Imagine a world where servants
enter their boss’ presence via hidden doorways disguised as bookshelves, the ‘Madame’
bathes in Evian, and supermodel guests refuse to flush their own toilets. Where replacement puppies are ordered for the
duration of a holiday, and Lear jets are sent across the globe to pick up a
single Wagu steak (£200) for the dog’s dinner.
Accompanied by a bowl of chilled Evian, bien sur.
Welcome to the Saint Tropez caravan
park for super-yachts, where everyone is nuts.
A super-yacht is any privately-owned pleasure
yacht over 80 feet in length, although an 80-foot yacht is a minnow now in an industry where oligarchs, tycoons and
royalty wage endless status-wars to build the largest mega-yachts. The biggest now (Eclipse, owned by Roman Abramovich) surpasses 535 feet and comes equipped with cinema, anti-missile shield and a submarine. Some might call that overkill.
These super-yachts, with helipads
and Jacuzzis and cabins of marble and gold, cluster at anchor off Saint Tropez
and Saint Barths or squish together in the ports of Portofino and Porto Cervo,
close enough that they can hear each other’s music and watch each other’s
procession of guests- the movie stars and models, mafia and oil barons, the
bankers, inventors and diamond-mine owners.
Add mistresses, prostitutes, bodyguards and nannies, and here you have
the world’s strangest caravan park, where the richest families on earth return each
year, en masse, to mingle with their kind.
Some years ago, I moved to the
South of France to find a job as a super-yacht stewardess, which, sadly,
doesn’t require a cape as the title might suggest. (A lobotomy might prove
useful though.) I hadn’t realised that I was about to become a domestic servant
in a floating Downton Abbey, albeit one where my employers would sometimes more
resemble Vlad the Impaler than the benevolent Lord Grantham. I had doubts as to whether I was
psychologically suited to being ‘the help’.
As it turned out, these were excellent, well-founded doubts.
My first day on a 30 million dollar yacht was illuminating. I was instructed by the chief stewardess that ‘Madame’,
(the yacht owner’s wife) would only bathe in Evian water, and that we were to
send her dry-cleaning to Paris on a Lear-jet.
I was prohibited from using the same doorway as her, and was told to enter and exit her cabin via the emergency escape hatch. The captain also warned me against ‘speaking to
the guests without being spoken to first’.
He clearly didn’t realise that telling an Australian to ‘know her place’
is an exercise in futility.
Three weeks later, I quit the yacht
after ‘Madame’ split her Filipino servant’s nose with a flying stiletto after
discovering one of her evening gowns had slipped off its hanger at sea. She screamed
at the young woman that she would throw her passport overboard and that she
would never see her family again. When I
suggested (quite strongly) that the girl should quit, she told me that she couldn't quit, as Madame had flown to the Philippines and bought her from her family with a
suitcase full of money. If I was the 21st century servant, this girl was the 21st century slave. My super-yacht education had begun with a
bang. Like all worthwhile education, it
involved scandal and danger, and would change the way I saw the world.
Not all super-yacht owners are
bonkers, of course. Some are polite, spend
their time playing Scrabble, and barely ever throw things. Amusingly for people swanning about in a
giant white yacht, some even try to travel incognito and wear scruffy old clothes. I won’t be writing much about them. Dull, you see. Violent megalomaniacs are just that bit more
interesting. Especially the billionaires
that used to live behind a certain heavyweight curtain. I’m not sure if they
think that Lenin might jump out from behind the jetskis, confiscate their
American blue jeans and make them start queuing for bread again, but that lot
sure know how to misbehave.
Welcome to the secret life of super-yachts.
Wildly ostentatious, utterly conceited...and hugely entertaining.
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