THE SAVIOR OF CALUMET

In bluegrass country, a mysterious Polish aviation mogul named Henryk de Kwiatkowski is the horsey set's hero for bailing out legendary Calumet Farm. But who is this self-styled friend of kings, whose extravagant tales and beautiful American-born second wife have made him a figure of myth and speculation wherever he goes? BOB COLACELLO reports

BOB COLACELLO

A month after he'd Learjetted into Lexington, Kentucky, from his Lyford Cay, Bahamas, base and plunked down $17 million in cash at a courtf ordered auction for the fabled but bankrupt Calut met Farm, rescuing the onetime home of eight Kentucky Derby winners from the threat of development as a theme park, golf course, or subdivision, and vowing not to change "a speck of grass" on its 800 acres, Henryk de Kwiatkowski flew back into town for the first race in which one of his horses was running under the Calumet colors, devil's red and blue. The horse, named Lech, after the Polish-bom de Kwiatkowski's friend President Walesa of Poland, lost. It was the only off moment in a day that otherwise was all about what Henryk de Kwiatkowski, a self-made aviation tycoon, horseman, and investor said to be worth close to a half-billion debt-free dollars, likes best: winning.

"Welcome to Kentucky! Thank you for saving Calumet!" the peach-haired usherettes at Keeneland racetrack gushed when de Kwiatkowski, still coltish in his late 60s, even though he walks with a cane since shattering his left leg in a polo fall last year, arrived with his prize second wife, former model Barbara Allen. Lunch in the private Lafayette Room was on the house, as has been every restaurant meal he's taken in Kentucky since buying Calumet. (The night of the auction, jockeys at a Lexington bar saluted his entrance by standing on their chairs and shouting, "Viva Henryk, the king of Calumet!") Sportive young women in khakis asked for his autograph, baizeblazered grandees lined up to shake his hand, reporters and photographers milled around him in the paddock, and Waddell Hancock, the flinty matriarch of aristocratic Claiborne Farm, declared him "the hero of the Bluegrass." By the end of the day, de Kwiatkowski was so euphoric that he decided that Lech's loss was actually a win—because the horse that had come in first, Shudanz, had been sired by his stallion Danzig Connection, thus adding $100,000 in value to each of its 40 syndicated shares, half of which he holds. "That's $2 million to me,'' he calculated. "Ha!"

"When I met him some 20 years ago," a Park Avenue hostess notes, "he had the dough, but not the de.

Two weeks later, at the Kentucky Derby, the new owner of Calumet was being hailed as a hero by another local matriarch, Mary Bingham, of the Louisville Courier-Journal dynasty, and the V.I.P.'s lining up to congratulate him ranged from Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady and Kentucky governor Brereton Jones to the horse-buying rap star Hammer and his brother Juice. When Marylou Vanderbilt Whitney, the de Kwiatkowskis' hostess for Derby weekend, led them onto a balcony facing the racetrack's fast-food courtyard and hollered as elegantly as she could in her Scaasi frock, "This is Mr. and Mrs. Calumet," the betting crowd below went wild.

But then, the betting crowd has been waiting for good news since 1987, when prices for horses started declining at least as rapidly as prices for art. "Henryk de Kwiatkowski's purchase of Calumet has created more enthusiasm in the entire horse industry than anything in recent years, ' ' James E. Bassett III, chairman of the Keeneland racecourse and auction business, told me. "When he purchased the farm, he got a five-minute standing ovation from about 3,000 people."

"In unison," said Henryk de Kwiatkowski when he told me the same story. "Without any cue. On their tiptoes."

He added that he had already spumed several quick-profit offers for the farm, including one for "more than $30 million." He said that his horses were on their way to Kentucky from England, Ireland, and France, and that his decorator, Sister Parish—the old-money octogenarian who has also done the de Kwiatkowskis' residences in Lyford Cay, Palm Beach, and Greenwich, Connecticut, as well as their Beekman Place apartment in New York—was "under orders" to have Calumet's white-columned manor house finished in time for the big ball that he and Barbara are planning to give next May. The mintjulep set is already astir with anticipation: Henryk, they whisper, sometimes with a wink, is going to invite his friend Queen Elizabeth II.

Fifteen minutes after I arrived at his house in Lyford Cay for a long weekend, Henryk de Kwiatkowski let it drop over drinks with his houseguests that he had "personally" delivered AWACS to King Fahd of Saudi Arabia ("a very able man") and that he had "personally" spray-painted over the TWA logo on the plane that the Israelis used in the 1975 Entebbe rescue mission ("I supplied the plane because I don't believe in hijacking"). One afternoon, he told me that the Shah of Iran had been a very close friend. ("I lived in the Saadabad Palace with him.") He also said that President Kennedy had offered him an ambassadorship to any Eastern European country he wanted. ("I was in Hyannis Port playing touch football with Stas Radziwill and Lee and everybody.") That evening, he told dinner guests that President Nixon had offered him an ambassadorship to any Eastern European country he wanted. ("Nixon said he liked the way I think.") Both times, he gave the same explanation for turning down a diplomatic post: after valiantly serving in the Polish wing of Britain's Royal Air Force during World War II, he said, he was reduced to making speeches on Hyde Park Comer protesting British employment restrictions on Poles, and one day he attracted the attention of the future Canadian prime minister Lester Pearson, who was so impressed that he later arranged for a special act of Parliament granting him Canadian citizenship. According to de Kwiatkowski, both Kennedy and Nixon wanted to propose an act of Congress making him an American citizen, but he felt that would be ungrateful to Canada.

It is stories like these, told at great length and frequently, that have created an aura of myth and controversy around Henryk de Kwiatkowski—and that lead people who have sat through them a few times to call him everything from "a bit of a boaster" to "one of the biggest bullshitters that ever walked on earth."

A retired R.A.F. officer living in Lyford Cay will march out of a room rather than listen to any more of de Kwiatkowski's stories of his wartime heroics as a fighter pilot, which the officer considers grossly exaggerated. This man and others even suggest the possibility, though they provide no proof, that de Kwiatkowski has assumed the identity and war record of a dead brother or cousin, or of another airman with the same name—a suggestion which de Kwiatkowski dismisses as ridiculous. Prince Michael of Bourbon-Parma, who, like de Kwiatkowski, is in the business of selling planes to kings, challenged de Kwiatkowski to his face when he started regaling socialites at a Palm Beach party with anecdotes about the Shah. Many wonder where the "de" in his name comes from, as the Romancelanguage prefix indicating an aristocratic background doesn't exist in Polish. ' 'When I met him some 20 years ago, ' ' a Park Avenue hostess notes, "he had the dough, but not the 'de.' " He insists he was bom de Kwiatkowski, explaining that his grandfather Frenchified the family name after fighting under Napoleon.

"He's a Walter Mitty character," says a London friend. "He makes up stories and believes them. It's a labyrinth of truths and nontruths. You get lost listening to him." Another friend calls him "the Baron Munchhausen of Lyford Cay." Novelist Jeffrey Archer spent two entire days tape-recording him for his 1979 best-seller, Kane and Abel, which is about a poor Pole who miraculously escapes from a Siberian prisoner-of-war camp, as de Kwiatkowski maintains he did, and goes on to make a fortune in America. "They're bloody good stories, and he's a bloody good storyteller," Archer says. "When you're writing fiction, it's beside the point whether something's true or not."

In de Kwiatkowski's version, the Shah wrote a $90 niil]ion check to him on the spot.

"Can you imagine a white-tie ball at Calumet? The Queen would arrive, with her son— it would give such a kick to the industry."

For a nonfiction writer, verifying de Kwiatkowski's stories is not an easy task, partly because so many of the supporting players—he always casts himself in the lead—are heads of state, or dead, or both. But the fact of the matter, I think it's safe to say after interviewing nearly 60 Polish, British, Canadian, Iranian, Bahamian, and American business, military, social, equestrian, and royal sources, is that there is much more truth to Henryk de Kwiatkowski's tales than his way of telling them would lead one to believe.

One story, for example, that always causes eyebrows to rise is de Kwiatkowski's claim that he flew the Shah of Iran into and out of exile in Rome when Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq briefly seized power in 1953. Washington Times editor Amaud de Borchgrave was the Newsweek correspondent covering the Shah's return to Teheran. "I went on the plane after it landed and interviewed the crew. Henryk was the pilot. Or at least he was in charge of the plane."

De Kwiatkowski has always said that this service stood him in good stead with the Shah 20 years later, when he pulled off the deal that put him into the big time, selling nine used 747s from TWA to Iran for $183 million and earning a $20 million commission. Though he negotiated that deal directly with the Shah over a late-night backgammon game at Saadabad Palace, several exiled Iranian courtiers say that it is highly unlikely that de Kwiatkowski actually "lived" or stayed in the palace of His Imperial Majesty. It is possible that he spent a few nights somewhere in the vast royal compound. As Farah Diba, the former Queen of Iran, told me in Paris, "We did not have houseguests. We had guesthouses."

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"He takes a kernel of truth, which is already pretty interesting," de Borchgrave says, "and then embellishes it, sometimes to the point of casting doubt on a story that is basically true."

"I suspect that underneath the phenomenal success," says one of de Kwiatkowski's oldest friends, Baron Lyssardt Hoyningen-Huene, "he has a deep inferiority complex. That's why he engages in such extravagant rodomontades at times. But I don't want to diminish in any way his real accomplishments. All this bragging does not detract one iota from the fact that Henryk is an extraordinary man. ''

"I have done all these things," Henryk de Kwiatkowski is telling me. "If I say I didn't do them, to be humble, it would be a lie." He is sitting on a beach chair, facing the calm turquoise bay in front of his white-latticed villa in Lyford Cay, the high-security private enclave favored by rich tax exiles and international retirees, which is situated on the opposite end of New Providence Island from grotty, touristy Nassau. To his right, perched on the point where the bay meets the Atlantic, is the splendid pink house owned by the Count and Countess de Ravenel. Down the beach to his left are the part-time homes of Stavros Niarchos, George Livanos, and Julio Iglesias. De Kwiatkowski says his property is one of the largest in Lyford Cay, which is true, but it is 3 acres, not 14, as he says.

He is wearing Hermes bathing trunks and a white polo shirt with "H de K" monogrammed in red under a red crest of crossed polo mallets topped by a crown. (The de Kwiatkowski servants address their employers as Mr. and Mrs. de K., and answer the phone "The de K. residence.") He is very tanned, and has a full head of dark hair shot with silver. When he takes off his black-framed reading glasses, which make him look a lot like Felix Rohatyn, and flashes an eager, full-toothed smile, he bears a startling resemblance to illustrations of Genghis Khan.

I ask him to start at the beginning, in Poland. "I was bom in Warsaw," he says. "The age is always a question, which I later on will explain—how they changed it. I was bom in 1926, actually. The actual birth was in Warsaw, but we lived in Poznan—"

Before he can go any further, he is interrupted by a phone call from Ireland, informing him that his horse Gdansk Honor has won his third race in three times out. During the weekend, there will be three more calls announcing that three more de Kwiatkowski horses have come in first, in races in Ireland, in England, and at Aqueduct in New York. Two nights earlier, de Kwiatkowski won $180,000 in 15 minutes at the blackjack table in a Nassau casino, exactly one year to the day, a regular houseguest attested, since the last time he'd visited the same casino, and walked away $220,000 richer. Though his friends, with near unanimity, say he's the luckiest man they've ever met, de Kwiatkowski doesn't see it that way.

"Very few people who say this really know my past," he says. "I'm so unlucky. I've seen so many members of my family disappear. And if there is such a weighing machine, every time I win, I feel that God is adding a little stone, as many stones as are necessary to even it up on the weighing machine."

It is a harrowing personal history—set against the chaos of Eastern Europe and the Middle East during the Second World War—that de Kwiatkowski recounts sitting in the shade of a Caribbean palm tree. He says his father, a Polish cavalry officer, was killed by the Germans when they invaded Poland in 1939. His mother, four older brothers, and older sister suffered "various deaths" during the course of the war. He himself was in school on the morning of the invasion, September 1, 1939, and fled east across Poland with his instructors and schoolmates. "It took us 17 days to get to the border," he says. "And when the Russians came in, we were caught. I received 20 years' hard labor in Siberia at the age of 13."

He adds that he and his schoolmates held off Stalin's tanks with Molotov cocktails for several months before being captured and stuffed into cattle cars, "without clothes, without blankets—nothing, just the warmth of bodies. It was 45 below zero, and every time we stopped, they threw out frozen bodies that didn't survive."

His escape from Camp 54 in Novosibirsk, 1,800 miles east of Moscow, is the piece de resistance of Henryk de Kwiatkowski's war stories, a dramatically detailed saga that takes him most of the afternoon to tell me. It involves a selfless prison doctor who provided him with a few rubles and a hand-drawn map of Central Asia; the sympathetic wife of the chief of the Uzbekistan N.K.V.D. (the precursor of the K.G.B.), who hid him in her compartment on the train out of Siberia; trekking across Kazakhstan on foot, working his way from one Soviet cooperative farm to the next; nearly having his hand cut off for stealing a lemon in a Tashkent bazaar; stowing away in a rat-infested coal container on the boat that took him across the Caspian Sea to Iran; and finally charming his way into the British Embassy in Teheran by blurting out the only English words he knew, a Shakespeare sonnet taught to him by his Anglophile uncle from the Carpathian Mountains. "The man looked at me and thought I was out of my mind," de Kwiatkowski says with a chuckle. He then proceeds to recite Sonnet 29 in its entirety: "When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, / I all alone beweep my outcast state..."

According to de Kwiatkowski, the British transferred him to their base in Khanaquin, Iraq, where he was enrolled in the Royal Air Force. Because he wasn't old enough to fight, he explains, an officer on duty altered his birth date from February 22, 1926, to the same date in 1922. (This was fairly common wartime practice.) His R.A.F. serial number, he says, was 705662.

R.A.F. records, as well as records kept at the Polish Air Force Association and the Polish Institute in London, confirm the outline of de Kwiatkowski's story, though there are some discrepancies. A Henryk Kwiatkowski (no "de") with that serial number and the 1922 birth date was bom in Warsaw; was educated in Lubin, a town near Poznan, from 1928 to 1939; was arrested by the Soviets in Kowel, in eastern Poland, in February 1940; and was sent to a labor camp in Siberia. But these records also show that he was amnestied in April 1942—all Poles in Soviet labor camps were officially amnestied after Germany turned on Russia—and that on April 18, 1942, in the U.S.S.R., he joined the Polish armed forces, which were being reorganized in Kazakhstan by General Wladislaw Anders, and which gradually made their way to the Middle East. He is listed as a cannoneer with the rank of corporal. It should be noted that both the general amnesty for Poles and the formation of the free Polish army were messy, amorphous affairs. Many Soviet commandants refused to release Polish prisoners, and many Poles who eventually secured release papers then wandered around Central Asia for months before connecting with Anders's army. ("That was me," de Kwiatkowski later told me. "I joined the Polish army for a little bit.") His R.A.F. record shows that he enrolled on April 21,

1943, but there is no record of where, or of how he was transported from the Middle East to England. He has always said that it was on a ship called Empress of Canada, which was torpedoed by an Italian submarine off the coast of Sierra Leone in 1943, and that out of some 2,000 passengers he was one of only seven survivors. In reality, there were about 800 survivors.

In interviews he has given over the years to Fortune, Newsweek, and The Greenwich (Connecticut) Review, de Kwiatkowski has claimed that he flew Spitfire fighter planes along with two of his brothers, who were killed in action; that he was a courier for the Polish underground and parachuted into Warsaw and was evacuated by submarine; that he flew support missions on D-day and won a Distinguished Flying Cross. "When five planes shoot at you and they all miss," he told Newsweek in 1982, "that's not bravery. It's destiny."

He did not repeat these claims in his interview with me, saying only, "I flew as an observer, an air gunner, during the war. In Gatwick Airport, after the war, I got a pilot's license." R.A.F. records list him as a wireless operator/airman who rose to the rank of warrant officer, the highest rank attainable for a noncommissioned officer. These records indicate that he was posted in England throughout his service, mostly at training bases for radio operators and air gunners but not for pilots. According to these records, he never saw action, and on D-day, June 6,

1944, he was stationed at an R.A.F. training base in Morecambe, Lancashire. He was given three standard-issue medals (War Medal, Defense Medal, Air Force Medal), but not the D.F.C., which was awarded only to commissioned officers. (Another Henryk Kwiatkowski, who flew bomber planes and died in Poland in 1990, did get the Distinguished Flying Medal; there was also a Henryk Kwiatkowski who flew Spitfires, was awarded the Polish Victory Cross, and was shot down over Berlin in 1944; there are five Henryk Kwiatkowskis in R.A.F. records, and 13 Kwiatkowskis in total. "Kwiatkowski is like Smith in Poland," says a Polish Institute secretary.)

In our interview, de Kwiatkowski also stated that during the war he had been "used" by M.I.5, the British internal intelligence service, as an "interpreter" of Polish, Russian, and German, and that after the war he worked with it "for a short period during the partition of India and Pakistan," translating Urdu. (He also speaks French, Spanish, and Italian, as well as "cocktail party" Portuguese and Farsi.) Such a connection would help explain how he happened to be involved in the Shah's 1953 restoration, which has since been conclusively linked to the C.I.A.

When I phoned him a few weeks after our interview to ask him to clarify his war service, he reiterated that he had been an "air gunner." And wireless operator? "The radio training I got for underground-type operations. . . . Whether I then went [with] M.I.5 or M.I.6," he said, referring to another British intelligence agency, "I am not going to say. I am not running for office. I don't have to sell myself to anybody."

De Kwiatkowski says both Kennedy and Nixon wanted to propose an act of Congress making him an American citizen.

This same sort of haughty impatience, at once annoying and vulnerable, comes through in perhaps the most revealing comments he made during that long afternoon on his Bahamas beach: "I've done so many things that are impossible for me to discuss with the average person. A person who is suspicious—You did this? You did that? You done the other thing? I cannot transmit to ignorant people. If I would have been an ordinary boy, without being subject to war, oppressions, and all those things that happened in my lifetime, I would have been like anybody else. Gone to school, earned a living—I don't know what I would have done. But circumstances threw at me all these events—and the desire to survive and to excel in every field of competition. You must remember, in my country, the moment I left my home, I had to compete to live: I had to compete to escape, I had to compete to catch the last seat on a truck when I was running away, I had to compete not to be killed by people dedicated to destroying me. I was an enemy to everyone, because my mother was German—Austrian, actually—so I was an enemy to the Poles. I was an enemy to the Germans because my father was Polish. So it was very difficult for me to justify myself at the early age of 14—who I am."

Yet he rejects the suggestion that he might have felt like an outsider: "Never, never. Under no circumstances! On the contrary, I felt like I was conquering everything. Completely! I walked into a Russian camp and I felt, I will survive! I walk into a meeting of a board of directors and I feel I will mold it in such a way that the result will be what is desirable. When I say competing, it is the type of competition that gave me tremendous confidence, I don't know from where, but. . .1 walk in, I feel absolutely at home. Absolutely! I feel in control. And not only at home: I feel I am the head of the household. ' '

People who know Henryk superfidaily might not like him," says Jean-Pierre Fraysse, a French financial executive who worked closely with de Kwiatkowski in the late 70s and early 80s. "He gives the wrong impression: Who is this guy telling these unbelievable war stories? But having known him intimately for five years, I like him very much. He's a great achiever. The money he has made is real. And whereas others who made money in the 80s have lost it, he has kept it. People may look at him as a madman, but if you look at the bottom line, Henryk is still around and thriving, which proves that he has been very clever and very consistent. ' '

De Kwiatkowski says he got his start in the aviation business in Pakistan after the war, ferrying Muslim pilgrims to Jidda from Karachi for a tiny airline which eventually evolved into Pakistan International Airlines. (Hence his knowledge of Urdu.) He has also said in previous interviews that he had a five-year scholarship to study aeronautical engineering at Kings College, Cambridge, but he admitted to me that he merely took R.A.F.-sponsored courses for ex-servicemen in Cambridge and received "an Oxford-Cambridge school certificate." In 1952 he immigrated to Montreal and took a $35-aweek engineering job with the Canadian subsidiary of Pratt & Whitney, the manufacturer of airplane engines. Although he told me that he completed a B.S. degree in aeronautical engineering at McGill University in Montreal, the registrar has no record of him.

Baroness Meriel de Posson, who in 1952 was a college-age Canadian heiress sailing home from England for summer vacation, met de Kwiatkowski on the boat. "He managed to find a way to get himself up into first class," she recalls. "He had rather nice clothes, so no one noticed. Only two sets, black-tie and blue blazer with gray flannels, but that was all he needed. He obviously had made very good connections in England, because he showed me letters of introduction from all kinds of people, including some to my own mother, Mrs. Charles MacLean. He used to come to dinner on Saturday nights and have to take the airplane grease from his job from under his fingernails. He kept saying in those days, 'I'm going to be a millionaire one day, you wait and see.' "

De Posson's cousin Nelly Burke adds, "He was traveling in the highest social circles in Montreal. He threw himself right in. He was very European, very charming, kissing hands, clicking his heels, a real sort of ladies' man."

De Kwiatkowski shared a small apartment in the right part of town with two other Continental bachelors in their 20s, Emilio Gioia, now a New York realestate developer, and Gioia's cousin Count Roberto Corinaldi. He was already impressing party guests with his sensational war stories. "One day I got a new car," Emilio Gioia says. "And he arrived home, walking slowly from his Pratt & Whitney job. He said, 'What a great car.' I said, 'I know you have a dinner date tonight, but please don't take my car and tell your friends it's yours.' By dinnertime, he had convinced me to loan it to him—that's how good a salesman he was even then. And the next day I was in my car, and his girlfriend asked me, 'What are you doing in Ricky's car?'

"When I met him, everybody called him Ricky," Gioia explains. "Then he insisted on Henry. Then it became Henryk. Then it became Henryk with a capital 'De.' And then with a small 'de'—for aristocracy."

His career took off even faster than his name. In 1957 he was promoted to the Hartford, Connecticut, headquarters of United Aircraft, the parent company of Pratt & Whitney. Three years later, he was based in Paris and making $80,000 a year as head of European sales for United Aircraft. In 1962 he started his own company, Kwiatkowski Aircraft, Inc., with $3,000 in capital, a secretary, and an office at 30 Rockefeller Center. He later created a subsidiary, Intercontinental Aircraft, in Nassau, the Bahamas, but the two offices between them have never had more than 26 employees on the payroll. Over the years, Henryk de Kwiatkowski says, he has brokered more than $2 billion in sales, earning himself well over $100 million in commissions alone.

To put it simply, he created the usedairplane business. His first major deal involved selling a dozen used DC-6s that Scandinavian Airlines System wanted to get rid of (so that it could buy new DC-8s) to Aeromexico and Varig Brasilian Airlines, and then unloading Vang's fleet of used DC-3s on Aereolineas Argentineas. De Kwiatkowski, of course, doesn't like the term "used airplane." "Whether a plane is new or old," he stresses, "it has the same certificate of airworthiness. So each time the plane is delivered, as far as I'm concerned, it is new."

He also came up with "an entirely novel concept of leasing aircraft," notes his old friend Baron Lyssardt HoyningenHuene, an international banker based in Nassau. "He guaranteed to buy a certain number of airplanes off the drawing board from Boeing, and then put together a 15year-lease arrangement with Varig and other airlines which covered his payments to Boeing. At the end of the lease, he owns the planes with their residual value, free and clear of any mortgages. He then converts them to midair refuelers or cargo planes, or sells them to Third World airlines."

De Kwiatkowski adds, ''"'That was a stroke of luck, that I happened to have chosen Boeing. Because if I did it with Convair, which came out with the 880 line at the same time as the Boeing 707, but was not as successful, I would be broke."

His greatest coup, the $183 million deal with the Shah in 1975 for nine used TWA 747s which were converted to cargo planes for the Imperial Iranian Air Force, combined de Kwiatkowski's hands-on business savvy and extraordinary salesmanship with his willingness to use everything from his war stories to his society connections to make a sale. According to his Lyford Cay neighbor Sibilla Clark, sometime before de Kwiatkowski went to Iran he asked her if he might drop by for a drink with her houseguest, Lord Mountbatten, whom he said he had served under in Southeast Asia during the war. (He told me that he had first crossed paths with Mountbatten at the time of the separation of Pakistan and India, when Mountbatten was viceroy.) "He came for half an hour and stayed for two and a half hours," Sibilla Clark says. "Lord Mountbatten was so impressed by him and his stories—Henryk had done his homework; he knew everything Mountbatten had done in Southeast Asia—that he agreed to write a letter of introduction to the Shah."

De Kwiatkowski says that this letter was to remind the Shah of his 1953 service, and that a friendship he had struck up with the Shah's twin sister, Princess Ashraf, when she visited Pakistan in the late 40s, also helped pave the way to his backgammon games with the King of Kings. (Princess Ashraf would neither confirm nor deny this.)

Amaud de Borchgrave, who was close to the Shah and heard the story from toplevel Iranians and Americans in Teheran at the time, says, "The Shah took a shine to him, and they played backgammon two or three nights. Henryk very astutely waited for the Shah to ask him what he was doing in Teheran, and then told him, 'As a matter of fact, Your Majesty, I'm leaving tomorrow morning, because no one in your government is interested in something that can give you supremacy over the entire Persian Gulf.' He knew the Shah's principal geopolitical concern was having a quick response to any crisis in the Gulf states, from Bahrain to Oman, and that the Iranians had Hovercraft transport helicopters, which gave them a 24-hour-response capability. Henryk convinced him that the converted 747s would give him a one-hour-response capability. The Shah summoned the airforce head of procurement in the middle of the night."

In de Kwiatkowski's version, the Shah personally wrote out a $90 million check to him on the spot, which he later endorsed over to TWA. But former queen Farah Diba says, "My husband never wrote a check in his life."

About the same time as this deal, de Kwiatkowski also sold three Continental Airlines 747s to the Iranians for $38 million and two TWA Lockheed L-101 Is to Saudi Arabian Airlines for $55.5 million. (He was, by the way, involved in the 1982 AWACS sale to the Saudis, according to Jean-Pierre Fraysse, who was advising him at the time.) His total commission on the three transactions, plus a related provisioning contract with the Iranians, came to nearly $30 million. The Wall Street Journal reported the shock in the aviation industry over de Kwiatkowski's unheard-of 11 percent commission, but he asserted in signed notarized statements to TWA that no bribes or kickbacks had been paid to Iranian or Saudi officials, and TWA head L. Edwin Smart justified the commission by saying, "The sale was a turning point in TWA's fortunes.'' It was also a turning point in de Kwiatkowski's fortunes, and not only on the most obvious level: at the time, he was reportedly TWA's largest individual shareholder, with about a 9 percent stake.

He is no stranger to high-risk investing. In 1986, Fortune reported, de Kwiatkowski invested "much of his considerable wealth in currency futures, betting that the dollar would rise." It didn't, and by late 1990 he was "down some $300 million" (and had developed a mortifying case of shingles). He was literally saved by Desert Storm, the success of which sent the dollar temporarily rocketing. He is now said to be a major stockholder in Texaco; he told me that he also has "taken a large position" in United Airlines, G.M., Ford, and Chrysler. "I don't play the stock market. I invest in the United States' future. A great deal. And I've never been on margin. Margin means sleepless nights. . . . There's no one I owe five cents!"

The same year that he went into business for himself, Henryk de Kwiatkowski married his first wife, Lynne Sawdon, a sporty blonde in her 20s who friends say looked like Julie Christie. He courted her by flying her to Acapulco, with a hired mariachi band in tow, on a used DC-8 he was delivering to Aeronaves de Mexico, and wed her a few months later in Rio de Janeiro, from where he was delivering a used DC-3 a day to Buenos Aires (and returning every night on a commercial flight). They had been introduced by her stepfather, Paul W. Williams, a senior partner in Cahill, Gordon, Reindel & Ohl, the Wall Street law firm that represented United Aircraft, and an influential Republican fund-raiser and former New York State Supreme Court judge.

In 1964, Henryk and Lynne de Kwiatkowski bought a capacious duplex facing the East River in the best building on Beekman Place, opening one bedroom at a time as their six children were bom in rapid succession. The de Kwiatkowskis' apartment had been owned by a descendant of Harriet Beecher Stowe's; with typical de Kwiatkowski luck they found some of her manuscripts and correspondence sitting on a shelf. "I donated it to a university," he says, "and got a $200,000 tax deduction!" They also bought Joan Crawford's beach house in Westhampton, Long Island, and found a very early Farmer's Almanac behind a beam: another donation, another deduction. The Lyford Cay house, called Serendip Cove, was bought in 1974 from a New York investor de Kwiatkowski had met at a charity ball at the Waldorf-Astoria. The investor needed money before the stock exchange closed at three the next afternoon, because he had to make a margin call; de Kwiatkowski says they wrote out the purchase agreement on their Waldorf place cards. He paid $350,000; today the house is worth about $6 million.

Cielo won seven races in a row, and de Kwiatkowski syndicated him for $36.4 million.

Old family friends suggest that it was Lynne who first took an interest in the horse business, but it seems almost inevitable that Henryk de Kwiatkowski would have been drawn to the world of bloodlines and thoroughbreds, of derbies and racing colors and Triple Crowns. In August 1975, flush with funds from his Iranian exploits, he jumped into that small and snobbish world with characteristic boldness, turning up in its summer capital, Saratoga, New York, as a houseguest of its then reigning queen, Liz Tippet, and buying five thoroughbreds from old-line horseman John Olin for $2 million. A few years later he took up polo, the sport of kings.

One of the horses he bought from Olin, the two-year-old filly Kennelot, was an instant winner at the track and became a successful broodmare, producing many more winners for de Kwiatkowski. He named his thoroughbred business Kennelot Stables after her, and gave it the colors of the Polish cavalry, red and white, which he says were also the colors of the de Kwiatkowski stables in Poznan. In Saratoga, he hired Olin's former horse trainer, the legendary Woody Stephens, a cantankerous Kentucky native nicknamed "Mr. I" because, an insider explains, "with Woody, it's always 'I this, I that.' Maybe that's why he and Henryk get on so well."

Another shrewd move was the quick and lasting alliance he made with Seth Hancock, the powerful president of the elite Claiborne Farm in Paris, Kentucky, where de Kwiatkowski still keeps his best stallions. (Though they will gradually be moved to Calumet.) "I think Henryk has done a terrific job," says Helen Alexander, a King Ranch heiress and Lexington horse breeder. "He has made quite a bit of money, in a business where many people lose it. He's got good advisers and he lets them do their job. That shows good judgment. It's not just luck."

In 1980, however, against Woody Stephens's advice, de Kwiatkowski paid $150,000 for a "three-legged" colt he thought "looked regal," and named him Conquistador Cielo, after an exclusive aviation club. Two years later Conquistador Cielo astounded the experts by winning seven races in a row, including the Belmont (one of the three American races, along with the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, that make up the Triple Crown), and de Kwiatkowski syndicated him for a then record $36.4 million. De Kwiatkowski won the Belmont again in 1984, with Danzig Connection, a son of Danzig, another horse with a bum leg that he had bought (for $325,000) against the advice of Woody Stephens, and whose 1980 syndication was such a debacle that de Kwiatkowski was stuck with almost half of the 40 shares, even though he had offered them at only $80,000 each. After Danzig Connection's Belmont win, however, and numerous other wins by numerous other Danzig progeny, shares in the sire headed toward heaven: by 1985, they were selling for more than $2.7 million each, and Danzig was worth more than $100 million.

In addition to the enormous sums de Kwiatkowski has collected over the years from syndication sales and stud fees, his horses won $9,454,248 at American racetracks between 1975 and 1991, according to the Daily Racing Form, and untold millions more in European races. In the first four months of this year, horses of his have started in 24 American races, and won 5, placed second in 4, and come in third in 2 more—a phenomenal rate of success. "He always seems to have good fortune," says Polo magazine founder Ami Shinitzky. "In 1986 we had a raffle at our annual awards ceremony in Palm Beach. First prize was a Rolex gold watch. The president of Rolex pulled a name out of the bowl, and lo and behold it was Henryk de Kwiatkowski. And the whole room of 700 people burst out in laughter, because they thought it was a joke."

Today, Prince Charles often rides one of de Kwiatkowski's dozens of Argentinean polo ponies, and de Kwiatkowski owns more than 200 thoroughbreds, including the champion broodmare De la Rose and Danzig, still one of the two most sought-after and expensive sires in the world, with a stud fee of $200,000 per service. He keeps 80 of his racehorses in training, at an estimated cost of $2 million a year, which doesn't quite put him in the league of Dubai's ruling al-Maktoum brothers, who have more than 1,000 horses in training, or of the Aga Khan and Gulfstream chief Allen Paulson, with more than 200 each. But he's right up there with Australia's Robert Sangster (100), Paul Mellon (70), Stavros Niarchos (50 to 60), and the Queen of England (40 at most).

He has long favored Polish names for his horses—Star of Gdansk, Gdynia, Polonia. But he has also named horses after cities along his escape route from Siberia—Tashkent, Khokand, Samarkand—a fact he pointed out to Raisa Gorbachev while fox-trotting her around the dance floor at a Reagan White House state dinner. "I told her that I had received my education at one of their seats of higher learning. She asked me which one and I said, 'Camp 54, Novosibirsk.' "

And he has named a horse for each of his six children by his first wife: Michelle Mon Amour, Nicole Mon Amour, Arianne Mon Amour, Lulu Mon Amour, Conrad Numero Uno, and Stephan's Odyssey. The last came within a whisker of winning the Kentucky Derby in 1985.

Yet even as his horse business was flourishing, his marriage to Lynne was foundering. They were separated in 1982 and divorced in 1984. Since 1980 he had been spending more and more time with C. Z. Guest, who was introducing him into upper-crusty social circles in New York and Palm Beach and on Long Island, and whose husband, Winston, a venerable figure in the horse-racing and polo worlds, had become increasingly ill and reclusive. There were rumors that de Kwiatkowski might marry C.Z. after Winston Guest died.

But then, in the summer of 1982, landing his helicopter on the lawn of the Cushing-family compound in Newport, Rhode Island, he caught sight of Barbara Allen. She was barbecuing with her pal Minnie Cushing and he was going to a fancy dinner dance at the Astors'. "I said to myself, What a beautifully cut figure. And I was thinking entirely of her while I was at this party," he recalls. "After that, I saw her every day. She had something for me, and I had something for her."

A lithe, dark, sloe-eyed beauty just edging 30, Barbara Tanner Allen was a New Mexico-born daughter of an airforce officer, and a graduate of New York's Finch College. In 1970 she had wed Joseph Allen, a young newsprint heir and contemporary-art collector. When he bought a part interest in Andy Warhol's Interview, she started writing for the magazine, and on assignment met and fell in love with the dashing wildlife photographer Peter Beard, who was romancing Lee Radziwill at the time. They ran off to his farm in Kenya together, precipitating her divorce. After breaking up with Beard two years later, she worked as a model in New York—she was the first woman to wear jeans on the cover of Harper's Bazaar—and became famous for a succession of famous beaux: Greek shipping heir Philip Niarchos, to whom she was engaged for three years; Mercedes-Benz heir Mick Flick; British rock star Bryan Ferry; CBS chairman William Paley.

"The thing about Barbara," says her longtime friend Diane Von Furstenberg, "is that she's not a calculating person. She went out with these men because she found them interesting, and the proof is that she's always walked away emptyhanded." (Philip Niarchos did give her a formidable pair of diamond earrings, one of which she soon lost dancing at Studio 54.)

"She's completely guileless," says Nan Kempner, another old friend. "What you see is what you get. She's very straightforward. She doesn't play games. And I think she's been wonderful for Henryk." For one thing, his second wife is the only person who can cut his war stories short, with an arched eyebrow and a sharp "Henryk!," which he accepts with an indulgent guffaw. "I understand his need to exaggerate," Barbara de Kwiatkowski tells me. "He had to do it all his life to get where he has." His old friend Baroness de Posson adds, "It's like a nervous tic. It's become a habit."

Barbara and Henryk de Kwiatkowski were married in May 1989, at the sprawling stone house he had built for them on a 100-acre property in Greenwich, Connecticut, he had bought from Ivan Lendl, who had bought it from Barbara's first husband. Henryk's best man was his first wife's stepfather, Judge Williams, and Barbara's maid of honor was Bryan Ferry's wife, Lucy. Peter Beard was in attendance, and the other 150 or so guests ranged from Warhol film director Paul Morrissey to Jerry Zipkin. Many guests noted that two of Henryk's daughters wore black. "Well, it was a late-afternoon wedding," Barbara de Kwiatkowski ■says, guilelessly, "so I don't think they meant it as mourning or anything. But then, another one of his daughters wore yellow, which she knew I was going to wear."

De Kwiatkowski has one child with his second wife, Nicholas Alexei, whose godparents are Maria Niarchos (sister of Philip) and Reinaldo Herrera, both longtime friends of Barbara's. And family friends say everyone is getting along much better now. Henryk celebrated last Christmas at Beekman Place with both Lynne and Barbara and all seven children. He is known to be an extremely generous father. For his son Conrad, a not-so-struggling artist, he had pricey decorators Jed Johnson and Alan Wanzenberg convert an old cottage on his Greenwich estate into a handsome skylit studio. His son Stephan, who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in June, was said to get a $15,000 monthly allowance. De Kwiatkowski also likes to take his children wherever he goes, including his two daughters who have married, Michelle to Italian aristocrat Alessandro Corsini and Nicole to Geneva banker Laurent Timonier. Three years ago, the de Kwiatkowskis toured Poland en famille. In Poznan, Henryk received the key to the city and donated advanced medical equipment to the local hospital, and in Gdansk they were "royally received in every aspect," as he puts it, by Lech Walesa, who became so friendly that he pinched the bottom of one of the de Kwiatkowski girls.

And now the de Kwiatkowskis are coming to Kentucky, as the ruling family of the kingdom of Calumet. "Calumet," says an Englishman not prone to exaggeration, "is the acme of good taste. It's like owning a Canaletto or a Bronzino. It's priceless, irreplaceable. It's like a burnished jewel that's been polished again and again. Mar-a-Lago is kitsch in comparison. This is the real thing. Even if you were a light-bulb salesman from Milwaukee, and of course Henryk is much, much more than that, it gives you instant credibility and social elevation."

The first thing you see when you fly into Lexington is Calumet Farm: endless rolling green pastureland crisscrossed with 30 miles of storybook white fences. In addition to the 14-room main house, there are seven other houses, 15 bams, a gazebo, a tree house, a log cabin, one of the best-equipped veterinary clinics in the world, and two swimming pools, one for humans and one for horses.

Established in 1924 by Calumet Baking Powder magnate William Wright, it was the showplace of American thoroughbred breeding and racing for six decades, with eight Kentucky Derby winners, including two Triple Crown winners, Whirlaway and Citation; five Horse of the Year awards; and 2,500 winners of races of all kinds.

During the 50s and 60s, Wright's son's widow, Lucille, and her second husband, Eugene Markey, a Hollywood writer who had been previously married to Joan Bennett, Myma Loy, and Hedy Lamarr, made it a social mecca as well, giving black-tie Kentucky Derby balls that attracted everyone from Elizabeth Arden to John Wayne. But when they died within two years of each other in the early 80s, Wright's granddaughter-in-law, Bertha, turned its management over to her son-in-law J. T. Lundy, who borrowed heavily to finance his ambitious expansion schemes, assuming the 80s boom in horse prices would never end. In 1990 its last great moneymaking stallion, Alydar, died in a freak accident, and by late last year, after 200 horses had been auctioned off for $20 million, there was nothing left but a debt of $127 million and 236 empty oak-paneled stalls.

"I predict that in one year I will break even," de Kwiatkowski declares. "My plan is to make Calumet the most successful breeding and racing farm in the world!" He also plans to make his first Kentucky Derby ball a white-tie affair. "I used to go to the Metropolitan Opera Ball with my father-in-law Paul Williams," he reminisced one night after dinner at Lyford Cay. "I'd come home and not want to undress. . . . Can you imagine giving a white-tie ball at Calumet, with everyone arriving in that foyer with that big chandelier? The Queen would arrive, with her son—it would give such a kick to the industry. That's how I will ask her to come: 'Your Majesty, you will help revive the horse industry if you come.' And I'll invite all my friends, the ones who wish me well and the ones who don't."

His wife is the only person who can cut his war stories short, with an arched eyebrow and a sharp "Henryk!"

De Kwiatkowski shares an English horse trainer, William Hastings-Bass, with the Queen, and in horsey circles she is said to be fond of both Henryk and Barbara de Kwiatkowski. When their paths cross, de Kwiatkowski clicks his heels and kisses the Queen's hand. He has given her a nomination (service) in Danzig, and last year he escorted her on a fourhour tour of Claiborne Farm. "Queen or no queen," he says, "she knows my foals better than I do. She loves nothing more than to see a well-confirmed horse." Or as London society decorator Nicky Haslam states the case, "The Queen likes anybody who talks about things on four legs—that win."

The last time I spoke with Henryk de Kwiatkowski, he was in London, where he spends six weeks every summer, ensconced in a stately suite at Claridge's with Barbara, Nicholas Alexei, and a nanny. He was in fine form. He'd had dinner with his new best friend, Baroness Thatcher, and the Queen had greeted him at Ascot. And he'd been playing polo every day again, despite his doctor's orders, his wife's protests, and the 18-inch steel pin holding his left leg together. His Kennelot polo team, which has included several high-goal Argentinean stars as well as Julian Hipwood, who used to play on Prince Charles's team, costs him about $800,000 a year to maintain, and is the only American team ever to win the World Cup of Deauville. "The Prince was very affectionate with me the other day, about my injury, I mean. And we won three games against Australia, Kerry Packer's team, including Kerry Packer," de Kwiatkowski said, referring to his arch-rival in polo. "In fact, Packer offered to buy three of my ponies for $10 million. He asked me if I knew how many zlotys that was—you know, Polish money. I said, 'No, and I don't know of any Pole who has declared bankruptcy, but I know of several Australians who have.' "

The news from Kentucky, he said, couldn't be better. He had been asked to be the grand marshal of Lexington's EquiFestival in October, and he'd had another offer, from a German bank, to sell Calumet itself, for $50 million, which he had turned down flat. "I intend to leave it to my grandchildren. I want them to have sufficient roots, that everyone can see, so that they don't have to justify their existence every day, socially or otherwise."

But Calumet doesn't just give legitimacy to Henryk de Kwiatkowski's as-yet-unbom grandchildren. When I first called him to request an interview, a few days after the news of his purchase hit the papers, he told me that he had received a congratulatory phone call from Will Farish, a Texan who owns a leading Kentucky horse farm. "He said some very kind words, and then he said, 'Just a moment, Henryk, the president of the United States would like to say a few words to you.' He was fishing with Bush. And the president gets on the phone—this could only happen in America—and he says to me, 'We need a few more Henryks in this country. A Henryk to turn around the automobile industry. A Henryk to turn around the steel industry. . .' "