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Maria Teresa was married to President Victor Paz Estenssoro in 1955, having first met him during a post-college stint as an airline hostess. She speaks fluent English and French, is an avid reader in both languages (favorite authors: Graham Greene, Albert Camus), collects paintings by Bolivian artists, is an enthusiastic theatergoer. She is also the hard-working head of the Costurero del Niño (literally, children's sewing box), a charitable organization that distributed clothes to 50,000 underprivileged children last Christmas. For her three daughters, aged three, five, and seven, who have been given a strict Roman Catholic upbringing, Bolivia's First Lady insists: "I want to give them a normal life, not one of privilege."
Iran's Tiara. Two of the world's youngest queens won their life of privilege for the oldest of dynastic reasons—the ability to bear an heir. By the constitutions of vast Iran and tiny Jordan respectively, the dynasties of Reza Pahlevi and the House of the Hashemites may continue only so long as the monarch has a son to succeed him.
After dissolving two marriages (to Egypt's Princess Fawzia, Iran's Soraya) when they failed to yield a son, the Shah of Iran married 21-year-old Farah Diba (whose last name means silk) in December 1959. An olive-skinned beauty with lustrous brown eyes and soft, full lips, brainy, sports-loving Farah produced a boy in ten months and was duly named Empress by her grateful husband.
Though she comes from one of her country's "1,000 Families," Farah was a high-spirited architecture student in Paris with a Left Bank haircut and a razor-thin purse when the Shah beckoned. After two years on the Peacock Throne, Farah, as Washington discovered during the Shah's U.S. trip in April, is charming, poised, and possessed of an Arabian Nights' ransom in emerald and diamond tiaras, earrings and necklaces. She has plunged energetically into social work, started redecorating the royal palaces and, say court officials, has only to smile to earn another tiara from the impassioned Shah.
Jordan's Dream Girl. King Hussein of Jordan also divorced his first wife, Egyptian Princess Dina, in 1957 after two years of marriage, one daughter, no heir. A lonely, courageous King on a shaky throne, he finally met "the girl of my dreams" three years later at a party given by the English colonel who was attached to the palace as chief security officer. The girl was his blue-eyed, brown-haired daughter, Toni Gardiner, 20, a merry, fresh-faced high school graduate who shares Hussein's love of fast cars and planes, and was working as a typist for a movie company in Jordan.
Hussein's choice of an English bride was strongly opposed by the Queen Mother, and widely unpopular among the British-hating Palestinian refugees who comprise two-thirds of the population, but the King refused to change his mind. Muna, as he calls her, has yet to be named Queen. She was shot by Photographer Halsman not far from a cage filled with birds. Said he: "I felt she was like that."