Red Moon
14-12-2007, 11:50 PM
The Prince and the slow girl: What could Jade Goody see in the son of one of the world's richest men?Jade Goody has been sleeping fitfully of late.
When she has managed to drop off, she confessed with a girlish giggle to a friend this week, her dreams have been almost exclusively populated by the man she has christened "My Prince Charming".
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given that Jade has in the past fortnight found herself the unlikely beneficiary of some serious wining and dining by a real-life Prince - and son of the billionaire Sultan of Brunei to boot - the dim-witted Big Brother star is letting her imagination rather run away with itself.
"Sometimes fairytales do come true," she announced with straight-faced seriousness to one friend, as she toyed coquettishly with the showy diamond ring presented to her last week by the 25-year-old Prince Azim of Brunei.
(The ring's worth £3 million, or £30,000, depending on who you believe.)
She is forced to admit that the only downside - to borrow her own Essex girl parlance - is that the "minted" Prince is "a bit of a minger".
To the uninitiated, that means he is not exactly a great looker.
Indeed, it is fair to assume that in the dippy Jade's childhood fantasies, her ideal man did not bear an uncanny resemblance to the midget sidekick Tattoo from the Seventies television series Fantasy Island.
But his lack of good looks apart (the Prince stands barely 5ft 4in, is clearly fighting a battle with his weight, and appears not yet to have started shaving), who could blame her for dreaming?
After all, he is a prince and he splits his time between his filthy rich father's 1,700-room palace in Brunei and the family's London mansion in Kensington Park Gardens.
And, it must be said, Miss Goody is not going to be troubling Nicole Kidman in the beauty stakes.
There remains one fly in the ointment - and it comes in the somewhat oily shape of Jade's 20-year-old fiancè, Jack Tweed.
Tweed has "felt it necessary" to act as chaperone whenever the spectacularly badly dressed Asian playboy has requested the pleasure of his girlfriend's company for nights out clubbing, or for dinner at a smart Chinese restaurant in the capital.
He might well have reason to be concerned.
Jade, say those close to her, has suddenly gone "extremely quiet" about the New York wedding she and wannabe football agent Jack had been planning for the New Year.
Could it be that the 26-yearold Essex girl and mother-of-two is already imagining herself as Princess Jade?
Last night, a friend of the couple told the Mail: "Jade's mind is working overtime.
"She was talking non- stop about a wedding to Jack: now nothing. I really think she sees something happening with the Prince."
Tweed is said to be furious at having to play gooseberry, but Jade has been swept off her feet by the tubby Prince, whose father is the world's third-richest man and worth, it is said, £20 billion.
Last week, Jade and Azim made a distinctly odd couple as they emerged beaming for the paparazzi from the ultra-trendy Aura nightclub in London.
Jade's outfit of what appeared to be a silver nightie and orthopaedic slippers was topped in the tasteless stakes only by Azim's garish satin jacket teamed with a T-shirt and tie.
His designer trousers were so long that he had spent the previous fun-filled hours dancing excitedly all over their hems.
Their strange friendship is said to have taken off when the Prince contacted Miss Goody after watching her on Celebrity Big Brother in January.
(Evidently, he was not put off by her now infamous racial bullying of fellow housemate Shilpa Shetty.)
He is said by his friends to find Jade "intriguing".
By contrast, she has declared the Prince "wicked".
Breathlessly, she told the Mail this week: "The Prince is just an amazing friend. I've met so many people through him, like Johnny Depp and Mariah Carey.
"So now I am going to America with someone who looks after Will Smith and Halle Berry, and they have taken a real interest in me and I have got a lot of work lined up in America."
Johnny Depp? Will Smith?
It seems Jade's head has been well and truly turned by her would-be paramour.
At this point, it would be wise to sound a note of caution to the somewhat giddy Miss Goody - not least because the spoilt Azim has something of a habit of collecting celebrities (admittedly not normally Z-listers like Jade), in the same way that his father collects Ferraris.
(The Sultan's latest accounts list him as owning a staggering 367 of them.)
Take Miss Carey, for example. Last August, in a typically lavish act, Prince Azim dispatched a palace retainer on one of his private jets to New York, where the lackey was given the task of
delivering to the singer a flawless eight- carat diamond and platinum necklace and matching ring before she went on stage at Madison Square Garden.
The gems, rumoured to be worth in excess of £3 million, were said at the time to be simply a "token of friendship".
Nor is Miss Carey the only famous woman who has found herself on the receiving end of the royal scion's largesse.
So taken was the Prince with Jerry Hall's naked turn during her stage role as Mrs Robinson in The Graduate in 2000 that before the curtain had come down he was at the stage door seeking an audience with her.
Despite a 26-year age gap, the following day the smitten Prince sent her a black and white diamond bracelet as a mark of his "appreciation of your talents".
And the following year, when she opened in another play in Hampstead, North London, he sent her a bouquet of flowers so gargantuan that Miss Hall had to send them home in a separate taxi.
She is not the only ageing beauty who has felt the full force of his ardour.
Two years ago, Prince Azim was photographed hand-in-hand with 66-year-old Oscar-winning actress Faye Dunaway, as the two emerged from Nobu, his favourite Park Lane restaurant.
(The eaterie is close to "home", as the Prince often stays next door at The Dorchester, which is owned by his father.)
Hardly surprising, given the expensive gifts that he is wont to bestow on them, that the Prince now considers both women his "firm friends".
His taste, however, is not exclusively for the more mature woman.
When he celebrated his 25th birthday in July with a lavish party at Stapleford Park stately home in Leicestershire, he flew in supermodel Eva Herzigova and actress Scarlett Johansson to join Miami Vice star Don Johnson and Raquel Welch for the festivities.
The guests were entertained by Michael Jackson, who, the Prince is quick to point out, performed for free because of their longstanding close friendship.
Not that Azim, who was educated at the Quaker boarding school Leighton Park in Berkshire, is not generous to a fault when it comes to his famous friends.
When American R&B star Usher appeared in London in 2001, the Prince reserved 20 rows of seats for his closest chums and sent the singer a pair of diamond-encrusted Nike trainers.
Likewise, guests at his most recent birthday party were presented with a £20,000 goody bag that included a voucher for a safari in Kenya, a full dental make-over, a new mobile phone, satnav and an original oil painting.
All of which is good news for the increasingly financially strapped Jade. She has admitted she is living on her savings after her career nose-dived following her racist outbursts.
(She famously described Bollywood star Miss Shetty as "Shilpa Poppadom".)
The scandal caused her to lose her two shows on Living TV - Jade's PA and Just Jade - which had been earning her £150,000 a year.
A £250,000 fly-on-the wall series was also canned, and her one-time best-selling perfume, Shh, was taken off the shelves.
Her publisher, HarperCollins, dropped the paperback edition of her autobiography.
She also lost her £50,000 investment in her own beauty salon, Ugly's, when the business went bust.
Then, in September, she was the victim of a mysterious £30,000 burglary at her home in Chipping Ongar, Essex, and after moving into a new £750,000 home in nearby Upshire she missed the first £2,000 mortgage payment on the house.
Goody, who first found fame as a contestant on Big Brother in 2002, insisted at the time that she was not broke, but had accidentally given the wrong bank account details to the mortgage company.
Such minor annoyances are not, one suspects, likely to trouble her new suitor. Prince Haji Abdul Azim, to give him his full title, has enjoyed a gilded existence compared to the Bermondsey-born Miss Goody.
Her father, Andrew Goody, left her mother Jackiey when Jade was a toddler, spent four years in Wandsworth Prison for robbery and died of a heroin overdose in 2005.
The Prince grew up in his father's huge palace, filled with priceless Versailles furniture, in the tiny oil-rich state of Brunei.
One of four sons of the Sultan, his mother, former air hostess Princess Mariam, is the second of the ruler's two "co-wives".
The indulged Azim, whose elder brother, Crown Prince Al-Muhtadee Billah, is the heir to the throne, has wanted for little.
As a child, Disney characters were flown in by his father to entertain him, and Elton John and Rod Stewart were hired to sing at his birthday parties.
His suite of rooms at the palace were designed to resemble a fairytale castle hidden in its own forest.
One room even contained a tree trunk, with a carpet specially woven to look like stones on the forest floor.
But Azim is said to have incurred the 61-year-old Sultan's displeasure when his partying lifestyle led him to have his application to study at Magdalen College, Oxford, rejected.
The Sultan's ire was such that a government spokesman was forced to deny that Tony Blair had personally taken up the Prince's case with the university authorities.
According to friends of the pop musicloving Azim, however, he was less than cut out for the academic life.
He has told his family he dreams of becoming the next George Michael and has been spending his substantial amounts of free time recording in a North London studio. The high-living Prince is also known in his circle for booking a £4,500 penthouse suite at Claridges so that he and his friends can have noisy karaoke parties.
"He's a nice bloke," said one acquaintance this week.
"But he's not exactly what you would call the sharpest tack in the box.
"He has got it into his head that he could be a successful singer, and he's been spending time laying down tracks in a recording studio. I've actually heard him sing, though, and I wouldn't put money on it selling.
"The truth is that he's a bit of a nerd who gets a kick out of hanging out with the stars.
"Let's face it, these people wouldn't give him a second look if he wasn't the son of a billionaire who goes around flashing his cash all over town."
With that expensive rock firmly on her finger, however, the hard-up Miss Goody is clearly not planning to look this royal gift horse in the mouth.
What price now for one of the most unlikely marriages in showbiz history?
Source: Daily Mail (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/showbiz/showbiznews.html?in_article_id=502416&in_page_id=1773)
When she has managed to drop off, she confessed with a girlish giggle to a friend this week, her dreams have been almost exclusively populated by the man she has christened "My Prince Charming".
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given that Jade has in the past fortnight found herself the unlikely beneficiary of some serious wining and dining by a real-life Prince - and son of the billionaire Sultan of Brunei to boot - the dim-witted Big Brother star is letting her imagination rather run away with itself.
"Sometimes fairytales do come true," she announced with straight-faced seriousness to one friend, as she toyed coquettishly with the showy diamond ring presented to her last week by the 25-year-old Prince Azim of Brunei.
(The ring's worth £3 million, or £30,000, depending on who you believe.)
She is forced to admit that the only downside - to borrow her own Essex girl parlance - is that the "minted" Prince is "a bit of a minger".
To the uninitiated, that means he is not exactly a great looker.
Indeed, it is fair to assume that in the dippy Jade's childhood fantasies, her ideal man did not bear an uncanny resemblance to the midget sidekick Tattoo from the Seventies television series Fantasy Island.
But his lack of good looks apart (the Prince stands barely 5ft 4in, is clearly fighting a battle with his weight, and appears not yet to have started shaving), who could blame her for dreaming?
After all, he is a prince and he splits his time between his filthy rich father's 1,700-room palace in Brunei and the family's London mansion in Kensington Park Gardens.
And, it must be said, Miss Goody is not going to be troubling Nicole Kidman in the beauty stakes.
There remains one fly in the ointment - and it comes in the somewhat oily shape of Jade's 20-year-old fiancè, Jack Tweed.
Tweed has "felt it necessary" to act as chaperone whenever the spectacularly badly dressed Asian playboy has requested the pleasure of his girlfriend's company for nights out clubbing, or for dinner at a smart Chinese restaurant in the capital.
He might well have reason to be concerned.
Jade, say those close to her, has suddenly gone "extremely quiet" about the New York wedding she and wannabe football agent Jack had been planning for the New Year.
Could it be that the 26-yearold Essex girl and mother-of-two is already imagining herself as Princess Jade?
Last night, a friend of the couple told the Mail: "Jade's mind is working overtime.
"She was talking non- stop about a wedding to Jack: now nothing. I really think she sees something happening with the Prince."
Tweed is said to be furious at having to play gooseberry, but Jade has been swept off her feet by the tubby Prince, whose father is the world's third-richest man and worth, it is said, £20 billion.
Last week, Jade and Azim made a distinctly odd couple as they emerged beaming for the paparazzi from the ultra-trendy Aura nightclub in London.
Jade's outfit of what appeared to be a silver nightie and orthopaedic slippers was topped in the tasteless stakes only by Azim's garish satin jacket teamed with a T-shirt and tie.
His designer trousers were so long that he had spent the previous fun-filled hours dancing excitedly all over their hems.
Their strange friendship is said to have taken off when the Prince contacted Miss Goody after watching her on Celebrity Big Brother in January.
(Evidently, he was not put off by her now infamous racial bullying of fellow housemate Shilpa Shetty.)
He is said by his friends to find Jade "intriguing".
By contrast, she has declared the Prince "wicked".
Breathlessly, she told the Mail this week: "The Prince is just an amazing friend. I've met so many people through him, like Johnny Depp and Mariah Carey.
"So now I am going to America with someone who looks after Will Smith and Halle Berry, and they have taken a real interest in me and I have got a lot of work lined up in America."
Johnny Depp? Will Smith?
It seems Jade's head has been well and truly turned by her would-be paramour.
At this point, it would be wise to sound a note of caution to the somewhat giddy Miss Goody - not least because the spoilt Azim has something of a habit of collecting celebrities (admittedly not normally Z-listers like Jade), in the same way that his father collects Ferraris.
(The Sultan's latest accounts list him as owning a staggering 367 of them.)
Take Miss Carey, for example. Last August, in a typically lavish act, Prince Azim dispatched a palace retainer on one of his private jets to New York, where the lackey was given the task of
delivering to the singer a flawless eight- carat diamond and platinum necklace and matching ring before she went on stage at Madison Square Garden.
The gems, rumoured to be worth in excess of £3 million, were said at the time to be simply a "token of friendship".
Nor is Miss Carey the only famous woman who has found herself on the receiving end of the royal scion's largesse.
So taken was the Prince with Jerry Hall's naked turn during her stage role as Mrs Robinson in The Graduate in 2000 that before the curtain had come down he was at the stage door seeking an audience with her.
Despite a 26-year age gap, the following day the smitten Prince sent her a black and white diamond bracelet as a mark of his "appreciation of your talents".
And the following year, when she opened in another play in Hampstead, North London, he sent her a bouquet of flowers so gargantuan that Miss Hall had to send them home in a separate taxi.
She is not the only ageing beauty who has felt the full force of his ardour.
Two years ago, Prince Azim was photographed hand-in-hand with 66-year-old Oscar-winning actress Faye Dunaway, as the two emerged from Nobu, his favourite Park Lane restaurant.
(The eaterie is close to "home", as the Prince often stays next door at The Dorchester, which is owned by his father.)
Hardly surprising, given the expensive gifts that he is wont to bestow on them, that the Prince now considers both women his "firm friends".
His taste, however, is not exclusively for the more mature woman.
When he celebrated his 25th birthday in July with a lavish party at Stapleford Park stately home in Leicestershire, he flew in supermodel Eva Herzigova and actress Scarlett Johansson to join Miami Vice star Don Johnson and Raquel Welch for the festivities.
The guests were entertained by Michael Jackson, who, the Prince is quick to point out, performed for free because of their longstanding close friendship.
Not that Azim, who was educated at the Quaker boarding school Leighton Park in Berkshire, is not generous to a fault when it comes to his famous friends.
When American R&B star Usher appeared in London in 2001, the Prince reserved 20 rows of seats for his closest chums and sent the singer a pair of diamond-encrusted Nike trainers.
Likewise, guests at his most recent birthday party were presented with a £20,000 goody bag that included a voucher for a safari in Kenya, a full dental make-over, a new mobile phone, satnav and an original oil painting.
All of which is good news for the increasingly financially strapped Jade. She has admitted she is living on her savings after her career nose-dived following her racist outbursts.
(She famously described Bollywood star Miss Shetty as "Shilpa Poppadom".)
The scandal caused her to lose her two shows on Living TV - Jade's PA and Just Jade - which had been earning her £150,000 a year.
A £250,000 fly-on-the wall series was also canned, and her one-time best-selling perfume, Shh, was taken off the shelves.
Her publisher, HarperCollins, dropped the paperback edition of her autobiography.
She also lost her £50,000 investment in her own beauty salon, Ugly's, when the business went bust.
Then, in September, she was the victim of a mysterious £30,000 burglary at her home in Chipping Ongar, Essex, and after moving into a new £750,000 home in nearby Upshire she missed the first £2,000 mortgage payment on the house.
Goody, who first found fame as a contestant on Big Brother in 2002, insisted at the time that she was not broke, but had accidentally given the wrong bank account details to the mortgage company.
Such minor annoyances are not, one suspects, likely to trouble her new suitor. Prince Haji Abdul Azim, to give him his full title, has enjoyed a gilded existence compared to the Bermondsey-born Miss Goody.
Her father, Andrew Goody, left her mother Jackiey when Jade was a toddler, spent four years in Wandsworth Prison for robbery and died of a heroin overdose in 2005.
The Prince grew up in his father's huge palace, filled with priceless Versailles furniture, in the tiny oil-rich state of Brunei.
One of four sons of the Sultan, his mother, former air hostess Princess Mariam, is the second of the ruler's two "co-wives".
The indulged Azim, whose elder brother, Crown Prince Al-Muhtadee Billah, is the heir to the throne, has wanted for little.
As a child, Disney characters were flown in by his father to entertain him, and Elton John and Rod Stewart were hired to sing at his birthday parties.
His suite of rooms at the palace were designed to resemble a fairytale castle hidden in its own forest.
One room even contained a tree trunk, with a carpet specially woven to look like stones on the forest floor.
But Azim is said to have incurred the 61-year-old Sultan's displeasure when his partying lifestyle led him to have his application to study at Magdalen College, Oxford, rejected.
The Sultan's ire was such that a government spokesman was forced to deny that Tony Blair had personally taken up the Prince's case with the university authorities.
According to friends of the pop musicloving Azim, however, he was less than cut out for the academic life.
He has told his family he dreams of becoming the next George Michael and has been spending his substantial amounts of free time recording in a North London studio. The high-living Prince is also known in his circle for booking a £4,500 penthouse suite at Claridges so that he and his friends can have noisy karaoke parties.
"He's a nice bloke," said one acquaintance this week.
"But he's not exactly what you would call the sharpest tack in the box.
"He has got it into his head that he could be a successful singer, and he's been spending time laying down tracks in a recording studio. I've actually heard him sing, though, and I wouldn't put money on it selling.
"The truth is that he's a bit of a nerd who gets a kick out of hanging out with the stars.
"Let's face it, these people wouldn't give him a second look if he wasn't the son of a billionaire who goes around flashing his cash all over town."
With that expensive rock firmly on her finger, however, the hard-up Miss Goody is clearly not planning to look this royal gift horse in the mouth.
What price now for one of the most unlikely marriages in showbiz history?
Source: Daily Mail (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/showbiz/showbiznews.html?in_article_id=502416&in_page_id=1773)