The letter arrived on a gray December morning in Panama, but Mohammad Reza could barely lift it. He hadn’t been able to hold much of anything for weeks, not since the cancer had eaten away his strength and made his hands shake like leaves. He knew the handwriting before he even opened the envelope. Soraya’s looping, elegant script, the same letters that had once signed notes left on his pillow in Tehran.
And when he read her words, he wept. She wrote that she had heard about his illness. That she had never stopped loving him. That if he would have her, she wanted to see him one last time before he passed.
All he had to do was reply. And he wanted to. God, he wanted to. He confessed it to himself there in that humid Panamanian room, surrounded by guards who had been ordered to insult him.
He had never stopped loving her either. He had been desperate to say goodbye to her in person. but he couldn’t. Because Farah was still very much his current wife, and he couldn’t see Soraya in her presence.
So instead, he begged her to wait, begged her to meet him secretly and alone in Cairo, and he enlisted the help of Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat to make it happen. He only had to hold on long enough to get there
It was a familiar pattern in a life full of them. A life that had started with a father who believed affection would turn his sons gay, so he beat them instead, kicking disobedient subordinates in the groin and treating his own heir like a soldier to be hardened. A father so terrifying that young Mohammad once called him one of the most frightening men he knew.
And a mother who doted on him, who worshipped him alongside his sisters, who made him feel like the center of the universe until his ego swelled to match his insecurities
He was eleven when he demanded students at his Swiss boarding school stand at attention when he walked past. They beat him up instead. He was nineteen when his family chose his bride for him, Princess Fawzia of Egypt, daughter of a powerful royal line that might legitimize their shaky new dynasty. He read about his own engagement in the paper like everybody else.
The marriage was a political transaction dressed in silk, and Fawzia was never accepted by his possessive mother or his jealous family, who saw her as a rival and humiliated her at every turn. She gave birth to a daughter in 1940, but it wasn’t the boy he’d been hoping for, and it would be their only child together. In 1945, atthe height of political chaos, she fled back to Egypt, abandoning himand divorcing him quickly
He survived an assassin’s bullet in 1949, one that hit him in the face and left a scar he hid under a mustache for a year. He survived the fall of his father, the invasion of British and Soviet forces, taking the throne as a nervous, twitchy young man.
And he survived marriage after marriage,searching for an heir like a man searching for water in a desert
Then came Soraya. Half-Iranian, half-German, a beauty with a sharp temper and a will of her own. He saw her and described her as magnificent. He proposed the very next day after their first meeting.
She was just eighteen, moody and wild, throwing tantrums when she didn’t get her way, smashing priceless vases against walls. When she fought with him, she banned him from their marriage bed for weeks, forcing him to sleep on a cot outside her door. He loved her anyway. He loved her desperately.
But after three years, doctors told them she was infertile
In 1958, he announced their divorce to the Iranian people, weeping openly on television. A British ambassador later admitted that she was his only true love. And just a year later, he married again, this time to Farah Diba, a young and fertile woman who gave him a son in 1960. He had his heir.
He had his dynasty. And he buried his love for Soraya so deep he almost believed it was gone
Now, dying in Panama, it was all coming back
He had changed so much over the years. The once nervous prince had transformed into an egomaniac, comparing himself to Cyrus the Great and demanding the title King of Kings. He surrounded himself with sycophants who reassured him he was one of the greatest leaders in the world.
He collected custom-made cars like a boy with toys, at least twenty-five of them, and poured money into the air force because he adored airplanes. He obsessed over Charles de Gaulle, his ego ideal, and liked his lackeys to call him Iran’s de Gaulle. He claimed to receive messages from God, claiming he’d been a conduit since he was five years old
But none of it had been enough to fill the void. None of it had made him less afraid
He survived a second assassination attempt in 1965, when a deranged soldier killed two guards rampaging toward his private quarters.
He survived his leukemia diagnosis in 1974, though he kept it the best-kept secret in Iran. He survived the revolutions, the protests led by Ayatollah Khomeini, the photos of him frolicking on the beach that were doctored to hide the aids holding him up, the PR disaster that only raised the alarm bells. And then, in January 1979, he fled. He boarded a plane alongside Farah and watched his country disappear beneath the clouds.
On February 11th, Iran officially dissolved the monarchy. He was a king without a kingdom
For months, he traveled desperately,seeking asylum and treatment. He could no longer walk. He was so afraid of another assassination attempt that he forced his bodyguards to wheel him around under cover of night.
Every day he grew weaker. Every day he clung to life with the same desperate grip he’d once used to cling to power
And now Soraya’s letter was in his hands, and he couldn’t even hold it steady
He wanted to see her. He wanted it more than he’d wanted almost anything in his life. He arranged for her to wait for him in Cairo.
He arranged for Egyptian President Sadat to help him get there. He only had to survive a little longer
He flew to Cairo when he was at the very threshold of death’s door. weaker than he’d ever been or ever would be. And there, in Egypt, thousands of miles from the country he’d once ruled, he waited for a reunion that never came
On July 27th, 1980, before ever seeing Soraya again, he slipped into a coma and died
As he lay dying, his final thoughts landed on his lost country.
He repeated, over and over, until the words lost all meaning: “Iran is Iran. “”Iran is Iran. “”Iran is Iran. ”
And yet, he performed his most touching tribute in secret.
A nationalist to the end, he kept a bag of Iranian soil underneath his hospital bed. He held on to it like he’d never held on to anything else in his life. He held on to it until his fingers went still
He never saw Soraya again. He never saw Iran again.
But he died clutching a piece of it, hidden beneath his bed, where no one could take it from him. And in the end, that was all he had left. the only true love of his life, the country that had consumed him, and the woman he’d never stopped loving, all reduced to dust and memory and a bag of earth
