Top Dollar

ED: So far, we’ve heard about two women who pursued an imperial connection to the dismay of the families they married into. But titled families didn’t always turn up their noses at the thought of an American match, particularly if the woman came to the match with many.

BRIAN: At the end of the 19th century, dozens of American heiresses married into the British aristocracy. Known as dollar princesses, these women were from families that had recently struck it rich. Their fathers had made their money in railroads, department stores, or the stock market, rather than inheriting their wealth. Frozen out of New York’s high society marriage market, they traded American cash for old world status and respectability. I sat down with writer Angela Serratore to explore how this international marriage market began.

ANGELA SERRATORE: If you married somebody with a title, that kind of trumps everything else. And then suddenly, you have access to this New York society that has perhaps been a little bit hostile and you also have the pleasure of being able to skip it entirely, because it’s now beneath you.

BRIAN: OK, so since it takes two to tango, and certainly, to get married, what did the British families get out of this deal?

ANGELA SERRATORE: Well, to go back to your question about money talking, for them, money definitely did talk, in large part because if you are an Earl or a Duke or a Lord and you’ve got a large country estate, you’ve got to run that estate. But to have any other kind of employment is unthinkable, it’s just not something the upper classes and the nobility do. And these houses are expensive to take care of, the grounds are expensive to take care of. So if you marry a dollar princess, you’ve got a beautiful young wife, you’ve got an influx of cash immediately to fix up your house, pay any of your family’s debts and you’ve also got a guarantee of a yearly allowance for the rest of your life, which means, this sort of question of, how are we going to keep up financially, you never have to worry about it again.

BRIAN: And how did the finances work and how large were they? I mean, can you give me any examples?

ANGELA SERRATORE: Well, it certainly varies depending on the situation and how much money any given father has. But so the first big dollar princess is Jennie Jerome. And in 1874, she meets Lord Randolph Churchill and this is a real love match. They meet on a ship. Three days after they meet, they’re engaged. Both sets of families are a little bit hesitant. But the families come together and they negotiate and Jennie’s father gives Lord Randolph $50,000. So I don’t know exactly what that comes out to in–

BRIAN: That’s a lot of money.

ANGELA SERRATORE: –it’s a lot of money in 1874, though not as much as some people get. But that’s sort of the average. And then you would get maybe $10,000 a year as an allowance.

BRIAN: Is there more than just money entailed for these British families, do they benefit in other ways from these marriages?

ANGELA SERRATORE: I think they do. I think a lot of these American girls are bringing a kind of American spirit to Britain and I think, particularly when it comes to the political careers of some of these men and also the next generation, one thing that we haven’t mentioned is that the son that Jennie Jerome has with her husband, Lord Randolph Churchill is Winston Churchill.

BRIAN: Right.

ANGELA SERRATORE: Winston Churchill, when he was starting his political career through the end of his mother’s life, very rarely made a decision without consulting his mother. And that’s just not something England has really seen before.

BRIAN: So if you were to tell us about one, I don’t know, most representative dollar princess, who would that be?

ANGELA SERRATORE: Well, there’s only one answer to that and that is, Consuelo Vanderbilt who in 1895 marries the 9th Duke of Marlborough at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in New York.

BRIAN: I recognize the last name, Vanderbilt, but what was it about Consuelo that made her such a featured dollar princess?

ANGELA SERRATORE: It’s really the work of her mother, Alva. Consuelo’s mother is what the tabloids today might refer to as a momager. From the day Consuelo was born, it is Alva’s job to make her the sort of brightest, prettiest, best, most successful girl that society has ever seen. And when she comes onto the marriage market, every eligible suitor is interested.

And the Duke of Marlborough, who in the press, goes by his nickname, which is Sunny, is on paper, the most eligible of these bachelors. He is the heir to the estate of Blenheim, which today is still one of the most magnificent country estates in all of Great Britain. But he’s sort of a ne’er do well and Consuelo is very sheltered. At the time of her wedding, one of the newspapers says that she has all the naive frankness of a child. She’s very shy. She’s very close to her mother.

BRIAN: How old was she when she was married?

ANGELA SERRATORE: She was 18. And in the months leading up to her marriage, it’s in the papers every day. There’s a story about her bridesmaids. There’s a story about her jewelry. There’s a story– and I found this one really affecting– a couple of weeks before the wedding, about the lingerie that she’s going to wear on her wedding day. And this is sort of a shy 18-year-old girl and I can’t even imagine what she must have felt like having everybody in America read about her underwear.

BRIAN: And when you say, everybody in America, so it wasn’t just the upper classes that were reading about themselves here, I gather this was popular with the hoi polloi?

ANGELA SERRATORE: Oh yeah, these girls are celebrities. The day of Consuelo’s wedding, thousands of people show up outside the church. And the police are in sort of a tricky position, because they’ve got to keep the peace amongst the crowd, but the crowd is almost exclusively teenage girls and young women in their 20s. They’re trying to figure out how to manage the sort of very real wedding hysteria.

BRIAN: So dare I ask, what comes of their marriage?

ANGELA SERRATORE: It’s rumored that on the carriage away from the church after they’re married, Sunny starts to give Consuelo the lay of the land, what her life is going to be like in England. And one of the things that he mentions is that he’s got a mistress, he’s very in love with his mistress and he has no plans to give her up. And several papers and Consuelo’s autobiography itself reports seeing very real tears on her face before, during, and after the wedding. And none of these tears look particularly happy.

BRIAN: You know, I just have to ask, why would any parent do this to their daughter?

ANGELA SERRATORE: Consuelo’s marriage is certainly the most famous of these, but it’s also the moment at which people really do start to reconsider this whole enterprise? Parents are noticing that their daughters are not happy. American fathers with money too are getting fed up with sending their dollars overseas. Consuelo’s husband was gifted at the time of their marriage– stock in the Vanderbilt company worth $2.5 million in 1875. Her father, William Vanderbilt, agrees to give Consuelo and Sunny each a yearly allowance of $100,000.

And a lot of fathers in particular start to say to their wives, why don’t we just keep the money at home, where instead of frittering it away on some guy’s house, it’ll actually have the chance to multiply?

BRIAN: And what about the cache of laundering this money, if you will, into social status? This is a period in American history where Americans are beginning to feel a little more confidence. There’s a kind of America first emerge when it comes to social status.

ANGELA SERRATORE: Absolutely. And by the time we get to the late 1890s, anybody who is really eligible has been snapped up already. And a lot of the husbands that come at this point are really sort of aggressively painted as mercenary. Really, the point at which people say, we’ve got to stop doing this is in 1903, a Pittsburgh heiress named Alice Thaw, whose father was a railroad magnate, married the Earl of Yarmouth. And their wedding ceremony was delayed several hours, because on the morning of their wedding, the groom was arrested for failing to pay his gambling debts. And Alice’s father had to collect the groom from jail and renegotiate his compensation package.

BRIAN: Well, when you take a look at the Royal marriage today, do you see any parallels with 120 years ago.

ANGELA SERRATORE: I really do. I should also say that not all of these marriages are as disastrous as Consuelo’s and Sunny’s. Mary Leiter, whose father owns a chain of department stores in Chicago, marries in the 1890s– Lord George Curzon. And George Curzon eventually goes on to become the viceroy of India. And virtually everybody who has a political connection to him says that this is almost entirely because of the skill and charm of his wife. They’re a real romantic team and a real political team.

And I think Harry and Meghan seem very much like a love match, they seem crazy about each other. I hope they’ll be very happy. But I think it’s also important to remember that particularly now when you agree to join the Royal Family, you’re really signing a business contract. Meghan will have given up her work and taken up the job of becoming a royal. And she and Harry gave an interview on television the day after they announced their engagement and Megan did most of the talking.

BRIAN: So no dollar princess here. But clearly she’s bringing a lot to the table.

ANGELA SERRATORE: Yeah, Meghan is bringing I think a sort of future and continued relevancy to the royal family. Every year, newspapers in England run a poll– should we even have the monarchy anymore? Is it in 2018 perhaps distasteful to have a monarchy at all? And Meghan is new and different and vibrant, and I think that gives them continued relevancy.

ED: Angela Serratore is a writer based in New York. You can find her article on dollar princess– How American Rich Kids Bought Their Way Into The British Elite– on smithsonian.com. So thinking about the women we’ve heard about on the show today, it seems like something that all their marriages have in common is that they’re covered in the tabloids and such, but they have a real political impact as well. So the dollar princesses in particular got me thinking about how marrying well also had a political impact for families here in the US. A wife like Jennie Jerome or Mary Leiter could bring money to the table that her husband could use to run a political campaign and she could also bring political connections and her own political savvy, even if women couldn’t participate in politics directly. So Brian, Joanne, do you think these kinds of political marriages have happened in American history?