Poster for the 2019 movie Downton Abbey, featuring Elizabeth McGovern as the “dollar princess” Cora, Countess of Grantham, and Hugh Bonneville as the Earl of Grantham
9 November 2020
Dollar princess is a name for an American heiress who marries into impoverished European nobility, a transaction where she gets a title and elevated social status and his finances are restored. The concept of a dollar princess is probably best known to present-day audiences through the character of Cora Crawley, the Countess of Grantham in the television series (2010–15) and film (2019) Downton Abbey. She plays an American heiress who has rescued the fortunes of a financially unlucky English earl. Although the term is not used in either the series or the movie.
The term was inspired by the German musical Die Dollarprinzessin, libretto by Alfred Maria Willner and Fritz Grünbaum and music by Leo Fall. The play opened in Vienna in 1907. The play was translated and brought to England, where it had a very successful run there and later in the United States. The earliest English-language reference to the play that I can find is from the Daily Mail of 5 December 1907:
Mr. George Edwards [sic] returned to London on Tuesday from Vienna, bringing home as the result of his visit no fewer than five contracts for musical plays. Two of these are for new works by Franz Lebar, composer of the “The Merry Widow,” two are by Oscar Strauss, and the fifth is “The Dollar Princess,” an opera by Dr. Fals [sic], a rising young Viennese composer, now being performed with great success at the An Der Wien Theatre, Vienna.
And this, from the P.I.P.: Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times of 11 July 1908, gives a synopsis of the main plot line:
Next Christmas, Mr. George Edwardes will produce “The Dollar Princess” somewhere in the North of England. This play, which he acquired during a recent trip abroad, tell us all about a certain American millionaire who has a very smart secretary, with whom his daughter—that is to say, the daughter of the secretary’s employer—falls in love. At first, I understand, the secretary does not quite reciprocate her feelings towards him, but finally—well—“they both live happily ever afterwards.”
Although in the play the “princess” is metaphorical. She doesn’t marry into royalty, rather her wealth has already made her a kind of American royalty. While many of the servants in her house are fallen nobles, the fate of many European noble houses during the First World War, the man she marries is well-bred but distinctly middle class. So, while she does not actually marry into nobility, the idea of European nobility relying on wealthy American patrons for their livelihoods is very much present.
Dollar princess moves beyond the title of the play by the 1920s, acquiring the meaning we know today. The earliest use of the general term that I can find is from the American magazine Current Opinion of February 1921. The article is titled “The American Dollar Princess in Greece” and is about Princess Anastasia of Greece and Denmark, born Nonie May Stewart, who married Prince Christopher, youngest son of the King George I of Greece. Anastasia was the aunt of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Before her marriage to the prince, she had two previous marriages, the latest to Indiana businessman William Leeds. Typically, the male noble is portrayed as a gold-digger, getting the better part of the marriage arrangement, but this article reverses that and portrays her in unflattering light:
No Byzantine empress was too reckless or too unconventional for the Venizelist press in its quest for a personality with which to compare that Princess Anastasia, who, before marrying into the royal house of Greece, was plain Mrs. Leeds, an American widow of vast wealth. Before Venizelos fell, his press at Athens invented sensational biographies of this lady. She was supposed to have gone through the divorce courts of Chicago as sensationally as any queen of the films; she was an obscure little high school girl when she took it into her head to elope with the first of the various men from whom she later extracted alimony, and that was how the vast fortune of the “dollar princess” was accumulated; she broke the heart of a tobacco king before she came in for the wealth of a tin plate king, and all the tin plate in America is assumed in a certain Greek press to belong now to the Princess.
A year later, the term turns up in an American short story, “The Game of Poverty,” by Philip Gibbs:
“I suppose you’re amused with yourself,” she went on. “You introduce a dollar-princess in disguise to poor but honest folk, and then breeze away, careless of having stirred up a witch’s cauldron of trouble and wrecked a number of innocent and happy lives.
And it also makes it into the 1922 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica:
The place of the novel which educates or develops was taken by the romantic variety which preceded the expressionist type. Thomas Mann, who so sucessfully told the tale of Buddenbrooks, approximated to this type with his novel Königliche Hoheit, somewhat of a fairy tale in its story of the marriage of an impoverished German prince with an intellectual dollar-princess.
While an American woman marrying into European nobility is often portrayed as a real-life fairy tale, the term dollar princess turns that on its head with its rather cynical take on the lives of the rich and famous.
Sources:
“The American Dollar Princess in Greece.” Current Opinion, 70.2, February 1921, 180. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“Five New Operas.” Daily Mail, 5 December 1907, 5. Gale News Vault: Daily Mail Historical Archive.
“German Literature.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, twelfth edition, vol. 31. London: 1922, 228. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Gibbs, Philip. “The Game of Poverty.” Everybody’s Magazine, 46.6, June 1922, 50. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“P.I.P. Playgoer.” P.I.P.: Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times (London), 11 July 1908, 20. Gale News Vault: British Library Newspapers, Part I: 1800–1900.
Photo credit: Focus Features and Universal Pictures International, 2019, imdb.com.