The Shah

by Abbas Milani

  With the newly designed red-velvet-lined crown on his head, Reza Shah sat on the Throne looking stern, content, and older than his age. He had a bejeweled sword in one hand, the scepter of power in the other, and a pearl-studded cloak over his shoulders beneath which he wore a military uniform. The cloak was blue, and blue is, in Persian mythology, the color of royal thrones, and in the Old Testament, the color of God’s throne. In Babylonian mythology and European lore, blue is the color of royal blood.24

  The blue cloak was covered with a paisley design; paisley, it is said, is the quintessential visual metaphor of Iran’s bifurcated and tormented identity—riven between Arabic Islam and pre-Islamic Persian creeds. The paisley, they say, is a bent cedar, and the cedar is the tree Zarathustra planted in heaven. The heavenly tree was “bent” under the weight of the Arab invasion. The paisley’s appearance on the cloak was an early omen of what was to come. Soon after his coronation, Reza Shah adopted a policy of glorifying the pre-Islamic part of the Iranian identity and weakening the Islamic component. His son, Mohammad Reza, also continued this policy, but under different circumstances and with drastically different results.

  After the salvo of guns celebrating the advent of a new dynasty, the new King left the palace and rode through the city in a glass coach drawn by six horses, followed by the Crown Prince in another coach, both shining in the sun. The streets were lined with people. Pictures of the young boy sitting in the royal carriage betray a sense of dread and boredom. Until then, he had lived a more or less normal life, not jaded by the unseasonable demands of decorum. He was now forced to live through more than two hours of ceremonies, under the gaze not only of the public, but of his stern father. Hard as the ordeal must have been, the real challenge of living a ritualized life was only about to begin.

  A week of celebration followed the coronation, but the King refused to attend most of the events, “sending his son instead, who seated in an immense scarlet tent, guarded by two soldiers with fixed bayonets, spent his time solemnly eating through the sweets piled on a table before him.”25 Years later, in the course of an interview, the Shah confided to a journalist that during that first coronation, he had “tried to behave like a young soldier, according to my father’s wishes, just as my son behaved when I was crowned.”26

  On the day Reza Shah ascended the throne, the leisurely pace of the life of Mohammad Reza, who had hitherto been raised by his doting mother, suddenly and drastically came to an end. The first traumatic change came when the six-year-old boy was abruptly taken away from his mother and his home. He had spent much of his time at his mother’s, in his own words, “fighting all the time” with his older sister, Shams, and his twin sister, Ashraf.27 But now his father was the king, and Reza Shah wanted to make sure that his son was not, in his own words, “in a woman’s skirt.”28 It was important that the Crown Prince receive a manly education, so Reza Shah took this education into his own hands. The young boy was settled in a palace of his own, located in Reza Shah’s large compound, and put in the care of a distant relative, Amir Akram Pahlavan, who was to “combine the functions of royal mentor with those of proxy governor of the province of Mazandaran.”29

  But beneath the starched formalities of his new official life and title, there beat a curious child’s heart. For Mohammad Reza and at least one of his siblings, Ashraf, the “first few days of royalty were spent exploring the lush gardens of cypress and pine, the great halls with their huge wall frescoes, and ceilings of mosaic mirrors that glittered like diamonds.”30

  A special “elementary military school” was set up at the Court for the Crown Prince and some of his brothers and half-brothers from Reza Shah’s other marriages. The Shah later described how he was placed “in a carefully selected class of twenty students, mostly sons of government officials and army officers.”31 As with every other detail of the Crown Prince’s life, it was Reza Shah who decided the composition of the class. Amongst the select group he chose there was a boy named Hussein Fardust, whose father was an army lieutenant.32 Before long, Hussein became the Crown Prince’s “special friend” and would retain that special status for nearly all the rest of the Shah’s life.

  The elementary school was, in every sense, a miniature military academy. The boys wore uniforms; their curriculum was a mixture of military matters and traditional reading and writing lessons. The Shah later said, “the whole set up was so rigid . . . [it was an] atmosphere of absolute discipline and almost rigidness [sic].”33

  The same military discipline was enforced throughout the country’s rapidly multiplying schools.34 Girls were, for the first time in the history of the country, required to go to school, and both girls and boys wore uniforms—gray cloth with peaked caps for boys and gray overalls for girls.35 All schools began their day with calisthenics; before classes began, teachers and principals inspected each student for cleanliness and hygiene—short clean nails, short hair, and a tidy uniform.

  At the Court, Reza Shah had ordered his son’s teachers to make no special allowance for the Crown Prince. But neither the teachers, nor the young Mohammad Reza, were able or willing to heed the King’s command. By then a subtle change had, not unexpectedly, occurred in the young boy’s general demeanor. According to his father’s trusted Chief of Staff, the Crown Prince became “extremely sensitive. For example, when buying toys, before he was the Crown Prince, he paid little attention to how good or bad, how big or small a toy was, but no sooner had he become Crown Prince than he would criticize everything and become disgruntled. I remember him often . . . trying to convey to me that I am now the Crown Prince, and those days I was not the crown prince.”36

  While a child’s demand for such deference from adults would be surprising under any circumstances, it was particularly startling in the case of the hitherto shy and timid Mohammad Reza. It demonstrated both the elasticity of his character and the corrosive power of his position as crown prince to an authoritarian potentate. His character was no doubt malleable; it was often said that he was easily influenced by those around him. The deferential treatment afforded him easily overpowered whatever resistance his native modesty might have provided to the perks of potentate power.

  There was in the Shah a sharp and even jarring disharmony between his public and private behavior. His public persona was cold, aloof, and somewhat pompous. At the same time, the few who knew him as a friend or confidante speak of him as a man shy and diffident in demeanor, polite and kind in disposition, and very willing to overlook the solemnities of royal protocol. At least one aspect of this stark behavioral dualism he seems to have learned from his father. Reza Shah believed that familiarity begot, first, a laxity of discipline, and ultimately, contempt for those in power. Father and son both kept their distance, allowing only a handful of people entry into their inner sanctum.

  There was yet another dichotomy in the Shah’s behavior. His treatment of Iranians was different from the way he treated Westerners. With Europeans and Americans, he was more comfortable, less starchy, and less pompous. In audiences, only a handful of Iranians were ever allowed to sit down, while every Westerner, regardless of rank and riches, was allowed to sit. Anecdotes throughout the span of his life, from the time he was a boy of five, to the days when he was at the height of his power, illustrate again and again these complex, and often contradictory, facets of his public and private personae.

  A few days after Mohammad Reza was anointed by his father as the crown prince, his closest friend, Majid A’lam, came to play, as he had done so often in the past. But unbeknownst to the young boy, things had changed drastically in the life of his friend. Before he could enter the room where his old playmate awaited him, a liveried attendant—Reza Shah had himself helped design the uniform to be worn by all staff at the Court—instructed him, in a stern, uncompromising tone, “You are no longer to call His Highness anything other than His Highness.” Even his siblings were “ordered by the Shah to call their brother, Vala Hazrat, ‘Your Highness.’ ” His mother, too, began addr
essing him as “Your Highness.” She stood up every time her Crown Prince son entered a room. Even Reza Shah started to call his son “Sir.” He would never use the familiar pronoun, tow (the singular “you” in Persian), to address his son, insisting instead on the formal shoma.37 Everyone was expected to follow the King in the use of this more formal language. In the beginning, however, the young Mohammad Reza was clearly ill at ease with these formalities. And his first meeting with his friend exhibited this discomfort.

  With the pomp and ceremony befitting an audience with a crown prince, Majid A’lam was led into the room. But no sooner had the handlers and valets left the room than the young Mohammad Reza warmly greeted his friend as he had in earlier, less complicated days. “When they’re around,” the Crown Prince told his young friend, “call me Your Highness, but when we are alone together, you can call me the same name you always used.”38 But before long, the young A’lam too joined the chorus of those who called the Crown Prince only by his title and with the kind of deference owed his title, not his age. In fact, for the young Mohammad Reza, the circle of intimacies was rapidly and forever closing.

  He was in elementary school when he had his first brush with death. In the course of his eventful life, he would have several more such close encounters. At the Court, in the courtyard of his school, a murder of crows flocked every day. They not only soiled the grounds, but in Persian culture they are considered omens of evil and bad fortune. In lieu of a scarecrow, a soldier was given the task of spending every night in the yard keeping the crows away with a pellet gun. One day, the gun was inadvertently left in the classroom, and when the young Mohammad Reza walked in, he saw it, and as was his wont as a young boy, began playing with it in the yard. A classmate tried to grab it, and in the tussle, the gun went off. A pellet hit the rim of the Crown Prince’s hat and ended up in the opposite wall. Alarmed guards and teachers ran into the room and seized the gun; then their first concern was how to hide the episode from Reza Shah.39

  A second, more serious brush with death came about the same time, but the Crown Prince was altogether unaware of the threat. In October 1926, about twenty-five Iranian officers and civilians were arrested on the “grounds of a plot against” Reza Shah and the Crown Prince. While the Soviet papers claimed that many of those arrested—including one of the leaders named Haim, hitherto the head of the Zionist organization in Iran—were British agents, the British Legation, fearing what it called the King’s “insane and vindictive suspicions,” refused to intervene. The conspirators had allegedly planned to kill the Shah, the Crown Prince, and a number of other leading members of the government.40 Instead of telling his son about these threats, Reza Shah concentrated on teaching him the disciplined life of a soldier.

  Military training was not, of course, all that Reza Shah had in mind for his Vali Ahd (Crown Prince). He also hired a tutor—the wife of a general—to take charge of the young Mohammad Reza’s non-military and non-traditional training. She was a Russian-born, French-speaking woman, who had been a ballerina of considerable beauty and grace, and the Crown Prince mastered the French language under her tutelage. He attributed to her “the advantage [I acquired] of being able to read, speak and write French as if it was my own language.”41 In later years, he also learned English. All his life, his command of French and English was a crucial part of his political capital and an important element of his persona as a modernizing monarch. The Shah claimed that it was also because of his tutor that his mind was opened to the spirit of Western culture and his palate to the mysteries of French food.42

  Before long, this combination of “manly education” and cosmopolitan training came to include horseback riding and hunting. He also played soccer, dabbled in wrestling and boxing, and played a game they called “bicycle polo.” While his favorite early childhood game was “cops and robbers,” he also had an affinity for building. “I would spend long hours,” he says, “making mechanical models with my Meccano.”43

  In becoming the crown prince, perhaps the single most important change in the life of the young boy was that his formerly distant and often absent father began to meet with him regularly. Even more importantly, the father began to show his young son tenderness. With everyone else, Reza Shah was stern and serious, formal and forbidding; with the young Mohammad Reza, he indulged in “informal and easy-going humor.” He would joke with his son “in the most informal and affectionate manner” and even sing lullabies to him—but all in private.44 Reza Shah also made his son, at least in title and appearance, a precocious military man. The Crown Prince was eleven years old when he was named colonel in chief of the crack Pahlavi Regiment.45

  A picture commemorating his appointment captures the jarring incongruence of an eleven-year-old colonel. He stands in the middle of a crowd of older colonels and generals. He wears a heavy coat and is in full royal regalia. The other officers all stand at full attention, frozen in the solemnity of the moment, while the eleven-year-old colonel stands casually, his right hand royally, even “Napoleonically,” tucked into his pocket.

  In their meetings, Reza Shah wanted to make sure that his son “was well acquainted with everything that was going on”46 in the country. In the son’s words, his father did not “discuss politics with [him] but he would talk about general aspects of life.”47 If Reza Shah hoped to use these meetings to mold his son in his own image, he, like any other father, succeeded in some areas and failed in others.

  The most glaring difference of attitude between father and son was on the question of religion. As a child, in the span of three years, Mohammad Reza claimed to have had three mystical experiences. In each case, he said he had communed with saintly apparitions. To his devout and doting mother, these were blissful signs of heavenly favor. To Reza Shah they were inane fantasies, unbecoming a modern monarch. His father “scoffed at”48 these stories. Others claim that Reza Shah did much more than scoff at the alleged saintly encounters and actually forbade his son to repeat them in his presence. As a young boy, Mohammad Reza had no choice but to abide by his father’s commandment. But thirty years later, when he was king and was writing his memoirs—and at least momentarily free of his father’s disbelieving ghost—he wrote about the three experiences at some length and with relish. In his rendition,

  Soon after my investiture as Crown Prince, I had fallen ill with typhoid fever, and for weeks, I had hovered between life and death. This had been a dreadful ordeal for my devoted parents. . . . I then had a dream about Ali who in our faith was the chief lieutenant of Mohammed. . . . In my dream, Ali had with him his famous two-pronged sword, which is often seen in paintings of him. He was sitting on his heels on the floor, and in his hands he held a bowl containing a liquid. He told me to drink, which I did. The next day, the crisis of my fever was over, and I was on the road to rapid recovery. . . . I was only seven. . . . This experience was within the same year followed by two other events which were also significantly to influence my life. Almost every summer my family and I made an excursion to Emam-Zadeh-Dawood, a lovely spot in the mountains above Tehran. . . . since I was so young, a relative who was an army officer placed me in front of him on the saddle of his horse. Some way up the trail, the horse slipped, and I was plunged head first on to a jagged rock. I fainted. When I regained consciousness, the members of the party were expressing astonishment that I had not even a scratch. I told them that as I fell, I had clearly seen one of our saints, named Abbas, and that I had felt him holding me and preventing me from crashing my head against the rock. . . . The third event occurred while I was walking with my guardian near the royal palace. . . . Suddenly I clearly saw before me a man with a halo around his head—much as in some of the great paintings, by Western masters, of Jesus. As we passed one another, I knew him at once. He was the Imam, a descendent of Mohammed who, according to our faith, disappeared but is expected to come again to save the world.49

  He never had a vision again. His proclivity towards illness, however, continued unabated—in the span of thre
e years, he contacted whooping cough, diphtheria, malaria, and “several other ailments.”50 And while his mother encouraged his affinity for miracles and divine interventions, his father made every effort to convince his son that while he was indeed the anointed one, nothing other than his own disciplined dedication would determine his fortune.

  * The snakes are particularly eerie in light of the fact that in Iranian mythology, Zahak, the dread despot, had two snakes on his two shoulders, put there by the devil, and every day they each required a diet of two brains from two Iranian youths

  Chapter 4

  JOCUND JUVENILIA

  Thus play I in one person many people,

  And none contented. Sometimes am I king,

  Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar.