During the fast gallop that was his life, the Aga Khan, the playboy and spiritual leader who has died aged 88, always aimed for the winner’s enclosure – at the races and, just as assuredly, in the romantic stakes.
Through meticulous attention to breeding and racing thoroughbreds, he turned his passion for horses into a hugely profitable and successful business, owning five winners of the Derby – the blue riband of the British track – including Shergar, the greatest and most emphatic champion of them all who was later kidnapped and presumed slaughtered by the IRA.
He extended that study of form to women. He enjoyed their company, luxuriated in their admiration, rewarded them with all the generosity his stupendous wealth allowed and just as quickly unsaddled them – including two wives – when another fancy caught his eye.
Insulated by his great riches, such insouciance was one of his less attractive characteristics. During his first marriage to Sally Croker Poole, a willowy Army officer’s daughter, he bestowed an ostentatious yellow diamond ring – said to be worth £1 million – on the finger of his then mistress which she liked to flourish to envious admirers.
Yet his life was a paradox: he was both a serial philanderer and a generous philanthropist, a pleasure-seeking jet-setter and a leader of a mystical Islamic sect whose followers regarded him as a ‘living god’.
He liked to be addressed as ‘Your Highness’, the title bestowed on him by the late Queen Elizabeth, but as a young man, all this lothario of the turf wanted to do was ski for Britain – though he was never selected and he actually represented Iran in the 1964 Winter Olympics.
On his success with horses, he once observed that the racing public liked ‘continuity’, as he put it. ‘They like to follow a set of colours like mine [green and red], to watch the sons and daughters of horses they remember.’
There was no such ‘continuity’ when it came to his relationships with women. For the Aga, women had to be both decorative and subservient. ‘There is no discussion on this,’ he reportedly told his second wife, a German-born princess, at the outset of their marriage. ‘I determine things. You obey.’
For a man with homes on five continents, three private jets, a £100 million superyacht and a fleet of luxury cars, he was remarkably sensitive to criticism, feuding with journalists who had the temerity to question the apparent conflict between his sybaritic lifestyle and his role as a leader of faith.
There was criticism of his involvement in the £300 million development of the Costa Smerelda holiday resort on Sardinia and was angered by its nickname as a millionaires’ paradise. Nevertheless, it was where he chose to berth his yachts.
His followers revered him as the 49th direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad and a benefactor of immense generosity, a view that contrasted dramatically with his image in the West.
Prince Karim – ‘K’ to his friends – succeeded his grandfather as Aga Khan in 1957 at the age of 20, because he was thought to be more responsible than his bed-hopping father Aly – best known for his marriage to Hollywood star Rita Hayworth. Prince Aly subsequently died in a car crash in Paris in 1960.
On the day of his succession, the young Karim, then a Harvard student, soberly announced: ‘My religious duties begin today.’
His grandfather picked up huge donations by touring among his subjects. Ismailis would show their faith by paying him a tithe of his own weight in gold, diamonds and platinum on the occasion of his jubilees.
His successor was more circumspect about his wealth. But his sharp business brain helped Karim accumulate a sizable fortune and he was described by Forbes magazine as one of the world’s ten richest royals.
In recent years estimates of his personal wealth varied from between $1 billion (£800 million) to more than $13 billion (£10 billion), much of which he used for looking after his followers.
Although he was born in Geneva, he was half-British through his mother, Joan Yarde-Buller, previously married to the aviator Loel Guinness.
It was on the ski slopes of St Moritz that he met Croker-Poole, a former Deb of the Year.
The dashing and handsome Karim was captivated. At the time he was the world’s most eligible bachelor and, despite a magazine article describing him as ‘a gallivanting jet-setter who wants his horses, cars and women to be fast’, he avoided parties, never appeared in gossip columns and had been associated with only one woman for the previous five years.
Sally, meanwhile, with her golden-brown hair and slim figure was one of the most dazzling and in-demand models of the 1960s. It was love at first sight and, seduced by the Aga’s attentive courtship and lavish gifts of expensive jewellery, she accepted his proposal of marriage, converted to Islam and took the title of the Begum Salimah.
The wedding reception was at the Aga’s 13th-century house on the Isle de la Cite in the shadow of Notre Dame, Paris, in 1969. The colonel’s daughter wore a white sari and proceeded to say her vows across a carpet of pearls thrown at her feet by her husband’s fervent followers.
In the Ismaili ceremony, the words of the Prophet Muhammad were read aloud. Among the guests at the spectacular ceremony, where Muslims drank orange juice, Coke and sour milk while ‘K’ served champagne and Scotch to his Western friends, was Princess Margaret.
Yvette Blanche Labrousse, the fourth wife of the Aga’s grandfather, said: ‘I don’t envy her. She will need to be someone with a great deal of character and self-discipline, ready to accept second place to her husband.’
She might also have added to that list: resilience. The marriage started happily enough; their daughter Princess Zahra was born in 1970, a son Prince Rahim – now the 50th Aga Khan – in 1971 and another son Hussain in 1974.
‘And that seemed to be that as far as Karim was concerned,’ recalled a friend. ‘From the birth of his second son he showed less and less interest in Sally.’
The couple soon assumed separate lives. They even lived in separate countries, she in Switzerland and he at Chantilly, north of Paris, where the headquarters of his racing and breeding empire were.
Increasingly, his name was being linked with exotic women with equally exotic names: Italian Milena Maffei hung around for years in the hope that he would divorce Sally. Another was Ariana Soldati, the Egyptian-born widow of an Argentine businessman who spent a month being consoled by Karim on his yacht in the Mediterranean after the death of her husband in a polo accident.
But the most persistent gossip concerned Pilar Goess, an Austrian beauty who had posed nude for Playboy magazine. Pilar was the beneficiary of that yellow diamond ring. The mistresses stalked the married couple. ‘She’s always shadowing me,’ Sally remarked of Milena Maffei. ‘I go to the races and there she is, a few yards away.’
By the time Sally had settled at her mansion overlooking Lake Geneva in 1984, the marriage was all but over. Yet still there was no formal separation, let alone divorce.
The Aga was said to have been ‘desperately hurt’ by his parents’ divorce and would ‘never inflict it on his children’, a friend of Karim’s reported.
It coincided with the Aga’s most testing setback when his thoroughbred racehorse Shergar was seized from his Irish stud by an armed terror gang in 1983. The hunt for the horse, which had amassed £435,000 in prize money from only six victories, was called off after three months. Shergar was never found, and the mystery remains unsolved.
A further ten years and more of philandering was to pass before the Aga overcame his reservations about divorce and ended the marriage to Sally in 1995 with a £50 million settlement. Three years later he was wed again to German-based lawyer, Gabriele zu Leiningen, 26 years his junior. She took the title the Begum Inaara, meaning ‘bringer of light’.
Despite having a son, Aly, neither the light nor the union lasted. He was linked to other women, including a stewardess who worked on his private jet, and with British-born Beatrice von der Schulenburg, whose folk singer father Frederik van Pallandt, was half of the Nina and Frederik singing duo that had a number three hit with Little Donkey in 1960 – and who later became a member of a drugs syndicate.
I was to learn just how thin-skinned the Aga could be as he complained about articles I wrote detailing his dalliances, threatening to use European laws to sue me outside the UK.
No issue was too trivial. He even complained about an article relating how his estranged wife was using his official crest on her writing paper.
As my late colleague Nigel Dempster once observed of Karim: ‘Too rich, too privileged, too many racehorses and too many yachts.’