The prince’s hand came down across his wife’s face with the opera house full around them. Albert I, sovereign of Monaco, had struck the woman who had built much of what that building represented. The audience in the seats she had helped fill sat frozen. The ruler of the country, in the theater his wife’s money and energy had raised into one of Europe’s great stages, had humiliated her in front of the very people she had brought there.

It is one of the most repeated scenes in the history of the Grimaldi family, and it marked the end of the arrangement. The marriage was over in everything but name. Two weeks later, back in New York, a small book was working its quiet way through the hands that mattered. Printed in 1890 by the publishing house of Street and Smith, it carried the name *Titled Americans*.

The Library of Congress still holds it today under that full title, and its title page promised something specific: the volume was to be annually revised, like a stock listing. In its first edition, it listed the women who had already married into European rank, with their husbands, their titles, and their houses. Then, at the back, it did something stranger. It printed a list of unmarried British peers, with their estates and their incomes.

The stated purpose was “to arouse the ambition of the American girl. ” A catalog. A shopping list. The princes and the earls on the right side of the page, the fathers’ checkbooks on the left.

The version of America that the public received was a fairy tale. Girls from Detroit, from New Orleans, from Sacramento, from a dry good store in Ohio, crossed the ocean and came home as princesses. Their fathers paid, the newspapers cheered, and everybody got what they wanted. But the people who signed those contracts left a paper trail.

And the paper trail told a different story. October 1889. Two weddings, two cities, forty-eight hours apart. On the twenty-eighth, in London, a young woman from Sacramento walked into the Brompton Oratory.

The air was cold and damp, and inside the chapel it smelled of wax and incense. Her name was Clara Huntington. Her adoptive father was Collis Huntington, one of the men who had built the railroad across the American West. Around her neck sat a gift from him: a necklace of eighty diamonds, each stone two or three carats.

At the altar waited Prince Franz von Hatzfeldt-Wildenburg, of an old German house. A Catholic bishop performed the service. The words were in Latin, and the bride was a grocer’s daughter. Two days later, on October 30, a widow from New Orleans named Alice Heine married Albert, the new reigning prince of Monaco.

He had held the throne for a matter of weeks. She was thirty-two. She was rich. She was about to become the first American-born princess of Monaco.

Picture those two women that week. Each believed she had just bought her way into the oldest club in the world. Neither one had read the fine print. The pattern began with money that was barely a generation old.

In the 1870s and 1880s, America had produced a new kind of family: railroad money, iron money, banking money, store money. Fortunes so large that their owners could buy almost anything. Almost. The one thing Fifth Avenue could not buy at home was a past.

New York society kept its doors shut to the newcomers, and their daughters stood at those doors with nowhere to go. Europe had the opposite problem. The old houses had titles, castles, and centuries of portraits. What they no longer had was cash.

Farm rents were falling, roofs were leaking, younger sons were running up debts at the gaming tables. Each side had what the other side needed. By one count often cited by historians of the period, 454 American heiresses married European aristocrats in those years. Forty-two of them married princes.

Alice Heine was born on February 10, 1857, in a house in the 900 block of Royal Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Her father, Michel Heine, was a German Jewish banker who had arrived in the city twenty years earlier. Her mother came from a wealthy Creole family. As a teenager, Alice moved with her parents to Paris, and the city took to her immediately.

At eighteen, she married Armand Chapelle de Jumilhac, the seventh Duke of Richelieu. It was a real title with a real name behind it. Five years later, in June 1880, the duke died in Athens. He was thirty-two.

Alice was a widow at twenty-three, with two small children and a fortune that one New Orleans history puts at seventeen million francs. She did not go home. She opened a salon in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and the young Marcel Proust came through her doors. He would later borrow her for a princess in his great novel.

Keep that thought, because the novel gave her a crown before Monaco did. Clara Huntington’s path was quieter and harder. She was born in Sacramento on March 13, 1860, the daughter of a grocer named Edwin Apprentice. Her father died when she was two.

Her aunt Elizabeth was married to Collis Huntington, and the couple took the little girl in and gave her their name. Collis was one of the Big Four of the Central Pacific Railroad, and by the time Clara was grown, his money could open almost any door in America. While traveling in Spain, Clara met Prince Franz von Hatzfeldt. He was handsome, well-connected, the nephew of the German ambassador in London, and very short of money.

One phrase has followed him ever since, repeated in every account of the marriage. He had, people said, a wine taste on a beer income. His debts were enormous. The exact figure varies with the teller; what the record does show is that Collis Huntington wrote the settlements, bought the jewels, and paid for the wedding.

Then there was the youngest and the wildest. Clara Ward was born in Detroit on June 17, 1873. Her father, Captain Eber Brock Ward, is often called Michigan’s first millionaire, a man who made his money in steamships and iron. He died in January 1875; Clara was not yet two years old.

She grew up with her mother, with money, and with almost no one able to tell her no. Schools in London and Paris could not hold her for long. When she was sixteen, her mother found her a husband: Joseph Prince de Chimay, from an old Belgian family with ties to the court of King Leopold II. He was thirty-one.

They married in Paris on May 20, 1890. One Michigan history puts her dowry at three and a half million francs. That figure comes from a single source, so treat it as a measure of scale rather than a receipt. Either way, a Detroit girl went to the altar, and the family castle got a new roof.

From the outside, it all worked. For a few years, each of these marriages looked exactly the way the newspapers wanted it to look. And nowhere did it look better than in Monaco. When Alice Heine arrived, the principality was a rock above the sea with a casino and a reputation.

Her husband, Prince Albert, had no great interest in either. His passion was the ocean. He spent months at a time aboard his research ships, measuring currents and dredging up creatures from the deep. So Alice took on the other half of the country.

She brought a fortune and a sharp head for business. She pushed the opera at Monte Carlo. She brought in singers and composers from Paris. She helped make that small principality one of the great stages of Europe.

The court that had needed her fortune began to need her judgment as well. In England, Clara Huntington became Princess Hatzfeldt, and she played the role with discipline. From 1896, she and her husband lived at Draycot House, an estate in Wiltshire. There were horses, house parties, and racing.

The prince became a familiar figure on the English turf. In 1906, one of his horses, Ascetic Silver, won the Grand National. Picture that afternoon at Aintree: the prince in the owner’s enclosure, the crowd roaring, the American money behind every hoof of that horse. The arrangement held.

There were no children and no scandal anyone could print. Then, in August 1900, Collis Huntington died. His will left Clara more than $2 million, a figure that later grew to around $6 million. Now think about where that money landed.

Not in Sacramento, and not in a bank account she controlled alone, but inside a princely household in Wiltshire, with racehorses to feed and a husband whose creditors had been waiting for years. The railroad fortune had become the upkeep of a German title. In Belgium, things went differently from the very start. Clara Ward was seventeen, American, and loud, and the court around Leopold II did not know what to do with her.

A daughter was born in 1891 and a son a few years later, but stories about the young princess spread fast. In one of them, still repeated in Michigan histories, she stood on the battlements of the family château and threw gold coins down to the villagers to watch them scramble. Whether it happened in those words, nobody can verify. What matters is that people believed it, and that the Chimay family began to wonder what they had married into.

The heiresses had paid for the title, but the title did not come with a welcome. It came with an audience, and that audience was waiting for them to fail. The first crack came on a November night in 1896, in a restaurant in Paris. Prince and Princess de Chimay were dining out.

There was a gypsy orchestra in the room, and at its head a Hungarian violinist named Rigo Jancsi. He was not young, he was not rich, and he had nothing a catalog would list. He played toward their table. Picture that room: the silver, the candles, the prince looking at his plate, and the princess, twenty-three years old, looking at the violinist.

There were secret meetings after that. Within weeks, Clara Ward left her husband and left Paris with Rigo. On December 24, 1896, a small newspaper in Ludington, Michigan, ran the story under a three-word headline: “Gone with a Gypsy. ” The scandal went around the world.

On January 19, 1897, the prince divorced her. Now the children. This is the moment the story stops being a joke for the society pages. Clara Ward had a daughter of five and a son of two.

When she walked out of that marriage, she walked out of their lives. She gave up custody. One account says she agreed to keep paying for their upbringing, and that is the most the record says on her behalf. She chose a man and a fiddle over her own children.

What she felt in that moment, no one recorded. But she was twenty-three. She had been married off at sixteen. And for the first time in her life, she had picked something herself.

She knew what it would cost, and she paid it in full. Her mother cut her out of the family money. Belgium closed its doors to her for good. And Clara went somewhere no princess had gone before.

She went on stage. In Paris, she began performing in what were called poses plastiques: standing motionless under the lights in a tight body stocking, a living statue. She appeared at the Folies Bergère. Photographs of her in those poses still survive.

In 1897, Toulouse-Lautrec made a lithograph of the couple and called it *Idylle Princière*, a princely idyll. The title was a joke, and all of Paris got it: a princess and a café musician drawn by the painter of the music halls. There is a well-known cake in Budapest that still carries the violinist’s name, the Rigo Jancsi, a square of chocolate sponge and cream. Accounts differ on who first made it and why.

The legend says a confectioner made it for the lovers. A cake with his name on it survived. The marriage didn’t. They married after his own divorce came through, and they were divorced again within a few years.

Rigo, the story goes, didn’t stay faithful either. The girl who had been told no by almost nobody now heard it from everyone. Her mother’s money was closed to her. Her children were behind a castle wall in Belgium.

Her own name, the one her father had made in Detroit, had become a punchline on two continents. Meanwhile, in Monaco, the facade was cracking in a much quieter way. Alice had built the opera into something Europe talked about, and one of the men around that opera was the singer and composer Isidore de Lara. Alice and de Lara grew close.

Close enough that the whole principality talked. Then came that evening at the Opéra de Monte Carlo, when Prince Albert struck his wife in plain view of the audience. On May 30, 1902, Alice and Albert were judicially separated in Monaco, and a few days later in France. They never divorced.

She simply left. Here is what that separation tells you. Alice Heine had kept her side of the bargain. She had brought money and she had brought results.

But a title is held by the man who inherits it. And when the marriage ended, the throne stayed exactly where it was. Albert kept Monaco. Alice kept her name and her fortune and went back to Paris.

She was forty-five. She never remarried. If stories like that one are why you are reading this, hold on to the question that the whole pattern raises, because it follows every one of these women to the end of her life. The next generation learned nothing, because it didn’t need to.

The money kept coming. Nannie May Stewart was born in Zanesville, Ohio, on January 20, 1878. Her father was a merchant. People called her Nancy.

Her first marriage ended in divorce. In 1900, she married William Bateman Leeds, a man the newspapers called the Tin King. When he died in Paris in 1908, he left her a fortune estimated at $35 million. She was thirty.

She was one of the richest widows in the world, and Europe noticed. In Paris, around 1914, Nancy met Prince Christopher of Greece and Denmark, a son of the Greek royal house. They became engaged that year, and the announcement came from Capri of all places, an island of white villas above the sea. And then they waited.

The Greek court didn’t like it. A divorced American, twice married, ten years older than the prince. Then the war came. The Greek royal family went into exile.

And the opposition that had held for six years quietly melted, because a royal family in exile has bills to pay. On January 20, 1920, in Vevey, Switzerland, they finally married. Days later, she joined the Greek Orthodox Church and took a new name: Princess Anastasia. Her fortune, by most accounts, did a great deal to ease the exile of her husband’s family.

And Nancy’s son followed her into the same world. In 1921, William Leeds Jr. , heir to the Tin King, married Princess Xenia Georgievna of Russia, a great-granddaughter of Tsar Nicholas I, whose family had lost everything in the revolution. He was still in his teens.

The marriage ended in divorce in March 1930. Mother and son: two American fortunes, two royal houses in exile. The pattern had learned to run in families. Nancy herself had almost no time to enjoy her title.

Soon after the wedding, she was diagnosed with cancer. The illness moved slowly and then all at once. On August 29, 1923, Princess Anastasia of Greece died at Spencer House in London, with her husband at her bedside. She was forty-five.

She had waited six years for that title and held it for three and a half. Her body went home to America, and she was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. The Ohio girl who had paid for the hardest years of their exile was laid in the ground in New York, an ocean away from the family whose name she had carried. By then, Clara Ward was already gone.

After Rigo came two more husbands: an Italian named Pepino Riccardi, and then a railroad station manager named Cassalotti. On December 9, 1916, in Padua, Italy, the former Princess de Chimay died. She was forty-three. One obituary summed her up in a single cruel sentence, calling her a slave of her desires, who died an outcast.

Her son, the one she had left at two, died in 1920, still in his twenties. Which brings us to the woman who took the whole pattern to its limit. Barbara Hutton was born in New York on November 14, 1912, the granddaughter of Frank Woolworth, of the Five and Dime stores. On May 2, 1917, her mother, Edna, was found dead in her apartment at the Plaza Hotel.

Barbara was four. The cause given was suffocation linked to an ear infection. There were whispers of something else, but nothing was ever established. The little girl grew up surrounded by money and very few people.

In 1930, as the country sank into the Depression, her debutante ball cost $60,000. The newspapers were furious, and she never forgot it. Within a few years, the papers had a name for her that followed her for the rest of her life: the poor little rich girl. Then came the prince.

Alexis Mdivani was one of the marrying Mdivanis, a family of Georgian exiles who had fled the Soviet invasion in 1921 and made themselves famous by marrying money. Their princely title was disputed. Their family had belonged to the untitled Georgian nobility, and their father had served the Russian Tsar as an aide-de-camp. On June 22, 1933, at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Paris, Barbara Hutton married him.

Thousands of people crowded the streets outside. Her father reportedly gave a dowry of $1 million. Alexis spent her money on a house, polo ponies, and clothes. By March 1935, they were divorced.

On August 1 of that year, Alexis was driving a Rolls-Royce in northern Spain, with another woman beside him, when the car went off the road and turned over. He was killed instantly. He was twenty-seven. And here is how small that world really was.

Before Barbara, Alexis had been married to another American heiress, Louise Astor Van Alen. After Alexis died, Louise married his brother, Serge. Five weeks after that wedding, in 1936, Serge was killed in a polo accident. Two princes, two brothers, one heiress, and both of them dead within a year of each other.

Now, the balance sheet. Start with Barbara Hutton, because her story runs the longest. In December 1937, at the urging of her second husband, a Danish count, she gave up her American citizenship. She married seven times in all.

Two more of those husbands carried princely titles. Her only child, Lance Reventlow, grew up to race cars. On July 24, 1972, a small Cessna carrying him crashed on a mountainside near Aspen, Colorado. He was thirty-six.

People close to Barbara said she never recovered. She spent her last years in a room at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, nearly blind, receiving lawyers and accountants. On May 11, 1979, she died of a heart attack. She was sixty-six.

One widely repeated figure says that $3,500 was all that remained of the Woolworth fortune. Some have disputed that number, and the full accounting was never made public. People around her later blamed the divorces, the gifts, and advisers she trusted far too much. Look at who paid, and who didn’t.

Not one of those husbands was ever made to account for the fortunes they spent. Alexis Mdivani spent millions of Barbara’s money in less than two years, and nobody ever asked him to give any of it back. The Chimay family kept the children and the castle. The Greek royal family lived on Nancy Leeds’s fortune through the worst of their exile.

Nobody was charged with anything, because nothing on paper had been a crime. Every one of those transfers had been signed, witnessed, and blessed in church. When the marriages failed, the women left. The titles stayed behind.

And here is what makes it hard to call any of these women simply victims. Most of them chose it. Alice Heine went from a duke to a prince. Nancy Leeds waited six years for hers.

Barbara Hutton went back to the altar again and again, knowing exactly what the newspapers would say. They were not fools, and they were not children. Except for Clara Ward, who was. They understood the trade better than anyone.

What none of them could control was the other side of it. The man kept the title no matter what happened. The woman kept only what she could carry out of the house. In Monaco, Albert reigned for another twenty years after the separation.

Alice died in Paris on December 22, 1925, and she was buried at Père Lachaise, far from the principality she had helped build. Remember the novel. In Proust’s great book, a character modeled on her appears as the Princesse de Luxembourg. The crown he gave her on paper never had to be returned.

In England, Prince Hatzfeldt died of pneumonia in November 1910, and his body went to the family vault in Germany. Clara Huntington stayed on in England alone. A week before Christmas 1928, she died in London. She wasn’t buried with her husband.

She lies in a cemetery in Windsor, under a large stone carrying the crest of the German house she had married into. Local historians still can’t say for certain why she ended up there, a town she never lived in. Then her relatives went to court over her will, and the fight over the money she had brought into that title lasted another three years. And the pattern didn’t end with any of them.

On April 18, 1956, a Philadelphia actress named Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier III of Monaco, the great-grandson of the very prince who had separated from Alice Heine. The world called it the wedding of the century. Accounts repeated ever since say the Kelly family paid a dowry of $2 million to the house of Grimaldi, and that her father grumbled that his daughter didn’t have to pay any man to marry her. Whether he said it in those words, nobody can verify.

But sixty-seven years after Alice, the money was still flowing in the same direction: from an American family to a European throne. Go back to the book, *Titled Americans*, New York, 1890. Look at what that book could never hold. It had no space for a slap at the Monte Carlo Opera.

It had no column for a daughter of five left in a Belgian castle. It had no line for a widow buried alone in Windsor, or for a bank balance of $3,500 in a hotel in Beverly Hills. The book recorded the day each woman bought her title. It never recorded the price.

Picture two graves: one at Père Lachaise in Paris, where the first American princess of Monaco lies far from the throne; the other in the cathedral in Monaco itself, where the second was laid to rest among the Grimaldis after her car went off a mountain road above the principality in September 1982. Two American women, the same principality, the same bargain. One was sent away, and one was kept. And the question every generation of heiresses asked, and every generation of fathers answered with a checkbook, is still open.

Can you buy your way into a family that never wanted you, and stay there on your own terms? Nancy Leeds waited six years for the answer. Barbara Hutton spent her whole life looking for it.