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.