Two loves of the lonely princess

Parviz Radji

PALACE OF SOLITUDE by Her Imperial Highness Princess Soraya Esfandiary Bakhtiary Quartet, £12.95, pp. 166 Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the late Shah of Iran, married three times. His first wife, Fawzia, sister of King Farouk of Egypt, was acknowledged to be ethereally the most beautiful. His third, Farah Diba, was without doubt the most humane, and by far the best educated. Soraya Esfandiary, his second and the authoress of the melancholically titled present volume, was incomparably the loveliest. The one and only time that I saw her, the impres- sion she made was an enduring one. Her piercing iridescent eyes were the colour of emerald. Her lily-white skin, as the Persian metaphor describes it, like a marble piece under which a candle was aglow. She had been endowed by nature with an over- abundance of feline allure.

The Shah chose her from her photographs and throughout their seven- year marriage, he remained, uncharacteris- tically, not merely faithful but uxorious. Her court life in Tehran was miserable due entirely to the endless intrigues and rival- ries of the Shah's ambitious and meddle- some sisters and the machinations of his domineering mother. Despite that, her married life seems to have been happy, if curiously formal, French being the only language in which they would tutoyer, and there is a telling passage about the serious-

ness with which husband and wife viewed one another:

can still remember the masked ball at Princess Ashrafs home for which Moham- mad Reza had decided — royalty demanded it — to disguise himself as a lion, and I, for the same reason, as Madame de Pompadour.

She endured the political vicissitudes of her husband's confrontation with Mossad- eq and credits herself with suggesting to the Shah the idea of mounting a coup against the recalcitrant prime minister. She shared his flight into temporary exile and detected in him a tendency both to despondency and indecisiveness at moments of crisis, and to vainglory and megalomania when success seemed assured. Though they never wavered in their affection for one another, it was her inability to provide the Pahlavi dynasty with a male heir that spelt the end of her reign as Empress.

Her separation from the Shah was with reluctance but not acrimony and led, pre- dictably, to a crisis of identity and to two years of frenzied and aimless travel. Even- tually she settled to a dolce vita existence in Rome and attempted to fulfil her child- hood ambition of 'becoming a Scarlett O'Hara'. Her film, The Three Faces of a Woman, was a flop but in the process she met the director, Franco Indovina. He had a wife and children, was 'an impossible love', as she describes it, not least because to begin with, they couldn't even communi- cate in the same language. But her initial qualms were somehow overcome, and they shared together five years of blissful har- mony, until he died in a plane crash in his native Sicily.

`A quoi ca sert de voyager quand on ne peut jamais se quitter,' Simone de Beauvoir would have said to her, but to no avail. After Franco, Soraya fled again, to Den- mark, to the fjords of Norway and to the vapidity of Roman high life. And, again, she recovered to settle, in Paris this time, where she lives today.

Palace of Solitude is a straightforward account of Soraya's life and two loves. It is not a book of captivating literary style or In bad taste as well.

So thin a duster could break it, and given in love, it's lasted for years.

All history resides on a souvenir from a hen's insides.

Egg on a Mantelpiece

Some parchment-skinned Chinese painted these boats, this pagoda, this high peak and these incomprehensible characters for a pittance on this eggshell.

Herbert Lomas

enormous historic value. Moreover, for some curious reason, virtually every Per- sian name in the book, whether of individ- uals or places, has suffered a degree of mutilation, many beyond the point of recognition.

As someone who has suffered perhaps more then her fair share of tragedy in life, I was pleased to read in the final chapter that Soraya is not sad. 'Will I love again?' she asks. If a personal comment is permit- ted, may I say that I very much hope so.