A EGENDARY LIFE MARY GHARAGOZLOU LIVED A LIFE OF THE STUFF OF WHICH .... ROMANTIC NOVELS ARE CREATED, A LIFE REM]NISCENT OF THE ADVENTURES AND DARING OF VICTORIAN LADIES WHO VENTURED INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IN SEARCH OF NEW VISTAS AND NEW LOVES. MARY'S PATERNAL FAMILY LINES GO BACK TO THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY IN PERSIA, AND SHE ]S THE PRODUCT OF THE MARRIAGE OF A DESCENDANT OF PERSIAN LANDLORDS AND MINISTERS AND AN AMERICAN LIBRARIAN. MARY DIED LAST FALL, AFTER MANY YEARS ASSOCIATED WITH THE WELFARE OF ARAB]AN HORSES IN THE MIDDLE EAST. ARABIAN HORSE WORLD'S TRIBUTE TO MARY IS PRESENTED HERE IN THREE PARTS: HER OBITUARY, WRITTEN BY ANTONY WYNN FOR THE INDEPENDENT, A LONDON NEWSPAPER; MARY'S FABLE BASED ON THE LORE OF THE ARABIAN HORSES OF KHUZISTAN; AND MARY'S ACCOUNT OF HER STRUGGLE, IN THE EARLY 1980s, TO MAINTAIN HER ARABIANS. On a summer's evening in 1975, in a mountain village of northwest Iran, the by Antony Wynn tribesmen put away the remains of dinner and brought out the opium pipe. Mary Gharagozlou began to tell us a wistful story. Some years before, she said, she had been driving down the dusty road from Isfahan to Shiraz when her ancient Buick broke down. Coming towards her was a Land Rover with a Baluchi driver and what appeared to be a dashing English officer beside him. Unsure that they would stop to help, s~e hitched up her skirt and stuck her leg out of the door. While the Baluchi driver mended her car the Englishman eXplained that he was on leave from the Trucial and Oman Scouts and heading for Khorasan, where he hoped to get some sandgrouse shooting. Mary told him that she was bound for Shiraz, but that if he cared to break his journey at her house in Tehran she would entertain him on her return. Three days later she came back to Tehran and whirled him round the nightclubs MEHRI LEILA GHARAGOZLOU, for a week, but the call of the sandgrouse was too strong and the officer went on his FARMER AND HORSE BREEDER: BORN TEHRAN 1927; MARRIED 1947 way to Khorasan. JACQUES DE BOUVIER (ONE Some 10 years later, at a dinner party in London, I was astonished to hear a once DAUGHTER; MARRIAGE DISSOLVED), dashing ex-army officer, now a diplomat, embark on a wistful story of a journey he had 1952 MAJID KHAN BAKHTIAR made many years before to Iran when he was on leave from the Trucial States. When I (MARRIAGE DISSOLVED); DIED told him that I was able to complete his tale for him the evening turned into an TEHRAN 14 SEPTEMBER 2001. exchange of legends about Mary Gharagozlou, each one more extraordinary than the last. OPPOSITE PAGE: MARY LEADING HER Mary Gharagozlou came from a long line of Persian landlords and statesmen. Her HORSE WHILE STAYING WITH THE father was Naqi Khan, son of Amir Tuman, who was Persian Minister to Washington TRIBE IN KHUZISTAN. and the brother of Nasser ol-Molk, a Balliol man and a friend of Curzon, who in 1910 was appointed Regent. The Gharagozlou tribe had been brought from Central Asia to norm-west Persia by Tamerlane in the late 14th century and the family owned hundreds of villages around Hamadan. Mary's mother was an American librarian at Johns Hopkins University, nee Katherine Ladd, whom Naqi Khan swept off her feet. He brought her back to live in Varkaneh, a village in the mountains outside Hamadan most of which disappeared under snow in winter, and where there was no running water. He died when Mary was about four and she and her sister were educated by the Presbyterians in Tehran. Mary was the man of the family. A spirited girl, at the age of 10 she came to the attention of Reza Shah when her horse bolted and nearly knocked him off his horse as he was watching cavalry manoeuvres. Later, she became the foremost expert of Iran on dry farming. In 1945 the Soviet-backed Tudeh party established collectives in north Persia but Mary, although only 18 at the time, enjoyed such respect from her village headmen that they refused to accept forced sequestration of her estates. She was a great beauty in her youth and retained a lasting glamour all her life. She married Jacques de Bouvier, the son of the Swiss ambassador, but the marriage did not last long. She then married Majid Khan Bakhtiar, the rather louche chief of the Bakhtiari tribe, who had met de Bouvier's father in a Tehran nightclub. Mary and 337· ARABIAN HORSE WORLD· MARCH 2002 Majid Khan led a dual life. In the spring they migrated with the tribe from the plains at the head of the Persian Gulf up ovet the mountains to theit summet pastures near Isfahan. Maty persuaded Majid Khan, a man of flocks and herds to whom a plough was anathema, to start dty farming on his winter quarters. They were very successful and prospered greatly. They hunted gazelle with salukis on the plains and mouflon and ibex in the hills, while in the winter they went to the nightclubs of Paris. On one occasion she was asked to entertain Sir John Russell, the British ambassador, who wished to shoot francolin. He told the Bakhtiari khans, who prided themselves on their marksmanship, that he was only a Top: MARY'S GREAT, GREAT, moderate shot. He missed not a single GREAT, GREAT-GRANDFATHER, bird and shot more than his host, who THE HEAD OF THE GHARAGOZLOU TRIBE, THIRD was much put out of countenance. In FROM LEFT. the evening, as the men of the tribe BOTTOM: AT FAR LEFT, AMIR were engaged in stick-dancing, the TOUMAN GHARAGOZLOU, khan challenged him to a bout. Mary, MARY'S GRANDFATHER. THE who had heard that the khan intended OTHER TWO ARE COUSINS OF to break Russell's leg, showed him how AMIR. to parry and saved the ambassador from a thrashing. At the time of the Persian land reforms in the early 1960s Mary Gharagozlou was put in charge of tribal affairs, reporting directly to General Hosain Pakravan, the new head of Savak, the security service. The government wished to settle the nomad tribes, who were seen as too independent and destabilising to central authority. Mary did her best to 338· ARABIAN HORSE WORLD· MARCH 2002 resist this policy, pointing out that the nomads provided the country with its meat and that, if they were forced to settle, their sheep would die. To be able to do this job she divorced Majid Khan, who did not wish her to be involved. She traveled by jeep, horse and camel in regions that no educated official would contemplate visiting. During a tribal famine she was instrumental in saving the Bakhtiari by supplying them with wheat and flour. At the time of the Qazvin earthquake in 1962 General Pakravan put her in charge of an astonished army battalion, with instructions to arrange relief. Secretly fortifying herself with benzedrine, she ran them all into the ground, thus gaining their respect and unquestioning obedience. In 1974 Majid Khan took a bet that he could not land his aeroplane by night on the beach near the Shah's palace on the Caspian coast. He was killed in the attempt. Shortly afterwards there was a misunderstanding that Mary might have been inciting a tribal revolt against the Shah's policy of settling the tribes. During the famine she had ordered an enormous quantity of flour and animal feed without waiting for government authority. The ministry refused to pay and she had to sell her house in Tehran to meet the bill. She was removed from her post and forbidden to enter tribal territory. Left with no money, she retreated to Majid Khan's home near the Gulf and concentrated on his stud of Khersan Arabs, which was all that she had left. One of these horses she sent to the Tehran races, where it ill-advisedly beat the Shah's horse. Fortunately for her, the Shah was in a good mood and decided to take over her stud and put her in charge of it. This she agreed to, on condition that she could take the horses up to the cool of her old home at Varkaneh in the summer. Top: THE KHERSAN STALLION NASSRAN. ABOVE: THE STALLION NESMAN WITH A BACHTIARI RIDER. 339· ARABIAN HORSE WORLD· MARCH 2002 Top AND BOTTOM: THE SAGLAWI STALLION BASCHIR (MOBIARAL X LOTUS) OF THE KHUZISTAN. OPPOSITE PAGE: ASIL KHUZISTAN MARES GRAZING IN A DATE ORCHARD IN BAM. She then dedicated herself to persuading the World Arab Horse Organisation (WAHO) to give official recognition to the Persian Arab. They required her to compile a detailed stud book of all these horses, whose lines were printed in the minds of their owners seven generations back but had never been recorded in writing. Sixteen years after she had been banned from the Bakhtiari country she felt that it would be safe to return. In the hills near the old oil-wells of Masjed-i-Soleiman she stopped a 14-year-old boy to ask directions. The boy, who could not even have been born when she was last there, gradually realised who this strange, authoritative woman must be, who knew the names of all his uncles. He shouted out that Mary Khanom had arrived, and the tribe, which she had saved during the famine, held her as a guest for three days, as they poured down from the hills to pay their respects to her.