Although she was technically married to an Egyptian, she lived with Kemal in the Sisli district of Istanbul. This did not prevent him from continuing his relationship with Corinne. After the British occupied Istanbul, Corinne’s house was searched for weapons. Kemal had fled to Anatolia, where began the struggle for independence.
Fikriye followed him there, where she lived openly as his mistress. She wanted to be his wife, but although he loved her dearly he would not hear of it. He wanted a Western-style marriage to a woman who could stand beside him. Although she kept her face unveiled, Fikriye was an oriental woman who would always walk behind. Besides, as a Pasha, his first wife should be a virgin. The dark, slender Fikriye was already, technically, married.
Nevertheless, she would do for the present. Having her with him on the campaign would keep him away from the promiscuous women who hung around the garrison with whom he had entertained himself before.
The campaign to liberate Turkey ended with the burning of Smyrna. While Atatürk was there, a young woman came to his headquarters and asked to see him. He refused, then thought he might take a look. When he saw her, he dismissed his orderly and asked her to sit down.
Her name was Latife and she was the daughter of Ushakizade Muammer, a rich Smyrniot with interests in shipping and international commerce. Although Latife was a Turk with olive skin and large dark eyes, she had studied law in Europe and spoke French like a Frenchwoman. Her parents were spending the summer in Biarritz, but she had returned to Turkey to help his cause. Like many Turkish women, she wore his picture in a locket around her neck. In Atatürk’s mind, this fuelled the fantasy that she was in love with him.
She lived in a large house outside the city and invited Kemal and his staff to stay there. She even threw a formal reception for him. But she would not go to bed with him. This puzzled Kemal who, as a liberator of his country, was used to willing, eager women. But Latife was determined to become his wife, not just his mistress. When he left Smyrna for Ankara at the end of the month, she still had not succumbed.
Kemal wrote to Latife. Now he was head of state, he needed a wife, he said, and she seemed to fit the bill. She visited Ankara. Kemal’s ailing mother died while she was there, but, nevertheless, Kemal asked Latife to marry him at once. The following day, they married in European style in her father’s house. In an Islamic marriage, the bride and groom do not see each other until after the ceremony. Kemal and Latife broke with tradition and took their vows seated together at a table.
Kemal took his new wife on a honeymoon tour, using her as an example in his campaign to emancipate Turkish women. This was how women should be treated, he said, indicating Latife standing beside him in breeches. When women offered to put her up, he insisted that his wife stay with him. There was to be an end to the harem and the separation of the sexes.
Flaunting his new wife in such an unseemly manner provided ammunition for the traditionalists among his opponents — especially when Latife appeared in low-cut gowns at gala events.
At the time of the wedding, Fikriye was away in Germany in a sanatorium. The hardships of his military campaign had left her with tuberculosis. The first she heard of the marriage was in the newspaper. She returned to Turkey and stayed with Kemal and his new bride at Chankaya for four days in the summer of 1923. Then she returned to Ankara and checked into a hotel. A few days later, she went to see Kemal at the presidential palace, but was refused admission. She drove back to her hotel and shot herself with a pistol she had bought in Germany. The shot did not kill her immediately, but she died soon after in hospital.
The guilt that Kemal felt over Fikriye’s death made married life impossible. Kemal and Latife clung together for the next two years, but on 5 August, 1925, the marriage was dissolved. Latife went to live in Istanbul, though would be discreetly out of town if Kemal visited the city. In 1933, he was given the name Atatürk Father of the Turks — by the National Assembly. He continued his heavy drinking and died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1938. Latife outlived him by thirty-eight years.
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.