Aly Khan, legendary playboy son of the Aga Khan, prowled the Riviera in relentless pursuit of speed, sport, and women. In 1948 he set his sights on Hollywood’s “Love Goddess,” Rita Hayworth, who was being pursued by Ari Onassis and the Shah of Iran after her marriage to Orson Welles disintegrated. In an excerpt from Throne of Gold, Anne Edwards tells the tale of Rita and Aly’s tumultuous union.
Intense sunlight made a blaze of the magnificent spectacle of His Highness Aga Khan III’s golden-jubilee procession. A platform, with a divan upholstered in spun gold and studded with hundreds of diamonds and rubies, had been erected in a large open square in the section of Bombay often referred to as “the Ismaili Vatican.” The vast throng of more than 30,000 of the Aga Khan’s followers were crushed together, waiting to be blessed by their divine ruler and to see him receive his weight in gold in the style of Moguls of an ancient time. The ceremony, tula-vidhi, was supposed to bring peace, health, and prosperity to the person weighed.
Directly descended from Muhammad through the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima, and thought by his followers to be endowed with the infallible gift of revelation, the Aga Khan was the Imam (spiritual leader, or “Pope”) to more than 15 million Ismaili Muslims. Yet, though recognized as an important linchpin in Oriental politics, he possessed no political territories. To the world at large he was known for his fabulous wealth and his Thoroughbred horses, and, in fact, he spent more time in his luxurious suite at the Ritz Hotel in London and his several homes in France than at his princely estate in the elite Bombay suburb of Malabar.
Once the Aga Khan was seated the shouts of his followers rose. He stood up so that they could see him better, and raised both arms for silence, a gesture which the crowd mistook for a salutation and cheered vigorously. Nearly 15 minutes passed before the shouting subsided.
At last the Aga Khan sank heavily onto the weighing chair. His eyes narrowed behind the round gold rims of his thick glasses as he watched three Ismaili nobles load bars of gleaming gold bullion onto the counterpan until the scale was finally balanced to rousing cheers from the spectators. The Aga Khan tipped the scale at 220.3 pounds (he was barely five feet five inches tall). The value of his weight in gold was 335,000 rupees, about $125,000, a vast fortune in 1936 in either America or Europe, but almost beyond imagining in India, where even 30 years later, according to the writer V. S. Naipaul, the poverty was quivering. India was a nation where it was cheaper to use men than machines, where parents lopped off a child’s hand or crippled him to make him a more poignant beggar, where great masses of people spent their entire lives on the streets of the country’s overpopulated cities.
After the weighing, personal and valuable gifts were presented to the Aga Khan: a gold-bordered robe and 1,000 rupees in silver from the Maharaja of Kutch, silver and jewels from other rich men. Passages of the Koran were read to the crowd by the Aga Khan, after which a path was cleared. The immense crowd fell to their knees. Rose petals, to scent the air, were thrown “like a gentle rain” before the Aga Khan’s gilt palanquin as it moved through the streets of Bombay.
The public celebration was almost certainly a personal benchmark for the Aga Khan as well. It was a time not only to reflect on a full and remarkable life thus far but also to begin to think about the man who might succeed him as Imam.
The Aga Khan’s elder son and heir apparent, Aly, was 25 at the time of the golden jubilee. Aly’s mother, the second of the Aga Khan’s four wives, was a beautiful, dark-eyed Italian ballerina whom the Aga Khan had relentlessly courted after seeing her onstage in Giselle at the Monte Carlo Opera House in 1907. Aly’s childhood was lonely. His mother pursued a career as a sculptor by day, and gave lavish parties at night, while his father shuttled among the capitals of the world, seeing to the concerns of his followers.
As a young man Aly was tremendously good-looking, quite exotic with his mixed Italian and Oriental heritage. He seemed solemnly determined to prove that he could do everything anyone else could do—only faster. He was always at the top of the hunt when he rode to the hounds. He raced his horses with reckless abandon. He drove in famous Grand Prix races in France, Monaco, and Italy.
To Aly it was all “fabulously fun,” which is how he described a 10,000-mile round-trip flight—the longest civil flight ever out of India—from Bombay to Singapore in 1932, flying over treacherous jungles in a single-engine plane with no radio. He had a lot of experience at big-game hunting, having bagged three lions, seven tigers, and some 20 leopards and panthers while on foot, not from the safety of the elevated platform called a machun.
Like his father, Aly was never attracted to Oriental women. When he was 23, he fell deeply in love. She was a tall, slim English beauty, three years his senior, fair and slightly haughty, and she was married. Her name was Mrs. Loel Guinness, née Joan Barbara Yarde-Buller, daughter of Lord Churston, who was descended from King Edward III. She had been married to the Guinness heir when she was 19 and he was only 20, and their wedding was the society highlight of 1927.
The Yarde-Bullers were fabulously wealthy in their own right, but with her marriage Joan was now hostess of her husband’s town mansion, 11 and 12 Carlton House Terrace, overlooking St. James’s Park, and spent summers at his parents’ spectacular estate in Mougins, near Cannes in the South of France (where an airstrip had been laid down so that Loel’s private plane could land), and at Deauville, where they also owned a villa.
It was at a dinner party in Deauville, in the late summer of 1933, that Aly met Joan; Loel was abroad. There is a story that Aly was so taken with her at first sight that he leaned across the table and asked, “Darling, will you marry me?” She laughed and informed him that she was already married and the mother of a young son. That did not stop Aly. He wooed her with flowers and private, romantic messages until finally she agreed to meet him secretly. Soon they had embarked upon a very serious and all-consuming affair that culminated 18 months later in a sensational divorce trial that made front pages of newspapers worldwide.
On May 18, 1936, Joan and Aly were married quietly in Paris, with the Aga Khan present. The bride wore a simple black silk ensemble trimmed in white, and a broad-brimmed black straw hat with a white bow that framed her narrow, piquant face. In photographs the eye is caught by the Aga Khan, rotund and smiling, his white jacket and metal-framed glasses glittering in the bright spring sun. However he may have felt about the public nature of his son’s romance and winning of a bride, there is little doubt that he had great hopes that marriage and fatherhood would give Aly a sense of maturity and of his responsibilities.
Yet Aly’s marriage did nothing to dampen his interest in speed, sports, bloodstock, and women. During World War II, he served with British intelligence forces in the Middle East. His immediate superior officer, Colonel A. D. Wintle, remembers being told “the only risk I ran in having him on my team was that he was irresistible to women, could not leave them alone. And the Germans knew it. . . . I once asked him why he chose to pose as the great lover when he could have been remembered for so many other things.
“‘They call me a bloody nigg*r’ was his reply, ‘so I pay them out by winning all their desirable women.’ ” In fact, Aly was always convinced that Joan’s family and English friends held him in low esteem because of his mixed racial background.
After the war Aly was often seen without his wife in Monte Carlo and in the chic clubs and casinos on the Riviera. The Riviera chronicler Stanley Jackson wrote, “Aly Khan walked [into the restaurant of the Cannes Casino]. . . . He was smaller than I expected [he was five feet six inches tall], quite roly-poly [weighing about 160 pounds] and going bald [this was in 1947]. He was soon chatting merrily away about Maxine Elliott’s luxurious villa, the Château de l’Horizon, which he had just bought for £35,000. I gathered that Aly would preserve the water chute down which guests could slide straight into the sea [he did], if they preferred that to the huge swimming pool, but he had no intention of switching on her imitation moon for dark nights.
“Suddenly he jumped to his feet and shot off to greet a very pretty brunette. . . . They were soon dancing cheek-to-cheek, locked in trancelike mutual admiration,” Jackson continued. “It was said that he dipped his fingertips in rosewater to prolong his lovemaking and boasted cynically that he never shot until he saw the whites of their eyes.” One of Aly’s lovers claimed that he was able to hold an erection for hours.
The ancient Arabic art of imsák was said to be responsible for Aly’s extraordinary sexual prowess. As a young man he had gone (as the Aga Khan had before him) to a doctor in Cairo, with whom he had spent six weeks studying the control of his muscles so that he did not reach a climax. “He liked the effect it had on women,” one friend claimed. “He liked to get them out of control while he remained in control—the master of the situation.”
