Nigel Cawthorne - Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

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.”