SOME GIRLS

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, I had already dropped out of NYU theater school and was struggling to support my bohemian existence when I scored the role of Victim 1 in a B horror flick. While we sponged each other clean of Karo syrup blood, a fang-wearing Nordic beauty gave me 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. I would stay two weeks and make twenty thousand dollars; 3. I wouldn't have to sleep with anybody. Two weeks later I was on a plane bound for the island of Borneo, where I would spend the next year-and-a-half of my life in the harem of Prince Jefri Bolkiah, the youngest brother of the Sultan of Brunei. I went from my 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. I was one of the first Western women to infiltrate this modern-day take on an ancient institution and I soon found myself enmeshed in a love affair I never expected with the restless, Oxford-educated prince. Disney has it all wrong about princes.

HAREM GIRLS
Deutsch von Ingrid Exo
[HC Luebbe, 04/10; PB 01/12]