“At the newsmen’s trial for slander,” Time magazine reported at the time, “Irma’s father had indignantly complained: ‘To doubt my daughter’s aristocratic descent is to slander the father of the fiancée of Farouk, whose wedding is imminent.’” (The resolution of the lawsuit is unclear.)
Her niece said that Ms. Capece Minutolo’s father was Prince Augusto, who owned a luxury car dealership.
Another open question was whether any nuptials were in fact imminent. At the time of the lawsuit, Time quoted Ms. Capece Minutolo as saying: “I prefer not to marry. Farouk is sensible and tender, but marriage is the tomb of love.”
Later, however, she said they married in an Islamic ceremony in 1958. Ms. Capece Minutolo was present at Farouk’s funeral, along with his first wife, Queen Farida, although the British newspaper The Telegraph reported that she was not mentioned in the former monarch’s will. She was typically described in news media reports as his companion.
In the early years, their relationship drew comparisons to George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion,” or perhaps its musical offspring, “My Fair Lady,” with accounts of Farouk sending her to school, having her restyled and bankrolling singing lessons. “It was a perfect match between an Eliza Doolittle and a Henry Higgins,” Mr. Stern wrote.
The singing lessons bore fruit in the early 1960s, when Farouk arranged her debut performance at a black-tie recital of arias at an arts club in Naples. Less than a minute after she launched into her first aria, from Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” the lights went out. “A few women started to scream,” The Boston Globe recalled in a 1969 article. “A lot of men roared with laughter.”
Candles soon arrived from a church next door so Ms. Capece Minutolo could finish her set by their flickering light. It was a worthy idea, except that the performance was interrupted once again when a candle set the pianist’s sheet music aflame.
