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Transformed into Jordan's queen, Lisa Halaby followed party line

Sunday, April 20, 2003

By Mackenzie Carpenter, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Some 26 or so years ago, when I was working as a lowly assistant at the PBS TV station in Washington, D.C., Jim Lehrer asked me to bring a job applicant to his office.

	"Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life" By Queen Noor Miramax ($25.95)

I nearly gasped when I saw her. Tall, blond, drop-dead gorgeous. Who the heck is that? I wondered. She eyed me coolly, then, no doubt, dismissed me from her world as I dutifully led her to her interview.

She didn't get the job, but a little more than a year later, folks in the office vividly remembered Lisa Halaby when it was announced that the 26-year-old Princeton grad and by-then-employee of Jordanian Airlines had gotten a much better offer: queen of Jordan.

Not only did she become King Hussein of Jordan's fourth wife, she received a new name: Noor Al-Hussein, or "Light of Hussein," and became the instant mother of eight stepchildren.

Talk about a quick turnaround.

The courtship of a blue-jeaned young American girl by a man dubbed the world's most eligible bachelor may seem like a fairy tale, but what happened afterward is not. Instead, her memoir is a reasonably honest portrait of a marriage amid the turbulence of Middle East politics, published four years after the death of Hussein and just in time for the latest war in that troubled region.

Actually, the timing of this memoir, written with journalist Linda Bird Francke, might seem propitious from a public relations point of view. But on a recent book tour, the queen wasn't taking questions about the Iraq war. And why should she?

During her more than two dozen years as queen of a country that borders Iraq and Israel and is home to many Palestinian and Iraqi refugees, she learned, no doubt the hard way, to measure her words carefully lest they become a political liability to her husband.

Now a widow who still maintains the honorary title of queen (the current Jordanian queen is Rania, wife of King Abdullah), she is nothing if not politic -- except when it comes to Israel.

It's a little hard to get past descriptions of her Jordanian in-laws referring to Israel's independence in 1948 as "the catastrophe" and screaming at the television set, "Don't sign it!" on the day of the historic Camp David Accords.

She notes the power of the "Zionist lobby" in Congress, and American supporters of Israel were, she writes, "CEOs of large American corporations and representatives of the top levels of media and entertainment businesses, financial institutions, legal and medical professions, and increasingly the highest reaches of government."

Indeed, "Jews from all over the world" have "achieved influence and power at the highest levels."

But that's the viewpoint she married when she married her husband, an Arab king who, for 47 years, dodged assassin's bullets and maneuvered his country through numerous wars and uprisings, all in ultimately futile attempts, she said, to build peace in the region.

Nothing in her own childhood could have prepared Queen Noor for life in a palace in Amman with an extended family of needy stepchildren, occasionally querulous in-laws and scheming courtiers.

She grew up in, as she describes it, "your typical moderately dysfunctional mid-20th century family," the daughter of a dashing, distinguished but distant father of Arab descent (Najeeb Halaby served in the Kennedy administration and as chairman of Pan American Airlines) and a socially ambitious mother of Swedish ancestry (who cried when young Lisa refused, before relenting, to become a debutante).

Bounced from school to school before graduating from Princeton with a degree in architecture (though she dropped out for a year to become a ski bum in Aspen, waiting on tables and cleaning houses), she was a loner and a dreamer who aimed for a career in journalism or the Peace Corps.

She writes that she was more surprised than anyone when she caught King Hussein's eye.

That's the most fun part of the book. Halaby, through her father's connections, had been working in Jordan for eight months on a project that was soon to end, but before she could return to the United States to enter journalism school, she was asked to lunch by Hussein, who knew her father and whose third wife, Queen Alia, had died in a helicopter accident the year before.

It was a lunch that lasted seven hours, she noted in her diary, but that's about all she wrote down. And indeed, just what transpired during the ensuing three-week courtship?

Noor doesn't say, except for some prim details: They spent time with his children, watched movies, had long talks. Very nice.

She plainly adored her husband. He was a loving father and stimulating companion. And, as long as she stayed within the confines of her well-coifed queenship (she has a sense of humor about her attempts to look regal; one disaster at snooty French hairdresser Alexandre left her looking, in her own words, "like Marge Simpson"), he encouraged her to get out there and improve the country.

But Hussein was no sensitive man of the 1980s. After she had a miscarriage in which he made no attempt to comfort her, Noor confronted him, only to have Hussein inform her that many others, including his good friend, the Shah of Iran, who had just been exiled from his country, had suffered far greater misfortunes.

Huh?

"His response to any personal concern I expressed would be to counter with some greater problem that he was suffering from, in order to put my problem in perspective," she writes, adding in the next breath that "this man, who had the biggest heart in the world, could not talk about things that were personally painful to him precisely because he felt that pain so deeply. He simply could not handle it."

Noor also addresses rumors, rampant during the early 1990s, of Hussein's infidelity, noting that when she confronted him, he denied it. She chose to believe him.

The book was published about half a year behind schedule, after it was reportedly sent back for rewriting because the queen -- who is known to prefer making long speeches about agricultural policy to answering personal questions -- wasn't delivering the goods, at least in terms of good dish.

Indeed, Noor was so aloof as a child, she writes, that her mother consulted a psychologist, who assured Mrs. Halaby that her daughter would grow out of it. Still, "to this day I am most comfortable when a conversation has an intellectual focus. Perhaps this helps explain why I have always felt particularly inept at and impatient with small talk, intrigues and gossip."

Agricultural speeches aside, there's no doubt Noor is taken more seriously than when she first married, particularly in her role as an articulate spokeswoman for the Landmine Survivors Network.

It's a far cry from the early days, when she was casually asked by an American reporter if she and Hussein planned to have children.

The queen answered with an equivocal comment like "If God wills," only to find that the ensuing story, in People Magazine, ran the headline: "A Blue-Jeaned American in Jordan Says of Her King: 'I'd Be Delighted To Have His Child.' "

This would have never happened on "The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour."