Wealth & Money Quote by Morley Safer

Safer packs a whole social universe into a passenger list, then shrugs as if the chaos is just part of the timetable. The genius of the line is that it borrows the swagger of classic travel writing but undercuts it with newsroom skepticism: yes, the Orient Express is glamour, but it is also a pressure cooker where status, secrecy, and loneliness sit in adjacent compartments.

The inventory is doing double duty. “Spies” signals Cold War residue and the enduring romance of espionage, but it’s also a wink at how every elite space attracts surveillance, leverage, and performance. The “grand duke” is aristocracy reduced to a type, an artifact you might encounter like décor. Then Safer pivots to “a few beautiful woman” (dated grammar intact), and he tightens the screw: “very rich and very troubled.” Beauty and money aren’t presented as enviable; they’re flagged as complications, vulnerabilities that make good copy. That’s the reporter’s eye: the real story isn’t the chandelier, it’s the fracture line beneath it.

“Anything can happen and usually does” is more than a travelogue flourish. It’s a thesis about enclosed worlds: when you compress strangers into luxury, you don’t eliminate human mess; you stylize it. Safer’s intent isn’t to mythologize the train so much as to admit why the myth persists. The Orient Express works as a cultural stage because it promises both spectacle and the plausible deniability of motion. Everyone is going somewhere; everyone is also running from something.