A few days later in Melbourne, the premier of the state of Victoria, in a televised speech from the floor of Parliament House, accused the opposition party of being a mismatched marriage—worse than that of Pitty Pat Dunlop and the prince. The Melbourne newspapers carried the remark on their front pages.
In Sydney the called-off marriage was the most exciting event in years. “We fell about laughing here,” said a friend of both parties. “It was all a publicity stunt to turn them into international figures, and it backfired on them.”
People talked of nothing else. And when they finished talking to one another, they talked to the press, if asked. In an article by Daphne Guinness, Caroline Simpson, a member of the powerful Fairfax family, spoke her mind. “Hasn’t this whole thing been a joke from the beginning?” she asked. “None of us thought it would get to the wedding stage and the church, did we? Dr. Dunlop came to see my mother [Betty Fairfax] this afternoon. They talked for hours. I think he had a lot to do with stopping it. It is really an extraordinary thing for a mother to push a child in that way.” There was a certain amount of glee in social circles that Lady Potter “had egg all over her face.” “The person I feel sorry for is Ian Potter,” said Sheila Scotter, another social leader, “and his absolutely darling daughter Carolyn Parker Bowles, who does move in society circles in London with certain royals, including the monarch.”
On her way back to Sydney via Paris and New York, Primrose Dunlop arranged to go public with her story on Australia’s “60 Minutes” when she returned. The rumor was that she was paid $38,000 by the network, and that she would drop a bombshell on the show.
If the producers of “60 Minutes” really did pay Pitty Pat $38,000, they were rooked, for there was no bombshell. Or perhaps, as has been suggested, libel laws being what they are, the bomb was considered inadvisable, and was defused. The interview was benign, even boring. “Everyone here feels cheated by it,” said a friend of Montesini’s. “Such a pathetic amount was produced. Anyway, I heard they only paid her $23,000.”
Pitty Pat was interviewed in the apartment of her mother and stepfather, and viewers had no sense of watching a sad and sympathetic jilted woman. She seemed arch and superior, holding her eyebrows high and looking down her nose at Jeff McMullen, the Morley Safer of Australia’s “60 Minutes,” as if she were granting an audience to a troublesome commoner.
“That’s Mummy and H.M. the Queen,” she said, showing a photograph of Lady Potter in a deep curtsy before Queen Elizabeth.
The only surprise in the program came when McMullen asked, “Were you sexually compatible with the prince?”
“Yes, we were. Wouldn’t you be with someone you were going to marry?”
“Would you take him back?”
“Yeah. He’s a decent guy.”
She said she did not believe that Lorenzo was gay. If something had happened in his past, it was of no concern to either of them. She mentioned the possibility of lurid photographs—that was probably the predicted bombshell—but said she didn’t believe they existed.
“Do you think Lorenzo’s a prince?” asked Jeff McMullen, pointing out that Montesini’s relatives had mocked the title.
“I don’t know,” replied Pitty Pat. “I would like to see his grandmother’s will. She wanted him to take up the title. That’s where it all started.” She added that titles did not matter to her.
She said that she didn’t think Lorenzo had been in it for the money. “Besides,” she said, “my stepfather does not give away his money lightly.” She said that the story had been started by John Laws, the radio announcer, who suggested to Lorenzo while airborne that his title was worth a fortune to the Potters. For that, she said, she felt a great deal of resentment for John Laws.
When asked how she felt about the premier’s mentioning her name in Parliament, she became imperious in her dismissal of him. “How tacky. What a common remark,” she snapped.
She then allowed herself to be talked into telephoning her almost-husband on national television in order to ask him why he had never consulted her about calling off the marriage. The prince-steward was out, on a flight presumably, and she got his answering machine.
“It’s me,” she said, and asked him to call her when he returned. In closing, she told McMullen that the heartache she felt was worse than the embarrassment.
• • •
Montesini, in an intimate moment with his friend the Australian journalist Daphne Guinness, gave his account of the fiasco. He claimed that Lady Potter had announced his engagement without his knowledge when he was in Tokyo for Qantas. “I felt trapped by it,” he said, “pushed on by Pitty Pat’s mother into something that got out of hand.” However, he went along with it, “swept into the euphoria of such a grand occasion as a wedding in Venice.”
“I could not see past April 16. I could not think beyond getting to Venice and going to the church. I could not begin to think of the night of the sixteenth, and where I would sleep after the wedding. I even rehearsed going up the aisle and standing in front of father Vincent Kiss and when it came to the bit about ‘Do you take Primrose to be your lawful wedded wife?’ shouting ‘NO!’ and turning round and running out of the church.”
However, he did not mention these inner torments, at least not to his fiancée and her family. According to him, the real reason for the breakup was the Potters’ desire to terminate his friendship with Straub. When asked about the rumor that there had been a wedding settlement of some $2 million, Lorenzo said, “Take a naught off and you’d be nearer the mark, but I haven’t been given a penny.” In Venice, he said, John Lane told him that Lady Potter had changed her will so that he couldn’t get his hands-on the fortune that will eventually be Pitty Pat’s. That, Lorenzo claimed, coupled with the information that Pitty Pat had said that after the sixteenth she would be a princess traveling first-class, made him feel used.
One week later, however, he also went public, in the Australian magazine Women’s Day. Whether, like Pitty Pat, he was getting paid for his revelations is not known. But his statement, like hers, was a party-line exercise in face-saving. “I did not have the money to give her the life-style she would have expected,” he said. “I loved her—and I always will—but as the rumors, all of which are untrue, began to circulate, I realized I was out of my depth and that it would be best to call off the marriage.” He said that he had had a close and satisfying sexual relationship with Primrose, and he described her as sensual. “Every time I looked at her, I was reminded of a Byzantine empress.” He denied that he was gay, and he downplayed the importance of his title. “It must be understood that Prince Giustiniani is a courtesy title only, and there is no way Primrose could use it on her passport, or use it in real life. She understood that completely. We often talked about it and laughed about it.”
He was most grieved, he said, by her appearance on “60 Minutes.” “It was horrendous when, on the program, she tried to ring me and I heard my own voice on my telephone answering machine.”
SPECIAL REPORTING FROM SYDNEY BY DAPHNE GUINNESS
August 1990
KHASHOGGI’S FALL
A Crash in the Limo Lane
Adnan Khashoggi was never the richest man in the world, ever, but he flaunted the myth that he was with such relentless perseverance and public-relations know-how that most of the world believed him. The power of great wealth is awesome. If you have enough money, you can bamboozle anyone. Even if you can create the illusion that you have enough money you can bamboozle anyone, as Adnan Khashoggi did over and over again. He understood high visibility better than the most shameless Hollywood press agent, and he made himself one of the most famous names of our time. Who doesn’t know about his yachts, his planes, his dozen houses, his wives, his hookers, his gifts, his parties, his friendships with movie stars and jet-set members, and his companionship with kings and world leaders? His dazzling existence outshone even that of his prime benefactors in the royal family of Saudi Arabia—a bedazzlement that led to their eventua
l disaffection for him.
Now, reportedly broke, or broke by the standards of people with great wealth—his yacht gone, his planes gone, his dozen houses gone, or going, and his reputation in smithereens—he has recently spent three months pacing restlessly in a six-by-eight-foot prison cell in Bern, Switzerland, where the majority of his fellow prisoners were in on drug charges. True, he dined there on gourmet food from the Schweizerhof Hotel, but he also had to clean his own cell and toilet as a small army of international lawyers fought to prevent his extradition to the United States to face charges of racketeering and obstruction of justice. Finally, Khashoggi dropped his efforts to avoid extradition when the Swiss ruled that he would face prosecution only for obstruction of justice and mail fraud, not for the more serious charges of racketeering and conspiracy. On July 19, accompanied by Swiss law-enforcement agents, he arrived in New York from Geneva first-class on a Swissair flight, handcuffed like a common criminal but dressed in an olive-drab safari suit with gold buttons and epaulets. He was immediately whisked to the federal courthouse on Foley Square, a tiny figure surrounded by a cadre of lawyers and federal marshals, where Judge John F. Keenan refused to grant him bail. He spent his first night in three years in America not in his Olympic Tower aerie but in the Metropolitan Correctional Center. No member of his immediate family was present to witness his humiliation.
Allegedly, he helped his friends Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos plunder the Philippines of some $160 million by fronting for them in illegal real-estate deals. When United States authorities attempted to return some of the Marcos booty to the new Philippine government, they discovered that the ownership of four large commercial buildings in New York City—the Crown Building at 730 Fifth Avenue, the Herald Center at 1 Herald Square, 40 Wall Street, and 200 Madison Avenue—had passed to Adnan Khashoggi. On paper it seemed that the sale of the buildings had taken place in 1985, before the fall of the Marcos regime, but authorities later charged that the documents had been fraudulently backdated. In addition, more than thirty paintings, valued at $200 million, that Imelda Marcos had allegedly purloined from the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, including works by Rubens, El Greco, Picasso, and Degas, were being stored by Khashoggi for the Marcoses, but it turned out that the pictures had been sold to Khashoggi as part of a cover-up. The art treasures were first hidden on his yacht and then moved to his penthouse in Cannes. The penthouse was raided by the French police in search of the pictures in April 1987, but it is believed that Khashoggi had been tipped off. He turned over nine of the paintings to the police, claiming to have sold the others to a Panamanian company, but investigators believe that he sold the pictures back to himself. The rest of the loot is thought to be in Athens. If he is found guilty, such charges could get him up to ten years in an American slammer.
In a vain delay tactic meant to forestall the extradition process as long as possible, he had at first refused to accept the hundreds of pages of English-language legal documentation in any language but Arabic, although he has spoken English nearly all his life and was educated partially in the United States.
People wonder why he went to Switzerland in the first place, when he was aware that arrest on an American warrant was a certainty there and that Switzerland could and probably would extradite him if the United States requested it. The answer is not known, although there is the possibility that Khashoggi, like others in that rarefied existence of power and great wealth, thought he was above the law and nothing would happen to him. Alternatively, there is the possibility, which has been suggested by some of his friends, that he was tired of the waiting game and went to Bern to face the situation, because he was convinced that he had done nothing wrong and was innocent of the charges against him. There was neither furtiveness nor stealth, certainly no lessening of his usual mode of magnificence, in his arrival in Switzerland on April 17. He flew to Zurich by private plane. A private helicopter took him from the airport to Bern, where he had three Mercedeses at his disposal and registered in a very grand suite at the exclusive Schweizerhof Hotel. Ostensibly, his reason for visiting the city was to be treated by the eminent cellular therapist Dr. Augusto Gianoli with revitalization shots, whereby live cells taken from the embryo of an unborn lamb are injected into the patient to ward off the aging process. Dr. Gianoli’s well-to-do patients often rest in the Schweizerhof after receiving the shots.
But apparently the revitalization of vital organs wasn’t the only reason Adnan Khashoggi was in Bern on the day of his bust. He was killing two birds with one stone, and the other bit of business was an arms deal. Those closest to him are highly sensitive about the fact that he is always described in the media as a Middle Eastern arms dealer. True, he started out like that, they say, but they object to the fact that the arms-dealer label has stuck, and cite, instead, his other achievements. As one former partner told me, “Adnan brought billions and billions of dollars’ worth of business to Lockheed and Boeing.” Be that as it may, Khashoggi will always be best remembered in this country for his anything-for-a-buck participation in the Iran-contra affair, one of the most pathetic episodes in the history of American foreign policy, as well as a blight forever on the Reagan administration. True to form, the business he was conducting in his suite at the Schweizerhof that day was a sale of armored weapons.
When the Swiss police arrived at the suite, the other two arms dealers mistakenly thought they were after them, and a slight panic ensued. The arms dealers left immediately by another door in the suite and were out of the country by private plane within an hour of Khashoggi’s arrest. Khashoggi, remaining totally calm, asked the police if they would place him under house arrest in his suite in the Schweizerhof Hotel instead of putting him in jail, but the request was denied. Then he asked them not to handcuff him, and the request was granted. The prison in Bern where he was taken, booked, fingerprinted, and photographed is barely a five-minute walk from the Schweizerhof, but the group traveled by police car. The friends of Adnan Khashoggi deeply resent that the Swiss government released his mug shots to the media as if he were an ordinary criminal. “I went immediately to Bern after the arrest,” said Prince Alfonso Hohenlohe, one of Khashoggi’s very close friends in international society and a neighbor in Marbella, Spain, “but they wouldn’t let me in to see him. I sent him a bottle of very good French red wine and a message to the jail. I hear he is the best prisoner they have ever had. I would cut off my arm to get him out of this situation.”
For years now, misfortune has plagued Khashoggi. In 1987, Triad America Corporation, his American company, which was involved in a $400 million, twenty-five-acre complex of offices shops, and a hotel in Salt Lake City, filed for bankruptcy after its creditors, including architects, contractors, and banks, demanded payment. Khashoggi blamed the failure on “cash-flow problems.” His most recent woe, reported by Reuters after his imprisonment in Bern, is that the privately owned National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia is suing him for $22 million, plus interest. The process of falling from a great height is subtle in the beginning, but there are those who have an instinctive ability to sniff out the first signs of failure and fading fortune. Long before the public disclosures of seized planes and impounded houses and bankruptcies, word went out among some of the fashionable jewelers of the world, from Rome to Beverly Hills, that no more credit was to be given to Adnan Khashoggi, because he had ceased to pay his bills. Then came the whispered stories of how he was draining money from his own projects to maintain his lifestyle; of unpaid servants in the houses and unpaid crew members on the yacht; of unpaid maintenance on his two-floor, 7,200-square-foot condominium with indoor swimming pool at the Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York; of unpaid helicopter lessons for his daughter, Nabila, even while the extravagant parties proclaiming denial of the truth continued. In fact, the more persistent the rumors of Khashoggi’s financial collapse grew, the more extravagant his parties became. Nico Minardos, a former associate of Khashoggi’s who was arrested during Iranscam for his involvement in a $2.5 billion
deal with Iran for forty-six Skyhawk aircraft and later cleared, said, “Adnan is a lovely man. I like him. He is the greatest P.R. man in the world. When he gave his fiftieth-birthday party, our company was overdrawn at the bank in Madrid by $6 million. And that’s about what his party cost. Last year he sold an apartment to pay for his birthday party.”
Probably the most telling story in Khashoggi’s downfall was repeated to me in London by a witness to the scene, who wished not to be identified. The King of Morocco was staying in the royal suite of Claridge’s. The King of Jordan, also visiting London at the time, came to call on the King of Morocco. There is a marble stairway in the main hall of Claridge’s which leads up to the royal suite. Shortly after the doors of the suite closed, Adnan Khashoggi, having heard of the meeting, arrived breathlessly at the hotel by taxi. Used to keeping company with kings, he sent a message up to the royal suite that he was downstairs. He was told that he would not be received.
Shortly after I was asked to write about Adnan Khashoggi, following his arrest, his executive assistant, Robert Shaheen, contacted this magazine, aware of my assignment. He said that I should call him, and I did.
“I understand,” I said, “that you are the number-two man to Mr. Khashoggi.”
“I am Mr. Khashoggi’s number-one man,” he corrected me. Then he said, “What is it you want? What will your angle be in your story?” I told him that at that point I didn’t know. Shaheen’s reverence for his boss was evident in every sentence, and his descriptions of him were sometimes florid. “He dared to dream dreams that no one else dared to dream,” he said with a bit of a catch to his voice. He proceeded to list some of the accomplishments of his boss, whom he always referred to as the Chief. “The Chief was responsible for opening the West to Saudi Arabia. The Chief saved the Cairo telephone system. The Chief saved Lockheed from going bankrupt.” He then told me, “You must talk with Max Helzel. He is a representative of Lockheed. Get him before he dies. He is getting old. Mention my name to him.”
The Mansions of Limbo Page 11
