Princess Diary

Leila wore pegged Guess jeans and had bad skin and unruly, kinky hair.

After school and on weekends, in the gargantuan, lemon-colored Colonial-revival mansion her mother had purchased with some miniscule fraction of the untold billions she and her husband had–it was rumored–plundered from Iran, we listened to Def Leppard and played with Leila’s ridiculously fat and un-neutered yellow lab-golden retriever mix (he tried to fuck everything in sight, but his favorite target was a giant plush banana with googly eyes).

We went to movies together in her mother’s armored Mercedes with at least two bodyguards, one of whom would always drive ahead of us in a Chevrolet Suburban.

I saw Leila’s grave for the first time today.

The monument itself is a large, low slab of black granite surrounded by a bronze ornamental railing. It is more sarcophagus-like than the kinds of headstones I see when I pass the graveyard here in town on the way to the supermarket. But it is not lavish; it doesn’t really stand out at all in the crowded but pleasantly shady row of similar markers in which it sits.

The name “Leila Pahlavi” is carved in both English and Farsi in one corner of the slab in gold letters. Leila was my friend. She is buried in the Passy Cemetery in Paris.

I’ve never visited Leila’s grave in person, but I saw it today in a movie called The Queen and I, a documentary by the Iranian-born filmmaker Nahid Persson Sarvestani.

Leila and I got to be friends when she and her mother, Farah, the queen in The Queen and I, and her family moved to my little corner of western Massachusetts after Leila’s father, the deposed Shah of Iran, died in Egypt. We were seventh-graders together.

My nickname for her was “Lay.” Hilarious. She got a similar kick out of my last name, which in Farsi sounds a little bit like the word for “penis.”

As a proto 12-year-old homo, I found many things extremely appealing about Leila. First of all, she was funny; we made each other laugh. And the very fact of her and her family was utterly unexpected in–but quickly incorporated into–the dailiness of existence in my small hometown. Also, she had a great backstory; she was a modern-day Anastasia: Glamorous, or at least as glamorous as a 12-year-old girl with bad skin and unruly, kinky hair could be. Also, the bodyguards meant we could never make out at the movies–they sat in the row behind us–without her mother finding out. We used to talk about hot guys–she explicitly, I, of course, more circuitously.

If I was a proto-homo at age 12, then she was my proto-hag.

But you fall out of touch with your 12-year-old comrades in arms, even the ones you promise yourself you’ll never not talk to.

The last time I heard from Leila was when she called me and asked if I wanted to go with her to a Moto-Cross rally in Madison Square Garden. (I know it sounds weird, but Leila loved shit like that.) This was, maybe, 1991. The next time I heard about her was about 10 years later when the news of her apparent suicide–an overdose of sleeping pills in a London hotel room–made the papers.

Sarvestani’s movie The Queen and I was fascinating to me because it is the first-person account of the filmmaker, a former Iranian communist revolutionary, who was amazed to find herself sympathizing with her subject, Farah, the ludicrously-styled–even today–”Empress” of Iran. Farah was the Princess Diana of the mid-20th Century Middle East. She was the very monarch whom Sarvestani had once simultaneously envied, adored and worked furiously to overthrow. The Queen and I is a powerful story of how a complicated friendship can emerge even in the most unlikely and adversarial of circumstances. The film is also a self-indictment by the middle-aged Sarvestani for her deference to and sympathy with Farah.

I’m both saddened and in a way relieved that I developed what I think of as my political consciousness before I knew how horrible Leila’s father and the gruesome dictatorship over which he presided truly were.

When I was 12, she was no more and no less than my friend. 25 years later, I still miss her.