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Wednesday, March 03, 2004
An Empress in Exile
February 28, 2004
The Times - Magazine Section
Interview Mark Irving
Interview MARK IRVING
Main Portrait ALASTAIR MILLER
The Times – Magazine section
28 Feb 2004
There was Marilyn, there was Liz and there was Jackie. And then Andy did Farah. Warhol's portrait of the Empress conveys the glamour. But what of the woman behind the iconic image? For the 25 years since she and her family fled Iran, Empress Farah has largely kept a discreet silence. But now, aged 65, she has decided to publish her memoirs under the simple title of Farah Pahlavi.
The carefully maintained face that greets me echoes the face on the cover of her book. This serves up high cheekbones, dark, wide-set eyes, a broad forehead and then the mouth, which falls expertly into pose. The look is semi-tragic, professionally static, a soft-focus hold that, 30 years ago, a television mini-series would have killed for. In the flesh, the look is pretty convincing. Her lipstick matches her highly polished nails.
The Paris flat – it is not hers, but photographs of her, the Shah and their family are everywhere is small but well-appointed. Staff flit back and forth to the tiny kitchen while her major-domo, a gaunt figure in English tweeds, hovers outside in the corridor.
I am beckoned to sit beside her on the small sofa. Even seated, she remains impressively tall. The apricot-gold hair is brushed high above her head, forming a coiffured helmet: not quite a crown, but it has something of the stature of ancient Egyptian pharaohs. Tea arrives accompanied by highly coloured biscuits and is poured into small, blue, glass cups.
The Empress ignores it all, and instead, with a casual gesture, snaps open a small box and lights a thin cigarette. I'd noticed the security men outside and was quietly wondering what kind of life she must lead. Was she still targhuti, or "satanically oppressed", the term the Islamic Republic has given to those from the former regime? What's your status, from the point of view of the Iranian Government? I ask.
"Officially, I don't know. Because I've always spoken out against what is happening in Iran for the past 25 years, they probably consider me an enemy. For example, one of the daughters of ex-President Rafsanjani ran a magazine for women in Iran three or four years ago. She included a line from a New Year's message from me in one issue. The line was simple: that, in this new century, the young people in Iran will have a better life. For that, the magazine was closed." She inhales sharply from the cigarette.
The dedication fronting her new book includes the following: "To the memory of all those who have been killed by obscurantism. To the memory of those who have given their life for the integrity of Iran."
For many Iranians of a certain age, Empress Farah represents the benign face of the Shah's regime. Even young Iranians, who weren't born in 1979, speak of her with awe, their voices falling to a whisper when her name is mentioned. For them, she's a star from a period when glamour was truly visible, a time when no one cared or perhaps even knew what "ideology" meant. For them, the Empress remains a walking movie poster: from hair to clothes to accent, Farah equals retro-chic.
Born to a leading Iranian Azeri family in 1938, and schooled in Tehran and Paris, Farah Diba, as she was then known, soon struck a figure within smart circles. Tea parties, tennis matches and a trouble-free background smoothed the path to Mohammad Reza Shah, heir to the Iranian monarchy, who was on the lookout for a third wife, having put his marriages, first to Fawzia and then to Soraya, behind him.
Marrying on December 20, 1959, Farah subsequently bore Reza in 1960 (now styled Reza II), Farahnaz in 1962, Ali Reza in 1966 and Leila in 1970. At her husband's coronation in 1967, she wore a Harry Winston diadem weighing two kilos. As she lowered herself on to her throne, she became Shabanou, or empress, of Iran, a title specially created for her (previous royal wives were known merely as malikeh, or queen).
From here on, Empress Farah defined what jet-set really meant. From Las Vegas to Monte Carlo, Cairo to London, the scene was the same: diaphanous clothes, fantastic eye make-up and a Nefertiti neck that kings, presidents and Hollywood stars couldn't keep their eyes off. In Iran, the clothes were a little less floaty, but not much, causing more than one frowning mullah to make careful notes.
There was real work, though. She instigated numerous cultural projects around the country, setting up at least ten museums and cultural centres before the curtain came down with the revolution. Perhaps the most important, from the perspective of young Iranians, remains the Museum of Contemporary Art, in what used to be called Farah Park (now Laleh or "Tulip" Park).
"Many artists I met wanted to have somewhere official to show their work. We couldn't afford the very oldest masters when building the collection, so we focused on international contemporary art. In that period, the prices were quite low compared to what they might be worth today. Thank God they didn't destroy these paintings during the revolution. I was so afraid they would attack them. But the staff removed them quickly for safety."
She interrupts our conversation to get changed for the photographer. Within minutes, she returns, wearing a beautiful, long smock of different blues and greens. "It's from Baluchistan, a province of Iran," she tells me, an astute political gesture. She works to the camera expertly, and doesn't tire.
Later, over more tea, we talk about her own art collection and life at the Niavaran Palace in northern Tehran, the home she shared with the Shah. More of a complex of palaces than a single building, today it has a somewhat ghostly air. The house in which they lived, an elegant mid-20th-century affair surrounded by wooded gardens leading up towards the snow-capped mountains that fringe Tehran, was under repair when I visited it last month.
"I've been trying to remember what we had in the palace," the Empress says vaguely, dropping the kind of sentence that drag queens can only dream of being able to deliver. "There was a small Utrillo, a Marie Laurencin, a Vlaminck in the living room, a small Renoir in my husband's bedroom – God knows where it is now – and there were ancient bronzes from Lorestan, ancient Islamic objects and other things." I haven't the heart to tell her that I saw none of these when I managed to sneak inside the huge door of the palace. Scaffolding was everywhere and all I could glimpse was the gilded limb of a nymph adorning an 18th-century French clock protruding from under a sheet. "And then I had the Andy Warhol of me, but I have no idea what's happened to that."
It must have been hard to leave the treasures behind when Farah Diba and her husband left Iran on January 16, 1979. "I didn't want people to say that we had taken everything out with us. On the way to the airport, I invited journalists to photograph the rooms in the palace before it was ransacked. I wanted them to remain in the country I love."
It's hard to know how much remains there now. Walking around the palace complex in Tehran, past the numerous rooms with their dazzling walls of mirrored stucco, past the dentist's room used by the Shah, the war room, the cocktail bar, the decorated loggias with their marble fountains and intricate fretwork panelled walls, I caught sight of a large vase decorated with a coloured photograph of the Shah and his family. There was no sight of the black strips that, at the start of the revolution, were placed over the eyes of all images of the royal family.
The estates of the Shah and those of many of the leading figures of the old regime are now controlled by the Bonyad Mostazafan, a shadowy foundation that wields enormous power over Iran's cultural and industrial economies. Requests to meet with an official from the foundation to discuss their holdings were politely turned down, but it is widely reported that these amount to billions of dollars. Along with all that art, the spectacular crown jewels remained in Iran and are now held in a special museum in Tehran run by the Central Bank of Iran.
"We had to sign everything out that we wore, and then return them. These jewels were already there before the Pahlavi dynasty, of course. I felt a bit uncomfortable wearing some of the jewels when visiting India, since many of them had come from there during previous centuries," says Farah, with a practiced apologetic gesture. Perhaps it takes a queen or an empress to have such a long memory. But she instantly produces a book and flicks through it, showing me picture of her wearing different crowns, necklaces and earrings. Many of the major stones – the emeralds, rubies, sapphires – are bigger than large eggs.
Personally, she insists, she "wasn't interested in jewellery. I could wear what I wanted from the crown jewels. But I never asked my husband to buy me jewels. The crown jewels are part of the job. During the 1990 Gulf War, there was a TV interview with an Iraqi opposition member who said that the Queen of Iran had sold the crown to Mrs Saddam Hussein. It was so ridiculous. I later sent the journalist a photograph of the Shah's crown in the museum." The truth is that, like the contemporary art in the museum founded by Empress Farah, the crown jewels present a conundrum for the Iranian authorities. "Yes, they can't make them disappear," she says, her lips smacking.
Underneath all this glamour and glitz, however, lurk darker questions. Such as the role of the Shah's armed forces during the infamous Jaleh Square massacre in September 1978 that presaged the revolution proper. Her voice rises a notch. "The shots came not first from the military, but from people dressed in military fatigues. The opposition was very well organised in manipulating the media. The blood you see on people's hands in those photographs is sheep's blood, not human. They also played a tape of my husband's voice supposedly offering our national resources to foreigners. It was total mass hysteria and manipulation."
Yet this potted simplification isn't tenable. I have spoken to independent photographers in Tehran who were there, who photographed the blood, the bodies being dragged away, the flowers swimming in the gore and the mud, and it was all very real. I have held photographs in my hands. But in Iran, nothing is what it seems, or quite what it says it is. It is a country of masks. It's just that the Empress's own mask is particularly well-designed.
"Like all secret police all over the world," she declares, "they were trying to protect the security and stability of my country. Let's not forget the period it happened. It was the Cold War and Iran is geopolitically very important. Our big neighbour was the Soviet Union. Three of our prime ministers had been assassinated by religious fanatics, there were three attempts on the Shah's life, and attempts to kidnap my son as well as myself."
She lights another cigarette and puffs at it quickly. "It was an unholy alliance of red and black, of the communists and the religious fanatics...You can't become a full democracy in a short time. My husband tried to balance a relationship with the West as well as the Eastern bloc. Look what has happened to the area since he has gone. Russia invades Afghanistan, Iraq invades Kuwait and Iraq invades Iran. I remember David Frost saying to my husband when we were in Panama [one of several countries in which the Shah and his family sought refuge after the revolution] that 'they say you are a megalomaniac'. Does having peace and stability in the Persian Gulf or having your country catching up with the developed world mean you are a megalomaniac?" The pencilled eyebrows arch sharply upwards, the hands are stretched out wide, waiting for the spotlight to pick her out.
"Islamic fundamentalism is dangerous because it breeds religious fundamentalism in other religions," she says, hinting that she might be referring to Bush's America. "I can't believe we're entering the 21st century and are fighting a religious war. Iran used to be a cradle of civilization and its people were respected. But now if you tell people you're Iranian they look at you as if you're a monster...My son [Reza] has been saying that we need a secular and free democratic system, whether it's a constitutional monarchy or another system." There are no prizes for guessing which one she prefers.
Exile has had its genuine tragedies for the Empress. Her husband died in exile in Egypt in 1980. Then there was the tragic suicide in London of Leila, her youngest child, on June 10, 2001. At a delicate mention of this, the Empress looks past my head, into space. "She was only nine years old when we left Iran and for the immediate period afterwards, we weren't with the children. They left for Texas a few days before we left. There was so much talk of people being killed, and we were moving from country to country. This was not good for her. I don't think she got over it".
She exhales in slow motion, the thin blue smoke curling up her cheeks. "The problems started in the early Nineties, and she was always tired and suffering from chronic fatigue. She went to many doctors and psychologists but it didn't help."
When I ask her how she has learnt to cope with exile, the Empress smiles. "There's an old saying from an Iranian poem: 'This house is beautiful but it is not my house'."
And with a flourish of a large coat, she is gone, into the waiting Mercedes that speeds her off to another part of a city that is and isn't her home.
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