The heavy wooden gate rumbles open to reveal a scene of almost comical Beverly Hills prosperity.
There’s a courtyard filled with trees, flowers and immaculate topiary in front of a sprawling bungalow with large windows. To the left is a magnificent vintage convertible: a cream 1954 Packard with gleaming chrome fittings, orange and brown panels and matching upholstery. To the right is a sporty black Rolls-Royce.
Between them, having his portrait taken under an imposing entrance arch, is the 71-year-old Palestinian-American property developer, serial entrepreneur and media personality whom I have come to see.
Even from a distance it is clear that Mohamed Hadid retains the self-assurance that enabled him to outduel Donald Trump for a slice of the Rocky Mountains in the Eighties and then build some of the grandest homes in Los Angeles. He moves with the grace of an Olympic skier (he was one once) and, as you might expect from the father of the supermodels Gigi and Bella Hadid, he has a world-class pout.
It occurs to me that if I were Hadid I would be delighted at making such a striking first impression. I might even strive to construct exactly this tableau for new visitors. It says: “I have won at life.”
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Hadid’s coiffed silver hair reaches almost to his shoulders and he is wearing a black leather jacket over a tight white v-neck T-shirt with white crocodile-skin loafers, skinny black jeans and a white leather belt held up by a chunky silver buckle in the shape of a capital “H”.
“We’re just finishing up,” he says with a friendly wave, before striding towards the Packard to have a lot more pictures taken.
Vogue Arabia once anointed him “the man with the best genes on the planet”, but as he and his ex-wife Yolanda, a former model, used to remind their daughters at the start of their careers, good looks can only get you so far.
“There are many prettier girls than you,” they told Gigi, 25, and Bella, 23, who are now two of the biggest stars in the fashion industry, worth $29 million and $25 million respectively, with more than 90 million Instagram followers between them and love lives avidly followed by their fans (Gigi has just had a baby girl with Zayn Malik, once of the boy band One Direction, while Bella has had a high-profile on-off romance with Canadan singer The Weeknd for years). They passed on the same lessons to their son, Anwar, 21 (also now a successful model with a celebrity other half – the pop star Dua Lipa).
I am here to talk about Hadid’s new project: a line of the world’s best caviars. Frankly though, nearly everything about this former refugee with a sense of adventure and a world-famous family is intriguing.
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Take the Packard. Hadid, who is now sitting behind the wheel, first laid eyes on the car almost 40 years ago on the day that he almost killed himself taking off from his huge farm in Maryland in a twin-engine plane that he owned at the time.
“I hit a tree on the way out and the right engine lost power. I swayed towards the right and I decided I wanted to continue. I didn’t want to go back to land on my farm, so I went to the next small airport and this car was sitting over there. I landed the plane with one engine and I said to the guy, ‘Whose car is this?’ He said, ‘Mine.’ I said, ‘How about if we trade?’ I left the plane there, as is. I used to have like 70 cars. This is the only car I have left [from that period], the only one I enjoy driving around here.” It has become, he says, “a lucky charm through all the ups and downs in life”.
Hadid gets out of the car and works some more poses for a while, his knee bent just so.
“I learnt my modelling from my kids,” he says, when the session finally ends.
What was the biggest lesson they taught you?
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“To be modest,” he replies.
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Hadid marches through the house, which is stuffed with art from around the world and across the centuries, including a large pink Jeff Koons balloon dog sculpture in the front room and several old European oil paintings in the dining room. In the kitchen he gathers up a sheaf of papers full of information about Hadid Caviar and heads out into a back garden bursting with vegetation.
It is one of several Hadid family properties around the Los Angeles area.
“‘I learnt to model from my kids.’ Their biggest lesson? ‘To be modest’
After his divorce from Yolanda in 2000, Hadid lived for years in a ten-bedroom faux château in Bel Air with a huge ballroom, a Turkish hammam and a screening room decorated with elaborate murals. He sold it for $50 million in 2010, but stayed on as a tenant of the shell company that bought it until the property was sold again two years ago.
He is building a new house on a 100-acre plot of land on top of the large hill overlooking the garden we are walking through. It is not to be confused with the seven-storey glass and curved steel property that Hadid began building on the side of a Bel Air hillside in 2011, hoping to one day sell it for $100 million. That house, decried by opponents as a “monstrosity” and “the starship Enterprise”, has instead cast a shadow over his reputation because of protracted legal disputes with neighbours and the city itself. In 2017, he pleaded no contest to criminal charges related to the mansion’s numerous building code violations, and in June this year California’s Supreme Court rejected Hadid’s appeal against a court order to tear down the building because it posed a “clear and present danger” to the local community. It remains standing for now.
“Let’s not talk about it,” Hadid says. “It will put me in a mood.”
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We sit at a long wooden banqueting table with 18 empty chairs by a gurgling fountain, beneath a line of outdoor chandeliers.
He arranges the stack of publicity materials about his caviar brand neatly in front of him and folds his arms.
He has loved luxury for as long as he can remember, he says. “Maybe because I was a refugee [but also] because we had a great heritage background, so I always feel like I should have lived in a different era, I should not have been here.”
Hadid’s ancestor on his mother’s side is Daher al-Omar, an 18th-century provincial leader in the Ottoman Empire who carved out an autonomous region in northern Palestine and was known for his religious tolerance, deft political skills and ambitious construction projects.
“I was born in Nazareth,” begins Hadid before he is drowned out by the sound of a power tool revving somewhere nearby.
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“Excuse me. Daniel! Daniel! Don’t make any noise please,” he shouts to the gardener. “Don’t work here now.” A muted “OK” comes back from the undergrowth.
Hadid resumes the history lesson. Daher al-Omar built a “modest palace” in Nazareth and commissioned an Italian fresco painter to decorate all the ceilings. Two centuries later, Hadid was born there in his mother’s parents’ quarters, “17 or 18ft away” from a church built on the supposed site of the Annunciation, the declaration by the Archangel Gabriel to Mary that she would bear the Son of God.
It was 1948 and the region was erupting. The British Mandate of Palestine had ended, the state of Israel was declared and the fledgling Jewish nation found itself fighting a war on multiple fronts against Palestinian militias and invasions by Arab armies from Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. Atrocities occurred on both sides and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven into exile.
Against this backdrop, Hadid’s mother attempted to return with her baby son and daughter to her husband’s grand home in Safed.
She found the Hadid residence locked. The family of Polish Jews that they had taken in and sheltered as their guests in 1946 had claimed the property.
With danger all around, Hadid’s mother eventually made it to a refugee camp on the edge of Damascus with him and his sister. Hadid’s father ended up in a camp in Gaza with Hadid’s two other sisters. They were reunited only because Hadid’s uncle, a doctor for Unesco, was able to locate both parts of the family.
“My parents never told us about our exodus from Palestine until we were older, and they had a reason for it: they wanted us to go forward with our lives without having hatred towards the Jews.”
Hadid remembers nothing of the refugee camp, but does recall the day that he watched his father win Jordanian passports for the entire family in a game of backgammon with the Jordanian ambassador in Damascus. By then they had been stateless for seven years.
Hadid’s father, a professor of English, Arabic and French literature before the war, had quickly found work at the University of Damascus and then with the United States Information Agency. He became the head of the Voice of America broadcasting network in Syria and later opened and ran offices in Lebanon and Tunisia.
In 1964, the family moved to Virginia in the US. It was “very difficult” for Hadid, who could not speak English and had never really mastered either Arabic or French because of all the moving around.
Because he was good at soccer, he managed to earn a scholarship to Duke University in North Carolina as a kicker on the American football team. When the coach took that away, he leapfrogged to a black university in the state that became a “back door” to courses at more prestigious institutions including North Carolina State University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose names he would go on to drop extensively.
“I say I attended these schools,” he tells me. “I never said I graduated from these schools.”
The family was far from rich, but when he was still a teenager Hadid bought his first small aircraft with savings from paintings he did for his mother’s friends, wages from odd jobs and a long-term financing deal agreed with the vendor. A few years later, he opened a nightclub in Rhodes with a business partner (although, as an observant Muslim, he has never drunk alcohol).
“We are not the Kardashians. We are more private than people think
In the Seventies, he worked as a vintage car dealer in Washington DC and in the import-export business serving clients in the Middle East before going into property, where he gained rapid success and earned a certain mystique for his unusual origins and ability to raise enormous sums of money quickly.
Prejudice filled in the gaps.
Rivals speculated, without any evidence, that his financing came from the Shah of Iran, or the PLO or drug barons in Lebanon.
Later it emerged that Hadid was backed for a time by a group of Saudi investors.
In the late Eighties he was heavily involved with building a mosque, Islamic school and cultural centre in Virginia that now feeds thousands of needy people a week. He has called it his greatest achievement.
At that time, he says, “I had a tremendous amount of confidence.” He always believed “that I can succeed, because I can always start from nothing. Because in my opinion I started from nothing.”
Do you still feel that way now? He thinks about it. “Yeah.”
In 1987, Hadid pulled off his most celebrated deal – he outflanked Donald Trump to secure rights to the site for a hotel at the base of the main ski mountain in Aspen, Colorado.
Trump sued and for a while the stand-off became Aspen’s most divisive issue. Hadid suspects that it was Trump’s people who put together a racist cover for the local newspaper that showed him riding a camel, leading a harem “as if I just came from the desert” with the sign, “Welcome to Hadidville”.
He won anyway (he says he beat Trump in two other deals at around the same time too) and later he had Trump and his second wife, Marla Maples, over to his house in Aspen to stay for a few nights. They never became close but he recalls the future president as a “gutsy” opponent who shared his addiction to the thrill of doing high-stakes deals and his sense of invincibility.
“It’s the rules of being a developer. It’s not unknown that a developer can die and come back five times.”
What does thinking like a developer tell you about how Trump will tackle the final weeks of this election?
“His mindset is that things change on a daily basis and the opportunity is there when you are ready for it.”
It doesn’t sound as if Hadid is planning to vote for Trump in November. He and his daughters have publicly criticised the administration’s Middle East policy and he says he was “devastated” by the decision to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. He cares deeply about immigration rights and the environment and the “image of America”. But all he will say is, “I’ll vote my conscience.”
Like Trump, Hadid encountered serious money troubles soon after his Eighties peak. He blames the hotel trade (“An ego-driven business, not a money-driven business”), which sucked him in with the Aspen deal and the subsequent purchase of Ritz-Carlton hotels in Washington and New York.
His empire collapsed and so did his marriage.
Hadid, always the risk-taker, recuperated from his professional setbacks by taking up speed skiing. It became almost “suicidal”, he concedes happily, but he did compete for Jordan in the 1992 Winter Olympics.
That early Nineties period was the closest Hadid has come to losing it all financially.
He won’t say what he’s worth today, but less than a year ago one of his companies filed for bankruptcy during the Bel Air legal battle. (A judge refused the application, saying the claim had been lodged solely to thwart the demolition order.)
Hadid divorced Mary Butler, the mother of his two elder daughters, Alana and Marielle, in 1992. He married Yolanda two years later.
Relocating to California, Hadid mounted a comeback as a prolific developer of mansions, including the $18 million home where Michael Jackson died in 2009. The money poured in again but his three youngest children, like their elder siblings, all went to the equivalent of local state schools because, “They didn’t want to be these privileged kids.”
Yolanda, whose childhood was tougher than her husband’s, insisted on keeping the children as grounded as possible. Neither of the girls was allowed to model seriously until they were 18. By then they were both pursuing further education in New York (criminal psychology for Gigi; photography for Bella).
“Now they have plan A, B and C,” says Hadid proudly. “They have the education, they have the modelling and they’re both in business.”
Yolanda turned out to be “an amazing ex-wife”, he adds. So did Mary and, judging from the siblings’ social media feeds and what Hadid says, the entire extended family is very close.
Not counting Gigi’s baby, Dua Lipa is the latest addition to the group. Hadid, who had no idea who she was and “didn’t know how to spell [or] even pronounce her name” when he first met her, now sees one of the biggest music stars of 2020 “almost every day”. He particularly appreciates that, “She likes to have everybody around, because she doesn’t have a family [in LA], so we are her family.”
“Half an hour before you came she was here, doing her make-up at the kitchen table. She’s one of the most amazing young ladies and I’m so happy for my son to have her in his life because she put him in the right direction. He was all over the place.”
“People get attracted to Anwar because of his kindness,” Hadid says later. “He’s just super-kind. Unlike me, because I was very materialistic. I always wanted the cars, the big stuff, the aeroplanes, the big houses. My son is the complete opposite. One time he said to me, ‘I don’t want to be you,’ and for a minute I got really upset. Then I realised this was an amazing compliment to me – that he wants to be someone else, he doesn’t care. You give him a watch, he doesn’t want it. I bought him a car. He said, ‘Dad, first I can buy my own car. And number two, I like my old car. I don’t need an expensive car.’” There is admiration and wonder in Hadid’s voice.
None of his children ever asks him for anything, he says, but their fame has still complicated his life.
People “don’t look at me as Mohamed Hadid. They look at me as the father of Gigi and Bella and Anwar and Alana and Marielle. It’s dangerous for me to be their father. I have to be very careful. Everything I do is a reflection on them.” He has turned down “a lot” of business opportunities because he doesn’t want to hurt their reputations, but even so people – I think he means the media and the neighbours who oppose his Bel Air property – “use my kids as an instrument to harass me.
“Just being their father is a tremendous burden on me. They were my kids. Now I’m their father. It is what it is.”
The Bel Air dispute has dented his affection for Los Angeles and taught him that there are a lot of people who “don’t understand what I have done for this town”.
He believes that his reputation has been damaged unjustly because of “one guy who hates me”. Warming to the theme, he singles out the Bel-Air Association, a homeowners’ group, as “a little mafia”. He adds a torrent of comments about various specific individuals.
The scale of his ambition remains undimmed – he is currently working on the Skyline apartment complex in Cairo, which is planned to be the largest residential building in the world – but he is now convinced that the point of success is to be able “to use your name to better the world, for the good of humanity. All the rest is BS.”
So it seems like a good time to ask if, now that Keeping Up with the Kardashians is coming to an end, he could envisage a Hadid reality television series. After all, Yolanda became a household name as a stalwart of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and Hadid himself made occasional appearances on the show and also popped up with Shiva Safai, at the time his fiancée, on The Second Wives Club and Shahs of Sunset.
“We are not the Kardashians,” he says patiently. “We are actually much more private than people tend to think. We know the Kardashians as friends. Kendall [Jenner] is a great friend of my daughters and we have a lot of respect for what they do, and how they did it. They are good people and they created something so unusual that you have to commend them.
“But I don’t use my kids to enhance my career. I protect them. I watch over them. I don’t want to take them out on the street and take pictures with them. Would we ever do a show? No, I don’t think that will happen.”
Do you get asked?
“Every day. Literally. Maybe ten TV stations want to do it.”
I ask him about his caviar business. He launches into a long discussion about the provenance of great caviar and the remarkable rarity of his “Sultan’s Edition” eggs, which are harvested from a very scarce albino sturgeon and sell for £15,000 for a single 500g tin.
Hadid’s big insight on true luxury came in his hotel-owning days when, unlike a certain former business rival with a tendency to plaster all his properties with the same gold finish, he learnt that, “My taste is not what’s important.”
So although he knows a lot about caviar, and Hadid is an expert, his venture – “The world’s most desirable caviar” – is the fruit of exhaustive discussions with true connoisseurs.
A few days later, a box arrives at my house containing a tiny canister of the “Gold Edition” Hadid caviar, along with a bag of crackers and a handpicked lemon from his garden. I enjoy it a great deal, but not as much as I enjoyed talking to the man whose name is on the tin.
THE HADID £30,000 CAVIAR TASTE TEST
Dealing in caviar used to be a shady old business involving dodgy cartels and mink-coated middlemen in the republics around the Black and Caspian seas. But since wild sturgeon fishing was banned in the mid-Noughties, the industry has become much more transparent, with minutely regulated aquaculture farms springing up across the world, from England to China, to fill the gap.
Farmed caviar doesn’t have quite the cachet of wild but, on the plus side, it’s made it much more readily available to you and me. Just don’t mistake “available” for cheap. An entry-level caviar, from the widely farmed Siberian sturgeon, say, costs about £1,000 a kilo. Given that 50g is the minimum amount most people consider suitable for sharing – enough to top about a dozen blinis – it means you are looking at about £50 for a cosy night in. No self-respecting oligarch would dig out their mother-of-pearl spoon for that, of course. The rarest stuff, almas caviar, harvested from albino sturgeon, was traditionally reserved for royalty; it costs up to £65,000 a kilo.
I can only imagine how it tastes. But, thanks to Sophia Lgorji, I can at least tell you what a £30,000 caviar is like.
I’m sitting with the technical manager of Hadid Caviar, Mohamed Hadid’s new caviar house. In front of us are six tins from the range, from a “Silver Edition” baerii from the aforementioned Siberian sturgeon, to a “Sultan’s Edition” golden almas, priced at £15,000 for 500g, the smallest tin they sell, which I think tells you all you need to know about Hadid’s customers. They do intend to introduce a 30g tin soon, though, which at £900 will be quite the bargain.
Lgorji is only sorry she hasn’t been able to bring a tin of the top-of-the-range beluga almas, which Hadid also sells, but as they expect to harvest only 20kg a year (compared with 5 tonnes of regular beluga) it’s not easy to come by. I tell her not to worry: there are worse ways to spend a morning than a caviar tasting. So I prepare to dust off a few synonyms for “salty” and “fishy” and dive in.
Actually, that’s not quite true. Just as an inexperienced whisky drinker will resort to a vocabulary of “smooth” or “peaty”, “salty” and “fishy” are equally amateurish blind alleys in caviar tastings. “Fresh caviar never tastes fishy,” says Lgorji. “If it does, it’s off.” And salty? Well, yes, because they add salt to the fresh roe in order to turn it into caviar, but you need to look beyond that to notes of hazelnut, say, or oyster. It takes practice. Some people claim they can identify up to 15 flavours in a single spoonful. As you’ll see, I was floundering after two or three. Tony Turnbull, Times food editor
Silver Edition baerii (£50 per 50g)
Branded “Silver Edition” by Hadid but so infra dig it doesn’t merit a mention on its retail site. Nutty, faintly mushroomy, with creamy soft greyish eggs.
Gold Edition oscietra (£75 per 50g)
A lighter, greeny colour and more velvety texture, with a flavour of buttery hazelnuts and ocean spray. This was my favourite.
Black Edition imperial (£75 per 50g)
A hybrid of two species of sturgeon with a drier, firmer texture, a more pronounced nutty earthiness and a slight pop as you press your tongue on the roe. It’s popular with chefs because it holds its shape well in soups or on top of a scallop.
Ruby Edition sevruga (£90 per 50g)
Sevruga was always the Russian favourite with its grey eggs and powerful taste of the sea. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was almost… fishy. Certainly it has a longer, pronounced finish.
Black Diamond Edition beluga (£200 per 50g)
From the celebrated huso huso sturgeon farmed by the Caspian sea. The price is partly because the fish takes longer to reach maturity – about 20 years – but also because its large, soft, pearlescent eggs are highly prized. It tasted of walnuts, butter and, I thought, creamy egg yolk, but Lgorji pulled a face when I mentioned that, so maybe that’s just me.
Sultan’s Edition golden almas (£900 per 30g)
The small soft eggs are a dazzling yellow colour and pack much more punch than the other caviars. I detect walnuts, butter, anchovies. Nice, but £30,000 nice? If you have the money, why not?
hadidcaviar.com