What it's like to be a billionaire's butler

One of his first jobs was a two-year stint as the chief steward aboard the yacht of a sheik—basically, a butler at sea. The sheik wasn’t on his boat all that often, but when he did set sail, he liked to take the vessel “whoring,” as Bentley puts it. “The girls would all line up on the dock. The sheik would say, ‘You go. You go. You come aboard.'” On one four-day trip from Spain to Morocco, one of the sheik’s wives surprised the crew in port. “She came on board with her daughters, looking in every bed, trying to find a pubic hair.” Luckily, Bentley had been given a heads-up. He had his maids strip the sheets. Meanwhile Bentley hid six prostitutes in his own cabin, knowing that a sheik’s wife would never go into the staff’s lower-deck quarters. Then he stayed up all night in the laundry room, scrubbing evidence. Finally, exhausted, he went to his cabin for his first real sleep after the sheik’s four-day bender.

The moment he closed his eyes, a subordinate knocked on his door: The sheik needed him on deck immediately. “Can’t you take care of it?” Bentley pleaded. No, the boss demanded Bentley. So he pulled himself out of bed, threw on his uniform, and raced up to see his employer. The urgent matter? The sheik needed him to turn off a light. “That one, there,” he said, pointing to a switch three feet away. “That’s when you have to be thick-skinned,” says Bentley, who flipped the switch without a sigh.

You’d think the sheik would be an easy lock for Bentley’s worst boss, but the competition is stiff. There is the American building magnate who split open Bentley’s head with a well-hurled Hermès shoebox. And the Italian businessman who sent him to London to get fitted for a new uniform, which turned out to be a bulletproof vest. Bentley kept his cool around all of these lunatics. It’s not that he doesn’t get frustrated, he says, but even in the heat of battle, he can weigh the gratification of retaliation—say, bludgeoning the sheik on the yacht with the solid-gold candlestick holder—against the value of his career. He gets to live on a beautiful estate, travel the world, and “spend someone else’s money on the best of everything.” There are perks.