V A N I T Y  F A I R - June 2004 Page 121

"She is an imposing figure to the diaspora Iranians."
By Dominick Dunne

ROYAL IN EXILE
Farah Pahlavi at the Party celebrate her new book, An Enduring Love: My Life with the
          Shah, at Le Cirque in New York  March 24.

One afternoon I had tea with Farah Pahlavi, the widow of the Shah of Iran, at the Fifth Avenue apartment where she was staying during a visit to New York to promote her autobiography, An Enduring Love. My Lfe with the Shah. She is a tall, distinguished,  and extremely handsome woman, an empress without a country for nearly three decades. There is a great sadness about her, even when she   laughs, even when she talks lovingly about her  grandchildren.

Her book is a love story devoted to her late husband. From her opulent life in the palace in Tehran to the humiliation of being unwanted everywhere in the world after her husband’s overthrow by the Ayatollah Khomeini, her story is well told and very moving. I had forgotten that the holding of 54 American hostages from the embassy for 444 days beginning in 1979 was in part retaliation for the United States’ having allowed the Shah to be operated on for cancer in New York. Farah Pablavi, her dying husband, and their four children—two girls and two boys—found a temporary residence in Panama, and later Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, offered them permanent sanctuary in his country. As we drank Iranian tea in Iranian cups, she said, "You can lose everything, but you can’t ever lose your own dignity."

These days she has a quiet life, spending part of her time in Potomac, Maryland, in order to be near her grandchildren, the issue of her elder son, Prince Reza, who live in the Washington, D.C., area. She does not go about in the Washington social life. The rest of the time she resides in Paris, and she does not go about in the Parisian social life, either. She is haunted by the loss of her daughter Princess Leila, who died of a drug overdose in London in 2001 at the age of 31. Her regal glow has dimmed, but it is still there. A few days later I saw her at a book party at Le Cirque given for her by David Rockefeller, Barbara Walters, and Mrs. Randolph Hearst Jr. As she moved through the crowded room, people stepped back to make way for her.
She didn’t tell me this, but I have learned that she is an icon for Iranians all over the world. Recently she was practically mobbed by an adoring crowd at an event in Los Angeles. She has a Web site and gets thousands of e-mails, some of them from Iran. When she replies to people in the country where she was once the wife of the ruling sovereign, she often uses a fictitious name. "She is still an imposing figure to the diaspora Iranians living outside Iran," one of her aides told me.

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