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“Be like every American girl—be simple,” urged Paris Dressmaker Jean Desses last summer, when his favorite customer announced that she was planning a trip to the U.S. and needed some new things to wear. The Queen of Greece, the pert, petite lady to whom he spoke, seized on the good advice. She had only one royal admonition to offer. “I have a tiny waist,”* she said, “and I want to show it.”

Thus agreed in principle, Dressmaker Desses and his customer, Frederika, Queen of the Hellenes, got together last week in Paris for the final fittings of the wardrobe which the Greek Queen is taking aboard the liner United States for her first visit to the U.S. next week. It was. as Desses had promised, simple. After long consultation with the head men in the Greek treasury (who had only $5,700 to spend), the dressmaker had cut his original specifications from 22 to 15 new garments, but he obligingly helped make over some of the Queen’s old things, and even agreed to lend her a fur coat. After all, Desses is of Greek descent himself, as well as an old friend of the Queen. The final collection included a dozen hats and a dozen pairs of shoes, but Desses was far from pleased with the meager turnout. “I just don’t know how she’ll manage,” he sighed.

The pessimism was misplaced. Ever since the days of another Balkan Queen, Marie of Rumania, storming the sentimental citadel of U.S. republicanism has become a required skill for European monarchs. Americans, denying themselves the luxury of a monarch of their own, usually capitulate to visiting crowned heads without even a faint show of resistance. In addition, 36-year-old Frederika of Greece and her handsome husband, King Paul, have already captured an impressive array of U.S. hostages in their homeland.

It is reasonable to suppose that, by the end of a Washington week protocol-heavy with presidential banquets, reviews, wreath-layings and graceful speeches, their conquest of the U.S. capital will be complete. In fact, a healthy respect for the charms of the invaders went into the timing of their invitation: they were invited to make their visit after the foreign aid bill had been passed and while Congress was not in session, for fear that somehow Frederika might beguile the lawmakers into giving Greece more than its share.

Down the Line. The spearhead of next week’s invasion will be the lady. Amiable and easygoing, King Paul is as strapping (6 ft. 3 in.) a monarch as any society matron could wish for. Frederika, his 5-ft. 3-in. Queen, whose trim figure and impudent face are topped by an unruly mop of chestnut curls, was once described (to her face) by a U.S. Congressman in his cups as “the cutest little Queenie I ever saw.”

Many a soberer American has expressed a like opinion. “Very seldom in my career,” said General George Marshall after meeting Frederika, “have I come upon such lutidity and strength of character, covered with a unique charm that makes them irresistible.” U.S. General James A. Van Fleet, who led the Greeks in Europe’s first military victory over Communism, vows that Frederika “has everything, right down the line—charm, intelligence, beauty, ability, and a great love for her adopted people.” An American sergeant who owned a red M-G exa’ctly like the one which Frederika herself drives through Athens, took to waving companionably when the two cars passed. He was crestfallen and suddenly stiff with formality when he learned that his friendly fellow motorist was the Queen. “Relax, sergeant,” said Frederika amiably, “and let’s get back to our old waving basis.”

But for Victoria. This easy informality and Frederika’s gift for bowling over generals, sergeants and congressmen alike has proved a major asset to a ruling house whose royal motto is: “My power is in the love of the people.” But Greece’s Queen is no royal flibbertigibbet. Born to the purple as well as being married to it, she takes what she calls “this King business” with deadly seriousness, and exploits every ounce of her charm and wit to strengthen its power.

“Did you ever stop to think,” Frederika once asked Winston Churchill, “that if your Queen Victoria had died before she reached the throne, my father would now be King of England?” Because Victoria did survive, the Duke of Cumberland, Victoria’s uncle and Frederika’s great-great-grandfather, had to be satisfied with the Kingdom of Hanover, and that was lost forever in 1866 when his son took the losing side in a war with the King of Prussia. The feud was not patched up until years later when the Hanoverian prince, Ernst August. Duke of Brunswick, married the daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The third child (and first daughter) of that marriage was Frederika Louise Thyra Victoria Margarita Sophia Olga Cecilia Isabella Christa, Princess of Hanover, Great Britain and Ireland, Duchess of Brunswick and Liineburg, and present Queen of Greece. She was born on April 18, 1917 in the Hanoverian fortress of Blankenburg, in a united Prussian Germany about to go down to defeat.

Princess Fried Egg. Princess Frederika was raised—mostly in Austria—in the stern, proud tradition of Germany’s Junker nobility. It was unthinkable, she told schoolmates later in life, that she would ever be permitted to marry beneath her own exalted station.

A bright, alert, gay and affectionate tomboy, she was educated at home by her strict mother and an English governess. Frederika was 17 before she was sent off to school, first in England, then in Florence. The Italian school was typical of many which catered especially to wealthy American girls. Its proprietor. Miss Edith May, was hesitant when the Duke of Brunswick sought to enter his daughter. Her school, she said, was not for princesses: it was a democratic institution where all girls would be treated alike, make their own beds and call each other by their first names.

Frederika did not mind at all. She loved being allowed to ride on Florence streetcars, leaping up to give her seat to the elderly while she herself clung to a strap. Generally hatless, informally dressed and never too neat (“I don’t believe Frederi-ka’s seams were ever straight,” said one teacher), the German princess seemed in many ways as American as her schoolmates. They called her “Freddy” and even “Fried Egg,” and often gathered in her room to help her wrestle with the groaning accordion she sought to master.

Loyal Pepperpot. At one point, the school body was almost equally divided over the merits of a book on sex which had somehow found its way into the sacred precincts. Some of the girls, after a diffident look, decided the book was “icky.” Frederika took the firm stand that anybody who thought a book like that was icky was pretty darn icky herself. A more serious controversy raged over the politics of Adolf Hitler, whom Freddy at first defended with all the stridency of most German youth of her generation. Girlish arguments over Hitler occasionally ended in tears at Miss May’s, but as the school year went on, Frederika read articles in British and U.S. magazines about the Nazi regime. At the end of the year, she was full of doubts. “Freddy was terribly interested in world affairs,” says one of her school friends. “She had a pepperpot of a mind, and she was very loyal to Germany, but we always understood that her defense of the German government was simply a defense of her homeland.”

It is likely that both Freddy and her schoolmates at that time cared less about the political situation in Europe than about Freddy’s reason for visiting her two “aunts”‘ (actually second cousins) at the Villa Sparta, just a short walk from school. The reason: the presence at the villa of the aunts’ younger brother, Crown Prince Paul of Greece.

Frederika and Paul (another relative of Queen Victoria) had first met when she was only ten. Frederika boasts to this day that she fell in love with him at first sight.

Whatever the facts, the romance had from the first the full approval of all the royal families concerned—the Hohenzollerns, the Hanovers, the Glücksburgs, who rule Greece, and even the Windsors, who, as rulers of Great Britain, must pass on the betrothals of all potential heirs to the British throne. On Jan. 9, 1938, two years after Frederika left school, she and Prince Paul were married by the Archbishop of Athens. Some 60 representatives of Europe’s royal houses stood by to see the Crown Prince carry his bride off to his brother’s palace in a golden coach.

A Two-Platoon System. As Crown Princess of Greece, Frederika of Hanover was nearer to occupying a real throne than any member of her family had been for generations. But the shaky throne of the Glücksburgs was no stable institution like the one which long-lived Victoria had kept them from mounting in England. Some 3,000 years before, the ancient Greeks had cast out their hereditary rulers and set up the world’s first democratic government. During all but one of the many centuries since the collapse of those democracies, the Greeks have lived as conquered peoples under the rule of foreign emperors, caesars and sultans.

The first King of modern Greece, Otto of Bavaria, was a lackluster German princeling picked to rule the new nation by the European powers who helped her win independence in 1829 after 400 years of domination by the Turks. He succeeded only in goading his Greek subjects into two revolutions, and leading them to disastrous defeat in war, before he abdicated. Still undiscouraged. the Greeks tried again, and invited Prince William of the Danish royal house of Glücksburg to come over and try his hand. In 1863 he was crowned George I, King of the Hellenes; 50 years later, he was assassinated. Ever since then, the Greek people have been voting the patient Glücksburgs on and off their throne with the unpredictable frequency of a football coach substituting players under the two-platoon system. Paul’s brother. George II, was enthroned three times and dethroned twice. Their father. King Constantine, was twice called to the throne and twice thrown off it.

The Barbarian; As heir presumptive to this royal ring-a-rosy, Prince Paul as a young man showed an understandable lack of interest in kingship. Chafing under the dominance of his stingy elder brother George II, the easygoing Crown Prince spent most of his time away from Greece, aimlessly drifting from the home of one royal relative to that of another or sporting with the fast-living “Alfa Romeo set” in Italy. Once, as a lark, he slipped back into republican Greece wearing a thick black beard and posing as a deckhand on a friend’s yacht. By the time he married Frederika, at the age of 36 (she was 20), restless, roaming Paul was more than ready to settle down.

Frederika herself was instantly at home in her new surroundings. “I was born, a barbarian,” she has often said—to the infinite delight of her Greek subjects, “and I came to Greece to get civilized.” The heady atmosphere of a nation where politics is a national sport was as much to Frederika’s taste as the national wine Retsina, which smacks of turpentine to most foreigners. The new princess lost no time in establishing the dynasty which would make her stay in this delightful place secure. Her first child, a daughter, was born just ten months after the marriage. A second, the present Crown Prince Constantine, was born 19 months later.

Like many unregal newlyweds, Paul and Frederika spent their first married years in obscure battle with the household budget. King George II never hung so much as a new set of lace curtains in the palace without shopping every store in Athens to find a proper bargain. In Paul’s small villa at Psychiko outside Athens. Frederika’s time was mostly taken up by caring for her babies, making over old clothes, and poring over the accounts to see if Paul’s allowance might stand inviting a few close friends to dinner.

In October 1940, Benito Mussolini, itching for a personal triumph in Hitler’s war, launched his Blackshirt attack on Greece through Albania. Eagerly seizing her first opportunity for service, Crown Princess Frederika plunged four-square into the task of mobilizing Greece’s women in a drive to provide clothing for the pitifully under-equipped Greek army. The army stopped the Duce’s Fascists cold, Frederika’s clothing drive was a huge success, and both won new respect in the eyes of the Greek people. Then, early irf the next year, Hitler sent the Wehrmacht into Greece. The royal family was forced to flee, first to Crete (where bombs rained about Frederika’s curly head), then to Egypt (where fat King Farouk tried in a cursory way to seduce her), and finally to South Africa, where Frederika’s third child. Irene, was born.

The Constituents. In 1946, once again by popular vote, the Glücksburgs were called back to the throne of a Greece ravaged by war and torn with internal strife. Scarcely more than half a year later, George II died, leaving his bleeding country and its battered crown to Paul and Frederika. Greece was all but bankrupt, and much of it was reduced to rubble. Aided and supplied from outside, Greek Communists were fighting—and winning—a bloody guerrilla war against their fellow countrymen. The future of Greece’s throne offered at best a long-shot gamble, but with the fervor and thoroughness of a born politico, Frederika set to work canvassing her constituents and winning them over to her side. During the first years of Paul’s reign, scarcely a square mile in all the 51,000 that formed Greece was left untrodden by either the King, the Queen or the royal couple together. They rode in jeeps, crossed mountains on muleback, slept on dirt floors and ate with the peasants. No fighting front was too hot to keep them away. Once with Paul at the wheel, the royal jeep took a short cut through a mined road. The Queen picked up her husband’s baton of rank, and. waving it over his head in a burst of feminine illogic, vowed to bash his head in if he dared hit so much as a single mine.

At a reconstruction project, the husky King delighted local workers by seizing a shovel and making the dirt fly with the best of them. In a hospital, Frederika held the hand of a dejected soldier whose head was so swathed in bandages that only his eyes peeped through. The Queen listened quietly to his fears about being scarred and ugly, and answered all his worries with a radiant smile. “You could never be ugly,” she told him, “not with such beautiful eyes.”

Frederika organized and personally supervised every detail of The Queen’s Fund, a vast charity whose original object was to find food and shelter for the thousands of homeless children wandering lost in her land. Her impassioned pleas for her pet causes seldom fell on deaf ears. “If you could have a vote taken at this minute,” said Wisconsin’s Senator Wiley after hearing Frederika talk at dinner one night, “you would get the American aid to Greece doubled.”

An Awful Bore. As the first German Hanover to occupy a throne in more than 80 years. Frederika more than justified her regal forebears. But a Queen, particularly a mere Queen consort, with such outstanding gifts and firm opinions was bound to have an unsettling effect on the delicate balance of Greek politics. Frederika’s personal charm and many good works had gone far in Greece to wipe out the stain of her German past and the fact that three of her brothers were officers in Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Her Teutonic inclination toward rigid government was not so easy to erase. Like most of her ancestors, Frederika firmly believed that monarchs should rule their countries.

“Of course, we are national symbols,” she once told a reporter, “but that doesn’t mean we must be figureheads. What an awful bore that would be.”

As Queen of Greece. Frederika dabbled firmly and frequently in the political pond, and up to very recently she never hesitated to express her opinion on any and all subjects to whatever newsman might drop by. Her frank description of Farouk’s attempted seduction, to a LIFE reporter* three years ago, resulted in the severing of diplomatic relations between Egypt and Greece. Such freewheeling monarchy for a while made her a newsman’s dream come true, but it led her inevitably to clash with those more responsible than herself for Greece’s welfare.

Two of these were U.S. Ambassador Henry F. Grady and his successor, John E. Peurifoy. the men most responsible for seeing that the U.S. got full value for the billions it gave Greece under the Truman Doctrine. A third was the present Premier. Field Marshal Alexander Papagos, a stern and polished old warrior who had often scolded Paul in his salad days, who had twice risked his career defending Gliicksburg Kings and twice led the Greek army to victory—against the Fascists and against the Communists.

The Marshal was by all odds the most trusted man in Greece. In 1951, after watching 26 corruption-ridden governments come and go in six years with no discernible benefit to their country, the Greeks turned once again to him to get them out of their trouble. In the general election of that year, Greek voters gave Papagos’ newly organized Greek Rally by far the biggest number of seats in Parliament. Frederika was more than ever fearful of the man who thus stood as her only rival for the love of the people. At the Queen’s urging, King Paul seized on a technicality of the election machinery, passed over the Marshal, and called on a coalition of his leftist opponents to form a government. The following year, when Papagos ran again under a revised electoral system. Frederika devoted herself to preventing his election, despite past warnings by both Grady and Peurifoy against such politicking. The result of her efforts was that Papagos won by a clear majority. one of the greatest within the memory of Greek politics.

Today, after a year of Papagos’ government, none of the gallant gentlemen concerned will admit the slightest friction between themselves and Frederika. Peurifoy and Grady have only the highest praise for her. The feud between the Marshal and the Queen, which never got far beyond the cafes of Athens in any case. seems to have been tacitly forgotten by everyone concerned.

Stability & Surplus. Under the upright old Marshal and his brilliant but unloved economic planner Spyros Markezinis, Greek recovery has proceeded apace. The $2 billion in military and economic aid (about $270 for every man, woman and child in Greece) which the U.S. poured into the country has played a major part in the nation’s miraculous return to health; but the ruthless efficiency of Markezinis is making it pay by putting each new dollar to full use. Riding roughshod over every ancient prejudice and privilege in the land, Markezinis began his program by cutting government spending to the bone. He took hundreds of state-owned vehicles off the road, fired thousands of civil servants. He devalued the bloated drachma, took restrictions off imports, and set into motion the first tax reform that Greece had enjoyed in decades. The rich, for the first time in history, had to pay through the teeth.

Today the Greek army (160,000 men) is one of the best in NATO. It is well fed, well equipped and well clothed—in woolens from Greece’s own mills. Unemployment is down from 150,000 to 50,000. Greek farmers have just reaped one of the finest crops in their long history. This year, for the first time since the war, the Greek government was able to report a budget surplus—$10 million.

Double Chocolate. All this seems to prove, at the very least, that Queen Fred-erika’s political actions were ill advised; and she seems to have learned a lesson. The fact is, the royal couple’s unfailing charm and devoted example are still a major factor in the relative contentment of Greece today. Democracy-loving Greeks, who have no use for pomp and arrogance, like to run across their friendly, smiling Queen democratically browsing through Athens shops in search of a good buy. They pride themselves on her skill as the nation’s first wife and mother, on the sensible way she brings up her children, on the royal couple’s life at the palace, where Frederika often darts into the kitchen herself to cook dinner, or the summer villa where Paul putters in the garden and Frederika goes about her tasks in shorts. Greeks like the fact that their Queen is pretty, gay and charming, that she can win friends and influence people in the name of Greece. They like her and they like her husband. Despite the palace feuding, Frederika and Paul have given the throne of the Glücksburgs a new stability matched only by the economic stability Papagos has given their country.

Inveterate intriguers and discontented politicos will still argue and intrigue against both the Queen and the Prime Minister in Athens cafes, as long as either lives, for that is the way of the Greek. But when Frederika reaches Washington this week in her borrowed fur coat, few in Greece will fail to admit that she has more than earned the reward recently promised by her latest conquest, Adlai Stevenson: a double chocolate soda.

-23//2 inches. -(l.r.) Constantine, Paul, Frederika, Sophie and Irene. -“He didn’t know who I was. but he took one look [as Frederika sat talking to Queen Farida |, ordered his wife out of the room and switched off the light. I was quite terrified. If I slapped his face, I knew it might cause all sorts of international complications. So I just stood up and said, ‘That very big man outside in the naval uniform is my husband, and I love him very much.’ Farouk simply 1’aughed, turned on the light and walked out.”

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