[custom_adv] Farah Pahlavi was the first woman in the country's 2500-year history to be bestowed with that title. She was adored, almost worshipped by many of her late husband's subjects. [custom_adv] + But though the cheery woman who walks into the lobby still gives off a bright-eyed royal radiance, absent are any regal airs and graces. [custom_adv] No longer is she trailed by men in dark suits mumbling into their sleeves, a far cry from the days when royal coaches paraded through the streets of Tehran flanked by a mounted guard of spear-carrying horsemen. [custom_adv] Nor is she extravagantly dressed. Pahlavi is wearing a thigh-length woven paisley jacket and camel trousers, her tawny hair gathered up in a bow, an unfussy outfit for a queen who in her palace heyday wore glamorous showstoppers by Givenchy, Dior and Valentino. [custom_adv] Upstairs at the reception, when an persian-American plastic surgeon approaches Pahlavi hesitantly, bowing his head in genuflection and then bending down to kiss her hand, she looks somewhat taken aback. [custom_adv] Minutes later they are laughing, joking and reminiscing about their homeland with almost backslapping bonhomie. Turns out the doctor trained in Shiraz at what was then called Pahlavi University, an institution she helped found and the first in homeland to be based on the American model. His entire medical degree cost just a hundred bucks, he tells her to uproarious laughter, and thus he owes her an enormous debt. [custom_adv] Watching her humbly work the room, happily posing for photos – nobody asks Her Majesty for a selfie – one wonders how this genial grandmother could ever have been placed on a revolutionary death list. [custom_adv] Then you sense this infectious charm, this natural empathy, this ease among her followers, was precisely the reason why. On the eve of her 80th birthday, Pahlavi is here to celebrate the publication of a new book. [custom_adv] The power she once projected peers out from its cover: an iconographic portrait of her from the mid-1970s, taken through the lens of Andy Warhol's Polaroid Big Shot camera. [custom_adv] the Empress of Art tells the story of one of the 20th century's more unlikely cultural brokers, a woman who amassed the greatest collection of Western modern art anywhere outside of the US or Europe, starting with the Impressionists and ending with what were then contemporary greats such as Jackson Pollock. [custom_adv] "It's beautiful, it's fabulous, it's a work of art in itself," she says of this handcrafted limited-edition book that comes in a canary-yellow clamshell case. [custom_adv] But inside is a story of exile, loss and heartbreak, of artistic triumph and tragedy. Once you learn the backstory, Warhol's silk-screen rendering takes on a different meaning. One notices not just her charismatic dominion but also the sorrow in those kohl-rimmed eyes. [custom_adv] Farah Diba – the name Farah means "joy" in Persian– was a daughter not of the Persian aristocracy but rather Tehran's middle class. Born in 1938, she was nine when her father, an Imperial persian Army captain, died, and she was raised by her mother, Farideh, "a very serious woman" who struggled financially but managed to send her daughter to private Italian and French schools.