Farah Diba, the wife of the Shah of Persia, went from splendor in Iran to a life of wandering, with her husband seriously ill, and two of her four children died in dramatic circumstances.
At the age of 84, Farah Diba, marked by the death of two of her children, continues to be a reference for many women, inside and outside Iran. Even though the regime of her husband, the Shah of Persia, did not stand out precisely for being democratic, it did stand out for great social advances and a Westernization that was not well understood by a considerable part of the population.
Its final fall occurred with the triumph of the Iranian revolution, led by Ayatollah Khomeini, who established an Islamic republic that would be even more bloodthirsty than the dictatorship it preceded.
After the fall of the Shah of Persia, sick with cancer, she began a journey through a series of countries such as Morocco, Bahamas, Mexico, the United States (along with the United Kingdom, great supporters of the regime), Ecuador, and Egypt. In the latter, the Shah died on July 27, 1980, and her president Anwar el-Sadat ceded the Koubbeh palace in Cairo to Farah Dibah and her family, where they would reside for two years.
Sadat was assassinated at the Victory Parade on October 6, 1981, and was succeeded by his vice president, Hosni Mubarak, who held power in a dictatorial manner for three decades. Farah Diba was regent for just a few months between July and October 1980, before definitively leaving the African country, from which the first of Shah's three wives, Princess Fawzia, came.
A life marked by tragedy
Two enormous tragedies were in store for Farah Diba, the death of two of her four children. The first, Leila Pahlavi, was only 31 years old. She was found dead in a London hotel room surrounded by pill bottles. No one could understand how a woman who had had it all, who had grown up in the royal palace in Tehran surrounded by cotton wool, surrounded by servants, and with a private zoo of her own, could have endured such pain as to take her own life.
She was supposed to have a very close relationship with the Shah of Persia and Farah Diba, also with her brothers. Princess Leila herself admitted this in an interview with a French journalist: Even when I was only three years old, (my father) took me by the hand when he went to meet foreign dignitaries. Every day he would go and find him in his office, even if he was in the middle of a meeting.
For security reasons, the Pahlavi family was divided on numerous occasions and there were times when the children woke up and did not know where their parents were. It was a real hell for them. Undoubtedly, the death of the Shah was very traumatic for Princess Leila Pahlavi, who in her professional journey came to parade for Valentino.
She thus recognized it in the aforementioned French interview in 1999: The last memory I have of him is the most painful. When I understood that the end was near, they wouldn't let me into his room. For a long time, I had the feeling that my absence had betrayed him.
The daughter of the Shah of Persia and Farah Diba led a life of luxury, but it is said that she never forgot her homeland and what they had left behind. As she struggled to find her way around him, she began to worry about his thinness. It later emerged that she had been addicted to Seconal and other drugs since 1992. She had been through various detox clinics in the United States and the United Kingdom but to no avail. Her lifeless body was found at the Leonard Hotel in London on January 4, 2011. She was just 31 years old.
“For the past few years, Leila has been very depressed. Time had not healed her wounds. Exiled at the age of 9, she never got over the death of her father, Her Majesty Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, to whom she was particularly close," Farah Diba said after losing her daughter. by The New York Times.
A decade later, on January 4, 2011, the lifeless body of Alireza Pahlavi, 44, was found in her Southend home in Boston. She died as a result of a shot and from the beginning, the suicide hypothesis was handled. According to her family, she had not been able to get over the death of her sister and, like her, was uprooted for having left Iran in such dramatic circumstances.
With a degree in music from Princeton, the son of the Shah of Persia and Farah Diba completed a postgraduate degree in ancient Iranian studies at Columbia and left his family broken with grief. Even so, his mother has known how to overcome adversity. Those nostalgic for Shah's regime still remember her fight for women's suffrage or the foundation of the Pahlavi University, which focused on improving women's education and the first American style in Iran.
In a recent interview in Town and Country, Farah Diba looked back not only on her moments of splendor. Also tragedies. This was his reflection: What happened was very hard. I thought: I have to be strong for my other two children, for Reza and Farahnaz, and for my grandchildren, but also for the many other mothers in Iran who have suffered the same loss."
