Life Without Narriman

"His shoulders fascinated me, and his arms and his powerful wrists covered with dark, virile hair," cooed Farouk's Queen Narriman, in world-syndicated memoirs palmed off as her own. "And I found love such as I would never have dared to hope for." For his part, wrote Farouk, who seemed to have an equally corny ghostwriter, "Life without her would be lonely indeed . . . Narriman was the first human being . . . who really began . . . to understand the man behind the panoply of royalty."

Ever since Naguib's coup of last July stripped 33-year-old King Farouk of his crown, Narriman has had to contemplate Farouk's powerful, hairy wrists in exile--first on Capri, finally in a 30-room villa staffed by eight servants in the Alban Hills outside Rome. Bereft of palaces, they pursued pleasures: days at the races, nights at the opera, wee hours at Rome's tame little nightclubs. Each had a Mercedes-Benz, green for him, cherry red for her. Sometimes they appeared separately, 19-year-old Narriman with a coterie of envious, twittering, teen-age girls, Farouk with a pretty French blonde or Italian brunette.

Tired of It All. Often Narriman sat for hours with her teetotaling husband at a nightclub without exchanging a word, while he accompanied the orchestra by banging the silverware, or led the musicians with a spoon. He gambled heavily. His tublike figure became familiar on the Via Veneto, puffing down to newsstands to fuel up on comic books and spicy magazines.

After seven months of it, Narriman looked pale, tired--and tired of it all. Two weeks ago mother-in-law Mme. Assila Sadek flew in from Cairo and flew at the ex-King. Result: Narriman, impassive behind dark glasses, drove to Rome's Ciampino Airport in her red Mercedes-Benz, accompanied by her triumphant mother, also wearing dark glasses. After tearful partings with friends, Narriman the child bride flew off to Switzerland with her mother and her pet poodle, Jou-Jou, but not her son, King Fuad II, heir to the throne. In Geneva she announced that she would return to Cairo, where she could file for divorce. (Moslem wives may shed husbands by petitioning the Sharia, the Moslem personal court, for divorce on one of four grounds: infidelity, mistreatment, desertion or impotence.) Naguib had issued her an ordinary passport after a cabled personal appeal from Mme. Sadek, asking him to "help two lonely ladies in a foreign country."

Cellar Rendezvous. Farouk took the end of marriage No. 2 philosophically (No. 1, to Farida, the "Peerless One," ended in 1948, after ten years, three daughters), and with more high-pitched prose: "Awaiting every new development with full faith in the justice of God," he had his lawyer tell newsmen, Farouk "bows to His will with absolute serenity."

A few hours later, looking absolutely serene, Farouk descended into the upholstered cellar of Rome's Club Boite Pigalle, where, at the usual reserved table, with a bottle of mineral water in the champagne bucket, he held a 2 a.m. rendezvous with a blonde.

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