The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

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  IN THE AUTUMN of 1957 Farah left Iran to begin her university studies at the École Speciale d’Architecture in Paris, the preferred training ground for Iran’s elite. Her first year away from home was not easy. She experienced homesickness and was troubled by the European students’ hazing rituals and casual racism.

  Paris in the late fifties was a magnet for refugees, dissidents, and exiles from around the world protesting European colonialism and condemning in particular France’s military campaign against Algerian independence. Their activities were monitored by intelligence agencies from several countries, including the Soviet Union. As one of only a few women in the Iranian student contingent, Farah Diba soon drew the attention of a KGB agent, who kept them under surveillance. He noted her attendance at a rally of Communists against the war in Algeria and assumed she shared the marchers’ radical sentiments. But Farah had only joined in at the last minute to silence the taunts of friends who accused her of lacking courage, and she found the experience unsettling. The intrigues continued. One time, Farah was introduced to a student from East Germany who later turned out to be a Communist spy. Many years later she attended a play in Gilan Province with her husband when an actor resembling the mystery German from her university days rushed onstage waving an imitation revolver. The mystery man was not arrested and he was never seen again. Scholars who studied the KGB archives at the end of the Cold War judged the spy agency’s interest in Farah to be “misplaced.” The Russians “failed to realize that [the Queen] remained, as she had been brought up, a convinced royalist.” That did not stop rumors circulating in future years that Iran’s Queen harbored Marxist sympathies or was even a closet Communist.

  Farah was “a hard worker,” remembered a classmate, “sitting up late over her studies and never cutting classes, as some of us did.” She respectfully stood back during the Shah’s embassy reception in the spring of 1959 despite the prodding of Jahingir Tafazoli, the embassy’s cultural attaché. Unbeknownst to her, Tafazoli had been groomed by the same KGB agent who decided Farah Diba was a fellow traveler. Now, with the search for a new Queen under way in Tehran, he was anxious that she catch the Shah’s attention. Farah was already at the center of a swirl of gossip about her future marriage prospects. “And why shouldn’t the Shah marry you?” her friends in Paris joked. “You’re pretty.” She teased them in return, suggesting they “write to him and try to convince him that there’s a very suitable girl for him here.” But one of her closest girlfriends mailed her a postcard from Madrid that read simply, “Farah Diba = Farah Pahlavi.”

  Farah returned home to spend the summer of 1959 in Tehran. With her savings running low, she was anxious to win another round of scholarship funding for the new academic year. As it turned out, the official in charge of approving education grants was Ardeshir Zahedi, the Shah’s son-in-law, who also happened to be a friend of another of Farah’s uncles, Esfandiar Diba, one of the monarch’s former equerries. Diba asked Zahedi to help his niece with her financial problems while dropping the hint that “his niece had all the requisite qualifications for becoming His Majesty’s wife.” Zahedi agreed to meet the girl and her uncle to discuss the scholarship. Unbeknownst to either of them, they were observed from behind a sliding glass door by Princess Shahnaz. Zahedi was impressed enough to invite Farah back to the house the following day to have tea with his wife.

  The Zahedi residence in the hilltop neighborhood of Hesarak enjoyed a panoramic outlook over the capital. The hosts and their awed young guest were chatting away when a car pulled up outside. Noticing a commotion in the hallway, Farah looked up in amazement to see a visitor at the door—it was the Shah. He was curious to meet the girl who so impressed his daughter. “Good Lord!” thought Farah. “I could feel my heart pounding. I was amazed and thrilled all at once.” The atmosphere was cordial enough that the Shah canceled his plans for the evening and stayed for dinner. Many years later he was asked what set Farah apart from the other girls. “I think I knew, directly I saw her, saw the way she was, with other people—with myself, too, so natural, so charming … speaking excellent French, interested in everything, obviously with a mind of her own … and I seem to remember some of us playing a silly game, with counters, or something … they kept flipping onto the floor, and she was the one who kept on picking them up for us … A little thing, but it told me a lot about her.… Yes, I think I knew as soon as we met—certainly within a day or so—that she was the woman I had been waiting for so long, as well as the Queen my country needed.”

  Farah Diba offered the Shah a fresh start. She was young, modest, cheerful, and a stranger to the petty intrigues of court life. She shared her future husband’s athleticism and passion for helping people. There would be potent symbolism in a marriage between the Shah with his dreams of modernizing Iran and the young woman whose life story symbolized the aspirations of Iran’s emerging middle class. Marriage to Farah, a descendant of the Prophet, would technically make the Shah a son-in-law of Mohammad and burnish the Pahlavi Dynasty’s shaky credentials with the religious establishment. Finally, the Shah told Zahedi that he was determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past. His marriage to Soraya had estranged him from his family and hurt his daughter. “I did not treat my daughter well before,” he admitted. “I was not as good a father to her as I should have been.… This time I wish to choose a wife who is my daughter’s choice. Ardeshir! You know that I am marrying for my country’s sake. Had it not been for my country’s sake, I would not have wished to divorce and remarry. This will be an opportunity to improve the relationships in our family. Strained family relations make me miserable and unhappy.”

  When Farah received a second invitation, this time to dinner, she understood the nature of the Shah’s interest. “This time I had an inkling that some plan was being devised concerning me,” she recalled. Over the next several weeks she joined the Shah for long walks, outings around town in his sports car, and short jaunts in his plane. During their first flight he asked her to adjust one of the controls—it was only after they landed and she saw ambulances at the end of the airstrip that she learned they had had a lucky escape. “The undercarriage wouldn’t come down,” the Shah casually told her. “You got the wheels out manually.” “We could have been killed,” she said, “but he remained completely calm through it all.”

  Farah’s inspection before the Pahlavi women was a triumph. Queen Mother Taj ol-Moluk asked after her Aunt Louise, who had known her sisters at school. “It is certain that on that day,” Farah recalled, “the King’s inner circle saw me as an unaffected girl who knew nothing of their world of courtiers and diplomats.” There was still one last hurdle to overcome. Within the Imperial Family there was unhappiness at Zahedi’s hand in selecting Iran’s next Queen. Gossips tried to undermine her prospects by whispering that the prospective bride was a closet leftist related to the despised Mohammad Mossadeq. Zahedi agreed to investigate the charges but also tried to put the Shah’s mind at ease. The Dibas and Mossadeqs might be related through clan ties but it would be “unfair to hold that against her when [Zahedi] himself was also a distant relative [of Mossadeq].” “Everyone in Iran,” he reminded the Shah, “is related to each other.” This was true enough—Iranians liked to joke that they were one big fractious family. Zahedi offered the further assurance that the young woman and her family were loyal monarchists.

  Meanwhile, Madame Diba could not hide her anxiety about sending her daughter to the Imperial Court with its reputation for intrigues. Years later, Madame Diba admitted that had her husband been alive he might well have opposed the engagement. Farah’s mentor at the Jeanne d’Arc School, Sister Claire, expressed similar reservations: “I saw, stretching ahead for her, a dazzling but thorny path … no Court is without intrigues and jealousies.… I looked at her—so young, so vulnerable, and I feared for her.” Years later, Farah confirmed that her decision to marry had been motivated more by a sense of duty than by passion or romance—love would come later. “He wa
s the figure-head—the man I and my friends revered,” she said. “We were all under his spell.… Perhaps it was not a love match, in terms of a romantic novel—not a coup de foudre … but I think, in my heart, I had always felt a strong emotion about him. And then, when it seemed he needed me, of course I did not hesitate.… But he was my king—how could I possibly have refused?”

  News of the Shah’s engagement broke while Farah was en route to Paris to wrap up her studies. By the time her plane landed, Orly Airport was descended on by a scrum of newspapermen and photographers. She was mobbed at the airport, and the drive to the hotel was a hair-raising affair, with photographers chasing the car through the streets and flashing bulbs in the car windows. A dangerous car chase through the streets of Paris ensued: “I was screaming, thinking that we would kill one of them at any moment.” She withdrew from her classes, packed her bags, and bade farewell to her friends and the city she loved so much. At the formal betrothal ceremony, held in Tehran on November 23, 1959, the Shah presented his twenty-one-year-old fiancée with an engagement ring that “shone like the sun” and a blue case that opened to reveal a necklace, earrings, bracelet, brooch, and ring set in diamonds, emeralds, and rubies.

  The Shah’s fiancée caused a minor stir before the wedding when she acknowledged in an interview that not all Iranians were content with their lot. Farah had been born and raised outside the aristocracy. In Paris she had been exposed to new ideas about social justice and fairness, and the recent creation of Savak, the secret police, and the accompanying crackdown on political dissent and freedom of expression had caused widespread fear and resentment among educated middle-class Iranians who hankered for the 1906 Constitution and Western-style democracy. In Iran the gap between ruler and ruled was as wide as ever. “She said she knew some of the Iranian people were not very happy and she hoped to be able to help them,” one interviewer reported. “She said she understood their problems as she had been a simple student.” She told the Times of London that she would devote her life “to the service of the Iranian people” and encourage women to get an education and enter the workforce. Iranian students marveled that one of their own—someone young, progressive, and idealistic—now lived in the palace of the shahs. Critics scrutinized Farah’s comments for signs that she harbored political ambitions of her own. When he proposed to Farah, however, the Shah had made clear that he expected her to take an active role in the life of the nation, one that went beyond the ceremonial duties expected of his consort. He did not want a repeat of the unhappy experiences of Fawzia and Soraya, who had been reluctant queens unwilling to sacrifice and share the burdens of royal life.

  The Shah need not have worried: in marrying Farah Diba he gained the partner he never knew he needed.

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  FARAH SPENT HER wedding eve in the company of her close friend Elli Antoniades, the daughter of Greek refugees. The two young women had known each other since age nine. “We were the only two girls in class without fathers,” said Elli. They were up early on the morning of December 21, 1959, in a state of great excitement. It took three hours for the famed Carita sisters, specially flown in from Paris, to style the bride’s hair around a diamond hairpiece that weighed four and a half pounds. Designed by Harry Winston, Farah’s tiara was delivered after breakfast by a small retinue of security guards and government ministers. Her bridal gown, designed by the House of Dior, was trimmed with pearls and rhinestones and weighed thirty-three pounds. “She wore a matching veil and cape-like bolero,” reported the New York Times, “a diamond tiara and a necklace of diamonds as large as sugar lumps.”

  In deference to Farah’s wishes, the Shah ended the tradition of ritually slaughtering livestock along the wedding procession route. Like her fiancé, she dreaded bloodshed and could not bear the thought of violence against harmless animals on the happiest day of her life. The couple exchanged their vows before a small audience in the Marble Palace’s Hall of Mirrors. The ceremony was about to begin when the bride, overcome with nerves and emotion, remembered she had no ring for her groom. Ardeshir Zahedi stepped in and gave her his ring as a substitute. The newly betrothed couple moved to a grand salon where they hosted a reception for two thousand guests. “By the end of the day, Her Majesty was only thinking of her head,” said her friend Elli. “She had a headache [from the weight of the tiara].”

  The Shah was determined to avoid the mistakes that had left Soraya isolated and embittered in the palace. He assigned Amir Pourshaja as Farah’s valet with instructions to help ease her entry into court life. He also encouraged his young wife to maintain her friendships outside the palace. Two months after the wedding, Elli received the first of the dinner invitations that were to continue over the next two decades. “Her Majesty could fall back on her friends and they could always tell her the truth,” she said. “That was a clever thing for the Shah to do.” Farah soon learned the limits of her influence and the pressures of life in the palace. She was pregnant with her first child in August 1960, when she visited the port city of Abadan and surprised local officials by asking to inspect the housing conditions of local workers. Feeling nauseous, and almost overcome by stifling heat and the reek of oil fumes, she was so distressed at the poverty that she burst into tears. Her embarrassed host asked her permission to make a financial offering to local families. “Ostentatiously, he collected identity cards, jotted down names—and as Farah Diba drove away, tore up the list and tossed it into the gutter,” wrote a witness.

  The young Queen was expected to bear children, and the icing on her wedding cake had left no doubt in anyone’s mind as to what was expected of Iran’s twenty-one-year-old royal consort. “May Allah grant you a male offspring,” read the inscription. Farah fulfilled everyone’s wishes with the birth of an heir, Crown Prince Reza, on October 31, 1960. But when the delivery proved difficult, the Shah’s overly zealous physician administered “rather too much anesthetic.” While her husband and the Imperial Family celebrated the arrival of the little prince in the next room, the baby’s mother lay passed out in bed. “In the rejoicings, I think I was almost forgotten,” she remembered, “and only my mother thought to ask: ‘And my daughter, how is she?’” The young Queen was brought around by a nurse tapping her on the cheek and calling out, “Majesty, Majesty.” She was immensely relieved when the Shah told her she had given birth to a son and heir. “I burst into tears,” she admitted. “My God, I thought to myself, if I had had a daughter, what would have happened? Everyone would have been so terribly disappointed.” People danced in the streets when they heard the news, swarming the Shah’s car as he left the hospital and picking it up and carrying it on their shoulders. Never before, he told his wife, had he seen “such an outpouring of universal joy and warmth.”

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  THE PAHLAVIS PAID a state visit to the White House in April 1962. Relations between Tehran and Washington were deeply strained by differences stemming from President John F. Kennedy’s fear that the Shah was not doing enough to reform his country and that Iran was imperiled by communism. Kennedy’s advisers worried that under Eisenhower the United States had aligned itself with an authoritarian leader who lacked popular legitimacy. When they surveyed Iran they thought they saw a country on the verge of a Cuban-style socialist takeover.

  Kennedy also held a personal grudge against the Iranian monarch. He was angered by reports that Ardeshir Zahedi, now Iran’s ambassador to Washington, had secretly supported Richard Nixon’s 1960 presidential campaign with cash donations. The president had also received briefings from liberal officials critical of the Shah’s leadership style and his constant intrigues in domestic politics. U.S. Supreme Court justice William Douglas, who knew Kennedy well, concluded that the president favored replacing Iran’s monarchy with a liberal republic. “I talked to Jack frequently about conditions in Iran and the corruption that was rampant,” wrote Douglas. Kennedy saw the Shah as “not the person we could trust.… The idea was to withdraw American support for the Shah causing his abdication.”
In his first few months in office, Kennedy put pressure on the Shah by ordering a review of U.S. policy and temporarily suspending arms sales. He made it clear that he expected measures to be taken to alleviate poverty, crack down on top-level corruption, and divert funds away from the military and toward education and health. Unlike their Republican counterparts, Democrats on Capitol Hill in Washington believed the Iranian monarchy was doomed at a time when republics were being established throughout the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Few experts in Washington banked on the Shah’s survival. In June 1961 Senator Frank Church told his colleagues on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, “I just think it is going to be a miracle if we save the Shah of Iran.” At the time rumors were circulating in Tehran of coup plots involving the CIA, army generals, and the head of Iran’s intelligence organization.

  The Shah suspected that Kennedy and the Democrats wanted him out. The White House, he believed, failed to credit his achievements or appreciate the challenges he faced in reforming a conservative Muslim society. Since childhood he had dreamed of ruling as the people’s King and improving their lives with far-reaching reforms. In recent years he had signed decrees breaking up the crown estates and turned over deeds to more than half a million acres, enabling a hundred thousand peasant families to farm their own plots of land. But privately held landholdings were another story. The Majles was still dominated by the so-called Thousand Families, the landed gentry who resisted pressure from the government to sell their estates for partition and redistribution. The ulama, landowners in their own right, were as resistant, and helped the gentry block legislation that the Shah had hoped would enact nationwide land reform. In 1959 he had retreated rather than risk an open breach with the two main pillars of conservative support for the monarchy.