Women of Means by Marlene Wagman-Geller

Author:Marlene Wagman-Geller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mango Media
Published: 2021-01-03T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

The Wounding Thorns (1938)

Sultan Shahriya, angered after his wife dabbled in adultery, ordered her execution. To avoid further humiliation, every night he married a virgin whom he beheaded the next morning. Scheherazade, one of his hapless brides, devised a plan to escape her predecessors’ fate. During pillow talk, she spun such fantastic tales that the king delayed her death. After 1,001 nights, the Sultan fell in love, and Scheherazade lived out her natural life span. The ancient Persian tale had real-life implications for a modern-day Shahbanou (Persian for Shah, meaning Queen).

Farah, the woman who would be queen, was born in Iran, the only child of Captain Sohrab Diba (Persian for silk) and Farideh Ghotbi. The captain’s father had been the Persian Ambassador to the Russian Romanov Court. The sole trauma of Farah’s idyllic childhood came at age nine with the sudden death of her father from cancer. Her grief was made even greater as her family had hidden his illness to spare her worry. His passing left his wife and child in straitened circumstances, and they left their large villa for an uncle’s cramped apartment. As a teen, Farah studied at the Sorbonne’s Ecole d’Architecture. In France, Farah had a rendezvous with a destiny that rivaled the tales of One Thousand and One Nights.

The Pahlavi dynasty was not of an ancient lineage; it originated with Reza Shah Pahlavi, the first Shah of Persia, who changed the name of his empire to Iran. The patriarch took his surname from the ancient Persian language. In 1959, his successor, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, met Farah at the Iranian embassy in France. He was taken with the twenty-one-year-old beauty and was intrigued when she had the moxie to complain how their country’s reduction of scholarship funding created a hardship for its students studying abroad. She recalled of their first meeting, “I wrote a letter to my mother saying he has such beautiful eyes but very sad eyes.” The encounter turned into a royal romance despite their nineteen-year-age difference, her status as a commoner, and Mohammed’s two failed marriages. His first wife was Princess Fawzia, daughter of King Fuad I of Egypt. The teenaged couple united two great Muslim lands, and during their wedding, fireworks lit up the sky over the Nile. She bore their daughter, Princess Shahnaz; however, when there was no further pregnancy, as the Shah needed a male heir to inherit the peacock throne, she returned to Egypt. The next Shahbanou was Princess Soraya, a daughter of Iran’s powerful Bakhtiari family. He adored her; however, just as Napoleon had to end his union with Josephine because she was barren, the same fate befell Soraya. The story of her divorce inspired a French songwriter, Francoise Mallet-Jorris, to write “Je Veux Pleurer Comme Soraya” (I Want to Cry like Soraya). What helped dry her tears was a more than generous settlement. When she passed away in Paris, she left behind a fifty-million-pound fortune that included a Rolls Royce, her 22.37 carat diamond engagement ring, and a lavish Parisian apartment.

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