Everyone gets to the point of saturation and so it is with the scandals of late; as much fun as it is, it inevitably becomes too much. So, I ran. Most often I run to The Alexander Palace, sometimes to the John Singer Sargent Gallery. Last night I ran to The Imperial Reichs College of Princes and Counts of The Holy Roman Empire.

It's not the most romantic retreat to find solace in, but it is a fascinating look at one of the oldest institutions in Europe revived in recent years. (I have always had anachronistic tendencies, but don't tell my pages.)

While dilly-dallying on the site, I noticed the name of Prince Albert von Thurn und Taxis under "HEREDITARY POST MASTER GENERAL OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE" and remembered he was listed as the youngest billionaire on Forbes list. Then my mind let out one of those sighs of the past and I thought of his mother, Gloria.

Gloria had married Prince Johannes von Thurn und Taxis, a rather scandalous aristocrat 34 year older, but Gloria stole the show. After producing two daughters and finally an heir, Gloria dazzled the New York of the Go-Go Eighties. She came from a noble, but impoverished, family in Germany which had lost everything to the Soviets (her mother was a Szechenyi, the same Magyar noble family Gladys Vanderbilt married into). The NY press dubbed her "The Punk Princess", but we knew her as "Gloria TNT" because John Fairchild and Diana Vreeland said so, and we believed EVERYTHING they said, then. ("W" reported Gloria once interrupted her husband when a toast he was making dissolved into incoherent rambling with, "And, please thank my husband for his Post Modern toast.") We loved her.

Prince Johannes died in 1991 when Albert was just 8, and the prevailing thought was that she would squander the family fortune. It was a fortune begun in the 15th Century in the form of a postal service. It was so efficient and effective that rulers over the centuries realized it's value and awarded title after title until the von Thurn und Taxis were, indeed, HEREDITARY POST MASTERS GENERAL OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. Times and wars came and went, but the mail had to get through and the family diversified enough to weather all. They acquired vast tracts of land, mountains, and forests in Germany.

Johannes had not taken the effort to shield his son's inheritance from German inheritance taxes and a huge debt of 350 million dollars was due. Gloria (TNT) took over, fired her husband's financial team, and cleaned her attic. This was the attic of a 500 room castle and she sold thousands of family heirlooms, particularly the silver, to pay off the debt. When asked why and how she could do such a thing, Gloria replied, "Albert can always go out and buy a silver soup tureen. He can't go out and buy a forest." Today, she is credited with saving the fortune and, according to Business Week, that 2 billion dollar trust returns a healthy 10% per year. She still lives with her three children in that 500-room castle, although they have many other homes around the world. Still under fifty, she leads a rather sedate, aristocratic life, no longer a "Punk"; but I would bet she still is dynamite.