TOILETS & the WEALTHY
THE LINE OF BEAUTY – The throne behind the power: from Putin’s toilet brush to Trump’s golden bowl – The bathrooms of strongmen show there’s a lot to loos
Feb 4th 2021 Economist
We know how Vladimir Putin would like us to think of him: President Eternal, shirtless in khaki combat pants, galloping over the Urals in search of a bear to wrestle. We also know the areas of his life he would prefer to remain in a blur of unknowing – his wealth, his relationship status, his tally of children. We can be fairly sure, I think, that he takes little pleasure in the image dumped into the Russian imagination by Alexei Navalny, the Novichok-proof and now-jailed leader of the Anti-Corruption Foundation. Vladimir Vladimirovich, trousers gathered at his ankles, piping a whorl of excrement into a toilet bowl, flanked by a symbol of cartoonish decadence – an $850 lavatory brush.
In Portugal in 1974, pro-democracy activists planted carnations in soldiers’ gun barrels. Czechoslovakia’s Velvet revolutionaries carried candles. Russians protesting against Navalny’s imprisonment are raising gold-painted plastic toilet brushes aloft, like torches of liberty. The reason? One of Navalny’s last acts before being arrested was to drop a feature-length video offering a “Through the Keyhole” style account of the secret palace Putin is alleged to have built near Gelendzhik on the Black Sea with a dirty $1.3bn. The toilet brush was the star exhibit.
The image is proof of Navalny’s cleverness. It illustrates Putin’s inescapable humanity in unwelcome detail. (Do we really think he scrubs his own skid-marks from the porcelain?) It raises shit-smeared gold as a potent example of the futility of wealth. And putting Putin in a lavatorial context is a welcome reminder of the long history of strongmen’s bathrooms as a space of folly and paranoia. Kim Jong Un, for instance, brought a portable toilet to the North Korea-us summit in 2018, apparently to prevent his faeces being collected and analysed by a rival intelligence service keen to gather information on his health.
Before he was sentenced, Navalny aimed another blow below the presidential belt: “However much he pretends to be a great geo-politician, he’ll go down in history as a poisoner. There was Alexander the Liberator, Yaroslav the Wise, and Putin the Underwear Poisoner.” In Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, it’s the flatterers who are forced to spend eternity dunked in excrement. Whatever his future holds, Navalny need have no fear of that. Except for his life, he has nothing to lose but his chain.
Incommoded Commodus
Commodus was a gladiator as well as an emperor, and he fought dirty. Fighting is perhaps not quite the word: one of his Colosseum showstoppers involved rounding up a group of disabled Romans, squeezing them into snake costumes and clubbing them to death while cosplaying Hercules.
For this and other vulgarities – renaming the 12 months of the year after himself, for instance – a knot of conspirators decided to terminate his reign. The time: New Year’s Eve 192ad. The method: a spiked cut of beef. The result: shouting and vomiting, but no death.
A sympathetic senator, Cassius Dio, records that the emperor’s “immoderate use of wine and baths” protected him from the poison. The bathroom, however, was where the job was finished. Narcissus, his personal trainer, strangled Commodus in the tub. The act was supposed to cleanse the empire of his sins. Perversely, it sent Rome’s glory down the plughole: “After this,” reports Cassius Dio, “there occurred most violent wars and civil strife.”
A royal flush Ludwig II of Bavaria
History remembers him as Mad King Ludwig. True, only a certain kind of mind spends hours kissing and chatting with a statue of Marie Antoinette, or insists on setting dinner places for dead French monarchs. This lavatory, though, installed at his unfinished palace on an island in the Chiemsee lake, is evidence of luxury, not lunacy.
The rococo handles suggest a sedan chair; the bowl-obscuring curtain looks like it’s about to part before a performance of “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg”. It looks comfortable. It looks state of the art. And this is entirely consistent with Ludwig’s spendthrift predilection for extravagant domestic tech: Neuschwanstein, his most advanced architectural fantasy, was supplied with telephone lines, electric lighting and a lift that made the dining table descend to the floor below, to spare him the sight of servants clearing away the soup plates.
This castle was also unfinished when Ludwig died, suddenly and mysteriously, in June 1886. A throne room had been built, but contained no throne. A toilet with an automatic flush, however, had already been fitted. How sane. And how sanitary.
Dirt sticks Mussolini
In 1912 Angelica Balabanoff, editor of the socialist newspaper Avanti!, took a promising young journalist out to lunch and offered him a job as her deputy. She had one condition: “You must wash more often. How many times do I have to tell you? Soap and water, Mussolini, soap and water!”
Perhaps the advice sank in. A decade and a party later, Mussolini had founded his own personality cult, imposing himself on the Italian public through posters, radio broadcasts, newspaper columns – and bathroom toiletries.
Bars of scented soap were cast in his image. But as an Italian caricaturist Enrico Gianeri noted in his 1945 book “Cesare di Cartapesta” (“The Papier-Mâché Caesar”), blocks of fat and glycerine are not a stable medium for Fascist propaganda. “After use the aggressive jawbones wilted,” he recalled, with some satisfaction, “the face slimmed down, the heavy eyelids slid onto the gaze of the bloody fool.”
Rank and vile Adolf Hitler
One of the most persistent myths about Hitler is that he was fastidious about his personal hygiene. There’s no evidence for this. Eye-witnesses tended to mention his bad teeth, bad breath, bad table manners and flatulence.
There is a notable photo of his Munich bathroom. The photographer is David E. Scherman of Life magazine. The subject is also a photographer: Lee Miller, war reporter for Vogue. There’s theatre in this shot: Hitler’s photo sits by the side of the bath Miller is sitting in, the image of the owner as diminutive peeper; a small sculpture of an Aryan nude is perched next to what looks like an intercom system.
A grubby mark and pair of clumpy boots on the bathmat, though, are the real statement. Miller and Scherman had spent the previous few hours at Dachau concentration camp. That is the dirt of the Holocaust on those boots, trodden into the domestic space of its architect. The date is important: April 30th 1945. As Lee washed the horrors of the day from her body, Hitler hunkered down beneath the pavement of Berlin. That evening he put a gun to his head and blew out his brains, leaving others to clean up after him.
Rock bottom Idi Amin
Operation Entebbe is a dramatic symbol of the political violence of the 1970s. In June 1976 a coalition of German and Palestinian terrorists hijacked a plane from Tel Aviv and held the passengers hostage in a disused building at Entebbe airport – with the full approval of Idi Amin, president of Uganda. A 1,000-strong group of Israeli Defence Force commandos raided the airport and rescued all but four of the 106 hostages.
People can’t stop making movies about it. (There have been four since 1977.) None of the film treatments, however, dramatises the weirdest piece of collateral damage: the destruction of a 6,000kg marble lavatory destined for the presidential bathroom in Kampala.
In September 1976 this replacement – and its matching bidet – were ready for despatch from manufacturers in France. Press reports claimed that the toilet was modelled on one that belonged to Louis XVI. To the extent that Louis XVI had four fingers and a thumb on his right hand, this was correct. The conveniences of Versailles were few and far between – and wooden.
Blood bath Nicolae Ceausescu
Nicolae Ceausescu, who ruled Romania with an iron fist from 1967 to 1989, is rarely associated with the smallest room. The People’s House, the parliament building in Bucharest, is the world’s second-biggest building: 4m square feet of pointless, lunatic giganticism with public rooms too vast to serve any imaginable function, except perhaps a bicycle race or an exhibition of submarines.
His private villa in the city’s Primaverii district is constructed on a more human scale. (It has been open to the public since March 2016, when it was still tended by the same pair of housekeepers who had mopped up after the Ceausescus.) The taps, towel-rails and toilet-roll holders are gold. Even the sink trap glows. The mosaic-work in the shower asks us to think of Byzantium.
Yet like so many authoritarian bathrooms, this one calls back to pre-revolutionary France. As Ceausescu and his wife Elena gazed at themselves in these Murano mirrors, did they never think of the bloody end met by Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette? Tour guides today don’t dwell on the fate of the villa’s occupants, shot by firing squad on Christmas Day in 1989. But visitors might, as they pad around in those blue plastic shoe-covers so necessary at heritage sites and crime scenes.
Sink fund Mobutu Sese Seko
“The chief is the chief,” said Mobutu Sese Seko in 1991. “He is the eagle who flies high and cannot be touched by the spit of the toad.” The occasion? Sacking his prime minister, Étienne Tshisekedi, who had tried to stop him helping himself to the country’s national bank.
This is what Mobutu spent it on: a complex of palaces looming over his hometown of Gbadolite, a modest settlement near the border with the Central African Republic that, in the 1970s, suddenly found itself in possession of an airstrip so big it could accommodate Mobutu’s use of Concorde as a charter plane. You’ll have to imagine the opulence. Like the other residences, the Eagle’s Nest Palace was stripped and looted in the civil war that toppled his regime in 1997.
Don’t imagine anything obviously African. The Democratic Republic of Congo (then known as Zaire) has a rich aesthetic tradition, but Mobutu preferred Monet, Renoir and cognac served by white-gloved butlers. No pre-looting description of this bathroom seems to have survived, but there are better accounts of the whirlpool tub in Mobutu’s holiday home on Lake Kivu. A sky-blue colour scheme. Bottles of aftershave clustered on the tiles. Stereo speakers in the ceiling. Endless running water. An environment more suited to a toad than an eagle.
Ba’ath room Saddam Hussein
Perhaps it’s easier to contemplate the vulgarity of a dictator than compute the depth of his atrocities. The rule of Saddam Hussein brought poison gas to Halabja and torture to Abu Ghraib prison. (The latter with a notorious American epilogue.) Yet the 2003 invasion of Iraq by a US-led coalition was followed by a critical barrage against its deposed president’s taste in domestic fixtures and fittings.
In London the Times engaged its design columnist Lucia van der Post to deplore Saddam’s bath taps. The Sun printed a shot of its own correspondent sitting on the dictator’s lavatory. (“You loos, Saddam”, ran the caption.) “If a reason to invade Iraq was wanted”, wrote P.J. O’Rourke, an American satirist, considering Saddam’s plastic chandeliers, “felony interior decorating would have done.”
His palace in Tikrit had a three-storey white marble and mother-of-pearl staircase with gold balusters. His bathrooms, by contrast, make more modest photographs. A gold-trimmed bidet in Basra; this step-up bath in Baghdad. Not everything stayed bolted down: one of his sinks ended up in the Old Court House Museum in Vicksburg, Mississippi, installed in the men’s room.
Fake loos Viktor Yanukovych
Most despots favour new-builds: mushroom mansions in unfingermarked marble. Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president who shored up his power with the muscle of the Berkut secret police, was happy to take the lease on Mezhyhirya, a former monastery that had been the summer residence of his communist predecessors.
He did make a few alterations. A little lake with a replica galleon. A golf course. A medium-sized ostrich enclosure. But when he was ousted in 2014, Yanukovych was the victim of a sanitary calumny: a photograph purporting to show his lavatory went viral. A weird armchair-like construction set with mirrored tiles, two sculpted lion heads and a plain white plastic seat.
It wasn’t actually his. Mezhyhirya is now open to the public as the Museum of Corruption. Visitors can inspect the stuffed lions, suits of armour, snakeskin plant-pots and Steinway piano. The bathroom, with its oak-topped urinal, and a bidet and lavatory set mounted on little golden feet, may prove a disappointment.
Convenience truths Donald Trump
When Donald Trump vacated the White House in January, Mark Ruffalo led Hollywood’s chorus of raspberries. “The Golden Toilet Presidency is over,” declared the actor. Fact check: Trump never owned one.
Although his private jet has 24-carat plated bathroom fixtures and his Manhattan penthouse looks like King Midas turned up drunk at Barbie Versailles, as far we know Trump has never defecated through a burnished ring of precious metal. Yet the idea attended the 45th presidency like a bad smell.
The notion came into being via the manufacturers of novelty sand-timers and a man from Philadelphia who, during Trump’s visit to London in 2019, placed a 16ft automaton of the seated president at the base of Nelson’s Column. Why? Blame the Guggenheim.
In 2017 Trump asked if he could borrow Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 painting “Landscape with Snow” from the museum. The Guggenheim’s director, Nancy Spector, declined, but pinged back a counter-offer: “America”, a “participatory sculpture” by Maurizio Cattelan. This was a fully-functional 18-carat gold toilet, worth $6m and pre-used by 100,000 Guggenheim visitors.
The White House passed (as it were). The sculpture’s whereabouts is now unknown: it was installed at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, from where it was stolen in September 2019. The image, however, remains firmly plumbed into the cultural consciousness.
