What I Learned Visiting a Mega Yacht
The Grass Isn’t Always Greener
Recent press about oligarchs and mega yachts triggered long ago memories of my visit to a mega yacht in Cap Ferrat off the coast of France. My family was far from wealthy, but they worked in the arts and came to know people with the wealth that enabled them to own townhouses in Georgetown, apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue, Renoir paintings, museum-quality gems and of course a 70-metre yacht with a full crew.
Observing life aboard a mega yacht was fascinating, but since that visit I’ve found myself thinking more often about the experiences and self-sufficiency these fabulously wealthy people lacked rather than what they had.
Least anyone assume this yacht-owning family were snooty or deliberately mean, in fact the women in the family whom I knew better than the patriarch (of whom I will someday write), were sweet to me and, if anything, rather shy about their circumstances. Moreover, the family made substantial donations to disease research charities and major museums.
Cap Ferrat, at that time was the playground of billionaires and world famous movie stars. Its main street was lined with matching royal palms, grand five-star hotels built in the 1920s like a row of glistening wedding cakes, doormen in crisp uniforms and balconies sporting clean yellow and white or blue and white canopies.
As we drove to the yacht club, the passersby we saw from the car, were all elegantly thin, beautifully dressed, tanned and ready to be admired. The sky was perfect and the temperature was delightful. I doubt that bad weather was even permitted.
We boarded the yacht before lunch and had a tour of the staterooms where the family lived, the bathroom where the toilet was actually concealed within a throne and then we sat in the main stateroom to await lunch.
Naturally the family dog had been flown in from the States and his rubber squeaky toys were strewn about the carpet. This was any family’s living room you might imagine except if you remembered where you were and you erased the butlers.
We went to the dining room for lunch which I believe was sautéed fish accompanied by champagne. I wish I could tell you more about the lunch, but I was so gob-smacked with the entirety that some of the details are lost.
When we finished lunch, the yacht left the marina and set sail for a nearby coastline. We changed into our swimsuits below deck and then assembled in the main stateroom. One of the butlers came through with a small silver tray on which we could place our jewelry so it didn’t get lost in the Mediterranean Sea as we swam. Those who wanted to swim climbed down to a lower deck and then down a ladder into the Sea. That swim was a delicious lifelong memory and the view of coastal estates was a perfect tableau of beautiful homes on a sun-drenched hill where people need never worry.
But as I’ve thought back, for all this family had, there was much they lacked.
None of them will ever know the satisfaction of having a job and earning a living. They will never work as a wait person in a beach town restaurant, or a house cleaner or a corporate executive, each of which I have, in turn, done. Even succeeding at school became just an exercise or curiosity because striving for achievement never mattered.
When you work for a living, you know for better or worse that you earned your keep and you got paid because you contributed something to an enterprise, large or small. You brought food to a customer, you cleaned a kitchen sink or you closed a deal for your company. Someone valued what you did.
Because of their fortune, these family members had an ever-present worry that people they dated much less married, were after their wealth. They lived with a level of guardedness that probably never enters most people’s minds. They worried that people only befriended them for their money and not for who they were as individuals. It seemed as if the vast wealth made them doubt their own value as friends or anything else.
Because they never supported themselves, they were afraid of all things that might pierce the safety of their bubble life. They had no idea whether they could survive outside that life and perhaps suspected they could not. Maybe this explains, in part, why they were so shy.
Of course maybe they were shy because of their enormous wealth and, among other things, the fact that their toilet was built into a throne.
In any event, to me there was a distinct none-too-happy lop-sidedness in their view of themselves and their relationships with other human beings. It was as though they found themselves incredibly dependent, privately fearful and constantly filled with self-doubt.
I don’t suggest that the very wealthy deserve our pity, but it seemed to me their vast wealth had a strangely disabling and undermining effect.
My one-time visit to a mega yacht remains an incredible memory, but all in all, despite the grandeur and extravagant luxury, I would not actually change places with them.
© 2022 L.E. Langner