PARIS, June 11: When she died late last year, relatively alone in the city where she’d spent much of the past four decades, Princess Soraya was little remembered, except perhaps for having been the Iranian beauty who was repudiated by the Shah of Iran in 1958 for having been unable to provide him with a heir.
Little media coverage was accorded to her demise, perhaps because the same new generation that had never really heard of the Shah of Iran, knew even less about his first wife, Soraya Esfandiary Bakhtiary.
Princess Soraya died such a lonely death that when the time came to sell off her estate, her attorney Morel d’Arleux, when he attempted to contact Tehran to see whether Iran’s present authorities might not be interested in acquiring some of her royal possessions, was met with the most brutal silence. Soraya had apparently indicated before her death that she would welcome some form of reconciliation with Tehran, even if in fact that country’s present regime was largely responsible for the downfall of her first husband.
Tehran accorded the same silent answer to the auction house — Beaussant Lefevre — chosen to dispose of Soraya’s estate. All attempts at interesting Tehran in the sale which has just been organized in Paris met with the same heavy silence from Tehran’s bigwigs, indeed the press communiques launched to news services around the world were completely ignored by Iran’s national news agency and Iranian newspapers as a whole, none of which had indeed cared already to announce her death.
But, the French auctioneers entrusted with the sale of the estate of Princess Soraya, who had “very optimistically” forecast revenues of three million euros ($2.8 million) for the sale, were pleasantly surprised by the results for the recent three-session event at Drouot-Montaigne, the celebrated Paris auction center, which saw all 942 lots eagerly bought up, for a total product of 6.58 million euros ($6.2 million).
Even Soraya’s blood red 1958 Rolls Royce Silver Spur took little time to be sold, and fetched the extraordinary sum of 60,500 euros ($57,000), apparently put forth by a Paris-based bidder whose chauffeur was immediately sent to the Avenue Montagne venue of the sale to take possession.
More surprising perhaps was the disposal of all 100 lots — in certainly the most prestigious session — of the royal jewels given to her by the Shah of Iran, jewels that Soraya had hoped might one day make their way back to Tehran. These went for 3.9 million euros ($3.6 million), and were notably acquired by Iranian expatriates.
Germany, indeed, provided a good many of the bidders during all three auction sessions, perhaps because of Soraya’s German roots.
Another of the principal, and most bid-for, lots to be acquired — this by an unidentified bidder based in the Gulf who put up 1.3 million euros ($1.2 million) — was the wedding dress specially created by Christian Dior for Soraya’s February 12, 1951, wedding to the Shah.
