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.
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.