Sailing along the Italian Riviera on a multi-million-dollar yacht is mind-blowing. The scenery scorches itself indelibly on your eyeballs, your soul touched forever.
Or in some cases maybe not. Read on…
Mesmerized by the magical beauty of the sea, the sun, the air, the coastline, of the perfectly appointed colorful houses climbing up along the Italian Amalfi Coast and Cinque Terre — and these people live here? How incredibly idyllic.
But I am pulled from my reverie by our guests on board. I was 21 and second stewardess on a superyacht. (Side note: If you have seen the current yachty reality show Below Deck… It is nothing like that working on a high-class yacht. Nothing.)
Our superyacht was owned by a one-armed Spanish guy in his 60’s. How he’d lost his arm I didn’t know but wondered if it was something to do with the bulls he was breeding for bullfighting in Spain. For that alone I wasn’t too keen on the guy. And decided he probably deserved it. He only visited once thank goodness as we were often chartered out to guests for weeks at a time.
The boat cost $60,000 a week to charter, plus fuel charges (people didn’t know where they wanted to go when they got on), port charges (or parking for the night, some port charges were $1000 per night in Portofino, Sardinia, and Sicily. And food (the guests would have sudden lavish parties for all their sudden friends who would start arriving on Cigarette speed boats, overly tan with hardly any clothes on). So, $60,000 per week plus many extra charges. It was a lot in the 80’s.
We were based out of Antibes and Monte Carlo, and guests would stay for weeks at a time. Which was nice. You could get into a groove with each group of guests, find out their likes and dislikes, etc. But mainly we seemed to be the invisible elves, our guests not wanting to be disturbed, but still requiring a new cocktail in their hand whenever they extended it.
We sailed all along the French Riviera, Cannes, Nice, Saint Tropez, Monte-Carlo, San Remo and down to Corsica, the Amalfi Coast, Napoli — shopping in Portofino, Sardinia, Sicily, and a lot of the small islands, Capri, Elba, and eventually west to Pantelleria, just off the Sicilian coast and closer to Africa than Italy.
When you get down to southern Italy, the translucency of the sea is astounding, and the mass of the rocks wind-blown and sand blasted from the Sahara for centuries into amazing shapes. It’s another world, and very hot in the summer.
Everything on the boat was immaculate. Polished walnut wood and brass fixtures with honey wax scenting the air, the squishiness of the plush carpeting like soft sand in between your barefoot toes. The air-conditioning touching you in soft whispers.
The boat slept eight guests in large, magnificent cabins, singles and doubles, complete with en-suite marble bathrooms and gold dolphin taps. There were four decks and below the sun deck, two speedboats on winches that could be lowered to the sea on either side. And way below deck a plethora of other sea and land vehicles hidden away.
We were only eight crew on the boat including the captain. There were two stewardesses.
Being second stewardess was an every-other-day kind of thing, swapping out with the first stewardess. Mornings were either serving the guests their breakfast, whatever they wanted; or cleaning their cabin whilst they had breakfast. One or the other. Rotating for as long as they stayed, to take care of them. And alternating lunch and dinner.
We only had one chef, Julie, so jumping into the galley with her to prep gourmet food was also a thing. It was fun. It was a very hot summer, and fabulous. Most of the time.
For a couple of weeks in Monte Carlo, we were moored next to Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi’s $70 million yacht, Nabila, named after his daughter. It was the largest yacht in the world at the time, and featured in the 1983 Bond movie Never Say Never Again starring Sean Connery. It apparently had a nightclub and a movie theater on board, including walls that opened into secret palatial rooms.
His boat dwarfed ours. And seemed to be run by a Filipino crew, but I could see parts of their deck from our bridge. Some mornings I saw them walk a goat to the front of the boat, tie it up and then slit its neck, leaving it to bleed to death, for their kosher meal for the day. Some dutiful Filipino deckhands would later come and hose away all the blood and make it spotless, as if nothing had happened. Nothing happening here.
Khashoggi was having financial problems — relatively speaking — at the time, it was well known, yet his superyacht would leave early morning three days a week to take his five-year-old son to school in Nice. Khashoggi’s Rolls Royce would also leave the dock in Monte-Carlo and drive the 14 miles or so to meet the boat when it pulled into Nice, and take the little boy off the boat and then drive him less than a mile to school. Why on earth they even involved the boat in this large adventure just baffled me. But Khashoggi was known for his extravagance.
Nabila was sold in 1988 to the Sultan of Brunei, who later sold it to Trump, so, you know, it has some serious Karmic energy. He renamed it The Trump Princess. In 1991 after his own financial problems, Trump sold it to Saudi Prince Al-Waleed, at a considerable loss, to settle some financial deal, for $20 million. The Saudi prince renamed the vessel again, to Kingdom 5KR. It’s now reportedly worth $90 million.
In the mid-80s in the Mediterranean, the superyachts were either European owned or they were Arab boats. Large, white, and sleek, with angular black windows. The Russian oligarch yachts hadn’t arrived on the scene yet. And nor Bezos with his fantasy yacht for that matter. The internet, nor Amazon, was invented yet.
On my afternoons off I would stand on the bridge in my white polyester uniform looking through the binoculars in amazement at the other yachts anchored off Saint Tropez, but particularly a massive dark tinted windowed Arab boat anchored out, as speedboats ferried beautiful girls backwards and forwards from the beach all afternoon. Fascinating.
Two weeks later I bumped into one of the crew of that boat in a bakery in Naples. He told me that the girls in the speedboats were high class call girls, who’d have to be draped in jewels and couture and often would just have to sit around all day looking stunning in Chanel, but could make up to $25,000 for committing various acts usually involving unsanitary things and glass top tables. It has always intrigued me how some people spend their time…
We had a very high-profile politician on board our boat for a month. We weren’t supposed to know who he was and had to call him by a code name, but we obviously knew. I would clean his cabin every other day, swapping out with the first stewardess. He wore red plaid flannelette pajamas to bed and would leave the bathroom with a riot of shaving mousse all over the huge mirror every day. It was quite spectacular. Maybe he practiced karate moves in front of the mirror with soaped-up shaving brush in hand. Remarkable. How could someone so high ranking be such a mess I wondered.
It took me years to realize he had a cut throat razor to shave, and the shaving foam was just where it landed, off his face.
His passport was left next to his bed, so I knew who he was – he was Israeli Ambassador Extraordinaire to the U.S. and his name was Benjamin Netanyahu. We had to call him Mr Ben, and he was traveling with (his now wife) Sara, although at the time they had separate cabins. I think she was his assistant.
He had no personality. Very dry, and I wasn’t sure that he was enjoying his holiday.
We were off of the island furthest west from the coast of Italy, that is still Italy, Pantelleria, and it’s beautiful, although I never stepped foot on it, as we didn’t dock there but were anchored out for days, maybe weeks. It’s a volcanic island with cliffs and no real beaches.
Pretty interesting in retrospect, given what’s happening in the Middle East. We were rather close to the coast of Libya at the time, and “Mr Ben” had regular calls coming in on the satellite phone. The Libyan war was going on. It’s pretty heavy stuff.
I’m now left wondering about how it would have changed the course of history if I’d just pushed him overboard…