On A Booming Super-Yacht Market | Vanity Fair New Zealand mogul Alan Gibbs and his daughter and girlfriend in the Aquada, which he invented, driving around his 194-foot exploration yacht, Senses, as the boat's helicopter circles above. Photograph by Todd Eberle. ‘Have you ever seen anything so cool in your life?” Jamie Edmiston, the 29-year-old super-yacht broker, has to shout, for we are in a Eurocopter EC130 over the ocean off Antibes, on our way to a yacht called Senses. It’s May of last year, and all the giant luxury boats are clustered on the Côte d’Azur for the Cannes Film Festival and the Grand Prix in Monte Carlo. Having wintered in Palm Beach, the Caribbean, and beyond, the crews have streaked across the Atlantic while their employers jetted over on their Gulfstreams, Citations, Boeing Business Jets, and Bombardier Global Expresses. Edmiston and I have taken off from the so-called Quai des Milliardaires (“Dock of the Billionaires”) at the International Yacht Club of Antibes, which was begun in 1999 to berth the big boats.

As we fly over the seagoing behemoths, Edmiston points certain ones out: the Leander, parking-lot tycoon Sir Donald Gosling’s stately home on water; Aussie Rules, built by golf star Greg Norman and recently sold to Miami Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga, which has a swimming pool, a movie theater, and a dozen smaller boats on board; Sokar, the pride of Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed, on which his son, Dodi, and Princess Diana spent their last days, in 1997. We’re 12 miles offshore, the minimum requirement for a helicopter to land on a boat along the Riviera, approaching Senses, a 194-foot exploration yacht, one of the largest in the world, with interiors by Philippe Starck and an abundance of “toys,” a yachting term that can mean anything from a Jet Ski to a submarine. Edmiston cries, “Look at the dolphins!” The copter tilts sideways, and I can see dozens of dolphins, leaping into the air and leading us straight toward the boat, as if they had been sent to fetch us.

When we land on the fourth and uppermost deck, the yacht’s co-owner, Alan Gibbs, 65, the New Zealand inventor, takeover artist, and telecommunications mogul, is standing there in his bathing suit with two ravishing young women in string bikinis at his side—Emma, his daughter, a neuroscientist, and Sandra Baker, his Tahitian girlfriend. Gibbs leads us to the sundeck for lunch. “It’s about freedom to, not freedom from,” he says to explain the thrill of owning a yacht. “We’re free to do, free to go, is how I see it. We’re not going to fly to the moon from here. But it would be hard to find a better way to explore the earth than on this.” The boat beneath us is a $40 million Goliath with a 120-ton fuel tank that costs $80,000 to fill and can keep the yacht at sea for a good part of the summer. Gibbs has taken Senses halfway around the world. “We were the first large yacht that actually visited Tunisia,” he says. “They couldn’t quite cope with it.

The helicopter just drove them nuts—that some private person would have a ship that looked like the navy and wanted to fly all over Tunisia in a helicopter.” Suddenly he shouts, “Get the toys in the water!” There is an instant buzz of walkie-talkies, and 14 crew members scurry out. Up goes the yacht’s helicopter, and down go the 42-foot tender, the 32-foot sailing yacht, and six Jet Skis. Then Gibbs yells, “Launch the Aquada!” A hatch opens, and the world’s first high-speed amphibious car, Gibbs’s invention, seven years in development and coming to the market soon, glides down a ramp into the sea. As its wheels retract, it turns into a speedboat. Gibbs drives, and the women sit atop bucket seats, spume wetting their hair as they seem to push the limits of extravagance. Back on board minutes later, Gibbs says, “That was really James Bond stuff out there. But Bond is only mucking it up.

We’re really doing it!” ‘Ever larger boats have replaced palaces, estates, and art as the ultimate symbols of wealth, which is not altogether surprising, given the fleeting and disposable nature of our society,” says Mark Getty, the son of Sir J. Paul Getty Jr., as he shows me around Talitha G, which was launched in 1929 by the head of Packard, sold to the chief of Woolworth’s, requisitioned by the U.S. Navy during World War II, rescued by Saturday Night Fever movie producer Robert Stigwood, and immaculately restored by J. Paul Getty Jr. in 1993. Named for his second wife, Talitha G has six staterooms, open fireplaces, Lalique glass doors, period art and furnishings, and the latest technology. Hollywood superstars and captains of industry can charter her for $350,000 a week, excluding gas and gratuities. It’s the day of the Grand Prix in Monte Carlo, and from *Talitha’*s aft deck Mark Getty and I are gazing out on a sea full of super-yachts.

We can hear the Formula One race cars buzzing around curving hillsides above us and the crowd’s cheers. But the bigger race is definitely here in the harbor, Port Hercule, where 111 boats pack every available slip—at a cost of $25,000 to $50,000 a week each—while dozens more that can’t find space or are just too big to fit are moored around the harbor’s rim. As big as cruise ships, super-yachts have names to match—Giant, Kingdom 5KR, Hedonist, Huntress, Limitless, Seawolfe, Passion, Nectar of the Gods, Naughty by Nature, Big Roi. Sir J. Paul Getty Jr.'s Talitha G, restored in 1993 by the late Jon Bannenberg, long considered the world's foremost yacht designer. Photograph by Todd Eberle. In order to see them up close, I descend three decks and get into a Wally Tender, the motorboat used to ferry owners, guests, crew, and supplies from ship to shore and yacht to yacht.

Like everything else in yachting, the Wally Tender is over the top; this $670,000 propeller-powered Batmobile is considered a necessary accessory by everyone from the designer Valentino to Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. I’m traveling with Luca Bassani, the owner of Wally Yachts, who has revolutionized yachting, first with sailing yachts and then with power ones. He slams the tender into gear, and the boat almost levitates, quickly bringing us right up alongside the huge vessels. They rise up from the ocean like monoliths. There’s the vanilla-colored, $100 million Pelorus (378 feet), one of four super- yachts owned by the Russian oil billionaire Roman Abramovich . Pelorus is equipped with bulletproof glass, a missile-detection system, two helicopters, a submarine, and high-intensity “paparazzi lights,” designed to obliterate the film of any interloping photographer. Beyond that is Lady Moura (344 feet), owned by Saudi billionaire Dr.

Nasser al-Rashid, with an 80-member crew, a fully equipped hospital, an onboard sand beach, and a 59-foot dining table. Next is Greek shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos’s 379-foot Atlantis II, which has rarely left the harbor since his death, in 1996. Then comes Delphine, launched in 1921 by American automobile magnate Horace Dodge and requisitioned by Franklin Roosevelt for meetings with Winston Churchill and Vyacheslav Molotov during World War II; restored, it rents for $60,000 a day. Moored outside the port is Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Octopus, making its debut in the Mediterranean, having just sailed from New Orleans, where Allen used the boat to promote his company’s new software at a convention of cable-TV executives. Built at a cost that reportedly escalated from $250 to $400 million, with a crew of 60 that includes former navy SEALs, Octopus is, at 413 feet, the world’s largest privately owned yacht, so huge that the lifeboats strapped to its side look like tiny toys.

Anchored by means of a dynamic positioning system that enables the captain to stop with perfect precision, it’s a skyscraper with seven decks, two helicopter landing pads, a swimming pool, a basketball court, an infirmary, a garage, a movie theater, and, in its belly, a port to house many of the 14 tenders. These include a custom-built submarine that can remain underwater with 10 people for two weeks and a remote-controlled robot for exploring the ocean floor. There’s a concert space for 260, a massive guitar sculpture that rises up through the entire height of the boat, and a recording studio, which is a second home to musicians ranging from Dan Aykroyd to Robbie Robertson. On the lowest level is an observation lounge with a glass bottom and stadium-strength lighting that illuminates the depths, for watching sea creatures. This colossus has everything on it but torpedoes, which Allen declined when the builder suggested them for security. Meanwhile, Allen’s great rival, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, has just completed Rising Sun, 47 critical feet longer than Octopus, a new record for length. As J. P.

Morgan once said when asked about the cost of his yacht, Corsair III, which, at 300 feet and with a crew of 70, was the world’s largest in the early 1900s, “If you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it.” In the shadow of these monsters in the harbor is an array of smaller yachts, which are still big enough to be classified as “mega-,” or “super-,” a category that includes all powerboats and sailboats more than 80 feet long, according to Diane Byrne of Power & Motoryacht magazine. There are between 5,000 and 6,000 super-yachts in the world, and the number is growing steadily—622 were launched in 2003 alone. “It’s a grand traveling home,” says Dr.

Charles Simonyi, one of the pioneers of Microsoft and a driving force behind the invention of its Excel program, as he relaxes on the sundeck of *Skat—*Danish for “my darling.” A slate-gray, 231-foot vessel that is sometimes mistaken for a battleship, it serves as the bachelor’s home and office six months of the year. Decorated with Victor Vasarely and Roy Lichtenstein paintings and Arne Jacobsen “egg” chairs, Skat is the result of Simonyi’s failed search for satisfying apartments. “I tried Montréal, I tried Monte Carlo, I tried Copenhagen,” he says. But why, he finally decided, join the dogfight for locations and suffer the indignities of local taxes, constant maintenance, and zoning restrictions when you can sail into the heart of the capitals of the world on a luxurious, fully staffed fortress? “In all of the Scandinavian capitals—Oslo as well as Copenhagen and Stockholm—we are always docked next to the king’s or queen’s palace,” he says.

“We are occupying the best real estate, and I have the nicest bathroom and a fantastic restaurant.” Although Simonyi insists that he uses Skat as a base to run his businesses, life on board most boats is pretty sybaritic—breakfast until noon, lunch until 3, cocktails at 6, dinner until 12, and drinks until dawn. When the Grand Prix winner is announced, every yacht in the harbor blasts its horn, and they sound like an armada of whales, drowning out the applause coming from Monte Carlo’s natural amphitheater above. Within hours most of the boats will depart, untangling themselves from one another’s anchor lines and heading out to sea. If you don’t own a yacht, you can always charter one, at prices ranging from $203,000 a week for the 175-foot Perfect Prescription (which Jaguar leased and lent to Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and Matt Damon during the filming of Ocean’s Twelve) to $850,000 a week for Annaliesse, a 279-footer with 18 staterooms (instead of the usual 12).

On the day of my visit, Annaliesse has been chartered for a wedding. Lionel Richie is on board to serenade the party, and the bride and groom and 100 guests arrive by helicopter, all of them dressed in white bathrobes. With the exception of Tiger Woods, who owns a 155-foot boat he christened Privacy, celebrities tend to lease or rent. Denzel and Pauletta Washington rent a yacht almost every summer; so do Magic Johnson, rap star Jay-Z, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw, and Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson. If you can’t charter, you can visit friends who do or, as they say in the yachting world, go hopping. “Yacht-hopping,” explains fashion model Naomi Campbell, who took her first cruise a decade ago, on Mohamed Al Fayed’s yacht. When I meet her, she’s staying on Formula One racing impresario Flavio Briatore’s Lady in Blue. Today, she says, she’ll hop from Lady in Blue to Valentino’s TM Blue One to the Brazilian party boat called Bossa Nova. “Boat to boat,” she says. “It’s disgusting.

When I say, ‘yacht-hopping,’ I mean I go to say hi to my friends.” Darwin Deason with his partner, Katerina Panos and their crew and security force, ready to greet guests for cocktails. Photograph by Todd Eberle. I’ve been invited to spend some time on the Apogee, at 205 feet the 62nd-largest yacht in the world, according to *Power & Motoryacht’*s 2004 rankings. It cost $50 million and charters for $320,000 a week. “Welcome to the Apogee,” says the steward who scoops up my luggage from the dock at Cagnes sur Mer and deposits it in a tender. Speeding through the soup of Jet Skis, minnow speedboats, and midsize yachts, I can see the Apogee and its owner, Dallas-based international computer-services titan Darwin Deason, and his glamorous partner, Katerina Panos, waving from the aft deck. They are flanked by the 17-member crew, standing in two neat lines.

They greet every guest this way, 12 of us all together, with the whole crew shaking our hands and introducing themselves before they escort us to the six guest staterooms, each named for a Greek island. Our bags are unpacked for us, and Deason gives us a tour of the interior’s 26,000 square feet: the wood-paneled upstairs and downstairs saloons, the Apogee Club Bar, the disco dance floor with a Wurlitzer juke-box, the formal dining room—all the way up to the fourth-level sundeck, where we forgo the fully equipped gym and the 12-person Jacuzzi to bake in the sun until cocktails are served. By then the twin Caterpillar engines are purring and we’re cruising the five miles to Monte Carlo. ‘A yacht is a demonstration of wealth,” says yacht broker Nicholas Edmiston, Jamie’s father. Formerly C.E.O. of the venerable yacht-sales-and-charter company Camper & Nicholsons, Edmiston created his own business in 1996 to focus on selling and chartering “really big yachts,” which he says means upwards of 150 feet.

Business is booming, with yacht construction up 22 percent over last year and a $950 million increase in sales, according to industry experts. “There has been a huge expansion in big yachts over the past six to seven years, with even bigger ones on the drawing board,” says Edmiston. “More than ever in history—because we’ve got more rich people. A yacht is probably the most expensive single purchase that anyone is ever going to make.” Nothing else comes close. A jet? A mansion? They are mere starter kits for yacht enthusiasts. “There was a huge prime estate that just came on the market in England—3,600 acres, the most beautiful grade-one house, designed by Sir Christopher Wren’s protégé. Immaculate. And that is $75 to $80 million. I’m selling yachts today for $150 to $200 million.” He looks out over the port of Monte Carlo.

“I always say to people, ‘Never spend more than 10 percent of your net worth on buying a yacht.’ So the guy that wants to buy a yacht for $25 million is worth $250 million.” Time is of the essence, Edmiston says, because once you have enough money to buy a boat, chances are you don’t have nearly enough years left to enjoy it. “From the beginning of the planning to taking delivery is three to four years,” he says. “So if you’re the 67-year-old billionaire standing on the dock here with a young woman on your arm and she says, ‘Honey, I’d love one of those!,’ can he risk waiting four years to get it built? Or is it better to say to the guy who just paid 50 million for a new yacht, ‘How about if I give you 65?’ I know what I’d do.” A new yacht from a German or Dutch shipyard can appreciate approximately 25 percent the minute it hits the water, he says.

“Roughly 10 percent of the price of the yacht is what it costs every year to run it,” adds Edmiston, listing the costs: captain and crew (plus helicopter pilots, personal maids, guides, masseuses, hairdressers, etc.), insurance, harbor fees, maintenance, fuel—which industry experts say can run as high as $300,000 for a summer’s fill-up for Paul Allen’s Octopus. Edmiston motions across the harbor to a 300-footer. “To paint a yacht like that is around $4 to $5 million,” he says. “Of course, you don’t have to do it every year.” Most owners charter their yachts, but the super-rich never do; they want them in constant readiness. “I was on a big yacht down in Sardinia not long ago, and the owner was complaining that he couldn’t get any decent fresh fruit,” says Edmiston. “It’s a nice place, Sardinia, but not really noted for agriculture. So there was a helicopter on the yacht, which I sent to the market in Cannes, a 400-mile round-trip.

He got his raspberries and strawberries and was very happy.” The fruit probably cost $4,000 in fuel and other expenses. “Who cares?” says Edmiston. “What I cared about is that the owner got what he wanted.” ‘This yacht took two years in dreaming, three years in building,” says Mexico City industrialist Carlos Peralta, standing on his seventh boat, a Swarovski-crystal-encrusted fantasy called Princess Mariana, for his wife. It has six decks, six bars, 1,600 movies, 16,000 pre-programmed songs, three chefs, a cellar with 2,000 bottles of wine and 1,000 bottles of tequila, a laundry, a wall that opens to turn a bedroom into a terrace, and such high-tech features as fingerprint-identification pads to secure staterooms and other areas. We’re bobbing in the bay off the Hôtel du Cap, surrounded by yachts, including Barry Diller’s two-masted ketch, The Mikado.

Peralta tells me that covetous Saudi princes have been circling his boat all week in powerboats, and that he has turned down several offers to sell it at an enormous profit. “It’s the most expensive thing you can build,” he says, “but it gives you pleasure like nothing else.” “I’ve bought a second boat that I call the Lady Lola Shadow, a 186-foot, 20-year-old supply vessel, and I’ve just loaded her with toys,” says Idaho-based newspaper magnate Duane Hagadone, who, in commissioning his 205-foot Lady Lola, admonished the designers, “Give me some sizzle!” The result includes the 18-hole Lady Lola Golf Club, where golfers hit floating golf balls off a retractable tee on the sundeck toward 18 floating pins and have their games tracked by satellite and displayed on a television screen. “The second boat follows along behind the Lady Lola.

I’ve got a custom-made wooden boat, a 150-mile-per-hour speedboat, a submarine, landing boats, canoes, kayaks—17 boats, plus the helicopter, in the Lady Lola fleet.” “Most people don’t even know they want a yacht,” international boat broker Steve Kidd says of his clientele, powerhouses who think they’ve done it all until someone leads them onto a yacht and into another dimension. “Fifty kilograms of Iranian beluga at $500,000, 300 bottles of Dimple scotch, 300 bottles of Johnny Walker Black, 50 cases of champagne, 40 pounds of foie gras, close to 100 pounds of Niman Ranch beef—bill just shy of a million,” says a provisioner of one boat owner’s memorable order. London-based designer Donald Starkey adds, “I’ve personally put on one yacht alone a Picasso, a Dubuffet, two Utrillos, two or three Chagalls, and more.

The value of the art is probably three times the value of the yacht.” Valentino’s rep Carlos Souza says, “Whenever guests come to TM Blue One, they make sure they pack lots of cashmere, because Valentino likes the temperature subzero, the air-conditioning running full blast.” Public-relations executive Lara Shriftman tells me, “On one boat I went on, they had a different set of designer china for every single meal. The crew cleaned the boat morning, noon, and night. In the bathrooms they had 20 different kinds of shampoo in a basket for a lot of high-maintenance girls. All the linens were Pratesi—600-thread count.” What is it about a yacht that bewitches the super-rich? “Abandonment, an immediate yes,” says the actor George Hamilton without hesitation. King Edward VIII engaged in his romance with Wallis Simpson, which led to his abdication, during a 1936 charter on a steam yacht called Nahlin. But the allure of a yacht goes beyond mere romance.

Occidental Petroleum magnate Armand Hammer had three wives, but the only photograph he carried in his wallet was of his yacht, according to Nancy Holmes in her book The Dream Boats. Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli, whose yachts included Agneta, a teak beauty with rust-colored sails, liked to say, “You can tell what a man is like only by his boat and his woman.” After dining on Gloria and Loel Guinness’s yacht, Sarina, in the 60s, Elizabeth Taylor told Richard Burton she wanted one. “We chartered a sweet old lady, whose original name I’ve forgotten, to go to the Greek islands,” Taylor tells me, describing the dilapidated, 165-foot motor yacht built in 1906 that she and Burton bought for $200,000. They named her Kalizma, an acronym for their children Kate, Liza, and Maria, and spent a reported $2 million in restoration. “She wasn’t pretty at all on the interior—all navy and nautical trim—and yet there was something so charming about her. Richard and I fell in love with her immediately, although it meant doing a complete revamp.

I hired a decorator and asked him to remove every trace of the nautical theme. We put in diesel engines and stabilizers and transformed her into a cozy, comfortable, pretty little house, very romantic and colorful. We hung our paintings in the dining saloon and put Louis Quatorze chairs in the living room. The bedroom was all yellow and white. I think it was the prettiest one we ever had. There were rooms for all the kids, and we used her as a floating home. We took her up the Thames and kept all of our dogs on board because of the quarantine laws in England. Other boats would pass by and shout that we had the largest floating kennel in the world. She gave us more pleasure and fun and was the best present we ever gave each other.” The exterior of the yacht, Christina O. Photograph by Todd Eberle. I’m on a tender off the coast of Cap-Ferrat, sailing toward the mother ship of super-yachts, the Christina O.

On this 325-foot former Canadian Navy frigate, which Aristotle Onassis bought in 1954 for $34,000 and transformed at a cost of $4 million, the Greek tycoon invented yacht culture: living on his boat for months at a time, conducting his international business empire from his master suite, seducing in his “lucky” stateroom such fabled women as Maria Callas, Greta Garbo, and Jacqueline Kennedy. “So this it seems is what it is to be a king,” Jackie Kennedy allegedly said when she first stepped onto the Christina in October 1963. King Farouk called the Christina “the last word in opulence,” and in Jackie’s day it had a crew of 60, two French hairdressers, three chefs, a masseuse, a maid for each of the 12 staterooms, and a small orchestra. Restored for $50 million and relaunched as the Christina O in 2001 by a syndicate, the yacht was booked for a cruise for $1.54 million for two weeks during the 2004 Olympics, in Athens.

“This boat is a place of fire, burning fire, a place of romance, power, and beauty!” says Michel Blanchi, of the Christina O Partnership, as he takes me through the Callas Lounge, which has a Steinway piano in it; the Lapis Lounge, with its famous lapis lazuli fireplace; the aft deck, with the hydraulic swimming pool whose bottom rises to become a dance floor; the master suite, with a painting by Renoir in it; and into Ari’s Bar. The handles on the bar are whales’ teeth carved with pornographic scenes from The Odyssey, and the seats are covered in the foreskins of whales’ penises. Once, leading Garbo to the bar, Onassis said, “I’m going to sit you on the biggest prick in the world.” She responded, “Mr. Onassis, you are a presumptuous man.” But she soon succumbed to his advances. Onassis’s arch-enemy, fellow Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos, not only married Onassis’s first wife, Tina, but also had the gall to compete with him in boats.

When Onassis converted the Canadian frigate Stormont into the Christina, he added about 30 feet so that it would be bigger than Niarchos’s boat. When Niarchos dared to build an even bigger yacht, the Atlantis II, 55 feet longer than the Christina, with a gyroscopically controlled swimming pool whose water remained steady in rough seas, Onassis went ballistic. “I was actually there, and Onassis was furious!” says Peter Evans, author of two books about him, Ari and Nemesis. “Making phone calls around the world, to see if he could get a gyroscope adapted for his pool.” Evans smiles. “Rivalries and silliness. But it mattered to these people.” Left, a spiral staircase on the Christina O, the Onassis yacht; Right, the notorious bar on the Christina O, with barstools covered in the foreskins of whales' penises; here Aristotle Onassis romanced such fabled women as Maria Callas, Greta Garbo, and Jacqueline Kennedy. Photographs by Todd Eberle. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis unwittingly became a bellwether of the coming craze for yacht supremacy.

Having heard all about her husband’s sexual conquests on the Christina, Evans says, she almost persuaded him to sell it and design a new yacht from scratch, to be called Jacqueline. She even had the perfect designer to suggest: Jon Bannenberg. ‘Nobody needs a yacht,” Jon Bannenberg liked to say, so instead of designing yachts for practicality, he created yachts that spoke to his clients’ dreams. “He opened the floodgate of imagination,” says Jim Gilbert, the founder of ShowBoats International magazine. “When he came into the business, teak and mahogany were the only woods; blue and white and the occasional forest green were the only colors.

This guy starts telling people that the same principles that apply to fashion should apply to yachts, that a yacht should stimulate all of the senses, not just the nautical senses.” One Dutch shipyard added $1 million to the cost of every Bannenberg-designed yacht for what it called “the Bannenberg factor.” “My father never lost sight of the fact that all of us in this amazing business owe our livelihoods to people who spend, well, you know the sums, so he always made the whole process the most fantastic, exciting experience,” says Dickie Bannenberg, who has run Jon Bannenberg Ltd. since shortly before his father’s death, in 2002. A Sydney-born interior designer, Jon Bannenberg began his yacht-designing career in the early 1960s, when one of the clients of his London firm asked him what he thought about the plans for the yacht he was building. “It’s terrible,” Bannenberg said. When the client dared him to do better, Bannenberg did, and thereby embarked on a career that would span four decades and the creation of about 200 yachts.

He introduced many of the features that are standard on today’s big vessels: bold hull and window shapes, split-level saloons, elevators, back stairs for crew, his-and-her baths, movie theaters, and such special touches as aft-deck garages for automobiles. His creations included Carinthia V, for German retail tycoon Helmut Horten (who, after it sank on its maiden voyage, commanded Bannenberg to build another, bigger and faster); the Highlander, for Malcolm Forbes; the Lady Ghislaine, for British media baron Robert Maxwell (whose drowning off the yacht in 1991 remains a mystery); the Southern Cross III, for Alan Bond, the Australian industrialist who won the America’s Cup; the restoration of Talitha G, for Sir J. Paul Getty Jr.; and the 316-foot Limitless, for the Limited-store magnate Leslie Wexner. The yacht that shocked everyone was the $70 million Nabila, which Bannenberg designed for Adnan Khashoggi. When it was launched, in 1979, it was the most opulent yacht in the world.

Nabila Khashoggi, the daughter of the notorious arms dealer, meets me in a Sunset Boulevard coffee shop, in her home base of Los Angeles. In her mind the Nabila is as new as it was on the day it was launched, when she was 15. “Your baba made a boat!” she remembers being told before being led, with her eyes covered, by her stepmother, Lamia, and her nanny to a slip at the Benetti shipyard in Viareggio, Italy, where the Nabila stood on stilts. “I opened my eyes and . . . first, the size!” she remembers. “I just burst into tears.” The 270-foot silver yacht had twin engine exhausts that resembled wings, a crew of 40, three chefs, 11 staterooms, a helicopter, a movie theater, a disco, a hospital with rotating crews of surgeons (and coffins, just in case), 296 telephones, and a fortune in revolving art. “It looked like a silver bullet,” Nabila remembers. When it was launched, hundreds of doves were released and priests and imams said prayers.

Soon celebrities the world over began streaming on board, and spectators packed docks whenever the vessel pulled into port. “I went on the Nabila with Elizabeth Taylor,” says George Hamilton. “A plane was sent for us. You would have thought you were landing on the Titanic. I don’t think Elizabeth ever wanted to leave. There were helicopters that would take you wherever; if you wanted to go to another country, you were on a plane in 15 minutes.” Khashoggi also filled his yacht with a steady supply of beautiful, consenting young women. “Oh, definitely,” Nabila says. “My father certainly lives life to the fullest, but there’s an elegance about him. So it wasn’t like a frat party. But there were a lot of girls . . . when my stepmother wasn’t there.” The party ended in 1989, when Khashoggi was jailed on charges of mail fraud and obstruction of justice. (He was acquitted the following year.) The first thing to go was the yacht, which he sold to Donald Trump for $25 million, after deducting $1 million on the assurance that Trump would change its name. Trump called it Trump Princess.

The vessel was later sold to Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud, currently the world’s fourth-richest man, according to Forbes, who renamed it Kingdom 5-KR and who also bought Trump’s stake in the Plaza hotel. “If I wanted revenge on Donald, I’d marry this guy and get everything back,” Ivana Trump said as a joke while I was interviewing her about her own yacht, M/Y Ivana. “Just recently, I was walking with my father on the Croisette, in Cannes, and Prince Alwaleed was sitting at a coffee shop, and the Nabila, now the Kingdom, was in the bay,” says Nabila Khashoggi. “He invited us to sit with him, so there were the three of us sitting and talking about the boat, how beautiful it was. It was very sweet, because to me Prince Alwaleed called his boat the Nabila.” Size matters is the message on Michael Breman’s T-shirt. Breman is sales director of Lürssen, the German shipyard, and we are bobbing on a dinghy beneath the blue bow of Paul Allen’s Octopus.

Lürssen built it as well as Larry Ellison’s Rising Sun, and “Size matters” is the shipyard’s unofficial slogan. Beside Breman is Espen Øino, the Antibes-based designer of Octopus and other breakthrough yachts. They were together in Øino’s office in 1998 when the “brief,” or purchaser’s outline for a new yacht, came through Øino’s fax machine. “Wow, this is the boat I would build if I had the money,” Breman remembers saying when he read the fax, although the two men refuse to identify the client and will discuss only the yacht, which several other designers and shipyards also made bids to build. “The client didn’t want a flashy little Mickey Mouse yacht,” says Breman. “He wanted a yacht in ship’s clothing,” says Øino. As we circle Octopus, we can see many of the 46 antennae for every imaginable communications device as well as the two life-boats capable of rescuing the crew of 57 and 26 guests. Using the Finnish icebreaker Fennica as a model, Øino won the commission for the boat, which took three years to build.

As always, Breman consulted his daughter, Josi, then seven, when he was trying to come up with a name. “Octopus,” she said, and the name stuck. Like Allen, Larry Ellison had been stricken by the notion of the perfect yacht. Like Allen, too, he already had three yachts, including the Katana, formerly owned by Mexican TV titan Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, who pushed his designer, Martin Francis, to create a wonder, according to Øino, who worked on the boat with Francis. “He said, I am a very private person and I don’t want to be seen. But when I do go to port, I want my presence to be felt through my boat.’” The result was one of the world’s fastest and most stylish vessels, with a gas-turbine jet engine, three decks of cyclopean windows, and a 260-foot oil tanker so that El Tigre, as Azcárraga was known, could refuel at sea. Ellison bought the yacht from Azcárraga’s estate in 1998 for $25 million, spent $35 million overhauling it, and recently sold it for $68 million.

But this almost perfect yacht only “drove him to contemplate what the perfect boat would be like,” Matthew Symonds writes in Softwar, his biography of Ellison. The perfect yacht would be “a proper ship, not some ghastly floating palace,” Ellison told Symonds. After interviewing every conceivable designer, Ellison walked into Jon Bannenberg’s office off London’s Kings Road in late 1999 and found the man to interpret his dreams. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's 413-foot Octopus has seven decks, two helipads, and a concert space for 260. Photograph by Todd Eberle. Bannenberg didn’t live to see *Rising Sun’*s completion, but he finished the design. “It’s not only the greatest yacht that I have ever built but the greatest that has ever been built in the tradition of great yachts going back to 1810,” he told Symonds. A longtime bitter rival of Paul Allen’s in business and yacht racing, Ellison originally called the boat by the code name LE120, for its 120-meter length (393 feet).

But Ellison eventually decided to extend Rising Sun to 460 feet, 47 feet longer than Allen’s Octopus. “The boat is very beautiful—a kinetic sculpture made of metal and glass,” Ellison told Symonds. “But in a post September eleventh world it seems excessive. Now everything that’s not essential seems excessive. Beautiful gardens and beautiful boats have lost their place in the dangerous new world we live in. They no longer promise an escape from the world. There is no escape anymore.” The race, however, is hardly over. “I’m presently designing a yacht that will outsize Rising Sun considerably, but I can’t tell you any more,” Espen Øino informs me. In addition to luxury and size, the super-yachtsman yearns for speed. Larry Ellison almost died for it, pushing himself and his crew to sail through a hurricane-force storm in which five boats sank, six men died, and at least 55 sailors had to be rescued by helicopter, to win the Sydney-to-Hobart race in 1998. Robert Miller, the Hong Kong based owner of Duty Free Shoppers, the international chain of stores, forsakes everything for speed.

“He likes the action, the shit fight, when things get hairy,” says the captain of the Mari-Cha IV, the world’s fastest monohull racing yacht, of his boss and skipper. An engine-room fire 400 miles off the coast of Brazil, sharks in Madagascar, and hellish storms around Cape Horn are all occasions to which Miller has risen. His captain, Jef D’Etiveaud, says that the 72-year-old tycoon is happiest when awakened in his bunk—a hammock swinging in an otherwise empty cell—to steer his ship through a churning sea. “When you get to a certain speed, she sings, she tingles, and she roars—she loves the speed,” the soft-spoken, Massachusetts-born Miller tells me as we step onto his yacht, a 140-foot sailboat emblazoned with a red dragon logo, which he commissioned at a cost of roughly $10 million for one purpose only: to break world records.

(Most recently he did the San Francisco to Hawaii run in just over five days.) He can have all the comfort he needs on his other boat, Mari-Cha III, with its museum-quality art, John Munford interiors, and Honduran mahogany paneling, in the company of his Ecuadoran wife, Chantal, and their three daughters and 10 grandchildren. On his racing yacht, Miller does whatever it takes to win: spending weeks with his crew of up to 26 (which has included his son-in-law Crown Prince Pavlos of Greece), rationing water, eating freeze-dried astronaut food, and living in a stripped-clean hull with nothing to weigh it down. Miller is proud of his current dominance in racing, and he’d like to see if he can break the monohull record for sailing around the world, which stands at 93 days. He expects Mari-Cha IV to continue winning for at least another year, by which time someone will have managed to build a faster boat. “I’ll be very unhappy,” says Miller, knowing that when that happens he’ll be back at the drawing board.

‘I’m on the world’s most luxurious sailing yacht, and I have to live up to it,” says Mouna Ayoub as the moon rises over Cap-Ferrat and her stewards serve us a six-course extravaganza of nouvelle-French fish dishes on the everyday Christofle by Bernardaud china—not the 150-year-old Meissen, which is reserved for royalty. Our hostess is wearing white fox, a Galliano gown, and big diamonds, and we are on Phocea, her magnificently restored four-masted schooner, which has a 16-member crew and sycamore interiors by Viscount David Linley, nephew of the Queen. Having divorced one of the world’s richest men, the extravagant couture buyer oversees every aspect of her yacht, which she charters out for 197,000 euros a week. She calls her acquisition of the boat “a love story about a woman who was deprived of freedom since she was five, a love story about a woman who found love and freedom. It’s not a man who gave me this.

It’s Phocea.” She spotted Phocea in the Bay of Volpe, off Sardinia, in 1992 and fell in love with it. Back then she was ensconced on Lady Moura, now the seventh-largest yacht in the world, the 344-foot possession of Saudi Arabian Dr. Nasser al-Rashid, which, when it was launched in 1991 at an estimated cost of $100 million, was the most expensive yacht ever built. Ayoub had designed the interiors, “the whole boat, every inch,” and its name was an acronym of her name and Rashid’s. The couple divorced in 1996. World-class clotheshorse Mouna Ayoub on Phocea, which she bought in a dilapidated state for $5.35 million and restored at a cost of $30 million. Photograph by Todd Eberle. In her memoir, La Vérité, she wrote that her life as the wife of a Middle Eastern magnate was a prison from which she could escape only in an abaya and veils, but tonight she refuses to discuss her ex-husband or his boat.

She recalls the morning in 1992 when she left Lady Moura on a tender for a jog along the Bay of Volpe and first saw Phocea. She swam up to it and asked for a tour. Her request was denied because the owner, entrepreneur Bernard Tapie, who owns the Olympic Marseille football club, was asleep. Back on Lady Moura, Ayoub stood on the A Deck and gazed at Phocea. “I knew that with those sails I could go anywhere, even without an engine,” she says. She made a vow: “One day she’s going to be mine, and nobody is going to prevent me from coming on board.” Even before her divorce, she went after Phocea, and after its owner was convicted of bribery, the yacht ended up, she has written, “sad and neglected, in Port Vauban, where she lingered for months begging for love and care. I decided that I should be the one to save her.” Though the chief engineer of Lady Moura told her Phocea was a wreck, Ayoub bought it at auction for $5.35 million and launched a $30 million restoration.

Yachtsmen speak about porn boats, yachts with all-female crews, and yachts with stripper poles and endless lines of “trolley dollies,” those loose young women forever eager to roll their suitcases down gangplanks. But the template for misbehavior at sea is docked in Monte Carlo’s Port of Font-vieille, the low-slung, two-masted schooner called Zaca, the infamous yacht of the late actor Errol Flynn, who, the six-member crew insists, still haunts the boat on which he slowly went insane, despite an actual exorcism by the Anglican Archdeacon of Monaco in 1978. “We feel him here; things happen that we just can’t explain,” says the captain, Bruno dal Paz, leading me into *Zaca’*s saloon, which has been restored by an Italian businessman and hung with a 1943 Picasso. Captain Bruno opens a thick scrapbook of yellowed press clippings. In 1946, Flynn, after beating the charge that he had committed statutory rape on his first yacht, Sirocco, fled Hollywood.

“Instead of killing myself I bought a new boat,” he wrote in his autobiography, My Wicked Wicked Ways. Perhaps Zaca, Samoan for “peace,” was cursed from the start; at its 1930 christening, the champagne bottle failed to break on its bow, always a bad omen. On one of Flynn’s first voyages, Zaca sank. On another, his crew mutinied. On what was supposed to be a “make-up” cruise, Orson Welles split from his wife, Rita Hayworth. After two wives left Flynn, the swashbuckler fell into a delirium of booze and drugs on the boat—a descent that included orgies, drug smuggling, a trip to Mexico to help a friend who was a Nazi evade an arrest warrant, and a second rape charge, by a woman barely of legal age. At 50, Flynn was “drinking vodka for breakfast and keeping a condom full of cocaine in his swim trunks,” according to a clipping in *Zaca’*s scrapbook. “I’ve squandered seven million dollars.

I’m going to have to sell Zaca,” Flynn lamented in an interview just before flying to Vancouver with his 17-year-old girlfriend, Beverly Aadland, to sell it for $150,000. The sale never took place, however, because Flynn had a heart attack, or committed suicide, just before signing the papers. There are approximately 30,000 people working on yachts. Moving from one giant vessel to another, I was amazed at how young, attractive, well educated, and multi-lingual the crews all were. I soon discovered that, for every crew member employed, there are hundreds waiting to join a career that comes with unlimited perks (I watched the crew of Skat eating rack of lamb and drinking Taittinger for dinner) and excellent pay (a captain’s annual salary is $1,000 per yacht foot, and crews are usually paid in cash, says Dallas-based international financial consultant George Kline, who invests many a captain’s and crew member’s earnings). Even off duty, they refuse to mention specific owners or yachts, because they generally sign confidentiality agreements with their employers.

“On a boat I’m not going to mention, we had a group of Americans out for the Cannes Film Festival,” says Sebastian Frazer, a steward. “One night they went into the Jacuzzi with five women, but then the men went to bed, leaving the women, who began a full-on porn show. By then we’d lifted anchor from the Bay of Cannes, and they were going at it, completely oblivious that there were boats on both sides. The funny thing was that the Jacuzzi wouldn’t get hot enough, so we were boiling water and running up three levels with kettles to warm it, while also serving them Dom Pérignon. Even though the women hadn’t chartered the yacht, any guest that comes on board you still treat as a paying guest.” In the mid-90s, a yacht owner placed one of the first ads to offer charters in a Moscow newspaper, and newly rich Russians swarmed to pony up $250,000 for a week on the boat. “Whiskey beer!” was all the first Russian on board said, at eight in the morning. “I took a step back, and he repeated it three times.

Bring whiskey beer!’” remembers a steward named Gabriel, who arranged multiple brands of whiskey and beer on a silver tray, which he presented to the guest, who immediately began slugging down a succession of boilermakers. Soon a party was raging. “Six guys, 15 prostitutes—behavior that would send shivers down your spine,” says the steward. “Every horizontal surface on the boat gets some action. When the crew’s around, they generally give us a wink ... and keep going.” Americans currently lead the world both in buying and chartering yachts, but soon the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich may surpass all others. The 37-year-old father of five, who started life as an orphan and whose wife is a former Aeroflot stewardess, chartered his first yacht in 1998, according to Abramovich: The Billionaire from Nowhere, by Dominic Midgley and Chris Hutchins. He then quickly began snapping up super-yachts as capriciously as he’d bought oil rights in Russia and the Chel-sea Football Club.

First he paid an estimated $25 million for Sussurro, a 161-foot gas-turbine Feadship, a product of the famed Dutch shipyard. Next he paid between $80 and $100 million for the 370-foot Le Grand Bleu, previously owned by cellular-telephone king John McCaw. The largest American-owned private boat when it was launched in 2000 and now No. 6 in the world, it’s complete with an Austin Powers—style bottom-level viewing port, around which guests sit to watch the sea life, which Abramovich summons by shooting out food via remote control. After that he bought the 377-foot Pelorus, the world’s fifth-largest, from Saudi billionaire Al Sheik Modhassan. Then, last summer, he took possession of his new, 282-foot, $100 million Feadship, which he christened Ecstasea, and went with his full fleet of four yachts to Portugal. “He always comes on with his family. They don’t drink, they don’t smoke, they eat healthy, they work out,” says a source who has been on the boats.

Another source adds, “He likes to have breakfast on one yacht, lunch on another, dinner on the third, and, of course, he’s got a different set of chefs on each yacht.” P. Diddy Combs is another celebrity who has thrust himself into yacht culture. In the summer of 2002, after yacht-hopping for years on St. Barth’s, he decided to charter a boat. He settled upon the 170-foot Samax, whose former owner had named the boat Tits and the tenders Nipple I and Nipple II. P. Diddy took Samax to his favorite spot on the French Riviera, Saint-Tropez. “He spent $25,000 on clothes,” remembers Fonzworth Bentley, Combs’s former assistant. Immediately, tabloid headlines blazed with allegations of all manner of misadventures and mayhem at sea. The reality, says Bentley, consists mostly of cannonball competitions off the top deck, endless games of spades, round-the-clock apple pie à la mode, and constant surveillance by local authorities. “Two years ago, Puff got a speeding ticket on the WaveRunner off of Saint-Tropez,” says Bentley.

“The thing is, Puff didn’t actually do it. Someone else from the group got the ticket. But he was on Puff’s boat and he was black, so it was just Puff. The reality is we’re still black. I don’t care if you’ve got a yacht and you’re in Saint-Tropez. The police is watching.” Still, Bentley admits, life on a Diddy-chartered boat is a 24-hour party. “This man was on Broadway!” he exclaims, referring to P. Diddy’s run in the 2004 revival of A Raisin in the Sun. “If I was on Broadway as long as he was, on the last day either I would have ran through Times Square butt-naked screaming or got a phat yacht and went crazy overseas. So he chose the latter.” But, he adds, the super-yacht world is equally insane. “You hear about how black people like to flaunt their wealth? But the level of flaunting of the wealth on a yacht is far more ridiculous.” Bentley and P. Diddy call it flossing. Bentley explains: “You staying on a yacht? O.K., how big is your yacht?

It’s not only the size of the yacht, it’s also the width. Then it’s: How good is your dock space? Then it’s: How many times does your crew change from daytime to evening? Then it goes to: What kind of wood is your dinner table made out of? Ours is padauk wood from India . . . ” ‘You see the planes? I organized!” says Formula One racing king Flavio Briatore on his spectacular yacht in the Bay of Volpe as a squadron of jets does crazy loops overhead. The air show is impressive (it was actually organized by the state), but the show is just as good on Briatore’s new yacht, the Lady in Blue, with its stunning Alberto Pinto interiors, Fernando Botero paintings, César sculptures, and a lunch table crowded with beauties in bikinis. Last night, at the opening of his Billionaire Club in Porto Cervo, where the jewelry shops stay open past midnight, Flavio was surrounded by gorgeous young women. The paparazzi screamed, “Flavio!

Flavio!,” and his club’s video screens flashed endless photos of him: Flavio holding up the trophy he and his Renault Formula One team had won at last year’s Monaco Grand Prix; Flavio with his harem of famous women, which has included Naomi Campbell, Elle Macpherson, and the mother of his baby daughter, Heidi Klum; Flavio in close-up, climbing out of a swimming pool. “Why do women love yachts?,” I ask Flavio, who is sitting in the saloon wearing a sarong. Before he can answer, Naomi Campbell, who’s staying on the Lady in Blue, explains. “I can’t imagine a woman who would say, ‘I don’t love a boat, I don’t love a private plane.’ I mean, when I met Flavio, I didn’t know what he did, who he was. But I think the yacht’s part of his whole mystique, his appeal. It’s a whole package.” Once lovers, they are now friends.

After their first date, a dinner in Athens, where Naomi was on a modeling assignment, Flavio flew her to the shipyard in Genoa and showed her his yacht, the first Lady in Blue, which was being refitted. When the work was completed, he gave Naomi the ultimate gift: his yacht on her birthday. Last year marked the fifth such birthday party, off Saint-Tropez, with a performance by Cirque du Soleil, fireworks, and 400 guests, including U2’s Bono. “That’s the old Lady in Blue,” says Flavio, motioning out into the bay, which is littered with super-yachts, from New Sunrise, the mammoth vessel of the Israeli businessman Sami Ofer, to Kisses, the fabulous Art Deco—filled Feadship of former Philadelphia Eagles owners Norman and Irma Braman. The original Lady is now called Sirahmy and is owned by the head of Telecom-Italia. “It was very sexy,” Flavio says of his former yacht. But the new one, three years in development, is even sexier—“the top boat, technically, at this moment,” he says proudly.

(A scant three months after taking delivery, Flavio sold his new Lady in Blue to Miami developer Jeffrey Soffer. “The yacht wasn’t for sale, but Flavio said, Everything’s available at the right price,’” says Soffer’s father and business partner, Don Soffer. The boat was sold fully furnished, but Flavio insisted on keeping several major pieces of art, as well as his captain, Luigi del Tevere, who had previously captained the yachts of Adnan Khashoggi, the Sultan of Brunei, the Swarovski-crystal family, and Mohamed Al Fayed. “Mr. Briatore already has a bigger boat, which he is calling Force Blue,” says Captain del Tevere.) ‘For me, everything comes from the sea, and a boat is a kind of laboratory, a quarry,” the architect Renzo Piano says on his yacht, Kirribilli. Based in his hometown of Genoa, the birthplace of Columbus, Piano has spent his career transferring his yacht designs to his architectural projects. The ferro-cement he developed for his yacht is now on the roof of the Menil Collection art museum he designed in Houston.

The idea of a “ship like Jules Verne would design in the middle of the sea” established the overall theme of Paris’s Pompidou Center, which he co-designed. The carbon-fiber antennae on Kirribilli will soon appear in a gigantic steel replica atop the new New York Times Building on Eighth Avenue. Just as Piano applies his yacht designs to his architectural projects, some of the world’s most famous designers transfer their fashion showmanship to oceangoing vessels. Diego Della Valle, the Milan-based fashion magnate and owner of Tod’s, sitting in his all-mahogany Marlin, formerly John F. Kennedy’s motor yacht, whose auction Della Valle heard about through a Christie’s newspaper ad, says, “I went to see it, and after 10 minutes I made my offer. That same day, Ralph Lauren invited me to lunch at his house. His phone rang, and Ralph answered and passed the phone to me, saying, ‘Diego, you have bought a boat!’ After renovation, the Marlin began to cruise the Mediterranean, still holding the American presidential flag.” Clothing designer Roberto Cavalli is another boat-lover.

Of his new, 132-foot yacht, RC Roberto Cavalli Freedom, he says, “So special! So unusual! So Cavalli!” The motor yacht’s iridescent exterior changes colors, from papal purple to emerald green, “taking the reflection from the water down and the sun up,” Cavalli explains. There are leather-covered floors, python armchairs, lacquered goatskin walls, a profusion of animal horn, and Cavalli’s signature leopard-print and purple bedspreads with white mink throws. “The most important thing about the yacht is the color, like my clothes, and to be special, like my clothes!” he says, then whispers conspiratorially, “And it’s a little bit sexy, too, like my clothes.” “My mother was a very elegant woman, and I think my boat has that same sort of elegance,” says Giorgio Armani , sitting on his super-yacht, Mariu, named for a song his mother sang to him as a child.

The boat’s hull is the silver of Armani’s hair, and its interior is an homage to Armani’s world, from the 16-member all-male crew decked out in Emporio Armani to stem-to-stern Armani Casa furnishings. Probably the most ferocious design force to hit the yacht world is Philippe Starck. We are sailing on Virtuelle, the silver sailing yacht Starck designed for Carlo Perrone, the Genoa-based businessman and great-grandson of the 19th-century arts patron Marie-Laure de Noailles, whose Paris mansion now houses the Baccarat Gallery-Museum. “One day I was in my office in Paris, and a very elegant woman arrived, who said, Can you design me a yacht of something like 80 meters [250 feet]?,’” Starck remembers. He didn’t know the woman, but he knew he would never design a mega-yacht. He had followed the escalating gran-diosity of these vessels with outrage, even lambasted the refrigerator-white gin palaces so vehemently in speeches at yacht-society meetings that people left the room. “I’m sorry,” he told the woman. “I love boats. I have seven boats of my own.

But I shall not design for you a big powerboat.” Owner Carlo Perrone, the Genoa-based businessman, and French designer Philippe Starck aboard Virtuelle, the silver sailing yacht. Photograph by Todd Eberle. She asked why, and he let rip. “Vulgarity!” he said. “All of these big boats are just purely vulgar! People build and buy these boats to show the money they have, the power they have! For me, it’s social pollution! For me these boats are . . . gold shit!” Starck had unleashed his fury on Hala Fares, wife of the Lebanese deputy prime minister Issam Fares and one of the world’s most stylish women, famous for her taste, evident in her clothes and the interiors of her homes and the family’s 727 jet. “She did not speak for one minute,” says Starck. “Finally she said, ‘If I challenged you to make a yacht elegant, what would you do?’ So I was trapped!” For five years, Fares, Starck, and Feadship collaborated on the Wedge Too.

As with all of her design projects, Fares built the yacht without any hindrance from her husband, who would not even see it until it was completed, during the 2002 Christmas holidays in Monaco. “We invited our president and First Lady for Christmas, and oh, my God, my heart was beating,” Fares remembers. But the moment her husband saw the yacht’s two-level superstructure of oiled teak panels and stepped onto the 7,530 square feet of hardwood flooring, covered with Starck’s outrageous yet handsome furnishings and interior design, he smiled. “This is great!” he said, and the 20-member crew broke out the champagne. The next year Wedge Too won the ShowBoats International award for the most innovative motor yacht. Although he still despises conventional super-yachts, Starck has nonetheless joined the yacht race. He’s now designing “the most advanced, the most modern boat in the world,” a 300-plus-foot mega-vessel whose plans look like Titanic meets 2001: A Space Odyssey. The client? “A young Russian genius of mathematics, a Russian Bill Gates,” says Starck.

“[Aesthetically] we are deeply in love.” ‘We had Gregory Peck, Frank and Barbara Sinatra, Michael Caine, Harry Belafonte, Sean Connery, Julio Iglesias, Roger Moore, Hubert Givenchy, Alan King, Anna Magnani, Adnan Khashoggi, Gina Lollobrigida, Rex Harrison, Don Hewitt and his wife, Marilyn, who were married on the boat—on and on and on,” says Simone Levitt. From 1972 to 1982, there was no more coveted invitation than a lavish, all-expenses-paid, two-week vacation on La Belle Simone, the 250-foot “floating Taj Mahal” of William J. Levitt, the developer of the post–World War II housing projects called Levittowns, and his beautiful French wife, Simone.

“It was a fairy tale,” says Simone Levitt of her life on a yacht so big that it ignited a feud between her husband and Revlon founder Charles Revson, whose Ultima II was 15 feet shorter, and so grand that it was used as the *Christina—*instead of the actual *Christina—*in the 1976 movie about Onassis called The Greek Tycoon. Then, just like that, the yacht was gone, sold to Saudi Arabia’s former OPEC minister Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, along with every last penny and possession. Before Bill Levitt died, in 1994, at the Levitt Pavilion of New York University’s North Shore University Hospital, which he’d underwritten, he repeated something he’d long before told his wife: “A yacht is a furnace that just burns money.” Things got so tough that Simone Levitt was reduced to serving as a hostess on a cruise ship. Today super-yacht life for her is reduced to framed photographs on her bathroom wall. “We were good schnooks, my husband and I,” she says. “Oh, my God, they drank our champagne and ate our caviar. He played the piano and I sang.

When I had the boat, everybody is kissing your you-know-what. But after my husband died, people aren’t rushing to invite me.” She continues: “Do you realize what I would give now to have the money that we spent on the champagne, the caviar, the trips, the crew, the oil, the gasoline? It cost a million a year. My God, I could live like a queen today. We just gave and gave, and sometimes, when we went onshore, they had the audacity not to pay for dinner. Once in a blue moon, yes, but most of the time my husband put his hand in his pocket.” She insists that she’s not bitter.

“I had a woman approach me at a party and say, ‘Oh, my dear, it must be terrible to have been all the way on top and fall all the way down.’ I said, ‘If someone told you that for 10 years you could have anything in the world—a yacht, a Rolls-Royce, sables, minks, diamonds, emeralds, sapphires—but at the end of the 10 years you would have to give it back, would you not do it?’ She said she’d rather not have it at all. But now my memories are my wealth, and no one can take them away from me.” She adds, “Everything ends, nothing is forever. A yacht is a fantasy, and whoever believes it’s going to be there forever is going to be hurt.” Tonight I’m dressed as a Renaissance fop in one of the costumes flown in from London for a bash on the 180-foot super-yacht Amnesia, on which I’ve sailed from Naples to Capri to Sardinia.

Across the rose-petal-strewn dinner table sit my host, Daniel Snyder, the 40-year-old owner of the Washington Redskins, who has chartered the boat for two weeks, and his wife, Tanya, dressed as Romeo and Juliet. Next to them, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and his wife, Gene, are costumed as Sir Lancelot and Guinevere, and nearby are original CNN anchorman Bernie Shaw and his wife, Linda, dressed as Henry VIII and one of his wives. In a few hours former superagent Michael Ovitz and his wife, Judy, whose yacht, Illusion, is moored nearby, will join the party. Docked between Ultima III, owned by Revlon’s Ronald Perelman, and Te Manu, owned by Mel Simon, co-owner of the Indiana Pacers, we’re having a feast. Our crew, whom we’ve come to love like family, are also in Renaissance apparel, and the chef has cooked a suckling pig.

I’m so up, enjoying all this opulence, that I halfway believe I belong, until a stewardess, dressed as a serving wench, whispers in my ear, “And what time will you be departing in the morning, sir?” When I return to my stateroom, my old suitcase has been placed beside the bed. The next morning a new group of guests arrive, and I hear the crew laughing at their jokes, as they recently did at mine, and pouring them champagne. As a crew member holds out his hand to help me onto the tender that will deposit me back on dry land, I hesitate, longing to hang on to Amnesia like a suckfish on a whale, but for me the party’s over. On 6,000 super-yachts around the world, however, the party never ends.

Question: What was the name of the boat on which newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell was last seen alive?
Answer: Lady Ghislaine