An Exquisite Balancing Act

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

One was a sybarite who virtually abandoned his desert kingdom for a career of overseas carousing. He drank Scotch freely, ordered caviar by the pound, attended the raunchy shows in the nightclubs of Beirut so frequently that he knew all the leading belly dancers by name, engaged in myriad liaisons with women (he is said to have paid the wife of a Lebanese businessman $100,000 a year to make herself available) and, if old stories are to be believed, gambled away $1 million in the casinos of Monte Carlo during a single weekend.

The other is a King known for caution bordering on indecision and endless consultations before taking any action. His fiscal prudence is so extreme that he once became tearful on television while confessing that he could not balance his country's budget. He has for years conducted an exquisite balancing act among factions in his royal family, between the West and the Arab world, between the tug toward high-tech modernization and the impulse to preserve the semifeudal culture of his kingdom.

They are, strangely, the same person: Fahd ibn Abdul Aziz, King of Saudi Arabia and Custodian (of the holy places of Mecca and Medina), a form of address he prefers to Your Majesty. And the difference between the profligate prince and the cautious King reflects something more than the aging of the young hell raiser into a 69-year-old monarch whose 275-lb. bulk has so weakened his knees that he has trouble walking. Some 37 years ago, Fahd went through a conversion that, though forced on him, has had a lasting effect.

In 1953 the ascetic Crown Prince (later King) Faisal summoned his younger half-brother Fahd and told him he was disgracing himself and the kingdom. It was time, said Faisal, for Fahd to come home and devote himself to serious matters of state. Implicit in the rebuke was a warning that Fahd was endangering his chances of succeeding to the crown. As one of seven sons borne by the favorite wife of the legendary Abdul Aziz (generally known as Ibn Saud), who created Saudi Arabia, Fahd was among those in line someday to be King. But there was, and is, nothing automatic about the succession; like almost every other major decision in Saudi Arabia, it reflects a consensus of the royal family.

Spurred by shame and ambition, Fahd tamed his playboy ways and became Minister of Education just as the oil money was beginning to pour in. Though his formal education had been confined to a few years at a kuttab (Koranic school), Fahd built schools by the hundreds and several universities. He later served as Interior Minister, and in 1975, when King Faisal was assassinated and succeeded by another brother, Khalid, Fahd became Crown Prince. Khalid, troubled by a weak heart, paid little attention to affairs of state; Fahd in effect ran the country for years before he succeeded to the throne on Khalid's death in 1982.

The oil money by 1975 had reached flood tide -- around $100 billion a year -- and Fahd led Saudi Arabia into headlong modernization. He built hospitals, schools, superhighways, sports arenas. Many Saudis went in a single generation from mud huts to trim low-cost housing, free education for their children through the university level, and free medical care in modern hospitals. Fahd managed affairs with Bedouin shrewdness. He insisted that as soon as a project was approved, money for it had to be set aside. The practice horrified financial advisers who thought the cash should be invested to earn interest, but when oil prices broke and the kingdom's oil income plunged to $20 billion annually or less, Fahd, then King, did not have to cancel any projects.

Fahd's personal wealth, built on a fee levied on every barrel of oil extracted from Saudi land before 1980, is estimated at $18 billion, second only to the wealth of the Sultan of Brunei ($25 billion). He boasts at least 12 royal palaces, ranging from the $2.5 billion Al-Yamamah Palace complex in Riyadh to a "cottage" four times the size of the White House in Marbella, Spain. He owns several jets and yachts, all with gold bathroom faucets; his main yacht, a $60 million craft, is escorted by a vessel that carries Stinger antiaircraft missiles. His fleet of air-conditioned Rolls-Royces, Cadillacs and Mercedes would clog Rodeo Drive.

Though Fahd's views are tinged with superstition -- he follows the advice of astrologers -- he keeps the Koran at his bedside. He suffers from diabetes, back trouble, a weakness of the heart and shortness of breath, but still chain-smokes Marlboros. He has tried repeatedly, with varying success, to lose weight by methods ranging from diets to occasional visits to a Swiss fat farm.

Fahd's work habits are erratic. He will disappear for several weeks to relax at one of his houses abroad or on one of his yachts, then return to plow through all the work that has piled up in his absence. He sleeps during the day and often starts work at 11 p.m., then receives top officials and foreign envoys until 6 a.m. Some he keeps waiting for hours while he chats or watches a videotape -- the result not of discourtesy but of a lack of any sense of time pressure. Though his attentions are confined to his wives (he reportedly has three, and six sons), he still has an eye for women. Fahd was so smitten with Britain's Margaret Thatcher when he met her in 1975 that he is said to have ordered his court poet to compose an ode to her. An excerpt, as printed in a London tabloid: "Her figure is more attractive than the figure of any cherished wife/ or coveted concubine."

Fahd's admiration for the U.S. goes back to 1945, when he attended the San Francisco convention that founded the United Nations and became so fascinated by the country that he wanted to stay. He sent all his sons to American colleges, and he stays tuned to CNN on TV sets scattered through his palaces. Nonetheless, the presence of American troops cannot help intensifying the pressures on the kingdom to come further out of its isolation and into the modern world. Whether that can be done while maintaining the system of semifeudal family rule that Fahd has so far adroitly preserved is probably the biggest question still confronting Fahd -- or his successor.

With reporting by David Aikman/Dhahran and William Mader/London