ew Year is said to be one of the most common times to kill oneself - time's relentless all-change puts everything into

brutal perspective. Sometime on the night of 4 January this year, Prince Alireza Pahlavi, the 44-year-old younger son of the former Shah ofIran, came back to his house in Boston, where he lived alone and put a gun in his mouth and shot himself. He was just another lonely man in . early middle age who had rationalised himself out of human existence. Alireza left no children, no grieving wife. Just a brother, a sister, aunts and, of course, his mother, Empress Farah, the former empress ofIran, who, over the past 30 years, has lost her husband, her country and two of her four children. It is only 10 years since her 31-year-old daughter, Princess Leila, died - anorexic, drugged and alone - in one of the padded chintz rooms of the Leonard Hotel, close to Marble Arch. Although large quantities of barbiturates and a small amount of cocaine were found in the princess's emaciated body, it was thought her death might well have been an accident, albeit at the end of a self-destructive life. 'Her heart just gave up on her,' said Kooky Fallah, an old family friend and the Heathfield-educated daughter of the shah's minister for oil. At the time, the empress had said: 'You never get over the death of a child.' Now she has to make that journey again. 'My pain is no different from the pain of any mother who had lost her loved one,' the empress told the thousands of mourners at a memorial service for Alireza, held on 23 January at an auditorium near Washington DC. 'Whenever I think of Alireza, I tell myself he flew from the cage.' 'It's a devastating blow for the empress,' says Parviz Radji, Imperial Iran's last ambassador to London and formerly a close friend of Alireza's aunt, the notorious Princess AshrafPahlavi (whose romantic intrigues and alleged corruption added to both the glamour and the ignominy in which the imperial family was covered). 'Her second child. She lost the first to drugs. In this case, it wasn't. It must be depression - and utter depression - to put a shotgun to the roof of YOut mouth and pull the trigger.' It was Alireza's elder brother, crown prince Reza, who had to break the news to his mother, ringing her at her Left Bank apartment in Paris, where she lives when not in the Maryland house she bought to be closer to the crown prince and his three daughters, who live in Washington DC. The 50-year-old crown prince then posted a message on the Pahlavi family website: 'It is with immense grief that we would like to inform our compatriots of the passing away of Prince Alireza Pahlavi. Like millions of young Iranians, he too was deeply disturbed by all the ills fallen upon his beloved homeland, as well as carrying the burden oflosing a father and a sister in his young life.' (Their father died in exile in Egypt in July 1980, a victim of the cancer he had been suffering from since 1974.) Who knows whether the 72-year-old empress's loss was made easier or harder to bear by the fact that Alireza had recently spent some weeks with her, waiting for

'Alireza was deeply

disturbed by all the ills fallen upon his beloved homeland'

his US visa to be renewed? Although Alireza had lived in America since his father lost his throne in the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and was doing a PhD in ancient Iranian studies and philology at Harvard, he die! not have a-US passport, despite having been offered citizenship and a green card several times. 'Alireza wanted to hold on to his Iranian citizenship - the link with Iran was important to him,' says Robert Armao, the American PR grandee and former aide to Nelson Rockefeller who had looked after the exiled Iranian royal family since the shah had arrived, confused and abandoned, in the Bahamas in March 1979. It was Armao who found Alirezahis first school in New York, St David's, the alma mater of]FKJL The 12-year-old went to the school in the first year of his father's exile, while living at Princess Ashraf's house on Beekman Place in Manhattan. 'He was such a joker,' says Armao. 'I asked him if he was relating to the other boys at the school. He said, 'Of course! All they do is come up to me and say "Where the hell's Iran, anyway?'" Over the years, Armao had become a good friend of Alireza's, employing him as a consultant for his company; they were so close that Armao even kept Alireza's Persian cats for him when he went travelling. Armao's voice breaks as he talks about his friend - they had spoken several times on the phone just a couple of days before Alireza died. 'Alireza was in very good spirits. He got his visa and got on a plane. He'd been to a New Year's Eve party with friends in Texas and returned to Boston. Yes, he had depression.. He took medication for it. Something must have happened which we will probably never know. He probably just walked up to his room and said, "Screw it, I'm out of here!" I can see it very easily. k was a phrase he used. He was tired. Tired at 44 is sad. But he was tired.' Alireza had a lot to be tired of His life had been extraordinary. Handsome, with his father's prominent nose and chocolate eyes; Alireza looked every inch the Middle Eastern potentate - but he was just 12 when his father fled into exile shortly before Ayatollah Khomeini flew back to Iran in triumph. Many of the shah's westernising reforms were swiftly dismantled. Votes for women, mixed university and school classes and western clothes all vanished under the black chadors of Khomeini's Islamic revolution; 248 of the shah's ministers and generals were executed and his hated secret police, the SAVAK, were either hunted down and killed or swiftly re-employed in the ayatollah's new Ministry ofIntelligence and National Security. Alireza, told he was going away on holiday, never returned to his homeland again. He left his favourite toys and all his clothes and books behind. 'His collection of model planes,' says Armao. 'He used to ask me, "I wonder what on earth they are doing with them." The first months of Alireza's exile were spent in Manhattan, with Aunt Ahsraf, after Armao petitioned President Carter for the Shah's children to have safe haven in the US. But it was their maternal grandmother, Farideh Diba, who had to bring them to Beekman Place, as their mother only had permission to visit the USA twice a year. This was the start of a rootless, separated nightmare for the Iranian royal family. Instead of joining his children in America (where he was expected to seek asylum), the shah headed to Egypt, before going to Morocco at the invitation of King Hassan II of Morocco, for an indefinite stay. Then disaster struck. President Carter, so staunch an ally that he spent

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ago. She was, says Armao, 'a bright, sweet girl who understood him very New Year with the shah en famille in 1978, was compelled to withdraw well. It was my impression she really loved him. They broke up because the US's invitation of a safe haven - after the storming of the US embassy Prince Alireza was just not ready to marry and raise a family.' Shortly in Tehran by hostile students and militants on the 14 February 1979 (a before his death, according to Parviz Radji, 'Local gossip is that he lost precursor to the serious hostage crisis in November later that year). After quite a lot of money and he'd broken up with his girlfriend. He was two months, Hassan had had enough of his house guest and asked him to rather a sensitive and vulnerable man.' leave Morocco. Indeed, rumours about Prince Alireza's death are rife in the In March, he joined his children in the Bahamas, spending two months Iranian emigre community, whose imaginations have been fertilised squished in a beach cottage before landing in Mexico. The shah begged by three decades of exile and paranoia. Rumours that range from the American government to be allowed to receive treatment for cancer the Prince having been murdered by Iranian government hoods and in the US, and he arrived in New York. But the US embassy in Tehran Obama having covered up the murder because he doesn't want to was invaded again, 66 American hostages were taken, and the shah was admit that there is Islamic terrorism in the US, to the more banal no longer welcome on US soil. After a brief unhappy spell in Panama, gossip about girl and money trouble. the shah fled back to Egypt. 'The Boston Police Department clearly labelled the death a suicide and 'When you think of the relations we had with most countries,' the the case has been closed,' says Armao. As for money, Alireza's financial former empress said later, 'and suddenly they don't care to talk to you, position, his friends say, was still secure - his portfolio had just suffered as or write to you, or ask you to come and stay in their country ... that was much as anyone's in the last few years but he was fine. Of the girlfriend, very sad. It's a sad human experience to go through.' another Iranian exile he'd met in America, Armao says, 'Prince Alireza In Cairo, the shah decided his younger children should come and live was still with the lady in question at the with him, while Crown Prince Reza time of his death. He met her about a stayed at Williams College in the US. year ago. She left Iran when she was a Life got easier with the advent of little girl. We have not said much about President Reagan, who reissued an her as a security precaution and to spare invitation to the Pahlavis to live in the her numerous press inquiries as she is US. Following the shah's death - and still traumatised.' after the assassination of his friend Over the years, Armao says, Alireza President Sadat, in November 1981'had scores of girlfriends but he the Pahlavis moved to Williamstown, never found true love. He was deeply Massachusetts. Alireza went to Mount disappointed in the unfair treatment Greylock High School in his father received and the fact Williamstown before going to that his father was never seen by the Princeton to do a BA in 1984. After international press as the enlightened completing his MA in Ancient Iranian ruler and visionary he was in life.' Studies at Columbia in 1992, Alireza started his PhD at Harvard. Alireza was born into absurd luxury, in He was still trying to complete it the Niavaran Palace in Tehran's northern when he killed himself nearly 20 years suburbs, where his father, Mohammad later aged 44, although he had taken Reza Shah, sat on the Peacock Throne at time out to work for Arrnao's company. the heart of the 2,500-year-old Persian 'He engaged in research and spent time Empire. The palace, with its lakes and with business clients. He was an pavilions, liveried servants and excellent conversationalist and had a suffocating air of intrigue, was only one complete grasp of world affairs. He also Jacqueline Kennedy -leading her daughter Caroline's pony - takes of the shah's many houses. As well as the had wonderful contacts in many Empress Farah on a tour of the White House grounds, April 1962 casino island ofKish in the Persian countries. Clients found him warm Gulf, a villa by the Caspian Sea and numerous other estates in Iran, the and friendly and well versed on so many topics,' says Armao. shah owned the Villa Suvretta in Sr Moritz, a villa on Lake Geneva in When not working, Alireza loved flying and diving, where you can lose Switzerland, and Stilemans, the house and estate the shah had bought in yourself in infinite blue. He had his pilot's licence and his master diver's Surrey. But the Pahlavis were not only rich: they were, for the glossy certificate. His friends were a close-knit group of exiles he'd grown up magazines and the beau monde, glamour incarnate. with, as well as numerous orher friends he'd made allover the world. The shah felt such splendour was only his due. He was the Shahanshah Armao says, 'He loved to joke and tease, especially me. Whenever we - King of Kings, heir to Cyrus the Great and Darius; Iran's vast oil were together, he and I would speak literally for hours. We closed many reserves had world leaders fighting for his favours. He was Knight of the restaurants and even a nightclub every now and then. He was terribly Order of the Bath, of the Elephant of Denmark, of the Golden Spur of curious about current events and what was going on in the world. And the Vatican, weighed down with orders and Grand Collars from more he was a dignified gentleman with impeccable manners and a natural than 40 countries, including China and Brazil. The exquisite Empress way about him.' Farah was his third wife - his first marriage, to a sister of King Farouk of Other friends describe Alireza as 'unassuming' yet self-disciplined. He Egypt, had ended in divorce, as had his second, to the Iranian beauty never, they say, succumbed to the sirens of the jet-set when he could so Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhrian, when she could not produce an heir. Farah easily have traded his royal title for an heiress, as other exiled royals had Pahlavi (nee Diba), daughter of an imperial army officer, had done her done. Nonetheless, he was touted as one of the world's most eligible duty by the dynasty, with two sons and two daughters. bachelors. 'Alireza had loads of charm and smouldering eyes,' says a His royal position was, the shah believed, divinely appointed, yet his female friend. 'Girls loved him, but he did not have the aptitude for father was the son of a peasant soldier and a former corporal in the happiness. You could read his melancholy on his face.' Persian Cossack Brigade. Later, as a colonel, he had received the backing He did get engaged, to Sarah Tabatabai, another Iranian exile, in of the British, who ran the country's oil fields, and tipped the withered 2001, but the eight-year-long engagement was broken off two years

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