On 25 April 1926, in the hall of the Golestan Palace in Teheran a tall soldier of obscure origins placed the crown on his own head and was hailed as shah of Iran. In a few years he had gone from stableboy to monarch, creating a dynasty that would rule until the 1970s, temporarily restoring Iran to power and wealth. A harsh, uneducated martinet, grandson and son of soldiers, ramrod straight and irascible, Reza had been born in the Mazandaran Province on the Caspian Sea and had joined the Persian Cossack Regiment set up by Russian advisers. Adept on horseback and expert with Maxim guns, he rose to the rank of commander and married the top general’s daughter – just as Persia was falling apart. Its oil was essential to British power. In 1906, the Qajar shah had been forced to grant a constitution, but the kingdom was dominated by Britain and Russia. After Lenin’s revolution, the Soviets were pushed out by the British general Edmund Ironside, who sought a strongman. Then he met Reza for the first time. ‘Well over six foot, with broad shoulders,’ noted Ironside, ‘his hooked nose and sparkling eyes gave him a distinguished look.’
Reza seemed an ideal frontman. In 1921, he proposed to seize power. When the British approved, ‘He began dancing, whistling,’ recalled one of his officers, ‘and snapping his fingers.’ Reza and 600 horsemen rode into Teheran and overthrew the premier, setting up a replacement and becoming war minister himself; he announced his arrival with posters that began, ‘I command’. After crushing rebellious warlords, Reza emerged as a visionary reformer, a passionate patriot and a paranoid autocrat, while the ineffectual young shah sulked in Europe.
In October 1925, when the Majlis (parliament) debated the end of the Qajars and the installation of Reza as shah, two future potentates were present: a rich Paris-educated landowner, Mohammad Mosaddegh, aged forty-three, who had already been foreign minister, warned that Reza was too capable to serve as a constitutional monarch; while a twenty-three-year-old student of Islamic scholarship and history at the Qom seminary, and sometime poet, Ruhollah Khomeini, watched the debates, disgusted by foreign interference as much as by the rise of this irreligious general. Reza’s henchmen assassinated an opponent of his accession on the steps of the Majlis. Though they killed the wrong man, it did the trick. In December, the Majlis approved a new monarchy.
At the coronation, an urbane aristocrat, Abdolhossein Teymourtash, presented the crown to Reza, now forty-eight, sporting uniform and royal cloak. Teymourtash, a womanizing, gambling and boozing sophisticate, educated in Petersburg, designed the new monarchy: Ferdowsi’s
One thing mattered to Reza: his son Mohammad, aged six, born with a twin sister Ashraf, must succeed him. He nicknamed the prince Bird of Good Omen. But regarding any indulgence as likely to encourage homosexuality, Reza and son called each other ‘sir’, and Mohammad thought his father ‘most frightening’. But his mother Tadj ol-Molouk taught him that he was a man of destiny.
Teymourtash was influential too – Mohammad’s first love was the minister’s daughter. Teymourtash recommended that the boy study at Le Rosey in Switzerland, enabling him to escape his father. Here from the age of eleven the crown prince discovered the joys of western sybaritism – and finally found a friend, Ernest Perron, the school’s twenty-three-year-old gardener and assistant poetry teacher who introduced him to Rabelais and Mozart. This was not quite the virile instruction that Reza had envisioned for his heir.
