n July 1976, I traveled to Iran with my
then-boss, Andy Warhol, who had been
commissioned to paint the portrait of
Her Imperial Majesty Empress Farah
Pahlavi, a commission I had arranged
through the Iranian ambassador to the
United Nations, Fereydoun Hoveyda.
The Tehran we saw that summer was a
growing, prosperous, modern city—just
as the Iranian society we encountered
was dynamic, affluent and cosmopolitan.
The rich, a group that included a high proportion of
Christians, Jews and liberal Bahai Muslims, lived in the hills
on the northern side of town. Their villas resembled those
of Bel Air or Montecito—
except for the Persian
carpets beside the pools—
and the women wore bikinis
by day and Paris couture by
night. Closer to downtown,
vast middle-class housing
developments were under
construction, including one
by that pioneer of affordable
American suburbia, William
Levitt. Only in the bazaar in
poorer south Tehran did we
see women in head-to-toe
black chadors, and it was
there that the sound of
our American accents
elicited the occasional,
ominous hiss from within
the jostling crowds.
The Empress herself was
a symbol of how far
women had come under the
reign of her husband Shah
Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a complicated figure who, on one
hand, believed in the divine right of kings, and on the other,
strove to make his country the most Westernized in the
region, abolishing feudalism and emancipating women as
part of his White Revolution of 1963. Farah Pahlavi was the
first Iranian queen to be given the title of empress, and the
first to be named as regent in the event her husband died
before their first child, Crown Prince Reza, turned 21. She
presided over a staff of 40, and was patron of 24 educational,
health and cultural organizations, traveling to the least
developed parts of the country to open schools and
hospitals. Under her direction, the government brought
back thousands of historic Persian artifacts from foreign
museums and private collections, and built several
museums to house the recovered bronzes, carpets, ceramics
and other artworks. In the early 1970s she founded the
Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, and set about building
I
a collection that would include nearly 150 works by Monet,
Gauguin, Picasso, Magritte, Pollock, Bacon, Johns,
Lichtenstein, Agnes Martin and Brice Marden, among
numerous others of similar renown. The fact that she would
invite Andy Warhol, fresh from Studio 54, to the Imperial
Palace and pose for his Polaroid camera showed just how
open-minded, not to say hip, Her Imperial Majesty was.
Farah Diba was born on Oct. 14, 1938, in Tehran, the
capital of Iran. Her father, Sohrab Diba, the scion of a
distinguished diplomatic family, was a graduate of the elite
French military academy at St. Cyr and a career officer in the
Imperial Iranian Armed Forces, who died when she was nine.
An only child, Farah Diba was raised in Tehran by her
mother, Farideh Ghotbi, attending private Italian and French
schools before moving to
Paris to study at the École
Spéciale d’Architecture. She
first caught the Shah’s eye at
a reception at the Iranian
Embassy in Paris in the
spring of 1959, and he began
courting her when she
returned to Tehran that
summer. They were married
on Dec. 21, 1959, in a
Shi’a Muslim ceremony at
Tehran’s Marble Palace. In
keeping with traditional
customs, the bride, wearing a
Dior gown and a two-kilo
Harry Winston tiara, set 150
caged nightingales free, was
sprinkled with sugar by the
Queen Mother and showered
in gold coins by the
wedding guests.
She was 21; the Shah was
40. He had been married
twice previously, first to Princess Fawzia, the sister of King
Farouk of Egypt (with whom he had a daughter), and then
to Soraya Esfandiari. As the unions had failed to produce a
male heir, they had both ended in divorce. Ten months after
her marriage, Empress Farah gave birth to Crown Prince
Reza; he was followed by Princess Farahnaz in 1963, Ali
Reza in 1966 and Leila in 1970.
The following year, the Shah and Empress marked the
founding of the Iranian monarchy by Cyrus the Great 2,500
years earlier with five days of festivities at Persepolis,
the ancient capital of the Persian Empire. Conceived to
promote historic Iranian culture and to showcase the
progress the country had made under the Shah, it was
attended by half the crowned heads of Europe and the
Middle East, as well as such world leaders as Emperor Haille
Selassie of Ethiopia, President Josef Tito of Yugoslavia and
Chancellor Willy Brandt of West Germany. But whatever
“The fact that the
Empress would invite
Andy Warhol, fresh from
Studio 54, to the Imperial
Palace and pose for his
Polaroid camera showed
just how open-minded, not
to say hip, Her Imperial
Majesty was.”
—Bob Colacello
