Someday My Prince Will Come
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Someday My Prince Will Come
Someday My Prince Will Come
True Adventures of a Wannabe Princess
JERRAMY FINE
GOTHAM BOOKS
Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © 2008 by Jerramy Fine
All rights reserved
An extension of the copyright page is in the back matter.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fine, Jerramy, 1977–
Someday my prince will come: true adventures of a wannabe princess / by Jerramy Fine.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-1012-1703-0
1. Fine, Jerramy, 1977–2. Fine, Jerramy, 1977–Childhood and youth. 3. Young women—Colorado—Denver—Biography. 4. Young women—England—London—Biography. 5. Fantasy—Case studies. 6. Phillips, Peter Mark Andrew, 1977–7. Anne, Princess Royal, daughter of Elizabeth II, Queen of Great Britain, 1950–Family. 8. Windsor, House of—Miscellanea. 9. London (England)—Social life and customs. 10. London (England)—Biography. I. Title.
CT275.F5542A3 2008
978.8'83—dc22 2007033967
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While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
To my Knights in Shining Armor:
Michael Seymour, Jason Reeves, Iain Quirk,
Julian Connerty, and Richard Elsen
Without the limitless kindness, generosity, and dedication of these amazing men, this book literally could not have been written. Not only did they lead me through the darkness, but they renewed my faith in the power of good—and for both I will always be grateful.
Contents
Note from the Author
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Epilogue
Special Thanks
Note from the Author
This is a true story. You have my word on that. But it is also a memoir—meaning I’ve described events how I remember them and how I perceived them. I live in eternal fear of legal battles, so I’ve changed some names and identifying details, created composites when necessary, and occasionally modified the time-line to suit the narrative flow. This book is meant to do nothing but entertain readers and inspire them—and I hope it is always viewed in the harmless way in which it was written.
Someday My Prince Will Come
“There is no use trying,” said Alice. “One can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “Why when I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
—LEWIS CARROLL
Prologue
“When someone makes a decision, he is diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he never dreamed of when first making that decision.”
—PAULO COELHO
I was very young, but I was drawn to my destiny as if by a magnet.
Lying on my bedroom floor and propped up on my elbows, I studied every word in that precious library book. The font was tiny and the pages themselves were almost half the size of my six-year-old self, but my future depended on this so I had to stay focused.
I carefully followed the intricate lines of the Windsor family tree and individually assessed each male name to see if it was suitable. So far, I had found an earl who was almost nine. An earl was okay, but nine was kind of old. Then there was the lord. The lord might have worked, but he was only four, probably still in preschool.
My finger slowly traced over each name and birth date, searching for the perfect combination. Then, as if it was being magically guided, my hand suddenly stopped.
Peter Mark Andrew Phillips. Born 1977.
He was my age! The only eligible English royal in the world that was my age.
I circled his name over and over with my little fingertip. And in that moment, for better or worse, I felt the direction of my life changing irrevocably.
One
“There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality. Then there are those who turn one into the other.”
—DOUGLAS EVERETT
Jerramy, as a friend, I’m telling you that you’re absolutely delusional.”
Max’s voice boomed in the quiet Indian restaurant. No matter where we went in London, his loud New York accent never failed to make a scene, but I’d given up pleading with him to tone it down.
“No, I’m not,” I said defiantly. “Think about it. How many girls actually say they want to become a princess and how many actually go out there and try to do it?”
Max looked me straight in the eye. “And how many of those girls are under the age of seven?”
Well, I guess he had a point. I was not under the age of seven. In fact, I was sixteen years older than seven. I’d had sixteen years to come to my senses. But the simple fact remained: I was twenty-three years old and still believed that one day I would become a princess.
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To be honest with you, I have no idea how it started. I cannot remember a time in my life when becoming a princess was not my main ambition. There was a time, I believe it was preschool, when all of my friends dreamed of becoming princesses too. But later, when my friends moved on and dreamed of becoming actresses, astronauts, and flight attendants, I still wanted to be a princess. Those same girls actually grew up and became lawyers, fashion buyers, and management consultants. I was still trying to become a princess.
I wasn’t stupid. I knew this wasn’t a career that my high school guidance counselor could help me with. I knew perfectly well that I couldn’t just go out and get a Ph.D. in princess studies or buy a royal title off eBay and crown myself at my own coronation. If only! No, I was painfully aware that breaking into my chosen vocation was going to be far trickier than that.
But the thing was, unless I could biologically prove that I had real royal blood in my veins (which, for the record, I was working on), becoming a princess was sadly something I couldn’t achieve through my own in de pen dent efforts. To legitimize my particular professional dream, I had to marry a prince. Simple as that.
Now many would point out that I live in the twenty-first century and that princes aren’t exactly a dime a dozen anymore. In fact, for the most part, they are pretty much obsolete. So? Eighteenth-century Chippendale dressing tables aren’t exactly a dime a dozen either, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t go out and find one if I tried hard enough. Granted, limited-edition, antique English furniture is slightly easier to track down than a twentysomething, eligible male royal, but the point is, it’s not impossible, and I explained this to Max.
“Do you know how stupid you sound when you say that?” Max taunted. “Saying your ideal career is to be a princess is just as ridiculous as saying your ideal career is to be First Lady.”
I laughed. “First Lady is a good plan B!”
Sometimes I had no idea why I was friends with Max. But I appreciated his bluntness, no matter how brazen or obnoxious.
“Okay,” Max continued, “let’s say that hypothetically you really do meet one of these royal assholes. How are you going to get his attention? You’re hot, but you’re not the hottest girl I’ve ever met. You might be able to pull off a one-night stand with a prince, but for more than that, you’d have to be super, super hot. I’m talking uberhot.”
I rolled my eyes. I knew better than to be insulted. “Thanks, Max.”
The waiter came and placed half a dozen steaming dishes onto our little table. I piled some rice onto my plate while Max helped himself to chicken jalfrezi.
“Jerramy,” Max sighed, “for a girl as intelligent as I know you are, you really worry me. One of these days, you’re gonna have to start living in the real world.”
I took a large gulp of white wine.
Honestly, if I had an ounce of royal blood for every time someone mentioned the “real world” to me, I’d be a princess by now.
Most of my family and some of my very closest friends had at least learned to humor me; they saw my princess complex as a quirky and rather amusing endearment. But pretty much everyone else just laughed, shook their heads, and looked at me with pity—exactly what Max was doing at that very moment.
I knew what everyone was thinking: How could such a bright girl have such a ridiculously frivolous and downright impossible goal? And (here it comes) when was she going to grow up and start living in the real world?
My question was this: What’s so wrong with living in a fantasy world? Seriously. What’s so wrong about ignoring the conventions and practicalities of the so-called real world, and actually pursuing your childhood dream? Sometimes I think the “real world” is just a phrase invented by adults to give credibility to the miserable lives they’ve created for themselves. Feel free to call me delusional, but I was someone on this planet who, no matter how silly it seemed, was actually listening to my heart—I trusted it, believed it, and followed it. And in my opinion, there was nothing more “real” in this world than that.
So no matter how much I was teased, or how many obstacles I faced, or how many birthdays I celebrated past the age of seven, my singular desire to become a princess remained firmly in my heart. And I often thought it would take nothing short of an exorcism to remove it.
I had an odd fixation with Snow White when I was a child. In fact, I had accumulated such a huge collection of Snow White memorabilia that the Denver Children’s Museum put it on display. I insisted on dressing up as Snow White for Halloween five years in a row, and every day after preschool I’d rush home to listen to my Snow White record on my Fisher Price record player. (I wasn’t allowed TV, so it was the next best thing to the video.)
Don’t forget that back in the seventies, there was no such thing as a Disney Store; there were no Princess Collection aisles filled with everything a little girl like me could only dream of playing with. For my second birthday party, my mom had to scour the party shops to find anything vaguely Snow White themed, and when she finally found plastic Snow White cake-toppers, she thought she had hit the jackpot. I was so happy, I didn’t even notice that my health-nut parents were serving me a sugarless carrot cake with sugarless icing.
I guess you could say that Snow White was my best (albeit imaginary) friend, and whenever I was upset about my nonroyal life I would confide in her. My mom said she overheard me all the time: “Snow White,” I would sob, “you are the only one who understands!”
Looking back on it, it makes perfect sense. Snow White was an orphaned princess. And so was I.
I was born in Denver, Colorado, a city filled with a rather bland collection of modern architecture. The one exception was the state capitol building, which, compared to the dull structures surrounding it, seemed positively majestic with its marble steps, huge Roman columns, and golden dome. The first time I saw it in all its stately splendor, I was a toddler strapped into the backseat of the family station wagon. As we drove closer to it and eventually past it, my mother said I had burst into tears. When she asked me what was the matter, I had whimpered simply, “I…I…didn’t see the Queen.”
Evidently, I was so upset that she didn’t have the heart to tell me that the building wasn’t a palace and that the “Queen” didn’t live there, or more importantly, that Colorado had no reigning monarchy. I was left to discover these devastating facts on my own and for the next few months, every time we drove past the capitol, I would continue to scan the windows anxiously looking for royal family members I might recognize. And not just any royal family members. My own royal family members.
In the beginning, my parents thought I was just unusually precocious or perhaps blessed with an overactive imagination. I wasn’t getting my royal ideas from TV—I wasn’t allowed television. I wasn’t getting my ideas from books—I couldn’t read yet. But as my toddler behavior became ever more bizarre, they began to worry.
One day, when my mom dug out her old photo albums and showed me pages from her early years in Europe, I wouldn’t rest until she let me put the tattered postcards from her visit to the Crown Jewels on my bedroom wall.
My mom tells stories of how she would wake me up in the morning for nursery school, how I’d eerily gaze up at her without a hint of recognition, and say, “You’re not the woman who dresses me.”
Or another time when, I toddled up to her with my tiny hands placed haughtily on my tiny hips and asked, “Where is my armoire?”
“What’s an armoire?” my dad had to ask me.
My poor parents. Apparently, I constantly addressed them with an arrogance and superiority unheard of in a two-year-old—as if I were doing them a favor living amongst them in their humble home. And to be honest, that’s exactly how I felt. My whole world always seemed like an altogether foreign environment to me. And as a little girl, I felt increasingly frustrated that no one seemed to understand who I was, even if I wasn’t entirely sure myself.
It wasn’t long before my parents saw a pattern. Not only was I obsessed with royal
ty, I behaved like royalty. It couldn’t have been easy for them—but very much to their credit, my mom and dad were never insulted that their little girl frequently treated them like lowly commoners. And in retrospect, I actually have to concede that my parents were extremely open-minded in their assessment of me. After much reading on the subject and discussion with their friends, they decided that the explanation was relatively simple. I had been a princess, or some type of high-ranking royalty, in a past life. Because I was so young, past-life memories were surfacing regularly and I was having difficulty adjusting to the new nonroyal life that I was currently living. This explained why I was confused about the lack of palace furniture (armoires, for example); this explained why first thing in the morning, I often confused my mother with my chambermaid; this explained my intense relationships with Disney princesses; and most of all, this explained my incessant desire to escape or “go home.”
Never underestimating my toddler intelligence, my parents sat me down and carefully explained their past-life theory to me. Afterward, they looked at me expectantly, perhaps hoping to see an instant transformation now that I understood what I’d been going through. I looked right back at them. I had to admit, their theory had its merits. But it didn’t change anything, did it? Whether I’d been a princess in a past life or not, I still wanted to be a princess in this life.