The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  The Amanpour family lived in great comfort in North Tehran. “It was still in the city,” says Lizzy, “but the mountains were so close you could see them out our windows. We were very lucky—it was leafy, with streams running down the side of the street.” Theirs was a handsome brick house. There were servants (the family’s nanny was a beloved household member who, after the Revolution, they helped support for many years). There was a pool; there were gardens and horses. A walled outdoor patio was shaded by trees, and when the Amanpours gave parties—which, indeed, they did—lamps were hung from the branches. Christiane’s parents were complements. “Our mom had a sense of humanity and religion, and our dad a sense of fun—he was very gregarious and jokey,” says Lizzy. Mohammed immediately coined affectionate nicknames for his two older daughters and they stuck all their lives: Christiane became Kissy, and Fiona became Fuffles. Four decades after his firstborn darling girl bounced on his lap—when she was now the most famous female TV war reporter in the world—as part of a CNN special report on the changes in life in Iran from her childhood through the Revolution and into the post-Revolution years, father and daughter were televised coming upon each other at the burned-out shell of their once lovely family home. Father greeted daughter poignantly: “Hello, Kissy.”

  • • •

  THE IRAN THAT Christiane lived in daily for eleven years was just about as outwardly modern as it would ever be. Women drove, were educated, were employed. The chador—the face-framing head scarf that covered a woman’s hair for religious reasons—was worn by women in the provinces (some could wear the stricter, lower-face-covering veil if they wished), but most urban women chose not to; those who did often wore a bright-colored one. “You could see the Western influence in the number of restaurants that were open in Tehran and how men and women would go there together and would mix in the cinemas,” says scholar, author, and human rights activist Haleh Esfandiari, who was a young woman there at the time. “You could go to opera and art exhibits in Tehran. You could listen to Nat King Cole and Charles Aznavour records. The Westernization was palpable.”

  Something else was palpable: the glamour of Iran. The monarch, the dashing Shah, Reza Pahlavi, was ostentatiously regal, even decadent. He flew to Hollywood nightclubs and sat in banquettes with Howard Hughes and gifted cigarette girls with full-length mink coats for entertaining his bodyguards. The Shah’s second wife, Princess Soraya, was a striking beauty who greatly resembled Ava Gardner: sculpted nose, high cheekbones, sensually lidded eyes and all. At their 1951 wedding (to which President Truman, Queen Elizabeth, and Joseph Stalin all sent gifts), Soraya’s frothy, feather-edged couture wedding gown—which was spread out a good twenty feet from waist to hem when she was seated—was over-the-top magnificent for any corner of the globe in any decade. But the Shah was ultimately compelled to divorce Soraya; she did not bear him any children, and her tragic infertility was a grand soap opera that was commented upon in international newspapers and even in American movie magazines.

  A year after Christiane was born, the Shah married his third wife, an upper-class part-Azerbaijani beauty named Farah Diba. Farah Diba’s wedding gown was designed by the new darling at the house of Dior, Yves Saint-Laurent. Eight years later, when Christiane was nine, the Shah decided to make a grand statement. He had himself crowned King of Kings (or Shahanshah) of Iran, and Empress Farah became Queen. At the 1967 coronation, which drew media attention from all over the world, the new queen wore a full-length royal robe and a fantastically jeweled crown. Standing next to her was the Shahanshah in medal-bedecked military finery, his gleaming gold crown taller than the length of his face. This revival of Persian majesty was meant to inspire awe and pride in the country’s children, and it would soon be evident that it probably did have this effect on Christiane. Besides, the Amanpours already traveled in high circles; they knew Persian aristocracy. The Amanpours were in social contact with Queen Farah Diba and other members of the Pahlavi family, and one of young Christiane’s closest friends, Ayshe Farman-Farmaian, was in fact a princess—a descendant of the Qajar dynasty, which had ruled Persia from 1795 until 1925, when it was overthrown by the Pahlavis. Even as a teenager, Ayshe was a dazzling beauty—tall and lean with wild black hair and a sense of privilege worn lightly and confidently. She represented all the glamour that being Iranian—being Persian—could be, and there were aspects of her that matched Christiane’s sense of self.

  However dazzling a picture it took of itself for the Western world, Iran was now, quietly, on a collision course with itself. “There was Westernization but not freedom,” says Haleh Esfandiari. The intellectuals were being surveilled. “Everybody was concerned and worried about SAVAK,” the Shah’s secret police, whose pervasiveness sparked anxiety among the media class during the years of Christiane’s childhood. “If you worked in an office, in publishing—if you were a professional—you never talked in front of strangers, and there was a sense of self-censorship.” Esfandiari was an editor on the foreign news desk of a daily paper in the 1960s. “And I was very much aware of what not to write, what not to say.” Most alarming were the disappearances. Esfandiari “would see colleagues picked up” off the street by SAVAK, “just disappearing” as if into thin air.

  Young Christiane seemed to have a high-minded imagination, and she bonded with literature in a way that mirrored her current life and somehow inspired her future. She especially savored Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel Little Women, possibly seeing her bonds with her sisters reflected in the four sisters of that novel. She loved Rudyard Kipling’s “If—,” the classic poem that defines character and humility in the British colonial era. “Christiane was a very strong character. I looked up to her so much,” says her youngest sister, Leila. Being so very much older than the youngest two, she seemed “the trailblazer, the toughest personality, the most charismatic—very driven and so tough,” says Lizzy. “I really think Christiane’s personality doesn’t necessarily come from our parents—you wouldn’t say she’s a chip off of anyone’s block.” In the view of Diana Bellew, a friend of Christiane’s who has known the family for almost forty years, “All the Amanpour sisters are strong, and all that strength came straight from their mother.” Patricia was not a career woman—she was a homemaker and a “lovely, elegant, sweet woman, a serene, sometimes even saintly” presence. But there was also a tensile integrity to Patricia; this is the strength, Diana says, that came down to the girls.

  Christiane and Fiona were so close in age that they shared friends. But the two were polar opposites. Christiane was serious, Fiona flighty. “Fiona was a lot more outgoing and gregarious; Christiane was always very, very focused,” says Lizzy. Eventually, when they became teenagers, Fiona had the boyfriends—and dashing ones: rock singers, jockeys. Fiona had a bit of a wacky streak. Christiane, by contrast, was more self-contained and skeptical, introverted, not seeking out boyfriends, and she served as a steadying force on her slightly younger sister. “Christiane,” Diana Bellew says, “does not have a wacky bone in her body.”

  Young Christiane may have been comparatively staid and serious, but it may come as a surprise that she was, in her way, starstruck. She was romantic in both the high and the charmingly common ways. “She was obsessed with Liza Minnelli and Elizabeth Taylor,” says Leila. “And with lots of movie stars. Growing up, she had these huge scrapbooks of famous people.” She’d buy fan magazines and newspapers and cut out the images and paste them neatly onto the thick pages. She also loved romantic black-and-white movies of the grand 1930s—watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers glide across a dance floor was thrilling to her, and she could name all her favorite films. She read about Jackie Kennedy, and she and Fiona adored American popular music—the Eagles especially. In the brand-new global culture of the early 1970s the black-haired, black-eyed daughters of ancient Persia mentally transported themselves to Laurel Canyon, where fair-haired Texas and Michigan boys affecting a Death Valley desperado vibe they didn’t really have were minti
ng the lucrative California sound.

  When Christiane was eleven, she was sent to convent boarding school at the Holy Cross Convent in Buckinghamshire, England. She later liked to say that the nuns there whipped her about the legs for minor infractions and she was proud she hadn’t cried. But if this is not an exaggeration, then by the time she got to her next boarding school—six years later, at age sixteen—she had somehow turned into another young woman entirely: a skillfully ingratiating girl whom the nuns and the headmistresses pointedly favored, says Diana Bellew, who met her then and there.

  In fact, it was perhaps there at New Hall School, the Convent of the Holy Sepulchre, near Chelmsford, England, that lesser-known elements of Christiane Amanpour—the emotional intelligence, the emotionalism, the secret sense of grandeur, all of which would be hidden under her idealistic principles, her workmanlike appearance, her blunt talk, and her bravery, but which would power her career—first flowered, first manifested themselves.

  • • •

  NEW HALL IS A FORTRESSLIKE school for Catholic girls, founded in 1642 and situated in a sprawling isolated complex of old stone castles. Some of the buildings date back to 1062, and one of them was inherited by Anne Boleyn’s father and acquired by Henry VIII in 1518. All of English history whispers through the school’s winding halls. In 1974, the school was used to having a decent number of international students in attendance, but “most of us were country girls,” says Gig Moses, one of the sixteen-year-old sixth formers who crossed themselves daily in chapel and were instructed almost exclusively by women—primarily nuns. “New Hall was very strict. No boys! We were locked up,” says Diana Bellew.

  Virtually all the girls at New Hall—Diana, Gig, and the rest—had been there from age eleven; rarely were there transfer students. “Then into our midst one day,” Gig recalls, “came this . . . exotic bird . . . with striking features and long black hair! She was mad about Hollywood film stars and Fred and Ginger movies, and always had glorious coffee table books about them.” It is hard to overestimate the impact this glamorous girl had on the dull student body, Gig says. “She seemed from another world.”

  Christiane’s grand entrance to New Hall included an artfully lobbed fiction: She said she was a Persian princess. Her family indeed knew the Shah, she knew Queen Farah Diba, and, of course, one of her close friends was a princess. So appropriating a genuinely royal biography wasn’t that far a stretch. Perhaps it was also a testing of the waters—or a sense of budding inner distinction searching for an outlet and stumbling onto a suitably teenaged one. Whatever the reason, Christiane said she was a princess.

  She did it cleverly, telling just one girl she quickly intuited was very indiscreet. She swore that girl not to tell. So, of course, that girl did tell—and the girls she told then told more girls. It spread all over New Hall that a Persian princess was in their midst. All eyes were on her, this girl with the black hair fluffed into Farrah Fawcett layers. During chapel, she was “the best reader of the gospel—and was loved by the nuns,” says Diana Bellew, adding that the savvy “princess” “always got on well with the people she needed to get on well with.”

  Though she was “warm and enthusiastic,” Gig Moses says, and drew other girls to her—she became popular immediately—Christiane at New Hall exuded a natural sense of privilege that exempted her from certain dreary efforts. As athletic as she’d been in Tehran, she was now “definitely not keen on waving a lacrosse stick or venturing onto a netball court in the middle of winter,” says Gig. “She got away with all kinds of mischief—she got away with murder,” says Diana.

  Diana was assigned to be her roommate—that is how they met. “I couldn’t stand her!” Diana says. “She complained so much, just because she missed her old school.” The adjustment was so bothersome to Christiane that “she was angry and moaning all the time about it,” and she intentionally chose and wore “horrible clothes,” Diana says, as a form of rebellion. “After a month, I cried to the nuns, ‘I can’t live with that girl! She’s awful—she’s always moaning about everything being a nightmare.’” But Diana’s tears were useless. The nuns insisted that she endure rooming with Christiane. Christiane had become “friends with the headmistress. Those nuns who were in charge absolutely adored her. She really got along with these older women.”

  So Diana resigned herself and began to observe her new roommate in perplexed admiration. Christiane had the temerity to rail against how cold it was in science lab to “the terrible old drunk Irish woman” who brooked no guff in the chemistry class she taught. To underscore her point, Christiane returned to class after a weekend in London wearing gloves—fur gloves from Harrods, purchased by her maternal grandmother, whom she and her friends sometimes later irreverently referred to as Granny with the Checkbook. That cheeky elitism infuriated the chemistry teacher, but it rather tickled the headmistress, who had taken a great liking to the brazen, posh Persian girl. Diana had to admire Christiane’s nerve and pizzazz.

  And so Diana and Christiane became friends, and then best friends—lifelong friends, it would turn out. “She was something,” Diana finally realized. “Even at sixteen and seventeen, you could see it”—especially on weekends, when Christiane ditched the ugly clothes and wore “fabulous platform shoes and really great jeans.” “Oh, the platform shoes!” remembers Gig Moses of those days when they’d all three visit the boutique Biba on High Street in Kensington on weekends. The sixth- and then seventh-form girls were quite full of themselves in that wonderful young English era of “T. Rex, Queen, Rod Stewart, David Bowie, and the world seeing Arthur Ashe win at Wimbledon!” Christiane and Gig were very competitive, as house captain and vice captain—class leaders—and after Christiane’s spoiled-acting homesickness for her last school had long passed, the two girls would slide along Aloysius Corridor, the school’s long main hall, after it was freshly scrubbed and slick enough to skate on in their Idlers (popular brown leather loafers), “full of gumption for the daily routine of housework after breakfast,” Gig recalls.

  Despite the trendy hairdo and the Liza Minnelli fixation and other fripperies, Christiane was “not a girly girl,” says Diana, and she had a distinct fearlessness. “She was never scared to ask questions—any question, ever. I would think, ‘I’m stupid if I ask.’ But she had no shame, no embarrassment—she would want to get to the bottom of things.” Diana had a boyfriend who was big man on campus at “a very posh Catholic boys’ school. He was a real prize, and I was actually completely terrified of him. I didn’t know the things he knew, like art history. But Christiane had no fear of him—none. And she didn’t know any more about art history than I did.” Yet she stood her ground and argued with him. One thing Christiane could not do was learn to drive—at least not drive well. She had many lessons with the patient New Hall instructor but, according to Diana, she failed her driving test many times before finally passing it.

  • • •

  WHILE CHRISTIANE WAS ENJOYING those years at New Hall, the native country she came home to in the summer and on holidays was radically changing. Starting around 1973, “the regime of the Shah became more and more autocratic,” says Iranian-born Shaul Bakhash, one of the world’s leading scholars on Iranian history. Bakhash recalls that “even modicums of freedoms tightened. The Shah became far less tolerant of dissent—he imposed a single party . . . where in the past there had been elections, and there was pressure on people in civil service and the universities to join in, and people resented it.” Most alarmingly, torture had become widespread, especially for those militating against the government. Trade unions were suppressed, and there were suddenly “mindless” measures involving “constant interference in details of people’s private lives,” such as outlawing the cutting down of trees—you could theoretically be punished for cutting down a tree in your own backyard. The 1973–1974 explosion of oil prices (which “quadrupled overnight”) spurred the intensive modernization process that the Shah had started in 1963. “Had I no
t seen it with my own eyes,” Bakhash says, “I would not believe you could dislocate an economy in such a short period of time.”

  Iranians felt the country was losing its identity. “Suddenly you had Korean truck drivers, Filipino maids, and American military advisers. There were forty thousand to fifty thousand foreigners in a country of thirty-six million, but the impact was huge. It wasn’t just a fear of the clergy, the threat of this quote-unquote ‘Westernization.’ Even my friends”—intellectuals—“said, ‘We’re losing our identity.’” There was “a deadening effect on society, on political discourse, and certainly on intellectual discourse. And it was far worse, of course, for the traditional people in rural areas.” Suddenly, in the early to mid-1970s, in conservative areas like Isfahan—“there were bars, and women wearing shorts. Suddenly you injected into a provincial town large numbers of Americans who had their own style of living. It was shocking.”

  At the same time, something else was happening, something that might seem contradictory but would actually dovetail with the rural conservatives’ disapproval of the Shah’s changes: For the first time, Iranian students from traditional, lower-middle-class families were getting college scholarships to America, and the experience of witnessing freedom turned them very antimonarchy, very anti-Shah. Being in the States created in them a desire for a more open society. “Why don’t we have these things at home?” they wondered angrily. Meanwhile, the Shah’s suppression of political parties and trade unions was making it so that “nothing was left but religion,” Bakhash says. “Where could people gather but mosques?”