INDEX

ALL ABOUT JANE
Meet Jane
Jane's Filmography
Vital Statistics
Secrets to Staying Fit
Charities
Alternative Medicine
St. Catherine's Court
Meet James Keach
James' Filmography

ARTISTIC VENUES
Jane as Artist
Jane Seymour Handbags
Signature Collection
Household Collection
Children's Clothing

BOOKS
Making Yourself at Home
Remarkable Changes
Romantic Living
This One & That One
Two at a Time

MISCELLANEOUS
Voting Polls
Trivia
Tic Tac Toe
Rosie's Mom Squad

PHOTO ALBUM
Just Jane

GUIDE TO ROMANTIC LIVING

Chapter Four | Chapter Six

Chapter Five: Strong and Feminine: The Romantic Woman

This is not just a book about how to find and keep the love of your life. It is about how to be a romantic person. Once you are that person, I believe that what you want most in life will be yours. And if what you want is the person who will be the love of your life, I have no doubt you'll find him or her.

Men as much as women should try to find their romantic selves.

The idea of chivalry is not just a matter of men opening doors for women and thereby charming them. When it flourished in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was based on a certain code of values, in particular the idea of honor, and of respect for the femininity of women and the vulnerability of children.

This notion of respect matters a great deal. If you are to live a romantic, happy life you must respect others. You are on this planet with other people, sharing it with other people, and you must treat them well. You must listen to them, care for them, try to understand them. And they will do the same for you: the smile that you send out returns to you.

What I'm saying in this book combines the two meanings of the word romance: romance as in Romantics, the ambitious, striving, self-based philosophy of the great nineteenth-century writers, and romance as in the more conventional sense of sharing, finding love, and perhaps marrying and starting a family. This combination is also a fusion of the two great strands in a twentieth-century woman's life: the Romantic philosophy of feminism, having to do with finding your individual self and developing it, and the older, more traditional and often insistent need for love and beauty and a family, without which many women feel their lives negated.

You can have both. It doesn't have to be one or the other. You can be successful in your career and you can be feminine, maternal, loving, but to do so you must respect romance. You must not move, lock, stock, and barrel, into that gray male world of offices and telephones, because if you do so you are in danger of forfeiting what there is in you that is essentially feminine. If you are a woman why not use feminine wiles sometimes? Why not dress your talents in charm. Charm will open more doors than knocking them on the head will.

Don't be afraid of dressing to suit your own tastes---and don't be afraid of flirting. Don't think that men won't treat you seriously if you flirt. They must learn that women must be true to their own natures. That is the next revolution, that is the romantic revolution I'm searching for.

Flirting is a way of bringing someone close to you, of sharing a mood. It is a harmless, delightful game two people can play, and by learning to flirt, you can create romantic moments wherever you are.

Flirting isn't just sexual behavior: it's part of a sensual and emotional way of behaving toward other people that flatters and interests them. It's the way you look at a man across the table, listen to him, and make him smile and laugh. It's a way of reminding him that all is not dull and standardized and unisex yet. Fluttering your eyelashes isn't good flirting: listening with intelligence and interest is the way that romantic, twentieth-century women flirt.

Of course, flirting has to be handled with care. Inspired by the example of Scarlett O'Hara, I used to test my ability to flirt, and once, on holiday with some friends, I flirted with my best friend's boyfriend. I learned the power I had. She never quite forgave me. And to this day, I am not proud of that action.

It took me a long time to have the confidence to be my feminine self-to be both strong and feminine. To be each was easy; to combine them was the problem. For me, as for so many, it was hard to combine the two meanings of the word romantic-the search for self, and the sharing. It was only when I found myself that I could share.

There is a lesson here, I think, for all women who want to be strong and feminine. Learn from my mistakes. First of all, learn to be your own person. Learn to be alone sometimes. Build up your strong, romantic self. Then you will have the strength to cope with the demands of marriage and children as well as all the demands of being a woman in the twentieth century; of being expected to have a career, or a job, or at least some impressive talents.

Don't rush into marriage and children before you are ready for them. Grow up a bit, grow strong, take risks, and then marry when you are strong enough to share, to be occasionally selfless, to love someone else as much as yourself. But first you have to learn to love yourself, and know yourself.

Like so many women, I spent my teenage years and my twenties trying to be what other people wanted me to be. It's fine to be what other people want you to be, so long as you have a firm hold on who you really are. I didn't.

The director of Our Mutual Friend, a television series based on the Dickens novel, later told me, "You have to be your own woman." I didn't understand what he meant. It tortured me that I didn't know what he meant.

It has been the hardest lesson for me to learn, to become my own woman. I had been a little girl for my parents, a little woman for the man in my life, a ballerina for my teachers, an actress for directors and producers, a wicked and smoldering sex goddess for some journalists, a virginal creature for others. I had wanted to please everyone.

There's a simple realization, which didn't come until much later for me, but I'll share it with you now. It's a realization that is crucial to anyone's happiness and self-respect: You matter. Find out who you are; don't try to be someone for everyone. The only way to please everyone is simply to be yourself, a confident, affectionate, generous person. Your parents will probably be appalled when they see you growing into someone different from the dear little girl of their imaginations, but grow you must, and they'll respect and love you even more when they see that you have found you own way of life, your own way of living.

If you settle down too soon, you'll resent your husband, as I did. It wasn't his fault. Neither of us was ready for the sharing and sacrifice that love and marriage demand. We were both too busy making our own way, finding out what we could do and what we couldn't, wanting excitement.

All the publicity over my landing the part of Solitaire in the famous Bond film Live and Let Die did not help either. I was finding it hard to cope with the numerous different versions of me presented in teh newspapers. I was beginnins not to have any idea of who I was. I might have been a little confused before, but now I was really confused.

I was dressed by a top designer in expensive clothes, when my own taste was for homemade and sale clothes (admittedly due to a lack of funds). While preparing for the film, I discovered clothes for the first time. Everything was the best: I had shoes made to fit and underwear made of silk. I was amazed.

I should like to be able to say that my head was kept completely straight throughout--but it wasn't. Eventually I began to believe some of the things written about me, things that had been mostly made up by writers who were trying to make me more interesting.

One person in particular, a journalist and photgrapher, spent three days with me to find out who and what I was so that he could write an exclusive piece about the "sexy Jane Seymour." In desperation he begged me to tell him my fantasies. Did I like running through long grass, for example? I raised my eyebrows, wondering why I had to answer these questions. The next thing I knew, an without my control, an article appeared saying tha tI was a wild woman who loved running naked through long grass! Something, needless to say, I have never done--except perhaps when I was a toddler.

In the world of acting, even more than in the rest of life, you have to keep a tight hold on your identity if you don't want to go crazy. I didn't go crazy, but for a while I didn't know who I was and what was happening to me. I was being taken over by the media. I was even trying to live up to this manufactured person of the writers' imaginations and behave more outrageously. I flirted more, wore sexier clothes. It was ridiculous.

Sometimes it is tempting to play the roles assigned to you by others. But it is dangerous. Always play the roles you want to play. Don't pretend to be something you're not, unless of course it's a fantasy you've decided upon. You don't belong to other people. You belong to yourself. What you are is all you have-everything around you can change-and it is important to develop that self and strengthen it. I suppose what I'm really talking about is your soul, you inner self. That must be your own. You can't be free and romantic until you know who you are. And you can't love another person properly until you know and love yourself.

I think I first began to see how foolish I was to let go of my own identity when I reported for my first day of work on the Bond set.

The producer took one look at me--with the designer clothes, make-up, hair, everything--and said, "You look dreadful."

"I think I look dreadful, too. But this is what I was told you wanted."

"You looked better when you came to my office."

"Well, that's the way I dress, that's the way I really am," I said.

From then on, when it came to clothes, I made a point of wearing only what I thought right for me and for the character I was playing.I bcame involved in dress designing, and showed the costume designers what I liked and what I thought would work on me. A character and its clothes have to be part reality. They have to be based on you. This was how my infamous wardrobe began.

It's the same for life outside the world of acting: you must always follow your own tastes. If you wear only what other people think looks good, if you wear the latest fashion just because it is the latest fashion, you won't be comfortable, and therefore you won't look good. Beauty comes from being content with your body, with your mind, with your clothes, and with your face. Your clothes should express you, bring out the qualities in you, help you to be yourself. You should discover what is romantic for you, not just copy the looks of others. Wear veils, wear white, wear hats, wear your hair in a way that is special to you. Find out what you look marvelous in, and what suits your life, and wear it. You may surprise yourself and love the changes. Find a sense of humor to suit your style.

I look forward to the day when my children's children will ask, "Granny, what did you do while you were growing up?" and I'll be able to show them a picture of me as Solitaire, tied to a stake and looking very sexy and wild . . . my wild, misspent youth.

I was still developing, testing, trying to find out who I might be, what I could do, what I wanted. Teh last person I needed was someone who took me over. So do as I say, not as I did, and grow up before marrying. I am explaining about my marriages, so that you can learn from my mistakes, and perhaps marry the right man the first time. Also, I want to warn you not to take the romantic side of your nature to extremes. People think it is the sign of a hardened, unromantic person to marry more than once. Quite the opposite. It is usually the sign of a romantic, someone who loves to fall in love and follow the whole dream to its conclusion. Of course, the romance and the wedding the honeymoon are all marvelous. But don't get too carried away. Temper your romanticism with good sense.

Learn from my mistakes. There is no doubt that romantics like me make many rash, hasty decisions. We want everything to be perfect, so we convince ourselves it it. We want an ideal, everlasting marriage, so we marry as soon as we can. We reach for the skies, but if you keep reaching for the skies you might just get there and leave your partner abandoned, earthbound.

Mix your romanticism with good sense. Try to have moments of realism. Perhaps if you learn from my mistakes, you'll have just one, good marriage. At all costs, marry as a grownup, not as a child.

At what stage did I grow up? I don't quite know. But I know that over the last few years, I have become a calmer, stronger person than ever before.

Some people are grown up at twenty, some not grown up at forty. It is not a matter of years but of personality and experience.

Become yourself before marrying someone else. It's not fair to anyone to enter into solemn vows if you are in a state of flux. Once you are confident of yourself, once you love yourself, once you are a grown woman instead of a girl, then you are capable of loving someone else with maturity and wisdom. Until then, in my experience, the love affairs should remain romance, and not develop into that deeper kind of romance called "marriage," especially if you mean to have children.