The Transatlantic Marriage Bureau

Husband hunting in the Gilded Age: How American heiresses conquered the aristocracy

Julie Ferry

• Publisher: Aurum
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781781316818
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia social

In 1895 nine American heiresses travelled across the Atlantic and bagged themselves husbands and titles. Though this phenomena had been happening for many years, 1895 was undoubtedly the most successful one for the unofficial marriage brokers Lady Minnie Paget and Consuelo Yzanga, Duchess of Windsor. For the English gentlemen the girls married it was a way to sustain their land, houses and all of the trappings of aristocracy. For the girls, who came from new money and were therefore not part of the American social elite, marriage was a means to obtaining the social prestige they craved. The Transatlantic Marriage Bureau will romp through the year to tell the story of these nine women – the seasons, the parties, the money and the titles - always with one eye on the remarkable women who made it happen behind the scenes.

1

Society Gathers

January 1895, New York

‘A girl of eighteen, she married old, stupid Stevens [sic]. They say she was a Lowell factory girl…’ – MARIA LYDIG DALY

Mrs Marietta Stevens, swathed in a sealskin rug and seated on a plush velvet cushion, gave the signal to her footman that she was ready to go. Central Park was enveloped in a beautiful blanket of crisp white snow, which sparkled under the dazzling light of the winter sun. The air was cold and fresh, the everyday sounds of the park muffled, so that there was an eerie sense of stillness all around. Marietta was, as usual, one of the first to arrive. It had long been her way to lead New York’s elite when on parade and today was no different. She had always found it preferable to survey the scene in advance, to take a moment to catch one’s breath before Society descended on an occasion.

Today, the Stevens sleigh had been prepared to display its full magnificence; after all, it was the beginning of a new year. Its runners had been highly polished, the brightly coloured red paintwork was freshly applied, and the footmen and coachmen looked resplendent in their livery, their black collars trimmed with piping that matched their red-topped boots. Marietta, in all probability, would have reflected that it had been the right decision to discard the yellow livery of old, and the new style had been much remarked upon – even the Chicago Tribune had called it ‘unique’¹⁵. With the elegant aigrettes unfolding magnificently from her horse’s heads, there really was nowhere like New York in the winter to display one’s finery.

A sleigh ride in Central Park was, of course, an informal occasion. Coinciding with the usual round of afternoon calls, it served as a departure from the normal routine of carriage rides and provided a chance for society to flaunt another opulent addition to its stable of transport. As the first sleighs began to gather in the distance, Marietta could instantly tell which families would be gathering on that fine January day. In as much as the red-and-black display she had created marked her out as Mrs Marietta Stevens, equally distinctive was the maroon livery of the Vanderbilts or the dark blue of Mrs Astor. For all those who were ‘in society’, appraising oneself of every detail of New York’s most prestigious families was a skill that was honed over many years, along with memorising the names of old families and new, those who were on the rise and those who had retreated to the fringes, those who entertained lavishly and those who clamoured for invitations. Retaining and using this information was part of the game; if it was played successfully, those in the fold kept their highly coveted place among the elite. Ladies and gentlemen who made mistakes could expect to slowly descend the social order, their names reduced to drawing-room whispers, until they faded away altogether, reduced to living in some unfashionable part of town, never to return.

Marietta may have shivered at the memory of her own beginnings on the edge of New York society. Even after years at the top, she must have remembered her past with the clarity of one who had so often been shunned: how she had meticulously planned her rise and the sacrifices she had made to be considered one of society’s foremost matrons. And there was Minnie. Without Minnie she might never have cemented her position. Minnie now lived far away but her influence was felt and respected by ambitious mothers and impressionable daughters throughout polite society. So if Marietta could help her now-powerful daughter’s business – matchmaking eager and rich heiresses with titled but poor English nobles – from her position in New York, by suggesting a mutually beneficial transaction to the parties involved, she was more than willing. After all, she had had plenty of experience of the marriage market.

Marietta Reed was only nineteen years old when she met Paran Stevens while visiting a friend in Boston. She was the daughter of Ransom Reed, a wealthy merchant of Lowell, Massachusetts, and Paran was a much older widower, twenty years her senior and the father of a daughter the same age as his future wife. It was 1850 and Paran was captivated by the tall, handsome brunette who quickly established herself amongst Boston’s younger set. They were soon married, with two children, Harry and Minnie, added to the family shortly afterwards. Paran had made his fortune as the proprietor of several smaller hotels, including the Revere Hotel in Boston, The Continental Hotel in Philadelphia and The Battle House in Mobile, Alabama. He was known ‘widely and favourably for his business activity and enterprise’¹ and he used his instincts to pursue his dream of building a modern establishment in the then unfashionable uptown district of Fifth Avenue, New York. Believing the area would soon be populated by the nouveaux riches who had made their money off the back of the Civil War, Paran staked his fortune on the success of the opulent Fifth Avenue Hotel.

For old New York, the uniformity and distinctive colour of the brownstone houses around Washington Square on the lower edges of Fifth Avenue provided safety and security. They were a nod to tradition, having been where the first Dutch settlers, known as Knickerbockers (an Americanisation of a common Dutch surname), had chosen to make their homes, and became a proud rebuke to the ostentatious mansions of the so-called Swells that were blighting the uptown landscape. Swells were millionaires from all corners of the United States, recently flushed with indescribable wealth gained from fortuitous investments and speculations on the success of the industrial age. They were the parvenus converging on New York, irrepressible social climbers desperate to buy their way into the respectability that the proud Knickerbocker families represented, but boasting instead gaudy homages to Italian palazzos, French chateaus and English palaces.

The Knickerbockers stood firm, hiding behind a curtain of conventionality and tradition. Society would not be moved into welcoming the Swells and their new money with open arms, nor would it relocate uptown and live next to profiteers attempting to show their refinement by building increasingly vulgar mansions in the European style. But what Paran and his ambitious new wife understood, that the New York elite failed to grasp, was the pace of change gripping the city. Life before and after the Civil War was markedly different, and the trickle of new money that quickly became a flood would gamble on cheap real estate to carve out its own fashionable quarter where the rest of society would follow. That quarter was Fifth Avenue.

In June 1856, construction began on the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Amos Richard Eno, a dry-goods merchant who had moved into the real-estate business and owned the site, wanted to build a hotel that resembled a white marble palace. It covered the whole of the Fifth Avenue block between 23rd and 24th Streets and took three years to build. Labelled ‘Eno’s Folly’ during construction, the project was widely believed to be doomed to failure, but Eno doggedly continued and found that, on completion, Paran Stevens shared his vision, leasing the hotel with the intention of turning it into the most luxurious of its kind in New York. The New York Times praised the vast white marble frontages in the Italian style that illuminated Madison Square and 23rd Street, declaring it the most opulent hotel offering within New York City. No expense had been spared by Paran on the lavish interior, with every eventuality accounted for. The hotel included a reading room, telegraph office, barber shop, ladies’ tea room and restaurant, as well as boasting a ‘perpendicular railway’, one of the very first elevators in the country. The Fifth Avenue Hotel was a triumph, whose reputation was cemented when, in 1860, the young Prince of Wales, Bertie, chose to stay there on his first visit to New York. This provided a magnificent opportunity that Marietta was able to capitalise on. She ensured that Paran redecorated the Prince’s suite of rooms, even borrowing a Rubens and a Rembrandt from respected city art dealers to adorn the walls. Neither Marietta nor her husband could have possibly predicted how the success of this single visit would transform their lives but it was the Stevens family’s initiation into pleasing the Prince of Wales, something that would become an almost full-time occupation for their only daughter, Minnie, in the years that followed.

However, for now, Marietta set about establishing herself as a society hostess, quietly observing that Sunday nights among the pious families of the Knickerbockers were deliberately left free of social occasions, so that they could respectfully spend the Sabbath at home. She had by now realised that the patronage of a royal prince at the Fifth Avenue Hotel was not enough to gain a foothold into the inner circle that counted Rhinelanders, Joneses and Belmonts as New York’s elite. She would need something more to force the issue of her acceptance. Suspecting that it was the female members of the ruling class who most objected to her humbler origins, Marietta set about enticing their husbands away from their prayer books by holding musicales at her home at 244 Fifth Avenue.

The chief draw was Marietta’s talented sister, Fanny Reed, who, it was later said, ‘sang her sister into society’². This view gives little credit to Marietta. If it was Fanny who had the voice, it was Marietta who had the ‘magnetic personality’³ and social savvy that quickly saw her parties become the talk of the city. Of course, society matrons were outraged and shunned her parties. As far as they were concerned, her flagrant challenge to the traditional order was shameful and branded her a parvenu of the worst kind. Mrs Mary Mason Jones, a formidable matriarch from one of New York’s oldest and most respectable families, declared, ‘There is one house that Mrs Stevens will never enter. I am old enough to please myself, and I do not care to extend my sufficiently large circle of acquaintances.’⁴

Mrs Jones couldn’t have known that after her death Marietta would have the last laugh by taking over the lease of her adversary’s palatial mansion, permanently taking her place in a residence to which she was so often denied admittance. At the time, one of Mrs Jones’...