Driving the Saudis Read online

  I didn’t realize until I was in the chauffeuring world that it is a man’s world and alarmingly lonely when you’re a woman. Almost all chauffeurs are men. I’m not sure why I hadn’t noticed this before, but it was painfully obvious to me after just one hour of employment. The other women chauffeurs I met were either big and tough, or small and tough, and none of them was gregarious. I am rather medium and not so tough. It would’ve helped me if I’d been more intimidating.

  At times the job was terrifying. One morning at 4:00 A.M., I was pumping gas at a badly lit station on a deserted highway when a drunken bum quietly snuck up and grabbed me from behind. “C’mon baby, you’re gonna show me a good time,” he slobbered into my neck. I hadn’t even heard him coming until he was right there, on me. I shook him off, but I learned from then on to be hypervigilant in order to feel safe. I started carrying around a can of Mace that my dad had given me, I’d hold my keys strategically placed in my fingers so that I could wield them as a sharp weapon, and I also bought a 2-foot-long Magnum flashlight that could double as a billy club if necessary. I kept it within easy reach just underneath my car seat and practiced whipping it out in the event I ever needed to use it in a hurry.

  There were other unexpected perils on the job too. Finding a clean restroom in the middle of the night when I was hours away from home was an all-consuming challenge. I came to truly covet a clean toilet facility and grew to be an expert of the lightning-fast no-part-of-my-body-has-directly-touched-anything-in-here pee. This highly crafty technique employs the use of several disposable paper toilet covers and a stack of paper towels or napkins and, if the facility’s paper products are depleted, which is usually the case, some minor acrobatics. In some restrooms, it helps if you have the lung strength to hold your breath for a long time. Years of swimming paid off for me in a big way.

  When working late night at one of the hotels, I was often mistaken for a hooker by inebriated Hollywood types tottering out of the lobby bar, even though I am sure I made it clear by my body language—my eyes down, crossing the street ahead of them, and ignoring their catcalls—that I was absolutely not available for hire in that way, ever. Clients regularly propositioned me in the car, even as I was driving them home to be greeted by their wives and kids, and some would become insulting when I refused their advances. “Whaddaya gettin’ so high and mighty about? You ain’t no Marilyn Monroe anyway,” a pockmarked charmer complained to me as I fended him off.

  Early one morning, a drunken twenty-something club kid vomited and then passed out in my car, waking up only to try to urinate in it as I was struggling to extricate him from the vehicle. We had driven around for hours with him hanging out of the car window propositioning transvestites on Santa Monica Boulevard. He wanted to hire one as a present for his teenage girlfriend. “I gotta prove my love for her,” he cried over and over. How a transvestite would accomplish this I couldn’t determine, but thankfully none of them would get in the car. At 4:00 A.M., he couldn’t remember the address of his parents’ house in Bel Air. When I finally deduced the location and tried to drop him home, he was terrified his parents would awaken and punish him, and he refused to get out of the car, curling into a ball in the backseat. A houseman finally came out of the estate, thanked me for bringing him home, and carried the sobbing, transvestite-less club kid inside to bed.

  I hadn’t expected this kind of behavior. I had thought the work was going to be classy and maybe even a little bit cool, or at least I had talked myself into thinking that would be true. I had thought I would make a lot of money driving wealthy businessmen on quick trips to the airport who would then ask me to dinner at Nobu when they got back from their conference in Shanghai or Lake Como, possibly bearing gifts for me from duty-free shops. I had thought that I’d decline the invitations and the gifts, thereby gaining a reputation for possessing a high moral character. I had thought that I would be able to pitch movie ideas and field script development offers, but that just wasn’t happening. The hours were unbearably long, I was so severely sleep deprived from baby-sitting overly elated tourists on their all-night Sunset Boulevard club-hopping marathons followed by puking binges, that I was useless during the day to do my own work. To top off all the perks, the generous tips were nonexistent or at best disappointedly sporadic, and the job was dishearteningly soul sucking.

  As a chauffeur, I began to see behind the Tinseltown curtain in a way I never would have expected or wanted. In my first weeks of employment, I was assigned to drive the courtesy car for a tony Beverly Hills hotel. Most luxury hotels have house cars that drop off and pick up guests within a few miles radius when they want to go shopping or dine at a restaurant in the vicinity. It’s a plum job for the chauffeur, and I would have loved doing it routinely. Unfortunately, I was only covering vacation time for the regular senior driver, a permanent fixture who would likely expire on the job before giving it up.

  Early one night, the hotel doorman, José, asked me if I would do him a favor by picking up a girlfriend a few blocks away and bringing her back to the hotel. He wrote down a nearby address, and I drove to a condo on Doheny to collect her.

  An attractive young woman, simply dressed in a pale pink cotton sheath dress, was waiting outside for me under the portico when I drove up. She was petite and waif-thin, with short blond hair falling in soft curls around her pale face. Without makeup and high heels, she could have passed for a fourteen-year-old girl. She had a slight Russian accent, a bubbly personality, and a whispery voice that was pleasing and refined. I assumed that she was joining José for his dinner break.

  “A female chauffeur! I am lucky!” she said as she jumped into the limousine. Her cell phone rang then, and she chattered away on it for the short drive back to the hotel.

  “Thank you,” the young woman said when we arrived at the hotel. “I am sorry that I have not cash on me to tip you. I have nothing, but perhaps you will be here later and I will see you again? Perhaps at nine o’clock?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Have a nice dinner.”

  A few hours later, I dropped off some guests at the hotel front entrance. José was still on duty, so after he had taken their bags and ushered them inside to the reception desk, I said, “Hey, José, your girlfriend is really pretty and nice,” and he grinned.

  Just then the hotel lobby elevator doors opened and the young woman stepped out holding the arm of a white-haired older Japanese man in an elegant sharkskin jacket. She kissed him on both cheeks, he got back into the elevator, and then she walked across the lobby alone toward us, smiling. Her high heels clicked loudly on the marble floor, and she swung her beaded handbag playfully as she moved.

  “Oh, you are here, this is fantastic!” she said. “Are you perhaps free? I know my apartment is very close, but I am afraid to walk home alone in the dark.”

  “No, no, I don’t blame you,” I said. “Of course, I’ll take you.”

  She kissed José and again jumped in the limousine without allowing me to open the door for her. “Please, do not trouble yourself,” she said.

  She got on her cell phone again right away, so we didn’t talk on the way back to her place. In my rearview mirror, I watched her freshen up her lipstick and makeup as she made several calls. When I dropped her off, she handed me a crisp hundred-dollar bill.

  “This is for your kindness,” she said as she got out of the car.

  I tried to give it back. “No, please. You don’t need to tip me. I am happy to—”

  “I insist,” she said. “I appreciate your help very much, and besides the night is just beginning.” She winked at me; then instead of walking back into her apartment, she headed across the street to the Four Seasons Hotel. I don’t know why it took me so long, but I didn’t realize until that moment that she was a prostitute.

  I kept the hundred-dollar bill that she had given me for weeks, as long as I could go without spending it, and I thought of her when I finally did. She was just a baby, I said to myself.

  After a coup
le of months on the job, I couldn’t help but acknowledge that the whole driving thing was not working out on any front. The job was becoming a problem, not a solution. In fact, I was still broke, I hadn’t made any movie deals, I spent every evening worrying about where I was going to pee, and I was starting to get depressed about things that I hadn’t even thought about before.

  Just as I was hitting rock bottom, a new opportunity reared its pretty head. All of the other limousine drivers at the company where I worked were talking about the Saudis: “The Saudis, the Saudis, the Saudis! A family of Saudi royals are coming to Beverly Hills and they need drivers, and they pay top dollar!” Rumors flew about how much money we could make. One driver had a friend who had been invited to travel with a Saudi family after driving them around Los Angeles for only a few weeks. They paid for him to fly with them to London, New York, and Paris for months, all first class. He didn’t even have to drive; they just liked his company and wanted him around. They even gave him beaucoup spending money. Charles, an experienced driver friend from the East Coast, said he drove some Saudi royals for only thirty days, and at the end of the job he’d received his pay, a gold Rolex, and a $10,000 tip. Sweet! This group was expected to stay at least fifty days, so there could be some substantial money involved.

  The interviewing process for the Saudi job was odd. No one ever asked me about my professional chauffeuring experience. I assumed this was because Fausto, the lead driver running the detail, had recommended me for the job, but to this day I don’t know for sure and I can’t say it demonstrates very good business practices. Then I received a series of perplexing phone calls over a period of several days. The family’s security doing the advance work called me and asked how I had learned about the job, who else I knew on the detail, and who referred me. I knew they knew that Fausto had told me about the job and that he had referred me, and when I reminded them of this, they confirmed that this was so. Okay, so were they testing my memory of the last two days? Were they thinking I might lie about it? It was truly peculiar. And I had no way to know who else was on the job. It hadn’t even started yet, and besides it was all too secretive for me to know anything anyway. It was as if the actual job didn’t even exist, just the promise of employment, and that was pretty much useless. That’s like being told you have the lead in a movie and “principal photography will commence once the funding has been secured.” Anybody who has been in the entertainment business for ten minutes knows that that is code for “it’s probably not happening.”

  A couple of more days went by. After several more similarly puzzling calls, I was asked to fax my license to different numbers whose area codes I didn’t recognize. I then spent hours in line at the DMV to obtain an H-6 California printout that lists all traffic accidents or infractions incurred in the past ten years. I faxed the H-6 and my license again, this time to other different numbers. I spoke with many people a day about when the family was arriving and when the drivers would be needed. First they needed me, and then they didn’t. Then they needed me again, and then the job was off. The details changed on an hourly basis, and the dates were postponed repeatedly. I began to lose hope that the Saudis were coming at all.

  Then I had to refax all of my paperwork to still different numbers, but here in Los Angeles. That was encouraging. Fausto finally said it was a go, but first I had to meet with the family’s security staff in person. Up until then, it had been a phone romance only. I met a small battalion of superhero action-type figures briefly at a hotel in Beverly Hills. Every now and then one of them squinted at me and asked, “Jew? Are you a Jew?” No one had ever asked me that before, and certainly not repeatedly. Even Fausto asked me this over and over again. “You’re not a Jew, you’re sure? No Jew in you? You sure? No? Okay! We wouldn’t want to find out later. You sure? You sure? You sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure!” I told them but I thought to myself, Would they really not hire me if I were?

  That was the whole screening process. There were no background checks, no references called, nothing. I did have a clean DMV record, so I am sure that counted for something, but I was surprised at the lack of due diligence given how much rigmarole there had been over basic details. I could have been a Jew in disguise for all they knew.

  So I got the job to drive for a family of Saudi royals: Princess Zaahira and her children, the family’s security, and their entourage in a large detail of over forty drivers. The chauffeurs were told we’d be required to be on call and available 24/7, seven days a week, for perhaps as long as seven weeks straight. There would be no days off, and we could expect to be fired if we needed one.

  It was soon apparent that I was the only female working for the family. I had met two other women whom I rarely saw when the job started, but they didn’t last. One was fired after an altercation with the security personnel, and I heard the other one quit almost right away; she didn’t like the long hours.

  Women aren’t allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis don’t really want women driving them here either, but it turned out that I did come in handy in ways that probably no one could have expected.

  3

  I’m Part of a Special Op!

  Things started off rather nicely. Just before the family arrived, the drivers had a long full-day training session in a Beverly Hills hotel ballroom that was set up as if we were at the Davos World Economic Forum, with rows of tables facing a dais at the front of the room, pads and pencils before each chair, and bouquets of fresh flowers on every table. Several waiters were on hand throughout the day to pour sodas and water, a sumptuous breakfast and lunch were served, and cappuccinos were available whenever we liked. Bowls of chocolates and mints were refreshed throughout the day in case we needed a sugar push. It must have cost $20,000 to rent the room for the occasion. Most of the other chauffeurs looked uncomfortable and lingered near the periphery as if they’d never been in a hotel ballroom before, but I decided to make the best of it and parked myself in the front row of tables. I had three strong double-cappuccinos in a row and followed them with strawberries and pineapple once I was fully awake. This is a high-voltage cleansing regimen that I call the “Hollywood Royal Flush”—massive amounts of caffeine followed by fruit. The lunch later in the day was a selection of grilled salmon or roast beef au jus, with an array of seasonal vegetables. I relaxed in my chair and felt happily feted, like a guest at an expensive all-day wedding waiting for the band to strike up and the dancing to begin.

  I saw that two of my driver friends, Sami and Charles, were on the job too. It was nice to see some friendly faces since many of the other drivers seemed to know one another and stood in small groups chatting, and I felt left out. Sami was an unprepossessing Mexican: taciturn, discreet and cautious, sharp as a tack, and fiercely observant. He didn’t miss a trick. If I had a SWAT team, I would want him on it.

  Charles was a handsome older man filled with an inexhaustible supply of goodwill toward others. He had a calm, friendly manner and was generous with his knowledge and information. He was old school and refused to be easily ruffled; he’d been a chauffeur for nearly thirty years. Nothing surprised him because he’d seen it all and then some, and most likely he had done a considerable amount of it too. He was also accustomed to these long details and said to me early on in the job: “You gots to get your meal, you gots to hydrate whenever you can, you gots to look out for herself, girl.” It was good advice that I tried to remember as often as I could.

  An ex-commando type, Stu, was one of the heads of the security running the detail and conducted most of the instruction. When I say “instruction,” what I really mean is that there was a lot of standing around and waiting for somebody to talk to us. It wasn’t like an hours-long training class where we had to be responsible for information that was imparted. Mostly we just milled around in a fluid holding pattern that was periodically interrupted by a short lecture on the detail’s operation and protocol; overpreparation was not going to be a problem. There were several more imposing jefes w
ho introduced themselves during the afternoon, all bricklike men with monosyllabic names like Buck and Chuck, with short haircuts or closely shaved bald heads. There seemed to be a lot of men in charge, maybe too many, and I never did figure out the chain of command. But they were a surprisingly soft-spoken group; almost no one raised his voice, and never without good reason.

  Stu resembled a bizarre cartoon—somewhat like a colossal version of Popeye pumped up on steroids, but dressed in a tight short-sleeved white shirt and sharply creased khaki pants instead of a sailor outfit. He was a huge walking muscle; every part of him was thick and developed and ready to engage. He had a neck as wide as my thigh, solid and pulsing.

  Stu was from Mississippi, and he was a nice guy, truly a gentleman, and also a consummate professional. I witnessed this one afternoon when he was on duty covering Princess Zaahira while she was shopping with her friends along Robertson Boulevard. The security guys walked a close parameter around the group, and Stu was covering the rear. I watched him quietly step behind a tree. An instant later he leaned over, hands on knees, and projectile vomited two times in succession, then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and got back in step with the group. He told me later that he’d had tooth surgery that morning and was suffering from a bad reaction to the anesthesia. I was the only one who knew what had happened, and Stu worked the detail the rest of the day without missing another beat.