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In wartime 1941 Britain and the Soviet Union, seeking a supply bridge, suddenly occupied Iran, dividing it in two. Only then did Mohammed escape his father's shadow. Suspecting the old Shah of German sympathies, the Allies shipped him off to bitter exile in South Africa (where he died in 1944) and propped 21-year-old Mohammed on the Peacock Throne. When Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin chose Teheran as the site of their 1943 meeting, they did not even bother to let Mohammed know they were coming.
On the Way. The Shah finally got his country back in 1946 and boldly sent troops into Azerbaijan, Iran's northernmost province, to throw out a puppet regime the Soviets had left behind. Three years later, he came within a hair's breadth of death at the hands of a leftist fanatic who opened fire with a pistol as the Shah was handing out diplomas at Teheran University. Three shots drilled the Shah's hat, another creased his lip and right cheek and, as he dived to the ground, a fifth hit him in the left shoulder. Bodyguards riddled the would-be assassin, and the Shah next day grimly returned from the hospital to the throne, declaring: "My will is unrelenting."
He had not only political problems but domestic ones. Though his father sired four daughters and seven sons, the Shah still has no male heir to his throne. In 1948, after she had borne him one daughter, he divorced Egypt's Fawzia and three years later married the handsome half-German, half-Iranian Soraya. Despite Soraya's famed fiery temper, it was with regret that the Shah divorced her in 1958, apparently convinced that she was barren —a charge that makes Soraya angry.
For a time the Shah retired to the com pany of other women, the glow of fine French champagne and the stimulus of high-stakes poker games with cronies at Saadabad Palace, where he glumly lost a reported 10 million rials ($130,000). Late last year, after his companions had searched far and wide for someone who met the royal standards, the Shah struck up a third match with 21-year-old Farah Diba, a pert Iranian art student in Paris who, after royal treatment by Dior, Revillon and Carita, easily equaled his first two wives in comely poise. Soon after their marriage, Farah Diba announced that a child was on the way. On the assumption that the baby will be the long-awaited heir, the Shah reportedly has already decided to name him Cyrus—after ancient Persia's Cyrus the Great. The baby is due in late October, and the Shah plans gala celebrations early next year for the 2,500th anniversary of Cyrus' empire. which once stretched from the Indus to the shores of Greece.