THAILAND'S MOMENT OF TRUTH - ZENJOURNALIST

[to] what I think is the right thing to do, and I can assure you I shall try my best.
Meanwhile, international media mocked his apparent reluctance to go home:
Three times … the young (22) King had been rumored on the way home from the
villa in Lausanne, Switzerland to which he went two months after his brother's
death. Three times something (a Siamese coup, an automobile accident or a mere
change of plans) had interfered. Meanwhile, as the King spent his days going to
school, organizing a swing band, tinkering with his cameras and driving his cars from
Switzerland to Paris, royal duties piled up in Bangkok.
Last week gangling, spectacled Phumiphon was on the Red Sea in the steamship
Selandia, with his pretty fiancée, 17-year-old Siamese Princess Sirikit Kitiyakara
at his side. In Bangkok's downtown dance halls, where Siam's hepcats curve their
fingers backward and dance the rumwong, the hit of the week was a song composed
by the royal jitterbug Phumiphon himself:
The little bird in a lonely flight
Thinks of itself and feels sad . . .
[Homing Bird, Time, March 20, 1950]
Rama IX had been gone from Siam for nearly four years. He had been free from the
ponderous and suffocating rituals of the Grand Palace and away from the bloodied memories
of the Barompiman Hall. He had initially returned to university, but after he crashed his Fiat
500 Topolino into a truck outside Lausanne in October 1948 and was blinded in his right
eye, he stopped attending classes. The longer he stayed away from Thailand, the worse his
reputation became among the international media. He was often portrayed as spoiled and
slightly strange:
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When his brother died, it was felt that the new king should switch his educational
emphasis from architecture, which he was then studying, to law. Dutifully
Phumiphon attended a law course at Lausanne University, but because of his auto
accident studying gave him such a headache that he has not been back since. Since
then, however, he has shown his regard for the law by the pleasant little ceremony
with which he greets each new day: awakened by one of his twin aides, he takes from
him a law book along with his coffee and croissants. Occasionally the king looks at
the book. Other times he uses it as a prop for his pillow and lies back to contemplate
the ceiling. In these restful moments his thoughts generally wander to music, more
specifically to Johann Sebastian Bach. Back, the king has declared, “is the daddy of
us all.”
After a suitable period of such reflection the king (so each of his Lausanne days has
usually gone) rises and proceeds to his gadget-cluttered study. Here he smilingly
confronts a piano (with organ attachment), desk, movie screen, movie projector, filmediting
machinery, radios, wire recorders and models of ships of the Siamese navy.
Amid this disarray King Phumiphon attends to the mail from Bangkok. Mostly the
mail is light, a fill-in on the local situation from his uncle, Prince Regent Rangsit of
Chainad, or a few bills to be paid. Then the king lunches with his mother and spends
the afternoon out taking pictures if the weather is good, indoors working over his
musical scores if it rains. Evenings he spends chatting with his mother, reading the
Bangkok magazines and technical books on photography or, occasionally, touring the
local nightspots. About once a week a group of boys come in for their jam session.
[John Stanton, Young King With a Horn, Life, February 20, 1950]