SHOWCASE

Take One:Warhol
  

On the afternoon of 5 July 1976, Andy Warhol, accompanied by Fred Hughes - his business manager - and myself, stepped off an Iran Air flight at Mehrabad International Airport. We were greeted by a dozen little girls in gold brocade robes, who pinned pink roses to our lapels. Our trip was sponsored by [then] Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda, whose brother Fereydoun Hoveyda, Iran's [then] ambassador to the United Nations, had arranged for Andy to paint the portrait of Her Majesty Farah Pahlavi.

Apolitical by inclination, Andy was nonetheless fascinated by world leaders, whom he equated with movie stars because of their fame, which, ultimately, was what his work was all about. Indeed, he had launched his Pop art career in the 1960s with portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor and Jackie Kennedy - a pair of Hollywood actresses and a bereaved First Lady represented as holy icons of America's secular society. In 1975, he had done a commissioned portrait of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir; in February we had travelled to Germany so that Chancellor Willy Brandt could sit for the Polaroids that were almost always the basis of Andy's silkscreened portraits.

Andy had been angling to paint the Empress since 1974, when we first met Ambassador Hoveyda, a highly cultivated former film critic who relished bringing together diplomatic, cultural and social personalities for caviar-laden dinners at his Fifth Avenue townhouse. In Andy's eyes, the Empress had it all: beauty, glamour, style, world fame and great jewellery.