Sex Lives of the Great Dictators
Page 19
Omar Bongo’s appetite for luxury is legendary and this was not the first case in which his name has surfaced in the French courts. When Chaumet, the French society jeweller, ran into financial difficulties, Bongo was named in the firm’s accounts as owing £500,000.
The case inflicted lasting damage on Smalto’s reputation as “the king of tailors and tailor to kings” after the transcript of a recorded telephone conversation between two prostitutes named Ariane and Sarah was read out.
“Marika telephoned me, she has to go to Libreville. I told her that’s dramatic. His [Bongo’s] friend died of the thing,” said Ariane.
“Aids? That’s disgusting,” said Sarah.
“Yes, the worst is, a great couturier proposed it,” Ariane replied.
Gasps were heard in the Parisian court-room.
13. ATATÜRK — FATHER OF A NEW TURKEY
Kemal Atatürk is seen by many as a liberator. Certainly he was more liberal that the Sultan’s regime that he overthrew in 1920. But Atatürk believed in modernization at all costs and this required a one-party state. When he did flirt with the idea of creating an opposition party in 1930, it proved so successful that he immediately crushed it. Opposition by ethnic minorities, such as the Kurds, was suppressed even more ruthlessly.
Besides, Atatürk openly acknowledged that he was a dictator. He was proud of it. When a French journalist wrote that Turkey was governed by one drunk (Atatürk was famous for liking a drink), one deaf man (Atatürk’s prime minister) and three-hundred deaf-mutes (the chamber of deputies), Atatürk said: “The man is mistaken. Turkey is governed by one drunk.”
At the age of twelve, Mustafa Kemal was sent to the military academy in the then Ottoman city of Salonika. He already loved uniforms and became one of a group of flashy dressers. Although he had entered a practically all-male world, he managed a small romance with a girl named Emine. She was the eight-year-old daughter of an official at the school. Years later she recalled how fastidiously he dressed and how, in her schoolgirl’s eyes, she believed he was destined to become sultan. However, they were kept apart by Muslim custom and barely did anything beyond look at each other longingly through the window of her house as he passed by.
Kemal was incredibly jealous when his widowed mother remarried. He searched for a pistol to scare her new husband but, fortunately, did not find one until they were safely out of reach. He did not see her again until he finished his military training.
At fourteen, he moved on to an academy at Monastir. Before he went, a friend gave him a knife to defend himself against the sexual interest of other men. Women were still behind the veil and pretty young boys like Kemal were much in demand. Occasionally, he would travel back to Salonika to see Emine. Her sister recalled that they planned to marry, but nothing came of it.
On his vacations in Salonika, he enjoyed visiting the European quarter where women were unveiled and sang and danced and sat at tables with men. He enjoyed drinking and the women there found this handsome young soldier irresistible.
Later he was posted to Istanbul, where he became a regular visitor at the home of Madame Corinne, an Italian widow who lived in Pera, a Westernized district of the city. When he went to Sofia as military attache, he wrote to her constantly, assuring her that there were no pretty women there. However, his letters are strewn with mentions of women he had met — each and every one, he stressed, was not beautiful. One woman he did not mention was a German nurse called Hildegarde. When he moved on, he began corresponding with Hildegarde too.
In Sofia, he became the favourite of society hostess Sultane Rasha Petroff. One night, at a masked ball, he met Dimitriana “Miti” Kovachev, daughter of the Bulgarian Minister of War. They danced and talked all night. Soon Kemal was a regular visitor to the Kovachev household where Turkish was often spoken. He was also allowed to take Miti out on the town without a chaperone. In Turkey at that time, no young lady from a good family would be allowed out with a young man.
Miti was Kemal’s ideal European bride, but there was the problem of religion. Kemal consulted his friend Fethi, who was wooing the daughter of General Ratcho Petroff. When the question of marriage came up, General Petroff said: “I would rather cut my head off than have my daughter marry a Turk.”
General Kovachev also put his foot down. Marriage was out of the question. Miti was a Christian; Kemal a Muslim. To make his feelings abundantly plain, General Kovachev even refused to attend a diplomatic ball at the Ottoman embassy.
The beginning of World War I saw Kemal recalled to Istanbul. After showing great bravery at Gallipoli, Kemal returned to Sofia. He and Miti were plainly still in love, but convention demanded they be no more than polite to each other. Four years later, she tried to visit him in Istanbul, but the collapse of the Bulgarian front made the journey impossible. She married a Bulgarian deputy, but continued to follow the astonishing career of her young Turk.
Kemal had a reconciliation with his mother after she split from her second husband. After his death, her husband’s young sister, Fikriye, came to live with her, and Kemal took her as his mistress. Kemal’s mother disapproved heartily. Fikriye was not nearly good enough for her son.
Although she was technically married to an Egyptian, she lived with Kemal in the Sisli district of Istanbul. This did not prevent him from continuing his relationship with Corinne. After the British occupied Istanbul, Corinne’s house was searched for weapons. Kemal had fled to Anatolia, where began the struggle for independence.
Fikriye followed him there, where she lived openly as his mistress. She wanted to be his wife, but although he loved her dearly he would not hear of it. He wanted a Western-style marriage to a woman who could stand beside him. Although she kept her face unveiled, Fikriye was an oriental woman who would always walk behind. Besides, as a Pasha, his first wife should be a virgin. The dark, slender Fikriye was already, technically, married.
Nevertheless, she would do for the present. Having her with him on the campaign would keep him away from the promiscuous women who hung around the garrison with whom he had entertained himself before.
The campaign to liberate Turkey ended with the burning of Smyrna. While Atatürk was there, a young woman came to his headquarters and asked to see him. He refused, then thought he might take a look. When he saw her, he dismissed his orderly and asked her to sit down.
Her name was Latife and she was the daughter of Ushakizade Muammer, a rich Smyrniot with interests in shipping and international commerce. Although Latife was a Turk with olive skin and large dark eyes, she had studied law in Europe and spoke French like a Frenchwoman. Her parents were spending the summer in Biarritz, but she had returned to Turkey to help his cause. Like many Turkish women, she wore his picture in a locket around her neck. In Atatürk’s mind, this fuelled the fantasy that she was in love with him.
She lived in a large house outside the city and invited Kemal and his staff to stay there. She even threw a formal reception for him. But she would not go to bed with him. This puzzled Kemal who, as a liberator of his country, was used to willing, eager women. But Latife was determined to become his wife, not just his mistress. When he left Smyrna for Ankara at the end of the month, she still had not succumbed.
Kemal wrote to Latife. Now he was head of state, he needed a wife, he said, and she seemed to fit the bill. She visited Ankara. Kemal’s ailing mother died while she was there, but, nevertheless, Kemal asked Latife to marry him at once. The following day, they married in European style in her father’s house. In an Islamic marriage, the bride and groom do not see each other until after the ceremony. Kemal and Latife broke with tradition and took their vows seated together at a table.
Kemal took his new wife on a honeymoon tour, using her as an example in his campaign to emancipate Turkish women. This was how women should be treated, he said, indicating Latife standing beside him in breeches. When women offered to put her up, he insisted that his wife stay with him. There was to be an end to the harem and the separation of the sexes.
At the time of the wedding, Fikriye was away in Germany in a sanatorium. The hardships of his military campaign had left her with tuberculosis. The first she heard of the marriage was in the newspaper. She returned to Turkey and stayed with Kemal and his new bride at Chankaya for four days in the summer of 1923. Then she returned to Ankara and checked into a hotel. A few days later, she went to see Kemal at the presidential palace, but was refused admission. She drove back to her hotel and shot herself with a pistol she had bought in Germany. The shot did not kill her immediately, but she died soon after in hospital.
The guilt that Kemal felt over Fikriye’s death made married life impossible. Kemal and Latife clung together for the next two years, but on 5 August, 1925, the marriage was dissolved. Latife went to live in Istanbul, though would be discreetly out of town if Kemal visited the city. In 1933, he was given the name Atatürk Father of the Turks — by the National Assembly. He continued his heavy drinking and died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1938. Latife outlived him by thirty-eight years.
14. PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD
King Farouk of Egypt was a failed dictator, though his reputation was worse than many who succeeded. He was an ally of the Nazis, a war profiteer, an insatiable glutton, a ruthless seducer, a profligate gambler, a kleptomaniac and a wastrel. If there were seven deadly sins, it was said, Farouk would find an eighth.
After ascending the Egyptian throne in 1936 at the age of sixteen, he was kept in power by the British. He detested this arrangement. Not only did Farouk like to see himself as an all-powerful king with Egypt the dominant force in the Arab world, but also, ultimately, as the caliph of all Islam. In 1941, he made little secret of the fact that he hoped the Germans would invade and kick the British out. However, when the British finally withdrew their support from his regime in 1952, his anti-British army officers Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat — who had spent three years in jail during World War II for plotting a pro-Nazi take-over — ousted Farouk in an effortless coup.
Even before he was ousted, Farouk could not exert any real power. All he could do was indulge his whims. He once issued a decree banning any of his subjects from owning a red car. Then he had his hundred or so royal cars sprayed red.
In 1938, at the age of eighteen, Farouk married the beautiful seventeen-year-old Safinez Zulficar. It was a marriage made in hell. Farouk was a virgin who had been cossetted in the harem by his mother, Queen Nazli, whereas Safinez was a manhunter. Queen Nazli had no shortage of fun herself. At the time of Farouk’s wedding, she began a celebrated affair with her son’s tutor, Ahmed Mohammed Hasanein, a famous soldier, scholar and explorer. Then she took up with a young diplomat, a Coptic Christian named Riad Ghali, who she married off to her daughter, Farouk’s little sister. The three of them moved to Beverley Hills, where they lived together. It all became too much for Farouk when mother and daughter converted from Islam to Catholicism. He confiscated their lands and banished them from Egypt forever.
Still a naive young romantic, Farouk changed his new bride’s name legally to Farida, which means “the only one”. She did not return the compliment and began taking lovers.
Hurt by his wife’s infidelity, Farouk began taking lovers too. One of the first was Fatima Toussoun, the wife of Farouk’s cousin, Prince Hassan Toussoun, who threw herself at the young king. He could not resist the fair-skinned Circassian. They met for moonlit trysts at a small palace on the Nile at Halwan. Give me a son, he told Fatima, and I will marry you.
Farouk began suffering bouts of impotence from the age of twenty-three, and was believed to have underdeveloped genitals. To conceal this fact, he created for himself the image of a virile and insatiable lover. He invoked the droit du roi over the most beautiful wives and daughters of his subjects and claimed to have intimate contact with over five thousand women in his lifetime. He gave Farida a present every morning, but that did not compensate for what he was unable to do at night.
He consulted hormone specialists and became a connoisseur of aphrodisiacs. Love potions used in the time of the pharaohs were concocted. He tried amphetamines, hash mixed with honey, caffeine tablets and powdered rhino horn. He consumed vast quantities of oysters and eggs. Pigeons and mangoes were also cures for impotence, he believed. He put on pounds. Every morning in his bathroom, which was decorated with a mosaic showing naked slave girls, he was massaged vigorously by his chambermaids in an attempt to shed some weight.
Meanwhile, he flirted with attractive women. Those who would not succumb, he kidnapped. They were taken to one of his “harems” in the five palaces he owned around the country. Married women were more of a problem. Husbands often caused trouble if he kidnapped their wives. Instead he would resort to blackmail to get them into bed.
He would go through phases, collecting different types of women — the same way he collected stamps and antiquities. His aide, Antonio Pulli, would be sent out to find him European chorus girls who may be in need of the “diamond” bracelets he liked to bestow on his conquests. Or Pulli would be sent to comb the upper-class brothels for fair-skinned girls. Farouk went through a belly dancer phase, going through the top stars in the country.
One of the most attractive of his consorts at this time was an Alexandrian Jewess, Irene Guinle. Farouk never let race, religion or politics stand in the way of pleasure. They met when they were both twenty-one. Farouk was still slim and handsome then. Their affair lasted two years.
The daughter of a cotton broker, Irene spoke six languages. At seventeen, she had been discovered by a scout for MGM at the Alexandria Sporting Club. She took part in a lot of sport and had an athletic body with an especially well-developed bosom. But her mother would not hear of her becoming an actress. She considered them little better than whores. Instead, Irene was married off to Loris Najjar, an English-educated Alexandrian Jew who was about twenty-nine.
Unfortunately, Najjar had picked up certain predilections from his English public school. On their wedding night, he opened an attache case and produced a cane and a pair of black patent-leather high-heeled shoes. Irene ran from their Cairo hotel in horror. He found her cowering behind the pyramids and dragged her back to their room. He forced her to beat him until he bled, then scrape the high heels down his cuts. She had to do it three times a day.
“Everybody does it this way,” he told his young bride.
The whole thing sickened her. She became ill and her hair began to fall out. Irene was naive and believed that marriage was for life. It was only four years later that she discovered she could get a divorce. After Najjar, Farouk came as a welcome relief.
They met at a charity ball in aid of the war effort in 1941, when the German forces were posted on the Libyan border and seemed unstoppable. Although the assignation had been arranged by a mutual friend who knew how unhappy Farouk’s fairy-talc: marriage had become, Irene avoided him.
“I was allergic to anyone pro-German,” she said.
Eventually, he cornered her by the gambling tables. Suddenly Irene found that she was winning every bet. Then she felt as if someone was looking down her dress. She turned around and there was Farouk, grinning like a Cheshire cat. Attendants quickly brought a gilded throne for him to sit on. He gave it to Irene and sat on a small chair beside her.
He asked her to come for a moonlight dip. She refused and got up to go, but as she made her way to the door, she was approached by the British Ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson.
With British control of Egypt and the Suez canal in jeopardy, it was vital that they kept the pro-Nazi King Farouk under their wing.
“Of course you must go swimming with him at the palace,” Lampson said. “You must.”
She only consented because she hated the Germans and still she played hard to get. She sent Farouk’s RollsRoyce to her home to fetch her swim-suit. On the long beach at
Montazah, Irene changed into her swimming costume and plunged into the warm sea. Farouk, in full military regalia, sat on the sand in the jasmine-scented air and watched. Afterwards she went to the bathhouse in the Palladian temple to change. She had left her sandals on the beach and sent Farouk back for them. After that, the Rolls took her home.
He called her at ten o’clock the next morning and asked if he could see her. She refused, saying she did not like men with beards. This was a deliberate ploy on her part. Farouk’s newly grown beard allied him with the militant Muslim Brotherhood, who also wanted the British out of Egypt.
The fact that Irene was Jewish did not bother Farouk. In fact, it rather counted in her favour. His father, Fuad, had a Jewish mistress, Mrs Suarez, for twenty years. She even arranged his first marriage for him to his nineteenyear-old cousin, Princess Shivekar. The princess was one of the wealthiest women in Egypt. Fuad had crippling gambling debts and Mrs Suarez steered the princess’s money into investments with her Jewish friends, who turned an already great fortune into a vast one. Mrs Suarez also pressured the British into putting Fuad on the throne, even though he was not, strictly speaking, next in line of succession. She died in his arms, waltzing at a ball, and he spent the rest of his life mourning her.
After months of pressure from both Farouk and Lampson, Irene eventually consented to go out on a date with him. She wore a black dress that was so complicated to undo that she was confident the king would not get anywhere near her.
They ate a ten-course dinner, featuring oysters, pigeon and sea bass cooked by a French chef. It was served by four Sudanese waiters in his huge bedroom overlooking the sea. From the conversation, she soon realized that Farouk had had his spies checking up on her. He knew every intimate detail of her marriage. She also realized that he was like a child and she could control him.