Born in Karachi in the days of the British Raj to a family regarded as feudal Indian royalty, he had succeeded his father in 1885 at the age of eight to become the third Aga Khan and forty-eighth Imam. He was descended, in direct bloodline, from the Prophet Muhammad through the Prophet’s daughter Fatima. This made him the world leader of the Nizari Ismailis, the second-largest branch of Shia Islam, a non-radical sect whose fifteen million followers in twenty-five countries believe that the Imam has the spirit of God within him and is therefore a divine personage.
His Persian mother ensured that he was educated as a prince, with a thorough knowledge of his oriental background augmented by a Western gloss obtained at Eton and Cambridge. Knighted by Queen Victoria, and given a lifetime pension from the Crown at the age of twenty, he thereafter travelled the world to meet and receive the homage of his followers, and to consult with world leaders on matters that affected Ismaili Muslims. His roots were Indian, and this is where the largest section of his followers lived, but there were also sizeable communities in Arabia, Africa and elsewhere. In 1906, in an attempt to improve the lot of Bengali Muslims who were the core of his followers, he founded, and headed as president, the All India Muslim League (which fostered fair relations between Hindus and Muslims and would eventually lead to the founding of Pakistan in 1947).
Notably, Ismailis contribute a tenth of their income to the Imam, whose role it is to oversee the welfare of his followers with personal guidance and financial assistance, and to arbitrate in matters of strife among them. In effect this equates to an income worth hundreds of millions of pounds a year which is at the Aga’s own disposal. He had, however, no country or state to rule over – he was a prince without a kingdom, and from the end of the First World War until his death the Aga would unsuccessfully attempt to be made a Prince Regent for the British in one or other of the countries in which his followers resided, or else be given some territory to create a state for his people.
Friends on almost equal terms with many members of Queen Victoria’s family, the Aga Khan was often a guest at royal events such as coronations, marriages, christenings and funerals; he possessed a Royal Household Badge, given to him by the Queen, to guarantee entrance to all such functions. He moved with aplomb among kings and princes, tsars and grand dukes, maharajas and emirs, viceroys, prime ministers and world spiritual leaders, and was so well thought of in political and royal circles that he was frequently consulted on matters concerning India by the Royal Family and successive governments. In 1934 he was made a member of the Privy Council, and Vice-President of the League of Nations (an organisation of which he would later become President). At a personal level he considered himself a British subject, and kept a permanent suite at the Ritz for those times each year when he needed to reside in London, on the grounds that it was less expensive than keeping a house and staff there.
The Aga Khan had enormous personal charm, and this – together with his personal leanings – enabled him to venture outside his royal milieu to mix with actresses and beautiful society women, racehorse trainers and jockeys, golfers and entertainers. He loved popular theatre, the ballet and the opera; he was obsessed with horse breeding and racing, and golf. He adored music and Impressionist art, and had as a younger man known such luminaries as Stravinsky, Puccini, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Dame Nellie Melba, Sir Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, Forbie Forbes-Robertson, Edith Wharton and Marcel Proust – just a few names from a list too long to detail – and he could recount fascinating anecdotes about his encounters with all of them, making him a charming dining companion.
He had known Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill well, and he first met Winston at Poona in 1896 while the latter was serving in India with the 4th Hussars and had been introduced as a ‘promising polo player’ who had come to look at the Aga’s horses. In a subsequent encounter they had discussed FitzGerald’s translation of the Rubâiyât of Khayyam
which Winston could recite from memory. The Aga was not only impressed but taken aback, since Persian was his mother tongue and he regarded Khayyam as only a minor Persian poet. During their talk young Winston had remarked flippantly that he admired the poet’s philosophy that ‘it doesn’t greatly matter what we do now – it’ll all be the same in a thousand years’. The Aga was scandalised. ‘What you do now may be of little account in a thousand years,’ he told Winston, with what now seems remarkable prescience. ‘But certainly events a hundred years hence will very much be the direct results of our present deeds and misdeeds.’4
The Aga tried, genuinely, to live up to this concept, investing much of his vast income from his followers into an investment trust for helping Ismailis in need. He was a pioneer in providing education and medical facilities, especially midwifery. He founded universities and attempted to abolish the veil, which he insisted ‘did not exist till long after the Prophet’s death and is no part of Islam. The part played by Muslim women at Kardesiah and Yarmuk the two most momentous battles of Islam next to Badr and Honein, and their splendid nursing of the wounded after those battles, is of itself a proof to any reasonable person that purdah, as now understood, has never been conceived by the companions of the Prophet. That we Muslims should saddle ourselves with this excretion of Persian custom, borrowed by the Abbassides, is due to that ignorance of early Islam which is one of the most extraordinary of modern conditions.’5
In short, the Aga – fabulously rich, intelligent, supremely well-connected, urbane and charming – occupied a unique niche. Despite the fact that his devoted Ismaili followers regarded him as divine, he had a colourful personal life. His first marriage, which had been arranged by his mother, ended in an amicable divorce; his second marriage, for love, was to an Italian ballet dancer, Theresa. The Aga was attending the coronation of George V in London in 1911 when he heard that Theresa had given birth to his son and heir. In fact, she delivered two sons within a year but only one survived: Prince Aly Khan. Theresa died suddenly in 1926, aged only thirty-seven, of a blood clot following an operation. Three years later the Aga married his third wife, Andrée Carron, a French dressmaker he met in Paris and who thus became Her Highness the Begum Aga Khan. The couple had a house on Cap d’Antibes where the Begum spent most of her time, while the Aga continued his almost continuous world travels. This house made them neighbours to Maxine, and in 1933 when the Aga first visited the Château de l’Horizon he had just become the proud father of a second son, Sadruddin.
Correspondence at the India Office makes it clear that one of the reasons the Aga did not achieve his principal aim to be made a regent in one of the British protectorates in the Middle East was the behaviour of his son and heir, Prince Aly Khan, to whom officials at the India Office and the Foreign Office took exception. ‘The young man has a doubtful reputation and was recently mixed up in a divorce case of a somewhat sensational kind,’6 wrote one.
The Aga did not return immediately to the Côte d’Azur when the war ended, but Princess Andrée – as she always preferred to be known – did, and she lived quietly as before in Villa Jean-Andrée with Sadruddin. She had the same circle of mostly women friends but people could not help asking the question, where is the Aga? Initially it was not known that the Aga and Andrée had parted. She had expressed shock when her husband announced in 1943 that he wanted a divorce so that he could marry his social secretary Yvette Labrousse. The sixty-six-year-old Aga had always had mistresses, that was the norm for him,‡ and Andrée accepted it; they lived separate and complaisant lives connected mainly by their son. But tall, leggy Mademoiselle Labrousse – thirty years younger than the Aga and ten years younger than Andrée – was somehow different.
Born near Marseilles, the daughter of a tram driver and a seamstress, Yvette grew up in Lyons and was apprenticed to a dressmaker there before she became a beauty queen as Miss Lyons and ultimately Miss France, which brought her many rich admirers. The Aga met Yvette in the mid-Thirties in Cairo, where she was living as the mistress of a wealthy Egyptian, and he became besotted with her. Soon after he
left for France she followed him. There is a well-told story that soon after her arrival in France the Aga visited Yvette, who was staying with her mother. He brought with him a small attaché case which he placed on the table and opened to reveal that it was packed with large-denomination notes totalling a million francs. He told her that it was hers whether or not she became his mistress, but that if she came to him there would be lots more to follow.
Andrée believed that Yvette had strengthened her hold over the Aga when she expressed a desire to convert to Islam. She heard this when the Aga began to build Yvette a sumptuous villa, romantically called Yakymour,§ high on the sun-baked hills above Cannes, near the small village of Le Cannet. Yvette had helped to design and furnish this villa in Californie, although it was unfinished when it had to be abandoned to its wartime fate. It was not too unusual for the Aga to build houses for his favourite mistresses, so probably forty-five-year-old Andrée was not overly concerned about Yakymour, even though it was virtually on her doorstep, some ten kilometres away. Living in luxury at Antibes, Andrée had her own lifestyle and friends, and often made the top three in lists of the world’s best-dressed woman; she had long ago adopted a complaisant attitude to the Aga’s other women and it was even rumoured that she had a discreet relationship or two herself.
The uncontested divorce was granted at Christmas 1943 on the quaint grounds of ‘mutual dislike and diversity of characters’ and custody of Sadruddin was awarded to his father, although the boy was at boarding school in Switzerland and for practical purposes invariably stayed with his mother at Antibes during post-war school holidays. The couple agreed on a generous settlement, to be effected when the Aga regained access to his money and properties, and it was also agreed that after the war Andrée would have the family house at Aix-les-Bains, an apartment in Paris and the Villa Jean-Andrée, as well as a suitable income for her position.
Until the divorce Yvette lived quietly in her own apartment in Geneva, and the Aga travelled regularly by train to be with her. Although he missed terribly his old annual routine of spring in Paris and the Riviera, summers in England doing the season and winters in India, he still had golf and horses, his closeness to Sadruddin and the diversion of Yvette. So the war years were not too difficult for the Aga, even though in his memoirs he remembered them as the unhappiest time of his life. After waiting ten months for the sake of appearances, he married the statuesque Yvette in Vevey, near Lausanne, on 9 October 1944.
Aly Khan had met his new stepmother briefly before the war and the two had instantly taken a deep dislike to each other, so he decided he would simply ignore her. The news of the marriage depressed him for he suspected it would make his relationship with his father even more remote than it already was. But then, by chance, just as the war was coming to an end and German surrender was inevitable, something occurred that would create a new bond between the two men and restore some of the Aga’s respect for his son.
In the spring of 1945, when almost everyone else was anticipating the end of the conflict with relief, Aly realised that the end of the war would leave him rudderless. His marriage had effectively ended; Joan blamed his womanising, and undoubtedly that contributed, but the truth was they had grown apart. The war years had been hard, and dangerous at times, but Aly had found them deeply fulfilling. For the first time in his life he had been accepted for himself, not as the son of his famous father, but for what he was and what he could offer; he had forged some deep friendships and earned the respect of men he admired.
During the ten months leading up to the end of the war Aly was based at the Sixth Army’s headquarters at Heidelberg, and by spring 1945 he was seriously considering volunteering for further service with the American army in the Far East, along with Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. Then an unexpected opportunity to help his father came along; one which also promised the sort of adventure Aly enjoyed.
Besides his impeccable royal and noble connections, the Aga Khan was chiefly known in England and France for his interest in horses. He was a leading racehorse owner and by the end of his life had achieved an enviable record of five Derby winners and sixteen Classic winners. He was also the British flat racing champion owner thirteen times. In 1926 he had begun a tradition by presenting the Aga Khan Trophy to the winners of the premier international team showjumping competition at the Royal Dublin Horse Show.¶ In the Thirties the Aga’s stables in Newmarket, England, the Curragh in Ireland and Normandy in France were among the best in the world. It had been a huge tragedy to him when in 1940 more than a hundred of his beautiful horses, many of them from irreplaceable bloodstock lines, were looted from the Normandy yard as spoils of war and sent to the German national stud at Altefeld in Bavaria.
From his Swiss haven, the Aga had continued whenever possible buying, selling and even running his horses in Britain by telephone, through his racing managers. Towards the end of the war he issued a statement that all of his winnings would be donated to the Indian Army Fund.# This may have been, at least in part, a move to counteract adverse publicity earlier in the war that the Aga had been invited to Paris with the Begum and had dined there with Hitler and Nazi leaders. It was entirely fictitious – the Aga had never left Switzerland. However, he did go to see Hitler and his chiefs in August 1939, in a well-meant but naive attempt to try to prevent war, and furthermore his Parisian house was a venue for meetings of highly placed Nazis, on account of it having been occupied by the Germans. This sort of gossip had a habit of clinging, even when untrue, and he was anxious to revert to being ‘the good old Aga’, favourite of British racing crowds.
Having been brought up with horses and racing, Aly Khan had a marvellous eye for a horse, was a naturally gifted rider and a successful amateur jockey. That spring of 1945 he wangled a precious forty-eight-hour leave in order to fly to Newmarket** to watch Dante win the first post-war Derby at odds of 100/30.
Like many dedicated horse-lovers Aly could recognise individual horses on sight, much as he might recognise a person, and it was apparently by sheer chance that he was out with a patrol which arrived at Berchtesgaden shortly before VE Day. As they drove through mountain pastures Aly saw a group of thoroughbreds in a field and stopped his jeep to take a look. To his shock he recognised some of them, so he left his vehicle to walk round the adjoining fields, where he was able to identify twenty mares that he knew belonged to his father. Making his way to the stable yard nearby he found a favourite stallion. It was coincidence that he had come across them, and he quickly realised that it was important to get them back to France before all German assets were parcelled out, appropriated, or simply disappeared after the official surrender.
While he was still looking round a man came out of the feed store with his hands in the air. It was the groom responsible and it turned out to be Robert Muller, who had been assistant manager at the Aga’s Deauville yard in 1939. Muller had been captured while serving with the French army and transported to a prison camp in Poland. His record came to the notice of Ribbentrop, who had Muller brought to Altefeld and reunited with his former charges. Muller’s importance in the care of these valuable horses earned him no favours, however, and he was quite badly treated, but he had his revenge: he managed to steal a gun and hide it, and just before Aly’s arrival, when he learned that the Americans were a few miles from the town, he shot six German soldiers based at the stud because he believed they intended to kill his horses before the Allies could liberate them.
Muller told Aly he knew where most of the other stolen horses were too, and he helped identify the most valuable mares in the fields. Muller’s family home was at Metz, in northeastern France, some twenty-six miles from the German border. On the spot the two men cobbled together a plan whereby Aly would arrange for Muller to return home and locate a suitable stable yard where the horses could be held safely under guard for a short time pending their return to Normandy, then return to help Aly with their transportation.
Meanwhile, Aly returned to base and confided in his commanding officer
. He was able to arrange the necessary paperwork for Muller’s travel permit, as well as a leave of absence for himself and Major Gordon Grand, an officer friend with whom he sometimes rode and who agreed to assist him. Together they put together some spurious paperwork stating that Lieutenant-Colonel Prince Aly Khan was responsible for transporting General Eisenhower’s charger back to France. It was signed with one genuine signature and one forged one.
Aly then hitched a lift on a military flight to Geneva, where he met his father for the first time since 1939 and was able to tell him about the remarkable discovery and events of the last two days. Together they had various yards in France alerted to receive the rescued horses. Aly knew that moving irreplaceable horses which effectively belonged to the occupiers as war loot around a country ravaged by war, where gasoline was like gold dust and where there were Allied road blocks every few miles, would be no easy task. He also knew that what he proposed was illegal, and was even more difficult because of the speed with which it had to be effected. Apart from his CO, who lent his informal support to the venture, the Aga and the few who physically assisted Aly in the operation, no one else knew of this personal mission to rescue horses which were worth then close on a million dollars. But it seemed to Aly that the risks were justified.
He somehow acquired a scruffy two-horse trailer that he could tow with his US Army jeep. They loaded up the stallion and one of the most valuable mares and Aly set off alone for Normandy, a distance of over five hundred miles. Muller stayed to guard and care for the rest of the horses until Aly’s return, when Muller immediately set off for Metz where he stayed to receive the succession of horses that Aly and Major Grand delivered to him. Grand helped with the feeding, catching and loading in a series of exhausting back-to-back 250-mile trips in a series of twenty-hour days, until Muller had two dozen precious horses in his possession. He then personally escorted them through France to the Normandy stud in more comfortable vehicles and with the help of the Aga’s staff. Needless to say, Muller stayed with the Aga for the remainder of his career.
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