The daughter of an American diplomat recalls the heady summer before the fall of the Shah and the privileges that went with it

Mike and Jenny were waiting for me in the steaming snarl of traffic on Roosevelt Avenue. My younger brother and sister were on vacation from high school in the States and I was going awol from my job teaching English at an ESL Institute.

I brandished the wad of cash I’d wrested from my lecherous boss, leapt into the VW station wagon and, cradling the cassette player, sank blissfully into the backseat. Stevie Wonder wailed with delight as we fixed our gaze on the mountains and headed north to paradise.

We had made this trip countless times in the previous 15 years. Our journey in August 1978 followed a familiar pattern: the slow, traffic-choked crawl out of noisy, hot, polluted Tehran, followed by the exhilarating rush of speed as we hit the foothills; the air growing pure and cool on the gentle ascent up winding mountain roads, the sudden hike in humidity as we crested and descended through lush green forests, turning off the music to hear the insects sing, finally arriving with cries of happiness on the highway which would carry us along the Caspian coast.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Road to Caspian Sea Photograph: Andrew Waterhouse

Our hair thickened and curled as we welcomed the salty mist rolling off the sea and whipped past the roadside signs of hidden villas. Some, where we’d stayed over the years, we had named after our friends’ moms, such as Nancy Sara and Sally Sara.

Two of the first words I loved in Farsi were Ziba Kenar (beautiful shore), a ramshackle resort where my family had stayed in 1964. A lifetime later, we still laugh hysterically today at the memory of donkey rides along the shore, watching each other jerk up and down on the uncontrollable little beasts, staring in shock when they stopped to splash peepee into the sand.

In later years we played nocturnal war games with flashlights and walkie-talkies on the beach front, gleefully vexing the local gendarmes who mistook us for Soviet spies. As teenagers we rode motorcycles beside galloping herds of wild horses. At night we cranked the speakers of our Range Rovers and lay amidst the dunes, staring at the stars to a soundscape of Hendrix and Led Zeppelin.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Searching for seashells Photograph: Andrew Waterhouse

There were endless lazy afternoons playing backgammon, or being lulled into naps by the gentle harmonies of my brother Mike and his best friend Bijan strumming their guitars. Such were the memories accompanying our getaway in August 1978.

The summer was waning, along with my first year out of college. I felt an exhilarating sense of suspension which I shared with the world around me. Although I had been accepted to grad school in the US, a letter I wrote to a friend confirms I intended instead to stay in Tehran.

My engagement book for the year, later salvaged by my dad during one of his trips to Iran in the 1990s, reveals a manic lifestyle filled with hard work and much fun. Skiing, hiking, outings to the horse track, discotheques, hotel bars, clubs for the expats, the British Council library, lectures at the cultural institutes, Fellini and Scorsese films at the elite Farabi Film Club, world-class directors and movie stars at the Tehran Film Festival, bookstores everywhere, an arts and intellectual scene fuelled by cosmopolitan interchange as much as by oil wealth. My beat as the third-string arts-writer for daily newspaper Kayhan International brought me brief but intense encounters with artists from around the world.

A sunny day at the Caspian Photograph: Andrew Waterhouse

It appears I was an evangelist for gharbzadegi (westoxification), but it never occurred to me that east and west were mutually hostile. The young Iranian artists, architects, radio and television producers I was meeting had been trained in Europe, the States and the Soviet Union, but invariably strove for aesthetic synthesis with Persia’s rich and unique cultural traditions.

Political discourse was part of the scene. It had a seriousness and urgency I would never find in the States. I recall blithely excoriating the Marxist vocabulary of young Iranians and westerners alike. When university students approached me at the Iran-America Society’s coffee shop, however, I assumed they were agents of Savak, the secret police, attempting to entrap me in anti-Shah commentary.

I took the escalating crackdown seriously, but my entire adolescence had been shadowed by Savak and the CIA, and I am ashamed that at the time it all seemed like business as usual. I do remember, now, that I had started avoiding the bazaar and university districts in fear of the chaotic demonstrations which could erupt so suddenly. And in June and July 1978 I had witnessed riots in my family’s upper-class neighbourhood in northern Tehran.

Mike, my sister Jenny and I spent three days in serene seclusion at our beach retreat. Fakhundeh and Ali, the property’s caretakers, enjoyed observing our attempts at roughing it. We tried without success to roast a chicken on a campfire, but Fakhundeh, giggling, rescued it and prepared our dinner in their one-room bungalow. Mike played guitar. Jenny sketched and painted.

I wrote letters to college friends describing the play about the Trojan War I had just directed with a huge budget and a multinational cast. We had sold out over 200 seats for ten performances, despite being urged by the US and British embassies to cancel the run. Wilfully oblivious to the security threat to foreigners collecting in public spaces, I was giddy with the prospects for my theatre career. With the influx of over 50,000 expatriates to Tehran, the city was burgeoning into a pleasure dome for English-speaking entertainment-seekers. I wrote to a friend that I would be directing Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera in the autumn and postponing grad school indefinitely.

By the third day at the Caspian, the three of us were in a pleasant stupor but looking forward to the many guests due to arrive at the weekend. We remembered it was time to drive into the village and call my father from the public phone in the post office. We had the usual friendly exchanges with the locals standing in line with us.

When we finally connected with Dad, his tone was grim. He told us about the burning down of Cinema Rex in Abadan. Nearly 500 movie goers had been locked into the theatre and incinerated. Nobody knew who had done it. Dad asked us to pick him up the next day at Ramsar airport, along the coast. We uneasily told him we had invited some friends up for the weekend, but he sounded up for a party.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Around the fire, Caspian Sea, Iran Photograph: Andrew Waterhouse

The guests started arriving at twilight, roaring into the driveway on motorcycles, in BMW’s, and Land Rovers. They were a motley crowd, drawn from all sections of my social and professional life. My best friend from high school who had spent the year making a documentary about Azerbaijani nomads tore her clothes off as she ran down to the beach and soon I was introducing naked people to one another.

My Dutch leading man, who supervised a construction site down south, arrived with a jeep full of crates of beer, compliments of his buddy “Freddie Heineken”. The hard-drinking Brits, some Scots, who had built the monumental set for my show pounced, and soon started in on the drinking songs which had become as much a part of my party repertoire as the Travolta/Newton-John duets from Grease.

My pals who had just completed compulsory service in the Imperial military told hilarious, self-deprecating stories of interacting with working-class soldiers from all around Iran. My dad wandered amiably amidst the clusters of partiers. Night fell. Fires and pipes were lit. The rich, earthy fragrance of hashish enfolded us. We swam in the warm heavy water, which reflected the stars above.

The next morning my dad and I tiptoed around 50 or so snoring, murmuring bodies strewn throughout the villa. He made huge skillets of scrambled eggs and bacon in the tiny kitchen, awakening the guests with the aroma.

My brother Michael made a jaunt to the village for an armload of fresh barbari bread but returned shaken. An old man squatting beside the bakery had tossed stones at him. We shrugged it off. But tension pervaded the beach house itself. As people wolfed down their comfort food and knocked back little red vials of Vitamin B, it was impossible to avoid the topic of the latest horrific act of violence down at the other end of the country.

Who was responsible for the massacre of innocent citizens at Cinema Rex? Although most of us believed it was the work of Islamist fanatics, the twisting logic of that confusing time provided the possibility that forces loyal to the beleaguered Shah had perpetrated the atrocity in order to damn the opposition.

The Caspian Sea in seventies style Photograph: Andrew Waterhouse

In a VM bug, Caspian Sea, Iran Photograph: Andrew Waterhouse

Revealing anxiety and resentment I had not seen before, my Anglo theatre friends let fly a few ill-considered phrases referring to Iranians that outraged us.

“The King should round up these ragheads and shoot them.”

“And the Communists.”

“The Soviets are in the universities.”

“The students should go back to their villages.”

“They’re all peasants, it’s a backward country.”

“It needs a strong leader.”

“The Shah’s a wimp.”

“But he knows what’s good for the country.”

“He’s got the power to crush the criminals and he should use it.”

Dad and I exchanged looks of embarrassment and alarm. I couldn’t meet the eyes of the Iranian friends with whom I’d grown up, now glaring with contempt at these loudmouthed interlopers. Suddenly the colonial mindset I had studied briefly in college as part of a required “Western Civ” course was cartoonishly real.

All summer I had engaged only with my beloved cast and crew in their expat habitats rehearsing and socializing within the walls of clubs, churches, embassies and schools that had become fortified against the troubled life of the host country. These were foreigners enjoying a lifestyle that had, in fact, been promised in vain to the Iranian people by the Shah’s White Revolution, a programme of technological progress and economic reform derailed by corporate interests from abroad.

“You know nothing about my country,” was the first retort by a high-school buddy whom I’d never considered particularly nationalist. A tense silence ensued. The previous night’s raucous, skinny-dipping revellers were in the grip of a collective hangover, groggy and painful, each one braced to lash out at the threats to our shared position of privilege.

My dad, ever the diplomat, challenged the group to a morning swim, but everyone declined. The sea and the sky were grey and opaque. Ali and Fakhundeh watched from a distance as departures were made in a desolate mood. No one wanted to return to Tehran where we all sensed we had lost control over our futures.

Within weeks we would all be leaving in an atmosphere of escalating panic. Good thing I had grad school as a back-up plan. The party was over.