A few followed Randa in pursuit of independent careers. Salem enrolled his half-sisters Raedah and Saleha in American schools specializing in interior design; after they completed their training, he said, they could work on palace projects for the Saudi royal family. None of these women, even the most ambitious, could free herself as easily from Saudi patriarchy as could her brothers, however.
Several of Mohamed’s daughters suffered divorces under inflexible Saudi laws that deprived them of the right to live with their children. Najiah, a mother of four, lost custody of her children in Jeddah when her husband divorced her. Carmen Bin Laden once asked Najiah why she didn’t fight back; Najiah looked at her as though she were the “village idiot,” Carmen recalled. Najiah eventually escaped to Los Angeles, where she took flying lessons, became an accomplished pilot and was noted by some of her American friends for the very high speeds at which she routinely drove on streets and highways.10
Randa remained the most untraditional of Mohamed’s daughters—now both a licensed medical doctor and a pilot, as comfortable in the Austrian ski resort of Zell am See as in Cairo or Jeddah. Her relatively daring and visible life enjoyed Salem’s full protection and oversight, however, and so it carried little risk of censure from the family’s conservative wing.
She was approaching thirty. Although it would mean an end to their special relationship, Salem decided it was time for Randa to marry, and he gave his blessing to a suitable Egyptian groom who would later work as a manager for the Bin Laden companies in Jeddah. Salem rented the ballroom of a luxury hotel in Cairo, paid for Randa’s American friends to fly to Egypt first-class, and staged a gala celebration. He even flew out the American doctors who had performed his hemorrhoid operation. Before the event, a cluster of brothers and sisters donned blue jeans and joined Randa’s American friends on a tour of their half-brother Khalid’s Thoroughbred horse farms in the Egyptian countryside.
When the wedding day arrived, laced white tablecloths draped the tables, and the couple sat in fluted, high-backed white chairs. Several of Randa’s half-sisters served as bridesmaids. Some were veiled, others not; they wore peach chiffon dresses and gold headbands. The men dressed in black tuxedos. Osama was not among them. In a bittersweet moment, Salem gave the bride away. A few hours later, on stage, he sang and carried on, exuberant as ever.11
AMONG SALEM’S half-sisters, it was Saleha, the apprentice interior designer, who most severely tested the family’s boundaries of decorum.
Paul Piccirillo was an Italian interior designer and artist, about fifty years of age. He met the Bin Ladens through Salem’s New York partner Robert Freeman. Around the time that Saleha, who was about twenty years his junior, completed her studies at a design school in Houston, the Bin Ladens were busy on a number of demanding palace projects in Saudi Arabia; Piccirillo worked on some of these, as well as on the Jeddah home of Salem’s former wife, Sheikha. Several involved work on King Fahd’s own residences and required extensive travel to inspect and review rare silks for bedding and window treatments at Scalamandre in New York; custom-made furniture in Valencia, Spain; and chandeliers hand-crafted in Venice, Italy. Salem did not permit his sisters, even those who were professional designers, to travel abroad without either a female chaperone or one of a several older and trusted male business partners. One night in Paris, however, while on chaperone duty with Saleha, Bob Freeman went to bed early. He failed to notice that Paul and Saleha were paying particularly close attention to each other. While he slept, they “talked all night long and fell in love,” as Bob’s wife, Gail Freeman, recalled it.
In the ensuing months, Paul and Saleha continued to see each other. Eventually Salem found out; naturally, he blamed Freeman. “We’ve got to do something about this,” he warned. “This is just a tragedy.” There were rumors, Gail Freeman recalled, that some of “the brothers were going to go kill” Saleha for dishonoring the family by falling for an older European.12
Salem agonized and fumed, and eventually he gave in. He quietly arranged for the couple to marry; they moved to a small town on the Mediterranean coastline. It would take years before Paul was fully welcomed by the family, according to the Freemans, who felt that Paul was conspicuously shunned at Randa’s wedding. The couple held together, however, and gradually Bakr and other influential brothers accepted them.
WEALTH, MOBILITY, and Salem’s secularism carried the Bin Ladens to far cultural shores, but they remained, at heart, a conservative and Arabian clan. Among other things, their honor was a business imperative; their wealth depended upon the patronage of the Saudi royal family, and so they lacked the political discretion to live entirely as they pleased, as some of the much larger Al-Saud family seemed to think they could do. Indeed, behavior that many Bin Ladens might find racy or challenging, such as Saleha’s marriage to Paul, could look timid or downright square alongside the unrestrained European cavorting of some Al-Saud princes—debauchery that Salem and his friends sometimes facilitated, in Salem’s role as a royal concierge.
Salem prided himself on never sleeping with prostitutes. This required some fortitude because he arranged periodically for the supply of professional women to entertain Saudi guests at parties he hosted or arranged in England and elsewhere, according to several European friends and employees who were involved. The women were so numerous that they sometimes arrived together on a bus. As cohosts, those in Salem’s entourage were charged with promoting cheerful demeanors among the women (“I paid you to smile!”). But apart from their substantial compensation, the girls had little reason to be pleased. The guests could be crude, drunken, and unattractive. Thomas Dietrich recalled one event for visiting Saudis at Offley Chase when he stood eavesdropping on some young German prostitutes who did not know he could understand them as they spoke with one another. “They were bitching like hell” about the guests, he recalled. “‘Look at this guy—I hope he doesn’t pick me.’ I mean, they were just saying what you would imagine they would say.”13
For many Saudis, Western vice confirmed the precepts of Arabian misogyny, and for many Americans and Europeans, Arabian vices confirmed the precepts of Western racism. “The awe that America commanded, with its skyscrapers, freeways, magnificent telephone system and raw riches, was diminishing as Saudi Arabia casually acquired all of these things with great rapidity,” wrote Peter Theroux, an American who lived in Riyadh during this period. “The Saudis saw themselves as our absolute superiors. The secular chaos of America’s elections, boisterous press and above all the public sex culture, seemed, except in small doses, to disgust them.”14 It was, in this context, easier and certainly more acceptable for wealthy Saudis to buy sex while visiting the West than it was for them to enter into the mixed marriages and bicultural family life that might produce, over time, integration or even assimilation—as occurred with some frequency, for example, among Pakistani, Iranian, Egyptian, and Palestinian émigrés to the West. The obsession with bloodlines among many Saudis, particularly those from the dominant Nejd region, along with their wealth and deep conservatism, kept them apart. Salem’s fantasy of a United Nations (or at least a Security Council) of intercultural marriages was exceptional, and even it presumed the primacy of inflexible and patriarchal Saudi family law.