The Royal daughters received a bad education, married communors , divorced etc...
The environment in which the five princesses were raised may have something to do with the current status quo. The King and Queen were not in the most ideal circumstances when they began their family. Michael and Anne did not have much in the way of financial resources, they ended up moving quite frequently in the first few years of their marriage and they had a difficult time finding "meaning" in their new roles.
Queen Anne explained this time of constant transition in Anne of Romania: A War, An Exile, A Life: “The wound of being cut off from our country [Romania] was harsh and deep, especially for my husband. That was why we kept changing towns and countries, moving from one house to another. We could not manage to settle permanently anywhere at first, because we were searching for ourselves, searching for a place and an identity; we were looking for a place with which we could feel in harmony...It took the King almost ten years to find himself again...Our first three daughters grew up with a father who was gentle, fair and loving, but very quiet, serious and sad. When Margarita, at the age of four, asked why her father was so sad and quiet, I told her he was upset because he had lost his country. Our children knew this right from the beginning, even if they had to grow up a little before they could understand the situation properly.”
Her Majesty further confessed: “Around the beginning of the 1950s, the King and I began to face up to the problem of our inability to adapt to the society around us...At that time, we were both very sad, and I had begun to be full of bitterness. My husband’s reaction was to close in on himself; mine was to become bitter. We began to go out less often than we had before, because we had no doubt that most of the time he was invited only for his name, and not for who he was himself. Organising a dinner around a king was just a way of making a good impression in society. And so we withdrew.”
During the beginning of their time in Switzerland, Michael and Anne, as well as their daughters, presumably, became involved with Frank Buchanan (who died in 1961) and an organization he had created known as the Moral Rearmament Movement, which was based in Caux, not far from the family’s home in Versoix. Through Frank Buchanan, Michael and Anne became close friends with the British tennis player Bunny Austin and his wife, the former Phyllis Konstam, who acted in several Hitchcock movies. The Queen remembered that Bunny and Phyllis saved she and the King from “a terrible loneliness,” and that the Romanian royal family’s experience of Moral Rearmament was that “it was an initiative which greatly enhanced us from a spiritual point of view.” This may all very well be true, and perhaps Moral Rearmament ultimately had a beneficial impact on King Michael, Queen Anne and their family.
However, actress Glenn Close, who was involved in Moral Rearmament as a result of the involvement of her father, Dr William Taliaferro Close, with the organization, had a different take on the movement. Recently Close disclosed what it was like to grow up at the MRA’s Swiss headquarters. Close referred to MRA as a cult, and of Frank Buchanan she had this to say: “I haven't made a study of groups like these, but in order to have something like this coalesce, you have to have a leader. You have to have a leader who has some sort of ability to bring people together, and that's interesting to me because my memory of the man who founded it was this wizened old man with little glasses and a hooked nose, in a wheelchair.” Glenn Close also recalled what life was like at the MRA headquarters: “They had a big hotel, a very glamorous, exclusive hotel called Mountain House, which I think is in one of Fitzgerald’s novels. [They] made it into one of their world headquarters, and we stayed there for two years...You basically weren't allowed to do anything, or you were made to feel guilty about any unnatural desire. If you talk to anybody who was in a group that basically dictates how you're supposed to live and what you're supposed to say and how you're supposed to feel, from the time you're 7 till the time you're 22, it has a profound impact on you. It's something you have to [consciously overcome] because all of your trigger points are [wrong]." Close’s disclosures into what she deemed a cult causes one to wonder exactly how positive was the involvement of the King and Queen of Romania with MRA, and what lasting effects this exposure to a controversial organization might have had on their family and personalities.
This really would be very interesting. If we could know his relations Nicolae have now with his uncles.
