How did a Jewish girl from New Jersey with thespian aspirations and early admission to college wind up as the teenage concubine of the richest man in the world? It all started with a vampire movie. At seventeen, Jillian had already dropped out of NYU theater school and was struggling to support her bohemian existence when she scored the role of Victim 1 in a B horror flick. While they sponged each other clean of Karo syrup blood, a fang-wearing Nordic beauty gave Jillian a tip about an upcoming audition. The casting director's lies were as follows: 1. A rich businessman in Singapore was looking for a few pretty American girls to spice up his nightly parties; 2. She would stay two weeks and make twenty thousand dollars; 3. She wouldn't have to sleep with anybody. Two weeks later Jillian was on a plane bound for the island of Borneo, where she would spend the next year-and-a-half of her life in the harem of Prince Jefri Bolkiah, the youngest brother of the Sultan of Brunei. She went from her Lower East Side tenement where the ceiling leaked when it rained and the bathtub was in the middle of the kitchen, to a secret Xanadu where Picassos hung in the bathrooms and the carpets were woven through with real gold thread. Every night fifty women from neighboring countries lounged in evening gowns singing karaoke, sipping champagne and vying for attention from Jefri's royal entourage. Jillian was one of the first Western women to infiltrate this modern-day take on an ancient institution and she soon found herself enmeshed in a love affair she never expected with the restless, Oxford-educated prince. Disney has it all wrong about princes.
Description:
How did a Jewish girl from New Jersey with thespian aspirations and early admission to college wind up as the teenage concubine of the richest man in the world? It all started with a vampire movie. At seventeen, Jillian had already dropped out of NYU theater school and was struggling to support her bohemian existence when she scored the role of Victim 1 in a B horror flick. While they sponged each other clean of Karo syrup blood, a fang-wearing Nordic beauty gave Jillian a tip about an upcoming audition. The casting director's lies were as follows: 1. A rich businessman in Singapore was looking for a few pretty American girls to spice up his nightly parties; 2. She would stay two weeks and make twenty thousand dollars; 3. She wouldn't have to sleep with anybody. Two weeks later Jillian was on a plane bound for the island of Borneo, where she would spend the next year-and-a-half of her life in the harem of Prince Jefri Bolkiah, the youngest brother of the Sultan of Brunei. She went from her Lower East Side tenement where the ceiling leaked when it rained and the bathtub was in the middle of the kitchen, to a secret Xanadu where Picassos hung in the bathrooms and the carpets were woven through with real gold thread. Every night fifty women from neighboring countries lounged in evening gowns singing karaoke, sipping champagne and vying for attention from Jefri's royal entourage. Jillian was one of the first Western women to infiltrate this modern-day take on an ancient institution and she soon found herself enmeshed in a love affair she never expected with the restless, Oxford-educated prince. Disney has it all wrong about princes.