The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  A further complication, he adds, was “the unusual factor of an extraordinarily charismatic opposition leader in the person of Ruhollah Khomeini,” a cleric “who had a powerful way with words” and who, during that same early to mid-1970s period “had the good luck to be abroad.” Which meant two things: “He was free to speak out against the Shah, and he was not tainted by association with the government.” A tinderbox was close at hand.

  • • •

  AS CHRISTIANE EDGED toward high school graduation, being a journalist was the last thing on her young mind. She planned to be a doctor and therefore devoted her time to studying science. “She didn’t study very hard, but it wasn’t her fault,” Diana Bellew says. “New Hall was a traditional girls’ school and the science teaching was atrocious. She didn’t stand a chance with the quality of instruction in biology and chemistry there.” It would take a serendipitous decision, coupled with a tumultuous, historic international event, to awaken in Christiane a passion for a career that, in retrospect, seems to have fit her as perfectly as those expensive Harrods gloves.

  Following their graduation ceremony, New Hall’s 1976 class was given a “leaving dinner.” The girls all wore long, debutante-style gowns; their parents joined them. (Mohammed Amanpour even charmed one of the nuns into fetching him a manly whiskey instead of the bottom-shelf sherry that was being served.)

  What to do next? No cherished college admission letter was tacked on Christiane’s wall. “She didn’t get the grades she would have expected, and this was the first time this had happened,” says her sister Lizzy. Her poor marks in science ruled out acceptance into a pre-med program. She worked as a salesgirl in Fenwick’s department store. Fiona—the “flighty, hippie” sister (as Lizzy describes her)—was also in London. This would prove providential.

  Fiona enrolled in a journalism class, which her parents paid for. Fiona began her studies—but then she got distracted. She fell in love with a member of the white reggae group G.T. Moore and the Rhythm Guitarists “and she went off with the band,” recalls Lizzy. Ever the practical one, “Christiane tried to get a refund from our sister’s class for our parents,” says Lizzy, “but the school said no. The only way she wouldn’t waste all our parents’ money was to take the course herself.” Duty to her family, compensation for her madcap sister: This is what brought Christiane to journalism.

  It was a revelation. Christiane “was excited about the class. It gave her direction. She realized this was something she was meant to do,” Lizzy says. Journalism loomed into focus—just like that.

  Meanwhile, Christiane’s newly gleaned enthusiasm seemed to be bumping up against fate—dramatic and unhappy fate. In Iran, protests against the Shah began in October 1977, for the diverse reasons historian Shaul Bakhash mentioned: the Shah’s rapid modernization program, his quashing of political dissent and trade unions, the sharp economic dislocation, the jarring Western “impiety” of the oil-working foreigners, the fear and punishment meted out by SAVAK—the “deadening” effect it all had on the citizenry. By December 1978, the outcry had turned explosive, shocking the world. Early in the month, two million people flooded Tehran’s Shahyad Square. Then, days later, six to nine million people—a stunning 10 percent of the population—marched throughout Iran, putting the protesters on a par, numerically, with those who fomented the French and Russian Revolutions.

  Bakhash, who was in Tehran during those heated months, describes this incendiary chain of events as the desperate flailing of the population. “The fact that people came out into the streets in support of Khomeini didn’t mean” they wanted an Islamic culture, he contends. “The majority of the demonstrators did not want to go back to that. No! Iranians read into the growing protest movement what they wanted to see. Khomeini, in opposition”—and exile—“had preached a form of Islam that would bring about social justice and economic and political freedom. Many thought that once the Shah was overthrown, a secular government [would come in its place]. You’d be astonished at the kind of people that supported the Revolution—very wealthy, upper middle classes, the Westernized as well as the masses.”

  The Shah and his wife, Empress Farah, fled on January 16, 1979. “SHAH LEAVES IRAN FOR INDEFINITE STAY; CROWDS EXULT, MANY EXPECT LONG EXILE,” blared the front-page headline of the New York Times, adding that “tears appeared to be welling in the ruler’s eyes” as he arrived in Egypt, courtesy of the largesse of Anwar Sadat.

  Khomeini returned, triumphant, from exile, on February 1, to an overwhelming throng of supporters.. A month later, the new Ayatollah decreed: “Do not use this term, ‘democratic.’ That is the Western style.” The anti-Shah secularists’ and intellectuals’ dreams were dashed. Their idealism had been misplaced. Islamic fundamentalism became the law of the land.

  Christiane traveled back and forth between Tehran and London during these tumultuous months. Her younger sisters, who lived at home full-time, recall the jarring, even frightening developments. Says Lizzy, “I remember trucks going by at night firing shots.” And during the daytime: “Armed men on the roof of my school and revolutionaries in the street, and power cuts—we had gas lamps around the house because there was not much electricity. Dad was not able to go out to his tennis club, because everybody was affected by the curfew. So he taught me and Leila how to play backgammon. I remember Mom, who used to wear T-shirts in summer, coming home shocked—a man in the street spat on her arm for wearing short sleeves! We knew the atmosphere was changing.”

  Leila remembers how the family fled. “We left home with a couple of suitcases” to return to England in December 1979. “We left the house with all the furniture and all our possessions behind. We were due back in August 1980, but we never came back—our dad was advised not to go back.” There was at least one brief trip back: Christiane has remembered being in the living room of the house with her father sometime in 1980. She described it vividly during a tour of the now ruined house in 1999 for the CNN special: “My father was standing over there”—she pointed to a corner of what had once been a comfortable living room—“and he said, ‘Life as we know it is going to come to an end.’”

  Life as we know it is going to come to an end. . . . The Revolution had come, their house was being taken over, they had to flee. “My life changed,” Christiane said of that moment. “My political consciousness began.”

  Perhaps self-protectively, but also with the hard nugget of a pain and idealism that was destined to grow into work that was tough and humanitarian at once, Christiane’s instinct to “use” the tragedy leapt to the fore. She has, intentionally, put it in a jarringly utilitarian way: “My first ‘big break’ was the Iranian Revolution.” Then: “History completely turned over my country and put me in a place where I had to figure out what to do with my life. I knew what I wanted to do with my life: I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. Having grown up in a nice, privileged, comfortable environment, suddenly I couldn’t depend on anything anymore, not [even] my parents. . . . Overnight we were strangers in our own homeland. We watched in horror as our friends and family members were arrested, jailed, tortured, and some even executed. My world and worldview turned upside down.”

  Lizzy says, “We lived a fairly nomadic life for a year in England. We stayed in people’s houses, and every three months we would move. We really struggled.” Ultimately, the family found a small flat. Three of the four Amanpour sisters, separately, make the identical, blunt, sad remark. Leila: “For all intents and purposes, we lost everything.” Lizzy: “We lost everything.” Finally, Christiane: “We lost home, possessions, and people—everything.”

  Patricia Amanpour “just got on with it” as best she could in their new “tiny apartment,” Diana Bellew recalls. While the more sybaritic Mohammed “tried to get his hands on caviar,” anesthetizing his deep sense of shock and loss with exaggerations of cosmopolitan trivialities, Patricia reacted the opposite way. “She became very devout. I think she went to Mass every day.”r />
  As for Christiane, she later recalled, “I quickly decided to turn loss and failure into my driving force.” This was similar to the spot lesson Diane Sawyer forced herself to learn when her father suddenly died, and to Katie Couric’s fairly immediate resolve to help others escape the tragedies of the cancer deaths of her husband and sister. A family tragedy could be an excuse for contemplative retreat—or it could be an emergency window to an adrenalized perspective unobtainable otherwise, and a crisis stimulus to a sense of vocation. In Christiane’s case, that vocation seemed waiting to claim her.

  • • •

  BY NOW SHE WAS A DOUBLE EXILE. Pushed by her family, she went to America to study, entering the University of Rhode Island in 1979. “Our family members, especially our mom’s aunt Gladys, clubbed together [money] to help her get there,” says Lizzy. Not only was tuition challenging for the fresh exiles, whose finances were often held up in their now radicalized country, but Christiane “didn’t really have the sorts of grades” to get into a top-ranked school. “She had to really work hard when she got to America.” But even if London represented solace and was reassuringly familiar, America, all the Amanpours seemed to know, was the future. In fact, in 1979 and 1980, whole American cities—Beverly Hills was one—seemed to turn half Iranian overnight.

  “I loved every hard-won step along the way—I loved being at the University of Rhode Island, where I learned so much about American values and culture,” Christiane has said. She declared journalism her major and by now knew she wanted to be a foreign correspondent. Her role models were Martha Gellhorn, the dashing journalist of the Spanish civil War, the Normandy landing, the Vietnam War, and the Six Day War (and onetime wife of Ernest Hemingway), and Oriana Fallaci, the outspoken Italian correspondent who covered myriad conflict zones and who, in 1968, was viciously attacked by forces in Mexico. Christiane took classes in “all the things I didn’t learn growing up in Iran and England: American literature, political philosophy, political science.”

  Perhaps even more important to her personal growth was URI’s proximity to Brown University, just an hour away, where several of her friends were attending classes, including her girlhood friend Ayshe Farman-Farmaian and a friend from London, Christa D’Souza. Chic and social, Ayshe and Christa were standouts, even on a campus full of many wealthy, self-assured students. Christiane may have been enrolled at URI, but socially, intellectually, and emotionally, she belonged to the Brown community; she even chose to live closer to Brown than to her own university. Brown in 1979 was a bit off the radar compared with other Ivy League colleges, but it was a glamour school, attracting the children of wealthy and sophisticated families, and it was an intellectually daring and precocious place: It had recently instituted a new curriculum that allowed students, unfettered by department requirements and even grades, to map out their own educations to a remarkably high degree.

  Midway through her first semester at URI, on November 4, a group of young Islamists—furious that the Shah had received asylum in the United States for cancer treatment and that the Shah’s army had been shooting protestors on the street for months beforehand—invaded the American embassy in Tehran and seized fifty-two diplomats and embassy workers. Even Iranian nonfundamentalists—even liberals—saw this as what Shaul Bakhash, who was present that day, calls “an incredibly galvanizing moment in the history of the country. Iran had had a long history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century domination by two great powers, Britain and Russia. Breaking that hold was important. So America became the new imperial power, and, I think, the ability to stand up to this great power and impose your will on it was more important than hatred.” This perspective was hard for Americans to grasp, and the diplomats and embassy workers were held hostage for 444 days. Christiane was “slightly miffed,” she said two decades later, when, at URI, “to the tune of ‘Barbara Ann,’ fellow students would sing, ‘Bomb bomb bomb bomb! Bomb bomb Iran!’” Her beloved homeland—bombed? Surely there had to be an understanding of that part of the world deeper than this wounded cravenness of her fellow students. There was a whole other perspective available, and ultimately, if she succeeded at what she now longed to do, she could provide it.

  Still, she kept quiet about the offensive anti-Iran sentiment. People who met her socially, especially at Brown, took her as more British than anything else.

  When Christiane flew back to England for vacations during that first exciting year abroad, her family laughed at her enthusiastic new Americanness. Leila says, “I remember her accent starting to change, and we would laugh about her new expressions. She’d say, ‘Hang a left’ and ‘Hang a right’ and ‘Gross!’ We thought that was quite sweet and funny.”

  By her sophomore year Christiane had not only met, through her clique of Persian friends, Brown’s almost sore-thumb-obvious celebrity student, John Kennedy Jr., but had become one of his very best friends. Christiane—the serious and opinionated foreigner, her refugee status making her seem appealingly life-worn—was impressed that John had organized an anti-Apartheid rally on campus, and her approval mattered to him. After the rally, Christiane and John went with a group of friends to a campus burger joint. He took to calling her Kissy—so, soon, did all her close Brown friends—as did his mother. “She obviously got to know Jackie quite well,” and spent weekends at Mrs. Onassis’s Martha’s Vineyard estate, Leila says. Christiane may have been too discreet to gush about becoming a houseguest of America’s most iconic woman, a childhood idol of hers—“She was very natural; she never thought it was particularly amazing,” Diana Bellew says—but when she went home to her family in London she opened up and “talked about John a lot,” says Leila Amanpour.

  “I have no brilliant explanation why [John and I] became close friends other than there was a ‘simpatico’ between us—his word,” Christiane has said. She described some of the friendship’s virtues: “There was never this conscious or unconscious one-upmanship between us. There was never a romantic twist, nor ever the hint of one. I think he saw me as solid, English, sensible, and reliable. I always gave him the truth and the most honest appraisal I could muster.”

  John does seem to have respected her toughness, dignity, and bravery. Christiane “wasn’t hard. She was just sort of British and determined,” he said, three years before his death. Regarding her family’s displacement, “there was not one iota of self-pity” about Christiane. “She was very matter-of-fact, very stiff upper lip. You wouldn’t have known what she’d gone through.”

  At the beginning of the 1981–’82 school year, John and Christiane were chosen to become housemates of a friend of John’s from high school, Christina Haag, who was already living in a charming Victorian house at 155 Benefit Street, a lane of gas lamps and cobblestones in the historic neighborhood outside Brown’s campus. Christina’s other housemates had graduated; her friend Lynne Weinstein was moving in, as was a fraternity brother of John’s named Chris Oberbeck. Chris was the instigator in inviting John and his friend Christiane to come in as the final roommates. It turned out to be a diverse group. Chris Oberbeck was a preppy and a bedrock political conservative, and both Christina and Lynne were arty, well-heeled young women, soon to become, respectively, an actress and a photographer. (Christina would in a few years’ time become John’s most significant girlfriend until Carolyn Bessette, whom he married.) In this already eclectic group, Christiane was especially distinctive: She was several years older than the others, the only foreigner, the only exile, the most politically aware as well as politically fervent—an unapologetically strong personality. She was also the only housemate not attending Brown, an inconvenience, especially since, not having a car or a U.S. driver’s license, she had to intrepidly wrangle rides to campus.

  Christiane was awarded the largest bedroom in the house (John got the smallest), and although at least one housemate “didn’t perceive it this way,” she “was sort of the mother of the house,” as John once said. “She divided us all up into cookin
g and cleaning crews. She put a mop in my hand and sent me to clean the toilets.” During her trips home to England, she would regale her family with how “she was the sort of organized one—we would laugh at how she said she made races for everyone to clean the house,” Leila says, adding that the time at Benefit Street was “the one cooking phase in her life.” All the housemates took turns cooking, with Lynne the most accomplished cook and John the most inexperienced, proudly mastering hamburgers. Christiane often cooked them Persian food, introducing her American friends to the glories of crispy rice with dill and yogurt, “and everyone loved it,” says Leila. As a break from domesticity, the roommates frequented Mutt ‘n’ Jeff’s down the block, which served all-the-rage sandwiches named for rock stars and politicians.

  In the house, Christiane has said, “We had the most intense dinner table conversations. Reagan was president, and we endlessly debated his policies, from Star Wars to nuclear war. Chris Oberbeck was very Republican, and I had just discovered the antinuke campaign and so I was full of earnestness and righteous indignation at the thought this man might blow up the world. It all got very boisterous, and John, whose politics were clear” was “also an effective devil’s advocate.” John was liberal, but his approach, his Republican friend Rob Littell would say, was “sometimes surprisingly conservative” and “practical.” At the table were often assorted others, since all the housemates were in and out of relationships, including Christiane, according to Leila.

  Christiane by now was fervent in her desire to be an on-camera TV news reporter, specializing in foreign assignments. She started slow, with radio, walking into Brown’s own radio station, WBRU, and volunteering her services as an intern. She ripped copy out of the newspapers for the station’s news department and read news bulletins in the slotted breaks between the playing of a very well-curated selection of records and brand-new CDs (the station was rather ahead of its times), and when the station moved from one location to another, she pitched in with the packing and unpacking.