by Abbas Milani
Shakespeare, King Richard II, 5.5.32–34
Tragic is a young life whose happiest moments are spent in exile. In September 1931, the Crown Prince, Mohammad Reza, was sent abroad for his European education. He was almost twelve years old.
From the late nineteenth century, when Iran’s encounter with a now-dominant West intensified, sending children to Europe became for the country’s elite the ultimate sign of power, prestige, and prosperity. Reza Shah was sometimes handicapped in his dealings with Iran’s Eurocentric elite by what the British called his “sublime ignorance”1 of foreign cultures and his inability to speak a foreign language—other than his smattering of Russian. He wanted to make sure his son did not suffer the same cultural deficit.
For the young Mohammad Reza, being shipped off to Europe must have placed him in a genuine double bind. He craved his father’s affection and approval, yet felt intimidated by his tough disciplinarian approach. He certainly wanted to leave the many ritualistic demands of life at the upstart Court, but in the months before his departure, his distant father had initiated regular lunches and meetings with his Crown Prince. For Reza Shah, these meetings were part of his son’s royal tutelage.2 He wanted to familiarize the young boy with the complexities of power and politics in Iran. But, for the young Mohammad Reza, the lunches were in his own admission more than anything a chance to spend time with his father.
The decision to send away his Crown Prince had also been wrenching for Reza Shah. As he told a trusted confidante, it had been very hard for him to see his son go. Ultimately, he said, he knew he must “think of the country. Iran needs educated and enlightened rulers; we the old and ignorant must go.”3
It is a measure of the institutionalized misogyny of the time that despite Reza Shah’s own enlightened views on women—evident, for example, in his edict requiring all parents to send their daughters to school—he did not allow his own daughters to go to Europe for their education. Princess Ashraf, the Crown Prince’s twin sister, was at the time just as intelligent, inquisitive, ambitious, and independent as any of her brothers. Actually, early plans had called for her to accompany young Mohammad Reza and his brothers to Switzerland. But at the last minute, just before departure, Reza Shah changed his mind, allowing only the boys to go. Princess Ashraf was relegated to the role of an auxiliary to her twin brother’s life. Though this was on a par with what most Iranian fathers at the time would have done, in Reza Shah’s case it stands in sharp contrast to his otherwise ambitiously progressive views on women. Two years after being left behind, Ashraf was dispatched—along with her mother—to visit the Crown Prince, lest he be homesick. Enthralled with Europe and “What life was like in Switzerland,” Princess Ashraf sent a telegram to her father, asking Reza Shah’s permission to “remain and study in a European school.” Her father’s response was as curt as it was cruel. “Stop this nonsense,” he wrote back, “and come home at once.” There was no explanation, but this too, according to his daughter, was typical of Reza Shah.4
Switzerland was chosen as the Crown Prince’s destination for a variety of reasons. It was, first of all, a neutral country, and sending the future king there would disengage his education from the complex labyrinth of “Big Game” politics and rivalries. Furthermore, a Swiss education guaranteed mastery of the French language, and French was in those days still one of the coveted signs of distinction for the country’s status-obsessed elite. In the years before the Second World War, French was for the Persian elite still the lingua franca of power and culture. Moreover, Swiss boarding schools were known for instilling in their students the etiquette, if not the affectations, of European aristocratic affluence. Finally, in the Shah’s words, Switzerland was chosen because it had “a salubrious climate.”5
On September 5, 1931, the Crown Prince, his father, and a small entourage left Tehran for the Caspian coast. In those days there were no direct air or railroad links connecting Iran to the heart of Europe. Circuitous routes, either through Russia and eastern Europe, or through Lebanon and the Mediterranean, were the two most common ways Iranians used to reach Europe. What is today a five-hour plane ride was, in 1931, at least a seven-day journey even for royalty. On September 7, after bidding farewell to his misty-eyed father, Mohammad Reza boarded a special steamer headed for Baku in the Soviet Union.
A debonair and dashing man named Abdol-Hussein Teymourtash headed the Crown Prince’s entourage. He was the Court minister, and along with Ali-Akbar Davar, then minister of justice, he was considered one of the most powerful men in Iran.6 A man called Moadeb Naficy was to act as the Crown Prince’s guardian and physician, while another man, Mostashar-al Mulk, was to teach the future king the Persian language. Reza Shah wanted his son not only to learn how to speak Persian well, but to write it with elegance and eloquence. He was more than anything a nationalist, and for at least a thousand years, since the Arab invasion of Iran, the Persian language had become a bastion of nationalism for Persians. Like so much else in his vision of a modern Iran, Reza Shah seemed to have known, more by intuition than learning, that in the transition to modernity, language was the cement of the new nationalism—the cohesive element of what political scientist Benedict Anderson called the “Imagined Communities” of modernity.7 All through his tenure in Switzerland, the Crown Prince was expected to write home on a weekly basis “one letter, in the form of a composition, one lesson in Persian dictation and one lesson in penmanship directly.”8 Reza Shah not only read his son’s letters carefully, but also occasionally asked trusted scholars in Tehran, and of course the Crown Prince’s tutors in Switzerland, about his son’s progress in learning and mastering the Persian language.
In the public imagination, the Shah went to a boarding school named Le Rosey, where he was a good student but a better athlete and returned to Iran with some modicum of modern liberal values indelibly etched in his mind. The British, who were clearly following the Crown Prince’s footsteps in Europe, were the first to make such an observation. On the margins of a report from British officials in Berne, prepared not long after the Crown Prince arrived in Switzerland, the receiving official at the Foreign Office wrote, “a most encouraging report. It may be that the Crown Prince having been sent to Europe sufficiently young, may have really absorbed a European outlook.”9
But in fact, Mohammad Reza’s educational experience in Switzerland did not begin at Le Rosey. On October 17, 1931, after a long journey through Russia and eastern Europe, the Crown Prince and his entourage arrived in Lausanne.
For his part, Mohammad Reza seemed happy to be leaving home. From Lausanne, he moved in with a law professor named André Mercier in the small town of Vennes. To accommodate the princely presence, the professor had undertaken major construction around his house. After settling in, the Crown Prince began a course of studies at the École Nouvelle in Chailly.10
What happened at the small, exclusive boarding school is a matter of some controversy. Most sources, relying on the account of the Shah himself, simply suggest that he went to the school to learn French, and once he had a fair command of the language, went on to Le Rosey. A report from the British Consulate in Tehran at the time offers another story. It claims that the “1) Valihad (sic) [Crown Prince] has been at two schools in Switzerland, and was requested to leave the first. 2) That he was guilty of a heinous foul on the football ground, and that the other boys sent him to Coventry* or something of the kind. Hence his removal. 3) That he gave himself airs such as his schoolmates could not endure and they set on him and gave him a bad time. The headmaster requested his removal.”11 The consulate was unable to confirm these stories, but the prison memoirs of Mohammad Reza’s friend Hussein Fardust confirm much of the story. According to Fardust, Mohammad Reza got into regular fights with an Egyptian student. When the boy was forced to go to hospital at the end of one such fight, the school asked the Crown Prince to leave.12 Either way, less than a year after arriving in Switzerland, he moved to a new boarding school called Le Rosey.
Le Ros
ey was established in 1880 by a Belgian named Paul Carnal. The fact that he was married to an American woman allowed the school to combine the pragmatism of the New World and the tradition and culture of old Europe. The Shah’s days at the school were easily the happiest of his life. Though he was still under the constant gaze of his many handlers and minders, nannies and teachers, he was nevertheless free from the militarist discipline and the obsessively punctual daily routines of his father. His schoolmates remember him arriving at Le Rosey much in the manner of an Oriental potentate; at the same time, they praise him for his ability to quickly learn how to live with the reality of his new status—an equal among equals, who can neither expect nor dispense any royal rights or favors.
Le Rosey was, in those days, a haven for the sons of affluent diplomats and businessmen, or “tourists who wanted to travel without their noisy sons.”13 One of the Shah’s classmates was, for example, the older brother of Richard Helms, the director of the CIA during the Watergate break-in, and later the U.S. ambassador to Iran.† Le Rosey had more than its fair share of royalty and children of the aristocracy—from the children of the Metternichs and the Radziwills to young princes from Egypt. With an enrollment of one hundred boys, there were roughly two Americans for each non-American at Le Rosey,14 and “the sixty-odd Americans were not at all impressed by the thirty-odd non-Americans. In fact, the Americans seemed to make an indelible impression on the little rajahs, shahs, and princes.”15
On the first day of the Crown Prince’s arrival in the new school, the “affair Pahlavi” took place. He had arrived at the school in a canary-yellow Hispano-Suiza. He was not alone; his entourage included a chauffeur, a footman, a valet, and “a spectacularly handsome, silver-haired old gentleman who . . . was a Persian diplomat of high rank.”16
As the young boy descended from the Hispano-Suiza, he looked at his peers “with a stare that he must have intended to be regal.”17 If that was his intent, he certainly failed; his peers, like him devotees of fancy cars, were oblivious to his royalty, but were instead “busy examining the snake-like chrome tubes that coiled out of the hood of this car.”18 The Hispano-Suiza, used in those days only to drive him to school, was only the first in a long litany of the Shah’s fascination with such cars. By the time he left Iran in 1979, he had a vast collection worth millions of dollars.
School officials greeted the Iranian Crown Prince with due deference, bowed and beamed with joy, and led the young boy to his quarters—one of the two biggest rooms in the school dormitory, made even more special by the Persian rugs that lay on the floor. The one special privilege afforded the Iranian Crown Prince was that, unlike all the other students, he had the room to himself.
The Crown Prince spent the next few moments overseeing “the unpacking of his impedimenta (such a collection of baskets, coffers, hampers, trunks, boxes, and suitcases can hardly be called baggage).”19 By the time he finished and returned to the yard, it was early afternoon.20 One can only imagine the anxieties and trepidations in Mohammad Reza’s young mind as he was about to enter the yard. He would, at that moment, leave behind the insulated safety and solemnities that define royal status. If the story of his expulsion from the first school is indeed correct, he had already learned, the hard way, that when bereft of the protections and privileges of rank, he did not have the “technologies of the self” to cope with the real world. The moment his newly kinged father named him the crown prince, the young Mohammad Reza forfeited the fun, freedom, and frivolity of a normal childhood.
There is a common Persian expression that says, “Kill the cat on the first night of the wedding.” Authority and power must, according to the proverb, be established early in any relationship. Maybe that principle explains the young Mohammad Reza’s strange behavior when he first entered the Le Rosey courtyard. A small bevy of boys had huddled around a bench “that ringed the dignified old tree” whose majestic silhouette had become part of the school’s logo. Immersed in their conversation about baseball and Babe Ruth, they failed to notice the arrival of their new peer—the boy they eventually came to call Pahlavi. By the time the two boys finally noticed him, he was “stalking up and down like an angry tiger,” about three feet away from the tree and the bench.
Pahlavi had apparently been pacing angrily for some moments. Suddenly, he stopped, made an angry sweep of his right arm and using what sounded to the boys like a “mixture of French and Hollywood-gangster English,”21 made it clear that the students who were sitting should stand up. Assuming he wanted to sit down, the boys, engrossed in their baseball talk, moved to clear a small corner of the bench for the angry newcomer.
But a mere place on the bench was not what Pahlavi wanted. What he wanted them to know, the boys soon learned, was that people usually stood in the presence of the Crown Prince of Iran.22 Imbued by his father’s nationalistic pride, pampered by a doting mother and dutifully supplicant servants, the young Mohammad Reza had developed not just a fierce sense of nationalism, but an exaggerated set of expectations of what being a Persian crown prince could or should beget him in the world. He was about to discover the harsh realities of the world outside the Court cocoon.
By then other boys had gathered around the tree. Some snickered, while others made derogatory comments. “Pahlavi’s royal dignity was shattered. He flew at the nearest boy, who happened to be [an American boy named] Charlie Childs, and seized him by the throat.”23 Before long, Charlie had the better of the Crown Prince, who was “panting on the ground and Charlie was straddling the royal chest, pummeling the royal face.”24
After a couple of minutes, the boyish melee came to an end, and the young Pahlavi was grunting for mercy. “His black hair dank and falling over his eyes, his face scratched and bleeding, his shirt torn, he slowly got to his feet.” His next move, like his initial attack, surprised the students. He smiled, “shook Charlie’s hand a couple of times, and patted him on the back.”25 Pahlavi had, in one sense, certainly failed to kill the cat. What he achieved, however, was peace of mind. From then on, he lived amicably with the other students. They accepted him as equal.26
The young Mohammad Reza soon learned to enjoy his new life at school and even began writing for the school paper. A year before his return home, at Christmas of 1935, he wrote a long article for L’Echo du Rosey, indicating that what he loved most about his life at the school was its “esprit collectif” (collective spirit) and the “pure, amicable, and sincere solidarity” that existed amongst the students.27
In an apparent reference to his own experience, and in an almost confessional tone, he wrote about the joys and challenges of fashioning a new, more egalitarian, less hierarchic persona for himself. “Every student who comes to Rosey,” he wrote, “brings his own baggage, his own way of seeing things.” But at the new school, students face new realities, “different from what they knew,” and the “new is always a bit disconcerting.”28
Except for a note of condolence at the death of His Majesty, King of the Belgians, and a small joke at the expense of the British,29 the rest of his article is filled with gossip about student life at Le Rosey, as well as news of school sports—clearly the passion of his youth. There is, in his narrative, a carefree, light spirit that shines through nearly all the juvenilia written in this period.
The future Shah soon settled into a happy routine, dominated by his participation in almost every sport activity he could find at Le Rosey. In 1933, for example, he participated in soccer and was named captain of the team. He played tennis and lost a match to a young man named Baxter.30 He competed in track and field events, where he came in third in the 200-meter- and fourth in the 400-meter dash. He took part in the long-jump competition, where he came in last. In his first year of school, his academic performance was less than sterling and did not win him any prizes, or a mention in the list of the top three students of his class.31
His performance in soccer was clearly his forte, but that too was not always, according to the school paper, singular or outstanding. In an
article analyzing the 1933 season, while his team is praised for its overall performance, Pahlavi is criticized for “a bit of timidity” in his playing.32 Timidity was one of the Shah’s characteristics. In others, it could well be construed as a sign of reason and intelligence. It is, after all, according to Hamlet, conscience that makes cowards of us all. But in the Shah, particularly when he took on the persona of an authoritarian king, timidity could only lead to disaster. In his Le Rosey days, such timidity only begot him a bad notice in the school paper.
By the next academic year, the student called Pahlavi had clearly emerged as one of the better players on the soccer team.33 His performance in other sports was uneven and sometimes less than spectacular. In tennis, for example, as a member of the doubles team for the class in 1934, he was for a while “not able to bring off a victory.” In the first set of singles matches, too, he was “trounced” by a boy named Symington.34 In his third year, the Crown Prince improved his tennis and was praised for his “perfect style” and convincing victories over his competitors.35 For the rest of his life, tennis remained one of his favorite pastimes. He sometimes played friendly matches with some of Iran’s top players.
It seems that the same release he found in sports, he found as well in writing for the school paper. Aside from the handful of his personal letters, the articles he wrote there are easily the most important pieces of writing of his early years, as there is no hint of the entrenched honorifics found in his letters to his father or the stiff style of his notes to his teachers. Instead, the articles exude an air of comfort, with an informal style, and their content is no less carefree.
In the first issue to which he made a contribution, Pahlavi had two long articles—one was the lead editorial, called “Chronique Roseene,” and the other, “Croquis Roseene” (Silhouettes from Rosey). The first is a report of the mundane details of life on campus—who is in, who is out, who has a new desk light, and, of course, who has done well in sports. The tone is light and jovial, often tinged with a touch of youthful romance about the “Rosey honor.” He writes of the beauty of the Rosey chateau and praises the grandeur of the snowcapped mountains surrounding the school’s winter campus at Gstaad.36 The article called the “Silhouettes from Rosey” also covers student life but has a more sober and literary style. It shows his reading in the classics of Western culture—a central point of Le Rosey’s curriculum. He again speaks of Rosey honor, but also refers to concepts such as “the malady of our century,” and alludes to mythical figures such as Orpheus.37
