Legends in Love : They’re icons, screen stars, political heroes. But they fall heads over heels just like the rest of us. Here are four tales of courtship and conjugal bliss, from the book ‘Marry Me.’ : Jehan Safwat Raouf and Anwar Sadat

Married May 29, 1949

At 15, Jehan Safwat Raouf was fascinated with politics, obsessed with devotion to her native Egypt. When she met Anwar Sadat, a 30-year-old revolutionary whom no one suspected would one day be president of the United Arab Republic, she was in awe. Days later, they were in love; months later, they were married.

In the summer of 1948, other girls her age were giddy over movie stars and crooners, but Jehan was devoted to national news and the salvation of her homeland from the dominance of the British. She was infatuated with Capt. Anwar el-Sadat, who had been on trial for eight months for the political assassination of the Egyptian traitor Amin Osman, the country’s Minister of Finance. Osman had been a champion of ties between Egypt and the colonial British. Anwar had been dismissed from the army and imprisoned for two years during World War II for his clandestine activities with the Germans to weaken British control. In 1944, he escaped and lived in hiding until the war ended. A year later, after forming an underground organization dedicated to ridding Egypt of collaborators, he was arrested for Osman’s murder.

Anwar was everything Jehan longed to be--a patriot and an activist. Trapped by the cultural limitations placed on women, Jehan did what she could to spread the word of liberation among her family and friends. She followed every news article about Sadat, desperate for word of her hero’s fate. And she prayed daily, sometimes hourly for his safety. On the very day that she had breathlessly run three miles into town to find a paper and read that he had finally been acquitted, a miracle happened.

She was staying with relatives in Suez to celebrate Ramadan, the sacred ninth month of the Islamic year in which fasting occurs between dawn and dusk. She and Auntie Zouzou were slicing mango for suhur, the meal eaten just before sunrise, when her cousin’s husband, Hassan Izzat, announced that a friend had arrived for a visit. It was Anwar el-Sadat.

No one could have predicted a romance. He was divorcing his first wife, the mother of their three children. He was 15 years her senior. He had very dark skin, which was looked down upon in her culture. He had no money. And besides, Jehan’s parents were already making plans to arrange her marriage to someone they felt was suitable.

Arranged marriages were customary in the strict Muslim society in which she was brought up in Cairo. Jehan’s father, Safwat Raouf, had defied convention when he rejected the cousin his parents had selected as his bride and married an Englishwoman, Gladys Cotrell, a Christian who never converted to Islam and who always ate British food. Nevertheless, Jehan’s parents were considering three boys as prospective husbands, including Hassan Izzat’s brother. There would be a wedding in about two years when Jehan turned 17. “It was unusual to fall in love and have a romantic story,” Jehan recalls.

Within two days of meeting Anwar, she was infatuated. He too was enraptured with the young girl to whom he was soon pouring out his heart, sharing his hopes and dreams. To her amazement, when he learned she had just had a birthday, he offered to sing her a love song. They spent the next several days talking, often chaperoned by Jehan’s cousin Aida, who volunteered to sit with the couple so they could dine, almost te^te-a-te^te.

“We fell in love together--it was something magic between us,” says Jehan, who could barely wait for him to propose. When he did, it was less than a month after they met. The words, which neither of them preserved, were in verse that conveyed his love for her. He told her that he wanted to speak to her father and mother and be formally engaged.

Anwar was penniless, so Hassan suggested that they lie and tell her father that her intended was extremely rich. “Never, I will never cheat your father,” said Anwar, protesting the deception. But Jehan urged him to go along with it and promised to reveal the truth before they were married. “I am the one who is going to marry you, not my father, but they will not agree if they know that you are poor,” she asserted. He reluctantly agreed.

Hassan pleaded Anwar’s case to her parents. “My cousin told my father, ‘He is extremely rich. He has ranches,’ ” recalls Jehan. While her father disapproved of Anwar’s politics, he was more amenable to Anwar than her mother. Gladys was adamant that Anwar was too old; furthermore, no one in their family had ever married a divorced man.

Jehan was too respectful of her parents to marry without their approval so she lobbied for her mother’s blessing. “I insisted,” says Jehan. “I was not going to change my mind. I begged her sometimes. Sometimes I cried.”

They finally agreed to meet Anwar. But when he talked about his disdain for Winston Churchill, the British-born Gladys was hardly impressed. During their second meeting, however, he won her over. This time, Jehan coached him. “Talk about books. She is British. Most of her time is spent reading.” When he mentioned his fondness for Dickens, Gladys saw that he was a man of substance and character and finally gave her consent. Safwat gave his approval on the condition that Anwar never again engage in politics. Anwar agreed.

During the engagement, Jehan told her father the truth about Anwar’s finances. “He said, ‘I knew it,’ ” she recalls. “But he knew I loved him so much.” Safwat helped Anwar pay for Jehan’s two gold engagement rings, one shaped like a butterfly. Anwar couldn’t afford to buy her a second piece of jewelry, which was typical for an Egyptian engagement. Nor could he pay the dowry dictated by the Koran. “All our lives I teased him, ‘You married me very cheap,’ ” she says.

Six months later, on May 29, 1949, Jehan prepared for her wedding day by the centuries-old Middle Eastern custom of removing the hair from arms and legs with a hot paste of lemon and sugar. Jehan wore a long white gown that she designed herself and held a bouquet of roses, jasmine and iris. Anwar wore his military uniform.

Because of her age, Jehan could only sit in the same room as Anwar during the marriage ceremony at her parents’ house. It was her father who clasped hands with Anwar before a sheik. The sheik asked Safwat if Jehan accepted Anwar as her husband. “Yes,” said Jehan. “She consents,” said Safwat.

The party at Auntie Zouzou’s home featured belly dancers, musicians, a comedian and three dancing horses. Later that night the couple drove to the Pyramids and the Sphinx and contemplated their future life together and their love of Egypt. They honeymooned in Zagazig, located in the delta between Cairo and Alexandria.

During another drive to the Pyramids, Anwar said, “Jehan, you remember, I promised your father that I will not be involved in politics.”

“Anwar,” she reminded him, “You are not marrying my father, you are marrying me. And I love you because you are devoted to Egypt. I am the one my father took the promise for. I release you from the promise because I want you as brave as you are and I love you this way.” The couple had three daughters, Loubna, Noha and Jehan, who were born in 1954, 1958 and 1961, respectively, and one son, Gamal, born in 1956.

Thirty-two years after the couple were married, on Oct. 6, 1981, Jehan stood a few feet behind her husband, with two of her grandchildren at her sides, as they watched President Anwar Sadat--the man she had loved for what seemed like forever--be killed by assassins’ bullets. She turned to Vice President Hosni Mubarak and said, “Mr. President, you’ll have to take over now. It’s Egypt now that we have to face. Sadat is over.”