The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

  The Niavaran compound with its two palaces sat perched on a high promontory nestled in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains. Beyond the canopy of plane trees and down the slopes sprawled the capital, Tehran, “the foot of the throne,” though on most days its 4.5 million inhabitants were hidden behind a grimy shroud of yellow smog and grit. The Shah had grand plans for Tehran, which one visitor in the midseventies unkindly compared to “some enormous earth slide spilling slowly southward onto Iran’s great desert plateau.” Six years earlier, at the conclusion of the Persepolis celebrations, the Shah had inaugurated the soaring Shahyad Monument in downtown Tehran in the presence of the Emperor of Ethiopia and the Kings of Greece, Denmark, Norway, and Nepal. The Shahyad’s four giant latticed feet thrust skyward as a lyrical if pointed reminder that the spirit of ancient Ctesiphones, capital of Persia’s Sasanian Empire, was embodied in the vaulting ambitions of the modern Pahlavi state. Museums, concert halls, and art galleries as fine as any in New York and London already lined the grand central park named after his wife, Queen Farah. Construction on an underground metro had started, building was under way on a new international airport nineteen miles to the south, and approval had been granted for a twelve-mile-long, half-mile-wide forested green belt to improve air quality, preserve agricultural farmland, and protect Tehran from desert sandstorms. The Shah was anxious that his seventeen-year-old heir inherit a capital befitting one of the world’s five great powers.

  He walked back to the family residence in time for his usual 1:30 p.m. lunch with the Queen, who often ran a few minutes late. The half-hour meal was usually their first meeting of the day. His favorite lunchtime dish was cutlet of roast chicken, which was eaten to the bone. Lunch was followed by the all-important two o’clock national radio news broadcast, which the monarch never missed but which his wife often skipped to attend to business. At the conclusion of the national news report, the Shah retired upstairs to undress and nap. Refreshed, he rose and changed suits, returned to the office, and started the day over again.

  * * *

  AFTERNOONS CONSISTED OF another round of paperwork, meetings, and official engagements, though the Shah almost always found time to exercise. An accomplished equestrian, competitive skier, and tennis player, he also enjoyed swimming, waterskiing, volleyball, and extreme sports such as jumping out of a helicopter into the ocean without wearing a life vest. Several afternoons during the week, usually at about three o’clock if his wife was out of town or on her own engagements, he might drive to a safe house near the palace for an hour or two trysting with a young paramour. These pastimes, outlets to alleviate the pressure of a lifetime spent in the public eye and almost four decades on the throne, merely hinted at the contradiction between his public image and his private personality and character.

  Before his people the Shah projected a martial image, “stern, icily correct, almost devoid of humor. He seldom indulges in a smile, never a hearty laugh. He is friendless, suspicious, secretive, and, some say, paranoid.” “Some found him a little humorless most of the time,” agreed Cynthia Helms, whose husband, Richard, served as America’s ambassador to Iran. “The scar on his lip, caused by a 1949 attempt on his life, gave him a slightly cynical appearance. During the day he usually wore a double-breasted suit, and always stood ramrod straight. I could never decide whether this was because of his military training or to give him greater height.” The shoes he wore, slightly elevated to add another inch of height to his five foot eight frame, were the only outward sign of insecurity. The Shah’s starchy behavior proved too much even for that other model of royal rectitude, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, when the couple were paired up during celebrations to mark the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. After the party ended Elizabeth let the British Foreign Office know that she found the Shah “rather a bore” and “very heavy” because all he wanted to do was talk shop. She hosted him a decade later at Windsor Castle and found no improvement; once again she let it be known that she “found the Shah heavy going.”

  So guarded in his facial expressions that courtiers studied his every gesture to discern the slightest shift in mood, if the Shah was pensive, contemplative, or anxious his fingers would drift up to his forehead to play with a loose strand of hair. If agitated or otherwise stimulated or excited, he would rise from his chair to start pacing back and forth around the office. “The expression in his face never changed,” remembered Khalil al-Khalil, Lebanon’s ambassador to the Pahlavi Court. “He loved to show that he was as solid as Iran. He always kept a distance from people.” “As serious as a mullah, he never said anything stupid, smoked hardly at all, and almost never drank alcohol,” recalled Soraya Esfandiary, the second of his three wives. She recalled that even in private he addressed her formally, using the Persian word for “you” normally reserved for acquaintances and strangers. Queen Farah also marveled at her husband’s discipline. “He had really great self-control,” she recalled. “One time a photographer’s flashbulb exploded during a photo shoot. Everybody jumped. He didn’t move. It was fantastic.” One of the few occasions when he lost his temper with her in front of company came during a drive down the Caspian coast from Ramsar to Nowshahr. Car journeys were fraught affairs because His Majesty was a speed demon who liked nothing better than to floor the accelerator while his wife pleaded with him to slow down before they were killed. “Not so fast! Not so fast!” Farah cried as the car gained speed. Then, just as her husband turned to calm her, a bird flew straight into the windshield, forcing him to suddenly brake and almost lose control of the car. “And then he turned around and shouted at me,” she said, laughing at the memory.

  His remarkable capacity for self-control revealed itself in an incident at a missile test range in 1976. The Imperial Air Force had taken possession of a new batch of Maverick missiles, and the Shah trooped out to the desert with a group of high-ranking Iranian and American diplomats and generals to watch the first tests. “The missile was fired from six miles away,” recalled General Mohammad Hossein Mehrmand. “Then something went wrong. Instead of exploding, the missile executed a ninety-degree turn and flew straight toward the pavilion where the guests were standing. Everyone, including the American generals, threw themselves to the ground.” Everyone, that is, except the Shah, who stood ramrod straight, feet firmly planted on the floor, his face immobile, while the missile flew straight over his head and beyond to explode in a fiery ball whose shock waves almost collapsed the pavilion. While the stunned generals collected themselves off the ground, General Mehrmand ran to the Shah’s side. “Majesty! Majesty!” he cried. “We should stop!” The Shah was puzzled by the suggestion—why would anyone want to stop? “No, no,” he replied, “we will continue.” The shaken assembly took their seats and the test resumed. The second missile exploded on cue. The Shah took a bet with Mehrmand that the third missile would take just forty-five seconds to strike its target. When the Shah was proven right he momentarily forgot where he was: “He took his hat and threw it on the ground, he was so happy.”

  On the test ground that day the Shah had shown fatalism and courage under fire but also the boyish side that almost never found public expression.

  * * *

  ONLY FAMILY MEMBERS, close friends, and courtiers were aware that behind the public bravado and gold braid the Shah was a man of surprising modesty and remarkable shyness. For outsiders who met him for the first time, the disconnect between the monarch’s public and private sides was jarring. “On a one-to-one, eyeball-to-eyeball basis, he is mild, even a little timid and shy,” said a Western ambassador. “He speaks so softly that you sometimes strain to hear him. He likes to hear jokes, but he is utterly humorless himself. Really he is not a colorful personality. But in public he is the forceful striding monarch, stern looking and purposeful, and always slim and fit looking from exercise and careful dieting. Frankly I think the shy quiet man probably is the real Shah. The other one is a personality that he has had to practice in front
of a mirror most of his life to master.” “He was exactly the opposite of what people thought of him,” observed Mahnaz Afkhami, Iran’s first minister of women’s affairs. Before she entered government she had only ever seen the Shah from a distance. “I accompanied the Shah and Shahbanou to Pakistan. I had the chance to see how he interacted. He was a very mild guy.”

  Shyness was reinforced by his father’s first lesson in leadership: never let the people see you as you are. “My father was shy,” confirmed Crown Prince Reza. “He put on a mask in public. Maybe he should have tried more to show his real face. He followed the example set by his father. Part of the reason he put on a mask was that a different face would have been perceived as weak.” As a young prince, the Shah had been taught to maintain a certain reserve even in his personal relationships and never to trust anyone completely. “If I take a liking to someone,” he once admitted, “I need only the smallest shred of doubt to make me break it off. Friendship involves the exchange of confidence between two people, but a king can take no one into his confidence.” On the times when Farah urged her husband to smile more in public, the Shah reminded her that displays of emotion conveyed weakness. On Fridays, when family and friends gathered at Niavaran to eat lunch, watch movies, and play cards, he was careful not to spend too much time in the company of one guest lest the others gain the impression that he held him or her in higher favor.

  He dreaded small talk, struggled to make eye contact, and was visibly uncomfortable in informal social settings. These attributes and habits led many observers to conclude that the Shah was arrogant or worse. In November 1977 the Pahlavis visited Washington, DC, and were entertained at the White House by jazz legends Sarah Vaughan and Dizzy Gillespie who performed an after-dinner concert in the East Room. At the end of the show President and Mrs. Carter left their seats and walked up on the dais to personally thank them. Queen Farah rose, too, but everyone noticed that the Shah remained “stiffly seated” in his chair—he had frozen at the prospect of standing up in front of the crowd. His wife, fearing an incident, whispered in her husband’s ear to join them onstage. Still he remained glued to his seat, to the point that Farah physically clutched his arm and guided him onto the stage. But the damage was done and the next day the false rumor spread that the Shah of Iran had remained seated because he did not want to shake hands with black musicians. Iran’s preeminent dress designer, Parvine Farmanfarmaian, recalled the time she broke her foot skiing in the Alps. The Shah was skiing nearby and when he learned of her misfortune expressed his sympathy. During her infrequent visits to the Imperial Court she sometimes found herself dancing with the Shah. “He was so shy,” she said. “While we danced, the only thing he could think of to say to me was ‘How is your foot?’ That was the only subject he talked about. This went on for two or three years—the same question every time—until finally I said, ‘Majesty, isn’t there something else we can talk about? I have told you, my foot healed a long time ago.’”

  To shyness was added a capacity for denial and a tendency to avoid conflict, personal confrontations, and bad news. The last thing the Shah wanted to do was cause offense or hurt the feelings of those around him. “There was a gentleman, Mr. Nicknam, who looked after the sports facilities at Niavaran,” recalled the Queen, who often ran interference for her husband. “Every morning my husband walked from the residence across the lawn to his office, and every morning this gentleman would walk by his side grumbling about this or that thing. And His Majesty said to me, ‘This man is bothering me. I start my day feeling happy and he is always full of complaints.’ So I talked to the gentleman. I said, ‘Please don’t bother His Majesty with these problems. Come to me. You know I am responsible for looking after the household.’ My husband was very kind. He didn’t want to offend anyone.” The Shah’s sensitive, retiring nature was also the product of long periods of forced convalescence during childhood. The little prince had almost died of typhoid, was stricken with whooping cough and malaria, and throughout his life suffered from gastrointestinal discomfort. He had a sensitive liver, an enlarged spleen, and a compromised immune system that left him vulnerable to viral infections and frequent bouts of the flu. His preference for sunglasses to shield his eyes, which were sensitive to bright light, only reinforced the image of a remote, untouchable autocrat. For someone already naturally inclined to solitude and with the instincts of a loner, the constant pressure to make decisions and maintain a rigorous public schedule led to stress marked by bouts of debilitating depression, stomach trouble, and anxiety. Insomnia was such a problem that on his worst nights not even Valium could get him to sleep.

  Within the Niavaran household the Shah was known as considerate and uncomplaining. When he traveled abroad he made sure thank-you gifts were distributed to attendants and hotel staff. During a state visit to the United States he paid the medical expenses of the mother of his Secret Service agent out of his own pocket. On the same trip he took the serving dish out of the hands of an elderly female server. “I can’t allow this,” he protested. “She is like my mother.” In the palace he never made a fuss. When his valet accidentally gave him the wrong medication for an ailment he insisted the matter be dropped to spare them both the embarrassment of a scene. Grand Master of Ceremonies Amir Aslan Afshar recalled the time they were traveling in Austria and the Shah made his motorcade turn around and go back to their hotel after remembering he had forgotten to say farewell to the porter. “I am sorry I was too busy and I was not able to say good-bye,” he said, shaking the astonished man’s hand. “Thank you for all the kindness and hard work.” Another time, he expressed disappointment with one of his advisers. “Pull this fellow’s ears,” he told Afshar, and then thought better of it: “Make sure you don’t pull too hard. I don’t want his ears to fall off!”

  His dry, understated sense of humor reflected a fatalistic attitude toward life and its absurdities. An American reporter once asked what it was like to be Iran’s king. The Shah pointed to a bullet wound that creased his lip from an earlier assassination attempt and offered a dry one-word retort: “Dangerous.” Another time, he reminded a visitor that his people had been ruled by more than a hundred kings from a dozen different dynasties. “And do you know how many died peacefully in their beds?” he asked with a wry smile. Holding up four fingers, he said, “It’s not a good job.” Asadollah Alam, his closest adviser and one of the few men who could put him at ease, was a former prime minister who went on to serve as Hoveyda’s predecessor as minister of the Imperial Court. When the two men were alone they bantered back and forth like two college roommates, though Alam was careful never to overstep the mark. The two men were flying from Tabriz to Tehran when Alam recounted the time he lost his virginity to an older lady who had just downed a plate of garlic. On hearing this, the Shah fell “into such prolonged laughter that Her Majesty the Queen and the others became seriously alarmed.”

  Though the Shah enjoyed the use of five palaces and was widely assumed to be one of the richest men in the world, he paid no attention to his bank accounts and showed no interest in money except as a means of spreading largesse. For someone who was thoroughly distrustful in affairs of state he was surprisingly, even shockingly, naive about personal matters. When the palace accountant presented him with checks to sign he never stopped to ask what he was paying for; he was unable to conceive that his own servant would ever cook the books. The women in his life despaired at his reluctance to spend money on himself. The suits he wore had long since gone out of style, and his casual clothes hadn’t been updated since the early fifties. His wife’s efforts to style his wardrobe met with varying degrees of success. Maryam Ansary, the vivacious wife of the minister of finance, tried a different tack. One night at dinner she mentioned in passing that she had found “a fantastic tailor” to make suits for her husband and the prime minister. “Oh, so now you’re in the fashion industry,” the Shah needled her. The lady took the bull by the horns, so to speak, and retorted, “Your Majesty, your suits look old!” and the t
wo set off on a good-natured round of sparring about the merits of spending money on clothes. His indulgences were confined to the two or three new wristwatches he purchased each year, the nineteen sports cars he loved to tear about in, and a stable of magnificent Persian, Turkmen, and Arabian horses.

  The Shah’s portrait hung in every public and many private dwellings in Iran. “You can’t throw a stone without hitting one,” went the joke. “And if you do, you’ll get arrested.” Iranians fed up with the cult of personality would have been surprised to learn that the object of adoration shared their frustration. Queen Farah’s cousin Reza Ghotbi served as director of Iran’s national broadcasting service. He recalled the time he lunched with the Imperial Family and their guests at the Caspian. All chatter and activity ceased when the all-important two o’clock news began with the usual lengthy rundown of the Shah’s latest official engagements and speeches. Troubled by the attention, the Shah warily asked, “Isn’t there any other news at your radio station?” The director returned to his office and raised the subject with one of his staff, a popular radio newscaster. “I’m not feeling very happy with this kind of news,” he said, “with this focus on the King and Queen and everything members of the Imperial Family do.” His colleague reminded him why they lavished attention on them in the first place. “We’re not like the BBC or Radio France,” he said. “If we don’t lead the news with the Shah, people will think there has been a coup d’état in Iran.”