Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

15. THE PEACOCK THRONE

The last Shah of Iran learnt many of his tricks from his father, Reza Khan. Reza Khan’s first wife, Taj al-Moluk, was a strong woman who put up with his extramarital affairs. She presented him with twins — the Shah and his sister Ashraf.

In 1922, Reza Khan was having a very public affair with Aziz Khanom, the darling of wealthy Tehranis in the 1920s. He soon realized that this affair could damage him politically, and took advantage of Islamic law to make Aziz his second wife. Even though Aziz looked up to her as the senior wife, Taj al-Moluk refused to have her under the same roof.

To make things worse, later that year Reza Khan took a third wife, Turan Khanom, the daughter of the Qatar prince Majd ad-Dowleh, who bore him a son. But he divorced her after barely a year.

The following year, he fulfilled his Islamic quota with a fourth wife, sixteen-year-old Esmat Khanom, another Qatar princess. Reza Khan borrowed money from his inlaws to build a new home, and towards the end of 1923, he moved in with Esmat, visiting Taj al-Moluk, his first wife, for just two nights a week. This was not a formula for marital accord.

“To think, I wasted my youth and beauty on you,” she would say; but there was little she could do. By all accounts, Esmat was Reza Khan’s true love. She bore him four sons and ono daughter. Rut Tai al-Moluk was the mother of his first-born son and heir. Divorce was unthinkable.

In 1925, Reza Khan seized power and was named Shahanshah — King of Kings. In 1939, he made the mistake of siding with Hitler. Tehran was on a vital supply route to Russia, so the British deposed Reza Khan and put his son on the throne instead.

The Shah’s first marriage had been arranged for him by his father. The girl in question was Fawziah, the seventeen-year-old sister of King Farouk. She was a great beauty. Educated in Switzerland, she had been presented at most of the courts of Europe, including that of St James’s. The idea of going to a comparatively backward country like Iran did not please her. Farouk, however, was delighted at the prospect of making a diplomatic alliance with Persia in the age-old fashion. He was already negotiating to marry his other two sisters off to King Faisal of Iraq and Crown Prince Talal of Jordan, with the aim of building a pan-Arabic alliance.

The couple only met once before the wedding in the Abdine Palace in Cairo. Then they had to wait until after a second ceremony in Tehran before they could consummate it. Just getting Fawziah to Tehran was an ordeal. She had over two hundred items of luggage, taking with her two hundred dresses, one hundred and sixty pairs of shoes, seven fur coats and vast quantities of jewellery. Her wedding dress alone cost £10,000.

The following year, Fawziah gave birth to a baby daughter, Shahnaz. However, the marriage was not a happy one. Fawziah was quickly bored with Tehran. She would linger in bed until noon, spend a couple of hours dressing, then while away the rest of the day playing cards or going for a drive. After 1942, she lived in a separate apartment and seldom spent the night with her husband. The Shah complained that she constantly found excuses to shirk what he called her “marital duty” and members of the court called her “the frigid Venus”.

The Shah began to court other women, and when Fawziah received anonymous notes telling her this, she responded in kind. There were rumours that the Shah’s half brother, Prince Gholam-Reza, was in love with Fawziah. Then word spread that she was seeing Taqi Emami, a local tennis pro. Emami soon found himself banished from the court and forbidden to leave the country.

One of the Shah’s closest aides brought the matter to a head. One evening, he took the Queen to a small villa in the palace grounds where she found the Shah in a compromising position with society beauty Pari Khanom. The Shah made a half-hearted attempt to give an innocent account of the scene. Fawziah ran back to her apartments, locked the door and cried for hours.

In 1945, Fawziah returned to Cairo. The Shah granted her a divorce in 1948, but cited her infidelity rather than admitting his own. Five months later, Fawziah married Esma’il Shirin, the nephew of Farouk’s favourite mistress.

For more than a year, members of the Shah’s family scoured the world in search of a new bride. His twin sister Ashraf came up with a girl called Nina Bakhtiar; but two of his other sisters, the Princesses Shams and Fatemah, had plans of their own. Both were eager to get back into favour. Princess Shams had been banished after divorcing her husband and marrying the son of an army musician, and Fatemah had married an American adventurer named Patrick Hilliyer against the Shah’s expressed orders. They (bond an eighteen-year-old girl called Soraya in London. She was living in a bedsit in Kensington and attending a private English language school. Her photograph was sent to Tehran and the Shah decided to have her checked out.

Soraya was the daughter of Khalil Esfandi, a minor tribal chief, and Eva Karl, who had been born in Moscow of German and Baltic extraction. They met and married in Berlin and went to live in Iran where Soraya was born. When she was fifteen, the family returned to Europe, where Soraya completed her schooling and her father ran up huge debts in the casinos.

When no embarrassing skeletons were found in the closet, Princess Shams returned to Tehran in triumph with Soraya in tow. A dinner was organized by the Shah’s mother to introduce her to his brothers and sisters. Shams and Fatemah managed to insinuate their husbands into the gathering. When the Shah himself turned up unannounced in one of his flashiest uniforms, Soraya slipped into a state of shock. Nevertheless, the Shah was impressed by her, especially by her beautiful, green, almond-shaped eyes. Shams was told to ask Soraya for her hand in marriage on his behalf. He wanted an answer that night.

“In that case, my answer is yes,” Soraya said.

A wedding date was set, but Soraya came down with typhoid. There was an epidemic in Tehran at the time. The situation was grave. The doctors gave up on her. In desperation, the Shah let a personal friend, Lieutenant-Colonel Karim Ayadi — an army vet — try his hand at saving his young fiancee from what everyone agreed was certain death.

Ayadi miraculously succeeded in saving her, with the help of a new drug called aureomycin which he had read about in a French magazine. It had to be flown in from America. He was rewarded by being appointed the Shah’s personal physician. It was not until four years later that he qualified as a doctor.

For the wedding, a Christian Dior gown was flown in from Paris, but it was too heavy for the weakened Soraya to wear, so Ayadi and the Shah lopped ten yards off the train to the horror of the French couturier. For warmth, Soraya was told to wear thick woollen army socks and a cardigan, which she wore over her Dior gown and under her fur coat. The Iranians were pleased with the wedding pictures. They were happy that the Shah was marrying someone pleasantly fat.

However, Soraya soon became unpopular — and not just because she was thin. She never mastered Persian and her childish ways upset the courtiers. The Shah, on the other hand, found her childishness alluring and indulged her every whim. He would whisk her off to romantic hideaways. They were very much in love.

But after five years of marriage, she had not had a child and the Shah still had no son. Soraya was such a jealous person, he could only visit his daughter from his first marriage in secret. People began talking about “the German cow” and “the barren one”. The mullahs began to put pressure on him. Under Islamic law, he could take a second wife. Although the Shah resisted the suggestion, Soraya believed he would change his mind.

Then at a ball, Soraya caught the Shah dancing with a beautiful blonde, and gave an ultimatum. Either he abdicate and live with her in exile, or keep his crown and lose her. That night she flew out of Tehran. She settled in St Moritz, and the Shah repudiated her under Islamic law. He gave her $80,000. She kept the jewels she had collected over the years and he conferred the title Imperial Majesty on her. They continued to exchange letters and, on one occasion, agreed to meet informally. But both thought better of it.

So by the early 1950s, the Shah needed a wife again. His mother Taj al-Moluk interviewed a stream of debutantes. Each week a new list of possible brides for the Shah was published and journalists would receive hefty bribes from the families of eligible girls to mention their daughters as possible candidates.

Meanwhile the Shah had a number of brief affairs. He was seen with twenty-two-year-old Dokhi, nineteen-year old Safieh and a German film actress named Helga Anderson. Things got serious with Princess MariaGabriella of Savoy, the daughter of ex-King Umberto of Italy. They met in Switzerland, fell in love and considered marriage. The problem was that MariaGabriella was neither a Persian nor a Muslim. Her nationality could be fixed easily enough with an imperial decree. The Iranian embassy in Paris began the ground work. They paid huge sums to French genealogists to prove that Maria-Gabriella was a descendant of Princess Zelidah, the daughter of Muhammad II, the eleventh century Moorish ruler of Seville. The press announced that the Shah’s intended was a woman of impeccable Islamic background.

Maria-Gabriella would still have to become a Muslim, of course. Otherwise there would be hell to pay with the ayatollahs. The problem was that ex-King Umberto prided himself on being a good Catholic and he vehemently opposed his daughter’s planned conversion to Islam. Large sums of money were offered and ex-King Umberto slowly came round. He said he would stifle his objections if the pope gave his benediction to the marriage. In February 1959, the Shah paid a brief visit to Pope John XXIII, who said he could not sanction the marriage unless the Shah converted to Catholicism. This was impossible. Three months later the Iranian government announced that rumours regarding His Imperial Majesty’s marriage to a foreign subject were greatly exaggerated. The Shah would not think of taking a non-Muslim wife.

A few months later, the Shah’s sister Princess Shahnaz and her husband, Ardeshir Zahedi, found a new bridal candidate, eighteen-year-old Farah Diba. She had returned home for the summer holidays from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris where she was studying architecture. They found her charming and decided to introduce her to the Shah. He had, in fact, already met her at an official reception for Iranian students at the Iranian embassy in Paris. But the meeting had left little impression on him.

“How could you forget having met me?” she would chide later. “Was it not love at first sight?”

Farah remembered the incident all too well. She had broken with two of her friends, who were Communists, to attend. Then she had been shoved aside by royalists who mobbed the King of Kings. To restore order, the students were presented one by one. When it was Farah’s turn, the Shah expressed surprise that a woman should want to become an architect.

“He had such sad eyes, beautiful and sad eyes,” she wrote to her mother.

She was still in Paris when she heard of the break-up of the Shah’s second marriage. Again she wrote to her mother.

“I have just heard that His Majesty and Soraya have parted. What a shame!” she wrote.

The Shah’s search for a new bride filled the French press that summer and fellow students teased her about it. At one student party, everyone signed a paper saying that she should be queen.

When she arrived home for the holidays, her family urged her to visit Hessarak, Zahedi’s residence. She was presented to Princess Shahnaz. The two women met a number of times and it was clear to Farah that she was under scrutiny.

Shahnaz introduced her to the family. At one tea party at Hessarak, the Shah turned up. Farah quickly recovered from her shock and reminded him of the previous time they had met. The Shah showed a polite interest, nothing more.

Farah had an athletic body and the black eyes cherished by Persians, but she was a brunette and it was well known that the Shah preferred blondes.

By the time Farah was to return to Paris, nothing had been said. Shahnaz asked her to delay her departure for a couple of days, and at one final party at Hessarak, the Shah indicated that everyone except Farah should leave.

“I wish to have a private talk with you,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

He explained how his first two marriages had ended in divorce and the responsibilities — and possible dangers — of being his queen. Then he asked her to marry him.

Although he was more than twice her age, she did not hesitate.

“I would be honoured, Your Majesty,” she said. Then he took her hand for the first time.

Later she asked him why he had chosen her. He replied: “I liked your simplicity, your purity.”

But why had she accepted — did she love the man or the monarch?

“The two are one,” she said. “And I knew that I loved the man who was asking me to marry him.”

Ten months after their wedding, the Shah personally drove his wife to the maternity hospital, where she gave birth to a boy. This made her extremely popular with the Iranians. She was a full-blooded Persian and now she had delivered an heir. In celebration, the Shah released ninety-eight political prisoners and slashed income tax by twenty per cent.

During the first years of her marriage, Farah received a number of anonymous letters, warning her of her husband’s inability to remain faithful to a single woman. Her sole function, she was told, was to produce babies while he sought carnal pleasures elsewhere. In five years, she produced three children.

Although he had her crowned as his queen, it was true that the Shah could not remain faithful. Anyone on the make in Persia knew that women were the Shah’s weakness and would use this to their advantage.

“You had to pimp to progress,” said one courtier.

General Muhammad Khatam and Amir-Assadollah Alam made huge personal profits providing the Shah with courtesans. The Shah’s personal physician, now General Abdul-Karim Ayadi, scouted Western European circles for “companions”. Mainly they were blondes with big mouths. Lufthansa hostesses were in great demand.

It was rumoured that he had a love child in France and that one of his mistresses sent a huge bill for couture dresses to the Iranian embassy in Paris. But there were conquests closer to home. The Shah once insisted on making love to one of his ministers daughters in a helicopter hovering over Isfahan.

Former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti recalled that when the Shah arrived at the Venice Film Festival, he shocked the local prefect by asking for a woman for the night. The prefect replied: “That is a job for the police!”

Diplomats reported that the Iranian imperial court reeked of sex. Everyone gossiped about the Shah’s latest favourite. He made no effort to hide his infidelities from his wife. She appears to be the only one in the whole court who was chaste. Most notorious was the Shah’s sister, Princess Ashraf. She was said to have been photographed naked with a U.S. senator. A 1976 CIA report said that she had a “near legendary reputation for financial corruption and for successfully pursuing young men”, many of them securing government positions in recognition of services rendered.

The Shah also had a full-time pimp, Amir-Hushang Davalloo, who bore the title “His Majesty’s Special Butler”. Empress Farah dismissed Davalloo as “the court jester — he made the Shah laugh”.

In the imperial court, Davalloo was the only person who could go and see the Shah whenever he wanted. He could even enter the Shah’s private quarters without an appointment.

In fact, Davalloo had begun his career as a procurer in Paris in the 1940s. He fixed Nazi officers up with “escorts”. At one time, he numbered Herman Goring among his clients. He maintained links with the Parisian maison of Madame Claude which included among its customers King Hassan of Morocco. Madame Claude recruited amateur call-girls, many of whom went on to make good marriages. During the years when the Shah was kept in power by his vicious secret police, SAVAK, she kept him well supplied with women. One of Claude’s girls, a tall well-built blonde who called herself Ange, spoke out.

She said that she had spent several months in Tehran in 1969. She flew there first class and was met at the airport by a young man from the Ministry of the Court. He drove her to the Hilton in a Mercedes with tinted windows. They were given adjoining suites and he tried to seduce her, but Madame Claude had warned her that if she succumbed she would be on the next plane home, forfeiting a lucrative fee. She was there for the pleasure of the Shah alone.

For three days she did nothing but fend off her minder’s advances and learn how to curtsy — the Shah insisted that women curtsy, she was told. On the fourth day, she was driven to a villa in northern Tehran. It was heavily guarded. She was shown into a room where there was a table laden with food. She noticed a bottle of brandy and took a swig to calm her nerves. By the time the Shah turned up three hours later, she was completely drunk. She tried to curtsy and fell over. The Shah shook her hand.

“But I have to curtsy,” she said, trying it again.

Madame Claude had fold her shat the Shah liked to drink and to dance. So she poured him some brandy and did the tango. Then she dragged him upstairs. He was hours late for a meeting with the Empress at the airport and there was a huge row.

The Shah enjoyed her company so much that he insisted that she stay on in Tehran. She was closeted in the hotel and he saw her twice a week.

“He was always very nice to me,” she said, “kind, gentle and generous — not at all like the Arabs.”

They used to play games in the bedroom. His favourite was tag, which is called chat, or cat, in French. She used to chase him around the bed shouting: “Chat, Shah, chat, Shah.”

He laughed a lot, but those around him did not and Ange sensed that he was a deeply sad man.

Ange soon tired of being a prisoner in the hotel. Everybody knew what she was there for and kept an eye on her. She could not even go to the pool without a guard. The only person she was allowed to be alone with was the man from the Ministry. He was a good-looking man and continued to try to seduce her. He would invite her to his suite for dinner, then emerge from the shower with his dressing gown undone.

“No one will know, I promise,” he would say. But she resisted.

American businessmen in the hotel offered her thousands of dollars, but she turned them down too.

“I was there for the Shah,” she said.

After six months Ange had had enough.

“You cannot leave,” said the man from the Ministry. “You please His Majesty.”

But she went anyway.

When the Shah came to Paris for de Gaulle’s funeral in 1970, he tried to contact her, but she was going on a fishing trip with her boyfriend and refused to change her plans. Madame Claude was furious. She had to find someone else for the Shah. Over the years, hundreds of young women from Madame Claude’s found their way to Tehran.

Farah turned a blind eye to such things as best she could. Only once did her husband’s womanizing cause a serious rift. In the early 1970s, it was rumoured that the Shah had fallen in love with a nineteen-year-old Iranian girl with bleached blonde hair named Gilda. Worse, he was said to have married her and installed her in a cottage in the palace grounds. At the end of 1972, Farah abruptly left for Europe. A CIA report noted: “This sparked rumours of a rift between the Shah and Farah. Although there were suggestions that Ashraf may have had a hand in the affair it seems more likely that the Shah’s dalliance with another woman was the real cause.”

Queen Farah returned and demanded that the Shah get rid of Gilda. He was rescued by his brother-in-law General Khatami, the husband of his sister Princess Fatemah. Khatami kindly agreed to take Gilda as his own mistress. The Shah was said to have been very grateful at the time.

In 1973, an intrepid Italian journalist, Oriana Fallaci, had the audacity to ask the Shah whether it was true that he had taken another wife.

“That is a stupid, vile, disgusting libel,” railed the Shah.

“But, Your Majesty, you’re a Muslim. Your religion allows you to take another wife without repudiating Empress Farah,” Fallaci said.

“Yes, certainly. According to my religion, I could, so long as my wife grants her consent,” he pointed out, softening. “And, to be honest, one must admit there are cases where… when a wife falls ill, for instance, or when she refuses to perform her wifely duties, thereby causing her husband unhappiness… Let’s face it. One has to be a hypocrite or an innocent to believe that a husband will tolerate that kind of thing. In your society, when something like that occurs, doesn’t a man take a mistress, or even more than one? Well, in our society, instead, a man can take another wife.”

In January 1979, Farah accompanied the Shah into exile. They ended up in Panama after General Noriega assured the Shah that every man in the country had a mistress as well as a wife. Noriega even procured for him. One evening, he booked a suite in the Panama Hotel and arranged for a young woman to come for dinner. Noriega insisted that she was from a good family, not a whore. The Shah had dinner with the woman, then they retired for the night. This may have been the last time the Shah made love. He died in June 1979, with his loyal Queen Farah by his side.