An occasional peak at the amount of money the Saudi’s spend to maintain themselves can boggle the mind. An example is the recent trip by Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah to meet with President Bush (and walk hand in hand through the tumbleweeds) for a day at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas, chatting about oil prices, the Lebanese parliamentary elections and topics they have kept to themselves.
The Crown Prince, who is 81, is the actual Saudi ruler. His half-brother King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz, Wahhabi scholar and 82 year old son of the founder of Saudi Arabia, still holds the regent’s title but his kingship is all crown and no scepter. He has been incapacitated and incompetent for almost ten years.
Prince Abdullah’s matching Boeing 747’s landed in Dallas two weeks ago loaded down with enough people and material to populate and outfit a small town, think Nantucket in the winter. Abdullah had booked almost all of the 143 rooms at the charming and expensive Mansion on Turtle Creek (owned by the charming and rich Caroline Rose Hunt, daughter of the now dead and very rich oil man H.L. Hunt) for his entourage of body guards, factotums, scribes, hangers-on and dozens of servants and took over most of the nearby Hotel Crescent Court for the overflow. Saudi minions advancing the trip had already installed marble flooring in the prince’s bathroom as well as a marble bidet to accommodate the royal behind. Two hundred suitcases were off-loaded from the planes, transported by station wagons and trucks to the hotels and unpacked by a team of male servants. The clothing within-almost 1700 separate items, was hand-pressed by the hotel staff the day of arrival. The prince has four official wives but the quartet remained at home and presumably wouldn’t have engaged in ironing anyway.
The prince took one entire suite (at more than $1,000 a day) to use as a closet for his clothes and another room was turned into his private barbershop. The prince does not dress himself and a male staffer, different from the one who shaves him every morning, was there to drape and undrape the substantial princely body. Plasma TV screens were installed in another room so the prince could watch more than a dozen channels at once. The prince and his underlings spent four nights at the hotels. The exact cost is not known but it has been estimated (by Alan Peppard of the Dallas Morning News) at $500,000 or more, depending on the prices of food, and services. Peppard quotes the Mansion’s head chef as saying about Saudi room service requests that went from early every morning to early every next morning, “It was just a huge amount of food. I’ve never seen people eat like this in my life.” And the prince had brought his own executive chef and three assistant chefs with him from Riyadh. Loaded down with thousands of dollars worth of DVD players and other electronic devices bought in nearby malls the 727’s lumbered out of Dallas’ Love Field for Morocco four days after they landed.