HEIRESSES AND CORONETS (282 pp.)—Elizabeth Eliot—McDowell, Obolensky
($5).
Exactly half a century ago, the New York Journal set out to protect the non-working girl, or U.S. heiress, from titled European fortune hunters. The newspaper printed a kind of form sheet of the international marital sweepstakes under the headings: American Heiress, Her Fortune. Man She Married. How He Treated Her. Samples:
¶ Anna Gould, $15,000,000, Count Boni de Castellane, who spent her money on other women, abused and struck her. ¶Lilian May, $1,000,000, Lord Bagot, who stopped her from taking her child to church.
¶ May Brady Stevens, $500,000, Major Hall, who did crochet work about the house.
¶Ella Haggin, $5,000,000, Count Festils de Toina, who took her among cannibals, left her with them.
Apart from Major Hall’s crochet hooks. the image that lingers longest with the reader is that of poor Ella Haggin on a coconut isle with the ominous thrum of bongo drums in her ear, while the natives chomp raw fish for an appetizer. Author Eliot confides that eventually Ella got a divorce, but otherwise she leaves this and many another story in just the tantalizingly scrappy shape she found it in family memoirs or the gossip sheets of the gilded age. Either because of fellow feeling (she is herself the child of an Anglo-American match and bears the title of Lady Elizabeth Kinnaird) or sheer absentmindedness, Author Eliot keeps drifting away from her subject—how a parcel of status-seeking mammas, nouveau riche papas, dutiful daughters and out-of-pocket noblemen staged the great white fortune hunt, or coronet safari, of the late 19th century.
The Syndicate. Between 1874 and 1910, more than 160 U.S. heiresses staged the first lend-lease program. They bestowed more than $160 million on the stately homes of England and the Continent. Some of them did worse than Ella Haggin among the cannibals. One traveled to Berlin only to find that, financially, she was the bride of a syndicate with shares in her dowry and income. Then there was a certain Lady T., who felt that her noble husband and his valet were strangely inseparable, but only when she got to the “earl’s” estate did she learn that he was a lunatic and the valet was his keeper.
While virtually all of these matches were made on a balance sheet, a few ended with mutual love and respect. Mary Leiter of Chicago married Lord Curzon and went with him to India, where she served selflessly as Vicereine. At her early death, he was heartbroken. She was beautiful, but her parents were colorful. Mamma Leiter was something of a malapropster. With an imperious gesture she would call attention to the imported “statutes in the nickies” of her marbled mansion in Washington, D.C.
Exit Society. Most U.S. heiresses got either what they wanted or what they deserved. At the hub of their international set was the portly, roguish Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, and moneyed maidens with broad Midwestern accents found Queen Victoria’s son much more democratic than Manhattan’s formidable Mrs. Astor and her chosen 400. At one time, the prince was much smitten by a Cleveland-born Miss Chamberlain. She reportedly cooled his ardors with a bit of
American sass by addressing him on a crowded dance floor as “Jumbo.”
Jumbo died in 1910, and the golden age of heiresses and coronets went with him. The same year, Mary Pickford became America’s sweetheart. As Author Eliot sees it, the events were symbolically linked. The age of society, such as it was, had ended, and the U.S. entered the age of celebrities, such as they are.
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