A Swiss in the royal court of the Shah of Persia

From Lake Geneva to the palaces of the Iranian king, Mohamed Reza Pahlavi: the unusual path of the Swiss Ernest Perron, accompanied by intrigue and a whisper of a homosexual affair

1.

The Le Rosey Institute in Rolle near Lake Geneva is among Switzerland's most popular boarding schools. The children of the richest people in the world attend classes and are educated there. The boarding school was founded in 1880. The later King of Belgium, Albert II, Richard Helms, director of the CIA and US ambassador to Tehran, Alexander Karagjorjevic II of Yugoslavia, Rainier III, Prince of Monaco, were educated in this boarding school. Nicolas Berggruen, German investor. This information may be interesting for the Albanian public: Nicolas Berggruen is the son of Bettina Moissi, who is the daughter of Aleksandër Mojsi, the famous actor of Albanian origin. Nicolas Berggruen was born in Paris in 1961, his fortune is estimated to be around 1,5 billion dollars.

2.

One September day in 1931, at the Le Rosey Institute assistant gardener Ernest Perron was pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with organic waste. When the students of the institute started to make fun of him, a 12-year-old boy named Mohamed Reza Pahlavi came to Ernest Perron's aid. His father, Reza Shah Pahlavi, had sent his son to neutral Switzerland to gain new knowledge and learn Western culture. At the Institut Le Rosey began Ernest Perron's long friendship with Mohamed Reza Pahlav – a friendship that would take the unknown Swiss to the royal palaces of Tehran. In Switzerland, Perron was a loyal servant to the Iranian prince, helping him learn French and reciting poetry to him. Ernest Perron had a slight limp and was gay. At the Le Rosey Institute, the rumors about the possible connection of the assistant gardener Perron with the prince from the Orient did not stop.

3.

"When on April 29, 1936, Prince Mohamed Reza Pahlavi, who had already become a young man at the age of 17, took a seat in a first-class compartment at the train station in Lausanne to return to his homeland, alongside his was Ernest Perroni. Two unequal friends traveled through Bern, Vienna and Moscow to Tehran", writes the Swiss writer Alex Capus. In Tehran, Reza Shah Pahlavi was not at all thrilled that his son had brought from Europe a limping Swiss who was gay and recited poems by French poets. Reza Shah Pahlavi kicked Perron out of the palace, but after his son's pleas allowed him to work at the imperial summer residence at Ramsar on the Caspian Sea. However, the Swiss and the Iranian prince continued to meet secretly.

4.

On August 25, 1941, British and Soviet troops invaded Iran, deposed Reza Shah Pahlavi and installed his son Mohammed in his place. Now the young monarch and the Swiss were together again. In the years to come, Ernest Perroni would be Mohamed Reza Pahlavi's most trusted man. Perron had a talent for intrigue and games on the diplomatic floor, so many Western ambassadors willingly met him. Ernest Perroni began to be compared to Rasputin, the Russian itinerant preacher who had great influence on Czar Nicholas II of Russia. Soraja, the jealous wife of Mohamed Reza Pahlavi, called Ernest Perron "a diabolical Swiss". In her memoirs, Soraja writes that the Swiss visited the monarch in the bedroom every morning and no one knew what happened there during the hour that Perron stayed. The British ambassador in Tehran wrote to his colleague in Bern that Ernest Perroni was "a strange, decadent boy" who "made surprising comments about people's sex lives". The Belgian ambassador said that the young men, much less the crown prince, should not be allowed to fall into the hands of the Swiss. Ernest Perroni officially carried the title of "private secretary to His Imperial Majesty, the King of Kings".

5.

Before tying the knot with Soraya, Mohamed Reza Pahlavi was married to Fawzia bint Fuad of Egypt. She was the daughter of King Fuad I, who descended from the dynasty of Albanian origin of Muhammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt. Fawzia bint Fuad married the Iranian crown prince Reza Pahlawi, the future king of Iran (from 1941), on 16 March 1939. Fawzia bint Fuad was therefore Queen of Iran. With the Iranian king she had a daughter, Shehnazen. In 1942, the portrait of Queen Fawzia bint Fuad was published on the cover of the American magazine LIFE. That's how she became a world icon. Photographer Cecil Beaton described her as an "Asian Venus" with a perfect heart-shaped face and piercing blue eyes. In 1945 the couple divorced. In 1948 Reza Pahlavi was introduced in London to Soraya Esfandiary Bakhtiary, the daughter of a Persian prince and the German Eva Karl.

6.

The friendship between Ernest Perron and Mohamed Reza Pahlavi came to an abrupt end in 1954. Perron was kicked out of the palace and the monarch officially ended his friendship with him. Two reasons are given for this split: the American secret service CIA had told the monarch to distance himself from the suspicious Swiss or the monarch came to this conclusion himself to end the whispers in the people about his homosexual relationship with Perron. He spent some time in the palace of Mohamed Reza Pahlavi's sister, Shamsi, whom he greatly respected because she had converted to the Catholic faith. Not much is known about the later life of Ernest Perron. He died in Zürich in 1961.