EXIT HAVEL.(Czech Republic Pres. Vaclav Havel)(Interview)

On his last weekday in Prague Castle as the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel taped a brief farewell address to the nation and then took a telephone call from George Bush. Havel, who came to office thirteen years ago wearing borrowed trousers that flapped high around his ankles, now wore an exquisitely tailored navy-blue three-piece suit, a white shirt, and a tie that had undoubtedly done its duty at summit meetings and memorial services. A clutch of efficient aides scurried around his office door. A steward with a napkin folded over his arm delivered a glass of white wine. Sunlight streamed through tall windows, and chandeliers lent a glow to the flowers and the Oriental carpets.

The American President might have been surprised to learn that Havel's castle makes the White House seem inelegant, but Bush probably remembered the place well. Just a few months earlier, he had been to the Castle for a NATO summit--the first ever in a former Warsaw Pact capital. Bush, his Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and dozens of generals and other politicians were treated not merely to the usual working meetings but also to theatrical performances organized by Havel himself. The NATO visitors watched an ersatz eighteenth-century dance (complete with powdered wigs and simulated copulation) that might have been considered obscene had it not been so amusing. They listened to booming renditions of "Ode to Joy," a souped-up "Marseillaise," and John Lennon's "Power to the People."

"I didn't understand anything," Rumsfeld remarked as he headed toward dinner. "I'm from Chicago."

When I got a chance recently to ask Havel about his NATO productions, he smiled and said, "I didn't want it to look like just another meeting of politicians and generals, so I shaped those arrangements, to a great extent. The ballet was set in Central Europe and featured Mozart's music, and it also included elements of the American grotesque, to underline the Euro-Atlantic character of the gathering. It may have been on the verge of what Mr. Rumsfeld and certain others could tolerate."

Awkward and shy, Havel is a curiously natural director. Forty-odd years ago, he started out as a stagehand and a playwright. He was an acolyte of Beckett and Ionesco--the theatre of the absurd. The sense of the absurd extends to his own life. There is surely no modern biography that is more improbably yet dramatically coherent. Havel's is the rare life, Milan Kundera has written, that resembles a work of art and gives "the impression of a perfect compositional unity." Consider: A bourgeois boy becomes a bohemian playwright; he then becomes a dissident, who, for the crime of writing subversive essays and helping to organize a subversive movement called Charter 77, is encouraged by the regime to master the art of welding in a reeking Czech prison; finally, in late November, 1989, everything implodes and he is leading demonstrations in Wenceslas Square, and hundreds of thousands of people are shouting "Havel na hrad!" ("Havel to the Castle!"); within days, he is the head of state, working in the same hilltop redoubt that served as a seat of power for dynasts of the Bohemian kingdom and the Hapsburg monarchy, for the emissaries of Berlin and the satraps of the Kremlin.

During the uprising, which quickly became known as the Velvet Revolution, and for a while afterward, there were graffiti around town proclaiming, "Havel je kral"--"Havel Is King." The King tried to demystify his Castle. He ordered the costume designer for the movie "Amadeus" to create red-white-and-blue uniforms for the palace guards. (Communist-era guards wore khaki.) He himself at first refused the suits that his friend Prince Karel Schwarzenberg brought him. "I can't wear any of these!" Havel said. "I'd look like a gigolo." In jeans and sweater, he rode a scooter through the Castle halls. He threw a "festival of democracy" in the courtyards, with jugglers and mimes performing while he wandered around drinking Pilsner and greeting everyone. Later on, when he discovered that the chandeliers in the gilded Spanish Hall were outmoded, he accepted an offer from a couple of typical visitors, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, to pay for new fixtures. For weeks, he drove his staff crazy as he monkeyed around with the remote control, dimming the lights, then brightening them again.

"When I first came here, there were many things that I found absurd," Havel told me in his office. A sly, can-you-believe-it smile creased his face. "For example, it seemed to us on the first day that there were three rooms, close to where we're sitting now, which you couldn't enter. When we finally got inside, we discovered a kind of communications facility for contacts within the Warsaw Pact. So we took advantage of that and sent a New Year's greetings to Mikhail Gorbachev. Later, I heard from confidential sources that the K.G.B. chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov, didn't really appreciate the fact that we'd found those facilities."