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Author Graham believes that the Shah's motives in tolerating the corruption, and in guiding the network of investments of the Pahlavi Foundation, were less personal aggrandizement than a desire to retain tight control of the Iranian economy and win the loyalty of subordinates by lavish financial favors. Nonetheless, the Shah in power lived very well, to put it mildly. He shuttled among five palaces in Iran. Journalist Fallaci, interviewing the Shah in 1973 in one of them, noted that "almost everything in the place was gold: the ashtray that you didn't dare dirty, the box inlaid with emeralds, the knickknacks covered with rubies and sapphires." The ruler's sisters also basked in opulence. Princess Ashraf Pahlavi owns two town houses and a lavish triplex coop apartment in Manhattan. Princess Shams is said to have bought a seaside showplace in Acapulco and to have once planned a gold-domed palace overlooking Beverly Hills, Calif.
The Shah's life in exile, since he fled Iran last January, has been considerably less grand but still rather more than comfortable. In Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he lived for almost five months before coming to the U.S. for medical treatment, he occupied a rented four-building compound with spacious gardens set inside a twelve-foot wall. He can afford a personal security force and a staff of servants—and he pays the $975-a-day bill for his New York hospital suite promptly. But the Shah last week whiled away much of his time in the unregal pastime that many hospital patients are reduced to: watching television. Said one of doctors: "He watches some real crap. Westerns. Detective movies. Bad romances."
In reflective moments, the deposed monarch is bitterly angry. Immediately after he left Iran, he told President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, where he made his first stop, that "my advisers built a wall between myself and my people. I didn't realize what was happening. When I woke up, I had lost my people."
In part, it was a perceptive comment. The Shah had become isolated from his people. He failed to realize how deeply they hated the corruption and police terror, how seriously the country's Westernization offended its Islamic traditions, how much the middle class on which he pinned high hopes yearned for political expression as well as material prosperity. But the wall was built not by his advisers but by the Shah himself.
* Differing legends say that the original jewel-encrusted throne was lowered from heaven or made by a hired jeweler from Germany. At any rate it stood in the Great Mogul Palace in Delhi, India, and was brought to Persia by a conquering Shah in the 18th century. The throne on which Mohammed Reza Pahlavi sat is a copy made during the reign of Path Ali Shah (1798-1834) and named after one of his favorites, Tavous Khanoum, or Lady Peacock. * In 1939 the Shah married Princess Fawzia, a sister of Egypt's King Farouk, who had been chosen by his father before he ever saw her. He divorced her in 1948 and married Soraya Esfandiari, whom he divorced in 1958 after she failed to bear him an heir. The next year he married Farah Diba. They have four children: Crown Prince Reza, Prince Ali Reza and Princesses Farahnaz and Leila.