The Pahlavi Sisters: Iran’s Lost Princesses and the Lives They Built in Exile SS

On January 16th, 1979, Muhammad Raza Palavi boarded a plane at Thran’s Marabad airport and left Iran forever. He was 59 years old. He carried a small container of Iranian soil. He didn’t announce that he wasn’t coming back, but everyone watching from the tarmac knew. Within 16 days, Ayatollah Kmeni had returned from Paris.

And by February 11th, the monarchy the Palavi family had spent 54 years building was abolished by law. Three women watched this happen from outside the country. They were the Sha’s sisters, Ashraf, Shams, and Fatim, and they had each already fled. Each had left behind palaces, titles, staff, and the entire architecture of a life built on royal identity.

Each would spend the rest of her days answering the same question in a completely different way. Who are you when the country that made you ceases to exist? The answer for each of them was devastating and entirely her own. The Palavi dynasty wasn’t old by the standards of royal houses. Resza, the father of all three, had seized power from the crumbling Kajjar dynasty only in 1925.

But in those 54 years, the family had built a court of genuine and specific opulence, not abstract wealth, but weight and stone and foreign architects and ceremony. Princess Shams’s summer residence in Karage tells the whole story. In the late 1960s, she commissioned the Franklidd Wright Foundation to design her a private palace.

The foundation assigned principal architect William Wesley Peters, Wright’s own son-in-law, to the project. What Peters built on 170 hectares of rolling hills west of Thrron was unlike anything else in Iran. a 16,000 square f foot structure of sweeping circular forms, two main domes, and a ziggurat style lower wing, all connected by gently ramping floors that dissolved the line between interior and landscape.

The design concept was a stingray enclosing a pearl. Inside were a library, a banquet hall, private cinema with seating for 90 guests, a swimming pool, a rare bird hall, and what one travel writer later described as a relentless harmony of circles and spirals where the sky is everywhere. It was called the Pearl Palace. In February 1979, it was gone.

not demolished, but stripped from its owner by revolutionary decree, as thoroughly as if it had never belonged to her. The three sisters who left that world behind weren’t interchangeable. Shams was born October 28th, 1917. The eldest, the philanthropist Ashraf arrived October 26th, 1919, 5 hours after her twin brother Muhammad Raza, and she spent the next 96 years making up for lost time.

Fatame was born October 30th, 1928. The youngest, the halfsister, already a different branch of the family tree. Three women from one dynasty shaped by one institution dispersed by one revolution. What they did with that dispersal is a story history has almost entirely overlooked. Ashraf Palavi was many things and she cataloged them herself.

The French press had given her the name La Pantair Noir the Black Panther and she embraced it completely. In her 1980 memoir, Faces in a Mirror, she wrote, “Like the panther, my nature is turbulent, rebellious, self-confident.” People also called her the dragon lady and the man in a skirt. She preferred the panther.

Her earliest political act came in January 1936 when at 16 she appeared unveiled at a public ceremony in Thrron alongside her mother and sister Shams. A calculated alignment with her father Rea Shaw’s abolition of the veil visible and deliberate and entirely in character. Her most consequential act came in 1953. Prime Minister Muhammad Mosed had nationalized Iran’s oil industry and the sha deeply ambivalent was wavering on whether to support a CIA and British MI6 plan to remove him from power.

The operation called Ajax needed someone to change his mind. They chose Ashro. She was playing in French casinos when an Iranian agent named Acidola Rashidian tracked her down. According to Steven Kinszer’s All the Shaw’s Men, she was initially reluctant. The following day, British MI6 officer Norman Darbisher arrived with a mink coat and cash.

When she saw them, Darbisher later recalled, her eyes lit up and her resistance crumbled. She traveled to Iran and delivered the message. The Sha consented Mosedc was overthrown in August 1953. Her brother was consolidated on the Peacock throne. She didn’t stop there. After 1953, Ashro became a serious international figure in her own right.

She chaired the UN Commission on the Status of Women in 1965, served as Iran’s delegate to the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1967, and chaired the UN High Commission for Human Rights in 1970. She was deeply involved in the organization of International Women’s Year in 1975. By the mid 1970s, she was one of the most visible advocates for women’s rights in the United Nations system.

A fact that coexisted uneasily with her family’s autocratic rule at home and with the corruption allegations that followed her everywhere. Revolutionary Iran’s case against her was specific. A document surfaced claiming she had transferred $78,000 from her Bank Melly account to a Union Bank of Switzerland account in Geneva under the code name Cypa, an acronym for Son Altes Imperial Princess Ashraf, Your Imperial Highness, Princess Ashraf.

In a 1980 New York Times article, she denied the accusation directly, attributing her wealth to inherited land that had increased in value as Iran developed. The argument satisfied no one looking to remain unsatisfied. Ashro had never much cared about that. On the morning of September 13th, 1977, 16 months before the revolution, she was returning from the Palm Beach Casino in Khan to her villa at 35 Boulevard Edo Bodo in Jan Le Pa when two hooded gunmen opened fire.

14 bullets struck the side of her Rolls-Royce. Her lady in waiting was killed. Her chauffeur was wounded. Ashraf walked away unharmed. No group ever credibly claimed responsibility. The attack was never solved. She didn’t leave France afterward. She didn’t reduce her public footprint.

Two years later in 1978, Andy Warhol painted her portrait, a silk screen on canvas 40×4 in titled Unknown Female Iranian Princess, which in retrospect reads less like a commission and more like a document of a woman who refused to become unknown. When the revolution completed in 1979, Ashro was already outside Iran. She divided her exile between a 12,200 ft townhouse at 29 Beakman Place in Manhattan, purchased in 1980, the deliberately close to the United Nations she had once addressed, apartments in Paris, and her villa on the Riviera. The

geography of exile was, at least materially, comfortable. Emotionally, it was something else entirely. In December 1979, her son Shar Shafi, a 34year-old Imperial Iranian Navy captain, was shot twice in the head on the Ru Pergles in Paris outside her own home. Ayatollah Kalcali claimed it as the work of one of his death squads.

Ashro had Shar’s body imbalmed and transported to New York. She kept it there, unable to bury him in Iran. unable to simply release him into a country that had killed him. That fact, more than any financial detail or diplomatic biography, reveals the shape of her grief. In a 1983 interview with the Associated Press in Paris, she said, “At night when I go into my room, that’s when all the thoughts come flooding in.

I stay up until 5 or 6 in the morning. I read. I watch a cassette. I try not to think, but the memories won’t leave you. She also told the AP that year, “After the death of my brother, if we had had the $65 billion some people said we had, we would have retaken Iran just like that.

” The boast was both oporadic and heartbreaking. the woman who had genuinely helped change history once, sitting in a Paris apartment, trying to will herself back into consequence. She always insisted she regretted nothing. I would want to do the same thing, she said near the end of her life. It’s passed now, only memories. But there were 50 years of grandeur, of glory.

From 1981 onward, she gave no interviews and made no public statements. She wrote it all down instead. Faces in a mirror was published in 1980, a book one critic called a personalized homaly on the Pivy’s virtues and the perity of nearly everyone else in the world. Ashro didn’t dispute the characterization.

She had said what she had to say. She would also say at some point in her later years that she didn’t want to die in her bed, that an accident or a bullet was her preferred exit. She died in her bed in Monte Carlo on January 7th, 2016 at 96 from Alzheimer’s disease. Iranian state television described her as famous for being corrupt.

Her Beakman Place townhouse sold for $27.5 million in 2023. Muhammad Raza Sha Palavi left Thran on January 16th, 1979, and spent the next 18 months being turned away. Egypt received him, then Morocco, then the Bahamas, then Mexico. A hospitalization in New York in October 1979 for cancer treatment triggered the hostage crisis that consumed 444 days and ended former Secretary of State Henry Kissingers’s last remaining political goodwill in Washington.

Panama took him briefly. Egypt took him back. He died on July 27th, 1980, of complications from leukemia at a Cairo hospital, aged 60, stateless, in a borrowed bed in a borrowed country. Egyptian President Anoir Sadat gave him a full state funeral through the streets of Cairo. Richard Nixon attended. King Constantine II of Greece attended.

His family walked behind the coffin to the Alria Mosque. He had no country to bury him in. For Ashro, his death made permanent what the revolution had begun. For Shams, it confirmed what she had already known since Karaj, that the life they had lived was definitively over. Shams Palavi had always been the quietest of the three.

After the 1953 coup restored her brother to power, she returned to Iran and kept a deliberately low profile, running the Red Lion and Sun Society, Iran’s equivalent of the Red Cross, from 1948 until 1979, building it into the country’s largest charitable organization. She was in private, something her country’s public identity couldn’t accommodate.

She had converted to Catholicism in the 1940s, persuaded by Ernest Peron, the Shaw’s closest personal friend. Her husband and children converted after her. In a nation whose monarchy increasingly relied on Islamic symbolism, Shams Palavi had quietly privately become a Catholic. She left Iran before the revolution completed.

She and her family settled in Santa Barbara, California. She owned a ranch house in Monteceto, purchased as a private retreat and valued at $1.5 million in 1980 and eventually she stayed there permanently, settling by 1984. She gave no interviews after 1979. She made no public statements. The woman who had built a national humanitarian organization, who had attended state ceremonies in Thyron, who had spent summers in a palace designed by the intellectual heirs of Frank Lloyd Wright, moved into a California ranch house, and said nothing more for the

record. She died of cancer on February 29th, 1996 at her Santa Barbara estate. She was 78. Her gravestone at Santa Barbara Cemetery reads, “Her Imperial Highness, Princess Shams Palivi, beloved wife, mother, and grandmother.” The title is carved in stone. The country that title belonged to isn’t mentioned anywhere on the marker.

That omission is its own kind of statement. Fatima Pali arrived into the family already marked by difference. Born October 30th, 1928. She was Raza Shaw’s 10th child and the fourth born to his fourth wife, Esmat Doat Shahi, herself from the Kajar dynasty, the very royal house the Palies had displaced. Fatima was in bloodline, a living reminder of the old order her father had overthrown.

She spent her adult life adding to the complications. In the 1947 to 1948 school year, she enrolled at Converse College in Spartanberg, South Carolina. One of the first Iranian princesses to attend an American university. She left after a year without a degree. The experience mattered anyway. She had spent a year in a context where her title meant nothing in particular, and the evidence suggests she found that clarifying.

On April 13th, 1950, she married Vincent Lee Hillier in a civil ceremony in Chvidia, Italy. Hillyard was 26, American, the son of a former US console general in Iran. He converted to Islam before the wedding, taking the name Ali Akbar. None of it resolved the problem. An Iranian woman marrying a foreign national required prior government permission. She hadn’t obtained it.

A Muslim woman marrying a non-Muslim man was forbidden outright under religious law. The conversion addressed the letter of the rule, but not its spirit. The Sha didn’t approve. Fatma was effectively estranged from the royal court. The marriage brought personal tragedy. A daughter, Ra, fell to her death in infancy in 1954.

The couple divorced in September 1959. N years of rebellion, grief and distance from the palace ended with that divorce, but not with isolation. The Sha and his then fiance Faradiba attended her second wedding in November 1959 to General Muhammad Amir Katami, commanding general of Iran’s air force. The family had taken her back.

With Katami, she had three children, sons Kambes and Ramin, a daughter Pari. She trained with a British flight instructor and became the first Iranian woman licensed to fly a helicopter. By the 1970s, her personal fortune was reportedly worth $500 million, much of it derived from defense contracts handled through Katami’s position.

He died on September 12th, 1975 in a kiting accident in Desol. A death some accounts considered suspicious with suspicion directed at the Shaw himself, though nothing was ever established or proven. She left Iran before the revolution fully concluded. She settled in London and stayed there.

She died on May 27th, 1987 of cancer at her London home. She was 58 years old, the youngest of the three sisters, dead first eight years before Shams and 29 years before Ashro. Her death received little international coverage. She had lived her entire exile in relative quiet in a city that registered her presence the way cities register most exiles, tolerantly and without much memory.

The Iranian exile community that formed after 1979, two to three million people scattered across Europe and North America, processed the Pahlavies the way displaced communities often processed the families of fallen regimes with contradictory intensity. For Iranians who had opposed the Sha, the sisters represented autocracy made flesh.

For those who mourned the monarchy, they were its most visible survivors. Neither response left much room for the actual women. Ashro in her Beakman Place townhouse was revered and resented in equal measure by a diaspora that had no other figure to organize its grief around. Royal exile is a specific kind of psychological catastrophe.

It isn’t merely the loss of wealth, though the wealth was enormous and real. It’s the collapse of an entire identity structure. titles that shaped your sense of self. A court that gave every room a particular gravity. A country whose existence made your own existence coherent. European royals stripped of their crowns after World War I left behind extensive records of this exact disorientation.

Most never recovered a sense of purpose. The Palabi sisters had less time to prepare and less tradition to draw on. The dynasty their father had founded was only 54 years old when it ended. Young enough that even its own members could remember a world before it. Ashrov’s answer to that disorientation was to stay exactly who she was on purpose in perpetuity.

The Black Panther in exile on Park Avenue and the Boulevard Edward Bodwan. in her memoir and in her silences. She chose defiance as an identity preservation strategy and she sustained it for 36 years of exile before Alzheimer’s finally dissolved the architecture of who she had insisted on being. Shams turned toward what the institution couldn’t give her and faith could.

a Catholic in Santa Barbara, tending a smaller world with the same care she had once applied to a national organization, leaving no public record of what she felt about any of it. Fatma had started her own departure a quarter century before the revolution, marrying American, studying American, learning to fly, accumulating wealth at a slight angle to the dynasty’s official structures.

She was arguably the most prepared of the three for an existence outside the palace system. She was also the first to die in it. The Pearl Palace in Karage still stands. It’s a museum now, open to visitors who walk its ramping floors and look up at its two domes without knowing whose mornings it held. The 12,200q ft Manhattan townhouse where Ashro spent her sleepless nights sold in 2023 to buyers with no connection to the woman who lay awake there until 6:00 in the morning trying not to remember.

The Alria Mosque in Cairo holds the Sha’s remains in a borrowed country’s consecrated ground. Three women carried the weight of all of it, the palace and the title and the country and the brother for as long as each of them lived. Each in a different city, each in a different language of grief, each answering the same original question until the answer ran out.

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