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Farouk seemed uninterested. In 1949 he spotted a lovely young girl in a Cairo jewelry store. His spies reported that her name was Narriman Sadek and that she was about to be married to Egyptian Diplomat Zaki Hashem. Farouk sent Hashem off to a post abroad and married Narriman himself. A year later, the new Queen presented Farouk with a son, Prince Fuad. But this marriage also ended in divorce, and Farouk resumed collecting women in much the same fashion that he collected coins, stamps, clocks, jewelry and pornography.
At the Morgue. The growing disorder of Farouk's personal life and the corruption and mismanagement of his government led to the 1952 coup d'état by a group of army officers headed by Major General Mohammed Naguib, who was later displaced by Gamal Abdel Nasser. Deposed, Farouk sailed off on his royal yacht and was said to have arrived at Naples in tears.
In the years following, Farouk became a citizen of Monaco but spent most of his time in Rome. He grew ever more gross and more persistent in the pursuit of women. And it was mostly women, last week, who crowded around his bier at Rome's municipal morgue. His first wife, Farida, and her three daughters came from Switzerland. Six other women, who said they were Egyptian refugees, also signed the funeral register. Young Prince Fuad left a sickbed to attend the funeral and was the major beneficiary of Farouk's $3 million estate.
There were many ironies to his death. As ex-King of Egypt, he died in exile in Rome, just as ex-King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel III, died in exile in Alexandria. Also ironic was the fact that in the week of Farouk's death, the man who had helped overthrow him, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was almost unanimously re-elected President of Egypt, obtaining an incredible 99.999% of the 6,950,000 votes cast. If the results were to be believed, only 65 hardy souls voted against Nasser, while 489 ballots were defaced and therefore held invalid.
"Factory Hysteria." As the election returns might suggest, Nasser has been every bit as autocratic as Farouk ever was. Only one name was on last week's ballots, and only one name appeared in the screaming headlines of the government-controlled press, all of them demanding Nasser's "re-election." To the Egyptian masses, who tend to be docile people, these political shortcomings are less important than the economic results that Nasser has achieved. Industrial production has climbed from $753.6 million in 1952 to an estimated $2.1 billion this year. Exports have more than quadrupled, and the output of textiles has soared from $204 million to $660 million. Land reclamation, which averaged 5,000 acres annually under Farouk, now averages 150,000 acres a year. The size of the national budget has tripled in twelve years, and the per capita income risen in the same period from $120 to $180.