Last Nizam (9781742626109) (35 page)

Helen's personal life, however, was far from idyllic. Her desire for independence and Jah's expectations of how a good Muslim wife should behave were creating tension in the relationship. When Helen suggested going to Europe on her own, Jah was shocked and insisted that she take ‘a lady friend' with her. ‘I like to zip around in my Triumph Stag, but as a Muslim he finds it hard to accept that I should go out on my own and have men friends – just platonic,' she told Morrow.
¹⁷

One of those platonic friends was Peter Forbes, a cousin of businessman Kerry Stokes. Helen met Forbes in 1983 at a charity function organised by Kelly at the Stokes's home in Dalkeith. Forbes was a closet homosexual who sponged off wealthy relatives and used his charm to extract largesse from friends. He also had a reputation for being a witty and acceptable companion for lonely society wives. Knowing that Forbes was a homosexual and that the relationship was not physical, Jah agreed to let Helen hire him. Forbes became Helen's driver, social secretary
and escort, smoothing her way into Perth's swank social circles and nightclubs, including Connections, the city's only gay venue.

In 1985 Helen made her social debut at a fashion show organised by Elle, Perth's most exclusive boutique. ‘She took a tableful of friends that night, arrived fashionably late and featured a blinding array of fabled Indian jewels,' recalls Steve McLeod who wrote the
Woman's Day
feature. ‘From then on the hoi polloi got to see more of Helen, most often in [Juanita] Walsh's weekly social columns. She was at the Louis Feraud Parade, the opening of the Merlin Hotel's discotheque, the party for Garrard, jewellers to the Queen . . . and, most of the time, so was Peter Forbes.'
¹⁸

Helen's next step up the social ladder came in the autumn of 1986 when she threw open Havelock House for the first time for a cocktail party to raise funds for the Black & White Committee, a well-endowed Perth charity. When she phoned Jah in India to tell him of her plans, he was disapproving, but there was nothing he could do about it. ‘I want to live my life the way I like to live, to enjoy it and not worry about what people might say. It's taken me all this time to come to terms with that. It's been the hardest thing of all,' she told McLeod a few days later.
¹⁹

Perth had never seen a party like it. The 250 paying guests were treated to an Arabian Nights theme that included real camels, papier mâché elephants and inflatable crocodiles floating in the illuminated swimming pool. The only things missing were the tiger cubs that Perth Zoo had refused at the last moment to deliver. Helen ordered 23 dozen bottles of Moët & Chandon to wash down the barbecued prawns and marinated chicken. Drunk on champagne, Helen forgot her nervousness and began dancing with Forbes's bisexual boyfriend, a young university student named Mark Brown. Though the official party was over and most of the guests had gone home, she ordered more champagne to be fetched from the kitchen and told the pianist to keep playing.
Brown began flirting outrageously with Helen as a drunken Forbes kept crying out: ‘That's my boyfriend. I love him. She's taking him away from me!'
²⁰

The one-night fling turned into a full-blown affair and a few months later, while on a visit to Murchison House Station, she asked Jah for a divorce. ‘We wanted different things from life and gradually we tended to follow different paths,' Jah would later say. ‘I wanted to escape the so-called glamorous life. I had taken my fill of lavish parties and shared little in common with the glitterati of Perth's money society . . . Helen, on the other hand, was happy in this environment. She loved the constant parties, the attention and I suppose the escape these things gave her.'
²¹

In seeking an escape, however, Helen had sealed her fate. In February 1987, after complaining of throat trouble, she was diagnosed as being HIV-positive. Within a few months Brown and Forbes had also tested positive.

‘I remember Helen coming to my room one morning. She was crying,' Jah recalls, sitting on his blue armchair and lighting another cigarette, the late-afternoon Mediterranean sunshine streaming through the window of his Turkish apartment. ‘I asked if there was something wrong. She told me she had AIDS. Thinking it was some kind of women's disease I said to her, “I'm sure we can fix that.” The doctors told us it was a new disease, they didn't know much about it, but they knew it was fatal. I asked if there was a cure. They said there wasn't one.'
²²

Devastating as the news was for both of them, Helen insisted on going through with the divorce the couple had been contemplating for a year. In March 1987 Perth newspapers began carrying stories of the break-up. Bitter and angry, Helen moved out of Havelock House and withdrew completely from the busy social life she had so desperately cultivated. ‘We believe Helen died long before she actually did,' her sister Julie said. ‘She just
wasn't the Helen we all knew. And when Peter Forbes died she went downhill rapidly. In a bizarre sort of way she blamed Peter.'
²³

Though Helen managed to keep the news of her disease from her parents, Forbes made no secret of the fact that he had AIDS and that Brown had infected both of them. Jah, meanwhile, continued to visit Helen when she was admitted to the Royal Perth Hospital. ‘It was agonising to see her dying and to know that there was no cure. As the disease took hold she went through periods when she didn't know who I was. I last saw her three days before she died.'
²⁴

On 17 May 1989 the
Daily News
carried on its front page a story that Perth's ‘party-going princess' had died aged 41. Neither the
News
nor
The West Australian
, which picked up the story a day later, mentioned the cause of death, but every editor, radio shock jock and TV executive knew that Perth's only princess had died of AIDS. After the publication the following weekend of a story in the
Sunday Times
about people who deliberately transmitted the virus, local talkback radio host Howard Sattler demanded that the WA Department of Health take action by removing from society such criminals, otherwise he would take matters in his own hands and name them. He also threatened to reveal the identity of the ‘society woman' who had recently died of AIDS.
²⁵

Believing he was on the secret list Sattler claimed to have, Brown obtained an injunction in the Supreme Court against Radio 6PR and Channel Nine television, suppressing the publication of his name and Helen's. But on 29 May the court reversed its decision and allowed Helen to be named as the woman referred to by Sattler. The judge reserved his decision on whether to name Brown, who was from then on referred to as Mr X. In court, Brown's lawyer John Chaney said that ‘neither he nor the princess were aware who infected the other'.
²⁶
The
couple's relationship had continued until Helen's death and Mr X had not intentionally spread the disease. Chaney told the court that if his client was named, others in the same position would be deterred from exercising their rights. While Sattler was effectively gagged, Channel Seven journalist Derryn Hinch used his nationally televised current affairs program to name Brown in eastern Australian states. Viewers in Perth saw the words ‘Censored' written across Hinch's face while a beeping sound drowned out Brown's name.
²⁷

As newspapers milked the story as much as they could, there was outrage among civil liberties groups who claimed that the naming of an AIDS victim was a gross invasion of privacy and hurtful to the victim's family. ‘What really frightened them was that Helen was a middle-aged, heterosexual woman, and a royal one at that. It was an exercise in a small community's hysteria,' lawyer Penny Giles said at the time. Walsh blamed the press for inferring that Perth society was AIDS-ridden and that Helen had spread it. ‘They just wanted to knock up the richies, to make up they're all up each other and disease-ridden.'
²⁸

The intimate details of his failed marriage splashed across the front pages of the tabloid press, Jah left Perth in late May 1989 shocked and confused. Newspapers reported he was in Switzerland undergoing another round of AIDS tests and that he had instructed his lawyers to apply for a caveat on Helen's will in order to block Brown from becoming a beneficiary. Uncertain about his future in Australia and too browbeaten to go back to Hyderabad, Jah flew on to Turkey to consider his next move.

Losing the mother of his two boys was a great personal tragedy, but it was not the only crisis he had to deal with. Jah found himself involved in a custody battle for his sons, whom Helen had instructed to be placed in the care of her younger sister Rhonda.
His finances were also in a mess. Jah had been drawing on his inheritance at an unsustainable rate and very little of it was being used productively. The number of people in Hyderabad trying to sue him for one reason or another had passed the 800 mark and Indian tax authorities were breathing down his neck. ‘There came a time when he was told convincingly that “if you stay in Hyderabad you could be arrested” and when he moved out of Hyderabad he was told “you should not go back because there are too many cases against you and you could be in legal problems. Private debtors and the government would hunt you down,”' says
The Deccan Chronicle
's Khan.
²⁹

The first hint that Jah's financial problems were too real to ignore came in 1988. Jah's biggest toy was his 260-tonne wooden-hulled, ex-mine sweeper, the
Kalbarrie
. ‘The old Kalbarrie is his little workhouse,' one of Jah's associates was quoted as saying. ‘He likes things to go wrong on it so he can fix it.'
³⁰
Since purchasing the yacht in 1978, however, his greatest problem was keeping his hands on it. In September 1981 customs officials threatened to seize the boat because it had been imported without permission. The boat was allowed to remain in Fremantle Harbour until repairs were completed in August 1982. Jah then sailed it to Port Moresby, only to be intercepted off Broome by customs, who searched the boat and charged one of its crew members with possession of cannabis. From Papua New Guinea the boat went to Townsville where it stayed until August 1984, while Jah's office manager in Perth, Richard Howell, tried unsuccessfully to get worker's compensation insurance for the yacht's six-member crew. Howell eventually had to obtain expensive personal accident cover for each appointed crew member.
³¹
The boat sailed for Fremantle on 15 August 1984, picking up additional crew on the way. One of those crew members, Gary Wynn, drowned on 9 September while the boat was making its way down the Western Australian coast. Howell had sent
Wynn's name to the insurers before the drowning, but it was received only after his death. Cover was denied.

Jah's problems with his ‘little workhorse' did not end there. In early 1987 the
Kalbarrie
was hoisted onto a slipway in Fremantle to repair its hull, which had been chewed by sea worms, and to fix a damaged keel. A year later it was still there. Franmarine, the company that carried out the repair work, said it would not release the boat until the A$100,000 it was owed had been paid in full. Jah had refused to pay, claiming he had been overcharged for substandard work. Franmarine was prepared to take the dispute all the way to the Supreme Court, when in June 1989, Howell sent the company a letter saying that Hebros (Australia) Pty Ltd would be prepared to set aside a certain matter regarding the standard of work if the amount still owing could be paid in $25,000 lots. The letter revealed that there was more to the non-payment than a disagreement over workmanship: ‘As explained at our recent meeting our Australian funds situation is totally dependent upon us receiving funds from our Principal's overseas connections. Steps are being taken to ensure that requirements of this office are met. We do not reasonably believe that these funds will not be forthcoming. However, we must advise that their failure to arrive could seriously curtail our above suggested funding dates.'
³²

The cash-flow problems alluded to in Howell's letter stemmed in large part from Jah's failed attempt, two years earlier, to auction off the largest and most valuable coin in the world. The 1000-mohur solid gold sovereign was minted in 1613 during the reign of Mughal Emperor Jehangir. Twenty centimetres in diameter and 2.5 centimetres thick, the coin weighed 11.9 kilograms. Also up for auction was a smaller 100-mohur coin, weighing in at 1.1 kilograms, which was minted in Lahore in 1639. Though researchers had seen historical references to such coins, it was assumed that most had been melted down for bullion. It was the
first time the legendary sovereigns had been sighted in public for more than 350 years.

The auction, set for 9 November 1987 in Geneva, created enormous interest among collectors. Auctioneers Habsburg Feldman SA refused to disclose either the vendor or the provenance of the coins other than to say that they were used for presentation purposes by the Mughal Emperors. ‘I can't reveal the owner, but the coin is so fantastic it would not occur to anyone to fake it,' Dr Gera von Habsburg told London's
Sunday Times
, referring to the larger sovereign. ‘Nobody knows its early provenance after it was made in Agra, and nobody in the West knew about it at all before two years ago.'
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