Stand by your sovereign
What could be a more perfect reading choice in this chaotic, dirty-pool election year than two books about the bad behaviors and costly mistakes of kings?
First up is the deliciously bawdy, outrageously entertaining ''Sex With Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge," by Eleanor Herman (Morrow, $25.95). Herman has crafted an irresistible book about the power heating up the throne -- the king's official royal mistress, or maitresse en titre.
Pity the lot of single European monarchs. Their duty was to marry to produce a male heir, and more often than not mates were chosen for their fecundity rather than their beauty. The future George IV of Great Britain, when introduced to his intended, cried, ''I am not well" and called for brandy to keep him from fainting. Is it any wonder that kings took gorgeous young mistresses? Their humiliated queens suffered, but the public most often approved.
Ah, but while mistresses had power, pensions, and palaces, it wasn't all a bed of kingly roses. Pandered-to kings wanted their playmates perpetually sunny and healthy, and heaven help the mistress who might want to respond to the call of nature during a daylong carriage ride.
Herman's writing sparkles off the pages, introducing us to a ribald roster of infamous characters. There's Madame de Pompadour, the paramour of France's Louis XV, who became the unofficial minister of war and kept her position for 19 years even though she was frigid. There's Henry IV of France, who insisted to his wife that his mistress's swelling belly was the result of too much good food and then, nine months later, wanted her to help with the delivery.
The power and the pensions might be gone for modern-day mistresses and their kings, but there are other, richer rewards. Don't pity Great Britain's Edward VIII, the duke of Windsor, for abdicating his throne for commoner Wallis Simpson, because, Herman notes, he never wanted the responsibility of ruling. Feeling angry at Prince Charles for favoring plain Jane Camilla Parker Bowles over his dazzling Diana? That pair has lasted over 35 years, and there's now no law that says he can't marry her and make her queen.
But it's not just kings who make bad decisions about love. So does young journalist Jennifer Beth Cohen, mixing up love with politics in her fascinatingly moving memoir, ''Lying Together: My Russian Affair" (University of Wisconsin, $22.95). Told in an engagingly intimate voice, the book starts with Cohen pursuing a story about the sexual trafficking of young Russian girls. She contacts and hires Kevin, a man in Russia she used to know, and before you can say glasnost, they're burning up the phone wires, falling in love, and she's ''flying 600 miles into the arms of a man she's never kissed."
The story of their ill-fated relationship is told against a backdrop of incredible political upheaval and peppered with a cast of characters as extraordinary as those in the court of Versailles. There's Alexander Nikitin, accused of treason for criticizing the Navy's nuclear waste disposal, who gets provisionally released from prison only to enter a Kafkaesque world of treachery. There's Pasha, a Russian pimp who insists he's doing young girls a favor by enlisting them into prostitution. And, of course, there's the potentially career-making story Cohen's after, filled with the wily pimps and poverty-stricken young girls who are lured into sex slavery.
As Cohen finds out more about Russia, she begins to find out more about herself and Kevin, and it's not very pretty. Yeltsin fires his entire cabinet; Kevin begins to drink, and she pops pills. The ruble crashes, sending the country into a panic, and Kevin nearly kills himself. He verbally abuses her, professes love for an ex in an e-mail she happens to read, yet Cohen stays.
That's the point where I lose sympathy, but Cohen's vulnerable voice, and her refusal to feel sorry for herself, engage me again. She knows she's hiding from friends and family, and from herself, and that's it up to her to get found. ''Someone lives abroad because she has to," she says, and it's telling that at the end of this remarkable book, she's ready-- and able -- to go home.
Sex, power, and politics almost always share the same bed. And whether coexisting in a glittering 17th-century palace or the gritty modern streets of Moscow, they make for reading pleasures as addictive as chocolate.
Caroline Leavitt's novel ''Girls in Trouble" will be published in paperback next spring.
