Charlotte Hays - The Fortune Hunters: Dazzling Women and the Men They Married

WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

S omehow early on, in those halcyon days when I toiled for an alternative newspaper in New Orleans, it became clear that I was destined to chronicle the lives of society ladiesit happened during Carnival season. I wrote a piece about the ins and outs of being one of the citys debutantes who were presented at Mardi Gras balls. Next came my expose of the Junior League of New Orleans and then my revelations about the local art ladies. The die was cast.

Although this book is the logical consequence of the kind of reporting I started doing all those years ago in New Orleans, it does have roots closer to the surface. I had been living in New York and working as a gossip columnist, first for the New York Observer and then for the New York Daily News, but was, as they say, betwixt and between when I received a call from a well-known author and man about town. Would I be interested, he wondered, in working with Carroll Petrie, a South Carolina model who had been close to the Duchess of Windsor, on her autobiography? I knew almost nothing about her other than that she was the recent widow of Milton Petrie, a noted philanthropist.

When I first went to see Mrs. Petrie, who received me in her Fifth Avenue apartment, it was clear she was ambivalent about wanting to tell her storywhich included being married to a titled playboy, a marriage that literally went up in flames when he died in a racing accident, and three subsequent marriagesbut it was just as plain that she did not want to tell it. I suppose it might have been a mistake on my part to harp on the theme of candor in our first meeting. Even after it became obvious to me that she had no intention of doing an autobiography, I couldnt stop thinking about it. For somebody whod written society pieces most of her adult life, this saga, from South Carolina to Paris to Fifth Avenue, with a friendship with Eva Pern thrown in for good measure, was catnip, the pice de rsistance, but unfortunately Mrs. Petrie was resisting.

About the same time as I visited Mrs. Petrie, I wrote an article on forces of nature for the New York Observerit featured such forces as Arianna Huffington, whose career I had followed avidly since she emerged as the girlfriend of a highbrow London journalist who set her on her march to fame and fortune; Lynn Wyatt, the Texas socialite; and Pat Buckley, then the doyenne of New York society. I followed the forces-of-nature article with Ladies in Waiting, also published by the Observer, which dealt with baby Pats, or the rising generation of social dominatrixes who would run New Yorks black-tie circuit in the twenty-first century. Carolyn Bessette Kennedy was one of them.

Ladies, ladies, ladies: Youd think Id had enough, but women who aspire toand obtainpower and money through marriage or other sorts of liaisons with men are endlessly fascinating, from Madame de Pompadour, Louis XVs mistress, to the modern fortune hunter. For much of history, marriage or being a powerful mans mistress was how women made it, so to speak. I was intrigued by these women, and I had to figure out why some succeed brilliantly while others, perhaps even more beautiful, fall by the wayside. In retrospect, it was inevitable that the literary agent Deborah Grosvenor and I would hit upon the idea of a book on women who married super rich. Of course, it might also seem odd that an unmarried, penny-pinching journalist would undertake such a book, and Ill admit itseveral times I was at my wits end trying to get to the bottom of what makes these women, a breed unto themselves, tick.

In writing the book, I trod in the sacred footsteps of Sheilah Graham, another gossip columnist, who did not marry money but wrote about how to do it. Graham is best remembered today for having been F. Scott Fitzgeralds mistress in his down-and-out days in Hollywood, but she was also a prominent Hollywood columnist who in 1974 wrote How to Marry Super Rich: or Love, Money, and the Morning After. Even now, How to Marry Super Rich is a delicious read, but I felt the time had come to reexamine the subject. If nothing else, the cast of characters has changed, though it must be noted with some degree of awe that the redoubtable Marylou Whitney, nearing or past eighty (depending upon the speaker) and married to a gallant four decades her junior, has the distinction of having made it into both books.