Driving the Saudis Read online

  In the Kingdom, it’s the law that a woman must be completely covered when out of the house, but once she’s out of the country, she can wear whatever she wants, and the Saudi women do. The servants were religious, however, and I soon saw that they dressed in complete cover at all times no matter where they were, indoors or out.

  The head of the family was Princess Zaahira, who was traveling with a number of her sisters, friends, and cousins, several of her many prince sons and one princess daughter, of whom I was told by one of the servants, “she squeezed out at the last second with great happiness.” She wanted a baby girl and finally had one, last in line. All of her children had friends joining them for the trip—other young princes and princesses—and servants—an astounding number of servants, and secretaries, and nannies, and tutors, and trainers, and cooks, and doctors, even a psychiatrist, a massage therapist, the royal hairdresser, and a bunch of other people hanging around kind of like court jesters—that was the entourage. There were about forty people in all accompanying the family of seven.

  Princess Zaahira was in her late thirties and strikingly beautiful, really princess-like, with long, black, perfectly coiffed hair that she wore in elaborate and artful arrangements, and flashing dark eyes that carefully monitored everything happening around her. She had an open smiling face with high, wide cheekbones and luminescent flawless skin, and all her movements were measured and graceful. There was nothing rough or rushed about her. Maysam, one of the palace’s teenage servant girls from North Africa, said that Princess Zaahira was worshipped by her husband. I thought it must be because she was so beautiful, but I was told that it really was because she gave him seven sons. Because of this, she was his favorite of his many wives, and she basked in his favor. She was also far more beautiful than any of the other women in the group, even her sisters; it was as if an aura of shimmering light enveloped her, making her life magical and effortless. She had the “money shine,” as my driver friend Sami says: wonderfully waxed, perfectly polished, and beautifully buffed. Whenever her bulletproof-armored Mercedes-Benz pulled up to the hotel entrance signaling that she was coming or going, the employees at the hotel—men and women alike, who were accustomed to regular celebrity sightings and were pretty blasé in general—would invariably stop what they were doing to better position themselves to get a glimpse of her. She was that beautiful. It was easy to forget that this was probably partly so because she was surrounded by a highly skilled and accommodating staff tending to her every need.

  I was told that I was specifically hired to drive a young princess, a niece of Princess Zaahira. Fausto had given me a sign that said “MICHELE,” similar to the ones you see chauffeurs holding in front of baggage claim when you deplane. As the girls and women passed me, I pointed to the sign and asked, “Michele? Michele?” All of them giggled and quickly skirted by. I saw that most of the Saudi teenage girls were also dressed in thousands of dollars worth of fashionable clothing; they were ultra-chic miniversions of the older women. Saudis buy over 75 percent of the world’s haute couture, so I guess they start the girls off young.

  I continued to seek out Michele until a thin-lipped English woman with tightly curled apricot-colored hair, a chaperone to one of the young Saudi teenagers, reprimanded me for bothering the girls: “You are asking the wrong people. Michel is a man, the princess’s hairdresser. He is over there.” She pointed to a very tan middle-aged man dressed in a sequined T-shirt and tight, low-cut jeans, smoking a cigarette near the curb. He had a huge potbelly that poured out over his pants, and silver-streaked reddish wiry hair that struck out from his head in all different directions à la Don King. This was Michel. He wasn’t a Saudi; he was a Tunisian hairdresser whom the princess had met in Paris and now traveled with—the royal hairdresser. I was so disappointed. What the hell! I thought. Where’s my little princess? And he’s supposed to be a hairdresser? This guy needs a comb and some serious face time with a mirror. I don’t want to drive him, not without inoculations. He looks like he bites.

  The passengers didn’t walk out with any suitcases because there were two huge cargo trucks at the back of the limo line with a bunch of guys to grab the luggage. There were hundreds of bags, some as big as a Volkswagen. Many were shrink-wrapped in plastic like gigantic frozen TV dinners. Most of the cases were made by Louis Vuitton, Gucci, or Coach, and some of them cost as much as a year’s rent on my apartment. The servants lingered behind to make sure all the bags were accounted for and transported to the correct hotels. They sat on the suitcases, guarding the bags they were responsible for like roosting hens on their eggs.

  The Saudis traveled large, like a military operation. I discovered later that all of that shrink-wrapping covered furniture, fine silk rugs, all kinds of tchotchkes, Limoges china, special cookers, chafing dishes, lustrous silver serving trays, ornate gilded and ceramic Persian samovars, extraordinary coffees, teas, dried fruits, rice, beans, grains, spices, candy, and rich chocolate that you can get only in the Middle East. They brought a whole palace with them. Maybe several palaces. They even brought incense.

  Not all families travel this way. A friend of mine does staging for luxury homes in Los Angeles, and she was hired to completely redecorate a home for a Saudi princess who would be renting it for a short stay. The princess didn’t like the priceless antiques in the house and had it redone in an ultramodern style costing tens of thousands of dollars for a one-week rental. The princess didn’t bring anything with her when she arrived, and she left everything she’d purchased at the house.

  One of the shrink-wrapped monstrosities turned out to be a tea set that had its very own $500-a-day hotel room to itself: servants would go in and out at all hours preparing tea for Princess Zaahira and her entourage. The tea set had it made. It didn’t have a suite, merely a regular room, but even so, its hotel bill must have been close to $25,000 for a seven-week stay, and it had a balcony overlooking Beverly Hills. My rent was two months behind and I was rifling through my jewelry looking to see what I could sell to keep the sheriff at bay. I would have been happy to bunk up with that tea set anytime.

  The servant girls then got busy flitting agitatedly around the baggage, making sure that the carriers handled the family’s tea set and other treasures properly. Later in their stay, the girls would serve me tea too—once they got to know me and grew fond of me, as I grew fond of them.

  I pulled my gaze away from the avalanche of luggage and shadowy figured women to glance briefly at the gathering of glinting royals waiting near the Lincoln Navigators and Porsche Cayennes parked at the start of the vehicle line. I would get to know some of them too, especially the young women. I smiled as I passed by them, but they took no notice of me, and then I made my way over to the royal hairdresser who was smoking angrily on the curb, glaring into space.

  He looked like he was going to be trouble.

  5

  Palace Intrigue

  I quickly discovered that there was an elaborate hierarchy and pecking order pervading the royal family’s and accompanying entourage’s behavior at all times. I noticed that no matter the position in even the detail’s hierarchy, everybody wanted to have someone beneath them to order around. There was always a pecking order. The security guys liked to lord it over the drivers, the tutors liked to lord it over the nannies, the nannies liked to lord it over the servants, the servants liked to lord it over the hotel maids, and the drivers liked to lord it over the hotel valets. It was insidious and endless. At first, I didn’t realize the extent of its pervasiveness and assumed that the ubiquitous vying for power was an aberration perpetuated by a few miscreants, but I soon saw that it was standard operating procedure that clearly came from the top down and also served as a form of entertainment. The royal hairdresser was the worst offender of this. The first day at the airport, after he had been pointed out to me, I approached him politely, “Michel?”

  He gave me the once-over, looked away in disdain, and turned away from me. I adjusted to be in his eye line, but then he turne
d away again. I adjusted again, and again he turned away. It was a weird dance we were doing. It took me a few turns to realize that he was purposely facing away from me to demonstrate that he didn’t deem me worthy of occupying space in his field of vision—I was just a chauffeur, a nobody.

  “WHAT? WHY?” he screamed at me with a thick French accent after we had danced around a bit more and he saw that I wasn’t going away. He was Tunisian but had a lot of French attitude. He told me many, many times that he had spent much time in Paris, that he loved Paris, and that he preferred to be in Paris. And he was a screamer.

  “WHO ARE YOU?” he screamed.

  “I’m your driver, sir. How do you do? I hope you had a nice flight.”

  He scowled at me. “WHERE IS CAR?”

  I pointed to a black Crown Victoria parked a few feet away in the convoy of cars.

  “WHERE IS SUV?” he asked. “YOU ME DRIVE MYSELF IN SUV!”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I answered. “This is the car that’s been assigned to you.” He scowled again and moved away from me. I discovered that there was a hierarchy to the selection and distribution of the cars as well. All the princes and princesses had a luxury vehicle or one of the armored Mercedeses; most of the entourage had SUVs or some other high-end automobile that they had requested; those lower on the totem pole had town cars such as the Crown Victoria that was assigned to Michel. He wasn’t a member of the family or in the upper echelon of the entourage, and he was unhappy that he wasn’t being chauffeured in an Escalade or a Navigator. Maybe he’d gotten one in the past, or perhaps he’d requested one for this trip, but later when I mentioned his dissatisfaction to the security who had arranged the cars, they laughed with derision.

  An agitated woman in her thirties, dressed in a colorful mélange of flowing silk scarves that trailed behind her, approached us and demanded a cigarette from Michel. She glanced charily at me as if I were a rude interloper even though I was just standing there quietly, waiting for him to get in the car or tell me what to do. Then she began talking to Michel in a mixture of Arabic and French. She spoke in a loud and impassioned voice and gestured wildly as if she were performing in an old-fashioned melodrama. I waited. Every now and then, she’d spin around and glare at me. There was some kind of problem, but I couldn’t understand what it was in spite of all the elaborate histrionics. The drama escalated as she got further along in the story.

  Suddenly, she pounced on me and announced, “I will ride with Michel.” She had moved very close to my face, inches away, and I could smell the cigarettes on her breath. “First, you must drive us to the Beverly Hills Hotel, and then after we will go to the hotel where the princess is staying. We must change the hotel. C’est très important. My driver will follow us. You must tell him now. Tout de suite. Merci. That is all.”

  She hadn’t bothered to introduce herself, but I sussed out later that she was Princess Zaahira’s secretary, Asra. I looked around for her driver, hoping that he was nearby. I knew only two other drivers, Sami and Charles, and I had no idea yet who was assigned to whom on this job. There were too many of us.

  “Who is your driver please, Madam?” I asked her. She didn’t answer but instead stepped away from me sharply to make it clear that the discussion was ended. Then she and the hairdresser stood shoulder-to-shoulder, conferring again in their fervent Franco-Arab mix, smoking cigarette after cigarette, lighting them butt-to-butt, so that they sometimes each held two lit smokes at once with a haze of fumes enveloping them. Every now and then they would look at me accusingly as if challenging me to do or say something—I wasn’t sure. I could understand only a few words and phrases of what they were saying, and I was starting to get nervous because I could tell that something troubling was going down. I am a very observant person and have relied on this ability my whole life; I am usually able to glean what is going on and how to handle a situation from the bits and pieces of information I can gather if I keep my eyes and ears open. This was my first experience where it was clear to me that I was being purposely excluded from a conversation, but could also sense that I would be held responsible for any information that I missed—which had perhaps been deliberately kept from me—as well as the ultimate outcome. It was a safeguarding strategy that I came to call the scapegoat factor and was a consistent technique used within the royal family and the entourage to cast blame on others, spread misinformation as a way to obfuscate, or as a way to disassociate oneself from those potentially at fault. This made for a very tense environment in which no one could be trusted. It became apparent to me that it was systemic to the workings of the royal household.

  There was relentless rivalry within the group as well, but I couldn’t determine to what end. Were they competing for better salaries, or for an early cushy retirement, or just for the Princess Zaahira’s attention and good favor? I had no idea, and within a few days of exposure to this, I didn’t really care either. I’m normally curious, but palace intrigue held no interest for me; it was too mean-spirited. I’d rather read a textbook on particle physics—in Russian, which I can neither read, write, nor speak—than try to unravel the machinations of the royal household; it was just too convoluted and unsavory.

  I found out later that Asra was unhappy with her room assignment and was angling to get a larger, more comfortable suite. Most likely, she was displacing one of the tutors or nannies and was petitioning the hairdresser to align himself with her. She knew he had Princess Zaahira’s ear. Later in the seven weeks, some of her family who lived in the States came to visit, and she needed the extra room for her guests.

  As I was quizzing the other chauffeurs on who was assigned to Asra, her driver, Jorge, came charging up. He was a young thick-set Latino in an ill-fitting tight polyester suit, and he was sweating profusely from running around the terminal trying to find the woman. He had left her at the curb to bring the car closer, and she had disappeared. I told him I’d be driving his client and mine to the Beverly Hills Hotel and he should follow.

  “I don’t know where that is!” he said, wiping the sweat from his brow with his fingers. “I don’t want to get lost on my first day!”

  “It’s on Sunset, north of Santa Monica Boulevard, at the northwest corner of Crescent, near that five-corner funky intersection that meets Beverly.” Chauffeurs are used to giving directions to each other and always want street corners and compass points.

  He looked alarmed. “Is that in Beverly Hills?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s the Beverly Hills Hotel. Just follow me in. Watch out for the hairpin turn into the hotel so you don’t miss it. Punch my cell number into your phone, and call me if you get lost.” I could tell he was going to have difficulty on this job, especially working for Asra, and I’d known her for only a few minutes.

  I learned later why Jorge was so nervous, and it wasn’t just that he was an inexperienced driver. He was desperate to keep the job. His brother had recently been deported, and Jorge was supporting his ailing elderly mother as well as his brother’s two small children. Jorge was also an undocumented worker constantly looking over his shoulder for the cops to nab him. Because he was an illegal immigrant, he lived with an unrelenting amount of stress and was taking a huge risk by chauffeuring and spending so many hours in a car. He felt like a sitting duck. He’d gotten a California license years ago when you still could do so without proving that you were a citizen, but that had expired. If the police ever pulled him over, he would surely be busted and then undoubtedly be deported, leaving his family in the lurch with no one to provide for them. The children were American citizens since they were born in California, and his elderly mother had a green card but hadn’t yet been able to secure her son’s papers: the changes enacted by Homeland Security after September 11 now make all immigration processing excruciatingly slow.

  Jorge told me that he hadn’t been to Mexico since he was a teenager and he didn’t even know anybody there anymore except his brother. He had lived in the States illegally for more than twenty years an
d it was the only life he knew.

  Sure enough, Asra fired Jorge after only a few weeks on the job. She said that he’d been rude to her and hadn’t done what she asked. More likely, she was probably just impossible to please.

  I discovered that the duties of the royal hairdresser were to attend to Princess Zaahira’s coiffure when she woke up, always late in the morning, and then again before she went out to dinner. So this meant that the hairdresser had a lot of free time. Very rarely, Michel would also do grooming for one of the princess’s sons staying in another hotel. He’d known all the children since they were young and behaved rather like an eccentric uncle with them. They tolerated him while keeping him at arm’s length, but he was obviously quite close to their mother. Princess Zaahira and the royal hairdresser giggled and yakked together like two schoolgirl chums.

  It was my duty to drive him when he joined the princess shopping or, rather, I drove his empty car in a caravan of eight cars as we crawled up Rodeo Drive following Princess Zaahira and her entourage, who were on foot. The first time we did this, I could hear him scream for me a block away when he was ready to be picked up. I quickly pulled his car up just behind the princess’s bulletproof Mercedes and chase car, then ran around to open the door for him. He acted as if he’d been waiting for me for two weeks.