Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

14. PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD

King Farouk of Egypt was a failed dictator, though his reputation was worse than many who succeeded. He was an ally of the Nazis, a war profiteer, an insatiable glutton, a ruthless seducer, a profligate gambler, a kleptomaniac and a wastrel. If there were seven deadly sins, it was said, Farouk would find an eighth.

After ascending the Egyptian throne in 1936 at the age of sixteen, he was kept in power by the British. He detested this arrangement. Not only did Farouk like to see himself as an all-powerful king with Egypt the dominant force in the Arab world, but also, ultimately, as the caliph of all Islam. In 1941, he made little secret of the fact that he hoped the Germans would invade and kick the British out. However, when the British finally withdrew their support from his regime in 1952, his anti-British army officers Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat — who had spent three years in jail during World War II for plotting a pro-Nazi take-over — ousted Farouk in an effortless coup.

Even before he was ousted, Farouk could not exert any real power. All he could do was indulge his whims. He once issued a decree banning any of his subjects from owning a red car. Then he had his hundred or so royal cars sprayed red.

In 1938, at the age of eighteen, Farouk married the beautiful seventeen-year-old Safinez Zulficar. It was a marriage made in hell. Farouk was a virgin who had been cossetted in the harem by his mother, Queen Nazli, whereas Safinez was a manhunter. Queen Nazli had no shortage of fun herself. At the time of Farouk’s wedding, she began a celebrated affair with her son’s tutor, Ahmed Mohammed Hasanein, a famous soldier, scholar and explorer. Then she took up with a young diplomat, a Coptic Christian named Riad Ghali, who she married off to her daughter, Farouk’s little sister. The three of them moved to Beverley Hills, where they lived together. It all became too much for Farouk when mother and daughter converted from Islam to Catholicism. He confiscated their lands and banished them from Egypt forever.

Still a naive young romantic, Farouk changed his new bride’s name legally to Farida, which means “the only one”. She did not return the compliment and began taking lovers.

Hurt by his wife’s infidelity, Farouk began taking lovers too. One of the first was Fatima Toussoun, the wife of Farouk’s cousin, Prince Hassan Toussoun, who threw herself at the young king. He could not resist the fair-skinned Circassian. They met for moonlit trysts at a small palace on the Nile at Halwan. Give me a son, he told Fatima, and I will marry you.

Farouk began suffering bouts of impotence from the age of twenty-three, and was believed to have underdeveloped genitals. To conceal this fact, he created for himself the image of a virile and insatiable lover. He invoked the droit du roi over the most beautiful wives and daughters of his subjects and claimed to have intimate contact with over five thousand women in his lifetime. He gave Farida a present every morning, but that did not compensate for what he was unable to do at night.

He consulted hormone specialists and became a connoisseur of aphrodisiacs. Love potions used in the time of the pharaohs were concocted. He tried amphetamines, hash mixed with honey, caffeine tablets and powdered rhino horn. He consumed vast quantities of oysters and eggs. Pigeons and mangoes were also cures for impotence, he believed. He put on pounds. Every morning in his bathroom, which was decorated with a mosaic showing naked slave girls, he was massaged vigorously by his chambermaids in an attempt to shed some weight.

Meanwhile, he flirted with attractive women. Those who would not succumb, he kidnapped. They were taken to one of his “harems” in the five palaces he owned around the country. Married women were more of a problem. Husbands often caused trouble if he kidnapped their wives. Instead he would resort to blackmail to get them into bed.

He would go through phases, collecting different types of women — the same way he collected stamps and antiquities. His aide, Antonio Pulli, would be sent out to find him European chorus girls who may be in need of the “diamond” bracelets he liked to bestow on his conquests. Or Pulli would be sent to comb the upper-class brothels for fair-skinned girls. Farouk went through a belly dancer phase, going through the top stars in the country.

One of the most attractive of his consorts at this time was an Alexandrian Jewess, Irene Guinle. Farouk never let race, religion or politics stand in the way of pleasure. They met when they were both twenty-one. Farouk was still slim and handsome then. Their affair lasted two years.

The daughter of a cotton broker, Irene spoke six languages. At seventeen, she had been discovered by a scout for MGM at the Alexandria Sporting Club. She took part in a lot of sport and had an athletic body with an especially well-developed bosom. But her mother would not hear of her becoming an actress. She considered them little better than whores. Instead, Irene was married off to Loris Najjar, an English-educated Alexandrian Jew who was about twenty-nine.

Unfortunately, Najjar had picked up certain predilections from his English public school. On their wedding night, he opened an attache case and produced a cane and a pair of black patent-leather high-heeled shoes. Irene ran from their Cairo hotel in horror. He found her cowering behind the pyramids and dragged her back to their room. He forced her to beat him until he bled, then scrape the high heels down his cuts. She had to do it three times a day.

“Everybody does it this way,” he told his young bride.

The whole thing sickened her. She became ill and her hair began to fall out. Irene was naive and believed that marriage was for life. It was only four years later that she discovered she could get a divorce. After Najjar, Farouk came as a welcome relief.

They met at a charity ball in aid of the war effort in 1941, when the German forces were posted on the Libyan border and seemed unstoppable. Although the assignation had been arranged by a mutual friend who knew how unhappy Farouk’s fairy-talc: marriage had become, Irene avoided him.

“I was allergic to anyone pro-German,” she said.

Eventually, he cornered her by the gambling tables. Suddenly Irene found that she was winning every bet. Then she felt as if someone was looking down her dress. She turned around and there was Farouk, grinning like a Cheshire cat. Attendants quickly brought a gilded throne for him to sit on. He gave it to Irene and sat on a small chair beside her.

He asked her to come for a moonlight dip. She refused and got up to go, but as she made her way to the door, she was approached by the British Ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson.

With British control of Egypt and the Suez canal in jeopardy, it was vital that they kept the pro-Nazi King Farouk under their wing.

“Of course you must go swimming with him at the palace,” Lampson said. “You must.”

She only consented because she hated the Germans and still she played hard to get. She sent Farouk’s RollsRoyce to her home to fetch her swim-suit. On the long beach at Montazah, Irene changed into her swimming costume and plunged into the warm sea. Farouk, in full military regalia, sat on the sand in the jasmine-scented air and watched. Afterwards she went to the bathhouse in the Palladian temple to change. She had left her sandals on the beach and sent Farouk back for them. After that, the Rolls took her home.

He called her at ten o’clock the next morning and asked if he could see her. She refused, saying she did not like men with beards. This was a deliberate ploy on her part. Farouk’s newly grown beard allied him with the militant Muslim Brotherhood, who also wanted the British out of Egypt.

The fact that Irene was Jewish did not bother Farouk. In fact, it rather counted in her favour. His father, Fuad, had a Jewish mistress, Mrs Suarez, for twenty years. She even arranged his first marriage for him to his nineteenyear-old cousin, Princess Shivekar. The princess was one of the wealthiest women in Egypt. Fuad had crippling gambling debts and Mrs Suarez steered the princess’s money into investments with her Jewish friends, who turned an already great fortune into a vast one. Mrs Suarez also pressured the British into putting Fuad on the throne, even though he was not, strictly speaking, next in line of succession. She died in his arms, waltzing at a ball, and he spent the rest of his life mourning her.

After months of pressure from both Farouk and Lampson, Irene eventually consented to go out on a date with him. She wore a black dress that was so complicated to undo that she was confident the king would not get anywhere near her.

They ate a ten-course dinner, featuring oysters, pigeon and sea bass cooked by a French chef. It was served by four Sudanese waiters in his huge bedroom overlooking the sea. From the conversation, she soon realized that Farouk had had his spies checking up on her. He knew every intimate detail of her marriage. She also realized that he was like a child and she could control him.

She reached home around 12.30 a.m. Ten minutes later he called. He wanted to see her again. For two months, they saw each other regularly, but nothing happened.

He invited her to stay the weekend with him at the Abdine Palace. When she arrived, his servants took her suitcase to his bedroom. They were to sleep in the same bed. She asked him if it was all right if she slept naked. It was too hot to wear a nightgown. He said he did not mind if she did not. Then he kissed her goodnight chastely on the check and the two of them slept together naked.

Next day they went swimming in the palace’s indoor pool, naked. But there was no sex. After her nightmare marriage, Irene was rather relieved.

Farouk told Irene that he loved her. Fatima Toussoun had just given birth to a baby girl at the time and Irene asked about their relationship. Farouk said that he had sent her a pearl necklace in hospital, but had not gone to visit her.

Farouk began to take Irene out publicly and she became his official mistress. But he refused to accompany her to pro-British events.

Eventually she became his mistress in the physical sense and he shaved his beard off for her. In return, he wanted her to convert to Islam and gave her a jewelled Koran, which she studied. In the street, people would shout “Long live Irene” at her and Irene became queen of Egypt in all but name. Farida was wheeled out only on state occasions. Otherwise Irene would be seen everywhere with him. The only person who disapproved was Irene’s mother, who asked her to move out of the family’s apartment.

Irene spent most of her time in the Abdine Palace, which had five hundred rooms. Farida and Farouk’s other women were kept in the harem, but Irene stayed with Farouk in his apartment.

While Irene kept Farouk entertained, pro-German demonstrations on the streets reached fever pitch. The pro-British Egyptian prime minister was forced to resign but Lampson was determined to pick his successor. He surrounded the Abdine Palace with tanks, shot the locks off the palace gates and led troops up the grand staircase to Farouk’s study. There he presented the king with articles of abdication. Farouk could either sign them, or approve Lampson’s new prime minister. He had no choice.

By 1943, the German threat had receded and their affair rather lost its urgency. Farouk and Irene went to Farouk’s hunting lodge at an oasis south of Cairo, with Humphrey Barker who Irene believed to be the “bastard son of the king of England” — and his attractive companion, Barbara Skelton. One evening, Irene saw Humphrey drinking alone. She went upstairs to Farouk’s bedroom and found the door locked. She pounded on it until Farouk opened the door. Inside, Irene saw Barbara in their giant bed.

“I hope you find my bed comfortable,” Irene said.

The next morning, Farouk, Irene and Barbara had breakfast together. When a second round of croissants was brought out, Irene said to Barbara: “What a shame you won’t have time to finish. You have just been called back to Cairo.”

Irene had ordered the servants to pack Barbara’s bag and she was hustled off into the car.

“What have you done?” Farouk complained. “She was an incredible woman, fantastic.”

Irene refused to speak to him for the rest of the day. Back in Cairo, she went to stay with a friend. As she departed, Farouk promised to make her queen of Egypt. She would have his son and heir.

Soon after, she met Percival Bailey, a British officer, and they embarked on a whirlwind romance. Farouk would follow them around like a wounded puppy. If they went out to dinner or dancing, he would leave his pith helmet or his walking stick on their table, so they would know he had been there. After six weeks they married. This gave Irene a British passport. With an Egyptian passport alone, she would never have been able to get out of the country.

Before she left for England, Farouk’s aide, Antonio Pulli, came to see her. He told her that she was the only woman that Farouk had ever loved. Now she was leaving, he was afraid that the king was dying. He did not eat and did nothing but lay in bed all day.

She went to see him one last time and found him in a rage. If she left Egypt, he said, he would never allow her to return. He threatened to declare war on the Jews.

“I’ll lose my hair. I’ll lose my eyesight. I’ll only go with whores. I’ll spend the rest of my life gambling,” he ranted. And that is very much what he did.

She left for England and went to live in Sutton Place, the home of her husband’s aunt, the Duchess of Sutherland. Later, it was the home of oil-billionaire J. Paul Getty. After divorcing Bailey, Irene Guinle went on to marry a Brazilian millionaire.

Although Irene thought that she had seen off Barbara Skelton, the affair was more enduring. Barbara first saw King Farouk in Marseilles when he was sixteen. She was on her way to India with her Uncle Dudley. During World War II, she was sent to Egypt as a Foreign Office cypher clerk. She caught his eye one evening in a night club. Next day an equerry visited her with an invitation to go to Fayoum for the weekend. After that she began seeing him once a week.

Irene was his official mistress at this time and Barbara conceded that she was a great beauty. But Barbara continued seeing Farouk because he was so much more interesting than the British officers she was surrounded by.

Later, when Barbara Skelton became a novelist, she wrote a thinly fictionalized account of her time in the Abdine Palace. She talks of roof-top champagne parties with nude belly dancers who had their pubis shaved, the king going off to his bedroom with the pick of the pretty girls, and of the king beating her with a dressing gown cord. In her diaries, she admits she would have preferred a splayed cane.

She accompanied him to balls in haute couture gowns that he provided. The British authorities thought that she and the king were getting a little too close and feared that he might be pumping her for secret information. So they posted her home.

Barbara later married the writer Cyril Connolly and publisher George Weidenfeld. Her other lovers included poet Peter Quennell, critic Kenneth Tynan, cartoonist Charles Addams, film producer John Sutro, editor Robert Silvers, Francoise Sagan and Bernard Frank.

Eleven years of marriage to Farida had produced three daughters. Despite her own infidelity, Farida became increasingly distressed by women scampering up the backstairs to entertain the king until dawn. When a famous French opera singer was seen leaving his bedroom, Farida asked fir a divorce. He consented. He wanted the chance to have a son.

In 1941, Princess Patricia “Honeychile” Wilder Hohenlohe, a genuine American princess, turned up in Egypt. Born in Georgia, she was a former star of the Bob Hope Show. Her ex-husband was Austrian Prince Alexander Hohenlohe, but Honeychile had kept the title and a lot else besides — after the divorce. She boasted of Hollywood romances with Clark Gable and Tyrone Power, both of whom she threw over for her riding teacher. She also claimed to have had sex with John F. Kennedy in a dank air-raid shelter in London early in World War II. Now, despite the presence of her current, polo-playing, Argentinian husband, she was to have Farouk too. attentions she realized that she had hit the jackpot and unceremoniously dumped her beau.

Before the wedding, Farouk set out on a three-month bachelor party. Prostitutes from across Europe flocked to join his ever-swelling entourage. Barbara Skelton joined him at Biarritz. Later, she introduced her husband Cyril Connolly to him in Rome, but they did not get on.

Narriman’s royal wedding was so opulent that it could have come straight out of the Arabian Nights. It was followed by a four-month honeymoon in Europe — probably one of the most lavish and expensive honeymoons in history. He overwhelmed her with gourmet food, couture clothes, expensive jewels and priceless art. They stayed at the Royal Monceau in Paris, the Danieli in Venice and the Carlton in Cannes. When they went out on the royal yacht, he dressed the entire party of sixty in identical blue blazers, white flannels and yachting caps. Ashore they were ferried around in a fleet of Rolls-Royces. One can only wonder what Narriman, a peasant girl, made of all this.

Farouk was no more faithful to Narriman than he had been to his first wife. He had the entire top floor of the Mossat Hospital in Alexandria turned into the ultimate Ex-King Farouk established himself in Rome and squandered his dwindling fortune on the life of the ultimate playboy. He was the darling of the paparazzi and the papers were filled with his lurid escapades and jet set lovers. But despite his dissolute lifestyle, he still had one great love left in him.

He met sixteen-year-old aspiring actress Irma Minutolo at Canzone del Mare, the Capri beach club owned by Gracie Fields, the British music-hall star. She had big eyes, big lips and big breasts, which were shown off to great advantage in the bikini she was wearing.

Farouk spotted her emerging from the water. His eyes locked onto her. Abandoning his companions, he sauntered over to her, wearing a white terry cloth robe with the Egyptian crown emblazoned on it.

He took off the dark glasses that had become his trademark, stroked her reddish-blonde hair and complimented her on her figure. She immediately fell under the spell of his blue-green eyes. His huge girth, his balding head and his glasses, she recalled, suited him as a king. They made him less of a boy.

That night, Irma won the Miss Capri contest. The next morning Farouk had a hundred and fifty roses delivered to the hotel where she was staying with her mother. They had planned to stay the whole month but when the roses arrived, Signora Capece Minutolo grabbed her teenaged daughter and high-tailed it back to Naples.

Farouk was not to be put off so easily. He had her address traced and began sending her huge bouquets of flowers every day. Irma’s mother forbade her to answer the phone, but one day it rang while Mama was out in the garden and she answered it. It was Farouk. How had she liked the flowers, he asked. What flowers, she said. So Farouk got right to the point. He told her that he was in love with her and that she was the only ray of light in the darkness of his exile.

Suddenly the phonecalls and the flowers stopped. Irma was heartbroken. Her mother had made her so ashamed of the flirtation that she did not even dare tell her schoolfriends.

About a month later, Irma came out of school to find that the car that normally took her home was not waiting for her. Down the street, she spotted an emerald-green Rolls-Royce with the Egyptian flag flying from the antenna. A man in a dark suit came up to her. He was King Farouk’s secretary, he said. Would she follow him?

He led her to the Rolls-Royce. In the backseat was Farouk, wearing an elegant pin-striped suit. Where was her driver, she asked. That was all taken care off, Farouk said. He would be back in fifteen minutes.

Farouk reached over and stroked her hair, and he told her again that he loved her. What about the thousands of women he had had, she said, repeating what her mother had told her. Farouk laughed. They meant nothing to him, he said. She was the only one who had won his heart. Would she be his third Queen?

Irma burst into tears. She flung open the car door and ran. A little way down the street, she found her car and begged her driver to take her home. They struck a deal. If he said nothing, neither would she.

Irma heard no more for two weeks. Then, during school break, the caretaker told her that there was a call for her in his office. It was Farouk. He told her that the following day a dozen roses would arrive for her. She must examine them closely. He gave her the number of the Villa Dusmet at Grottaferrata in the Alban Hills outside Rome where he was staying.

The next day, the caretaker called Irma into his office. The roses had arrived. She examined them carefully and found that one of them was imitation. She opened it and inside was a ruby ring, encrusted with diamonds.

With a shaking hand she called the number she had been given. She was passed through three secretaries before she got to speak to Farouk himself”. She told him that he should not have bought her such an expensive gift. Of course he should, he said.

“But why me?” Irma wanted to know.

“Because you are different,” he said. “Because you are a child. Because you are pure. Because I adore you.”

Then he asked her to promise that she would think of him for an hour every day until he returned to Naples in a fortnight. Not only did she think of him for an hour every day, she thought about him twenty-four hours a day. She devoured everything about him in the Italian newspapers and magazines, though it hurt her to see pictures of him out in nightclubs with actresses and Swedish blondes.

Around this time, Farouk was seeing the voluptuous eighteen-year-old Swede Brigitta Stenberg, former lover of Lucky Luciano, the American mobster who had been deported back to Italy in 1946. Luciano and Farouk also met at Gracie Fields” Canzone del Mare. They had a lot in common — both were in exile, both had known great power, and both loved beautiful women. Luciano provided Farouk with protection on numerous occasions when Nasser, ever fearful that the Western powers would try to re-install Farouk on the throne, was out to kill him. Luciano knew every hit man in Italy. No plot could be hatched without him knowing about it and he thwarted Nasser at every turn.

Luciano met Brigitta just as she was picked up by a Sicilian-American who said he had a job for her in New York. The man gave her a ticket to New York with a stopover in Buenos Aires and took her passport for safekeeping. Luciano told her that the man was a white slaver; the stop-over would be a permanent one. He got her passport back.

Farouk had seen Brigitta out with Luciano a couple of times when he spotted her in a restaurant in Rome with a young friend from the U.S. embassy. He introduced himself and they spent an hour talking before he dropped her off home in his bullet-proof Mercedes. Farouk made a deal with Luciano to take her off his hands.

Brigitta liked Farouk because of his “sweet eyes” and because he had the power of life and death over twenty million people. He liked her, he said, because she reminded him of Narriman.

Despite Farouk’s attempts to keep pictures of himself and Brigitta out of the papers, the paparazzi always got through. Brigitta loved seeing the pictures in the papers. Irma did not.

Irma also had to worry about Farouk’s wife who was always there in the background, but the stories about Narriman gave her hope. When Farouk had met Narriman, she too had been a commoner, sixteen, blonde and a virgin.

When Farouk returned to Naples, Irma left school early and took a train to the fishing port of Posilipo. They met in the private room of a restaurant there. When they parted, Farouk gave her a letter. In it, he poured out his heart. She took it home and read it over and over again.

After that, there was another long period of silence. Then, in March 1953, the newspapers broke the story that Narriman had left Farouk. She planned to fly back to Cairo, obtain an Islamic divorce and sue for custody of their fourteen-month-old son, Fuad.

Farouk blamed the new regime in Egypt for the breakup of his marriage. They had used “that most powerful of all weapons, the mother-in-law,” he told the press. Narriman’s mother, he described publicly as “the most terrible woman in the: world”.

The break-up of Farouk’s marriage would certainly have been to the advantage of Egypt’s revolutionary regime. Farouk had been deposed, but the monarchy had not yet been abolished. So little Fuad was technically King of Egypt and the Sudan. Under Islamic law, a child should live with its mother until it is seven years old.

A few weeks later, Irma got another call from Farouk in the caretaker’s office. He asked her to come and live with him. To Irma, this was tantamount to a proposal.

To her old-world father, it was an outrageous suggestion, but her mother’s opposition to Farouk began to wane. She could see how lovesick her daughter was. She was impressed by the ruby ring he had given her and, although Farouk now claimed to be poor, he was known to be one of the richest men in the world.

That summer, Signora Capece Minutolo told her husband that Irma should go away to a language school in Rome to brush up her French. Signor Capece Minutolo said Irma’s French did not need improving. So Signora Capece Minutolo said perhaps Irma would benefit from a summer with the Sisters of the Sacred Heart in their Convent near the Spanish steps in Rome. Her husband agreed.

He was busy the day that Irma left, so he could not take her to the railway station in Naples. She was picked up there by Farouk’s Rolls-Royce and whisked back to his villa at Grottaferrata.

She was given a wing to herself with a huge marble bathroom remodelled to look like one in a Rita Hayworth movie that Irma had once casually remarked that she had seen. She was taught deportment, music, literature and how to ride. Top couturiers and furriers were summoned to dress Irma for her forthcoming “debut”. This was to take place on Rome’s Via Veneto, the home of la dolce vita where Farouk and Irma soon became king and queen of the nightclub crowd.

Farouk was constantly surrounded by beautiful women, but Irma smothered her jealousy and he never left her wanting for attention. At dawn the whole entourage would return to the Villa Dusmet. He would kiss her chastely on the hand and she would retire to her wing, not to see him until nine o’clock the next evening when the whole thing would start all over again.

With this sort of lifestyle, Irma was bound to attract attention, especially wearing the decollete gowns he bought her. Soon the Italians were calling her “Irma Capace de Totalo” — “Irma, Capable of Anything”.

Within a month, she was on the front page of every scandal sheet in Italy. Her father was furious. Farouk, gallantly, went to Naples to see her family. Why hadn’t Farouk asked permission before taking his daughter away, asked her father. Because you would have locked her in a convent forever, Farouk replied.

Now that Irma was Farouk’s official mistress, Brigitta Stenberg decided to make the break. She did not want to be his backstreet mistress permanently. As a going away present, Brigitta offered him the current Miss Universe, a Finnish girl named Armi Kuusia who had worked for her aunt. Brigitta said she would write to Armi to find out if she was interested.

Brigitta Stenberg returnee! to Sweden where she used her early experiences with Luciano and Farouk as a springboard to launch a successful career as a novelist.

Farouk took Irma away on a year-and-a-half tour of Europe, introducing her to stars, socialites and royalty. They even dined with Honeychile Hohenlohe in Kitzbuhel, though Farouk walked out because he believed that the English woman sat next to him was an agent of Nasser’s out to poison him.

His demands on Irma were minimal. When they travelled, they would always stay in separate suites. Back in Rome, he rented her an apartment in his block, but only saw her once or twice a week. When she expressed an interest in becoming an opera singer, he paid for her singing lessons and he staged a triumphant debut for her in Naples. But he stopped taking her to clubs and never took her gambling.

He did not stop going out himself of course. The novelist Gore Vidal remembers one night out with Farouk on the Via Veneto. The fat ex-king was sucking the nipple of a prostitute when a thief on a motor scooter snatched her purse. Farouk laughed, went on sucking her nipple, then gave her enough money to make up for what she had lost.

Through the newspapers and magazines, Irma knew he was seeing other women — Vidal dubbed them “chubby chasers”. But Farouk refused to discuss his other women and Irma remained convinced that she was the only one he really loved. He was more jealous than Othello, she said. When she took the Rolls for a drive down to the beach at Anzio without telling him, she discovered that half the police in Italy were looking for her. Another time a chauffeur made eyes at her. He was swiftly sacked.

Although he continued his philandering ways, they remained friends until his death, at the age of 45. The grossly overweight Farouk was in a restaurant with his latest girlfriend, the voluptuous blonde Annamaria Gatti, the night he died. He had collected her himself that night from her tenement flat on the Via Ostiense. Bodyguards were a thing of the past. He was driving a Fiat 2300 with diplomatic plates. The Rolls had been sold. They drove to a roadhouse called the Ile de France out on the Via Aurilia Antica for a midnight supper. Farouk consumed a dozen raw oysters with tabasco sauce, a lobster thermidor, a roast baby lamb with roast potatoes, a creamy chestnut Monte Bianco, two oranges and two large bottles of mineral water with a Coca-Cola chaser. He lit a Havana cigar — another of his trade marks — then suddenly clutched his throat and collapsed over the table. Everyone thought he was playing one of his famous practical jokes. When they realized that he wasn’t, it was too late. He was dead before he reached the hospital.

Many royalist expatriates believe he was poisoned, but, at nearly twenty-two stone, he was grossly overweight and suffered from high blood pressure. The death certificate said the cause of death was a cerebral haemorrhage. There was no autopsy and no inquest.

When he died, Farouk was carrying two U.S. thousand-dollar bills, a wad of 10,000-lire notes, a gold pill-box containing his blood-pressure tablets and a 6.35 Biretta that he carried to protect himself from assassination attempts. Soon after, his companion Annamaria Gatti disappeared.

At the funeral in 1965, Irma was allowed to walk behind the coffin with his first wife Farida and their daughters. After thirteen years as his official mistress, Irma had been accepted as the third queen. She went on to achieve fame as the oversexed opera singer in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1988 movie Young Toscanini, playing opposite Elizabeth Taylor.