In early 1951, Persia, the country now known as Iran, staged a wedding worthy of the Thousand and One Nights. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Persia, married Soraya Esfandiari, a beautiful nineteen-year-old girl. The couple was genuinely in love, but this was no fairy tale. Soraya, the bride at the center of the story, would eventually be repudiated by her husband, lose her love, and wander the world in exile searching for consolation.
She would become known as the Princess with the Sad Eyes. Soraya Esfandiari was born on June 22, 1932, in Isfahan, Iran, into a wealthy family. Her mother was German, and her father, Khalil, was a prince of the Bakhtiari tribe, a powerful family that controlled much of Iran’s oil at the time. He also served as Iran’s ambassador to Germany.
The family lived without worries, and when Soraya was young, they moved to Germany, returning to Iran in 1937 when the Second World War began. After the war, the family settled in Zurich, where Soraya continued her studies in Islamic culture. She later moved to London to live with her aunts and perfect her English. Raised with the freedom of Western culture, at sixteen Soraya dreamed of becoming an actress.
What she never imagined was that the Queen Mother of Persia had taken an interest in her after seeing a photograph shown to her by one of her ladies-in-waiting. For some time, the Queen Mother had been searching for a wife for her son, the ruler of the country, one who could fulfill the task of providing an heir to the throne. Reza Pahlavi was thirty-six years old. He had been married to Princess Fawzia, the sister of King Farouk of Egypt, but had divorced her, among other reasons, because she had not given him a son.
Fawzia had borne only a daughter. The Iranian constitution stipulated that only a man could inherit the throne, and Reza needed to find another woman capable of achieving that goal. He wanted to keep his lineage in power and prevent the throne from falling into the hands of his younger brother, Ali Reza. In the eyes of his mother, Soraya seemed the ideal candidate.
The Queen Mother sent her daughter, Princess Shams, to London to meet Soraya and other candidates. When the princess met Soraya, who was then eighteen, she immediately sent photographs to her mother with the message that she needed to see no other girl, declaring that Soraya was born to be queen, beautiful, elegant, and educated. The Queen Mother showed the photographs to her son. After seeing the pictures and hearing his sister’s description, he wanted to meet Soraya in person.
When Soraya arrived, she was exhausted after the long journey and wanted to rest. But the Queen Mother and her son were so curious to see her that they invited her to an intimate dinner that very night. When the two met face to face, they took an instant liking to each other and fell in love almost immediately. The next morning, the Shah telephoned Soraya’s father and asked for her hand in marriage, presenting her with a diamond engagement ring.
On October 11, 1950, they formalized their engagement and planned the wedding for December 26 of the same year. But Soraya suddenly fell ill with typhoid fever and was hospitalized. The wedding had to be postponed until the bride recovered. It was said that during her illness and convalescence, the lovestruck Shah sent her a bouquet of sixty red roses and a fine piece of jewelry every day to ease her loneliness.
Soraya became famous for the extraordinary jewels she wore. Finally, on February 12, 1951, they married. She was still a little weak but had recovered considerably. The ceremony took place in the Golestan Palace, where Soraya wore a gown designed by Christian Dior.
It weighed thirty kilograms, made of silver lamé, embroidered with six thousand diamonds, and adorned with twenty thousand white feathers. The train, initially twenty meters long, had to be cut down to eight meters so the bride could stand at all. The first years of their married life were idyllic. They lived in a large villa outside the palace and traveled the world on official visits.
But they were forced into exile in Rome for two years because of a critical political situation in Iran. At that time, there were many conflicts in the country, and the Shah himself had already survived several assassination attempts. In 1954, when Soraya was twenty-two, a court physician warned her that she would have great difficulty conceiving. The couple traveled the world seeking the best specialists, but to no avail.
The princess could not become pregnant. Days later came the terrible news of the death of the Shah’s brother and heir, Ali Reza, in a plane crash while returning from a hunting trip near the Caspian Sea. Now the situation had become very complicated. The Shah was a monarch without an heir, and on that prospect, the dynasty could come to an end.
Political and familial pressure on the couple intensified. The Shah, who loved his princess, eventually proposed marrying another woman and keeping both wives, but Soraya refused absolutely. The Council of Wise Men issued an ultimatum to the leader of the country: either he married another woman or he divorced Soraya. Finally, Reza Pahlavi made a very difficult decision.
He had to renounce his love for the throne. On March 14, 1958, with great sorrow and after seven years of a happy union, the divorce of the royal couple was officially announced. Soraya suffered the pain of her loss in silence and with dignity. The king was determined to give her a life of comfort, and the two reached an agreement.
She would keep the title of Imperial Princess forever, receive a settlement of ten million dollars, an apartment in Paris, a lifelong monthly pension of seven thousand dollars, and ownership of the jewels and gifts the king had given her during their marriage. She also received a diplomatic passport so she could travel freely wherever she wished. In this way, she was placed on the same level as the Shah’s sisters and continued to be treated by Persian embassies as a member of the royal family. Alone and heartbroken, she began to travel widely until she decided to settle in Rome for a time, where she rented a villa among the vineyards.
But everyone could see the sadness in her. Faithful to her love, she always referred to the Shah as “my husband,” for he was the only man she had ever married. She often said, “I loved him desperately, but in the end, the reason of state won. ” She enjoyed the Roman night scene, and between parties she met the director Dino De Laurentiis.
Impressed by her beauty, he offered her a role in a film he was making. Soraya accepted without hesitation, finally fulfilling her childhood dream of becoming an actress. She let herself be seduced by the film industry, but the film she starred in, Three Faces of a Woman, was a complete failure, and her acting career ended as soon as it began. Not everything was lost, however, because during filming she met the director Franco Indovina.
Although he was married, she began an affair with him and found the stability she so badly needed at that moment. She was quite happy. Five years later, Indovina finally divorced his wife, but unfortunately he died on May 4, 1972, when the plane he was traveling in exploded in Sicily. The death of her beloved left Soraya completely devastated.
It took her months to emerge from mourning and move forward. Wanting to leave everything behind, she moved to Paris, where she was welcomed by the high European nobility. Most considered it a privilege to have a princess and former empress of Iran among their guests. She also spent much of her time at her residence in Marbella, Spain, where she drowned her sorrows in parties with large amounts of alcohol.
It was around this time that she earned the nickname the Princess with the Sad Eyes. While Soraya lived her life as a single, rich, and sad woman, attending parties and recovering from hangovers, the Islamic Revolution unfolding in Iran had become uncontrollable and succeeded in toppling the monarchy. On January 16, 1979, the Shah was forced into exile with his third wife, Farah, and the four children he had with her. Feeling defeated, they took refuge in as many as six countries in a short period of time and finally he died in Egypt in July 1980.
The Shah had lost the great love of his life in order to have a son to succeed him. And in a great irony of fate, he himself turned out to be the last monarch of Iran. Soraya died twenty-one years later, in October 2001, at the age of sixty-nine, in total solitude in her Paris apartment. Her cleaning lady found her dead when she arrived for work in the morning.
She was buried in the family vault in Munich. Since Soraya died without descendants, her entire fortune went to her brother, Bijan Esfandiari, with whom she had always maintained a good relationship. But he also died just eight days after his sister. With no descendants and no will, the inheritance ended up in the hands of the German state.
Fifteen years after her death, Bijan’s personal driver and secretary was finally recognized as the heir to the fortune. This is how the story ends for a woman whose life was marked by the whims of fate, like a fairy tale, but with a sad and desolate ending.