In 1895, the year that Consuelo Vanderbilt married the Duke of Marlborough, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner wrote that some $200 million had “gone away from these shores” in the form of heiresses’ financial worth. In 1908 a play entitled The Stronger Sex, staged at Weber’s Theater on Broadway, took as its subject matter the pursuit of a rich girl by fortune-hunting noblemen, a practice that, according to one critic, “has become a public scandal.”
The practice was not really going anywhere—between 1933 and 1964 Barbara Hutton would marry five European aristocrats—but as a fashion, an industry even, it was on the way out. “We have heard that story before—till we can barely hear it patiently again,” wrote The Times in 1917 of a musical comedy at the Shaftesbury Theater, whose central character was an American heiress pursued by an impoverished European aristocrat, blah, blah, blah.
