Word: farouk
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...weeks ago King Farouk, with his Queen and his seven-month-old son, left Cairo in a hurry. He took 204 trunks with him into exile, but left most of his other possessions behind. Last week, for the first time, a group of Western newsmen got a peek at some of them. An Egyptian army captain rolled back the monstrous iron gates of famed Kubbeh Palace and cheerfully announced: "Boys, you're going to see things here that you probably thought didn't exist...
What the newsmen saw was the world's biggest and most expensive accumulation of junk. It threw a pitiless light on the character of the man who had lived here until a few weeks before. Farouk's tastes sometimes seemed curiously childish, like those of a schoolboy who has never grown up beyond the French postcard stage. Above all, the palace gave the impression that someone had feverishly and indiscriminately crammed possessions into the vast rooms, to ward off loneliness, or perhaps despair...
...housed all kinds of instruments, including an antediluvian phonograph and an organ. All the instruments were automatic. In the gymnasium were all sorts of exercise equipment, including an ingenious machine, made in Battle Creek, Mich., which was supposed (but signally failed) to keep the royal rump from becoming imperial. Farouk's study was a pornographer's paradise, hung with garish paintings and crammed with statuettes of nudes in attitudes conventional as well as unconventional-at least by U S standards. In his desk was a box of "magic tricks," including two pocket radiation counters inscribed: "Measure Nuclear Energy...
...Farouk's master bedroom was cold, ugly and boxlike, like a room in a cheap summer resort hotel. It was heaped high with a weird mixture of pornography, childishness and sentimentality-mild glamour shots like those advertising Chicago burlesque bars; Kodachrome nudes complete with pocket viewers; trick photographs that could be squeezed to make a fan dancer bump and grind There were also pictures of Queen Narriman as a bride. Near the royal stood two stacks of well-thumbed U.S. comics...
...dressing room were 100 suits, 50 canes, 75 pairs of binoculars and 1,050 ties, some with the initial "F" five inches high. Most pathetic item of all: a snapshot of Farouk as a boy, slim and handsome...