The Mansions Of Limbo Part 11

February 1989

THE LIGHT OF HUSSEIN.

People came because she was beautiful, and were then awed by her brilliance. She had dispelled the fairy-tale image. "This is no fairy tale. This is not a fairy tale at all," said Sarah Pillsbury, the Hollywood film producer, about her Concord Academy cla.s.smate Queen Noor al Hussein after the queen had spoken in the United States in October, defending the controversial role of her husband, King Hussein of Jordan, in the Middle East crisis. The Arab kingdom is precariously situated, bordered by Iraq, Israel, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. Should a war erupt, Jordan could become a battlefield. But in Amman, the capital, there was no overt sense of turbulence, or of a country close to war, during my visit two weeks later.

Foreign correspondents, on their way to and from Baghdad or Riyadh, talked in the bar of the Inter-Continental Hotel of atrocities and war, but taxi drivers and shopkeepers did not. Over dinner, the minister of information, speaking for the king, told a group of American journalists, "We don't want war. We are extremely nervous about military action in the area. We cannot afford to have a war. Jordan will be destroyed." But life seemed to go on as usual. In Petra, "the rose-red city half as old as time," I asked a Bedouin guide, "Don't you worry about the crisis?" "No," he replied, "we live our life in crisis. We have our faith. We're not afraid of death."

I had come hoping to see the American queen, whom I had heard speak several weeks earlier at the Brookings Inst.i.tute in Washington, D.C., but my visit began inauspiciously. Checking into the Inter-Continental Hotel, I was confronted by a figure from the palace, Fouad Ayoub, who informed me that there were obstacles. The appointment for an interview with Her Majesty, he said, was unfixed, uncertain, and unpromised. There was a reluctance to let me meet with her until certain guidelines had been agreed upon, guidelines that were never going to be agreed upon. The best I was able to muster up was an evening visit with the only female member of the Jordanian senate, Laila Sharaf. An unpromising interview, of real interest to neither Mrs. Sharaf nor me.

The taxi driver who took me from the Inter-Continental to Mrs. Sharaf's house, high up on a hill on the outskirts of the city, spoke English but resisted all my attempts at conversation. There was, I was soon to discover, an underlying dislike of Americans in the country. In the taxi was a photograph of King Hussein next to one of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, the man described by President Bush as worse than Hitler. King Hussein, who for many years positioned Jordan as a "moderate" Arab monarchy-who, indeed, has long been one of Washington's staunchest allies in the region-refused to join the anti-Saddam coalition. The surface reasons were apparent: Palestinians, who have sided with Iraq, account for more than half of Jordan's population, and the king could ill afford to ignore their interests. Even those Jordanians opposed to the brutal policies of Saddam Hussein are more opposed to the presence of American troops in the area. Although Jordan has abided by the U.N. sanctions against Iraq, the king's position severely strained his relations with the Bush administration and Saudi Arabia, which reacted by cutting off oil shipments to Jordan, leaving Iraq as its only supplier, and deepening the economic crisis.

At Mrs. Sharaf's large and handsome villa, the scent of night-blooming jasmine filled the air. The flower garden was in full bloom, and birds in great profusion sang on the roof. It was a setting of Middle Eastern luxe, marred only by the presence of an armed guard in a sentry box. I asked the taxi driver to wait for me in the courtyard. He was reluctant until I a.s.sured him that I would pay for his waiting time.

Laila Sharaf, the widow of a prime minister, is a distinguished woman in her own right, involved in cultural affairs. With the queen, she was active in starting the Jerash Festival of Culture and Arts, an annual program of dance, poetry, and music held in an ancient Roman amphitheater. The festival brought thousands of tourists to the country and was a boon to the economy, but with the beginning of the Gulf crisis, tourism became nonexistent overnight. Her butler brought a tray with gla.s.ses of lemonade, orange juice, cola, and water. We settled on comfortable sofas, and she began to describe to me the duties and accomplishments of the American queen.

A fiercely private woman until the recent events in the Middle East focused attention on her, Queen Noor has never captured the imagination of the American public in the way that Princess Grace of Monaco, her obvious counterpart, did. Comparisons to the late princess are said to disconcert, even annoy, her. In London recently, she attended the play Love Letters with her great friend Tessa Kennedy, the interior designer who decorated several residences of the Jordanian royal family. After the show, the queen went backstage to visit one of the stars, another old American friend, Stefanie Powers. A friend of mine who sat behind the queen said she was virtually unrecognized by the audience. She has never become a fashion darling of the international paparazzi in the manner of the Princess of Wales, the d.u.c.h.ess of York, and the two princesses of Monaco. However, since Iraq invaded Kuwait in August, the queen has had a much higher profile, becoming the most visible woman in the Middle East. She played a major role in helping to organize aid for the nearly three-quarters of a million refugees who fled from Kuwait and flooded into her adopted country. The presence of the refugees placed an enormous burden on Jordan's already stricken economy. Her main priority was to help get the refugees home, and to accomplish that she personally enlisted the aid of Richard Branson, the British music and entertainment entrepreneur, who owns Virgin Atlantic Airways. The queen had recently returned from the United States, where she had spoken publicly in New York and Washington and had been interviewed by Barbara Walters on "Nightline." On that program she evidenced her skill in evading ticklish questions. When Walters asked her to describe her impression of Saddam Hussein, she replied that she had met him only once, very briefly. When Walters continued, "When your husband comes home after he's had these meetings, how does he describe him?" the queen replied, "My husband and I discuss issues more than personalities."

She was criticized in Jordan by those who felt it was not the natural role of the wife of the king to give speeches about foreign policy. In addressing such criticism, Mrs. Sharaf said, "The queen not only understands the facts, but she has put herself on the same perspective as the Arabs. Her way of thinking is very Western, but she has absorbed the Arab side."

Outside the house, arrival sounds could be heard. The butler hurried into the room and spoke excitedly to Mrs. Sharaf in Arabic. "She is here," Mrs. Sharaf said, surprised.

"Who?" I asked.

She rose and rapidly made her way to the hall and opened the door. A BMW motorcycle was driving into the courtyard. On it was King Hussein, the longest-ruling leader in the Arab world. Sitting behind him on the seat, arms around his waist, was Queen Noor. A military vehicle filled with soldiers came up behind them.

Suddenly feeling like an intruder, I said, "Would you like me to leave?"

"No, no. Wait in that room," my hostess told me.

I retreated to the salon and listened as she greeted the king and queen. The royal couple said they had been out for an evening spin in the hills above Amman and had decided to call on Mrs. Sharaf. Then I heard the lowered voice of Mrs. Sharaf explaining my presence in the adjoining room.

Suddenly the door opened, and the queen walked into the salon where I was standing. She is thirty-nine years old, tall, slender, and exceptionally good-looking. She was wearing blue jeans and a loose-fitting light blue sweater, but her carriage was as regal as if she had been in coronation regalia. Her long honey-colored hair fell to her shoulders, kept in place by a headband. Despite the informality of her dress and the situation we found ourselves in, however, the formal distance of royalty prevailed. She had come to pay an impromptu call on a friend and had found an unexpected visitor. "Sir," she said in greeting. Later I discovered she addresses most men as "sir."

Her looks are American. Her handshake is American. Her eye contact is American. And yet, somehow, she is ceasing, or has even ceased, to be American. In Washington earlier in the month, when she spoke at the Brookings Inst.i.tute, she had several times said, "Speaking as an Arab ..." Lisa Halaby, Princeton '74, has truly become, during the twelve years of her marriage, the Queen of Jordan. Her voice is American, but her manner of speech is not. So deliberate is her prose style that at times I had the ridiculous feeling that she was translating in her mind from Arabic to English. She often interjects phrases such as "if you will" and "as it were." There is no chitchat. There are no short answers. Every sentence is carefully thought out and spoken in a modulated, complicated, sometimes convoluted manner.

Behind her, a moment later, the king appeared. He, too, was dressed for biking, in a black leather jacket and aviator gla.s.ses, but even though his attire was informal, his history enveloped him. The thirty-eighth-generation descendant of the Prophet, he has been on the throne of the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan for thirty-eight years. At the age of fifteen, he witnessed the a.s.sa.s.sination of his grandfather King Abdullah during a visit to the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. The same a.s.sa.s.sin then fired at him, but the bullet was deflected by a medal on the tunic of his military-school uniform. Two years later, he succeeded his mentally unstable father, King Talal, to the throne. If he was distressed at finding a reporter present during a rare private moment in his overcast life, he gave no indication of it. We shook hands. In all the official photographs that hang in the shop windows and office buildings of Amman, the king stands considerably taller than the queen. In reality, the queen is taller than the king by almost a head. Mrs. Sharaf motioned us to sit, and the butler reappeared with his tray of juices and cola. In the awkward moments that followed, I said that although I had hoped to meet them I had never expected to encounter them on a motorcycle.

"We courted on a motorcycle," said the queen. I was struck by the old-fashioned word "courted." "It was the only way we could get off by ourselves." Then she added, with a slight nod of her head to the courtyard outside, where the king's guards were, "Of course, we were always followed."

They discussed the n.o.bel Peace Prize, which had been awarded that day to Mikhail Gorbachev. The king had sent him a telegram of congratulations. They discussed Vaclav Havel. The queen said she had never met Havel, but would like to. She added that their days of travel were limited, at least for the time being. Invariably, the conversation returned to the Gulf crisis. It is a constant in everyone's mind. It is the dark cloud over their country and monarchy. "The country has never been more united," she said.

Although she is a beautiful woman, her intelligence rather than her beauty is her dominant force. She has weathered gossip and criticism, but even those salon ladies, as they are called, meaning the upper-cla.s.s ladies of Amman, who most disliked her in the beginning have a grudging respect for the manner in which she recently presented the views of her country in the United States. Her husband, who has been on the throne since his wife was one year old, is at the peak of his popularity in his country. Several times during the visit, he looked over at her and smiled. There is an open affection between them. When she returned from her recent trip abroad in the royal family's Gulfstream jet, the king was at the airport to meet her.

In the course of the conversation, the queen mentioned that she would visit the new site of the Jubilee School the next day. The Jubilee School is one of her pet projects, a three-year coeducational boarding school for the most gifted high-school students in the region, providing them with scholarships to develop their leadership potential.

After fifteen minutes I departed, leaving them to their visit. Outside, in the courtyard, the king's motorcycle had been parked by the front door. Eight soldiers carrying a.s.sault rifles hovered by the guardhouse waiting for their monarch. My taxi driver, who had been heretofore so disagreeable, was now wide-eyed with awe. He was convinced that the king had arrived by motorcycle at the hilltop villa specifically to meet with me in secret conference. I did nothing to dissuade him of his misperception. The following morning a call came from the palace, inviting me to go along with the queen on her visit to the Jubilee School. In the days that followed, every time I encountered the taxi driver at the taxi stand in front of the hotel, we shook hands and chatted amiably, but by that time I was being picked up by silver Mercedes sedans with soldier-chauffeurs provided by the palace, and had no more need of taxis.

Queen Noor al Hussein was born Lisa Najeeb Halaby on August 23, 1951, into a prominent Arab-American family. Her well-known father, Najeeb Halaby, known as Jeeb, was of Syrian descent. He headed the Federal Aviation Administration during the Kennedy-Johnson years and was at one time the president of Pan American World Airways. Lisa was fashionably educated at the National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., and the Concord Academy in Ma.s.sachusetts before entering Princeton University in its first coeducational freshman cla.s.s. She wore a black armband to protest the Vietnam War and became one of the first women cheerleaders. "She wore white ducks. She was the most gorgeous thing you ever saw, with her long hair," recalled television producer Gillian Gordon, one of her cla.s.smates and still a close friend. After her soph.o.m.ore year, she took a year off and moved to Aspen, Colorado, where she supported herself as a waitress. She also did work in the library of the Aspen Inst.i.tute and indulged her pa.s.sion for skiing. Returning to Princeton, she took her degree in architecture and urban planning. Her graduation yearbook picture shows a rather plain girl with long, stringy hair and a quizzical, faraway look in her eyes. Beside their pictures, most of her cla.s.smates have a paragraph about themselves, describing academic accomplishments and future dreams. But not Lisa Halaby. Beside her picture is a blank white s.p.a.ce, startling in retrospect, as if her past had already been put behind her and her future as the queen of a Middle Eastern country was too unfathomable even to imagine.

After Princeton she traveled to Australia and Iran, where she was hired as an a.s.sistant by Marietta Tree, the director of the American branch of the British architectural and planning firm of Llewelyn-Davis, Weeks. The firm had been commissioned by the late Shah of Iran to replan the city of Teheran, and Lisa Halaby lived there for six months doing architectural drafting. From Teheran she went to Jordan, where her father was closely connected with the head of Alia, the Jordanian airline, to work on a plan for the creation of an Arab air university. She was introduced to King Hussein when he was attending a ceremony to mark the arrival of the first jumbo jet to join Alia, which later became Royal Jordanian airlines.

The king's first marriage, to Dina Abdul Hamid, whom he had met in London when still a schoolboy, took place in 1955, shortly after his nineteenth birthday. Dina, seven years his senior, was an intellectual with a university education and a keen understanding of the politics of the Arab world. The marriage was encouraged by his mother, Queen Zein, who admired Dina's intelligence and Hashemite credentials and was eager for her son to settle down. A daughter, Princess Alia, was born, but the marriage collapsed only eighteen months after the wedding. While Dina was on a holiday in Egypt, the king divorced her. For the next six years, Princess Dina was allowed to see her daughter only once. Many years later, Dina married a Palestinian commando who was also seven years younger than she.

In 1961, King Hussein married for the second time. His bride, Antoinette "Toni" Gardiner, was a nineteen-year-old English girl, the daughter of a lieutenant colonel serving in Jordan. They were introduced at a dance. Toni became a Muslim and adopted an Arab name, Muna al Hussein, meaning "Hussein's wish." Like Dina, Muna was made a princess, but not queen, and when Hussein announced the engagement on the radio, he described Muna as a Muslim, but not as an Arab. Her English background was left for a subsequent announcement. A year later a much-hoped-for son was born. Prince Abdullah was named after Hussein's slain grandfather. Another son followed, Prince Feisal, and twin daughters, Princess Zein and Princess Aisha. In addition, Alia, his daughter from his marriage to Princess Dina, was brought up by Princess Muna as one of her own family.

By the end of 1972, King Hussein had met and fallen in love with Alia Toukan, the daughter of a Jordanian diplomat. To the surprise of most people in Jordan, who were unaware of any problem in his marriage, the king divorced Princess Muna and married Alia, whom he made Queen of Jordan. In 1977, Queen Alia was killed in a helicopter crash while returning from visiting a hospital in the south of Jordan. The queen left behind two children, Princess Haya and Prince Ali, as well as an adopted daughter, Abir. Abir as an infant had survived an air crash in which her mother was killed. She was found alive, cradled in her dead mother's arms. Alia was moved by the baby's plight and adopted her from her father, a Jordanian truck driver. Abir was brought up in the palace on equal footing with her royal siblings. In the five, years of her marriage, Alia had become a popular and beloved queen. The king was griefstricken by her death, and the nation was plunged into mourning. For a while he withdrew into seclusion.

When the king met Lisa Halaby, the attraction between the two was immediate. Marietta Tree, who was visiting in Jordan at the time, remembers being told by Lisa that the king had asked her to lunch. Later that day, returning from a trip to Petra, Mrs. Tree asked, "How was the lunch?" Lisa told her, "It lasted five hours. He showed me the palace, and we played with the children." One of her close friends told me that she detested the word "dated" when speaking of her romance with the king. They "courted" for six weeks, escaping from the ever-watchful eye of Amman society, sometimes on the king's motorcycle for jaunts in the country and sometimes by helicopter for private dinners at Aqaba, the beach resort on the Red Sea, where the king maintains a summer residence.

Lisa Halaby converted to Islam and took the name Noor al Hussein, which means "light of Hussein." They were married on June 15, 1978, and the new queen became stepmother to the king's eight children, adopting Abir, who was then seven, and the two small children of Queen Alia. Sarah Pillsbury said of her old friend, "She was always very bright and very mature. We were always very impressed with her. She got in touch with me about a year after the wedding, and we have kept in touch since then. I was struck by her dignity and her determination to be the best wife and queen. The king never said to her, 'Do this. Do that.' She figured it out herself. Has she changed? None of us are the same people we were back then, and she's not, either." Another friend, the journalist Carinthia West, who attended the National Cathedral School with her, said, "Sure, it was hard for her in the beginning. She had no family. No buddies." It is a fact that there was a great deal of resentment toward the new queen at the beginning of her marriage, especially on the part of the fashionable ladies of Amman. There are indications also that jealousies occurred in the king's family over the new, fourth wife of the king. "It wasn't just because she's tall, blond, and American," a Jordanian woman told me. "It was because she became the queen." In the years that have followed, Queen Noor has had four children of her own. Prince Hamzah was born in 1980, Prince Hashim in 1981, Princess Iman in 1983, and Princess Raiyah in 1986.

When the queen goes about her daily duties, she travels in a motorcade, but there are no Daimlers, no Rollses, no Bentleys, no sirens, and no flags. This queen drives herself, in a jeep-a Mercedes jeep, but a jeep nonetheless. She chooses who is going to ride with her, and her companions change during the day so that she can talk privately with her attendants or her guests. Her jeep is in the middle of the motorcade, preceded and followed by military vans with soldiers.

On several occasions I rode in the jeep with the queen. She drives the way she speaks, carefully. Unlike the English princesses, who are always being stopped for speeding, she does not drive fast. She is sometimes recognized by pa.s.sengers in other cars, who lean out their windows to wave at her. She always smiled and waved back. At a busy five-way intersection in the middle of the city, one of the soldiers in the vehicle ahead of the jeep hopped out to halt traffic in all directions so that the queen and her party could go through. "I don't like when they do that," she said. She stopped the jeep, shook her head, and waved the other cars through, sitting out the red light like any other driver. When the light turned green, she pa.s.sed through the intersection. The traffic cop on duty smiled at her, and she waved back at him. "He knows me," she said.

After looking over the new facilities for the Jubilee School, she visited a school for girls, going from cla.s.sroom to cla.s.sroom, listening to children recite or perform, talking to as many of them as possible, giving her full attention to each conversation. About 50 percent of Jordan's population is under the age of fifteen. There is no bobbing and curtsying to her as there is to English royals making their official rounds in flowered hats. Rather, the queen extends her hand in the American manner and almost immediately engages in conversation. Her style of dress is extremely simple: Usually she wore a below-the-calf-length khaki skirt with a blue denim shirt and a blazer. She told me that when she was first married she was taken aside by an adviser and told that her duties would consist, for example, of cutting ribbons to open schools and buildings. She knew that her role would exceed such functions, but there was no precedent in the country for an activist queen. "I had always worked," she said. "My role has been a pioneering role."

When she is performing her official duties, she speaks only in Arabic. "It's my working language," she said. "I use no English when I am working with the people in the country, but I use both English and Arabic with people in the scientific fields." She now speaks the language fluently but says, "I will never be a great poet in Arabic. It's such a challenging language." With the king, who was educated in England at Harrow and Sandhurst, she speaks both languages, but they converse primarily in English. "My children are completely bilingual, more than I could ever be. I spoke only Arabic with my first child. I hope and pray they won't have to study Arabic as a second language. I want them to think in Arabic. They all go to Arabic schools. Their courses are taught in Arabic, except for English courses. Arithmetic and science are taught in both languages."

"Do they have accents?"

"They don't sound like foreigners speaking English," she replied.

Once, talking about her children, she said, "I was so lucky I was raised the way I was, and that I traveled and worked before I was married. I want my children to do the same before they marry."

"Will you send your children to school abroad?"

"I once said to the headmaster of my husband's school, 'I will send my children to the best school for each one of them when the time comes.' They will study abroad. Each is ent.i.tled to have some time to compete equally with everyone else. Within Jordan, they will always be the sons of the king. There will be those who will surround them with too much attention, judge them too easily, even take advantage of them. To really learn how to stand on their own feet, they need to get away."

Despite growing anti-American sentiment, which in some circles extends to the queen, she is in daily touch with her subjects. "The people on the street like her. They get excited when they see her. They don't look up to her. They look to her for help. They see her as the female, the softer figure whom they can reach out to for help. She has been here twelve years now. She has grown in her job," said Dr. Sima Bahous, an a.s.sistant professor of journalism at Yarmouk University, north of Amman.

I went with Queen Noor to the village of Al Ba.s.sah, an hour's drive from the capital. It was the first visit ever paid to the village by a member of the royal family. Schoolchildren lined up on both sides of the road to greet her motorcade. Like a latter-day character out of Lesley Blanch's The Wilder Sh.o.r.es of Love, the queen walked through rows of clapping schoolboys and cadets to shake hands with the elders of the village. She entered a Bedouin tent and sat on a sofa that had been placed there for her. Opposite her on chairs sat the men of the village, who told her what they needed for the village. She replied in Arabic, promising them help, asking her aides to make notes, speaking in the same deliberate manner as when she speaks in English. Up the hill from the tent, women with covered heads watched from the porch of a house. When she finished with the men, she walked up the hill to the women. They crowded around her, several hundred of them, wanting to be near her. They held up babies. They kissed her hand. She addressed herself with special care to the problems of the women. "We are equal with the men and work together, plus raise our children," they told her. During the harvest, they said, they needed a kindergarten for their children while they worked in the fields. She promised to help them. She went into the olive groves and picked olives with the women, and then walked down into a green valley that looked biblical, where the villagers grew pomegranates and figs.

On the way back to the city, I drove in the jeep with the queen. High on a mountaintop in the distance was a beautiful sprawling estate looking down on the Dead Sea. It was the country house of Prince Muhammad, a brother of the king. "My husband and I were given land up there as a wedding present, but we never built," she said. "Maybe someday, something simple, a place to get away."

The king and queen maintain a large house in London as well as an estate in the English countryside, grand enough to have been lent to the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of York to live in while their own country house was being built. But their main home is Al Nadwa, the cream-colored royal palace in Amman. As palaces go, Al Nadwa is more like a rich man's mansion than a monarch's royal residence. If all twelve of the king's children were home at the same time-an unlikely event-it would probably be a tight squeeze. A large estate set in the middle of the city, it is in a well-guarded compound with staff offices, guest residences, barracks, and several other palaces, one of which, the old palace of King Abdullah, the king's grandfather, is used by Queen Noor for her foundation and offices.

We sat in the English-looking garden under a white marquee, looking out over a lush green lawn. The marquee seemed to have permanent status in the garden, since the poles were covered with ivy. The lunch table was set for two. A butler wearing English butler clothes-dark jacket, striped trousers-carried the food on trays from the palace down a poplar-lined walkway to where we were sitting.

"This is my favorite room in the house," said the queen. "The garden is a recent thing. I put all this in. Gardening is something new for me. I wish I'd done it long before. It established an equilibrium with nature, putting my hands in the dirt, planting."

She looks as though she might have played field hockey in boarding school, but she complained about not getting enough exercise. "I do aerobics with a friend who comes here, and play tennis. We don't have a swimming pool." Plans were drawn up for one several years ago, but for security reasons it was never built. She likes to dispel the image of luxury living behind the palace walls. "I like being able to say, 'We don't have a pool.' "

"Have there been difficulties between you and other women in the royal family?" I had heard there was a chilly relationship with a sister-in-law and a former sister-in-law.

She shrugged. "I suppose it is the same in every family," she answered.

"Do you see Queen Zein?" The king's mother, Queen Zein, lives in a large, well-guarded house on Jubaiha, the road in Amman where most of the emba.s.sies are located. For years Queen Zein was the central figure in the royal family. After King Abdullah's a.s.sa.s.sination, she was a powerful influence on her son when he became king.

"If there is a family wedding, part of the celebration will always take place at her house," replied the queen carefully. "She came to see me in the hospital each time one of the children was born."

Ever since her marriage, the queen has been gossiped about. She has been accused of extravagance in clothes and jewels. She has also been accused of having had plastic surgery on her face, but her friends insist that clothes and jewels are not where her interests lie. "She is pa.s.sionately interested in what's going on," says Marietta Tree. While I was in Jordan, a report was printed in an American newspaper that said she had recently purchased an estate in Palm Beach, Florida. When I asked her about it, she just smiled and shook her head in exasperation. "I am becoming inured to criticism. When you're in my position, people are always going to talk about you." She told me of a story that went around about her several years ago in which she was accused of purchasing a ring of extraordinary value. "Everyone knew someone who had seen the bill of sale, but it could never be found. It happened to Raisa Gorbachev too. I work with a wide variety of people from all segments of life. I'll never be approved of by everybody."

In all the time that I spent with her, there was never once when I felt I could have crossed the boundaries into the verbal intimacies of Americans meeting abroad. Her guard is never relaxed. Her conversation is without levity. It is not that she is humorless; it is simply that her sky is so darkened with the winds of war and its consequences that there is no time for laughter in her life. She is always addressed as Your Majesty. As an American, I found it difficult to call another American Your Majesty, but there is no other form of address. There are those in the court who address the king as Sidi, an affectionate term meaning "sir" or "My Lord," and address the queen as Sitti, meaning "My Lady," but I never did.

"How many a.s.sa.s.sination attempts have there been on the king?" I asked. I had been told there had been twenty-seven during his thirty-eight-year reign.

She waved her hands in front of her face as if to dispel my question. "I don't know. I don't want to know. My husband has learned from experience to be wise and prescient. He gives each moment of his life a maximum energy for good use. If we sealed ourselves off in a protective bubble, we wouldn't be able to reach out and touch and feel what people need. I feel they should be able to touch us. I'm willing to take the risk of being stampeded upon if it gives them hope. It runs against any security advice he has been given over the years. They feel he is not just a figurehead, or head of state in his office. He is there as a father to the people."

"Would you discuss the succession?" I asked her.

"At the moment, Prince Ha.s.san, the king's brother, is the crown prince, so he is the king's successor. In this country, the succession has always been modified to accommodate. The monarchy should always be able to serve as a constructive and unifying force. The most important thing is that it serves the people of the country. For me, it's entirely in harmony with all I was raised to believe the role of the leader should be. It should not seek to protect its existence for its own sake."

When Prince Abdullah, the older son of Princess Muna, was born, in 1962, King Hussein named him as the crown prince, but since the country was in a constantly turbulent state, Hussein realized that a small child was not a reasonable successor. The king has two brothers. Prince Muhammad and Prince Ha.s.san. Muhammad, who was next in line after the child Abdullah, was married to, and later divorced from, the international social figure Princess Firyal, who subsequently had a highly publicized liaison with the Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos. After much consideration, the king bypa.s.sed Muhammad in favor of his younger brother, Prince Ha.s.san, who is twelve years younger than the king. Oxford-educated and a brilliant public speaker, Ha.s.san is considered the intellectual of the family. His wife, Princess Sarvath, is the daughter of a distinguished Pakistani leader and amba.s.sador. Since the ratification of Ha.s.san, the king has bypa.s.sed his two sons by the English Princess Muna and has named Prince Ali, his son by the Jordanian Queen Alia, as next in line after Prince Ha.s.san. Prince Ali, now fifteen, attends Deerfield Academy in Ma.s.sachusetts.

"I have heard it said that, because you are an American, you are becoming a liability to the king. Is that correct?"

She seemed surprised. "I haven't felt that. I have never felt it. I was born into an Arab-American family. My name, Halaby, is Arabic. I have returned to the Arab world. I am not aware that my Americanism is a liability."

Although most people in Amman dress in Western fashion, there is a growing group of Muslim fundamentalist women who have eschewed modern dress as a form of protest. "It has come out of the frustrations of the people," Sima Bahous had told me the day before. "Everybody wants an ident.i.ty. It is more than a religious movement. If they unite behind a front, their voice will be heard."

"Do you feel threatened by the fundamentalists?" I asked the queen.

"I personally don't feel threatened, but I know that my work and what I have achieved could be threatened by them. Extremism will only feed off the economic inequalities. Traditionally, women in this area, even my mother-in-law, Queen Zein, wore their hair covered. It is part of the cultural tradition. As religious extremism started to develop, there came a form of dress that was devoid of color, that covered the body from head to toe. Over it is worn a headdress that is restrictive, an uglifying fashion psychologically, to defeminize, to des.e.x, to make women totally unappealing, to negate their femininity. It is a symbol of submission. There is pressure brought to women to dress like that. I don't dress for the conservatives in society. At the same time, I don't dress the way Western women do, which would be immodest in this country."

"If war comes, do you fear losing your throne?"

"In the first place, I don't consider myself as having a throne. The only thing I would ever fear is if the peace and stability that the monarchy has offered to this country were destroyed, if all my husband struggled for, and what I have struggled for by his side, were lost. That is what I fear for. My happiness, satisfaction, and security do not come from the throne or the monarchy or having been privileged to carry the t.i.tle of Queen of Jordan."

Her older son, Prince Hamzah, arrived from school and crossed the lawn to greet his mother. Dressed in a black T-shirt and light trousers, he looked like any American boy of ten arriving home from school, ready for playtime. In a garage on the opposite side of the palace, there were miniature Volkswagens and jeeps for the royal children, the kind that run on gasoline. Hamzah was joined by the princes' young American tutor. After greeting his mother and talking about the events of his school day, Hamzah pointed to the far end of the garden and asked, "Can we make some noise down there?"

The queen smiled and nodded to her son, and then resumed the conversation. "People are beginning to realize that we in Jordan don't conform to the worst stereotypes of the oil rich, or the worst stereotypes of the terrorists. Each Arab society is different from the others. For many in the Arab world, Saddam is a patriot. He represents someone who has stood up to the overwhelming forces of the West for what he believes in. He is against Western interference in Arab affairs. For many Arabs, whose history has been marked by Western interference over many decades, his tough stand is deemed to be courageous. Whatever happens, we shall follow King Hussein. For thirty-eight years, his humanity, experience, and wisdom have been what the people identify with."

In the background Prince Hamzah appeared from behind a tree, carrying a very realistic toy a.s.sault rifle. The tutor could be seen hiding behind another tree. The queen watched for a minute, shrugged, and said, "I guess he plays war with the boys."

It had turned dark. "Will you turn on the garden lights?" she called out to Prince Hamzah. Then her youngest child, Princess Raiyah, age four, arrived back at the palace from a children's music cla.s.s. Dressed in pink jeans and a pink T-shirt, she raced to her mother. For several minutes they discussed the music cla.s.s.

There was the beginning of a chill in the air. "The weather's going to change," she said. "This will be the last time I have lunch in the garden. It will soon be too cold to sit out like this. Sometimes there's even snow." She stood up. "Would you like to see the children's zoo?" she asked.

"If war comes, what will happen to Jordan?" I asked Sima Bahous.

"Some people think Jordan will suffer the most," she replied. "If it comes, the people in the streets will not be quiet. The youth of the country will not accept war without having a say in what will come about."

"Will the king survive?"

"War means change," she said. "Everything will be in danger. Not the king, who is popular, but the inst.i.tution of monarchy."

On the night before I left Amman, the king and queen asked a small group of American journalists to dinner at the palace. On arriving there, each guest was given a seating plan showing where his or her place would be at the table. Thirty-five minutes after we had a.s.sembled and been served nonalcoholic drinks, the king and queen arrived in the reception room and, as a couple, moved around the room, greeting each guest. That night the queen wore tight black trousers and a loose-fitting black evening sweater. The king was wearing a dark business suit.

They did not sit at the head and foot of the long, narrow, elaborately set table. Instead, they sat opposite each other at the center of the table, so that during general conversation they were able to converse together. While we were served food pa.s.sed by a staff of waiters, the king's plate was brought to him with food already on it. He ate almost nothing. Speaking in quiet tones, he held the attention of the entire table as he explained his role in trying to keep peace in the Middle East since August 2, when he had been awakened by King Fahd of Saudi Arabia at six o'clock in the morning to be told that the invasion of Kuwait had taken place. In the first forty-eight hours, he had gone off to mediate at the request of President Bush, President Mubarak, and King Fahd. He had been given a.s.surances that there would be no condemnation of President Hussein, nothing to put him on the defensive. His efforts at peacekeeping, however, had been misunderstood, mistrusted, or rebuffed by former allies and friends. He seemed mired in personal melancholy, smoking cigarette after cigarette during the meal. Taking a cue from the king, a journalist seated to the left of the queen also lit up a cigarette. The queen mildly chastised the journalist for smoking, a chastis.e.m.e.nt clearly meant for the king.

Rising at the end of the dinner, the male reporters made a beeline for the queen, surrounding her to ask questions. From the sidelines, the king watched his wife at the center of the group of reporters and smiled proudly and affectionately. Lisa Halaby, Queen Noor al Hussein, had clearly come into her moment in time.

January 1991.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

DOMINICK DUNNE is the author of The Winners, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, Fatal Charms, People Like Us, and An Inconvenient Woman. He produced the films The Panic in Needle Park, Ash Wednesday, Play It As It Lays, and The Boys in the Band. A contributing editor of Vanity Fair, he lives in New York City.

To Tina Brown.

who held out her hand,

with thanks and love

Bantam Books by Dominick Dunne.

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