Princesses Behaving Badly (26 page)

By 1904, more than 20 American women, most of them heiresses, could call themselves Princess Something or other. By 1915, that number had more than doubled, to 42. And it wasn’t just princesses—American women were duchesses, countesses, marchionesses, and more. In 1914, 60 peers and 40 sons of peers of Britain were married to American heiresses, so many that Britain’s prime minister, Lord Palmerston, commented, “Before the century is out, those clever and pretty women from New York will pull all the strings in half the chancelleries in Europe.”

But a fancy title doesn’t always bring happiness, as Clara Ward cautioned. Members of entrenched European nobility were apt to regard newcomers with suspicion, no matter how desperately they craved their cash. Jennie Jerome, Winston Churchill’s allegedly tattooed American mother, wrote in her diary about the welcome such princesses received: “Anything of an outlandish nature might be expected of her. If she talked, dressed and conducted herself as any well-bred woman would … she was usually saluted with the tactful remark; ‘I should never have thought you were an American’—which was intended as a compliment.… Her dollars were her only recommendation.”

G
OOD MONEY
,
BAD MARRIAGE

A lot of these unions didn’t work out. Gladys Deacon, for example, the beautiful daughter of a millionaire Boston banker, had huge blue eyes, a classic profile, and a forceful personality that would have been much less enchanting in someone less attractive. In the late 1890s, she met the duke of
Marlborough, whose palatial estate, Blenheim Palace, was immensely appealing. He, however, was already married to another Dollar Princess, though both were itching for a divorce. That didn’t happen until 1921, when Gladys was 40 and had already ruined her good looks. (At the age of 22, she’d injected paraffin wax into her nose in a bid to maintain its shape, which was just as bad an idea as it sounds.) The duke married her anyway, but life with this millionairess didn’t prove any better than with the last one. Gladys once brought a revolver to dinner and when asked why, remarked, “Oh, I don’t know, I might just shoot Marlborough.” Hubby had her committed, and she spent the last 15 years of her life confined to a hospital. She died in 1977, at the age of 96.

H
APPILY EVER AFTER

Others did find happiness, of a sort, and Winnaretta Singer was one of them. She was the twentieth of sewing-machine tycoon Isaac Singer’s 24 children (fathered through two legal and three common-law marriages). Born in America, she grew up in Britain and France; when her father died in 1875, 11-year-old Winnaretta was left with a $900,000 fortune (more than $18 million today). Her first marriage was to Prince Louis-Vilfred de Scey-Montbéliard, in 1887. Family lore claims that the groom entered the bridal suite to find his new wife armed with an umbrella and perched atop the wardrobe, threatening, “If you touch me, I’ll kill you!” No surprise that they separated after only 21 months and were divorced in 1891. It becomes even less surprising when one knows that Winnaretta was a lesbian.

The one good thing that came from this failed marriage was that, once wed, Winnaretta was free to conduct avantgarde
salons
, those meetings of artists, novelists, philosophers, composers, and musicians. These would spark her fruitful lifelong career as a patron of the arts, most especially of modern music. She encouraged Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, and
Jean-Baptiste Faure and hosted soirées with Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Oscar Wilde. The musical and artistic landscape of Paris—and, indeed, of all Europe—was infinitely enriched by her presence.

Her next marriage was also to a prince, but this time it was a much better match: Prince Edmond de Polignac was 31 years her senior, a musician and composer, and gay. His friends and family knew that Winnaretta was looking for a
mariage blanc
, that is, a union that would never be consummated. They also realized that Edmond was broke, and, to persist in hosting
salons
, Winnaretta needed a certain aristocratic rank. The deal was done.

The two were married on December 15, 1893, and in many ways it was a true love match: their mutual love of
salons
, of music and art, meant that they never lacked for things to talk about, were always each other’s best friend, and could still enjoy romantic relationships on the side. Winnaretta’s Sapphic conquests were numerous and simultaneous: she was widely assumed to be a part of a lesbian artistic and aristocratic subculture, called “Paris-Lesbos,” that included women like the writer Collette, the poet Renée Vivien, and the marquise de Morny. Edmond died in 1901, after nearly eight years of domestic harmony. Winnaretta remained a patroness and benefactor until her own death on November 25, 1943.

Gloria von Thurn und Taxis

B
ORN
F
EBRUARY
23, 1960
G
ERMANY AND THE ÜBERRICH DEVASTATINGLY DECADENT LANDSCAPE OF THE
1980
S

T
he year was 1986, and Prince Johannes von Thurn und Taxis’s million-dollar sixtieth birthday party had been going on for days. His health had been toasted at a white-tie lobster and caviar dinner, at a lobster and pheasant luncheon, and at a lobster and roasted-pig dinner. But the final evening’s entertainment was by far the
most sumptuous: an outlandish, preposterous eighteenth-century costume ball that began at 9:30 that night and ended at 9:30 the next morning. Conspicuous consumption doesn’t even begin to describe it.

The 500-room castle, Schloss St. Emmeram, was teeming with celebrities such as Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall as well as greed-is-good-decade richies like Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. All were dressed, without a whiff of irony, as the doomed, diamond-bedecked aristocracy of prerevolutionary France. Guests arrived at the castle’s courtyard to find servants in peasant getups plucking chickens and building bonfires (of the vanities?); they wandered through a disco maze of lights and mirrors, to be deposited in the Hall of Muskets, whose beams were festooned with strings of sausages. There were mountains of lobster, fountains of champagne, and a cake decorated with 60 marzipan penises serving as candles.

At last, Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis made her entrance. She was dressed, of course, as Marie Antoinette, wearing a powder-pink $10,000 bespoke gown and a two-foot-tall powdered wig topped with the French queen’s own pearl tiara. Later that night, she sang “Happy Birthday” to her beloved husband from atop a gilded cloud while accompanied by the Munich Opera. But the high times weren’t to last, and Princess Gloria was destined to come crashing down to earth.

Gloria had become Princess von Thurn und Taxis—or, to give her official title, Mariae Gloria Ferdinanda Gerda Charlotte Teutonia Franziska Magarethe Frederike Simone Johanna Joachima Josefine Wilhelmine Huberta Princess von Thurn und Taxis—in 1980, when she married Prince Johannes. He was 53 when he met the 19-year-old barmaid in Munich; they hit it off and were hitched within a year. He was a big personality who made no secret of his romantic interest in both sexes, and he enjoyed pulling pranks on unsuspecting friends, such as lacing banquet dinners with laxatives and dropping herrings down women’s dresses.

The bisexual jokester was also the wealthiest noble and biggest landowner in Germany. (Though the German nobility was dismantled in 1919, at the birth of the Weimar Republic, nobles got to keep their titles
and their money.) His family could trace its fortune back to thirteenth-century Lombardy, when they got in on the (very) ground floor of the Holy Roman Empire postal service. The Tassis family (from the Italian word for badger), as they were called back then, earned their wealth and status operating a local courier service; by 1489 Franz von Taxis became the empire’s official postmaster and held a virtual monopoly. In 1512 the family von Taxis was given their patents of nobility from Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, and by the seventeenth century they got to add Thurn, a derivative of Torre, to their name, on the claim that a way-back ancestor was a Torriani duke. (Really, it was just a great opportunity to add a tower next to the badger on the coat of arms.) In any case, 700 years and several banks, timber mills, breweries, and private forests later, Johannes was worth a reported $3 billion.

Though Gloria was also an aristocrat—a countess by birth—her family wasn’t wealthy. But growing up without money didn’t seem to impair her ability to spend it. She and her husband bought huge amounts of art, traveled the globe, and became fixtures of tabloids and glossy mags the world over. They threw wild parties that lasted days; his birthday fete was just one of many held at their massive castle in Bavaria, a stately pile that Gloria once said “makes Buckingham Palace look like a hut.”

In 1985 an interviewer for
Vanity Fair
magazine dubbed Gloria “Princess TNT, the dynamite socialite”—the name stuck and Gloria more than lived up to it. She barked like a dog on
Late Night with David Letterman
and got busted for possession of hashish at the Munich airport. She wore sweaters made out of teddy bears and received Holy Communion wearing a witch’s hat. She dyed her hair every hue of the rainbow, wore it in a Mohawk, or teased it up like the plumes of a peacock, earning her the additional sobriquet “Punk Princess.” She rode Harleys and horses, partied with Prince and princes, danced on tables in a Paco Rabanne chainmail minidress, and dressed as a cowgirl for fancy balls.

But after the boozy excess of the ’80s came the swift and devastating hangover of the ’90s. In December 1990, Gloria’s wild partying ended abruptly
with the death of her husband—and the discovery that their estate was a stunning $576 million in debt. At least $80 million was in owed death and estate taxes; a recessionary climate and bad investments made up the rest. Gloria also had three children under the age of 10, including 8-year-old Prince Albert, who would inherit the property and the debt when he turned 18.

The punk princess needed to make some big changes if she hoped to preserve the family fortune. As she told London’s
Daily Telegraph
, “My fairy story is over. You can’t be a fairy and meet a payroll.” And so the pink hair went, as did a number of family treasures. Almost immediately, Gloria settled with the state of Bavaria, which took $30 million in art and artifacts in lieu of the unpaid taxes. She sold 24 of their 27 cars, laid off the liveried staff at the family’s six castles, and sold a few unused properties. Then she enlisted the aid of Sotheby’s to get rid of even more family possessions, earning $13.7 million. The following year she held a second auction, which included 75,000 bottles of wine, netting another $19 million.

Her economy, however, did not endear her to her late husband’s family, who balked at auctioning off her son’s inheritance and questioned her right to do so. Father Emmeram, an uncle on her husband’s side and a 91-year-old Benedictine hermit, denounced the princess as a “ruthless minx.” But Gloria was a realist—some things in the family vaults were more valuable than others. “Albert can buy a new tureen anytime he needs one,” she said, “but he can hardly go out and buy a forest.” She soon realized, however, that pawning all the silver wouldn’t be enough to put the family fortune in the black. So she dug in further: she reviewed the family portfolio, cut bad investments, sold a few banks that weren’t performing. And she got creative. The castle, which had been a private residence for hundreds of years, was opened to the public for tours. She also wasn’t above trading on her own colorful image to reel in the tourists. “At the end of the day, my green and blue and yellow hair made me interesting and made this place interesting,” she said in 2006. “If I have 150,000 visitors a year, it’s not only because they want to see the history of the Thurn und Taxises, but also where Gloria lives.” Parts of the castle were also rented out for office space.

The punk princess spent the decade teaching herself corporate law
and economics; the chainmail minidress was replaced with Chanel suits. She largely disappeared from the pages of the tabloids that had once thrilled to her every hair-color change and bizarre ensemble. “I didn’t see anybody socially, because I was so tired in the evening,” she told
Vanity Fair
in 2006. “But I got to know all the companies, and I got to know the problems, and I could make decisions.” The 1990s weren’t easy, but by 2002 Gloria’s efforts had paid off. According to
Bloomberg Business Week
, the family conglomerate was enjoying a 10 percent return.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, Gloria’s transformation from TNT into an upstanding businesswoman and representative of German nobility was complete. In 2001, she even wrote a best-selling guide to good manners,
Our Etiquette: The World of Good Manners from A to Z
, coauthored with her good friend and fellow aristocrat Alessandra Borghese. Even more important, she managed to avoid becoming another parable of the price of 1980s greed culture.