The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

  “Why are you taking it down?” he would exclaim. “Higher! Take it back up!”

  “Your Majesty, it is not safe! We cannot allow you to hurt yourself!”

  “Take the bloody thing higher! I order you!”

  “No Majesty, please it is not safe!”

  “Higher, damn it!”

  The others in the party, treading water down below, would watch this scene unfold in a state of great mirth, laughing at the string of expletives that accompanied the Shah’s final leap into the blue. The pilots stayed on the scene until a flotilla of small boats trailing inflatable rafts arrived from the mainland. Everyone in the water then climbed aboard the inflatables and a race ensued back to the shore, with speedboats whipping the children through the water amid gales of laughter. If ever a child lost their footing and was flung off, one of the boats would stop, circle back around, and scoop them from the sea. One afternoon, however, fun almost turned to tragedy when Princess Mahnaz, the daughter of Princess Shahnaz and Ardeshir Zahedi, was lost at sea.

  Each summer, Mahnaz returned to Iran from boarding school in Switzerland. Her time in Nowshahr was when she had the chance to catch up with her grandparents, uncles, aunts, and the cousins. One day she slipped into the Shah’s helicopter unobserved just before it took off with its cargo of royal vacationers. She was the last to make the jump into the water and in the confusion somehow missed grabbing onto a line or climbing into the last inflatable before the convoy of boats roared back to shore. Suddenly, she was alone in the water. With no land in sight and dusk setting in, she calmed herself by lying on her back to save energy. The minutes passed slowly. Back on land, the adults and children were cleaning up in preparation for supper when someone noticed that Mahnaz was missing. After one of the children recalled seeing her in the water, the adults realized that the Shah’s only grandchild had been left behind. They raised the alarm and boats and aircraft sped to the area. The search party faced a daunting challenge. The currents were shifting and the pilots could only hazard a guess as to where they had set her down. The girl, meanwhile, lay still in the water with sea creatures nibbling at her limbs. Mahnaz was spotted from a helicopter with only a few minutes of light left and winched to safety.

  From Nowshahr, the Pahlavis returned to Saadabad to round out the summer and early autumn before heading back down the hill to Niavaran in late October. This final move completed the annual progress. Though the Court Ministry was responsible for maintaining the five palaces and twelve hundred staff scattered around the country, many problems still ended up on the Queen’s desk. She was the first to admit that the logistics involved in moving so often between different residences taxed everyone’s patience. “Often I have instructed the staff to use a certain set of tableware for an official occasion at Saadabad Palace,” she said. “They have immediately informed me that the set is at Niavaran Palace. In Nowshahr, I used to ask for something and receive the answer that it was in Kish Island. In Kish, I would be told that the thing I wanted was in Saadabad.”

  * * *

  NIAVARAN WAS A working palace and a family home. The residence and the grounds were filled with the sights and sounds of children laughing and tearing through the halls and animals scampering about. With the birth of Ali Reza on April 28, 1966, followed four years later by a sister, Leila, on March 27, 1970, the family was complete. The King and Queen had always wanted four children, and with two male heirs the line of succession was finally settled.

  Even before he was born, Crown Prince Reza was the subject of endless gossip and conjecture. “The rumors were that my mother was never pregnant, I was mute, and I was not my father’s son,” he recalled. One popular rumor had it that the young prince was born with webbed hands that resembled duck feet. The rumors of muteness were laid to rest only in 1973 when the thirteen-year-old opened a youth soccer tournament in Shiraz and officials made sure his speech was broadcast to the nation. Street gossip about the Imperial Family was part of the fabric of Iranian daily life. “They said absolutely anything, anything—the most fantastic rumors,” remembered Fatemeh Pakravan, wife of General Pakravan. One persistent rumor was that each day the Shah entered a secret underground tunnel that took him from Niavaran to Savak headquarters, where he presided over torture interrogations and watched as students were fed to the lions. The tunnel in question was actually a short passageway only a few hundred yards long that connected Niavaran’s basement to a small outhouse that stored machinery and a power generator. “Do you know how many miles my father would have had to walk each day to get to Savak headquarters?” said Reza with a laugh. “Savak was located downtown.” Still, the underground passageway came in handy when Reza filmed a high school remake of the hit television show The Six Million Dollar Man, starring Lee Majors. “In another life I would have been a director of films,” he admitted. He corralled his younger siblings and friends to act out a script that called for a jewel thief to sneak into Niavaran, snatch one of his mother’s diadems, and then escape through the tunnel.

  Great expectations were attached to the young prince. “I was far more scrutinized. I never saw the stroke of midnight until I was sixteen. I recall from my childhood, eighty percent was going to school and twenty percent was in my capacity as crown prince.” There were snatches of normality. “One night my father was chasing me down the hall while waiting for my mother to get dressed for dinner. I got hyper and ran into the bathroom, slipped on the shower rug and fell nose first into the back of my mother’s chair.” His parents canceled their plans, bundled the bleeding child into the car, and drove at high speed to the nearest hospital. Needless to say, their sudden appearance made it a night to remember for the medical staff and other patients in the emergency room. In his teenage years the prince showed an assertive streak that his father did nothing to discourage. He approved the thirteen-year-old’s request to make a solo flight without his flying instructor. Despite his mother’s reservations, both the King and Queen accompanied their son to an air force base and looked on with pride as his Beechcraft F33C Bonanza danced around the sky before executing a perfect landing. Farah bit her lip so as not to cry with pride—and relief. The young prince’s father looked on with barely concealed satisfaction. Reza was friendly with his bodyguards but that didn’t stop him from trying to break out of his security cordon. One day he sped off in his Mini Cooper, leaving the drivers of the tail car shaking their fists in traffic. Another time, he and his sister Farahnaz armed themselves with tape and paper and covered over the dozen security cameras installed in the palace compound. For this impertinence they earned a rare scolding from their father. By the time of his sixteenth birthday, the prince’s dark good looks drew stares and swoons from Tehran schoolgirls, who reported sightings of him shopping in the music stores that lined Pahlavi Avenue. At the Tehran American School, the American girls and a few boys decorated their lockers with photographs and posters of the prince decked out in football gear or wearing his flying togs.

  Princess Farahnaz was her brother’s confidante and close confederate in their escapades around the grounds of Saadabad and Niavaran. “She was a real tomboy,” said her mother. “She drove a three-wheel motorbike up the palace stairs.” Personally shy and sensitive, Farahnaz most closely resembled her father in temperament. From an early age she showed a keen interest in the lives and well-being of the servants and lavished affection on the family’s growing menagerie of pets. For a while the children were entertained with a lion cub given to Reza by President de Gaulle until it grew too big and was sent to Tehran’s zoo. Farahnaz’s pet fox often joined the family at mealtimes, though Madame Diba refused to enter her granddaughter’s bedroom for fear of encountering the mice. The teenager inherited her mother’s social conscience. “If she came across people in the street who were poor or unhappy, it always affected her,” said Farah. In the Niavaran neighborhood where she lived, locals often saw the little girl standing at the palace gates staring at them in the vain hope another child would come over to invite her to
play or chat. But more than anything, Farahnaz loved spending time with her father. She would listen with big eyes as he described to her his latest travels and the important people he had met during his day.

  The couple’s third child, Ali Reza, had a personality and spirit that called to mind his grandfather Reza Shah. The boy was as charming as he was tough. He was five when one night he crept out of his bedroom in his pajamas, stole along the gallery, and flung bread pellets over the balcony and onto the heads of his parents, who were receiving guests in the grand hall. He was the same age, his mother remembered, when he jumped into a barrel of tar being used to coat the terraces. “He was so naughty,” she said with a smile. “At the entrance to Niavaran there was a guard who sat at a table. He kept a loaded gun under it. One day Ali Reza crept beneath it and stole the man’s pistol.” Her son enjoyed his first day at nursery school so much that he ordered his driver to turn around and go home without him. One morning, impatient to play outside, he admonished his mother to hurry up and get dressed. “People will say, what kind of majesty is this still in her bathrobe?” he lectured her in fluent French. The Queen recalled that though Ali Reza was slow to speak, when he did it was in full sentences and with a directness that often brought conversation to a halt. One night at dinner he told his family that he liked “free love.” When the children raced across the gallery to keep their father company while he exercised before dinner, it was Ali Reza who would jump on his back, issue riding instructions, and start the pillow fights.

  Leila was the baby of the family and Ali Reza’s closest friend. At bedtime the Shah would ask her, “Pray for rain, Leila joune.” Rain was always on his mind, and Leila was often heard to say, “I like it when the sky is gray.” The Queen thought, “Her father has passed on his love of rain to her. Forever.” But he was a hopeless disciplinarian and a soft touch. “The children were conscious of the power they had over their father, and for his part my husband knew how to delight them and with just a few words restore the closeness interrupted by official trips or long working days at home.”

  Both parents were often away or at official events, and their absence was keenly felt. “I physically didn’t see my parents much,” Reza remembered. Farah admitted that she struggled and often failed to balance home life with her public duties. “Basically, we were never able to live as a normal family and give the children as much time as we would have liked,” she said after the revolution. “While they have a certain understanding of what our responsibilities were, the children remark on it to me today, and if I had my life to live over again, I would give more time to them and to my husband.”

  * * *

  IN THE EARLY seventies the rumor took hold that Queen Farah bathed in milk. She became aware of it herself when one of her maids mentioned the latest gossip at school. “Behind me, in class, there were two girls speaking about you,” said the young woman. “They said that the Queen bathes twice a day in milk.” The tale was so absurd that Farah dismissed it as nonsense. But she noticed that journalists soon began raising the subject of her bathing habits in interviews. “Is it true that you bathe in milk like Cleopatra?” they inquired. The exasperated Queen put the rumors down to the usual backstreet tittle-tattle but also to the demands of her role. “I am never photographed at work. The only photographs published always show me wearing the crown jewels. Unfortunately, ninety-nine out of a hundred people judge by appearances. No one wonders, ‘What is she, herself, like?’ They do not want to know that we, too, are human and, like others, have problems and feelings.”

  Other rumors could not be brushed off or set aside so easily. In a society where so many were prepared to believe that the Shah fed young people to lions, that his wife bathed in milk, and that his sister ruled behind the scenes as Persia’s Lady Macbeth, it was inevitable that the Pahlavi marriage would become fodder for the gossips. The Shah and Shahbanou were twenty years apart in age and the product of different generations, his more conservative and authoritative, hers more liberal and idealistic. He had been raised in an atmosphere of total obeisance and was not used to being questioned or challenged, least of all by a woman. Farah had suffered the loss of her father at a young age, been encouraged to stand on her own two feet, and understood the impatience of the younger generation for more freedom. Her family pedigree meant she need never feel insecure in the company of the Pahlavi clan. She refused to indulge her husband and did what she could to challenge the enablers who surrounded him at court. One evening she watched in rising anger as Bruno, the Shah’s pampered Great Dane, sidled up to the dinner table and started licking food off people’s plates. “Flatterers everywhere!” she snapped. “I refuse to follow their example. Even this dog is fawned upon just because he is yours. I alone refuse to stoop to such nonsense.”

  The Shah, exasperated, returned the sentiment. After the state opening of parliament in October 1972, while the couple waited in an anteroom for the return trip to the palace, the Queen observed that her husband’s speech from the throne “had done nothing but praise our achievements without mentioning a single shortcoming.” His testy reply betrayed his insecurities and also the suspicion that perhaps she had a point. “You’re becoming quite the revolutionary yourself,” he rounded on her in front of their aides. “I’d like to see you try and run this country at the same time as making revolutionary pronouncements and heaping your own administration with abuse. But do tell me, now that you’ve joined the revolutionaries, how is it you continue to dress yourself in jewels and finery?”

  Farah felt no need to apologize or back down. She worked hard and had earned the right to make her voice heard. She took the view that more candor and not less was needed in the palace. “His Majesty and I see eye to eye on nothing; almost invariably I disagree with him,” she once told a startled Court Minister Alam. Farah’s outburst was a rare indiscretion probably meant to shock the man she regarded as her husband’s chief enabler. She did what she could to keep him grounded. She refused to suppress her competitive streak, beating him in straight sets at tennis, keeping up with him on the ski slopes, and once sensationally outwitting him during his favorite after-dinner word game. The Shah loved games and was a keen bridge player. There was one word game he favored over all others and that allowed his intellect to shine. According to the rules of Botticelli, each player was allowed to ask questions of the protagonist. “For example,” said the Queen, “you are thinking of a famous person starting with ‘B,’ and the other people ask another question, ‘Are you, for instance, from a country in South America?,’ and you have to answer, ‘I’m not Bolivian.’ If you cannot answer, you may ask an indirect question: ‘Are you alive? Are you a man? A woman?’” One evening Farah shocked her husband into silence by correctly naming the head of a German tank division. He was so flummoxed that he brought the game to a halt and incredulously asked, “How do you know this? Tell me, how?” She collapsed in laughter.

  The Shah ceded the domestic realm to his wife’s better judgment. He indulged her passion for modern art and held his tongue when the sculptures and paintings she favored but that he found incomprehensible appeared in their homes. Only occasionally did he put his foot down. One day he noticed the bronze relief of a giant thumb mounted on a pedestal in her library. He decided this was going too far—in Iran the thumb symbolized the middle finger. Recalling the incident, the Queen blushed and said with a chuckle, “His Majesty banished it from the residence.” She moved the thumb to a pavilion outside her library, where it stands to this day, and Ali Reza later bought her a smaller-scale replica made out of glass. In its place in the library she installed a second bronze relief, this one intended to symbolize “nothing.”

  Among the things the couple shared in common was a love of the outdoors and athletics, French literature and culture, Dean Martin movies, and wildlife conservation. It was in response to his wife’s appeals that the Shah finally gave up hunting. Work often intruded in their personal life. The Queen advocated on behalf of groups and issues that h
er husband’s more conservative circle regarded as liberal and therefore suspect. “It’s very difficult for me,” Farah conceded. “I try to talk to him, not as a queen talking to a king but as a wife talks to her husband. Sometimes, though, I care so much about something, I get so excited I can’t breathe. But I have to be careful because if I’m not, and I start raising my voice he will think I am blaming him for what’s wrong and he’ll get angry.” Pressed for time, and fighting for his attention, Farah wrote her husband notes. “I don’t want to take up his time; I don’t want to trouble him with my problems during the day so the only time I can talk to him is at lunch or in bed and that’s the worst time to talk about your problems. Once in a while I have him alone for five or ten minutes in the car. But generally I write to him. If I talk to him he forgets. So I write little notes to him and send them to the office so he will read it with the rest of his papers.”

  Weeks passed when they saw each other only briefly and mainly at joint official engagements. One visitor to Niavaran in the midseventies recorded the following scene.

  I have watched her dash out (already changed from the clothes she was wearing when we were talking ten minutes earlier), at the same moment as a throbbing machine drops to earth on one of the terraces which serves as landing pad. It has come down to whisk her off, maybe to a distant province, or just the other end of the city.… At the same time there is another insistent buzzing overhead, and a second helicopter plumbs down at nudging distance from the first. This one is returning the Shah to his Palace for the series of audiences and conferences that make up his day. He is in uniform—perhaps he has been attending army maneuvers.… At this moment, while the helicopters throb and quiver, one coming to a standstill, the other raring to lift off into the skies, there is a frantic surge of children and dogs. Hugs, farewells, greetings, shrieks, laughter and barking sound below the whirring machines. Then the Pahlavi parents are off, each to their respective obligations.