The Princess and the People

She seemed born to a charmed life; her mother was Princess Olga of Greece, her father the Oxford-educated regent of Yugoslavia, Prince Paul. A man of rarified tastes, he designed the White Palace in Belgrade where she was born. When the servants who took care of her noticed a swarm of bees above her head one day while her stroller was parked under a tree, they considered it a sign of tremendous good luck.

But by the time Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia was four, a coup d’etat had forced her family to flee from their country. Left behind were the luxuries that had defined their lives. They took little with them, leaving Yugoslavia just a few steps ahead of the Nazis. One moment she was a princess in a palace, the next on the lam.

"We were given four hours to leave," recalls the princess. Under house arrest, the Karadjordjevics were exiled to Nairobi where they lived in a rundown estate, and later, a small house nearby. It was very hard for her parents to be isolated and far away from culture as they had known it.

But the young princess was made of strong stuff and remembers that jungle fondly. It was returning to civilization - her first entry to formal education was at age 13 at an English boarding school - that was hard. "I hated it," she says, recalling drawing graffiti on the walls the night before she was transferred to a French convent school.

For a long time, Princess Elizabeth beamed local politicians and the international community, who she viewed as turning against her family. But in 1987, when she returned after an absence of almost 50 years, she found a sense of belonging that overwhelmed her, and dismay at the needs of her countrymen.

"I cried for 24 hours; I couldn't sleep," she recalls of the train trip she took from Budapest to Belgrade in 1987. "It was so emotional to actually be on the soil of the country where I came from that was forbidden."

And so at age 50, thrice married and ensconced in a Manhattan penthouse, the princess decided to establish a charity: The Princess Elizabeth Foundation of Yugoslavia, to aid this ravaged country.

Not content with staying in New York, where she loves to take walks in Central Park, Princess Elizabeth travels several times a year to Yugoslavia, often staying for months at a time. She delivers medical supplies, including prostheses to the Institute of Orthopedic Prosthetics for Rehabilitation, unpacking the crates and talking to the amputees herself. At other times she brings along medical personnel, such as Dr. William Novick executive director of the International Children's Heart Foundation of Memphis, who operated on 20 children in Belgrade needing complex cardiac surgery.

"It's worse when you see the pain in person," says Princess Elizabeth. "You can give people prosthetics and medicine, but you can't repair their lives. So many people lost so much." Asked why she goes herself, rather than just sending the supplies and doctors over, she replies, "You have to, otherwise everything disappears into the black market."

Besides her humanitarian gestures, Elizabeth is also driven by a need "to restore dignity" to the memory of her parents. "Someone once told me that in a family of three children, if number one doesn't carry the banner, then number three has to do it," she says. "So I did it, especially for my father. This was my obligation. And my second obligation is to try and bring some [comfort] and joy to the people in Yugoslavia."

Related to many of European royalty (including Catherine the Great and Prince Charles), Princess Elizabeth looks every inch the royal personage, sophisticated and gracious. The mother of three, including actress Catherine Oxenberg, she also has had an interesting and somewhat extensive romantic history. One husband was prime minister of Peru; another a New York businessman she met on the ski slopes of Austria when she was 23 and he 40; the third, Neil Balfour, an English politician. And she was engaged to actor Richard Burton between his marriages to Liz Taylor.

Daughter Oxenberg recounts stories of a glamorous, jet set sort of life growing up, including hopping off an Iran-bound plane on a whim during a scheduled landing in Athens and staying for a few weeks. Then there was the time the mother and daughter shared a pizza with the Queen Mother in their London home during a blackout.

These days Princess Elizabeth is content to dote on her nine-year-old granddaughter and head up her foundation. Soon, she’ll be heading back to Yugoslavia, where she stays not only in the cities but also travels through the ravaged countryside. There, amongst the people, she endures such deprivations as no running water or electricity.

She has also revisited her birthplace, the    monarchy was abolished in 1946 and her family's property confiscated, there still remains some of what she knew as a child, including her father's leather-bound books in the library and the gallery of paintings, such as those by Rembrandt, Poussin and Canaletto.

"It was fascinating," says Princess Elizabeth of walking the halls of her old home. "I even remembered the colors of the bathroom. My mother loved periwinkle, and it was still there, exactly the same, and nine was yellow."

In a twist of fate, a childhood friend managed to save some old glass negatives of her family that were almost destroyed in the recent bombings of Belgrade.

It may seem odd to enter the golden years by trekking the back roads of a war ravaged country, but Princess Elizabeth sees only the positive.

"If I can help a few people over there have a better life, then I'll be accomplishing something," she says. "The way to peace is through culture and humanitarianism. And I believe that can happen." 


By Jane Ammeson