prisoner.

Within a week, Rasputin’s body, which had been lovingly buried in the imperial palace park, was dug up, doused with gasoline, and burned. The flames consumed him even as they consumed Russia, just as he had predicted. In July 1918

Nicholas, Alexandra, and their five children were murdered by revolutionary forces, as Rasputin—visionary, healer, satyr—had foreseen.

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N I N E

d i a n a , p r i n c e s s

o f m a n y l o v e r s

The chains of marriage are so heavy it takes
two to carr y them, and sometimes three.

— a l e x a n d r e d u m a s

I

“ T h e r e w e r e t h r e e o f u s i n t h i s m a r r i a g e , ” i n t o n e d Diana, Princess of Wales, sadly in her infamous television inter-view, pointedly referring to her husband’s mistress, Camilla Parker-Bowles, “so it was a bit crowded.”1 But the marriage was, in fact, far more crowded than Diana admitted. There were more than a dozen people in her marriage if one counted her own lovers.

It was November 20, 1995, and the stricken Diana, melan-choly eyes ringed heavily with kohl, lips tragically pale, was the first royal princess ever to admit on television that she had con-ducted an adulterous affair.

Panorama
interviewer Martin Bashir pressed her to discuss her relationship with army captain James Hewitt, who had detailed 2 7 5

their steamy love affair in the book
Princess in Love
, in cooperation with author Anna Pasternak. “Were you unfaithful with Captain James Hewitt?” he asked. Casting her glance modestly down-ward, the princess murmured, “Yes, I adored him. Yes, I was in love with him.”2

In the sixteenth century Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard had been beheaded for adultery. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Sophia Dorothea and Caroline Matilda had been locked up until their deaths. By the twentieth century execution and imprisonment were no longer accepted punish-ments for adulterous royal women whose battles were fought, not behind palace walls, but in the press. Diana, just like Crown Princess Louisa of Tuscany in 1902, was championed by some newspapers for her compassion and courage, and lambasted by others for her immorality and mental instability. “It’s almost as if they want to put me away,” she opined to a friend.3

And yet it had all started out so well. Wishing to avoid the scandal of men popping up in the press with lurid tales of sex with the future queen, the royal family dismissed Charles’s beloved Camilla Shand from consideration as his bride. Casting about for a suitable candidate, they settled on Lady Diana Spencer, an at-tractive if slightly awkward teenager, young enough to be molded for her role as queen. An added advantage was the fact that Diana seemed intellectually limited; she had not managed to graduate from high school and kept failing her tests. This sweet befuddled girl, a virgin from a noble English family, would be in no posi-tion to make trouble for Buckingham Palace. She would do as she was told: wave, smile, and produce royal babies.