The Mansions of Limbo

by Dominick Dunne

  A fiercely private woman until the recent events in the Middle East focused attention on her, Queen Noor has never captured the imagination of the American public in the way that Princess Grace of Monaco, her obvious counterpart, did. Comparisons to the late princess are said to disconcert, even annoy, her. In London recently, she attended the play Love Letters with her great friend Tessa Kennedy, the interior designer who decorated several residences of the Jordanian royal family. After the show, the queen went backstage to visit one of the stars, another old American friend, Stefanie Powers. A friend of mine who sat behind the queen said she was virtually unrecognized by the audience. She has never become a fashion darling of the international paparazzi in the manner of the Princess of Wales, the Duchess of York, and the two princesses of Monaco. However, since Iraq invaded Kuwait in August, the queen has had a much higher profile, becoming the most visible woman in the Middle East. She played a major role in helping to organize aid for the nearly three-quarters of a million refugees who fled from Kuwait and flooded into her adopted country. The presence of the refugees placed an enormous burden on Jordan’s already stricken economy. Her main priority was to help get the refugees home, and to accomplish that she personally enlisted the aid of Richard Branson, the British music and entertainment entrepreneur, who owns Virgin Atlantic Airways. The queen had recently returned from the United States, where she had spoken publicly in New York and Washington and had been interviewed by Barbara Walters on “Nightline.” On that program she evidenced her skill in evading ticklish questions. When Walters asked her to describe her impression of Saddam Hussein, she replied that she had met him only once, very briefly. When Walters continued, “When your husband comes home after he’s had these meetings, how does he describe him?” the queen replied, “My husband and I discuss issues more than personalities.”

  She was criticized in Jordan by those who felt it was not the natural role of the wife of the king to give speeches about foreign policy. In addressing such criticism, Mrs. Sharaf said, “The queen not only understands the facts, but she has put herself on the same perspective as the Arabs. Her way of thinking is very Western, but she has absorbed the Arab side.”

  Outside the house, arrival sounds could be heard. The butler hurried into the room and spoke excitedly to Mrs. Sharaf in Arabic. “She is here,” Mrs. Sharaf said, surprised.

  “Who?” I asked.

  She rose and rapidly made her way to the hall and opened the door. A BMW motorcycle was driving into the courtyard. On it was King Hussein, the longest-ruling leader in the Arab world. Sitting behind him on the seat, arms around his waist, was Queen Noor. A military vehicle filled with soldiers came up behind them.

  Suddenly feeling like an intruder, I said, “Would you like me to leave?”

  “No, no. Wait in that room,” my hostess told me.

  I retreated to the salon and listened as she greeted the king and queen. The royal couple said they had been out for an evening spin in the hills above Amman and had decided to call on Mrs. Sharaf. Then I heard the lowered voice of Mrs. Sharaf explaining my presence in the adjoining room.

  Suddenly the door opened, and the queen walked into the salon where I was standing. She is thirty-nine years old, tall, slender, and exceptionally good-looking. She was wearing blue jeans and a loose-fitting light blue sweater, but her carriage was as regal as if she had been in coronation regalia. Her long honey-colored hair fell to her shoulders, kept in place by a headband. Despite the informality of her dress and the situation we found ourselves in, however, the formal distance of royalty prevailed. She had come to pay an impromptu call on a friend and had found an unexpected visitor. “Sir,” she said in greeting. Later I discovered she addresses most men as “sir.”

  Her looks are American. Her handshake is American. Her eye contact is American. And yet, somehow, she is ceasing, or has even ceased, to be American. In Washington earlier in the month, when she spoke at the Brookings Institute, she had several times said, “Speaking as an Arab …” Lisa Halaby, Princeton ’74, has truly become, during the twelve years of her marriage, the Queen of Jordan. Her voice is American, but her manner of speech is not. So deliberate is her prose style that at times I had the ridiculous feeling that she was translating in her mind from Arabic to English. She often interjects phrases such as “if you will” and “as it were.” There is no chitchat. There are no short answers. Every sentence is carefully thought out and spoken in a modulated, complicated, sometimes convoluted manner.

  Behind her, a moment later, the king appeared. He, too, was dressed for biking, in a black leather jacket and aviator glasses, but even though his attire was informal, his history enveloped him. The thirty-eighth-generation descendant of the Prophet, he has been on the throne of the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan for thirty-eight years. At the age of fifteen, he witnessed the assassination of his grandfather King Abdullah during a visit to the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. The same assassin then fired at him, but the bullet was deflected by a medal on the tunic of his military-school uniform. Two years later, he succeeded his mentally unstable father, King Talal, to the throne. If he was distressed at finding a reporter present during a rare private moment in his overcast life, he gave no indication of it. We shook hands. In all the official photographs that hang in the shop windows and office buildings of Amman, the king stands considerably taller than the queen. In reality, the queen is taller than the king by almost a head. Mrs. Sharaf motioned us to sit, and the butler reappeared with his tray of juices and cola. In the awkward moments that followed, I said that although I had hoped to meet them I had never expected to encounter them on a motorcycle.

  “We courted on a motorcycle,” said the queen. I was struck by the old-fashioned word “courted.” “It was the only way we could get off by ourselves.” Then she added, with a slight nod of her head to the courtyard outside, where the king’s guards were, “Of course, we were always followed.”

  They discussed the Nobel Peace Prize, which had been awarded that day to Mikhail Gorbachev. The king had sent him a telegram of congratulations. They discussed Vaclav Havel. The queen said she had never met Havel, but would like to. She added that their days of travel were limited, at least for the time being. Invariably, the conversation returned to the Gulf crisis. It is a constant in everyone’s mind. It is the dark cloud over their country and monarchy. “The country has never been more united,” she said.

  Although she is a beautiful woman, her intelligence rather than her beauty is her dominant force. She has weathered gossip and criticism, but even those salon ladies, as they are called, meaning the upper-class ladies of Amman, who most disliked her in the beginning have a grudging respect for the manner in which she recently presented the views of her country in the United States. Her husband, who has been on the throne since his wife was one year old, is at the peak of his popularity in his country. Several times during the visit, he looked over at her and smiled. There is an open affection between them. When she returned from her recent trip abroad in the royal family’s Gulfstream jet, the king was at the airport to meet her.

  In the course of the conversation, the queen mentioned that she would visit the new site of the Jubilee School the next day. The Jubilee School is one of her pet projects, a three-year coeducational boarding school for the most gifted high-school students in the region, providing them with scholarships to develop their leadership potential.

  After fifteen minutes I departed, leaving them to their visit. Outside, in the courtyard, the king’s motorcycle had been parked by the front door. Eight soldiers carrying assault rifles hovered by the guardhouse waiting for their monarch. My taxi driver, who had been heretofore so disagreeable, was now wide-eyed with awe. He was convinced that the king had arrived by motorcycle at the hilltop villa specifically to meet with me in secret conference. I did nothing to dissuade him of his misperception. The following morning a call came from the palace, inviting me to go along with the queen on her visit to the Jubilee School. In the days that follow
ed, every time I encountered the taxi driver at the taxi stand in front of the hotel, we shook hands and chatted amiably, but by that time I was being picked up by silver Mercedes sedans with soldier-chauffeurs provided by the palace, and had no more need of taxis.

  Queen Noor al Hussein was born Lisa Najeeb Halaby on August 23, 1951, into a prominent Arab-American family. Her well-known father, Najeeb Halaby, known as Jeeb, was of Syrian descent. He headed the Federal Aviation Administration during the Kennedy-Johnson years and was at one time the president of Pan American World Airways. Lisa was fashionably educated at the National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., and the Concord Academy in Massachusetts before entering Princeton University in its first coeducational freshman class. She wore a black armband to protest the Vietnam War and became one of the first women cheerleaders. “She wore white ducks. She was the most gorgeous thing you ever saw, with her long hair,” recalled television producer Gillian Gordon, one of her classmates and still a close friend. After her sophomore year, she took a year off and moved to Aspen, Colorado, where she supported herself as a waitress. She also did work in the library of the Aspen Institute and indulged her passion for skiing. Returning to Princeton, she took her degree in architecture and urban planning. Her graduation yearbook picture shows a rather plain girl with long, stringy hair and a quizzical, faraway look in her eyes. Beside their pictures, most of her classmates have a paragraph about themselves, describing academic accomplishments and future dreams. But not Lisa Halaby. Beside her picture is a blank white space, startling in retrospect, as if her past had already been put behind her and her future as the queen of a Middle Eastern country was too unfathomable even to imagine.

  After Princeton she traveled to Australia and Iran, where she was hired as an assistant by Marietta Tree, the director of the American branch of the British architectural and planning firm of Llewelyn-Davis, Weeks. The firm had been commissioned by the late Shah of Iran to replan the city of Teheran, and Lisa Halaby lived there for six months doing architectural drafting. From Teheran she went to Jordan, where her father was closely connected with the head of Alia, the Jordanian airline, to work on a plan for the creation of an Arab air university. She was introduced to King Hussein when he was attending a ceremony to mark the arrival of the first jumbo jet to join Alia, which later became Royal Jordanian airlines.

  The king’s first marriage, to Dina Abdul Hamid, whom he had met in London when still a schoolboy, took place in 1955, shortly after his nineteenth birthday. Dina, seven years his senior, was an intellectual with a university education and a keen understanding of the politics of the Arab world. The marriage was encouraged by his mother, Queen Zein, who admired Dina’s intelligence and Hashemite credentials and was eager for her son to settle down. A daughter, Princess Alia, was born, but the marriage collapsed only eighteen months after the wedding. While Dina was on a holiday in Egypt, the king divorced her. For the next six years, Princess Dina was allowed to see her daughter only once. Many years later, Dina married a Palestinian commando who was also seven years younger than she.

  In 1961, King Hussein married for the second time. His bride, Antoinette “Toni” Gardiner, was a nineteen-year-old English girl, the daughter of a lieutenant colonel serving in Jordan. They were introduced at a dance. Toni became a Muslim and adopted an Arab name, Muna al Hussein, meaning “Hussein’s wish.” Like Dina, Muna was made a princess, but not queen, and when Hussein announced the engagement on the radio, he described Muna as a Muslim, but not as an Arab. Her English background was left for a subsequent announcement. A year later a much-hoped-for son was born. Prince Abdullah was named after Hussein’s slain grandfather. Another son followed, Prince Feisal, and twin daughters, Princess Zein and Princess Aisha. In addition, Alia, his daughter from his marriage to Princess Dina, was brought up by Princess Muna as one of her own family.

  By the end of 1972, King Hussein had met and fallen in love with Alia Toukan, the daughter of a Jordanian diplomat. To the surprise of most people in Jordan, who were unaware of any problem in his marriage, the king divorced Princess Muna and married Alia, whom he made Queen of Jordan. In 1977, Queen Alia was killed in a helicopter crash while returning from visiting a hospital in the south of Jordan. The queen left behind two children, Princess Haya and Prince Ali, as well as an adopted daughter, Abir. Abir as an infant had survived an air crash in which her mother was killed. She was found alive, cradled in her dead mother’s arms. Alia was moved by the baby’s plight and adopted her from her father, a Jordanian truck driver. Abir was brought up in the palace on equal footing with her royal siblings. In the five, years of her marriage, Alia had become a popular and beloved queen. The king was griefstricken by her death, and the nation was plunged into mourning. For a while he withdrew into seclusion.

  When the king met Lisa Halaby, the attraction between the two was immediate. Marietta Tree, who was visiting in Jordan at the time, remembers being told by Lisa that the king had asked her to lunch. Later that day, returning from a trip to Petra, Mrs. Tree asked, “How was the lunch?” Lisa told her, “It lasted five hours. He showed me the palace, and we played with the children.” One of her close friends told me that she detested the word “dated” when speaking of her romance with the king. They “courted” for six weeks, escaping from the ever-watchful eye of Amman society, sometimes on the king’s motorcycle for jaunts in the country and sometimes by helicopter for private dinners at Aqaba, the beach resort on the Red Sea, where the king maintains a summer residence.

  Lisa Halaby converted to Islam and took the name Noor al Hussein, which means “light of Hussein.” They were married on June 15, 1978, and the new queen became stepmother to the king’s eight children, adopting Abir, who was then seven, and the two small children of Queen Alia. Sarah Pillsbury said of her old friend, “She was always very bright and very mature. We were always very impressed with her. She got in touch with me about a year after the wedding, and we have kept in touch since then. I was struck by her dignity and her determination to be the best wife and queen. The king never said to her, ‘Do this. Do that.’ She figured it out herself. Has she changed? None of us are the same people we were back then, and she’s not, either.” Another friend, the journalist Carinthia West, who attended the National Cathedral School with her, said, “Sure, it was hard for her in the beginning. She had no family. No buddies.” It is a fact that there was a great deal of resentment toward the new queen at the beginning of her marriage, especially on the part of the fashionable ladies of Amman. There are indications also that jealousies occurred in the king’s family over the new, fourth wife of the king. “It wasn’t just because she’s tall, blond, and American,” a Jordanian woman told me. “It was because she became the queen.” In the years that have followed, Queen Noor has had four children of her own. Prince Hamzah was born in 1980, Prince Hashim in 1981, Princess Iman in 1983, and Princess Raiyah in 1986.

  When the queen goes about her daily duties, she travels in a motorcade, but there are no Daimlers, no Rollses, no Bentleys, no sirens, and no flags. This queen drives herself, in a jeep—a Mercedes jeep, but a jeep nonetheless. She chooses who is going to ride with her, and her companions change during the day so that she can talk privately with her attendants or her guests. Her jeep is in the middle of the motorcade, preceded and followed by military vans with soldiers.

  On several occasions I rode in the jeep with the queen. She drives the way she speaks, carefully. Unlike the English princesses, who are always being stopped for speeding, she does not drive fast. She is sometimes recognized by passengers in other cars, who lean out their windows to wave at her. She always smiled and waved back. At a busy five-way intersection in the middle of the city, one of the soldiers in the vehicle ahead of the jeep hopped out to halt traffic in all directions so that the queen and her party could go through. “I don’t like when they do that,” she said. She stopped the jeep, shook her head, and waved the other cars through, sitting out the red light like any other driver. When the light turned g
reen, she passed through the intersection. The traffic cop on duty smiled at her, and she waved back at him. “He knows me,” she said.

  After looking over the new facilities for the Jubilee School, she visited a school for girls, going from classroom to classroom, listening to children recite or perform, talking to as many of them as possible, giving her full attention to each conversation. About 50 percent of Jordan’s population is under the age of fifteen. There is no bobbing and curtsying to her as there is to English royals making their official rounds in flowered hats. Rather, the queen extends her hand in the American manner and almost immediately engages in conversation. Her style of dress is extremely simple: Usually she wore a below-the-calf-length khaki skirt with a blue denim shirt and a blazer. She told me that when she was first married she was taken aside by an adviser and told that her duties would consist, for example, of cutting ribbons to open schools and buildings. She knew that her role would exceed such functions, but there was no precedent in the country for an activist queen. “I had always worked,” she said. “My role has been a pioneering role.”

  When she is performing her official duties, she speaks only in Arabic. “It’s my working language,” she said. “I use no English when I am working with the people in the country, but I use both English and Arabic with people in the scientific fields.” She now speaks the language fluently but says, “I will never be a great poet in Arabic. It’s such a challenging language.” With the king, who was educated in England at Harrow and Sandhurst, she speaks both languages, but they converse primarily in English. “My children are completely bilingual, more than I could ever be. I spoke only Arabic with my first child. I hope and pray they won’t have to study Arabic as a second language. I want them to think in Arabic. They all go to Arabic schools. Their courses are taught in Arabic, except for English courses. Arithmetic and science are taught in both languages.”