Egypt: A Tale of Two Autocrats

For twelve years, Farouk of Egypt wandered in exile. In public he wore dark glasses and was accompanied by two bodyguards who fended off newsmen and curious bystanders. In private Farouk endlessly pursued women and was reputed to know every call girl in Rome by name. When a starlet appeared on the Via Veneto with a new piece of jewelry, friends would examine it and ask “Farouk?”

Fat, flabby, 45-year-old Farouk symbolized the gross results of a classically misspent life. Last week he died as he had lived — gorging himself on fine food with a willowy blonde at his side. The end came in Rome’s Ile de France restaurant on the ancient Aurelian Way near Vatican City. Accompanied by blonde Anna Maria Gatti, 28, Farouk dined at midnight on oysters, roast lamb, cake and fruit. At 1:30 in the morning, as he enjoyed a postprandial cigar, Farouk said he felt faint, clutched at his throat and fell forward on the table. An ambulance was summoned and Farouk was placed in an oxygen tent at the hospital. Minutes later he was dead, apparently of a heart attack. Found on Farouk’s body were a gold wedding ring, a cigarette lighter, a watch, a pill box initialed ‘F,’ a pair of dark glasses, a loaded Beretta automatic, identity pa pers, and a billfold containing $115 in Italian lire and $2,500 in U.S. bills.

Regular Tours. The young King who took over as ruler of Egypt in 1936 seemed hardly destined for such a sordid end. At the death of his father, King Fuad, he had been recalled from Britain’s Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. Farouk was then a tall, handsome youth of 16 who took pride in his position as Egypt’s Chief Boy Scout. After a two-year regency, Farouk got full power and pledged he would be “the first servant of my country.”

His reign began auspiciously. Farouk diligently toured Egypt and was acutely aware of the crushing, age-old poverty of the fellahin. On the advice of his Oxford-educated tutor, Ahmed Hassaneen Pasha, Farouk became interested in social reform. In the war years, Farouk and Hassaneen regularly toured bombed areas of Cairo and Alexandria.

Corrupt Courtiers. After the war, Farouk increased his influence in the Middle East by founding the Arab League. Then his first marriage, to Queen Farida, who had borne him three daughters, broke up, and trusted Hassaneen Pasha died of a heart attack. Hassaneen was replaced by an unsavory crew ranging from Pulley Bey, a former Italian barber and electrician, to Kareem Tabet, a wily Lebanese newsman. Farouk was soon gambling away his nights at the card tables of Cairo’s Royal Automobile Club or touring the Riviera circuit, where he rented 30-room hotel suites and sometimes dropped more than $100,000 a week at the casinos. His name was repeatedly linked with belly dancers and beauty queens. The Arab-Israeli war of 1948 ended in a crushing Egyptian defeat, and army officers grumbled that the fault lay with Farouk’s corrupt courtiers who, they claimed, had got huge gains by supplying the army with shells that wouldn’t fire and grenades that went off as soon as the pin was removed.

Farouk seemed uninterested. In 1949 he spotted a lovely young girl in a Cairo jewelry store. His spies reported that her name was Narriman Sadek and that she was about to be married to Egyptian Diplomat Zaki Hashem. Farouk sent Hashem off to a post abroad and married Narriman himself. A year later, the new Queen presented Farouk with a son, Prince Fuad. But this marriage also ended in divorce, and Farouk resumed collecting women in much the same fashion that he collected coins, stamps, clocks, jewelry and pornography.

At the Morgue. The growing disorder of Farouk’s personal life and the corruption and mismanagement of his government led to the 1952 coup d’état by a group of army officers headed by Major General Mohammed Naguib, who was later displaced by Gamal Abdel Nasser. Deposed, Farouk sailed off on his royal yacht and was said to have arrived at Naples in tears.

In the years following, Farouk became a citizen of Monaco but spent most of his time in Rome. He grew ever more gross and more persistent in the pursuit of women. And it was mostly women, last week, who crowded around his bier at Rome’s municipal morgue. His first wife, Farida, and her three daughters came from Switzerland. Six other women, who said they were Egyptian refugees, also signed the funeral register. Young Prince Fuad left a sickbed to attend the funeral and was the major beneficiary of Farouk’s $3 million estate.

There were many ironies to his death. As ex-King of Egypt, he died in exile in Rome, just as ex-King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel III, died in exile in Alexandria. Also ironic was the fact that in the week of Farouk’s death, the man who had helped overthrow him, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was almost unanimously re-elected President of Egypt, obtaining an incredible 99.999% of the 6,950,000 votes cast. If the results were to be believed, only 65 hardy souls voted against Nasser, while 489 ballots were defaced and therefore held invalid.

“Factory Hysteria.” As the election returns might suggest, Nasser has been every bit as autocratic as Farouk ever was. Only one name was on last week’s ballots, and only one name appeared in the screaming headlines of the government-controlled press, all of them demanding Nasser’s “re-election.” To the Egyptian masses,who tend to be docile people, these political shortcomings are less important than the economic results that Nasser has achieved. Industrial production has climbed from $753.6 million in 1952 to an estimated $2.1 billion this year. Exports have more than quadrupled, and the output of textiles has soared from $204 million to $660 million. Land reclamation, which averaged 5,000 acres annually under Farouk, now averages 150,000 acres a year. The size of the national budget has tripled in twelve years, and the per capita income risen in the same period from $120 to $180.

But such statistics cannot conceal Nasser’s failure in his long campaign to achieve Arab unity, or in his military campaign in Yemen that ties down some 50,000 Egyptian troops. His pell-mell “factory hysteria” resulted in a muddle of mismanagement and high costs. A Fiat assembly plant near Cairo employs 5,000 workers but turns out only 15 cars a day due to material shortages. The Helwan iron and steel complex produces rails that were turned down as inferior by Egyptian national railways and were finally accepted only on Nasser’s insistence. At year’s end Nasser was forced to sell one-fourth of his $138 million gold reserves to pay off short-term obligations and maintain the nation’s credit standing.

Meatless Days. With commerce largely under state ownership or control, consumers have to put up with acute shortages of almost everything from toilet paper to transistor radio batteries. Demand far outstrips supply of most foods; in much of the country there are three meatless days a week. But there is no hunger, as party stalwarts are quick to point out. “We can always go back to bread and beans,” says one proudly. For all the shortages, most Egyptians are far better off than they were a decade ago. The lack of such things as radio batteries is in a sense proof of this. After all, under Farouk, hardly any Egyptians even had radios.