April 23, 2026 • 41 mins
Police in New Jersey arrested a woman found sleeping in her car in a strip mall parking lot after the plates came back registered to a stolen vehicle. Her lawyer, Tennessee segregationist Jack Kershaw, insisted that his client was not only innocent, but said she was telling the truth - she really was a Romanian princess.
Sources:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1509995/HRH-Prince-Carol-of-Romania.html
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1982/07/15/Lawsuit-against-princess-dismissed/2985395553600/
https://stiri.botosani.ro/stiri/actualitate/paul-de-romania-mai-are-un-frate-printul-alexandru.html
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Call Zone Media. It was an ordinary Wednesday afternoon in
December of nineteen seventy nine when an employee at a
shopping center in New Jersey called the police to report
a pair of suspicious vehicles in the parking lot. There
(00:22):
was nothing specifically suspicious about them, I don't think photos
of the vehicles show. They were perfectly ordinary cars, and
the cashier who called the police couldn't possibly have known
that one of those cars had been reported stolen in Connecticut.
But something felt off, so an officer was sent out
(00:43):
to take a look through the windows. The officer could
see a teenage boy asleep in the backseat of the
station wagon. A middle aged woman was slumped over asleep
in the driver's seat, and maybe they could have been
sent on their way with just a warning not to
nap in department store parking lots. But this pretty ordinary
(01:08):
call to check on someone asleep in their car very
quickly became something of a strange situation. Once roused from
her nap, the woman sought to clear things up. She
got out of the station wagon and pulled open the
door of a Cadillac limousine in the next parking spot over.
(01:28):
According to the documents she fished out of the glove
box of the Cadillac driven by a man she referred
to as her aide de camp. She was Princess Jean
van Hornsollern, wife of Prince Carol, the son of King
Carol the Second and brother of King Michael the First,
the last King of Romania. I'm Molly Conger, and this
(01:54):
is weird, little guys. This is a side story, a
(02:15):
full on side quest, a tangent that had me so
far out on a limb that the branch broke off.
But I can do that if I want to, because
I'm the captain of this ship and you just belong
for the ride. Truthfully, I am still sick. I mean,
I'm getting better, and I'm sorry that you had to
(02:37):
endure a rerun last week, but I just can't seem
to shake whatever this is. Physically, it's like a bad
cold and it's not the flu, and it's not COVID.
I don't know what it is. But I've been so tired.
I can't think straight, and that's not really great because
my job mostly consists of thinking really hard. But my
(03:00):
voice is back and I'm well enough to work, So
here we are. But The last chapter of the story
of Jack Kershaw, the man who made the world's Ugliest
Confederate Statue, is one that I wanted to get right
because it involves the founding of the League of the South,
one of the white supremacist groups that organized the Unite
(03:21):
the Right rally here in Charlottesville in twenty seventeen. So
instead of half passing that episode the one I meant
to write last week, I'm gonna whole ass This episode
a funny little side story about a beauty queen con
artist from Nashville who ended up getting the final word
(03:41):
on whether or not she was ever a real Romanian
princess by having her son printed on her death certificate.
This story does take place within the broader narrative about
Jack Kershaw, but you don't need to have heard the
first two parts of that story to enjoy the one
(04:02):
if you have been following along in that ongoing story.
In the last episode we talked about the only famous
case of his legal career. Jack Kershaw lived to be
almost one hundred years old, and when he died in
twenty ten, just about any article about his life could
be boiled down to three main points. First most recently,
(04:26):
and perhaps most famously, he was the sculptor of the
bizarrely hideous Nathan Bedford Forest statue that used to stand
next to the Highway south of Nashville. That was the
subject of the first episode I did on Jack. Second,
he was a lawyer. Every obituary says he was a lawyer,
(04:49):
and the only client anyone ever mentions is that he
briefly represented James Earl Ray, the man who confessed to
and was convicted of the assassination of Martin Luther King Junior.
That was the subject of last week's episode. The third
fact about his life included in all those obituaries was
that he was a co founder of the neo Confederate
(05:11):
pro secession hate group, the League of the South. And
that's a story I want to tell you when I
have a clearer head, and for my editor Rory's sake,
may be clearer sinuses. But while I was flashing out
my timeline, if you're a long time listener, you'd know
I always start with an unnecessarily detailed timeline. I was
(05:34):
sort of surprised by his legal career, or black thereof,
because before I started writing about him, I knew those
three facts, the ones from his obituaries, He made an
ugly statue, he started a hate group, and he was
a lawyer. Those are the three things that define him.
(05:56):
So I figured, sure, his representation of James Earl Red
is a headline grabber. But I bet he had a
lot of clients like that. I mean, if he was
the kind of guy who had a client like that
at all, he probably had others. But he didn't really,
(06:17):
I mean, not that I could find. I don't have
access to those fancy databases lawyers used to look up
every case an attorney ever entered an appearance in. But
I did a pretty thorough search of old newspapers and
old racist newsletters, and his legal career comes up in both.
But it was a short career, and we'll get into
(06:38):
more detail about that when we get back to the
main storyline with Jack next week. But as I was
working out what kind of cases he worked on during
his career as an attorney, I found one that did
not fit. It did not fit at all. It didn't
make sense in the context of the rest of his
career because it was mostly segue mitigation stuff, I mean,
(07:02):
pretty much exclusively. He worked on cases that had some
connection to preventing progress on integration in the state of Tennessee,
making schools worse, some land use and tax stuff, some
Confederate Flag related matters, and he only practiced law for
about fifteen years. Aside from that one famous murderer he
(07:25):
spent six months promoting in the press. There's just not
a lot there that isn't about segregation in Tennessee. So
what was his name doing in a newspaper story about
a Romanian princess with a stolen rental car in North Brunswick,
New Jersey? Why was that his client? I mean, first
(07:48):
of all, it took him six years to graduate from
an unaccredited night law school at the YMCA. That wouldn't
have allowed him to practice law outside of the state
of Tennessee. But maybe the more obvious question here is
what was a Romanian princess doing asleep in a station
wagon and a parking lot off Route one. My first
(08:10):
guess was, well, that's not a real princess, obviously, that's
a liar or someone having a break with reality. But
I was wrong. Princess Jean was kind of a real
princess in the sense that she really had once been
(08:30):
married to Mirza Grigory Caro Lambrino, the formerly illegitimate son
of the Romanian King Carol the Second, who abdicated the
throne in nineteen forty. If she was a real Romanian princess,
then why was her first phone call from the Middlesex
County Adult Attention Center in North Brunswick, New Jersey to
(08:51):
a Nashville based attorney who'd mostly retired after public schools
had been successfully integrated. It was a tangent Worth pursuit.
On December fifth, nineteen seventy nine, the police were called
to check on a sleeping motorist in a shopping center
parking lot. Cop cars didn't have computers in them back then,
(09:14):
so things worked a little bit differently. These days, cops
can check things pretty quickly. When you hand them your
license and registration, they're going to their little computer and
they're running your name and your plates, and they're calling
in to dispatch. And if you aren't who you say
you are, if you haven't expired license, if you have warrants,
if your plates don't match the car's registration, if those
plates come back stolen, they'll know all of that pretty
(09:36):
much immediately. The National Crime Information Center a central database
maintained by the FBI was established in nineteen sixty seven,
and by the late seventies there was what you would
technically call computerized information storage, but it wasn't instant. It
took some time to send a fax to the NCIIC
(09:58):
and have a record's analyt to sort through the giant
magnetic computer tapes, so they might not have even bothered
with the records check if the napping driver had seemed
more normal. But she claimed to be a princess and
that was a little out of the ordinary, so they
ran the plates on both vehicles. Now, before you email
(10:22):
me about what it was like to have a traffic
stop in nineteen seventy nine, one of the articles about
this incident goes out of its way to describe running
the plates as a standard procedure, which makes it sound
like this was a relatively new thing that may not
have been standard everywhere, and some of the local news
(10:43):
coverage does make it seem like they would have let
her go with a warning if her behavior hadn't been strange.
And it turned out whatever instinct made them robe this
a little bit further was a good one. The license
plates on the Cadillac weren't real, but the station wagon
did have a definitive owner, the Avis Rental Car Company,
(11:06):
and they had reported it stolen in Connecticut several months earlier.
Her two traveling companions, her eighteen year old son Alexander,
and her aide de camp, a man named Eugene Gafton,
were released without charges, but the princess was charged with
receiving a stolen motor vehicle, taken into custody and booked
(11:30):
into the county jail. The local paper reported that the
princess declined to speak with them because she did not
want her friends back home to hear about her embarrassing predicament.
The Central New Jersey Home News did speak with two
people who claimed to be her close friends, and they
both vouched for the princess. Georgia Paul of Del Rio, Texas,
(11:53):
the daughter of a wealthy rancher, said she'd been dear
friends with the princess for years, ever since Princess Jean
had resided over her daughter's debutante. Ball Jack Kershaw, claiming
to be the princess's attorney, said they'd met years ago
in New York City when the princess bought one of
his paintings. The local paper reported that the police seemed
(12:16):
inclined to believe her story, but the director of the
county jail thought it was nonsense regardless of who she
really was. A judge set her bail at fifteen thousand dollars.
She didn't pay it through her attorney, Jack Kershaw. They
told reporters that she had access to assets worth over
(12:38):
half a million dollars, artwork, properties, things of that nature,
but she was refusing to postpond out of principle, preferring
to sit in the Middlesex County Detention Center with the
common people until she could clear her name. Her attorney,
Jack Kershaw, called the arrest the most absurd thing he'd
ever seen in his career, just a terrible mistake. The
(13:02):
princess was visiting the United States from her home in England,
where she lived with her husband, the Prince, and she
was touring the United States in her Cadillac, but she'd
rented the station wagon for her teenage son. Her aide
de camp had extended the rental agreement with the company,
Kershaw claimed, but it was a mix up with the
computers and the rental company was mistaken. This was just
(13:27):
a terrible mistake caused by these new fangled computerized records.
A judge reduced her bail, cutting it in half to seventy
five hundred. She still didn't pay it, and curious reporters
were starting to dig A real European princess sitting in
(13:49):
the county jail was a pretty exciting story, and they
started to find a little more information about the princess.
It seemed like maybe she wasn't refusing to post her
own bail money so much as she couldn't afford it.
There were rumors of huge debts. After a week in custody,
(14:13):
the princess was bailed out by her friend in Texas,
the cattile heiress Georgia Paul. A few months later, a
grand jury in New Jersey declined to indict the princess
on the charge of receiving a stolen motor vehicle. They
seemed to agree that it had been a misunderstanding with
the rental company rather than an intentional theft. And when
(14:36):
the princess did appear in court in New Jersey, it
wasn't Jack Kershaw at her side as her attorney. She'd
hired someone local to actually handle the case. Much like
his representation of James Earl Ray, this famous client of
his didn't really benefit much from their association. He gave
(14:58):
a few statements to the press, but he never actually
appeared with her in court on the criminal matter or
her subsequent lawsuit over it. He just grabbed a few
headlines and then faded out of the story. His name
doesn't appear at all. In connection with the lawsuit that
dragged on for several more years, she filed a fifty
(15:21):
million dollar lawsuit against Avis, the rental car company, as
well as several newspapers their publishers, Rupert Murdoch personally, several
individual reporters, and one police officer with the North Brunswick,
New Jersey Police Department. She alleged that the wrongful arrest
had caused her severe psychic trauma and emotional distress, as
(15:46):
well as greatly injuring her good name and reputation. Avis,
in turn alleged that she owed them nearly nine thousand
dollars by the time the police recovered the stolen rental car,
and she'd put over ten one thousand miles on the
vehicle during the one hundred and seventy four days that
she drove it without paying. The suit was eventually thrown
(16:09):
out due in large part to her refusal to sit
for depositions. She also never completed a court ordered psychiatric evaluation.
The case is too old to have been digitized, so
I can't read the filings, but it sounds like she
wanted to be able to say she sued for defamation,
(16:32):
but she knew damn well she'd make things much much
worse by actually allowing any additional information to come to light,
so she stopped participating after the initial complaint was filed.
So Jack Kershaw is largely irrelevant here. Remember that was
(16:55):
my entry point into the story. I was writing about Jack,
and he showed up in a hand full of newspaper
articles about this incident, and then he is no longer
part of the story. But now I find myself just
wanting to know more about this princess in the parking lot.
The stories surrounding this incident in December of nineteen seventy
(17:18):
nine are also curiously vague. She gave the police a
home address in Del Rio, Texas, but the address she
gave them wasn't one that actually exists, and a lot
of the news stories confidently assert that the princess was
a resident of Del Rio, Texas, while others are quite
(17:41):
sure that Del Rio, Texas had just been a recent
stop for a brief visit on her cross country tour.
Most newspapers reported that she lived in England with her husband,
the Prince, but none of these stories seemed to note
that she'd been separated from Prince Carol for nearly a
decad and properly divorced for about two years. Their custody
(18:05):
battle over their teenage son had made international headlines because
both parents had, in separate incidents abducted the boy from
one another on either side of the Atlantic, and after
this arrest, American newspapers describe her British accent, but almost
never mentioned that she wasn't British. She was also not Romanian.
(18:34):
She was from Nashville, Tennessee. But really the thing that
sounded most like a lie wasn't she was kind of
(19:00):
telling the truth. She was a princess. In accordance with
a ruling from a Portuguese court that retroactively legitimized her
ex husband as the eldest son of the Romanian King
Carol the Second, she did technically have some legal right
at that time to call herself Jean de Honzaleren. Honestly,
(19:25):
I think this story would be a lot less weird
if she had been lying about being a Romanian princess.
Felma Jean Williams became a princess in nineteen sixty when
she married Mircha Grigori Carl Lambrino Prince Carol Carol de Honzalern,
Prince of Romania, and for consistency's sake, I'll call him
(19:51):
Prince Carol throughout because his father's name was also Carol.
Prince Carol was the eldest son of Carol, the Second,
King of Romania from nineteen thirty until his forced abdication
in nineteen forty. But Little Carol didn't grow up as
a prince during his father's reign. He never actually knew
his father at all, and wasn't legally a prince at
(20:14):
any point during the existence of the Romanian monarchy. I'm
way outside my wheelhouse talking about royal drama, But King
Carol the Second seems like he was a little bit
of a mess. In the nineteen teens, his family tried
to marry him off to Olga Nikolayevna, the eldest daughter
(20:34):
of the Russian saw Nicholas the Second and his cousin
of some degree half a dozen times over. But he
thought Olga was unattractive and she didn't want to move
to Romania, so it didn't work out. Instead, he deserted
from the army during World War One to marry a
woman with no royal blood at all, which was a
(20:56):
bit of a scandal. It was this brief marriage to
a woman named Zizi Lambrino that produced his eldest son,
Prince Carol. This marriage was annulled almost immediately before the
child was even born, so our Prince Carol was not
born with his father's name, and he wasn't legally recognized
(21:19):
as his father's son until nineteen fifty five after his
father's death. But after our little Prince Carol's birth in
nineteen twenty, his father married a second time, this time
to his second wife, who was also his second cousin,
Princess Helen of Greece and Denmark, with whom he had
a second son, his only legitimate son, King Michael. King
(21:44):
Carol's first wife, Zizi Lambrino, and their son, Prince Carol,
were exiled from Romania and Prince Carol never knew his
father and never lived in the country of his birth.
So up until this point it's the mid nineteen twenties,
the King of Romania is still Ferdinand the First. Prince
(22:06):
Carol's grandfather, Carol Senior, was forced to renounce his place
in the line of succession because of the ongoing scandal
of his very public affair with his mistress Montalupescu. So
when King Ferdinand died in nineteen twenty seven, it was
five year old Michael who became king. In nineteen thirty,
(22:28):
Carol Senior coued his own eight year old son to
take the throne, becoming at that point King Carol the Second,
skipping a lot of rather unimportant Romanian history. King Carol
the Second was forced by future dictator Ayon Antonescu to
abdicate in nineteen forty. Young Michael was king again for
(22:50):
a few years before he too was forced to abdicate
in nineteen forty seven, this time by the Communist Party,
thus marking the end of the Romanian monarchy. There's a
lot of history in those years, but that's not our
business right now. It's just background for our story. Our
Prince Carol wasn't there for any of it. He'd been
(23:10):
exiled as a child. With his mother, Zizi Lambrino, raised
her son in Paris, and they received an allowance from
the boy's father. Even after Carol the Second abdicated the throne,
the money didn't dry up until the Communist Party took
control of the Romanian government in nineteen forty five, and
by that time young Carol was an adult. Both his mother,
(23:33):
Zizi Lambrino, and then his estranged father, King Carol the Second,
died in nineteen fifty three. I couldn't possibly begin to
understand the finer points of law governing European monarchy. But
in order to claim some inheritance from his father, he
needed to prove the legitimacy of his birth, and in
(23:54):
nineteen fifty five accord in Portugal ruled that he was
the legitimate son of King Carol the Second and thus
had the legal right to call himself a Romanian prince. Again,
there's some strange stuff going on here. I'm not sure
what interest the Portuguese dictatorship under Salazar had in decreeing
him to be a Romanian prince. I didn't have time
(24:16):
to find that out, but having the legal right to
use this title was very important to him. There is
no Romanian monarchy anymore, so he could call himself a prince,
but there's no throne to claim. The country abolished the
monarchy nearly a decade earlier, and even if they brought
(24:36):
back the monarchy, his half brother, King Michael the First
is still very much alive at this point. But the
title opened doors. Not doors to royal palaces, not any
doors in Romania which he could not legally enter, but
doors to banks and parties. You can get a pretty
(25:01):
good line of credit on a name alone. People invited
you to country clubs. You could really coast on a title,
which was very good for him because by the mid
nineteen fifties he was an unemployed book binder living in Paris.
According to the society pages at the time, that's where
(25:22):
he met his second wife, an American woman named Thelma
Jean Williams. He was at this time still married to
his first wife, a French opera singer. Carol and Jean
married in a small ceremony in France just before Christmas
of nineteen sixty. Newspapers at the time describe her as
(25:43):
in her twenties and say she was a former model
living in Paris as a columnist for the New York
Herald Tribune, and she's the niece of New York banking
millionaire Woodland Collar. And not a word of that is true.
Of all the articles about this relationship, only a handful
(26:04):
mention her having any parents at all. His parentage is,
of course front and center. He's a prince, but there's
just a few mentions of the woman's mother, a missus
joe E. Belcher in Nashville, and Missus Belcher told the
Associated Press when my gene was young, I told her
(26:26):
my little angel is good enough for kings and queens.
Now she's a real princess, and I'm so happy for her.
Missus Belcher told the reporter from the Associated Press she
hadn't actually seen her daughter in at least five years.
But this article seems to be the source for the
claims that the princess had worked as a model in
(26:48):
New York and California before moving to Paris to be
a newspaper columnist. There's no actual proof of any of
those things, just the excited pray of a mother who
hadn't actually seen her daughter in years. But Missus Belcher
did give one concrete detail. Her daughter had been a
(27:11):
contestant and the Miss Nashville beauty pageant in nineteen forty eight,
and that I can prove because it was in the newspaper.
The name and age of every young woman competing to
be Miss Nashville nineteen forty eight was printed in the
local paper, and a Miss Jean Williams of Madison, a
Nashville suburb, was twenty two years old in nineteen forty eight,
(27:36):
meaning she was born in nineteen twenty six, which at
the time of her wedding in nineteen sixty would make
her thirty four, not in her twenties. It seemed odd
too that her mother is only described as Missus Joe Belcher.
I mean, it's nineteen sixty. Women didn't really get their
(27:58):
own names. But he's not Missus Williams, and there's no
mister Williams. They only mention at all that the princess
ever had a father. Is in an article about the
wedding in the tennesseean Missus Joe Belcher said her daughter's
father died when she was just six months old. So
(28:19):
I scoured records looking for this father. Census records, birth records,
death records, cemetery records, newspapers. I didn't find anything. Princess
Jean's own death certificate lists her parents as Richard Williams
and Josephine Unknown, as reported to the corner by the
(28:40):
descedented's son, Alexander von Honzoalern. So Josephine maiden name unknown
is her mother. That's Missus Joe E. Belcher. In nineteen
sixty Joe Easten Belcher of Nashville was married to his
second wife, a woman named Josephine, and they're buried next
to each other, which is how I know. Her name
(29:02):
was Josephine Emmeline Belcher, and in his obituary her maiden
name is listed as Owens. Josephine Owens was born in
nineteen thirteen. That's what's on her tombstone, and at matches
census records, I was able to find from her childhood,
so I think I know where this lie comes from.
(29:23):
It's not all con artistry. A lot of what Gene
will say about her life was part of a con
But Missus Joe Belcher doesn't want to talk about her
daughter's father for the same reason. Neither of them is
telling the truth about what your gene was born. They're
only thirteen years apart. But honestly, I can't promise you.
(29:44):
Thelma Jean Williams is her real name. Aside from the
nineteen forty eight Miss Nashville competition, I had trouble nailing
Gene down anywhere before nineteen fifty six. The name Thelma
only appears in those newspaper as Racles from nineteen sixty.
It's not that weird to exclusively go by your middle name,
(30:07):
but I did think it was interesting that Thelma is
her stepfather's dead first wife's name, and that's something you
do sometimes see in con artistry. It's easy to borrow
a dead person's name if you need a fake name
for a khan. There are a lot of unknowns here.
(30:28):
I wish I could find her in any government record
that predates her marriage, or some kind of concrete proof
of what her name was when she was born, but
I couldn't. I'm not saying I can't or that it's impossible.
I'm just saying I didn't find it through my usual means.
I would love to know how she met a Romanian
(30:49):
prince in Paris in the mid nineteen fifties and convinced
him to leave his first wife for her. But I
don't really know the whole story there. I mean, you
can't deny the woman had drive, a fatherless daughter of
a teen mom from Nashville. Really did marry a recently
legally legitimized prince who she met in Paris, And that's
(31:10):
kind of romantic. After the wedding, the couple moved to Pool,
a town on the south coast of England. There, trading
(31:33):
on their royal titles, they wrecked up an enormous amount
of debt. Again, this is before computers. You know, you
can just make things up. Oh, I don't have the
cash today, but of course I'm good for it. I'm
a prince. Oh, it's so crass to even discuss money.
Of course the bill will be paid. She's a princess.
(31:56):
They were very active in charitable work, and they went
to lots of fancy parties. Yes, but eventually the bills
came due. They owed a lot of people a lot
of money, and their lives in Pool fell apart. By
nineteen seventy they were living apart. She pops up in
(32:16):
the society pages in American newspapers pretty frequently, and it's
almost always claimed that, well, she lives full time in
England with her husband, the Prince, but it doesn't seem
that she goes to England very often, and it's never
mentioned that they're separated. She's just drifting around the United
States coasting on this title, and Americans love the idea
(32:43):
of a princess. We want to be fooled, We crave it.
A newspaper photographer in Orlando snapped a paparazzi style photo
of her having lunch at a fancy hotel in nineteen
seventy and The Orlando Sentinel called her an exiled Romanian princess.
She's never been to Romania. She's from Nashville. Her name
(33:09):
pops up frequently as the mistress of ceremonies, the patroness
or the guest of honor, and a debutante ball those
big fancy affairs for the teenage daughters of very rich men.
Having a bona fide European princess at your daughter's debut
held a certain kind of cachet in high society, so
her services were in high demand. In nineteen seventy one,
(33:32):
newspapers in Miami describe a terribly fancy affair. The International
Fine Arts Debutante Association of the Order of the Unicorn
had managed to secure several very high profile patronesses. One
paper described as Miami's own little nest of royalty. The
(33:52):
princesses will all be there, including Princess Jean Marie de Chabrie,
the Baroness Vladimir kunvan Pushinhal, Grand Mistress, Lady Porter and
her Royal Highness Gene of Romania and Hansalarn. I mean,
how very royal. I don't think a single one of
(34:16):
these women was being entirely honest about who she was.
The baroness was the wife of a Russian immigrant, Vladimir Kun.
He's always described as the son of a Russian baron
who served as a general in the Tsar's army, and
his mother was a Greek princess, but neither the general
(34:38):
nor the princess are ever named or described in any
further detail. I mean, I didn't spend enough time researching
this to call this man a liar. I won't say
that he's a liar. I just think it's weird that
his mom was a princess and no one ever says
which princess couldn't find anything at all about the possible
(35:02):
identity of someone called Mistress Lady Porter. But Princess John
Marie de Chabrie was no princess. She was an actress
from Wisconsin named jan Jackson who was married to a
French Canadian con artist whose real name was George Marks,
and in the early nineteen seventies they tricked a lot
(35:23):
of people into thinking he was a temporarily embarrassed French prince.
Americans are just so readily fooled into believing someone with
a slight accent and fancy manners is actually the long
lost rightful heir to some foreign throne, because we just
don't know or understand a lot about hereditary monarchy, but
(35:48):
we go crazy for it. It's just so exciting to us.
I found articles every few months throughout the nineteen seventies
listing Princess Jean as the temporary guest of some rich
or another a few months in a guesthouse in Boca Raton,
a few weeks on a rich couple's yacht, A stayed
a fancy club in Miami while she shops for a
(36:09):
piedataire in South Florida, She's always being hosted and feted
and celebrated as a visiting princess, who, of course has
a home in England with her husband, the Prince, but
she never seemed to go there, because I don't think
she had a home anymore. Her lawsuit against the rental
(36:33):
car company seems to mark the end of her life
as a socialite. After the arrest in nineteen seventy nine,
there aren't very many more mentions in the society pages.
She still attended the occasional party a funeral from Massachusetts
native who called himself a German baron because he married
(36:53):
the niece of Hitler's Minister of war, some nonprofit gala
in Idaho. No more debutante balls. After her lawsuit was
dismissed for the final time in nineteen eighty three, she
seems to have moved to Vermont with her adult son, Alexander.
By nineteen eighty five, she'd been diagnosed with uterine cancer.
(37:16):
On her death certificate, the name Jean von Hohenzollern is
written with a typewriter, but there's a handwritten correction just
before her first name. Someone has written in penn h
r H Princess, her royal Highness Princess Gene von honz Hollern.
(37:41):
Mother's maiden name unknown, date of birth November fifteenth, nineteen thirty.
It's an official government document, a death certificate. It's the
only actual official government document with her name on it
that I could get my hands on this week. So
(38:01):
I guess, legally speaking, that's who she is. So who
she was, Princess Jeane born nineteen thirty. It's almost true.
It's all kind of true. She really did marry a prince.
(38:21):
She died in Vermont in nineteen eighty eight. She was
fifty seven years old, or maybe she was sixty one.
Her son Alexander, a ski instructor and a prep cook
in Rutland, Vermont, wrote a letter to the editor of
the Rutland Daily Herald, thanking the staff at the oncology
ward and the hospice for the care they'd provided to
(38:42):
his mother in the three years she spent fighting cancer.
Prince Carol died in two thousand and six, shortly after
visiting Romania for the first time in nearly seventy years.
He'd won the legal right to his own name in
Romanian courts before his death, something his half brother, King
Michael had tried to prevent Carol's son, Alexander, Princess Jean's son,
(39:08):
won his own legal battle in Romania to be recognized
as King Carol the second's grandson in twenty twelve. That
same court decision also recognized Prince Carol's son from his
first marriage, Paul, as an heir of the king. Prince
Paul is at least as of twenty twenty five, under
supervision of the French courts as he fights extradition to Romania,
(39:32):
where he's already been convicted of influence peddling, bribery and
money laundering. Since the death of King Michael in twenty seventeen,
Prince Carol's sons, Alexander and Paul have competing claims to
the title of head of the Royal House of Romania,
a country that has not had a monarchy since nineteen
forty seven. So I guess if you think back to
(39:56):
that Debutante ball in Miami in nineteen seventy one, Princess
Jane of Romania was the closest thing to a real
princess who was there that night. They were mostly outright frauds, liars,
Charlatan's fakers, con artists, and she was too. She was
a con artist and a fraud, but she really did
(40:18):
marry a prince. And besides, she might have been a
con artist from Nashville who never paid her debts, but
I think that just makes her a real American princess.
I mean, what other kind of princess would have a
retired Tennessee segregationist on speed dial? Weird Little Guys. It's
(40:55):
a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched,
written and recorded by me. Our executive producers are Sophie
Lichtterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the
wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by
Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird of the
Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it,
(41:15):
but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You
can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners
on the Weird lit the Guy's subreddit, And if you're
listening to this the week it came out, it's not
too late to submit your questions for the next Q
and A episode, either by email or on the subreddit.
As always, just don't post anything that's going to make
(41:37):
you one of my weird little guys,
Call Zone Media. It was an ordinary Wednesday afternoon in
December of nineteen seventy nine when an employee at a
shopping center in New Jersey called the police to report
a pair of suspicious vehicles in the parking lot. There
(00:22):
was nothing specifically suspicious about them, I don't think photos
of the vehicles show. They were perfectly ordinary cars, and
the cashier who called the police couldn't possibly have known
that one of those cars had been reported stolen in Connecticut.
But something felt off, so an officer was sent out
(00:43):
to take a look through the windows. The officer could
see a teenage boy asleep in the backseat of the
station wagon. A middle aged woman was slumped over asleep
in the driver's seat, and maybe they could have been
sent on their way with just a warning not to
nap in department store parking lots. But this pretty ordinary
(01:08):
call to check on someone asleep in their car very
quickly became something of a strange situation. Once roused from
her nap, the woman sought to clear things up. She
got out of the station wagon and pulled open the
door of a Cadillac limousine in the next parking spot over.
(01:28):
According to the documents she fished out of the glove
box of the Cadillac driven by a man she referred
to as her aide de camp. She was Princess Jean
van Hornsollern, wife of Prince Carol, the son of King
Carol the Second and brother of King Michael the First,
the last King of Romania. I'm Molly Conger, and this
(01:54):
is weird, little guys. This is a side story, a
(02:15):
full on side quest, a tangent that had me so
far out on a limb that the branch broke off.
But I can do that if I want to, because
I'm the captain of this ship and you just belong
for the ride. Truthfully, I am still sick. I mean,
I'm getting better, and I'm sorry that you had to
(02:37):
endure a rerun last week, but I just can't seem
to shake whatever this is. Physically, it's like a bad
cold and it's not the flu, and it's not COVID.
I don't know what it is. But I've been so tired.
I can't think straight, and that's not really great because
my job mostly consists of thinking really hard. But my
(03:00):
voice is back and I'm well enough to work, So
here we are. But The last chapter of the story
of Jack Kershaw, the man who made the world's Ugliest
Confederate Statue, is one that I wanted to get right
because it involves the founding of the League of the South,
one of the white supremacist groups that organized the Unite
(03:21):
the Right rally here in Charlottesville in twenty seventeen. So
instead of half passing that episode the one I meant
to write last week, I'm gonna whole ass This episode
a funny little side story about a beauty queen con
artist from Nashville who ended up getting the final word
(03:41):
on whether or not she was ever a real Romanian
princess by having her son printed on her death certificate.
This story does take place within the broader narrative about
Jack Kershaw, but you don't need to have heard the
first two parts of that story to enjoy the one
(04:02):
if you have been following along in that ongoing story.
In the last episode we talked about the only famous
case of his legal career. Jack Kershaw lived to be
almost one hundred years old, and when he died in
twenty ten, just about any article about his life could
be boiled down to three main points. First most recently,
(04:26):
and perhaps most famously, he was the sculptor of the
bizarrely hideous Nathan Bedford Forest statue that used to stand
next to the Highway south of Nashville. That was the
subject of the first episode I did on Jack. Second,
he was a lawyer. Every obituary says he was a lawyer,
(04:49):
and the only client anyone ever mentions is that he
briefly represented James Earl Ray, the man who confessed to
and was convicted of the assassination of Martin Luther King Junior.
That was the subject of last week's episode. The third
fact about his life included in all those obituaries was
that he was a co founder of the neo Confederate
(05:11):
pro secession hate group, the League of the South. And
that's a story I want to tell you when I
have a clearer head, and for my editor Rory's sake,
may be clearer sinuses. But while I was flashing out
my timeline, if you're a long time listener, you'd know
I always start with an unnecessarily detailed timeline. I was
(05:34):
sort of surprised by his legal career, or black thereof,
because before I started writing about him, I knew those
three facts, the ones from his obituaries, He made an
ugly statue, he started a hate group, and he was
a lawyer. Those are the three things that define him.
(05:56):
So I figured, sure, his representation of James Earl Red
is a headline grabber. But I bet he had a
lot of clients like that. I mean, if he was
the kind of guy who had a client like that
at all, he probably had others. But he didn't really,
(06:17):
I mean, not that I could find. I don't have
access to those fancy databases lawyers used to look up
every case an attorney ever entered an appearance in. But
I did a pretty thorough search of old newspapers and
old racist newsletters, and his legal career comes up in both.
But it was a short career, and we'll get into
(06:38):
more detail about that when we get back to the
main storyline with Jack next week. But as I was
working out what kind of cases he worked on during
his career as an attorney, I found one that did
not fit. It did not fit at all. It didn't
make sense in the context of the rest of his
career because it was mostly segue mitigation stuff, I mean,
(07:02):
pretty much exclusively. He worked on cases that had some
connection to preventing progress on integration in the state of Tennessee,
making schools worse, some land use and tax stuff, some
Confederate Flag related matters, and he only practiced law for
about fifteen years. Aside from that one famous murderer he
(07:25):
spent six months promoting in the press. There's just not
a lot there that isn't about segregation in Tennessee. So
what was his name doing in a newspaper story about
a Romanian princess with a stolen rental car in North Brunswick,
New Jersey? Why was that his client? I mean, first
(07:48):
of all, it took him six years to graduate from
an unaccredited night law school at the YMCA. That wouldn't
have allowed him to practice law outside of the state
of Tennessee. But maybe the more obvious question here is
what was a Romanian princess doing asleep in a station
wagon and a parking lot off Route one. My first
(08:10):
guess was, well, that's not a real princess, obviously, that's
a liar or someone having a break with reality. But
I was wrong. Princess Jean was kind of a real
princess in the sense that she really had once been
(08:30):
married to Mirza Grigory Caro Lambrino, the formerly illegitimate son
of the Romanian King Carol the Second, who abdicated the
throne in nineteen forty. If she was a real Romanian princess,
then why was her first phone call from the Middlesex
County Adult Attention Center in North Brunswick, New Jersey to
(08:51):
a Nashville based attorney who'd mostly retired after public schools
had been successfully integrated. It was a tangent Worth pursuit.
On December fifth, nineteen seventy nine, the police were called
to check on a sleeping motorist in a shopping center
parking lot. Cop cars didn't have computers in them back then,
(09:14):
so things worked a little bit differently. These days, cops
can check things pretty quickly. When you hand them your
license and registration, they're going to their little computer and
they're running your name and your plates, and they're calling
in to dispatch. And if you aren't who you say
you are, if you haven't expired license, if you have warrants,
if your plates don't match the car's registration, if those
plates come back stolen, they'll know all of that pretty
(09:36):
much immediately. The National Crime Information Center a central database
maintained by the FBI was established in nineteen sixty seven,
and by the late seventies there was what you would
technically call computerized information storage, but it wasn't instant. It
took some time to send a fax to the NCIIC
(09:58):
and have a record's analyt to sort through the giant
magnetic computer tapes, so they might not have even bothered
with the records check if the napping driver had seemed
more normal. But she claimed to be a princess and
that was a little out of the ordinary, so they
ran the plates on both vehicles. Now, before you email
(10:22):
me about what it was like to have a traffic
stop in nineteen seventy nine, one of the articles about
this incident goes out of its way to describe running
the plates as a standard procedure, which makes it sound
like this was a relatively new thing that may not
have been standard everywhere, and some of the local news
(10:43):
coverage does make it seem like they would have let
her go with a warning if her behavior hadn't been strange.
And it turned out whatever instinct made them robe this
a little bit further was a good one. The license
plates on the Cadillac weren't real, but the station wagon
did have a definitive owner, the Avis Rental Car Company,
(11:06):
and they had reported it stolen in Connecticut several months earlier.
Her two traveling companions, her eighteen year old son Alexander,
and her aide de camp, a man named Eugene Gafton,
were released without charges, but the princess was charged with
receiving a stolen motor vehicle, taken into custody and booked
(11:30):
into the county jail. The local paper reported that the
princess declined to speak with them because she did not
want her friends back home to hear about her embarrassing predicament.
The Central New Jersey Home News did speak with two
people who claimed to be her close friends, and they
both vouched for the princess. Georgia Paul of Del Rio, Texas,
(11:53):
the daughter of a wealthy rancher, said she'd been dear
friends with the princess for years, ever since Princess Jean
had resided over her daughter's debutante. Ball Jack Kershaw, claiming
to be the princess's attorney, said they'd met years ago
in New York City when the princess bought one of
his paintings. The local paper reported that the police seemed
(12:16):
inclined to believe her story, but the director of the
county jail thought it was nonsense regardless of who she
really was. A judge set her bail at fifteen thousand dollars.
She didn't pay it through her attorney, Jack Kershaw. They
told reporters that she had access to assets worth over
(12:38):
half a million dollars, artwork, properties, things of that nature,
but she was refusing to postpond out of principle, preferring
to sit in the Middlesex County Detention Center with the
common people until she could clear her name. Her attorney,
Jack Kershaw, called the arrest the most absurd thing he'd
ever seen in his career, just a terrible mistake. The
(13:02):
princess was visiting the United States from her home in England,
where she lived with her husband, the Prince, and she
was touring the United States in her Cadillac, but she'd
rented the station wagon for her teenage son. Her aide
de camp had extended the rental agreement with the company,
Kershaw claimed, but it was a mix up with the
computers and the rental company was mistaken. This was just
(13:27):
a terrible mistake caused by these new fangled computerized records.
A judge reduced her bail, cutting it in half to seventy
five hundred. She still didn't pay it, and curious reporters
were starting to dig A real European princess sitting in
(13:49):
the county jail was a pretty exciting story, and they
started to find a little more information about the princess.
It seemed like maybe she wasn't refusing to post her
own bail money so much as she couldn't afford it.
There were rumors of huge debts. After a week in custody,
(14:13):
the princess was bailed out by her friend in Texas,
the cattile heiress Georgia Paul. A few months later, a
grand jury in New Jersey declined to indict the princess
on the charge of receiving a stolen motor vehicle. They
seemed to agree that it had been a misunderstanding with
the rental company rather than an intentional theft. And when
(14:36):
the princess did appear in court in New Jersey, it
wasn't Jack Kershaw at her side as her attorney. She'd
hired someone local to actually handle the case. Much like
his representation of James Earl Ray, this famous client of
his didn't really benefit much from their association. He gave
(14:58):
a few statements to the press, but he never actually
appeared with her in court on the criminal matter or
her subsequent lawsuit over it. He just grabbed a few
headlines and then faded out of the story. His name
doesn't appear at all. In connection with the lawsuit that
dragged on for several more years, she filed a fifty
(15:21):
million dollar lawsuit against Avis, the rental car company, as
well as several newspapers their publishers, Rupert Murdoch personally, several
individual reporters, and one police officer with the North Brunswick,
New Jersey Police Department. She alleged that the wrongful arrest
had caused her severe psychic trauma and emotional distress, as
(15:46):
well as greatly injuring her good name and reputation. Avis,
in turn alleged that she owed them nearly nine thousand
dollars by the time the police recovered the stolen rental car,
and she'd put over ten one thousand miles on the
vehicle during the one hundred and seventy four days that
she drove it without paying. The suit was eventually thrown
(16:09):
out due in large part to her refusal to sit
for depositions. She also never completed a court ordered psychiatric evaluation.
The case is too old to have been digitized, so
I can't read the filings, but it sounds like she
wanted to be able to say she sued for defamation,
(16:32):
but she knew damn well she'd make things much much
worse by actually allowing any additional information to come to light,
so she stopped participating after the initial complaint was filed.
So Jack Kershaw is largely irrelevant here. Remember that was
(16:55):
my entry point into the story. I was writing about Jack,
and he showed up in a hand full of newspaper
articles about this incident, and then he is no longer
part of the story. But now I find myself just
wanting to know more about this princess in the parking lot.
The stories surrounding this incident in December of nineteen seventy
(17:18):
nine are also curiously vague. She gave the police a
home address in Del Rio, Texas, but the address she
gave them wasn't one that actually exists, and a lot
of the news stories confidently assert that the princess was
a resident of Del Rio, Texas, while others are quite
(17:41):
sure that Del Rio, Texas had just been a recent
stop for a brief visit on her cross country tour.
Most newspapers reported that she lived in England with her husband,
the Prince, but none of these stories seemed to note
that she'd been separated from Prince Carol for nearly a
decad and properly divorced for about two years. Their custody
(18:05):
battle over their teenage son had made international headlines because
both parents had, in separate incidents abducted the boy from
one another on either side of the Atlantic, and after
this arrest, American newspapers describe her British accent, but almost
never mentioned that she wasn't British. She was also not Romanian.
(18:34):
She was from Nashville, Tennessee. But really the thing that
sounded most like a lie wasn't she was kind of
(19:00):
telling the truth. She was a princess. In accordance with
a ruling from a Portuguese court that retroactively legitimized her
ex husband as the eldest son of the Romanian King
Carol the Second, she did technically have some legal right
at that time to call herself Jean de Honzaleren. Honestly,
(19:25):
I think this story would be a lot less weird
if she had been lying about being a Romanian princess.
Felma Jean Williams became a princess in nineteen sixty when
she married Mircha Grigori Carl Lambrino Prince Carol Carol de Honzalern,
Prince of Romania, and for consistency's sake, I'll call him
(19:51):
Prince Carol throughout because his father's name was also Carol.
Prince Carol was the eldest son of Carol, the Second,
King of Romania from nineteen thirty until his forced abdication
in nineteen forty. But Little Carol didn't grow up as
a prince during his father's reign. He never actually knew
his father at all, and wasn't legally a prince at
(20:14):
any point during the existence of the Romanian monarchy. I'm
way outside my wheelhouse talking about royal drama, But King
Carol the Second seems like he was a little bit
of a mess. In the nineteen teens, his family tried
to marry him off to Olga Nikolayevna, the eldest daughter
(20:34):
of the Russian saw Nicholas the Second and his cousin
of some degree half a dozen times over. But he
thought Olga was unattractive and she didn't want to move
to Romania, so it didn't work out. Instead, he deserted
from the army during World War One to marry a
woman with no royal blood at all, which was a
(20:56):
bit of a scandal. It was this brief marriage to
a woman named Zizi Lambrino that produced his eldest son,
Prince Carol. This marriage was annulled almost immediately before the
child was even born, so our Prince Carol was not
born with his father's name, and he wasn't legally recognized
(21:19):
as his father's son until nineteen fifty five after his
father's death. But after our little Prince Carol's birth in
nineteen twenty, his father married a second time, this time
to his second wife, who was also his second cousin,
Princess Helen of Greece and Denmark, with whom he had
a second son, his only legitimate son, King Michael. King
(21:44):
Carol's first wife, Zizi Lambrino, and their son, Prince Carol,
were exiled from Romania and Prince Carol never knew his
father and never lived in the country of his birth.
So up until this point it's the mid nineteen twenties,
the King of Romania is still Ferdinand the First. Prince
(22:06):
Carol's grandfather, Carol Senior, was forced to renounce his place
in the line of succession because of the ongoing scandal
of his very public affair with his mistress Montalupescu. So
when King Ferdinand died in nineteen twenty seven, it was
five year old Michael who became king. In nineteen thirty,
(22:28):
Carol Senior coued his own eight year old son to
take the throne, becoming at that point King Carol the Second,
skipping a lot of rather unimportant Romanian history. King Carol
the Second was forced by future dictator Ayon Antonescu to
abdicate in nineteen forty. Young Michael was king again for
(22:50):
a few years before he too was forced to abdicate
in nineteen forty seven, this time by the Communist Party,
thus marking the end of the Romanian monarchy. There's a
lot of history in those years, but that's not our
business right now. It's just background for our story. Our
Prince Carol wasn't there for any of it. He'd been
(23:10):
exiled as a child. With his mother, Zizi Lambrino, raised
her son in Paris, and they received an allowance from
the boy's father. Even after Carol the Second abdicated the throne,
the money didn't dry up until the Communist Party took
control of the Romanian government in nineteen forty five, and
by that time young Carol was an adult. Both his mother,
(23:33):
Zizi Lambrino, and then his estranged father, King Carol the Second,
died in nineteen fifty three. I couldn't possibly begin to
understand the finer points of law governing European monarchy. But
in order to claim some inheritance from his father, he
needed to prove the legitimacy of his birth, and in
(23:54):
nineteen fifty five accord in Portugal ruled that he was
the legitimate son of King Carol the Second and thus
had the legal right to call himself a Romanian prince. Again,
there's some strange stuff going on here. I'm not sure
what interest the Portuguese dictatorship under Salazar had in decreeing
him to be a Romanian prince. I didn't have time
(24:16):
to find that out, but having the legal right to
use this title was very important to him. There is
no Romanian monarchy anymore, so he could call himself a prince,
but there's no throne to claim. The country abolished the
monarchy nearly a decade earlier, and even if they brought
(24:36):
back the monarchy, his half brother, King Michael the First
is still very much alive at this point. But the
title opened doors. Not doors to royal palaces, not any
doors in Romania which he could not legally enter, but
doors to banks and parties. You can get a pretty
(25:01):
good line of credit on a name alone. People invited
you to country clubs. You could really coast on a title,
which was very good for him because by the mid
nineteen fifties he was an unemployed book binder living in Paris.
According to the society pages at the time, that's where
(25:22):
he met his second wife, an American woman named Thelma
Jean Williams. He was at this time still married to
his first wife, a French opera singer. Carol and Jean
married in a small ceremony in France just before Christmas
of nineteen sixty. Newspapers at the time describe her as
(25:43):
in her twenties and say she was a former model
living in Paris as a columnist for the New York
Herald Tribune, and she's the niece of New York banking
millionaire Woodland Collar. And not a word of that is true.
Of all the articles about this relationship, only a handful
(26:04):
mention her having any parents at all. His parentage is,
of course front and center. He's a prince, but there's
just a few mentions of the woman's mother, a missus
joe E. Belcher in Nashville, and Missus Belcher told the
Associated Press when my gene was young, I told her
(26:26):
my little angel is good enough for kings and queens.
Now she's a real princess, and I'm so happy for her.
Missus Belcher told the reporter from the Associated Press she
hadn't actually seen her daughter in at least five years.
But this article seems to be the source for the
claims that the princess had worked as a model in
(26:48):
New York and California before moving to Paris to be
a newspaper columnist. There's no actual proof of any of
those things, just the excited pray of a mother who
hadn't actually seen her daughter in years. But Missus Belcher
did give one concrete detail. Her daughter had been a
(27:11):
contestant and the Miss Nashville beauty pageant in nineteen forty eight,
and that I can prove because it was in the newspaper.
The name and age of every young woman competing to
be Miss Nashville nineteen forty eight was printed in the
local paper, and a Miss Jean Williams of Madison, a
Nashville suburb, was twenty two years old in nineteen forty eight,
(27:36):
meaning she was born in nineteen twenty six, which at
the time of her wedding in nineteen sixty would make
her thirty four, not in her twenties. It seemed odd
too that her mother is only described as Missus Joe Belcher.
I mean, it's nineteen sixty. Women didn't really get their
(27:58):
own names. But he's not Missus Williams, and there's no
mister Williams. They only mention at all that the princess
ever had a father. Is in an article about the
wedding in the tennesseean Missus Joe Belcher said her daughter's
father died when she was just six months old. So
(28:19):
I scoured records looking for this father. Census records, birth records,
death records, cemetery records, newspapers. I didn't find anything. Princess
Jean's own death certificate lists her parents as Richard Williams
and Josephine Unknown, as reported to the corner by the
(28:40):
descedented's son, Alexander von Honzoalern. So Josephine maiden name unknown
is her mother. That's Missus Joe E. Belcher. In nineteen
sixty Joe Easten Belcher of Nashville was married to his
second wife, a woman named Josephine, and they're buried next
to each other, which is how I know. Her name
(29:02):
was Josephine Emmeline Belcher, and in his obituary her maiden
name is listed as Owens. Josephine Owens was born in
nineteen thirteen. That's what's on her tombstone, and at matches
census records, I was able to find from her childhood,
so I think I know where this lie comes from.
(29:23):
It's not all con artistry. A lot of what Gene
will say about her life was part of a con
But Missus Joe Belcher doesn't want to talk about her
daughter's father for the same reason. Neither of them is
telling the truth about what your gene was born. They're
only thirteen years apart. But honestly, I can't promise you.
(29:44):
Thelma Jean Williams is her real name. Aside from the
nineteen forty eight Miss Nashville competition, I had trouble nailing
Gene down anywhere before nineteen fifty six. The name Thelma
only appears in those newspaper as Racles from nineteen sixty.
It's not that weird to exclusively go by your middle name,
(30:07):
but I did think it was interesting that Thelma is
her stepfather's dead first wife's name, and that's something you
do sometimes see in con artistry. It's easy to borrow
a dead person's name if you need a fake name
for a khan. There are a lot of unknowns here.
(30:28):
I wish I could find her in any government record
that predates her marriage, or some kind of concrete proof
of what her name was when she was born, but
I couldn't. I'm not saying I can't or that it's impossible.
I'm just saying I didn't find it through my usual means.
I would love to know how she met a Romanian
(30:49):
prince in Paris in the mid nineteen fifties and convinced
him to leave his first wife for her. But I
don't really know the whole story there. I mean, you
can't deny the woman had drive, a fatherless daughter of
a teen mom from Nashville. Really did marry a recently
legally legitimized prince who she met in Paris, And that's
(31:10):
kind of romantic. After the wedding, the couple moved to Pool,
a town on the south coast of England. There, trading
(31:33):
on their royal titles, they wrecked up an enormous amount
of debt. Again, this is before computers. You know, you
can just make things up. Oh, I don't have the
cash today, but of course I'm good for it. I'm
a prince. Oh, it's so crass to even discuss money.
Of course the bill will be paid. She's a princess.
(31:56):
They were very active in charitable work, and they went
to lots of fancy parties. Yes, but eventually the bills
came due. They owed a lot of people a lot
of money, and their lives in Pool fell apart. By
nineteen seventy they were living apart. She pops up in
(32:16):
the society pages in American newspapers pretty frequently, and it's
almost always claimed that, well, she lives full time in
England with her husband, the Prince, but it doesn't seem
that she goes to England very often, and it's never
mentioned that they're separated. She's just drifting around the United
States coasting on this title, and Americans love the idea
(32:43):
of a princess. We want to be fooled, We crave it.
A newspaper photographer in Orlando snapped a paparazzi style photo
of her having lunch at a fancy hotel in nineteen
seventy and The Orlando Sentinel called her an exiled Romanian princess.
She's never been to Romania. She's from Nashville. Her name
(33:09):
pops up frequently as the mistress of ceremonies, the patroness
or the guest of honor, and a debutante ball those
big fancy affairs for the teenage daughters of very rich men.
Having a bona fide European princess at your daughter's debut
held a certain kind of cachet in high society, so
her services were in high demand. In nineteen seventy one,
(33:32):
newspapers in Miami describe a terribly fancy affair. The International
Fine Arts Debutante Association of the Order of the Unicorn
had managed to secure several very high profile patronesses. One
paper described as Miami's own little nest of royalty. The
(33:52):
princesses will all be there, including Princess Jean Marie de Chabrie,
the Baroness Vladimir kunvan Pushinhal, Grand Mistress, Lady Porter and
her Royal Highness Gene of Romania and Hansalarn. I mean,
how very royal. I don't think a single one of
(34:16):
these women was being entirely honest about who she was.
The baroness was the wife of a Russian immigrant, Vladimir Kun.
He's always described as the son of a Russian baron
who served as a general in the Tsar's army, and
his mother was a Greek princess, but neither the general
(34:38):
nor the princess are ever named or described in any
further detail. I mean, I didn't spend enough time researching
this to call this man a liar. I won't say
that he's a liar. I just think it's weird that
his mom was a princess and no one ever says
which princess couldn't find anything at all about the possible
(35:02):
identity of someone called Mistress Lady Porter. But Princess John
Marie de Chabrie was no princess. She was an actress
from Wisconsin named jan Jackson who was married to a
French Canadian con artist whose real name was George Marks,
and in the early nineteen seventies they tricked a lot
(35:23):
of people into thinking he was a temporarily embarrassed French prince.
Americans are just so readily fooled into believing someone with
a slight accent and fancy manners is actually the long
lost rightful heir to some foreign throne, because we just
don't know or understand a lot about hereditary monarchy, but
(35:48):
we go crazy for it. It's just so exciting to us.
I found articles every few months throughout the nineteen seventies
listing Princess Jean as the temporary guest of some rich
or another a few months in a guesthouse in Boca Raton,
a few weeks on a rich couple's yacht, A stayed
a fancy club in Miami while she shops for a
(36:09):
piedataire in South Florida, She's always being hosted and feted
and celebrated as a visiting princess, who, of course has
a home in England with her husband, the Prince, but
she never seemed to go there, because I don't think
she had a home anymore. Her lawsuit against the rental
(36:33):
car company seems to mark the end of her life
as a socialite. After the arrest in nineteen seventy nine,
there aren't very many more mentions in the society pages.
She still attended the occasional party a funeral from Massachusetts
native who called himself a German baron because he married
(36:53):
the niece of Hitler's Minister of war, some nonprofit gala
in Idaho. No more debutante balls. After her lawsuit was
dismissed for the final time in nineteen eighty three, she
seems to have moved to Vermont with her adult son, Alexander.
By nineteen eighty five, she'd been diagnosed with uterine cancer.
(37:16):
On her death certificate, the name Jean von Hohenzollern is
written with a typewriter, but there's a handwritten correction just
before her first name. Someone has written in penn h
r H Princess, her royal Highness Princess Gene von honz Hollern.
(37:41):
Mother's maiden name unknown, date of birth November fifteenth, nineteen thirty.
It's an official government document, a death certificate. It's the
only actual official government document with her name on it
that I could get my hands on this week. So
(38:01):
I guess, legally speaking, that's who she is. So who
she was, Princess Jeane born nineteen thirty. It's almost true.
It's all kind of true. She really did marry a prince.
(38:21):
She died in Vermont in nineteen eighty eight. She was
fifty seven years old, or maybe she was sixty one.
Her son Alexander, a ski instructor and a prep cook
in Rutland, Vermont, wrote a letter to the editor of
the Rutland Daily Herald, thanking the staff at the oncology
ward and the hospice for the care they'd provided to
(38:42):
his mother in the three years she spent fighting cancer.
Prince Carol died in two thousand and six, shortly after
visiting Romania for the first time in nearly seventy years.
He'd won the legal right to his own name in
Romanian courts before his death, something his half brother, King
Michael had tried to prevent Carol's son, Alexander, Princess Jean's son,
(39:08):
won his own legal battle in Romania to be recognized
as King Carol the second's grandson in twenty twelve. That
same court decision also recognized Prince Carol's son from his
first marriage, Paul, as an heir of the king. Prince
Paul is at least as of twenty twenty five, under
supervision of the French courts as he fights extradition to Romania,
(39:32):
where he's already been convicted of influence peddling, bribery and
money laundering. Since the death of King Michael in twenty seventeen,
Prince Carol's sons, Alexander and Paul have competing claims to
the title of head of the Royal House of Romania,
a country that has not had a monarchy since nineteen
forty seven. So I guess if you think back to
(39:56):
that Debutante ball in Miami in nineteen seventy one, Princess
Jane of Romania was the closest thing to a real
princess who was there that night. They were mostly outright frauds, liars,
Charlatan's fakers, con artists, and she was too. She was
a con artist and a fraud, but she really did
(40:18):
marry a prince. And besides, she might have been a
con artist from Nashville who never paid her debts, but
I think that just makes her a real American princess.
I mean, what other kind of princess would have a
retired Tennessee segregationist on speed dial? Weird Little Guys. It's
(40:55):
a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched,
written and recorded by me. Our executive producers are Sophie
Lichtterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the
wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by
Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird of the
Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it,
(41:15):
but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You
can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners
on the Weird lit the Guy's subreddit, And if you're
listening to this the week it came out, it's not
too late to submit your questions for the next Q
and A episode, either by email or on the subreddit.
As always, just don't post anything that's going to make
(41:37):
you one of my weird little guys,
Host
Molly Conger
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