TheSunday Morning Herald:

Time was when Farah Pahlavi could paralyse parts of Manhattan merely through word of her presence. One time in the late 1970s, police on horseback struggled to hold back a crowd of baying demonstrators outside The Pierre, an aristocratic hotel by Central Park. On another occasion, the NYPD flooded midtown with more than 2000 officers, encircling the Hilton with what The New York Times described as a "shoulder-to-shoulder, 12-block show of force".

Those were the days when VIPs would draw up in low-slung limousines to hear her speak: Henry Kissinger, Lady Bird Johnson, Nelson Rockefeller. That was an era when she counted triple-A celebrities among her friends and acquaintances: Elizabeth Taylor, Yves Saint Laurent, Andy Warhol. It was also a tumultuous, pre-revolutionary age when rival demonstrators thousands of kilometres away from Iran exchanged angry chants in the shadows of the skyscrapers: "Long live her majesty!" versus "Down with the Shah!" Now, though, visits from a former queen once dubbed "the Jackie Kennedy of the Middle East" go largely unnoticed. In early October, when I arrive at the luxury apartment building on the Upper West Side where she's due to attend a late-afternoon reception, the doorman on duty looks at me bemusedly when I tell him I'm here to see "the Empress of Iran"

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