The Good Life Aquatic; The super-yacht business is booming, with moguls such as Larry Ellison and Paul Allen vying to outdo one another in size, submarines, missile-detection systems, helicopter pads, and aquatic cars- not to mention "paparazzi lights," Picassos, and Philippe Starck interiors.

Byline: Mark Seal

Paul Allen's Octopus. Edmiston motions across the harbor to a 300-footer. "To paint a yacht like that is around $4 to $5 million," he says. "Of course, you don't have to do it every year."

Most owners charter their yachts, but the super-rich never do; they want them in constant readiness. "I was on a big yacht down in Sardinia not long ago, and the owner was complaining that he couldn't get any decent fresh fruit," says Edmiston. "It's a nice place, Sardinia, but not really noted for agriculture. So there was a helicopter on the yacht, which I sent to the market in Cannes, a 400-mile round-trip. He got his raspberries and strawberries and was very happy." The fruit probably cost $4,000 in fuel and other expenses. "Who cares?" says Edmiston. "What I cared about is that the owner got what he wanted."

"This yacht took two years in dreaming, three years in building," says Mexico City industrialist Carlos Peralta, standing on his seventh boat, a Swarovski-crystal-encrusted fantasy called Princess Mariana, for his wife. It has six decks, six bars, 1,600 movies, 16,000 pre-programmed songs, three chefs, a cellar with 2,000 bottles of wine and 1,000 bottles of tequila, a laundry, a wall that opens to turn a bedroom into a terrace, and such high-tech features as fingerprint-identification pads to secure staterooms and other areas. We're bobbing in the bay off the Hotel du Cap, surrounded by yachts, including Barry Diller's two-masted ketch, The Mikado. Peralta tells me that covetous Saudi princes have been circling his boat all week in powerboats, and that he has turned down several offers to sell it at an enormous profit. "It's the most expensive thing you can build," he says, "but it gives you pleasure like nothing else."

"I've bought a second boat that I call the Lady Lola Shadow, a 186-foot, 20-year-old supply vessel, and I've just loaded her with toys," says Idaho-based newspaper magnate Duane Hagadone, who, in commissioning his 205-foot Lady Lola, admonished the designers, "Give me some sizzle!" The result includes the 18-hole Lady Lola Golf Club, where golfers hit floating golf balls off a retractable tee on the sundeck toward 18 floating pins and have their games tracked by satellite and displayed on a television screen. "The second boat follows along behind the Lady Lola. I've got a custom-made wooden boat, a 150-mile-per-hour speedboat, a submarine, landing boats, canoes, kayaks-17 boats, plus the helicopter, in the Lady Lola fleet."

"Most people don't even know they want a yacht," international boat broker Steve Kidd says of his clientele, powerhouses who think they've done it all until someone leads them onto a yacht and into another dimension. "Fifty kilograms of Iranian beluga at $500,000, 300 bottles of Dimple scotch, 300 bottles of Johnny Walker Black, 50 cases of champagne, 40 pounds of foie gras, close to 100 pounds of Niman Ranch beef-bill just shy of a million," says a provisioner of one boat owner's memorable order. London-based designer Donald Starkey adds, "I've personally put on one yacht alone a Picasso, a Dubuffet, two Utrillos, two or three Chagalls, and more. The value of the art is probably three times the value of the yacht." Valentino's rep Carlos Souza says, "Whenever guests come to TM Blue One, they make sure they pack lots of cashmere, because Valentino likes the temperature subzero, the air-conditioning running full blast." Public-relations executive Lara Shriftman tells me, "On one boat I went on, they had a different set of designer china for every single meal. The crew cleaned the boat morning, noon, and night. In the bathrooms they had 20 different kinds of shampoo in a basket for a lot of high-maintenance girls. All the linens were Pratesi-600-thread count."

What is it about a yacht that bewitches the super-rich? "Abandonment, an immediate yes," says the actor George Hamilton without hesitation. King Edward VIII engaged in his romance with Wallis Simpson, which led to his abdication, during a 1936 charter on a steam yacht called Nahlin. But the allure of a yacht goes beyond mere romance. Occidental Petroleum magnate Armand Hammer had three wives, but the only photograph he carried in his wallet was of his yacht, according to Nancy Holmes in her book The Dream Boats. Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli, whose yachts included Agneta, a teak beauty with rust-colored sails, liked to say, "You can tell what a man is like only by his boat and his woman."

After dining on Gloria and Loel Guinness's yacht, Sarina, in the 60s, Elizabeth Taylor told Richard Burton she wanted one. "We chartered a sweet old lady, whose original name I've forgotten, to go to the Greek islands," Taylor tells me, describing the dilapidated, 165-foot motor yacht built in 1906 that she and Burton bought for $200,000. They named her Kalizma, an acronym for their children Kate, Liza, and Maria, and spent a reported $2 million in restoration. "She wasn't pretty at all on the interior-all navy and nautical trim-and yet there was something so charming about her. Richard and I fell in love with her immediately, although it meant doing a complete revamp. I hired a decorator and asked him to remove every trace of the nautical theme. We put in diesel engines and stabilizers and transformed her into a cozy, comfortable, pretty little house, very romantic and colorful. We hung our paintings in the dining saloon and put Louis Quatorze chairs in the living room. The bedroom was all yellow and white. I think it was the prettiest one we ever had. There were rooms for all the kids, and we used her as a floating home. We took her up the Thames and kept all of our dogs on board because of the quarantine laws in England. Other boats would pass by and shout that we had the largest floating kennel in the world. She gave us more pleasure and fun and was the best present we ever gave each other."

I'm on a tender off the coast of Cap-Ferrat, sailing toward the mother ship of super-yachts, the Christina O. On this 325-foot former Canadian Navy frigate, which Aristotle Onassis bought in 1954 for $34,000 and transformed at a cost of $4 million, the Greek tycoon invented yacht culture: living on his boat for months at a time, conducting his international business empire from his master suite, seducing in his "lucky" stateroom such fabled women as Maria Callas, Greta Garbo, and Jacqueline Kennedy. "So this it seems is what it is to be a king," Jackie Kennedy allegedly said when she first stepped onto the Christina in October 1963.

King Farouk called the Christina "the last word in opulence," and in Jackie's …