Reigning Beauties

Thinking perhaps of such hapless compatriots as Joan of Arc and Marie Antoinette, Alphonse Lamartine, the 19th century French poet, declared: "Women are very frequently heroic, but seldom statesmanlike." Today, more than ever, given charm, taste, tact--and looks--the wife of a ruler can be statesmanlike simply by being a woman. In the color pages that follow, TIME surveys a new and lively generation of First Ladies who are adding style and spirit to statecraft from Abidjan to Washington. Whether entertaining at home or making the foreign rounds with their husbands, the reigning beauties of 1962 are the West's best argument for face-to-face diplomacy.

Of the nine most fetching and effective Queens and Presidents' wives, none was born to the role. The richest was a souless Paris architecture student when she met her royal husband, the youngest a none too efficient stenographer. Only three come of wealthy families. One Queen was born a princess; one princess had been a movie queen. One President's wife is d escended from the Spanish conquistadors, another from African warriors.

For all their differences, the nine First Ladies would probably get along famously at one of the hen parties that are among the most onerous burdens of Queens and Presidents' wives. All but two could gossip in English and in French. Jacqueline Kennedy and the Empress Farah are both amateur painters of competence. Jordan's Princess Muna and Brazil's Maria Tereza Goulart both think Frank Sinatra is the most. They are fond of serious music; almost all play the piano. Iran's Farah, the Ivory Coast's Marie-Therese Houphouet-Boigny and Monaco's Princess Grace all buy clothes from Dior, though Grace also fancies Balenciaga (who designed Belgian Queen Fabiola's mink-trimmed bridal gown), and in her Hollywood days was dressed by Oleg Cassini (now Jackie's couturier). Save for Fabiola, who had a miscarriage last summer but is reported pregnant again, all the reigning beauties are devoted mothers whose main occupational complaint is that their children have to spend too much time in the hands of nannies.

The prevalence of beauty and charm in high places is largely a byproduct of democracy; outside Britain, even royalty nowadays is generally free to choose and marry for love. Most of the reigning beauties also meet democracy's most demanding criterion of successful first-ladyship: each, in her way, embodies her country's ideal of womanhood. They are fond of outdoor life; they swim, ride horseback, play tennis or golf. They are enthusiastic and effective sponsors of charitable and cultural causes. Virtually without exception, they are chic, vivacious, quick-witted and warm. Above all, they are immense political and social assets to their husbands. Watching their wives at the center of attention during a recent Washington banquet, John Kennedy quipped to the Shah of Iran: "We might as well have both stayed at home."

American Arbiter. More than any other reigning beauty, John F. Kennedy's Jacqueline has set the pace for the new First Ladies. After announcing in advance that she had no intention of "bungling" her children's upbringing, Jackie Kennedy has not only succeeded in separating the jealous worlds of family and official duty, but has handled both with verve, resolve and good taste. During nearly 17 months in the White House, she has gone far toward recreating and refurbishing the serene, classically elegant residence that Jefferson intended it to be. She has helped, too, to awaken the sometimes dormant American respect for excellence, be it in food or poetry, decor or dance.

Not since Dolley Madison has the chatelaine of the White House dressed as elegantly, entertained as imaginatively, or so clearly seen both functions as a creative contribution to the success of an Administration. Jackie Kennedy's bouffant hair and back-tilted hats, simple cloth coats and slim-hipped sports slacks have been pirated by women the world over. Few men or women in the world today exercise such influence.

Serene Monegasque. America's second-front First Lady, Princess Grace of Monaco, has put her matchless monogram on an alien environment. Since her 1956 abdication as queen of the M-G-M lot (185 acres) in order to reign over Monaco (368 acres), Grace has made a home of the old, 200-room palais princier, which had fallen into disuse when Prince Rainier lived in bachelor discomfort on Cap Ferrat. Redecorated, replumbed and filled with flowers, the hilltop palais princier echoes again to the laughter of frequent guests and splashings from the heated pool that Grace built.

Drawn largely by Monaco's saving Grace, more tourists flock in each year (122,000 in 1961), and Rainier's treasury has a surplus, despite threatening noises from Charles de Gaulle. Although there are occasional reports of marital trouble and a return to Hollywood, Her Serene Highness clearly has no wish to become Miss Kelly again. She is devoted to their precocious children, Prince Albert, 4, and Princess Caroline, 5, and apparently devoted to Rainier. "The Prince," she purrs, "is very much the European husband. His word is law."

Belgian Bliss. Few First Ladies were more sorely needed or more swiftly accepted than Belgium's Queen Fabiola. For years, Belgians had besought their remote, unhappy King Baudouin to take a wife. Though it was in the midst of the Congo crisis that Baudouin, now 31, announced his engagement to Spanish-born Dona Fabiola de Mora y Aragon, the whole country rejoiced.

Both, before they met, had considered entering a religious order. A devout, devoted Queen who is two years Baudouin's senior, gentle, sweet-faced Fabiola plunged immediately into a punishing round of social work until the strain caused her miscarriage last year. To their delight, and courtiers' distress, even on state occasions Baudouin and Fabiola cannot help holding hands. Though she looks every inch a Queen in a Balenciaga gown and crown jewels, her people liked her best when she donned her nurse's uniform to race to Belgium's floods and recent mine disasters. Today she commands the universal adoration that Belgians have not felt for a Queen since 1935, when their beloved Astrid was killed in a car wreck.

Siam's Smile. The first First Lady by tenure is Thailand's exquisite Queen Sirikit, 29, who has been on the throne since 1950 and once even ruled the country during her husband's retreat to a monastery. A dark-eyed, diminutive (5 ft. 3 3/4 in.) porcelain beauty with upswept blue black hair and lotus-petal skin, shapely (34 1/2-23-36 1/2) Sirikit was placed again in the world's best-dressed women list this year--after Jacqueline Kennedy and her sister, Princess Radziwill. She almost always wears traditional Thai gowns, has influenced most other fashionable Thai women to forgo their preference for Western clothes.

Sirikit, whose father was a prince and Thailand's Ambassador to Britain, was schooled in Europe, where she met King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the only reigning monarch in the world to have been born in the U.S. (at Harvard, where his father was studying medicine), and a great-grandson of the reformer-King Mongkut, who was Anna's King of Siam. The Queen, mother of four children, is given much of the credit for her husband's transformation from an insecure, taciturn youth into a serious, socially conscious monarch. Sirikit, by contrast, is supercharged with sanouk, as the happy-go-lucky Thais almost reverently call the joy of living. Once, when asked why he never smiled, Bhumibol waved to his Queen. Said he: "She is my smile."

Golden Gaucho. Most spirited First Lady is Brazil's Maria Tereza Goulart, 27, who boasts gaucho blood and, when baited, can spit defiance like the onc,as (panthers) that roam her native south. Golden-skinned, with sculptured features and huge, provocative brown eyes, petite (5 ft. 3 in., 101 lbs.), dark-haired Maria Tereza designs many of her size 10 dresses, prefers simple white or black gowns for formal occasions.

Daughter of a struggling rancher from the same home town as her husband, Maria Tereza is impatient of pomp, and complains that her job is nothing but a ''ceremonial prop." Though the Goularts have twelve houses, she can often be seen doing her own shopping or teaching her two children to swim at Copacabana beach. Unlike most other First Ladies who have headed Brazil's leading charity for the underprivileged, Maria Tereza keeps a close eye on its finances and diligently tours slum areas handing out food.

Daily, before President Joao ("Jango") Goulart leaves for his office, she approves his shirt, tie and socks with a careful eye for harmonious colors. Though she left her husband on one celebrated occasion, sharp-witted Maria was largely responsible for his taking office. When President Janio Quadros quit office in a tantrum nine months ago, Vice President Goulart was fearful that civil war might erupt if he returned from Paris to claim his constitutional right to the presidency. "Don't listen to everybody," urged his wife. "Go and see who's right with your own eyes. I'm beside you no matter what happens."

Bubbling Bolivian. The antithesis of Brazil's First Lady is her namesake in neighboring Bolivia. Maria Teresa Paz Estenssoro, 28, is a brunette from Santa Cruz, an eastern city whose women are reputedly the most vivacious and beautiful in Bolivia. Athletic (5 ft. 5 in., 110 lbs.) and exuberantly unselfconscious, she climbs trees like a tomboy, can dance anyone off the floor.

Maria Teresa was married to President Victor Paz Estenssoro in 1955, having first met him during a post-college stint as an airline hostess. She speaks fluent English and French, is an avid reader in both languages (favorite authors: Graham Greene, Albert Camus), collects paintings by Bolivian artists, is an enthusiastic theatergoer. She is also the hard-working head of the Costurero del Nino (literally, children's sewing box), a charitable organization that distributed clothes to 50,000 underprivileged children last Christmas. For her three daughters, aged three, five, and seven, who have been given a strict Roman Catholic upbringing, Bolivia's First Lady insists: "I want to give them a normal life, not one of privilege."

Iran's Tiara. Two of the world's youngest queens won their life of privilege for the oldest of dynastic reasons--the ability to bear an heir. By the constitutions of vast Iran and tiny Jordan respectively, the dynasties of Reza Pahlevi and the House of the Hashemites may continue only so long as the monarch has a son to succeed him.

After dissolving two marriages (to Egypt's Princess Fawzia, Iran's Soraya) when they failed to yield a son, the Shah of Iran married 21-year-old Farah Diba (whose last name means silk) in December 1959. An olive-skinned beauty with lustrous brown eyes and soft, full lips, brainy, sports-loving Farah produced a boy in ten months and was duly named Empress by her grateful husband.

Though she comes from one of her country's "1,000 Families," Farah was a high-spirited architecture student in Paris with a Left Bank haircut and a razor-thin purse when the Shah beckoned. After two years on the Peacock Throne, Farah, as Washington discovered during the Shah's U.S. trip in April, is charming, poised, and possessed of an Arabian Nights' ransom in emerald and diamond tiaras, earrings and necklaces. She has plunged energetically into social work, started redecorating the royal palaces and, say court officials, has only to smile to earn another tiara from the impassioned Shah.

Jordan's Dream Girl. King Hussein of Jordan also divorced his first wife, Egyptian Princess Dina, in 1957 after two years of marriage, one daughter, no heir. A lonely, courageous King on a shaky throne, he finally met "the girl of my dreams" three years later at a party given by the English colonel who was attached to the palace as chief security officer. The girl was his blue-eyed, brown-haired daughter, Toni Gardiner, 20, a merry, fresh-faced high school graduate who shares Hussein's love of fast cars and planes, and was working as a typist for a movie company in Jordan.

Hussein's choice of an English bride was strongly opposed by the Queen Mother, and widely unpopular among the British-hating Palestinian refugees who comprise two-thirds of the population, but the King refused to change his mind. Muna, as he calls her, has yet to be named Queen. She was shot by Photographer Halsman not far from a cage filled with birds. Said he: "I felt she was like that."

African Orchid. No caged bird, but a delicious, capricious worldling, the Ivory Coast's sensuous, luxury-loving Marie-Therese Houphouet-Boigny, 31, delights Parisians even more than Jacqueline Kennedy or the Empress Farah. Sinuous and creamy-skinned (her grandmother was white), Marie-Therese was one of six children of an Ivory Coast customs official who sent her to France to finish high school. There she soon caught the eye of Felix Houphouet-Boigny, an able politician who even in 1956 was plainly destined to lead his country after it won independence from France.

Houphouet-Boigny stirred a scandal and risked his career by divorcing his wife and marrying Marie-Therese, who is 25 years younger. Today the Ivory Coast's First Lady is coifed by one of the most exclusive Parisian hair dressers (Carita), and dressed by Dior, whose salon is strategically located across the street from the Houphouet-Boignys' apartment. She prefers pastels and bright colors and, says her Dior salesgirl, "would never touch anything black." The affluent Houphouet-Boignys also have a villa in the stylish Swiss resort of Gstaad (her six-year-old adopted daughter, Helene, is attending school in Switzerland), an Ivory Coast beach house, an ultramodern five-story tower in the fashionable Cocody sector of Abidjan, the Ivory Coast's capital.

Therese loves orchids and sables, pilots a fast Lancia. She writhes with impatience at official occasions when her position restrains her from doing the twist. Asked her opinion of France's then Premier Michel Debre after the Ivory Coast's Independence Day Ball, Therese allowed that "He's nice," but added that "he doesn't cha cha half as well" as another statesman at the party. Frenchmen, who call her the Ivory One and see her as the forerunner of a new, Europe-influenced African woman, delight in her exuberant, ultrafeminine wit. It did not go unappreciated at a recent luncheon party at Bobby Kennedy's house, at which, latching on fast to New Frontiersmanship, she switched tables after every course. Murmured Therese, raising male expectations: "I suppose I'll be in the swimming pool for dessert."

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