When Alva Vanderbilt demanded a divorce from her husband, it became an instant scandal. Some blamed a mistress. Others whispered that Alva herself had strayed. No one guessed the real, sickening reason, and the truth would stay buried for years, tangled up in the story of her closest friend.
The women caught up in these marriages were called dollar princesses, a term born in the Gilded Age. Wealthy American families, the new railroad and industrial rich, married their daughters off to prestigious but often penniless European noble houses. The daughters brought fortunes. The husbands brought titles.
And what the brides usually got in return was misery. One of the first true dollar princesses became the most infamous of them all. Born in 1854, Jeanette Jennie Jerome was the daughter of an American financier and speculator. She had an aura of mystery to match her father’s money, and a commenter once noted that she had more of the panther than of the woman in her look.
Her parents knew exactly what they had on their hands, and they were not going to let it go without a profit. In 1873, while at a regatta with the future King Edward VII, Jennie met Randolph Churchill, the third son of the Duke of Marlborough. With her beauty and her money, she was irresistible to the young lord. He proposed within three days.
Their families spent the better part of a year arguing over payments and inheritances before the marriage finally took place. The same year she was married, Jennie gave birth to her greatest claim to fame, her son Winston, the future Prime Minister of Britain. Winston was born two months premature after Jennie reportedly fell, which made many wonder whether she had been pregnant before the wedding. When asked about his odd birth, Winston characteristically quipped that although he was present on the occasion, he had no clear recollection of the events leading up to it.
Whatever passion Jennie had for her husband did not last long. She was something of an absent mother to Winston and his younger brother John, which was not uncommon at the time. More unusual was where she spent her time instead, with a series of extramarital lovers pulled from the highest ranks of society, including King Edward VII himself. And this had surprising consequences.
Her affairs did not bring her closer to her husband, but they helped his career. The men she took to bed were so powerful that her affairs doubled as diplomatic sessions, and Lord Churchill rose steadily in esteem. Jennie even managed to become friends with Queen Alexandra, her lover’s wife, who was fully aware of the relationship. In 1895, Randolph Churchill died, leaving Jennie a widow.
She hardly changed her habits. Now in her forties and still in possession of her great beauty, she married George Cornwallis-West, a man just nineteen days older than her son Winston, who nicknamed her Pussycat. But there was no happily ever after. By 1909, Cornwallis-West had fallen out of love with his much older wife and began an affair with Jennie’s close associate, the famed actress Mrs.
Patrick Campbell. After Jennie and Cornwallis-West divorced in 1914, he turned around and married Campbell. Jennie did not respond well. In the summer of 1918, well into her sixties, she married Montagu Phippen Porch, a man who also happened to be three days younger than her son Winston.
It was scandalous at the time, but there was no time to see if the marriage would work. Jennie Jerome’s final days were as ugly as they come. In May 1921, while her husband was away, she slipped on a staircase in high heels and broke her ankle. Gangrene set in quickly, forcing an amputation in June to save her life.
It was fruitless. Later that month, Jennie died at sixty-seven from a post-amputation hemorrhage. Where Jennie Jerome skillfully navigated the currents of European society, the next dollar princess nearly drowned. Railroad magnate Jay Gould was one of the most forceful and cutthroat businessmen of the Gilded Age.
When his daughter Anna was born in 1875, people likely figured she was in for a wild if privileged ride. They were regrettably right, and most of her trouble stemmed from March 14, 1895, the day the twenty-year-old heiress married Boniface de Castellane, or Boni, the son and heir of the Marquis de Castellane. It was a mismatched pair, and not just because of her massive wealth and his relatively impoverished name. Anna was plain-looking and certainly no great beauty.
Boni was infamously vain and a notorious dandy. He stunned Americans with his flashy continental style, but he soon stunned Anna for another reason entirely. Boni was an unstoppable force in society, and he quickly became an unstoppable force in Anna’s bank account. Truly using his heiress’s dowry for all it was worth, Boni went through an incredible ten million of the Goulds’ money in just a handful of years, spending much of it on excessive gifts for his string of mistresses.
In 1906, Anna divorced him and, perhaps surprisingly, married his cousin Elie de Talleyrand instead. They stayed together until Talleyrand’s death in 1937, though it was hardly a fairy tale. In 1929, Anna’s eldest son with her second husband took his own life after the couple refused him permission to marry. Still, if the best living is a good revenge, Anna Gould ended up winning on that front.
Soon after the civil divorce, Boni decided he wanted to marry again within the Catholic Church, which meant he needed an annulment of his first marriage from the Vatican. The process proved nightmarish for him. After several trials and decisions, it took until 1924 for their union to finally be annulled. As Time magazine put it, probably not since Henry VIII tried in vain to get an annulment of his marriage with Catherine of Aragon had a matrimonial case been so long in the courts.
While Anna’s attack on her husband was slow, one dollar princess took an explicitly violent route. Born in 1865 in Yonkers, New York, Winnaretta Singer was one of the heiresses to the massive Singer sewing fortune. The family fortune was so big that even though Winnaretta was the twentieth of an incredible twenty-four children from her father Isaac Singer, she still had a million-dollar inheritance. This was too enticing for many noble suitors to ignore, but any amorous man who came into contact with Singer learned to regret it.
Her young life was tragic and tumultuous, a childhood spent moving between European countries before her father died when she was ten. When her mother remarried, it was to a brute of a man who abused her, spurring the young girl to seize control of her inheritance the moment she came of age and go live on her own. It was not long before she was in a new kind of trouble. Despite her relative freedom and objective wealth, at twenty-two Winnaretta found herself married to the French nobleman Count Louis de Ségur-Montaigne, a man who surely enjoyed the prospect of her family money.
But the count likely never enjoyed the prospect of Winnaretta herself, because on their wedding night he found out her secret. People within her inner circle knew she was a lesbian, but Count Louis seemed to have missed that gossip until he learned about it the hard way. When the two were alone after the wedding, Singer reportedly climbed onto an armoire and threatened to kill the count if he so much as touched her. Somehow, Winnaretta managed to make marriage work for her.
Just not this one. After five years, the count and Singer had the marriage annulled by the Catholic Church, having a much easier time of it than Boni and Anna Gould, not least because there was little evidence of intimate relations. In 1893, the twenty-eight-year-old Winnaretta married another noble, the fifty-nine-year-old Prince Edmond de Polignac, in a lavender marriage that suited the lesbian Singer and the gay Polignac quite well. Of course, this only made it easier for Singer to stir up drama.
The leading women of her day seemed to find her irresistible, and over the years she carried on affairs with the likes of the beautiful painter Romaine Brooks and King Edward VII’s rumored illegitimate daughter Olga de Meyer. The other people in these women’s lives sometimes found her infuriating. One scorned lover reportedly turned up outside Singer’s Venetian palazzo and ordered her, If you are half the man I think you are, you will come out here and fight me. For every romping story like Winnaretta Singer’s, the dollar princesses had ten more tragedies, even when their marriages were loving.
Mary Curzon is one of the most famous dollar princess success stories, but her fate after marriage was as tragic as they come. Born in 1870 in Chicago as Mary Leiter, her father was an incredibly successful merchant, and Mary earned a reputation for being as well-bred and educated as she was beautiful. When she caught a husband, he was a very big fish indeed. Soon after being introduced to London society, the twenty-year-old Mary met the thirty-five-year-old George Curzon, a member of Parliament and heir to the barony of Scarsdale.
Unlike so many other dollar princesses, Mary was drawn to George more for his political aspirations than for his title, and their marriage in 1895 was a genuine love match. It would rocket them both to international power. Like Jennie Jerome, Mary was one of the most charming diplomatic wives around, and when her new husband won re-election to Parliament soon after their wedding, many credited his bride’s sweet smiles for the feat. A handful of years later, George became Viceroy of India, with Mary becoming Vicereine, the highest official title in the Indian Empire for a woman.
She seemed to have it all, which is when fate snatched it away. In truth, something had been missing from the Curzon marriage for a while, a son and heir that George desperately wanted. Instead, Mary gave birth to a succession of three girls, the last of whom was born during her time as Vicereine in 1904. Though she tried to get pregnant again right after, she suffered a bitter miscarriage.
Weighed down by her failure and her endless political duties, Mary’s health grew frail until the day it snapped. The couple was back in England for a brief visit when Mary fell so ill she started slipping in and out of a coma. She made a miraculous recovery, but doctors had been telling her husband to prepare to say goodbye. It was not warning enough.
Due back at his post, George returned to India with Mary’s blessing, leaving her to convalesce alone. True to form, she pushed herself to get better. When she was barely able to move around, and only then with help, she wrote to George and told him she would join him in India shortly. She followed through, far earlier than she likely should have.
In the summer of 1906, Mary Curzon’s body finally gave out entirely. An illness and an awful cough that shook her bones took over, and she wrote to her brother that she sometimes feared she would never be well again. She was right. That July, she suffered a fatal heart attack at just thirty-six years old, proving that even when a dollar princess’s marriage goes well, it can still go wrong.
While Mary Curzon helped shape British politics for years to come, the next dollar princess helped shape an American dynasty, in its back door bedroom dealings. Consuelo Yznaga isn’t well known today, but she is embedded in American history. Born in New York City in 1853, she hailed from Cuban nobility and a long line of plantation owners. She grew up with the future elite of New York society, what novelist Edith Wharton would go on to describe as the buccaneers.
Her childhood best friend Alva Smith married William Vanderbilt, scion of the American Vanderbilt family. Yznaga’s own marital accomplishments were formidable. While Alva kept her money stateside, Yznaga went the dollar princess route, marrying George Montagu, the future Duke of Manchester, and bringing with her an eye-popping dowry worth multiple millions in today’s money. Consuelo Yznaga had been sold a fairy tale, but almost as soon as she settled into her new European estates, she realized something had gone horribly wrong.
Her husband might have been a future duke, but he was also a brute. In less than a decade, he squandered all the money she brought in on gambling and mistresses. He was so far gone that Yznaga’s father-in-law banished the couple to Ireland for years to get him under control. When Consuelo emerged back into society, it didn’t get much better.
Though her husband died in 1892, her new freedom may not have been a healthy development. Around the same time, Alva Vanderbilt shocked society by demanding a divorce from her husband William. Rumors flew as to the reason, and the truth may have been more scandalous than anyone could have guessed. According to whispers from those who knew the couple, William Vanderbilt hadn’t just cheated on his wife.
He had cheated with her best friend, Consuelo Yznaga. Perhaps the most poignant part was that Alva had named her own daughter, Consuelo Vanderbilt, after her traitorous friend, who was also the girl’s godmother. And this goddaughter had possibly the worst time as a dollar princess of them all. From the moment of Consuelo Vanderbilt’s birth in 1877, Alva was determined that her daughter make an aristocratic European match, just like her namesake.
She forced the girl to wear a steel rod from a young age to perfect her posture and would whip her with a riding crop at any sign of misbehavior. The Vanderbilt matriarch was open and unapologetic about her control. When Consuelo once protested, her mother retorted, I do the thinking. You do as you are told.
Like her predecessors, Consuelo won both the family and genetic lottery, being both unimaginably wealthy and unimaginably beautiful. Peter Pan playwright James Barrie wrote that he would stand all day in the street to see Consuelo get into her carriage, raving about her piquant oval face and long slender neck. By the time she reached maturity, she was the embodiment of the slim look that characterized women of the Edwardian era, and her mother knew it all too well. When Consuelo became of marriageable age, Alva was sure she could win her daughter one of the biggest catches in Europe, Charles Spencer Churchill, the ninth Duke of Marlborough, an illustrious family man and a cousin of Winston Churchill.
There was just one thing Alva hadn’t counted on. Consuelo was singularly uninterested in the Duke, title or not, because she was utterly in love with a socialite named Winthrop Rutherford, a man fifteen years her senior with less than half the possibilities of a Duke of Marlborough. When it came to keeping Rutherford, the normally compliant Consuelo got rebellious. Instead of caving to Alva’s demands, she planned to elope with Rutherford, ending the marriage negotiations with the Duke once and for all.
But her domineering mother was ready. When Alva got wind of the plans, she locked her daughter in her room, threatening to harm Rutherford and force Consuelo down the aisle. As Consuelo staunchly refused to marry anyone but Rutherford, Alva began getting extremely ill, a sickness apparently brought on by her daughter’s stubborn refusal to listen. The more Consuelo stood her ground, the closer Alva got to death’s door, until the girl, fearful she really was killing her mother, agreed to the wedding at last.
At that point, Alva suddenly made a full recovery, enough to witness one of the worst days of her daughter’s life. Consuelo’s wedding to the Duke of Marlborough was the talk of society, as was her strange behavior on the day. She spent her time at the altar uncontrollably weeping behind her veil. The Duke collected 2.
5 million, nearly 100 million in today’s money, as a marriage settlement that would inject new life into his dilapidated estates. It only took the honeymoon for Consuelo to realize the full impact of her mistake. Not only was the Duke a relatively shallow man, he was also completely dismissive of her. He made a series of chilling confessions.
First, he admitted he had only married her to save Blenheim, his ancestral home. Then he informed her that he, too, was completely in love with someone else and didn’t intend to romance her beyond producing an heir. Consuelo did give the Duke a son, but she was still miserable and rekindled her relationship with Winthrop Rutherford. She was as in love as ever and eventually confessed to her husband that she still wanted to elope.
There were even rumors that her second son belonged to Rutherford, not the Duke. The Duke reluctantly agreed to consider a split, and in 1900 Consuelo went to London to discuss an elopement with Rutherford, only to receive the shocking news that he didn’t want to marry her. In the desperate aftermath, she began an affair with the Duke’s cousin, Reginald Fellows, and may have done the same with the artist Paul César Helleu. Before long, the Duke and Duchess were barely on speaking terms.
They separated in 1906 and officially divorced in 1921. In a too little, too late moment of vindication, even Consuelo’s own mother, Alva, admitted during the court proceedings that the marriage was a mistake, confessing, I forced my daughter to marry the Duke. Eventually, Consuelo did find happiness when she married Jacques Balsan, an early lover of Coco Chanel. She remained married to him until his death in 1956.
When Consuelo herself died in 1964, many saw it as the true end of a not-so-gilded era and the end of the dollar princesses. However, one of the very first dollar princesses preceded the Gilded Age, and her dramatic life and tragic marriage set the pattern for the women who followed her. Born in February 1785, Elizabeth Patterson was the eldest daughter of merchant William Patterson, the second wealthiest man in Maryland. From a young age, people considered her one of the most beautiful women in Baltimore, and she put her good looks to good use.
In 1803, she met Napoleon Bonaparte’s wayward brother Jerome, who was stalling around the United States, afraid to return to France because he knew the emperor was annoyed at his conduct during a recent military incident. Despite this warning sign, Elizabeth quickly developed a romance with him. Everyone around her was worried, and her father even received an anonymous letter claiming that any wedding vows Jerome made would only be for the sake of wasting more time in America. It was another warning, but the more objections there were, the more determined Elizabeth was to marry him.
She even threatened to elope if her father didn’t give an official union his blessing. On Christmas Eve 1803, months after first meeting Jerome, she became Napoleon Bonaparte’s sister-in-law. It was an unmitigated disaster. However irritated Elizabeth’s family was about Jerome, Napoleon himself was even more unhappy about his brother’s new wife.
When he heard about the union, the ruler ordered his brother back home without his bride so he could annul the mistake. Jerome did embark on the journey back to France, but he brought the now pregnant Elizabeth with him across the ocean. They were in for a rude awakening. When they landed, Napoleon’s men, on his orders, wouldn’t even let the American woman set foot in continental Europe.
Jerome, incensed, swore to Elizabeth he would do everything that must be done, then headed off to Italy to convince his brother to relent. Elizabeth waited for months for her husband to succeed, giving birth to a son in London in the summer of 1805 in the meantime. Even though she kept receiving letters from her husband saying he would never abandon her and that he was working on his brother, it never came true. Jerome eventually caved to Napoleon’s demands, accepting a post as an admiral and then the position of King of Westphalia for his troubles.
Napoleon made good on his word and annulled the union, with Elizabeth receiving an official divorce in 1815. Then, just two years after the birth of their son, whom Jerome refused to support, her ex-husband married another woman, the German princess Catharina von Württemberg. Elizabeth never saw her husband again, except in one excruciating moment. In 1822, they accidentally crossed paths in Florence at the Pitti Palace.
Reportedly, they made brief eye contact, and neither spoke a word. Afterward, Jerome informed his current spouse, who was with him, that this was his American wife. That was the last they saw of each other, though they both lived decades longer. Elizabeth passed away in 1879 at the age of ninety-four.
Yet for all that, at least Elizabeth Patterson chose and fought for her doomed marriage. Her successors weren’t always so lucky. Some were locked in rooms, some were forced down aisles, and some simply never had a choice at all.
The fairy tales they were sold turned out to be Faustian bargains, and one by one, the dollar princesses paid the price.