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 La dolce vita
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| Looking south along Fifth Avenue from 93rd Street. 1:55 PM. Photo: JH. |
December 16, 2009. Fair and mild, yesterday in New York with what looked almost like snow-storm clouds rolling in from the West. Much colder air predicted but nothing about snow. I remain sentimental about seeing a snow-covered land (meaning, the city) by the last week of the year.
She Knew What Young Was. Meanwhile, walking up Madison Avenue after lunch, in the low 60s, I ran into Mai Harrison looking very chic. I first noticed her in the crowd precisely because of that. She was on her way up to 64th Street to a friend’s apartment. When we got there, I complimented her on the way she looked and she told me it was a Trigere.
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| Mai Hallingby Harrison yesterday afternoon on the corner of 64th and Madison in her Pauline Trigere coat (with matching dress underneath). |
Mai, then Mrs. Hallingby in 1988, at the American Ballet Theatre opening, in Christian Lacroix (photo by Mary Hilliard). |
I took her picture to show you what something great looks like ten or twelve years later in New York. As I was taking her picture a young woman stopped and asked if I’d like her to take a picture of me and Mai. I said no but thank you. But she thought maybe I was being modest and asked to be sure. I told her I was taking the picture because Mai was wearing a ten-year-old Pauline Trigere.
Did she know the name Trigere? Not sure. Maybe. She thought so. She had a vague idea. Probably many readers don’t know. Pauline to her friends with her smoky low register voice, her thick but completely comprehensible French accent and her signature tinted glasses.
She was, in her day, for a long run, a very prominent New York fashion designer -- back in the days when her stomping ground was known as Seventh Avenue. She died seven years ago in her 93rd year, and was very vital and active until only the last two or three months of her life.
Mai and I were recalling Pauline, the personality, the personal style, notable and smart; her “good legs” which you noticed in her wide steady gait. And her talent. I recalled the last time we’d had lunch together, only a few months before she died. She was very sad because a friend of hers had just died. “And she was so young.”
I asked her “young” friend’s age. “Seventy-two.”
I was surprised, at first, that Pauline considered 72 young. Then I realized the lady sitting across from me having her martini straight up before her lunch (we were in Michael’s) was 92. She knew what young was.
History lessons. The death last month of Princess Ferial, the eldest daughter of King Farouk was a human reminder of how other empires flourished and waned not all that long ago, with revolution, exile and military finessing monarchy.
Monkeys, whenever you look do it,
Ali Khan and King Farouk do it ...
Let’s Do It, let’s fall in love
Some Noel Coward lyrics to
Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It.” |
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| King Farouk on his throne. |
King Farouk was a celebrated, almost laughable, nearly notorious figure of mid-20th century, famous in the tabloids as a very fat and decadent playboy who had been exiled. He filled a Western image of a decadent sultan, a notion promoted by the Westerners who sought to control them.
Farouk I was born in 1920, and succeeded to the throne in 1936. He was the tenth Sultan (later referred to as King by the British) of the Mohammad Ali (Islamic) dynasty that was begun at the end of the 18th century after Napoleon was driven from Egypt by an army organized by Farouk’s ancestor.
He was newly sixteen when he inherited. He had been educated in England. He was slender and good looking and exhibited public speaking skills that lent authenticity to the idea that he was a natural leader. His countrymen were very hopeful.
Farouk was also considered the first native Egyptian in a thousand years although his ancestor was an Albanian and an agent for the Ottoman Empire. The dynasty lasted for a century and a half although at the beginning of the 20th century Egypt had become a British Protectorate.
As optimistic as youth appears, history, alas, had other plans for the dynastic king and country. By the early 20th century the British held (had seized) political and financial power in Egypt. which they“shared” as “advisers” with the monarchy. Meanwhile, by age 18 Farouk had already transformed his slender figure into a size that added to his eventual image as a citizen of la dolce vita. Which he most certainly was. |
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| The king's palace in Alexandria. |
After the Second World War, where Farouk seemed to favor the Nazis over his “protectorate” British associates/handlers, there was a coup d’etat and Farouk was forced to abdicate.
Out of that grew modern Egypt, a leading power in the region. Farouk went off to Capri and Rome where his self-indulgence expanded along with his girth. He died at table, one day in 1952, having just finished a large meal. He was forty-five.
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| His custom-designed '59 Caddy. Move over Elvis. |
Shortly before his death, he agreed to a magazine interview. “With the number of monarchies around the world in steady decline,” the reporter asked, “... how many kings, do you think, there will be at the end of century?”
King Farouk, without blinking an eye, replied,
“Five!”
“Five?” the reporter repeated, the King’s answer. “And what countries will still have kings?”
“There will be the King of England;* the King of Clubs, the King of Hearts, the King of Diamonds ...”
*Ironically, King George VI of England died shortly after this interview.
Last month, the Daily Telegraph of London published an obituary of Princess Ferial, the eldest daughter of Farouk, always a princess, but in reality not really. |
Princess Ferial Farouk, who died on November 29 aged 71, was the eldest daughter of the late King Farouk of Egypt.
Farouk abdicated in 1952 when revolutionary officers led by General Muhammad Naguib and Colonel Gamal Abd al-Nasser ousted him in a revolution.
She was 13 when she sailed with her father, her stepmother Queen Narriman, her two sisters Fawzia and Fadia and her half-brother Ahmad Fouad to Naples, Capri and then Rome.
Ferial spent a lifetime as a much-loved royal exile in Italy and Switzerland.
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| The year-old Princess Ferial with her 18-year-old mother, Queen Ferida, and her 19-year-old father, King Farouk. |
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Her birth, on November 17 1938, came at a time when her father was at the height of his popularity, married to the beautiful and equally popular Farida (formerly Safinaz) Zulfiqar.
When Farida went into labour in the palace of Montazah in Alexandria, however, the king was nowhere to be found. He was eventually discovered asleep on a beach, where he and his Italian childhood friend and palace servant, Antonio Pulli, had been salvaging cannons. The two young men had found a Napoleonic howitzer on the other side of Alexandria from the palace.
Arriving at Farida's bedside, the king listened to the gun salute, hoping for a son – but it stopped after 41 rounds; had it been a son it would have been a 101-gun salute. "It will be loved just the same," he announced, and named the child Ferial after his paternal grandmother. (All the Egyptian royals took names starting with the auspicious "F".)
Every child born in Egypt that day received a British pound; free food and clothing were given to the poor, and sweets were given to children.
Born when Farouk was 18 and Farida just 17, Ferial's early years reflected the high life of Cairene society at the Abdin Palace. A year after her birth, Farouk's sister Fawzia married the Shah of Iran. Farouk himself considered marrying Ferial to King Faisal of Iraq when the two came of age.
The Egyptian royal family was popular at a time when Britain, represented by the mighty ambassador Sir Miles Lampson, was taking a heavy hand with the king as the Second World War approached. The crucial year 1942 would see a British coup d'état in which Farouk, accused of pro-German leanings, only just managed to escape being forced to abdicate. |
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| Queen Farida and the baby Princess Ferial. |
Ferial's birth had also come at a time when her mother was losing out in a power struggle with Farouk's powerful mother, Queen Nazly, who doted on her son. Farouk's liaison with Princess Fatma Tussoun deeply hurt Farida, while her own friendship with the painter Simon Elwes gave rise to gossip. The marriage ended in divorce, and Farouk then married Narriman Sadeq, with whom he had a son and heir, Fouad.
Ferial's life was not a particularly happy one. As the family sailed away in 1952 on the royal yacht Mahroussa, the 13-year-old princess wrote to Farida: "My very dear Mother, it is heartbreaking to have to leave Egypt and not to kiss you goodbye. I hope God never again makes me go through the experience of these past few days. Having to say farewell to so many whom we love, and to so many beloved things."
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| The new Egyptian King Farouk standing before his people. |
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The King had loaded his gold into 12 ammunition boxes and had servants sent to Montazah Palace to collect Queen Narriman's jewellery. General Naguib arrived to say goodbye along with the former prime minister Ali Maher and the American ambassador, Jefferson Caffery.
Ferial shunned the limelight, for long resisting intense pressure to speak to the media. Over this past year, however, after her illness was pronounced terminal, she gave several important interviews on Arab television channels. In these she made a dramatic revelation: that a group within Egypt's new revolutionary council had tried to torpedo Mahroussa as it sailed for Italy, and failed only because of the skills of the captain, whom she called "Le Prince de La Mer". The story had never before been told, and apparently showed the determination of some revolutionaries to put an end to the 200-year dynasty of Muhammad Ali.
Two years after his abdication Farouk sent the three princesses to a Swiss boarding school, Le Grand Verger, at Lutry. Farida remained in Egypt for a decade after the revolution, before moving first to Lebanon and then to Switzerland, where she joined her daughters. She eventually returned to Egypt, where she spent her last years and was ultimately buried, as she had always wished.
In exile in Rome, Farouk was astonishingly strict with his daughters. According to his biographer Hugh McLeave, they had to seek his permission to cut their hair or varnish their nails. It took Fawzia months to pluck up the courage to ask her father's consent to study at an interpreters' school in Geneva, and he would allow Ferial to teach at a secretarial school in Lausanne only if she did not reveal who she was. He sent his son Fouad to the village school at Cully. Ferial was later to teach typing and French literature at a school near Montreux, where she spent much of her life after her marriage.
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| On left, Princess Ferial with her stepmother Queen Narriman with the male heir Prince Fouad, held by his father (now thirty-two). |
In 1966, at Westminster, London, she married the son of a Swiss hotelier, Jean-Pierre Perreten, who converted to Islam, taking the name Samir Cheriff. They had a daughter, Yasmine, who in 2004 married 'Ali Sha'arawi, the grandson of Huda Sha'arawi, the pioneering Egyptian feminist and author.
For a time Ferial and her husband ran a hotel near Montreux, in Switzerland; but the couple divorced soon after the birth of their daughter, and Perreten died in 1968.
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| Princess Ferial in later years. |
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After their mother's death in 1988, the three sisters filed a lawsuit against the Egyptian government in an attempt to repossess a royal palace and land in the Nile Delta.
They claimed that the properties belonged to their mother, but the court ruled against them on the ground that their mother had divorced Farouk in 1948, long before the revolution confiscated all royal properties.
Princess Ferial was a discreet woman who spent much of her time looking after her ailing sister, Fawzia, who suffered for many years from multiple sclerosis. After Fawzia's death in 2005, Ferial cared for her brother Fouad, who has suffered from serious depression since his divorce from his French wife, Dominique-France Picard, who converted to Islam under the name of Fadila. Ferial had strongly disapproved of this marriage, and took on her brother's troubles as if they were her own. She did more than anybody to hold the 'Alid clan together and in harmony.
She died in Geneva of stomach cancer, and was buried alongside her father and sisters Fawzia and Fadia in the Khedival mausoleum of Cairo's Rifa'i Mosque, where all members of the dynasty of Muhammad Ali are interred. Princess Ferial is survived by her daughter. |
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