Last Nizam (9781742626109)

by Zubrzycki, John

  According to Ann Morrow, the birth of Azam convinced Esra that the only way to protect the inheritance of her own children was by filing for divorce. During the acrimonious negotiations that followed, Jah arranged for Esra and Helen to meet in the sitting room of Havelock House while he tiptoed away ‘innocently thinking that the women in his life would get on like pals at the golf club’. But as Morrow points out, they could not have been more different: ‘Princess Esra with her green eyes and slightly impervious air and the emotional, cuddly Helen Simmons. The meeting was not a success.’5 Nor, for that matter, was the settlement Jah’s lawyers finally agreed to – a rumoured £12 million payout plus jewellery and antiques. The finalisation of the divorce, however, cleared the way for Jah to marry Helen at a civil ceremony in 1981. Their second son, Umar, was born two years later.

  Helen quickly put her stamp on Murchison House Station. Bill Shimmons was turfed out of the main homestead. A swimming pool was dug into the garden, trees were planted and a sprinkler system was laid to keep the lawn green. Jah had two water cannons installed to cool the house down in the late afternoon which produced rainbows visible for miles around. A large swing made from the front bench seat of an old Toyota Hilux hung from the front veranda. Jah also bought two massive diesel generators to provide enough electricity to run several air conditioners and a system of floodlights for security. Apart from the odd upholstered Louis XVI chair and a Georgian sideboard, the furniture was low-key and described as unpretentious and having ‘a lived-in look’.

  Havelock House, in contrast, began to resemble Hyderabad in its gaudy and ostentatious heyday. With Rod Kelly’s help, Helen filled the rambling Federation mansion with antiques shipped from Jah’s palaces. The dinner-service consisted of Wedgwood china, ivory-handled Mappin and Webb cutlery sets and cutcrystal glasses embossed with the royal insignia of Hyderabad. Two life-sized bronze leopards flanked the entranceway, six nineteenth-century crystal chandeliers each two metres wide graced the ground-floor rooms alongside 200-year-old Indian lanterns. The lounge was painted in the royal colours of green and gold and the dining room in burgundy. The drapes were copies of those that hung in Falaknuma Palace. Huge Venetian glass mirrors filled the hallways. European oil paintings and Mughal miniatures hung from the walls over giltwood console tables. Marble statues surrounded a kidney-shaped swimming pool set in a leafy garden of gums and bougainvillea. ‘It would take days to really appreciate and understand the splendour,’ remarked one visitor.6 Jah’s touch was to install security grilles, closed-circuit TV cameras to watch for intruders and fit bulletproof glass on the windows. He also had the garage modified to accommodate his two-door Rolls-Royce, the blue Bentley he had used in England, a Volvo, a Jeep, a white Cadillac bought from Alan Bond and Helen’s red Triumph Stag.

  For all the outward extravagance of being married to an Indian prince, Helen found herself drawn into Jah’s intensely private lifestyle, which oscillated between Murchison House Station, Havelock House and their six-bedroom weekender at York. In Perth their social life was restricted to the occasional dinner party with a very select group of friends, outings to the cinema to satisfy Jah’s insatiable appetite for movies and the odd meal in town. A compulsive traveller, Jah took Helen on trips to Europe, the US and England, flying first class and staying at the best hotels. He also took her on a pilgrimage to Mecca. ‘I was hoping she would be the first Australian woman to go on the Haj, but then I found out that an Afghan had married an Australian and brought her to Mecca in the early 1900s.’7

  It was not until 1983 that Helen first accompanied Jah on one of his visits to Hyderabad. Arriving at Begumpet Airport she witnessed Jah the laid-back sheep farmer become Nawab Mir Barakat Ali Khan Bahadur, the Eighth Nizam of Hyderabad. Government ministers met them on arrival, bowing almost to the ground as Jah stepped off the plane. Police cleared the way for their motorcade as it made its way from the airport. At the Chiraan palace, Arab guardsmen dressed in tattered red and blue dragoon-style uniforms stood to attention every time the royal couple came down the driveway. Ancient-looking servants shuffled silently as they dusted the antiques and polished the parquet floors. The city’s Muslims still considered Jah to be their religious leader. Helen was staggered to see hundreds of thousands of people filling the courtyard of the Mecca Masjid and the streets outside to hear him speak.

  After the stories Jah had told her about the greatness of the Nizams, Helen was dismayed at the decrepit grandeur of Hyderabad. The crumbling palaces were overgrown with vegetation and crystal chandeliers the size of single-bedroom apartments lay broken and colonised by pigeons. Hiding her blonde curls beneath a black scarf, Helen tried to make the most of her time in Hyderabad helping to tend the roses at Chiraan and learning to cook mutton biriyani by watching the staff sweat it out over coal braziers. But she found the strict segregation of princely life oppressive. ‘That was the hardest thing of all I think,’ she told Woman’s Day, referring to how uncomfortable she felt mixing in the courtly circles of dethroned European and Indian royalty. All money meant for her, she once said sarcastically, was ‘that I’ve put on a lot of weight’.8

  Juanita Walsh, the social editor of The Western Mail and a friend of Helen’s, painted an even gloomier picture. Helen’s life in India was one of total boredom spent watching her husband through the wooden grille of a harem with the other women of the household. ‘Jah had food tasters. Sometimes they were human but more often dogs were used for this purpose because Jah’s life was always under serious threat. Helen could see the dinner table where the men of the household ate through the grille and was traumatised the day one of the dogs died in screaming agony on the floor after tasting a morsel from Jah’s plate. Apparently, Jah calmly asked for another plate. Helen loved her husband but found it very difficult to accept his ways.’9

  Unaware of the arcane intrigues of dynastic politics in Hyderabad, Helen soon found herself clashing with her husband over the very things that had caused Jah to opt for a life in exile. ‘You are the Nizam of Hyderabad, everyone knows who you are, but where are your personal friends?’10 she asked him on her first visit. She cajoled Jah into dropping in unannounced on old colleagues from his schooldays whom he had lost contact with. She forced him into arranging a party for the hundreds of relatives he had carefully avoided since becoming the Nizam, knowing only too well the jealousy they harboured and the lengths they were prepared to go to in order to get their hands on part of his inheritance.

  To Hyderabad’s nobility, Helen’s innocence and spontaneity were a welcome contrast to the rectitude of her husband. Begum Meherunissa, a direct descendant of the last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, remembers a party at Chiraan Palace attended by Jackie Kennedy. ‘It was Jah’s birthday and Jackie Kennedy happened to be in Hyderabad at the invitation of the curator of the National Museum. Helen insisted Jackie be invited and arranged for Arab sword-dancers to provide the entertainment. She got up and danced with them. I remember little Azam got scared of the swords and the loud music and ended up astride the shoulders of one of the Nizam’s guards.’11 Lakshmi Raj, who sat between Jah and Kennedy at the banquet, recalls the former US First Lady marvelling at the display and saying: ‘I can’t believe my eyes. It’s like the Arabian Nights. Am I dreaming?’12

  Returning to Perth, Helen’s personal fairytale was wearing thin. She felt trapped between the responsibilities of being a mother and an increasingly absent and aloof husband. ‘I think she realised that she’d lost a lot of her own friends for Jah’s sake,’ her older sister Julie told Follow Me magazine. ‘She lived in a beautiful house, with fabulous areas in which to entertain, and she decided that if Jah didn’t want to socialise, she did.’13

  In 1985, Perth’s tabloid press finally got a glimpse of the royal couple’s very private lifestyle. ‘I like to start the day with some genteel occupation like arranging flowers and setting the table for our breakfast when we have long, easy chats together,’ she told the Express. ‘We mostly have fruit juices and perhaps
a croissant. I certainly love my food but I don’t indulge in it and I like to cook for my family at least a few times a week. It makes me feel busy, creative and committed.’14 She discussed entertaining, the joys of gardening and swapped recipes for marrow bone curry with food writer Santina Stransky. ‘I adore Indian cuisine. I learnt it after our marriage and that was quite an experience in itself.’15

  Woman’s Day carried a photograph of Helen posing in the sun room of Havelock House above a headline reading ‘Royal Blind Date Turns Secretary into a Princess’. The copy left little to the imagination. The ex-Perth Ladies College student who had been swept off her feet by an Indian prince. The Persian pearls and Golconda diamonds she wore that were the envy of her friends. The dynasty she had married into that once ruled a kingdom ‘the size of Belgium’ (it was actually the size of France). She was proud of the fact her children had allowed Jah to ‘learn all about being a father again – perhaps for the first time’, she told her interviewer. ‘It’s been wonderful to watch. He’s devoted to the boys and to see him head off to the movies, with Azi holding his hand, or taking us all off to the rock and roll wrestling the other night . . . We go for walks in the park or just sit around in the garden . . . It’s the kind of family life I think he’s always wanted and needed.’16

  Helen’s personal life, however, was far from idyllic. Her desire for independence and Jah’s expectations of how a good Muslim wife should behave were creating tension in the relationship. When Helen suggested going to Europe on her own, Jah was shocked and insisted that she take ‘a lady friend’ with her. ‘I like to zip around in my Triumph Stag, but as a Muslim he finds it hard to accept that I should go out on my own and have men friends – just platonic,’ she told Morrow.17

  One of those platonic friends was Peter Forbes, a cousin of businessman Kerry Stokes. Helen met Forbes in 1983 at a charity function organised by Kelly at the Stokes’s home in Dalkeith. Forbes was a closet homosexual who sponged off wealthy relatives and used his charm to extract largesse from friends. He also had a reputation for being a witty and acceptable companion for lonely society wives. Knowing that Forbes was a homosexual and that the relationship was not physical, Jah agreed to let Helen hire him. Forbes became Helen’s driver, social secretary and escort, smoothing her way into Perth’s swank social circles and nightclubs, including Connections, the city’s only gay venue.

  In 1985 Helen made her social debut at a fashion show organised by Elle, Perth’s most exclusive boutique. ‘She took a tableful of friends that night, arrived fashionably late and featured a blinding array of fabled Indian jewels,’ recalls Steve McLeod who wrote the Woman’s Day feature. ‘From then on the hoi polloi got to see more of Helen, most often in [Juanita] Walsh’s weekly social columns. She was at the Louis Feraud Parade, the opening of the Merlin Hotel’s discotheque, the party for Garrard, jewellers to the Queen . . . and, most of the time, so was Peter Forbes.’18

  Helen’s next step up the social ladder came in the autumn of 1986 when she threw open Havelock House for the first time for a cocktail party to raise funds for the Black & White Committee, a well-endowed Perth charity. When she phoned Jah in India to tell him of her plans, he was disapproving, but there was nothing he could do about it. ‘I want to live my life the way I like to live, to enjoy it and not worry about what people might say. It’s taken me all this time to come to terms with that. It’s been the hardest thing of all,’ she told McLeod a few days later.19

  Perth had never seen a party like it. The 250 paying guests were treated to an Arabian Nights theme that included real camels, papier mâché elephants and inflatable crocodiles floating in the illuminated swimming pool. The only things missing were the tiger cubs that Perth Zoo had refused at the last moment to deliver. Helen ordered 23 dozen bottles of Moët & Chandon to wash down the barbecued prawns and marinated chicken. Drunk on champagne, Helen forgot her nervousness and began dancing with Forbes’s bisexual boyfriend, a young university student named Mark Brown. Though the official party was over and most of the guests had gone home, she ordered more champagne to be fetched from the kitchen and told the pianist to keep playing. Brown began flirting outrageously with Helen as a drunken Forbes kept crying out: ‘That’s my boyfriend. I love him. She’s taking him away from me!’20

  The one-night fling turned into a full-blown affair and a few months later, while on a visit to Murchison House Station, she asked Jah for a divorce. ‘We wanted different things from life and gradually we tended to follow different paths,’ Jah would later say. ‘I wanted to escape the so-called glamorous life. I had taken my fill of lavish parties and shared little in common with the glitterati of Perth’s money society . . . Helen, on the other hand, was happy in this environment. She loved the constant parties, the attention and I suppose the escape these things gave her.’21

  In seeking an escape, however, Helen had sealed her fate. In February 1987, after complaining of throat trouble, she was diagnosed as being HIV-positive. Within a few months Brown and Forbes had also tested positive.

  ‘I remember Helen coming to my room one morning. She was crying,’ Jah recalls, sitting on his blue armchair and lighting another cigarette, the late-afternoon Mediterranean sunshine streaming through the window of his Turkish apartment. ‘I asked if there was something wrong. She told me she had AIDS. Thinking it was some kind of women’s disease I said to her, “I’m sure we can fix that.” The doctors told us it was a new disease, they didn’t know much about it, but they knew it was fatal. I asked if there was a cure. They said there wasn’t one.’22

  Devastating as the news was for both of them, Helen insisted on going through with the divorce the couple had been contemplating for a year. In March 1987 Perth newspapers began carrying stories of the break-up. Bitter and angry, Helen moved out of Havelock House and withdrew completely from the busy social life she had so desperately cultivated. ‘We believe Helen died long before she actually did,’ her sister Julie said. ‘She just wasn’t the Helen we all knew. And when Peter Forbes died she went downhill rapidly. In a bizarre sort of way she blamed Peter.’23

  Though Helen managed to keep the news of her disease from her parents, Forbes made no secret of the fact that he had AIDS and that Brown had infected both of them. Jah, meanwhile, continued to visit Helen when she was admitted to the Royal Perth Hospital. ‘It was agonising to see her dying and to know that there was no cure. As the disease took hold she went through periods when she didn’t know who I was. I last saw her three days before she died.’24

  On 17 May 1989 the Daily News carried on its front page a story that Perth’s ‘party-going princess’ had died aged 41. Neither the News nor The West Australian, which picked up the story a day later, mentioned the cause of death, but every editor, radio shock jock and TV executive knew that Perth’s only princess had died of AIDS. After the publication the following weekend of a story in the Sunday Times about people who deliberately transmitted the virus, local talkback radio host Howard Sattler demanded that the WA Department of Health take action by removing from society such criminals, otherwise he would take matters in his own hands and name them. He also threatened to reveal the identity of the ‘society woman’ who had recently died of AIDS.25

  Believing he was on the secret list Sattler claimed to have, Brown obtained an injunction in the Supreme Court against Radio 6PR and Channel Nine television, suppressing the publication of his name and Helen’s. But on 29 May the court reversed its decision and allowed Helen to be named as the woman referred to by Sattler. The judge reserved his decision on whether to name Brown, who was from then on referred to as Mr X. In court, Brown’s lawyer John Chaney said that ‘neither he nor the princess were aware who infected the other’.26 The couple’s relationship had continued until Helen’s death and Mr X had not intentionally spread the disease. Chaney told the court that if his client was named, others in the same position would be deterred from exercising their rights. While Sattler was effectively gagged, Channel Seven journalist Derryn Hinch used
his nationally televised current affairs program to name Brown in eastern Australian states. Viewers in Perth saw the words ‘Censored’ written across Hinch’s face while a beeping sound drowned out Brown’s name.27

  As newspapers milked the story as much as they could, there was outrage among civil liberties groups who claimed that the naming of an AIDS victim was a gross invasion of privacy and hurtful to the victim’s family. ‘What really frightened them was that Helen was a middle-aged, heterosexual woman, and a royal one at that. It was an exercise in a small community’s hysteria,’ lawyer Penny Giles said at the time. Walsh blamed the press for inferring that Perth society was AIDS-ridden and that Helen had spread it. ‘They just wanted to knock up the richies, to make up they’re all up each other and disease-ridden.’28

  The intimate details of his failed marriage splashed across the front pages of the tabloid press, Jah left Perth in late May 1989 shocked and confused. Newspapers reported he was in Switzerland undergoing another round of AIDS tests and that he had instructed his lawyers to apply for a caveat on Helen’s will in order to block Brown from becoming a beneficiary. Uncertain about his future in Australia and too browbeaten to go back to Hyderabad, Jah flew on to Turkey to consider his next move.

  Losing the mother of his two boys was a great personal tragedy, but it was not the only crisis he had to deal with. Jah found himself involved in a custody battle for his sons, whom Helen had instructed to be placed in the care of her younger sister Rhonda. His finances were also in a mess. Jah had been drawing on his inheritance at an unsustainable rate and very little of it was being used productively. The number of people in Hyderabad trying to sue him for one reason or another had passed the 800 mark and Indian tax authorities were breathing down his neck. ‘There came a time when he was told convincingly that “if you stay in Hyderabad you could be arrested” and when he moved out of Hyderabad he was told “you should not go back because there are too many cases against you and you could be in legal problems. Private debtors and the government would hunt you down,”’ says The Deccan Chronicle’s Khan.29