CURSE OF THE POOR LITTLE RICH GIRLS
Heiresses: The Lives Of The Million Dollar Babies Laura Thompson Head of Zeus £25 ★★★★★
Daisy Fellowes was what you might call a textbook heiress. In 1896, at the age of just six, she inherited a fortune thanks to her grandfather Isaac Singer, who had invented the sewing machine.
Posh, pretty and fabulously rich, Daisy had nothing to do all day but enjoy herself in inter-war London, Paris and New York.
She turned herself into a walking work of art. She wore black to weddings, white to funerals and sported the creations of the surrealist Elsa Schiaparelli, who invented her famous ‘shocking pink’ for her. Daisy was so proud of her body, kept in shape by dieting and quite a lot of drugs, that she received visitors in the bath, although shrouded in a cellophane cape for modesty’s sake.
One day out in Paris she noticed three charming little girls walking along with their nanny. ‘Whose children are they?’ she asked, only to be told they were hers.
None of this sounds particularly healthy, but Daisy was unusual for an heiress in enjoying her rackety life. Many of the other poor little rich girls in this fabulously entertaining book turn out to be thoroughly miserable.
There is Christina Onassis (pictured), who inherited a ship-owning fortune in the mid-1970s but was racked by the idea that she wasn’t thin or pretty enough. These feelings only got worse after her father married Jackie Bouvier Kennedy, who was not only an heiress but had the chic, gamine appearance and great clothes sense to go with it. Christina died in her 30s after four marriages and a heart attack caused by her lifelong battle with slimming pills.
Again and again, Laura Thompson shows how heiresses have an unfortunate knack of letting their fortune slip through their fingers, either through ridiculous extravagance or by marrying fortune-hunting men. In 1897 Cornelia Bradley-Martin and her husband held a costume ball at the Waldorf Hotel that cost $369,000, which would have fed almost 1,000 families for a year. A bystander noted that Cornelia was ‘so ablaze with diamonds from head to foot that she looked like a dumpy lighthouse’.
In the mid-20th Century Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress worth nearly $1 billion, clocked up seven husbands, including Cary Grant. She spent her money so compulsively, as if it were a curse, that when she died of a heart attack at age 66 she was virtually bankrupt.
Just occasionally an heiress got things more or less right. Angela Burdett-Coutts, a banking heiress, spent her money on good works. She teamed up with Charles Dickens to open a home for ‘fallen women’, sent a spin-dryer to Florence Nightingale to deal with damp bedsheets and set up sewing schools in the East End. Even so, she seems to have had the same
Achilles heel that affected less-worthy heiresses: men.
At age 66, Angela married her secretary, who was 29. Queen Victoria, who had long been jealous of Angela’s popularity as the Queen of Good Works, couldn’t wait to meet the happy couple. ‘She looked like his grandmother and was all decked out with jewels – not edifying,’ wrote the delighted Queen.