Playboy ambassador who entertained US elite with conga lines and kissing games

Ardeshir Zahedi diplomat b October 16, 1928 d November 18, 2021

Flamboyant, charismatic and photogenic, Ardeshir Zahedi was known in Washington’s circles of power as ‘‘the playboy of the Western World’’. As the shah of Iran’s ambassador to the US, his parties at the Iranian embassy were as glittering as anything the capital had to offer. He entertained not only presidents, senators, diplomats and businessmen but the likes of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Liza Minnelli, Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra, Andy Warhol and Elizabeth Taylor, with whom he had a whirlwind romance.

After Taylor separated from her husband, Richard Burton,

Zahedi moved her into the embassy’s royal suite, escorted her to the premiere of her 1976 movie

The Blue Bird, and invited her to join him on a holiday in

Iran. There were rumours of marriage but in the end the romance stalled. It was said the shah, who was not only Zahedi’s boss but his former father-in-law, had objected to the prospect of his ambassador marrying a Jew, albeit a converted one. The ambitious Zahedi was never going to disobey his ruler. His diplomatic papers, show that he addressed the shah as ‘‘the Shadow of my God’’.

In her memoirs, journalist Barbara Walters wrote that Zahedi ran ‘‘the No 1 embassy when it came to extravagance’’, holding lavish soirees in a palatial, 46-room Georgian-style mansion with terraced gardens on Massachusetts Ave. The jewel in this architectural crown was the Persian Room, with an enormous domed ceiling ‘‘encrusted with a kaleidoscope of mirrored mosaics, glittering medallions and tendrils cascading 30ft down the walls’’.

In 1977 alone, the official record shows that Zahedi hosted more than 7000 guests for social events at the embassy. An invitation to one of his embassy bashes was ‘‘a mark of social acceptance in Washington’’, wrote Kitty Kelley, author of biographies of Nancy Reagan and Taylor. ‘‘Always there were music and feasts. Sometimes there were belly dancers, hashish and pornographic movies.’’

There were also conga lines, kissing games and an endless flow of alcohol. His favourite tipple was Dom Perignon and, after the overthrow of the shah, when representatives of the new Islamic republic under Ayatollah Khomeini occupied the building, they uncorked more than 43,000 bottles of champagne, Scotch, vodka, vermouth, gin and wine from the cellar and, in keeping with Iran’s new prohibitions on alcohol, poured them down the drain of a fountain in the embassy’s backyard. It reportedly took four hours to dispose of it all.

After the shah’s downfall in 1979, Zahedi was sentenced to death back home and fled into exile in Switzerland. He was also investigated by the FBI over improper gifts and payments to public officials.

He knew eight US presidents, from Truman to George Bush Sr, and on his watch Iran sold vast amounts of oil to the US and in return bought arms worth billions of dollars to become America’s largest customer for military equipment. Yet Zahedi was never indicted. He remained loyal to the shah, and was by his side when he died in Egypt in 1980. However, he was not entirely hostile to the new regime in Tehran and was a defender of the country’s nuclear programme.

He lived the rest of life in Montreux, making occasional political interventions to lament the breakdown of relations between Washington and Tehran. He was particularly critical of President Trump’s threats against Iran, describing them as ‘‘a pressure tactic wrapped in bellicosity folded inside a chimera’’.

He is survived by his daughter, Princess Zahra Mahnaz Zahedi, from his marriage to Shahnaz Pahlavi, the shah’s daughter. They met in 1954 when she was 14, married three years later and divorced in 1964.

Ardeshir Zahedi was born in Tehran, the son of General Fazlollah Zahedi and Khadijeh Pirnia, whose father and brother both served as prime ministers of Iran. His parents separated when he was a boy and his father was imprisoned during World War II by the British on suspicion of being a Nazi sympathiser. He later became prime minister of Iran in the British and US-backed coup of 1953, replacing Mohammad Mossadegh.

After the war, Zahedi studied in Beirut and Utah State University, from where he graduated in 1950 with a degree in agricultural engineering. He supported his father in the 1953 coup and, having first met and befriended the shah in America several years earlier, he was well placed to act as a courier between monarch and prime minister.

He was 32 when the shah sent him to Washington as ambassador in 1960, but he fell out with the Kennedy administration and after two years he was reposted as ambassador to Britain for four years.

Back in Tehran he served as foreign minister to the shah before returning to Washington in 1973. Over the next six years he tore up the template of the discreet diplomat, turning Iran into a splashy luxury brand, which blinded President Carter’s White House to the revolution that was fomenting back in Tehran.

The result was disastrous for US foreign policy and contributed to Carter’s election defeat by Ronald Reagan, after militants took over the embassy in Tehran and held 52 US diplomats and citizens hostage.

For Zahedi the rupture between America and Iran was a shattering blow but he kept up his attempts to reconcile them until the end. ‘‘It is in their interest to pursue a new and constructive approach in their relations and prove their sincerity,’’ he wrote shortly before his death.