Kathie Lee need not apply

Author: By Christine Temin, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, September 7, 1997

Page: F8

Section: Travel

I am not a boat person. The summer when I was 17, I was packed off to Europe on a student ship and was violently seasick all nine days of the Atlantic crossing. The accommodations recalled the galley in some biblical epic film, crammed with slaves. On arriving in Rotterdam, I wired my mother that I wouldn't be attending college in the fall after all, because I wasn't setting foot on the boat to get back. She sent a plane ticket.

It was years before I again ventured onto a boat for any length of time, and this was a happier voyage: a week on the Nile on an elegant little craft called the Sunboat III, where a good quality Oriental carpet padded the gangplank, and the crew met passengers returning from a hot day in the tombs with cold towels and lemonade that they'd spike, if you asked.

This gave me the courage -- if that's the right word -- to sign up for a cruise in the Aegean on the Sea Cloud, in the sure and certain knowledge that I'd have a fireplace, walk-in closet, Chippendale secretary, four-poster bed, and marble bathroom with gold plated faucets in the shape of swans' heads.

All the above came courtesy of Marjorie Merriwether Post, Post Toasties heiress and original owner of the Sea Cloud, which was christened in 1931. Marjorie is my soul sister even if she didn't leave me anything in her will. What a life. At the beginning of the Depression, she spent $1 million on this seagoing pleasure palace with the majestic golden eagle figurehead and the Sevres china that had to be glued in place lest rough seas cause it to break. In ``Heiress,'' his 1978 biography of Post, author William Wright offers insights on the psychology behind Sea Cloud, which allowed Post a degree of luxury even the grandest suite at Claridge's could not match. On her great ship, Post could sail on her own schedule, with her own staff, with her clothes in closets instead of suitcases. She brought her environment with her.

``When they travel, most of the rich are sadly shorn of their ego-bolstering props,'' Wright observes. ``Estates, servants, paintings, racing stables, must be left at home. But with a yacht, the greatest ornament of your wealth is right there with you.'' Which must have been a comfort to Post and her family, including her daughter, the actress Dina Merrill, who spent much of her childhood on the ship, with private tutor in tow.

In the late 1930s, when Post was married to Joseph Davies, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, the Sea Cloud became an extension of the American embassy in Moscow. Post's diplomatic duties included entertaining such dignitaries as the king of Sweden. She liked to give them tours of the Sea Cloud's freezers, a great novelty at the time: Post was an early promoter of frozen food. During World War II, she leased the ship to the US Coast Guard for the patriotic price of $1 a year, having first stripped it of its finery -- not just the furnishings, but the brasses and boiserie as well. After the war, the perfectly preserved decor was put back.

In the 1950s, Post decided that even she couldn't afford the Sea Cloud, with its crew of 72. So she traded it to Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, who gave her a 44-passenger jet in exchange, so she wouldn't have to bother with buying plane tickets. Trujillo's son Ramfis used the yacht to woo the likes of Kim Novak and Zsa Zsa Gabor.

The Sea Cloud had several other owners before it suffered the indignity of being mothballed in Panama. There, in the late 1970s, a group of businessmen in search of a majestic vessel for adventurous cruises happened upon the ship. They bought and restored her, and the world's largest privately owned four-masted bark was back in business. Since 1987, the captain of the ship has been Lowell resident Richard Shannon, a former instructor at the US Coast Guard Academy and an authority on tall ships, a man whose calm, no-nonsense presence inspires confidence.

In Sea Cloud's original staterooms, portholes are the only clue you're on a boat rather than in a sumptuous house. Even the mizzenmast that cuts through a hallway is disguised as a white column. Post's own bedroom is done up in ivory and gold, with wedding cake plaster work. Across the hall is the cabin whose original occupant was Post's second husband, stockbroker E. F. Hutton. His room is decidedly masculine, paneled in dark woods.

Nowadays, life aboard the Sea Cloud approximates the glory days of Post's reign. The ship is a civilized anachronism that avoids all the things I don't want on a cruise: bingo, floor show, eight meals a day, Kathie Lee. The closest my cruise mates came to mutiny was complaining that the dress code for dinner was too casual. So it was upgraded, and all those jackets, ties, and silk dresses everyone had brought along were worn.

Each evening while Sea Cloud's 60 passengers eat dinner, the crew leaves the next day's schedule in the cabins, starting with early morning coffee and tea for those diehards who rise with the sun. The only mandatory activity is the lifeboat drill, in which an elegant young second officer demonstrated how to jump overboard. ``You really just step off,'' she said. Otherwise, activities are conversation in several languages, drinking, reading, dancing, more drinking, and board games. (Did I mention that wines with lunch and dinner are included in the cruise price?)

One morning there was also skeet shooting, of a caliber that renders a Save the Skeet movement unnecessary. The bottom of the Aegean is now littered with round orange plastic discs, almost all perfectly intact.

Watching the crew's endless work was another favorite pastime. All day long they sewed sails, swabbed decks, coiled miles of thick rope, and climbed the masts as nimbly as circus trapeze artists. The sight of so many sails filling with air is spectacular and regal: They take on a tempo and life of their own. Sailing on the Sea Cloud is done by hand, and it's labor intensive. Ditto for the upkeep on those opulent materials -- teak, mahogany, brass. The crew's chores also included serenading guests. Many of the male crew members are Filipinosmall-boned and dark-skinned. Many of the women are German, tall, and apple-cheeked. When these hard-working, wholesome young people combined forces to sing ``What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor?'' the effect was sweetly comical. When one crew member crooned on for a half-hour medley of schmaltzy solos, my husband pronounced him an oceangoing Wayne Newton -- and we discovered that no one but the Americans on board knew who Wayne Newton was.

Concerts and lectures punctuated languid afternoons. A distinguished New York pianist, Margaret Mills, was on hand to play the ship's Steinway upright. Asked to program ``normal'' music -- i.e. Chopin, Schubert, and Brahms -- she gently sabotaged the schedule with the addition of women composers, including the redoubtable Amy Beech. No one complained.

The slide lectures came courtesy of Johannes Bohmann, a German cultural historian and author, who spoke eloquently -- in both English and German -- about our ports of call, preparing us for the next morning's shore excursion. He warned us, for instance, about the 587 steps from the shore of Santorini up to the village of Fira. There are two ways to ride up: on a donkey or in a modern cable car. They're identically priced so one doesn't put the other out of business. I dented the local economy by walking all the way up, which made me feel virtuous enough to sit and sip Greek wine while admiring Santorini's famous whiteness. The white blankets the buildings, making you acutely aware of the shapes of the island's architecture, which so strongly influenced Le Corbusier and other modernists.

On Crete, we made the obligatory pilgrimage to the Minoan palace of Knossos, which was excavated and reconstructed by the late 19th-century British archeologist Sir Arthur Evans. His work is now controversial; he's criticized for turning Knossos into an archeological Disneyland. I found myself grateful for his efforts, though. If he hadn't rebuilt and painted parts of the palace, there would be precious little to look at besides the crumbling remnants of stone walls. The fabulous frescoes from Knossos now reside in the museum in Heraklion, well worth a visit. My favorite depicts men wearing short skirts with little weights so wind won't blow them up. Nobody saw what these guys wore under their kilts.

Our first Turkish port was Bodrum, a leading resort whose most impressive attraction is the late medieval Castle of St. Peter, which was built by the Knights of St. John, using stone recycled from the mausoleum that was one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The word ``mausoleum'' comes from the first person to have one, Mausolus, who ruled Halicarnassus, as Bodrum used to be called, in the fourth century BC. Today, the castle houses a museum, which offers two self-guided tours. Follow the red arrows for the long one, green for the short. It's immediately clear why red is longer: On the high stone wall near the entrance is a red arrow pointing straight up, suggesting you're supposed to scale the wall. The red arrow tour also seems to indicate that at one point you jump off a parapet.

Bodrum's museum also boasts an impressive Duelling Toilets exhibit, squat vs. seated, claiming superiority for the former, which is cited as one of Turkey's contributions to civilization.

The shore excursions combined education and entertainment in pleasing proportions. I also learned a thing or two about sailing during the week. I learned that a bark has three or more masts and square sails. One mast is called a jigger. ``You can remember that,'' said my husband, who had noted my conspicuous consumption at the bar the evening before.

And I discovered that in one way I am rather well adapted to sailing. The ballet training that makes me walk like a duck, feet pointing in opposite directions, comes in handy in descending the extremely narrow, ladderlike stairs that link decks. But I didn't come close to achieving the agility of the crew, who were always at the ready to carry guests' lunch trays to the upper decks, balancing them, stemmed wine glasses and all, on one hand.

Alas, during my cruise I also learned that the Sea Cloud won't sail forever. It's getting older, and, according to Captain Shannon, sometime in the next 10-15 years, will be retired. Meanwhile, Sea Cloud continues to offer cruises in the Aegean in the summer, in the Caribbean during the winter, and a two-week trans-Atlantic sailing in between, which sounds heavenly -- literally. In the absence of the ports of call that provide diversion on the other cruises, Shannon himself entertains the passengers. ``I teach them celestial navigation,'' he says.

I extended my Sea Cloud cruise with five nights in Athens at the beginning and five in Istanbul at the end, flying Boston-London-Athens and then Istanbul-London-Boston on British Airways. BA's new morning service from Boston to Heathrow gets you to London in time for dinner and in bed at a civilized hour, which I found effective in cutting out jet lag. In Athens, I stayed at the Hilton, which is well-located for walking almost anywhere in the city; has large rooms, many with balconies overlooking the Acropolis; and also boasts fine food and service. In Istanbul, I was at the Ciragan Palace Kempinski. The old part of the hotel was indeed once a sultan's palace; the new part, where most guest rooms are, has great views both of the wedding cake architecture of the palace, and the Bosporous.