by Jerramy Fine
As I grew a bit older, it wasn’t long before I developed my own theory—and in my opinion the evidence for this theory was equally overwhelming. I was obsessed with royalty and aristocracy from such a frighteningly young age that my parents often joked that I couldn’t possibly have been spawned by flower-power, equality-loving children of the sixties like themselves. And ironically, I couldn’t have agreed with them more.
If truth be told, as a child, as a teenager, and even into my twenties, I was never one hundred percent convinced that the people I called Mom and Dad were actually my real, biological parents. I know it sounds like a clichéd movie plot, but I’m being totally serious. You want proof? All you had to do was look at them.
Both of my parents had hair way past their elbows. That’s right. Both of them. My dad, with his long ponytail and thick dark beard, always looked like a cross between some kind of Indian guru and ZZ Top. And as for my mom, well, she was pretty, but the way she pranced around in her long ethnic skirts and embroidered peasant blouses, she looked like she’d been raised in some kind of psychedelic pixie forest. Then there was me: an innocent child, a helpless victim of their hippie lifestyle. They dressed me in tie-dye and hemp fiber, fed me tofu and quinoa, and soothed me to sleep with the dulcet tones of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.
And as if living with the hippies wasn’t enough, they had to go and give me a hippie name. Not only that, they had to give me a boy’s name. There is no logical explanation for it. I was named Jerramy for no other reason than “it sounded pretty.” I’m sure that after years of listening to nonstop Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix anything sounds pretty, but that’s hardly an excuse.
And don’t even get me started on my middle name. It’s Sage. As in the grayish green cooking spice. My parents claim it represents wisdom, but as far as I’m concerned, they might as well have named me Jerramy Oregano. Or Jerramy Garlic.
Deep down, I bet my parents questioned the biological facts of the situation too. I mean, surely if I were their real daughter, I would not be actively plotting an escape to a life of royal elitism, but instead would be fantasizing about a selfless existence in the Peace Corps. At the very least, my parents hoped that one day I’d tear myself away from my books on royal protocol and get as excited as they did about grinding their own flour every night. But despite all evidence to the contrary, they continued to claim that I was conceived one starry night in a rundown miners’ cabin deep in the Breckenridge Mountains—by them.
So my girlhood theory was this: The day I was born, a dreadful hospital mix-up occurred. The mix-up involved two young aristocrats from England, two ultraliberal hippies from America and two beautiful baby girls. Somehow, on this historic day, my infant self ended up in the hippie Colorado home rather than the glorious stately home in the English countryside.
More than twenty years later, both my parents still have hair longer than I do. And let’s just say that if tomorrow I were to be approached in the street by an elegant British couple who insist that in 1977 a certain Denver hospital made a terrible mistake, and that, how shall they break it to me, I am their real daughter—I won’t be the least bit surprised.
Of course I loved them dearly, but from day one I knew that my parents were hardly a pair that would seamlessly fit into the daily life of a royal palace to which I knew I was going to become accustomed. I actually had recurring nightmares about how they might behave at my future royal wedding. Can you imagine my bearded ZZ Top father escorting me down the aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral in front of all of Europe’s reigning royal families? The thought was too painful to bear.
I survived my nonroyal childhood by focusing on my escape—which included planning my royal betrothal and studying the culture of the future kingdom I would help to reign.
I subscribed to Royalty magazine—it was six dollars per issue because it was printed in the U.K., but to me, it was worth every penny of my monthly allowance and I studied it voraciously.
It helped that I already knew exactly which royal I was going to marry. And I have to say, as royal boys my age went, he was pretty close to perfect. His name was Peter Mark Andrew Phillips. (How romantically regal is that?) Son of the Princess Royal, Peter was Queen Elizabeth II’s oldest grandchild, and at the time, he was seventh in line to the throne.1
You may think that six is quite young to make such a huge decision about one’s future husband, but the minute I saw his name in that royal family tree…well, I can’t explain it. I just knew. I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that I would marry that boy. I just had to find him.
But finding Peter was going to take time and I quickly realized that it was going to take even more time if I allowed there to be an ocean between us. Studying magazines was not going to cut it. I knew that if I were serious about fulfilling my destiny, I had better get myself out of that hippie house and over to England ASAP.
But considering I was only six years old, this was easier said than done. Luckily, I had a plan. So far, I wasn’t impressed with my Denver kindergarten, and in fact, I found it so unchallenging that my teacher wanted me to skip it and go straight to first grade. Whereas I wanted to skip the American school system entirely and go straight to British boarding school.
Again, not quite sure how I knew British boarding school existed, but my parents were horrified when I suggested it. What child begs to be shipped off to boarding school thousands of miles away from home? But as I repeatedly tried to explain to them, I didn’t think going to England would be leaving home, I thought of it as going home.
But it was like arguing with a brick wall. The hippie parents would have been far happier sending me off to live in a nude commune than a snooty, class-ridden girls’ boarding school that would no doubt fill my head with all sorts of ancient, antifeminist, right-wing ideas. And despite my constant persuasive efforts on the subject, getting the hippies to agree with my plan was absolutely futile.
“You’d be miserable,” they insisted. “For starters, they’d make you wear a uniform.”
“But I love pleated skirts!” I wailed.
“You’d have to eat things like cold, burnt porridge.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“You’d be bored out of your mind, Jerramy!” my mom tried in vain to tell me. “These hoity-toity English schools you think you want to go to aren’t known for academics. You’ll learn nothing but how to curtsy and plan a dinner party. They’re designed purely to help girls marry the correct husband.” She said this last bit with visible disgust. Women’s lib was still very close to her heart. (To this day she still refuses to wear a bra.)
But to her dismay, I nodded excitedly. “Exactly! That’s why I want to go!”
She looked at me sternly. “Jerramy, you’re simply too intelligent for your dad and me to justify sending you off to a place that would do nothing but melt your brain cells. End of discussion.”
See? It’s no wonder Snow White and I got along so well. If that no-English-boarding-school mandate wasn’t classic evil stepmother behavior, I didn’t know what was. Just like my beloved Disney princess, I was a prisoner in my own home.
Two
“Everyone, when they are young, knows what their destiny is. Back then, everything is clear and everything seems possible.”
—PAULO COELHO
I remember the first time I found a proper photo of Peter.
Sure, I managed to spot him in the official photos of Fergie and Andrew’s wedding,2 but you can’t really judge a future husband if he is wearing a ruffly, navy blue page boy outfit with little gold buttons and sitting cross-legged on the floor in the corner of a magazine picture. Basically, all I knew about my prince for the first few years was that he had a cute boyish face and shiny golden hair. And I knew between my hair and his, we would have beautiful blond children together.
Peter wasn’t old enough (or well-known enough) to attract any significant attention from the press—especially in America. But if I scoured the English magazines hard enough, every
now and then his face would pop up in the background.
Then, one day, I saw him in his full glory. This time it wasn’t just his tiny blond head in the corner of the page that some photo editor had neglected to crop. No, this time the photo cropper hadn’t even touched him! And suddenly I found myself loo at a photograph of the most handsome ten-year-old boy I had ever seen. In fact, considering the male morons I was in school with at the time, he was the only handsome ten-year-old boy I had ever seen.
He was walking with his family to church. His posture was casually dauntless, his gray suit was immaculate, his Windsor knot was perfect, his profile was striking, and his complexion was positively glowing beneath those English rosy cheeks. I fell deeper in love than ever that day. And as I carefully cut out his regal image and taped it to my bulletin board, I knew that my six-year-old decision was the right one.
Meanwhile, life with the hippies was not improving. If truth be told, once my parents decided to move us out of Denver to a Colorado mountain town in the middle of nowhere, it seemed to be getting progressively worse. They told me they wanted to raise me and Ezra (my new baby brother) in a “safe, country environment” away from the pollution and crime of the city; they told me they wanted to “get back in touch with the land.”
What they didn’t tell me was they were going to assemble a full-size Native American tipi3 in our backyard, buy goats and chickens so we could “play farm,” and send me to school with a bunch of junior rodeo champions who drove to school with hunting rifles displayed in the back of their pickup trucks. Our new house was charmingly set near a small hill called the Hog Back and my new town’s biggest attraction was a two-headed stuffed lamb, which was on display at the local farming equipment store—just in case you wanted to gawk at some freak taxidermy while shopping for your pitchforks.
Years later at a London engagement party, I mentioned the name of this cowpoke town to an American I’d just been introduced to and I was amazed when he said he’d heard of it.
“You’re from there?” he asked incredulously. “Wow. That place has like zero outside influence.”
Tell me about it.
When I was finally old enough to buy alcohol at the town liquor store, I produced my passport as ID, and the clerk was mystified. He’d never seen one before.
“Ma’am,” he said with suspicion, “I’m gonna need to see some state ID.”
“But this is international ID,” I tried to explain.
“Sorry, ma’am,” he said. And I left empty-handed.
As a child, I was miserable. One freezing winter morning in first grade, I was waiting for the school bus with a bunch of other kids, when the farmer who lived across the street came out of his house holding a large rifle. We watched silently as he walked into the adjacent pasture and proceeded to shoot his herd of cows, one by one, right in front of us. It must have been butchering season or something, but he was such a hard-core farmer it didn’t even occur to him to wait until his young audience had gone to school.
A year or so later, I went over to a friend’s house so we could try out our new roller skates and was horrified to see the dead body of an elk ( we’re talking antlers, hooves, and all) lying across her kitchen counter.
“My dad shot it this morning,” my little friend said breezily as we walked by.
I’ll never forget those glassy elk eyes staring at me as my friend’s mom happily removed its bloody guts with a knife as naturally as if she were baking cookies.
In school, I was ostracized quite early on by the majority of kids because I had no intention of joining the Future Farmers of America or training to become a rodeo princess. (That was not the kind of royalty I had in mind!) Sure I could wander through the cornfields by myself at night without fear of being murdered, but so what? If the Red Barn and Big Barn were the only restaurants in town (and if deep fried bulls’ testicles4 were the regional specialty), I wasn’t convinced the low murder rate mattered so much.
Yet my parents seemed to love their new home and their new earthy lifestyle. They loved being away from the Denver smog, raising their own animals, and growing their own food. Still, I don’t think they realized how much work a hippie farm was going to be, because as part of this unwavering quest for utopia, suddenly my list of chores expanded exponentially.
My new responsibilities included clearing out the rabbit hutch and the chicken coop; collecting the chicken eggs; cleaning up the goat’s pen; and feeding the rabbits, the ducks, the cats, the dog, the fish, the gerbils, and the garter snake. And that’s just what I had to do after school. On the weekends I had to wash and put away the (mismatched) dishes, pick tomatoes from the organic garden, pick apricots from the trees (and pick up the gross gooey ones that fell on the ground), water my mother’s billions of flower gardens (that were lined with Tibetan prayer flags), and help make whole-wheat pastry for the never-ending vegetarian quiches. Did I mention that in addition to Snow White I also identified with Cinderella?
Both of my parents grew up in major cities so I kind of understood their desire to play farm when they finally moved to the middle of nowhere. But at least when Marie Antoinette played farm at her Petite hameau in Versailles, her staff made sure that all her livestock had been sprayed with eau de toilette and that the chicken eggs had been carefully washed before she went to collect them!
One Saturday morning, I was busy watering the vegetable garden, when our mother duck and her new team of fluffy ducklings waddled past me, quacking their heads off.
I turned to see what the newest duck-related commotion could possibly be about and noticed the strangest thing: A baby gosling had joined their group. Tottering on his new webbed feet, he was trying his best to march in line with the rest of them. His gray goose down stood out among the bright yellow fluff of the baby ducks, and even though he was probably their same age, his gosling body towered above them, standing almost as tall as the mother. Poor guy. He’d obviously been separated from his real goose parents, wandered onto our property, and suddenly found himself part of a very strange and very different feathered family from the one he was used to. My heart ached for him—I knew exactly how he felt.
My little brother didn’t mind life on the farm half as much as I did. He played baseball with the rotten duck eggs, played frisbee with the cow pies, and often got in trouble for throwing the chickens out of the tree house to see if they could fly. For a five-year-old boy, all that dirt and mud was fun! But not for me. I dreamed of the sophisticated outdoor pleasures you might find on a royal estate: a backyard filled with splashing fountains, elegant topiaries, and manicured lawns where I could play croquet.
I dreamed about trips to museums and nights out at the theater, of box seats at the ballet or the opera—but my only options were nights out at the Big Barn or bleacher seats at the monster truck show. Yet my constant requests to move out of hickville to at least a vaguely cosmopolitan environment went virtually unnoticed.
I just didn’t get it. I mean, didn’t my parents care that the local farmers made fun of their hippie clothes and the fact that they rode their bikes to work? Didn’t they find it strange that the town had more churches than restaurants? Didn’t it bother my dad that he was asked to leave a certain eating establishment because of his long hair? Apparently not.
“Just look at the mountains,” my parents would say to me with sweeping gestures and a scary, almost evangelical passion. “It’s just so beautiful here!”
So they were raising me in a provincial vacuum for the sake of beauty?
My fantasies about being shipped off to English boarding school or discovered by my real English parents increased. But even if my real English parents were actively looking for me, my town was so far away from any civilization (the nearest city was a six-hour drive in any direction), there was no way they’d be able to find me. To cope, I stayed away from the cornfields and the rodeos and threw myself into English society novels, books on the rules of hereditary titles, and any information I could find on the lives of a
ll reigning royals throughout the world.
“Jerramy, stop reading and go outside and play!” my parents would plead.
But to no avail. There was no way I was ever going to play in that tipi. There was no way I was ever going to think scattering chicken feed was fun.
I have to say that my many years of cornfield avoidance and self-imposed royal research eventually paid off, because one of the most important things I learned along the way was this: Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to come from aristocratic stock to marry a prince. And considering the “stock” I had been allotted, thank God for that!
As I grew older, I continued to scan the media and religiously study the trends of contemporary royal marriages as well as the credentials of the few remaining modern-day princesses. And I had to admit, things were looking up. It was almost like some kind of progressive princess movement was taking hold.
No disrespect to the late Princess Diana (as I positively adored her), but modern princes were no longer after wide-eyed nineteen-year-olds straight out of Swiss finishing school. Blue blood didn’t seem to matter like it used to. And crown princes didn’t just want beauty in a royal bride; they now wanted brains as well. Thousands of years of royal tradition had suddenly gone topsy-turvy—and all in my favor. We were entering a new royal era. And the more modern princesses I read about, the more I was sure that my theory was correct.
Take Princess Masako of Japan, one of the very first royal rule-breakers to enter the scene. Another ditzy aristocrat? Hardly. This girl went to Harvard and Oxford. She spoke four languages. She used to negotiate international trade accords. And, just like me, at her American high school she had a 4.0 GPA and was in the National Honor Society. She was only the second commoner ever to enter the Japanese imperial house hold, but despite this lack of noble breeding, Princess Masako is next in line to become Empress of Japan! Not too shabby for a high school bookworm.