by Abbas Milani
Both academically and athletically, 1934 was a better year for the Crown Prince. He was ranked second in his class academically, scoring in the eighty-fourth percentile of his class. In athletic excellence, he was ranked third.38 The same pattern, combining his newfound love of journalism with his avid love of sport, and his efforts to make sure he passed his academic exams, defined his next year at Le Rosey. In a lengthy essay at Easter 1935, he writes of the heroic effort of the school administration to make sure that students like him who did not go home to their families during holidays did not feel lonely. He waxes eloquent about the “profound impression” that one of his teachers, Monsieur Henri, had on his life. He talks of his teacher’s respect for tradition and for the law, and of his ability to harmoniously connect the past to the present and the future.39 These articles provide us a rare glimpse of the naked soul of Mohammad Reza, a portrait of the king as a young man.
But as he indulged in his passion for sports and tried to live the normal life of a Le Rosey student, the outside world was still watching him carefully. In 1935 the British Vice-Consul to Berne traveled to Le Rosey to find out just how the young Crown Prince was doing. The Vice-Consul wrote, “I lunched yesterday with M. Carnal, headmaster of Le Rosey School, and saw the Crown Prince of Persia (‘saw’ because I was not introduced and did not like to press the matter on the first occasion).” He describes the young Mohammad Reza as “tall and well-built (lacking the usual miniature-like Persian finesse)” and says that he “is an excellent all round athlete, being specially prominent in the football field. He is in fact one of Le Rosey’s crack players.” He writes of him as “extremely intelligent” and a hard worker who won the Prix d’Excellence for academic work. He confirms other reports that “the Crown Prince is treated just like other boys, who even ‘tutoyer’ him [address him with the informal ‘you’]; the only difference lying in certain privileges such as not filing in and out of meals with the other boys, a room to himself.”40 According to the British Consulate report, the “Crown Prince appears to be popular with other boys, who in no way resent his small privileges, as they are themselves in many cases the sons of princes or diplomats (Lignes, Radziwills, Thurn, and Taxis, Metternichs, etc).”41
The 1935 consulate report is important for another reason beyond establishing the Crown Prince’s popularity or athletic prowess. It includes the first official reference to the enigma that was Ernest Perron. Perron became easily one of the most controversial characters in the life of the Shah. Described by his friends and foes as everything from “diabolic to mysterious and from most odd to pure, ingenuous and innocent,”42 Perron played a crucial role in the Shah’s life and became a religious soulmate of Princess Shams, the Shah’s sister. He was a man of many paradoxes—both devoutly Catholic and decidedly homosexual.
They met at Le Rosey, and for the next two decades, Perron was the Shah’s closest, and near-constant, companion. Though, in the lore of Iranian politics, Perron was branded a British spy, the British Consulate describes him, in an almost alarmed tone, as “the oddest young man, a Swiss . . . who appears to be the Prince’s chief guide, philosopher, and friend. He was apparently engaged as a sort of Super-Servant for the prince in Switzerland.”43
Perron was in fact the son of a gardener or handyman at Le Rosey. He was born on June 29, 1909, making him ten years older than the Crown Prince. He was also something of a poet who eventually became the self-declared master of mirth for the Shah and the chief of protocol for the Pahlavi Court. He was “short and thin, almost fragile.” He limped, and he lived in “the servant quarter of Le Rosey.”44 In another report, the British Legation describes him as “a curious fellow . . . dressed like a musical-comedy Bohemian who also reads characters from hand-writing and the palms of your hand, and makes the most surprising statements on the strength of it about your ‘vie sexuelle’! . . . It is rather alarming that such an odd specimen should have such a hold over the young Prince. The Belgian Charge here, a most sensible fellow, has said that he would not entrust any young man to Monsieur Perron, let alone a future monarch, and his description of him as ‘un exalté, un illuminé, un mystique’ is just about right.”45 It is not hard to imagine that in the context of Le Rosey’s international congregation of pampered and status-conscious boys, life was not easy for a young man like Perron—in social rank, inferior as the son of a gardener, and in social demeanor, saddled with what was then the double stigma of effeminacy and the physical handicap of a limp. He was subject to constant taunts and even physical abuse. On one such occasion, Mohammad Reza apparently took pity on the gardener’s son and decided to offer him what protection he could.46 This turned out to be the commencement of a close and increasingly controversial relationship. In the beginning, it was not clear whether the Crown Prince would dare take his new friend back to Iran with him. It was not hard to surmise that Reza Shah, obsessively concerned with giving his son a “manly education” and on constant watch for any hint of effeminate behavior, would not be happy with the idea of his son’s returning from his “Grand Tour” of Europe with a gay man ten years his senior. The wrath of Reza Shah was something even his favorite son, the Crown Prince, would not risk easily. Yet Perron did go back to Iran with his friend, and as they anticipated, Reza Shah proved hard to convince, or to circumvent.
But in the meantime, in Switzerland, Perron became the Crown Prince’s constant companion. At Perron’s behest, Mohammad Reza began reading French poetry; he read Chateaubriand and Rabelais and before long, he thought of them as “my favorite French authors.”47 During weekends, the two often visited the house of Anoushirvan Sepahbodi—Iran’s ambassador to Switzerland at the time. For the Crown Prince in his youthful exile, the Sepahbodi house was a piece of Persia where he was treated like royalty. In a strange twist of fate, that same ambassador’s son was Iran’s envoy to Morocco when the Shah, more than four decades later, was in exile. But in the carefree days of Switzerland, the Ambassador’s house was where he had Persian food—chelo kebab was one of the Crown Prince’s favorite dishes—and listened to both Persian and classical Western music. For a while Liszt and Mozart were his favorites.
Before Perron, every relationship in Mohammad Reza’s life had been chosen for him by his father. Now he was making a choice of his own, and it was, by all accounts, a strange one. What role Perron played in the Shah’s life has never been clear. The Shah’s foes were particularly keen on turning this friendship into a serious liability for him.48 Others have used theories of modern psychology to explain the enigma. Perron, they say, was the Shah’s “selfobject”—a term coined by Heinz Kohut to refer to a particular form of psychic identification.49 A selfobject—as the concocted morphology of the word betrays—refers to a person who has been chosen by another, usually suffering from some variety of psychic disorder, to act as an extension of their Self. For fragile souls, the selfobject is used to bolster self-esteem, to provide much-needed support and succor.50 What this theory fails to explain is why, of all the people in the world, the Crown Prince would choose Perron as his primary selfobject. But in 1935 Switzerland, all such concern was for the future king still in the state of blissful “suspended animation.”
At the same time, the normal problems of youth—his desire to buy a fancy new car, rumors of his illicit liaison with one of the school’s maids51—interfered with his Persian lessons and the mandatory letters and reports he had to write to his father every week. Reza Shah would begin his normal routine only after he received and read his son’s letter. So central were these letters to Reza Shah’s mood, that on the rare occasions when one was late in arriving, the work of the Court would come to a screeching halt, and sometimes the Minister of Post and the Court Minister were sent to scour the city’s postal pipeline to locate it.
Knowing full well how attentive his father would be to every detail of its style and content, preparing the letter had become something of a major challenge for the Crown Prince. He referred to the time he spent writing the reports and lear
ning the language as his “hour of purgatory.”52 Nevertheless, the Shah developed a legible, at times even beautiful, handwriting style and prose that was succinct and polished.
Perhaps because of comments like this, a consensus has developed amongst his biographers that the Shah was particularly unhappy during his days in Switzerland. The Shah himself helped the spread of this idea. In talks he gave, as well as in his memoirs, he complained about his isolation in Le Rosey, how he was forced to spend time alone while his friends were at parties and balls. He wrote that “when I was at school in Switzerland, yes, yes, terrible . . . feeling, as you said, in a straitjacket, like a prisoner,”53 and finally, he complained that his guardians were unusually harsh and stern with him.54 The complaints have led compliant biographers to the conclusion that Le Rosey was “an extraordinarily unhappy period for the Crown Prince.”55
In reality, however, the Shah’s own writings of the period, the testimony of others, a closer reading of his memoirs, as well as photos from the period, tell an entirely different story. As a king, entrapped in the requisite rhetoric of love for his father and for the fatherland, it was politically untenable for him to admit to the fact that he loved life away from the Court, the country, and cares of the state. But beneath this thin, politically expedient façade was the reality of his youthful exile. Happy years of exile away from his country might be hard to reconcile with the divine dedication to save that country. In his memoirs, when he is not describing the politically exigent image of his unhappy days in a foreign country, he makes it clear that his health had improved in Switzerland because his mood had improved. The improvement, he writes, had nothing to do with better food or with the weather.
His doting sister Princess Ashraf writes of seeing him at Le Rosey and finding that he looked “healthy, and happy too, stronger and more fit than he had been in Tehran. I saw at once how much he had been influenced by Europe.” When she goes on to describe the nature of these changes, she exhibits a surprising sense of Eurocentrism—a belief in the superiority of the European culture. “Before he left Tehran,” she writes, “he had been, in spite of his quiet nature, a little rough around the edges. . . . In moments of excitement, he might . . . ride his horse into the house . . . but now his manners had been refined and Europeanized.”56 In the long hours of discussion Mohammad Reza had with his sister, there is no evidence of his complaining about the “straitjacket,” but conversely, much to indicate how happy he was and how impressed he was with all he had learned in his new environment. If anything, in the course of these discussions, the young Mohammad Reza complained not about his life in Switzerland, but of Iran. “My brother told me,” she writes, “how impressed he had been by the democratic attitudes he had seen at school. . . . He talked about how he had come to realize for the first time how much economic and social disparity there was among the people of Iran.”57 The unhappy exile story was an invention, intended to support the Shah’s assumed political persona of a man on a divine and historic mission to save his country.
* A British idiom, used to damn someone to the equivalent of an inferno
† Many biographers have mistakenly claimed that the Helms at Le Rosey was the future head of the CIA
Chapter 5
HAPPY HOMECOMING
A thousand flatterers sit within thy crown
Shakespeare, King Richard II, 2.1.100
He left a chaperoned boy and returned a dashing debonair man, dressed in a trim and tailored suit, his dark curly hair perfectly coiffed. He went in docility with an entourage handpicked by his father; he returned in quiet defiance in the company of a friend he had chosen himself, and who he knew would not meet with the approval of his father.
No less dramatic were the changes that had taken place in Iran in the five years of his absence. Reza Shah’s far-reaching reforms touched nearly every facet of Iranian life. From disparate parts of a country on the verge of collapse—what in today’s social science terminology would be called a “failed state”—Reza Shah had created a modern nation, with a strong central government, a small and budding industrial sector, and a modern but brittle army and bureaucracy.
About the time of the Crown Prince’s return, Iran was set to finish a transnational railroad. Reza Shah had ordered it built in spite of domestic and international opposition. Britain initially tried to dissuade him from the idea altogether; when it found that he would not be deterred, the British government tried to convince him to build it along an east–west axis, connecting Turkey and Europe to Pakistan and India.1 Reza Shah opted instead for a plan that connected the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea.
Although the Crown Prince was out of Iran when work on the railroad began, he was, unbeknownst to himself, entangled in some of the controversies surrounding the project. Reza Shah was unhappy that the trestles used in building the tracks were all imported from the Soviet Union. In response to his concern, a small group of politicians and businessmen created a company called Sherkate-e Jangalat (Forests Company) that used Iranian lumber to make the trestles. To “facilitate” their work, they named the Crown Prince as a partner in the company.
Soon, Reza Shah learned that the company had been greedily razing some of the beautiful forests and ancient trees of his beloved province of Mazandaran. He angrily ordered the company closed and its properties confiscated. There is no evidence that Prince Mohammad Reza, in Switzerland at the time, knew anything about his own ghost partnership in the company. But during his own reign, the practice of giving partnerships to members of the royal family to “facilitate” work became a common practice and occasionally a major headache for him and his regime.2
Reza Shah had also opened Iran’s historic sites, including religious centers and schools, for inspection and study by American and European scholars and anthropologists. Arthur Pope and André Goddard were two of the most important such experts. Many of the mosques discussed and displayed in books on Iranian art history were, for the first time, opened to non-Muslims under the direct order of Reza Shah. The future Shah would continue his father’s fervent patronage of both Goddard and Pope, as well as other Western archeologists and art historians. Pope’s monumental study of Persian art was one of the fruits of this patronage.
On May 13, 1928, Reza Shah unilaterally declared null and void all existing capitulary rights—a despised vestige of colonialism by which citizens of the colonial country were granted immunity from prosecution in Iranian courts.3 The decision was, rightly, celebrated with much fanfare as a sign of Iran’s newfound independence. But the end of capitulary rights also signaled a change in the nature of Iran’s relationship with the outside world, increasing tension with Britain.
Reza Shah’s first major confrontation with the British came soon after his 1926 coronation. The Iranian Foreign Ministry had written a “categorical note” to the British Embassy “demanding the removal of Indian Savars [mounted guards] from Persia.” The British had been using such guards in some of their consular offices. In those days, Harold Nicolson—husband to Vita Sackville-West and the man who, in his own words, had a “Kipling inside him, and something of an ‘empire builder’ ” 4—was Britain’s chargé d’affaires in Iran. He rushed to the Iranian Foreign Ministry to object. Only the armed forces of the Imperial Army of Iran, the Iranian note said, are now permitted to carry arms in Iran. The note was, in the opinion of Nicolson, “so categorical as to be almost offensive.” He wanted Iran to take back or change the note. Much to his displeasure, the Foreign Ministry informed Nicolson that the disputed note had been imposed upon the ministry by none other than Reza Shah and thus could, under no circumstances, be taken back or amended.5 Eventually, a solution was found by adding an annex to the text, softening the tone of the initial note. But at the end, the British were forced to abide by the content of what diplomats would call the “frank and honest” letter.
A number of other issues, large and small, continued to come up between Reza Shah and the British government, causing an almost chronic rift betw
een the two. There was, for example, the time when representatives from the British Embassy tried to visit Sheikh Khaz’al in Tehran, where he was under house arrest, but were told they must go through normal channels required for visiting prisoners.6 In the “Bas’idu incident” the British decided to fly their own flag over the small settlement on one of the Iranian islands in the Persian Gulf that they had been using as a coaling station for their ships. The Iranian government ordered and the British government agreed to take down their flag and instead fly the Persian flag. By then the British were already becoming increasingly agitated by Reza Shah’s recalcitrance.7 In fact, on the day of the Crown Prince’s return to Iran, there was another minor altercation between Iran and Britain when British sailors tried to land on Iranian soil without receiving the requisite permission or answering the normal queries of Iranian customs officials.
The most controversial confrontation between Reza Shah and Britain took place, as expected, over oil. In April 1933, after prolonged and contentious negotiations—in one instance, Reza Shah angrily tore to pieces the text of the D’Arcy Concession initially signed in 1901 that had given Britain a monopoly on Persian oil—and after the issue was taken up by the League of Nations, a new agreement was eventually signed, known as the 1933 Agreement. Reza Shah and his supporters declared it a great victory for Iran. Many years later, one aspect of these negotiations would become the subject of some debate. In the language of article ten of the agreement, it was clearly stipulated that Iran should have 20 percent of the profits not only of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Iran, but of all its subsidiaries around the world. After a few years, the company had in fact spawned dozens of extremely profitable subsidiaries, and Iran’s share amounted to millions of dollars.8 The British fought hard not to pay any such royalties, and when Iran’s oil industry was nationalized in 1951, article ten, along with everything else in the 1933 agreement, was declared null and void. There were at the time experts who argued that, in the long run, Iran’s revenues from these subsidiary rights would be greater than new revenues resulting from the nationalization of the country’s oil industry.
