I remember it well. It was August 1952, and I was dining with my parents on the Palm Beach casino’s patio in Cannes, when my father got up and went inside to gamble. He came back rather excited and told us that a friend of his, a Greek ship owner by the name of George Coumantaros, had passed eight hands without garage at baccarat and had won a fortune. (He bought a beautiful sailing boat and named her, what else, Baccarat.)
The next day we went out sailing on the Vagrant and news came over the wireless that King Farouk of Egypt had been deposed by the military. General Naguib led the coup, and was himself overthrown two years later by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose pan-Arab dreams ended in tears with his death in 1970. Farouk was a hell of a king — for the 18th century, that is. He gambled and whored and lived in grand palaces, and woe to one’s woman if he spotted her in a nightclub and asked her over. I met him many times in later years, in Lausanne, where he would arrive at the Lausanne Palace hotel and have the concierge open up the window displays and show him the latest watches and jewels. He would then go to the bar and we’d dish the you-know-what.
He was a sad, fat and lonely man but a gentleman. He often talked about his sister Fawzia, the Shah’s first wife, who continued to live in Alexandria until her death on 2 July of this year. (She was 91, a great beauty who left the Tehran court after six years complaining of boredom and the Shah’s fooling around. The Shah did fly women in from European capitals, but what’s the use of being Shah if you don’t import women.
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