press and above all the public sex culture, seemed, except in small doses, to disgust them.”14 It was, in this context, easier and certainly more acceptable for wealthy Saudis to buy sex while visiting the West than it was for them to enter into the mixed marriages and bicultural family life that might produce, over time, integration or even assimilation—as occurred with some frequency, for example, among Pakistani, Iranian, Egyptian, and Palestinian emigres to the West. The obsession with bloodlines among many Saudis, particularly those from the dominant Nejd region, along with their wealth and deep conservatism, kept them apart. Salem’s fantasy of a United Nations (or at least a Security Council) of intercultural marriages was exceptional, and even it presumed the primacy of inflexible and patriarchal Saudi family law.
Whether the subject was sex or shoes, it was almost impossible for a Saudi prince or merchant to travel in the West without being aware, from hour to hour, of the centrality of money in his interactions with Americans and Europeans. Salem managed this by surrounding himself with genuine Western friends who had earned his trust over time; he provided them with enough money and all-expenses-paid vacations to secure their loyalty, but not so much cash that they would likely consider leaving his side. Some of those who attached themselves to Salem, such as the Swedish mechanic Bengt Johansson or the American pilot Gerald Auerbach, had no great appetite for wealth or what it could purchase, and they stayed with Salem the longest. Others in the entourage, such as Jim Bath, seemed much more passionate about making money, and they faded from the inner circle more quickly. It seemed that just about every American who won a retainer from Salem soon pitched him on a side business deal. The ideas came at him like random, subliminal images flashing on the movie screen of a demented experimental psychiatrist—a strip mall in San Antonio, a mining deal promoted by the relative of a powerful senator from Louisiana, a cowboy movie that would be shot in the Philippines. If a particular proposal appealed to Salem’s whimsy, he might say yes, even if it did not fit in his family’s business lines. Salem told his flight instructor, Don Sowell, for example, that he shared ownership of a luxury apartment in London with the boxer Muhammad Ali. If the idea bored Salem (as the cowboy movie’s story line did), he would dismiss it with a wave of his hand.15
“These people are not great,” Johansson recalled telling Salem, speaking about the deal promoters who swirled around him.
“I know, Bengt,” Salem answered. “I am stealing more from them than they are stealing from me.”16
Once, cruising at forty-one thousand feet in a LearJet above North Africa, Salem worried aloud about whether his girlfriends cared for him only because he had money, recalled his pilot Jack Hinson. Salem paused, and then discarded the conundrum: “As long as I’m happy.”17
HE COULD NOT BEAR to be alone as he reached middle age. He turned forty in 1985 or 1986—he did not know either the year or the date of his birth, and he often used Valentine’s Day as a sentimental proxy. His need for constant companionship grew increasingly awkward. When he used the bathroom, for example, he kept the door open and demanded that his friends sit nearby and talk to him as he sat. If no members of his entourage were around, he called down to the front desk and offered to pay for a maid or maintenance man to come to his room, to sit outside the bathroom and keep him company while he did his business.18
His sleeping habits were no less unusual. When he shared a house with his friend Mohamed Ashmawi in Riyadh, he could not bear to sleep alone, and so he would wander in and climb into bed with Mohamed—there was no hint of sexual purpose, just a need for company. When Mohamed had a girlfriend living with him, he would sneak into the room in the night and announce, “I’m going to sleep with you,” Ashmawi recalled.
“I said, ‘You should be shy—I have my girlfriend.’ He said, ‘Let her sleep next to you and I’ll sleep next to you on the other side—you be in the middle.’”
“No, Salem.”
“Let’s try it. It might work.”
“Go sleep in your room.”19
He would finally leave, Ashmawi said, but then Salem slept fitfully and with his eyes open. He spent long days and evenings lying in bed, but he often only slept in fifteen-or thirty-minute intervals. He used all his bedrooms as a combination of office, family room, and playhouse. He routinely held meetings with foreign executives from companies such as Firestone while lying in bed; in the middle of a negotiation, he might tuck his head down and nod off, then just as suddenly jerk back awake.
These restless habits took a visible toll on his health. His body grew soft, his legs had atrophied from lack of exercise, and his eyes sagged and darkened so much that he looked at times like a raccoon. He hardly ever walked—cars drove him from home to airport terminal, and then across the tarmac to his plane, and then from his plane to the next terminal, and so on, until he reached his next bed. Bengt worried that Salem’s legs would soon fail him altogether, and he tried to implement a regimen of no more car rides between airport terminals and airplanes —if they at least walked across every tarmac, he said, perhaps Salem would gain back some leg muscle strength.
Sleeplessness exacerbated Salem’s temper, which could be volcanic. His outbursts usually passed quickly, and left him feeling guilty and sheepish, but particularly as his fatigue accumulated, he could succumb to brief rages. He might wordlessly walk back to the cabin of one of his airplanes and strike one of his brothers, then return and sit down without explanation. He might shout or berate a pilot or even a friend in his entourage, although with them he was very rarely physical. On two or three occasions, according to his friends, he allowed himself to drink beyond his limit and lost all control. Over the course of one particularly memorable and frightening night in Dubai during the late 1980s, Salem smashed up a Sheraton Hotel bandstand, broke a drum over a band member’s head, threatened his friends with violence, and created such ugly scenes in the hotel lobby that his friend from boarding school, Mehmet “Baby Elephant” Birgen, finally called a doctor to sedate him. In the morning, Salem said he couldn’t remember a thing.20
He speculated freely about his own death. In Cannes, around the time that he was developing his proposal to marry his four girlfriends, he sat with his Texas attorney Wayne Fagan and Baby Elephant. Salem mused about how he would react if he discovered that he had cancer or some other serious illness.
“You know what I’d do?” he asked, as Fagan recalled it. “I’d get in my MU-2, and I’d go out and I would find the highest cloud in the sky. And I would climb to the top of that cloud. And I would shut the engines off. I wouldn’t have chemotherapy.”
The room was silent. Salem looked over at Baby Elephant.
“You’re my closest friend, so I’d take you with me—I’m not going alone!”21
23. KITTY HAWK FIELD OF DREAMS
IN THE YEARS following his service in Miami as Bakr’s guardian, Baby Elephant charmed his way through debutante society in Dallas and Moet-fueled nightlife in Geneva. He moved into the jewelry trade, met the actor Sean Connery, and opened a London store in partnership with him; they called it Bond Street Jewelry. Mehmet chased women even more energetically than Salem, and because of his broad shoulders and his brooding dark eyes, he often had success. He and Salem made a pact that if one ever settled down and married, the other would do so as well, but the agreement never seemed likely to come into force. At one stage, Mehmet considered retiring to his native Turkey to write a book about the art of loving women. Instead, following several heartbreaks and financial reversals, he moved to Saudi Arabia. His work was often an extension of Salem’s concierge services. It did have an appealing variety; Mehmet could regale his friends with surreal stories about the whims and peccadilloes of the wealthy Gulf businessmen he looked after during their travels in Europe and America.
In late June 1987, he was in Miami having dinner with the family of his Venezuelan girlfriend, Margarita, when Salem telephoned. As Mehmet later described the conversation for his friends, it went like this:
“This Saturday, I’m marrying Carrie,” Salem announced.
“Oh,
“Yeah, Margarita cornered your ass, too.”
“No, nobody cornered my ass.”
“I’m telling you, she cornered your ass—because you’re going to marry her.”
“Come on, Salem.”
