Poor Little Rich Boys : TOO RICH: The High Life and Tragic Death of King Farouk, <i> By William Stadiem (Carroll & Graff: $22.95; 448 pp.)</i>

With all due respect to the carbohydrate community, it may be worth pointing out that not one of today’s world leaders is fat. To be sure, a few carry extra pounds here and there, but where is the president or premier who, if boiled down to tallow, could light up Manhattan for a long weekend?

Even the wives of Soviet officials have been moderately thin these last few years, perhaps fearing that if they get too heavy, the calorie-deprived masses will rise up and eat them. Television may have also played a role in whittling down the political elite, and we should blame television whenever possible.

For whatever reason, we now find ourselves in the grip of a bony orthodoxy, and perhaps look longingly back to the time when fat rulers walked the Earth, guys like Farouk I of Egypt, the subject of an entertaining biography by Los Angeles writer William Stadiem. Here was Falstaff writ large, a man who cast a huge shadow, a real creampuff of a potentate. Yet few people know much about him.

In AD 1936, Farouk’s father died and left him the throne of the pharaohs, a transition that once again reminded everyone that monarchies are not meritocracies. Farouk, 16, had been educated primarily by tutors, one of whom wrote these words of encouragement on a Farouk essay: “Excellent. A brilliant future awaits you in the world of literature.” A generous appraisal, considering that the work in question included seven spelling errors and this sentence: “My father had a lot of ministers and I have a cat.”

The lack of a pointy head (“Farouk never wrote a letter, never read a paper, never listened to music,” recalled one old friend) was not all bad, however, and probably helped endear him to the common folk, who showed their devotion in a multitude of ways. The nation’s pickpockets, for instance, suspended “liftings” during his majesty’s wedding feast, welcome restraint after the joy riot that followed the announcement of the king’s betrothal (22 killed, 140 severely injured).

But the king’s lack of intellectual rigor also left him unable to think his way out of the many traps laid for him by the likes of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Miles Lampson, the British ambassador. By the time Farouk was forced to abdicate in 1952, he had little to boast about, unless he wanted to bring up his leadership role in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, which was symbolized by the sinking of the Egyptian navy’s flagship (the Emir Farouk) by a jerry-built Israeli gunboat. Otherwise, the king’s reign probably was best summed up by the Economist, which said: “In 30 years he has done almost everything except make his horse prime minister.”

You may now be of the opinion that any Life of Farouk probably won’t qualify as high drama, which is true. But fear not: Stadiem is a writer for “L.A. Law,” meaning he is familiar with the demands of pumping life into an often dull subject. For the most part, he is equally successful in animating Farouk.

Some readers will enjoy Stadiem’s generous use of anecdotes, which are often reminiscent of newspaper accounts of Sri Lankan bus drivers who swerve to miss a water buffalo, taking themselves and their 200 passengers off a 500-foot cliff. Those who are not so callous as to chuckle at such tales (Stadiem tells of a pilgrim just back from Mecca who pours “holy water” into a well, touching off a cholera epidemic that killed 35,000 people) will prefer the author’s use of first-person accounts, such as this item from the memoirs of a British secretary:

“The Germans had two simple lines of propaganda in Egypt during the war: that Hitler was a Moslem, born in Egypt (I was shown his mother’s house in Tantah) and that, when he won the war, the poor man would get the rich man’s land. They were most effective talking points: The victory of ‘Mohammed Haider,’ as he was locally known, was prayed for in every village.”

But one does run into problems from time to time. Serious readers will find a few historical stumbling blocks, such as when Stadiem tells us that “Following the lead of Rommel, Hitler committed suicide.” The truth, of course, is that Rommel was compelled to commit suicide, by Hitler, after being implicated in the plot on the Fuehrer’s life.

Others (ahem) will confine their criticisms to the book’s tone, which sometimes sounds like frivolity trying to pass itself off as sophistication. Or, to be more precise, one occasionally thinks he’s reading the work of Ms. Kitty Kelley:

“Was it really so little?” the author wonders at one point. “How could the sex king have a tiny organ? Was all the sex a bluff? Was he less of a man because of this reputedly micro organ? It was all a massive case of reverse penis envy . . . .”

Well, perhaps we should forgive such lapses into frivolity, especially because the author also supplies us with information that really does allow a reader to get a handle on the subject, such as the fact that the king counted among his prized possessions the stuffed body of a hermaphrodite goat. What’s more, Farouk was a deeply frivolous man, whose most impressive organ, from any viewpoint, was his stomach, through which passed enough animals to sink Noah’s Ark.

During one quail-eating contest, for instance, the king polished off 50 of the luscious birds (his challenger conked out after three dozen). He often ate a dozen or so eggs for breakfast (along with his beloved Rice Krispies), larding down the main course with the internal organs of partridges.

Then there were the oysters, chickens, lobsters, lambs and other members of the barnyard brotherhood, countless numbers of which slid down the royal hatch, to be followed by creamy desserts and chocolates. It probably isn’t stretching things to say that if one could harness all the animals the king ate during his short life (1920-1965), the team would be powerful enough to drag the Sphinx to the gates of the National Zoo.

Farouk died in 1965, having just eaten, among other things, a lobster that may have been poisoned by Nasser’s agents. The last years weren’t his best: His attempts to get a job in public relations failed, though a Danish firm tried to hire him as an elephant trainer. He left behind a huge collection of clothes, pornography and Uncle Scrooge comic books. And, of course, calories, as the king weighed somewhere around 300 pounds at the time of his last supper. Ripeness was all for Farouk.

His body was moved several times, finally being buried among the squatters in the City of the Dead. Thus this black hole of a man, who took in much and produced very little, disappeared into the eternal maw.

One almost wonders if the Earth belched.