Jorge Guillermo

Jorge Pérez y Guillermo (born August 1, 1946) was the husband of Princess Christina of the Netherlands between 1975 and the couple's divorce in late 1996. He was accordingly brother-in-law to Queen Beatrix between 1980 and 1996. He is also a noted art collector. Since 1996, he has generally avoided gratuitous publicity.

Jorge Guillermo was born in Havana, Cuba where he attended school until 1960. Dr. Federico Gilberto Pérez y Castillo (1911–1967), his father, was a physician with connections to the political establishment. Prof. Edenia Mercedes Guillermo y Marrero (1925–2002), his mother, held a series of senior positions in education administration by 1960, combining her duties as director of education of the Province of Havana with a lectureship. Jorge Guillermo also had an older brother, named after their father, Gilberto Perez (1943–2015), who later became an American Professor of Film Studies. The decision that the family should leave the country was evidently taken, in the first instance, by Edenia Guillermo.

In 1960, following the Cuban Revolution, the Pérez y Guillermo family relocated from Cuba to the United States. Like thousands of other political refugees from Cuba, they settled in Miami, where Jorge Guillermo attended high school. Despite coming from a highly intellectualized family, there are indications that Jorge Guillermo did not share his elder brother's appetite for scholarship. He would nevertheless complete a course of university-level education. In 1963 he entered Cornell College in Iowa. His student visa expired after a year, but he and his brother were reclassified as refugees due to the political situation in Cuba. He then switched to Monmouth College in Illinois, graduating with an Art History degree in 1968. The transfer had been arranged by his mother, who worked at Monmouth College, between 1964 and 1975, as a professor of Spanish. Between 1965 and 1968, mother and son shared an apartment in the small town. Jorge Guillermo's father died in 1967.

Circa 1973, Guillermo moved to New York City, where he became involved in the work of the charismatic poet-educator Frank "Ned" O'Gorman, a friend whom he had known since 1971. Since 1966, Gorman had been working to improve the "storefront school" a day-care and education center for the disadvantaged very young children of working mothers in the city's Harlem quarter. While O'Gorman ran the center, the focus of Guillermo's contribution was reported to be on fund raising. At one point, Guillermo and O'Gorman became surrogate parents for one of the children attending the center after his grandmother failed to retrieve the boy at the end of the day. It was not clear whether the two men were unable to trace the boy's parents, or the parents simply refused to take him back. Either way, young Ricky, two-and-a-half, moved in, becoming a member of the friends' bachelor household. There was no formal adoption, but Guillermo and O'Gorman shared parenting duties, which included toilet-training. Details of Ricky's condition never became clear: he was seriously ill. O'Gorman himself later recalled without elaboration that "it took him six years to die".

Jorge Guillermo and Ned O'Gorman were drawn together by the fact that both were opera lovers. O'Gorman, in particular, was also an incorrigible socialite and networker. In 1968, he traveled to the Netherlands to attend the wedding of his friend Frank Houben. A fellow guest was Princess Christina, the youngest and most rebellious of the queen's four daughters. Christina was, at the time, studying for a teaching diploma while also attending lectures and engaging as a semi-detached member of the student community at the University of Groningen. A couple of months later, the princess broke off her studies in Groningen and moved to Canada, which she had, she pointed out, already visited several times on vacation. She was accompanied, it was reported, by her two private secretaries, the Misses Vlieger and Berghout. Towards the end of 1968, Christina embarked on the study of voice teaching at the "École de musique Vincent-d'Indy in Montreal". Three years later, she moved on again to complete her time as a music student at the Music Conservatorium (as it was known at that time) of nearby McGill University. In 1973/74, she moved to New York, taking a post at a Montessori school as one of that city's most thoroughly educated teachers of music. She also gave private singing lessons and worked as a volunteer music teacher at Ned O'Gorman's "Storefront school" in Harlem. It is not clear if she had remained in touch with O'Gorman since their meeting at Frank Houben's wedding in 1968, or whether the two re-established contact only after she had become, like him, a New Yorker. Either way, O'Gorman was still, at this point, living with Jorge Guillermo, whom he later described as a "trusted colleague at the Storefront school for nearly three years".

Sources differ over how Jorge Guillermo and Princess Christina first met. One states that their first encounter took place when they both attended the same performance at the Metropolitan Opera. Elsewhere, it is asserted that Guillermo was introduced to Christina van Oranje as early as 1972 at a dinner party arranged by a mutual friend, though at this stage he was unaware of her royal family connections. Given their close involvement in Ned O'Gorman's "Storefront school", and shared friendship with O'Gorman himself, it seems likely that directly or (less probably) indirectly, the couple met through Ned O'Gorman. They began dating, frequently going out together to the opera: Guillermo was reportedly writing a book on opera at the time. Romance developed. Their engagement was announced, formally, by the Dutch national press agency on 14 February 1975, though among friends the princess continued to introduce Guillermo simply as her "boyfriend". Guillermo's mother had gained US citizenship in 1969, but Jorge Guillermo was still, when he and Christina teamed up, simply registered as a stateless refugee.

These were still Vietnam years: commentators at the time speculated that he had resisted citizenship to avoid conscription. However, conscription had ended in 1973 and in April 1975 Saigon would fall. During 1975, Jorge Guillermo gained US nationality. Following the engagement announcement, the couple found themselves at the center of much press attention. They were both fluent in English which was the language in which they communicated together; but they told reporters that the princess was now trying to master Spanish while Guillermo was struggling to master Dutch. During a press conference that the two of them held to face questions arising from their engagement, Guillermo demonstrated a relaxed approach more redolent of New York than of a royal court. After his fiancée had referred to him a number of times as "Mister Guillermo", he smiled across at her reassuringly: "you can also just call me Jorge".

Jorge Guillermo and Princess Christina married on 28 June 1975, in the townhall at Baarn, which is the administrative center for the district that includes the royal palace at Soestdijk. This was followed by a church celebration at the cathedral in Utrecht. The church ceremony was ecumenical since Jorge Guillermo came from a Catholic family while the Dutch royal family adhere to the Dutch Reformed Church. Having failed to obtain permission from the States General (Dutch parliament) ahead of her marriage to Guillermo, Princess Christina automatically lost her right to the throne. However, although the matter is reported in a number of sources, as the youngest of four royal siblings, with at least six of her nieces and nephews ranking ahead of her in order of precedence when it came to the succession, any sacrifice involved was largely a theoretical one. By not involving parliament in her decision to marry, the princess also avoided any discussions on the delicate and far from settled constitutional issues arising from her having chosen a Roman Catholic spouse.