The Saʿūds ruled much of Arabia from 1780 to 1880; but, while Ibn Saʿūd was still an infant, his family, driven out by their rivals, the Rashīds, became penniless exiles in Kuwait.
In the book, she writes: "He had not yet become the penniless vagrant of his later films, but the cast-off clothes were already there as well as certain mannerisms such as thumbing his nose, twirling on one leg and his jaunty gait".
The opposite of this Frasier-y sort of strawman they keep going on about, the Alaskan equivalent of the "real New Yorker", is called a "sourdough," which was a Gold Rush term for a prospector who'd been stuck in Alaska so long he'd become a penniless crank.
It was the first of many deals for a man who would land in America penniless and become one of New Jersey's most prolific housing developers.
Gold is being pitched as a tale of greed and folie de grandeur in the vein of John Huston's 1948 western The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which starred Humphrey Bogart, Tim Holt and Huston's father, Walter, as penniless prospectors who become corrupted after discovering vast riches in 1920s Mexico.
But they have thrived in French Guiana, where the once-penniless refugees have become self-sufficient, and whose labors now account for about 80percentt of the fruits and vegetables sold in the remote French department.
And he laments that the image of Mexican-Americans has become tied to that of the penniless immigrant crossing the border illegally.
There is also a firsthand account of Valtesse de la Bigne, a scintillating figure who rose from penniless artist's model to become the queen of Parisian bohemia.
He abandoned the penniless existence of a subsistence fisherman to become a big-city vegetable seller.
His father was a penniless Jewish immigrant from Austria who had become prosperous as a furrier.
