Nigel Cawthorne: Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

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.