Princesses Behaving Badly

by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

  Happily for Olivia, everyone who could have attested to the truth of her claims was dead: the duke died in 1790; King George checked out in 1820; and Olive Wilmot, her mother, “died of a broken heart” sometime at the beginning of the princess’s narrative. Olivia backed up her claim with a lucky resemblance to the deceased duke and a bit of theatricality. She had the royal arms painted on her coach and hired footmen dressed in royal livery. The rest of her “proof” consisted of copies of letters between herself and members of the royal family and various ministers, as well as signed affidavits purporting to support her claims—all of which were forgeries.

  Olivia upheld the fiction, often in print, until her death in debtors’ prison in 1835. One of her last pamphlets, titled “Wrongs of Her Royal Highness the Princess Olive of Cumberland,” was published in 1833 and declares that “every law, both human and Divine, has been violated in the person of this lady.” It ends, “This Subject to be Continued …” And it was. After Olivia’s death, her daughter took up the cause and demanded to be recognized as Princess Lavinia of Cumberland. Unsurprisingly, she was denied.

  4. CLAIM TO BE ONE OF MANY:

  PRINCESS SUMAIRE

  In July 1940, Princess Sumaire, an elegant 22-year-old sometime fashion model, arrived in Shanghai to enliven the international expatriate community. She was, she claimed, the daughter of Maharajah Bhupinder Singh of Patiala, and she duly took up residence at the swanky Park Hotel. Shanghai at that time was a film noir come to life: glamorously violent, a dark demimonde of European refugees, gangsters, and conmen. Sumaire fit right in. She was rumored to have been disowned by her family for her “loose morals,” to be a “follower of the Lesbian cult,” and to be a nymphomaniac from whose amorous clutches even hotel bellboys weren’t safe.

  But the “princess” didn’t confine her below-board activities to scandalizing the good people of Shanghai with her sexual appetite. She was also an intriguer of the highest order who was at the center of a web of pro-Japanese criminal and political movers; among those who visited her lavish hotel apartment were known Axis agents. So British intelligence and police did a little digging. Turns out Sumaire’s real name was Rajkumari Sumair Apjit Singh, lately the wife of an official of the Indian state railways. It was easy for her to get away with calling herself the maharajah’s daughter, because he had 23 of them and couldn’t be bothered to keep track. Sumaire did have some relationship to the maharajah’s family, but it’s unclear exactly what; British police in Shanghai claimed that she was the maharajah’s niece and his lover.

  By December 1941, Sumaire was in a bad way financially, forced to give up her suite at the Park Hotel. But her fortunes were reversed yet again when her allies the Japanese invaded. Soon she was back at the Park, throwing cocktail parties for socially and politically connected Germans, Italians, and Japanese as well as people known to be working for Axis intelligence services. In 1943 Sumaire married a Japanese American, one of Japan’s Shanghai-based criminal contacts.

  The liberation of Shanghai in September 1945 meant that Sumaire was on the wrong side of the power divide. She penned distraught letters to the maharajah claiming to have been a victim of Japanese depredations while under occupation and begging for money to pay her “debts of honor.” The last sighting of the princess, as she was still calling herself, was when she tried to marry an American ex-Army officer in 1946 and earn a ticket to the United States.

  Or was it? In 1951, a Princess Sumair, also claiming to be the daughter of the maharajah of Patiala, surfaced in Paris as a haute couture fashion designer, creating Indian-inspired dresses for the filthy rich. Roughly 30 years after that, she pops up in America, married to a fur dealer named John Boughton and preparing to launch her Fifth Avenue store. In 1979, the Palm Beach Daily interviewed the “princess” about her collection and her fabulous upbringing in the maharajah’s palace. In May 1980, People magazine profiled the designer, now dividing her time between Palm Beach and Manhattan, whose clothes were in the “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” price bracket. Mentions of this Princess Sumair drop off precipitously after about 1983. The last trace of her online is a record indicating that a Sumair Boughton died in Milwaukee on May 15, 2003, at age 74, giving her date of birth as June 17, 1928.

  Were they the same woman? Possibly. Photos show a physical resemblance between the nymphomaniac Axis sympathizer of Shanghai and the Palm Beach fashion designer. In addition, both princesses had no problem using their name and supposed maharajah connections to get what they wanted, whether social recognition or dinner reservations. If they are one and the same, then it looks like Princess Sumaire may have gotten away with it in the end.

  5. CULTIVATE A PSYCHOLOGICAL DISORDER: PRINCESS ANTOINETTE MILLARD

  In the early 2000s, one face—sometimes topped with a diamond tiara—made frequent appearances in New York’s society pages. She was petite and pretty, with blonde hair, exquisite bone structure, and great taste. She seemed to know all the right people. She wore extravagant jewelry from all the best jewelers in Manhattan, went to all the best parties and fashion shows, and seemed to be on all the important charitable boards. She was Princess Antoinette Millard, a Saudi Arabian royal who’d recently converted to Judaism. And she was not a real person.

  The princess persona was the creation of Antoinette Lisa Millard, also known as Lisa Walker, a 40-something divorcée from Buffalo with an unchecked mental illness. This princess wasn’t even her only identity: she was also an investment banker; a lawyer with a degree from Boston University; a model for Bergdorf Goodman’s catalogue; a divorcée waiting for her husband’s $7 million settlement; a Jewish convert; one of a set of triplets (that one is actually true); and the sufferer of a tumor near her heart that needed urgent surgery.

  Millard perpetrated the various ruses for more than two years, until the whole charade came crashing down in 2004. Between November 2003 and January 2004, she’d charged more than $1 million on her American Express card, buying more than $492,000 worth of jewelry from various Manhattan jewelers, all of which she then insured. But she told the insurance company that the jewelry had belonged to her mother and aunt, supposedly Saudi royalty, and she had documents to prove it. And then, the coup de grâce: the day after Millard insured the jewelry, she said it was stolen when she was mugged, and then she made a $262,000 claim.

  That’s when investigators discovered that 12 of the 23 pieces she reported stolen had in fact been sold to a pawnshop the month before Millard insured them, and that the document she’d used to prove their existence was a forgery. On May 6, 2004, she was arrested at her apartment, an ordinary one-bedroom flat at 89th Street and Third Avenue. Unable to post the $100,000 bail, Millard was packed off to Rikers Island. Newspaper reports gleefully noted that she was not, and never had been, a princess.

  In 2005, Millard pleaded guilty to grand larceny and insurance fraud and might have spent up to 15 years in prison, but the district attorney recommended that she be admitted to a psychiatric facility. A psychiatrist testified that she suffered from depression, bipolar disorder, and anorexia. Her lawyers claimed that her condition was due to the trauma of witnessing the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. They also assured the judge that Millard would be admitted to the psychiatric unit at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital for a year, with the doors securely locked. Millard was asked to pay $540 in legal fees; she couldn’t come up with the money.

  A year later, Millard was arrested in Jacksonville, Florida, on charges of evading justice. What happened after that is unclear, but in 2010 she made headlines once again. It seems that the brazen pseudo-princess filed a lawsuit against one of the companies whose jewelry she’d tried to hock during her insurance fraud days, claiming they’d overcharged her. To the delight of the New York tabloids, the judge literally ripped up her complaint, forcing her to drop the $1.1 million suit.

  6: GET WRAPPED UP IN THE ROLE:

  THE PERSIAN PRINCESS

  When authorities busted
an illegal antiques-dealing ring in Pakistan in October 2000, they found what appeared to be the only Persian mummy in history. Dubbed the “Persian Princess” and estimated to be about 2,600 years dead, the discovery could have rewritten the history books, but it was all a hoax. Authorities eventually figured out that the ancient royal was likely a modern murder victim.

  The story began when Karachi police, acting on a tip, found video evidence of a man named Ali Akbar attempting to sell a mummy. This was a violation Pakistan’s Antiquity Act, but Akbar was just the middleman. He led investigators to the home of a powerful tribal leader near the Afghanistan–Iraq border, where the mummy was found in a crawl space hidden under a carpet in a locked room.

  The mummy, in a wooden sarcophagus with a stone cover, was lying on top of a reed mat coated with honey and resin. She wore a golden crown and a hammered gold mask. On her chest, an inscribed gold breastplate proclaimed, according to a cursory reading, “I am the daughter of the great King Xerxes … I am Rhodugune.” The owner told police that he got the mummy from an Iranian man who claimed it had surfaced during an earthquake.

  If real, the body would have been an indication that the Egyptians imparted their mummification techniques to trading partners in the region. Not only did the discovery whet archeological appetites worldwide, but it also threatened to spark an international incident. Pakistan found the mummy, but because the cuneiform writing on the breastplate indicated a Persian origin, Iran claimed the artifact as part of that country’s royal heritage. Even the Taliban got involved, saying that the mummy was smuggled into Pakistan from nearby Afghanistan and that they’d caught and executed the smugglers.

  The mummy remained in the custody of Pakistan’s National Museum, and the more experts examined it, the more things started to look suspicious. Investigators noticed that the breastplate inscription contained grammatical errors, and the gold jewelry was of poor quality, especially for a princess. The royal symbols carved on the wooden sarcophagus had clearly been drawn in pencil first. And the reed mat was, according to radiocarbon dating, only 50 years old at most. It seemed that everything associated with the mummy was fake. But people have tried to pawn off real mummies as fake royalty to inflate their worth. Was the mummy itself genuine?

  Here’s where things got disturbing. Whoever had removed the woman’s internal organs had taken them all—including the heart, which in Egyptian practice would have been left in the body—and had done so through a slit in the abdomen that looked worryingly like a stab wound. The brain had been pulled out through her mouth, not her nose, also contrary to Egyptian practice. She was also missing all of her teeth.

  And then, the clincher: CT scans revealed the presence of tiny bones in the inner ear that could not possibly have survived two millennia. In fact, the woman could not have been dead more than a few years. Further investigation revealed that the woman’s lower back had been broken by a violent blow. Peeling back the bandages for an autopsy, investigators found a middle-aged woman who had died in 1996. Cause of death: broken neck. The fake mummy princess was starting to look like a very real victim of foul play.

  It’s impossible to know from the autopsy if the woman had been murdered or suffered an accident, with a team of forgers simply recovering the body after death. Nevertheless, the whole thing pointed to a sinister ring of antiquities fakers, especially since this wasn’t a one-man job. Once they had their body, the forgers had yanked out her internal organs and packed her body with baking soda and table salt before taking great care to dress it up in mummy wrappings. A stonemason made the slab she was lying on, a woodcarver made the sarcophagus, a goldsmith beat out the mask and breastplate, and someone with a working knowledge of Egyptian mummification practices as well as Persian history and cuneiform writing took care of the rest. All that effort was not without potential reward; the tribal leader who was trying to sell the mummy claimed he had a buyer on the hook for $1.1 million (the asking price was $11 million).

  The anonymous woman’s broken neck and back were enough to prompt the Pakistani police to launch a murder investigation. But eventually interest in the victim dissipated. As of 2008, the last mention of her in the press, Pakistani police no longer seemed to be actively investigating the crime. Even worse, the unknown woman’s body remained unburied, left in cold storage at the morgue; according to officials, they were still awaiting permission to bury her.

  Charlotte of Prussia

  THE PRINCESS WHO THREW A SEX PARTY

  JULY 24, 1860–OCTOBER 1, 1919

  PRUSSIA

  It was a cold, snowy night in 1891 when sleighs arrived at the Jagdschloss Grunewald, a hunting lodge in the woods. Dozens of the Prussian court’s noblest aristocrats and most important officials, clad in furs against the winter chill, had come to the oldest Prussian palace in Berlin for a night of drinking, dancing, gambling, and sex. The furs were soon discarded, and it wasn’t long before the inhibitions were, too. Partners were exchanged, new positions tried out—all under the glassy eyes of countless stuffed deer heads, as well as the watchful eye of at least one enterprising noble.

  The next morning, after the cavorting aristocrats had departed with fond memories, a bit of a hangover, and possibly some exciting new venereal diseases, they began receiving anonymous letters threatening to reveal exactly what they’d gotten up to at the secluded schloss. And just in case the swingers couldn’t remember everything clearly, the letters helpfully included explicit details, which were accompanied by pornographic drawings and collages. Even worse, the descriptions went well beyond what happened at the castle. According to a 1904 biography of the Prussian emperor, the letter writer “was in the habit of trotting out old and long-forgotten skeletons, mauling over half-healed sores, and telling of nasty or dishonourable actions, some of them true, others invented.” That meant that the author of the missives was not only an attendee at the party, but also someone with real access to the Berlin court. Before it was all over, the scandal would reach all the way to the German Reichstag, money would be paid to keep the blackmailer silent, and at least one career would be ruined and one life would be lost.

  So who wrote the letters? The person at the top of the list was the one who’d thrown the sexy shindig: a chain-smoking princess named Viktoria Elisabeth Auguste Charlotte, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, daughter of the Prussian rulers, and younger sister of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German emperor.

  EMPTY ON THE INSIDE

  Princess Charlotte, as she was called, was the oldest and least promising daughter of the Prussian crown prince and princess. Growing up, she’d had no head for learning, was inclined to be snobbish and rude, and frequently butted heads with her mother. By the time she reached her teen years, Charlotte had earned herself a reputation as the “most arrogant and heartless coquette at court.” As her mother lamented, “that pretty exterior and the empty inside, those dangerous character traits! Everyone is initially enthralled, and yet those who know her better know how she really is—and can have neither love nor trust nor respect!” Ouch. (As for Charlotte’s “pretty exterior,” well, she was short, with a long body and stubby limbs, an immense bust, and one shoulder higher than the other. She also suffered from thinning hair. Maybe you had to see her in the right light?)

  In February 1878, 17-year-old Charlotte married Bernhard III, duke of Saxe-Meiningein. He was nine years older than she and had a “finicky and old-maidish” air, but Charlotte felt herself to be in love with him. In May of the next year, she had a daughter named Feodora, her only child. Not much into mothering, Charlotte soon left the child in the care of a nurse and returned to Berlin to inflict herself on the social scene.

  Charlotte was a typical mean girl—she pretended to be friends with people only to gain their confidence, learn compromising things about them, and then tell everyone. Her own brother called her “Charley the Pretender,” for her two-faced nature. She had a wicked tongue and aimed to rule Berlin’s court as its gossipy queen bee. At the same time, Charlotte was a
dmired for her sense of style, her French dresses, her cleverness, and her taste in horses, music, and flowers. She also threw great parties. And when her brother became Emperor Wilhelm II, Charlotte was suddenly highly sought after in Berlin society.

  SEX, LIES, AND PORNO LETTERS

  Soon after Wilhelm II’s ascension came the sex party and blackmail scandal. Charlotte, with her love of malicious chatter and trouble-making tendencies, was the first to be suspected of writing the letters even though she received several, too. Her enemies, of which she had a few, claimed she wrote the letters to herself and that she’d thrown the party to entrap the guests.

  In all, some 246 letters passed between blackmailer and victims. Despite censorship laws, a lot of the dirt came out in the press, prompting much moaning about moral decline. And because politicians also love gossip, heated debates broke out in the Reichstag, triggering a police investigation and a round of incriminations. But although she loved passing on tittle-tattle, it turns out that Charlotte was not the letter writer. After the spotlight left her it then landed on the unfortunate Count Leberecht von Kotze, one of her former friends; in June 1894, he was arrested. Although eventually cleared of all charges, he never felt fully vindicated and challenged everyone involved to duels. In 1896 he fought and killed Baron von Schrader, the man who had ordered his arrest.

  A police investigation lasting several years ultimately revealed that the real culprits were none other than the kaiser’s brother-in-law, Duke Ernest Gunther of Schleswig-Holstein, and his French mistress. The duke had long been the black sheep of the empress’s family, and he’d been at the sexy swingers’ ball. After his role was revealed, he was essentially banished from court. His mistress, meanwhile, was escorted to the German border under armed guard and kicked out with a warning never to return.