American Gold Digger: Marriage, Money, and the Law from the Ziegfeld Follies to Anna Nicole Smith

Abstract

This study of gold diggers is illuminating and original. Donovan defines gold digger as a woman who pursues romantic relationships primarily for economic gain. In five chapters organized chronologically and thematically, he examines the evolution of this stereotype from its emergence before World War I through Anna Nicole Smith’s marriage to an elderly billionaire in 1994. One chapter explores a moral panic about alimony in the 1920s; another investigates a 1930s crusade to end heart balm laws (prohibiting seduction, breach of promise, and alienation of affection); and a third analyzes a furor over “Allotment Annies” who married multiple servicemen apiece during World War II to pocket their military allowances. Another covers the Lee Marvin–Michelle Triola palimony case of the 1970s.According to Donovan, the trope originated in the early 1910s from the urban-amusement culture of dance halls and popular theater. In this setting, on the boundary between prostitution and dating, the custom of “treating” arose—women exchanging sex and companionship for money and gifts from men. Women who participated in these exchanges were young, good looking, sexually charged, deceptive, and manipulative; most of them appear to have been white and to have come from working-class backgrounds. Although few were actual sex workers, they nonetheless offended genteel sensibilities and, perhaps as a legacy of the recent Klondike gold rush, became known as “gold diggers.”A playwright named Avery Hopwood, who overheard dancers in the Ziegfeld Follies call each other gold diggers, borrowed the term to entitle his 1919 play about the travails of New York City chorus girls. The phenomenal success of The Gold Diggers and its remake as a silent film in 1923 and as a musical in 1929 turned what had been a slang phrase into a powerful, enduring stereotype. From the outset, the stereotype was pejorative and gendered, with class and racial overtones. Notwithstanding that the chorus girls who inspired Hopwood embraced the slang term and applied it to themselves knowingly and even affectionately, Donovan says that the stereotype has always been wielded against women, often when established systems of marriage and courtship break down. Gold diggers are vilified for being childlike, frivolous, and unsophisticated, as well as scheming and sexually adventurous. The stereotype has persisted because it allows Americans to concentrate their wrath on supposed individual misbehavior, diverting attention from larger cultural transformations and social inequities.Much of American Gold Digger comprises an analysis of popular culture, particularly the understandings spawned by movies, television shows, and celebrities. He correctly suggests that the messages promulgated by popular culture are essential to this kind of history. For example, Anita Loos’ development of her Lorelei Lee character played an outsize role in fixing the gold digger in the American imagination, first through the publication of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as a book in 1925 and later as a film that starred Marilyn Monroe. Loos also wrote the screenplay for Red-Headed Woman (1932), the archetypal portrait of a femme fatale, played by Jean Harlow, who uses sex to improve her social position.As enlightening as this perspective is, however, it hides a flaw in its methodology. As his study moves beyond the 1920s, Donovan becomes so narrowly focused on popular and celebrity cultures that he cannot say how the stereotype waxed and waned on the ground or how ordinary people received it, revised it, and used it in their daily lives. It is not clear how or whether some women could mount a defense of their materialism. Nor do we learn whether women ever applied a variant of the stereotype against men, as fortune hunters. In this book, the gold-digger stereotype floats freely through popular culture, its direction unalterable by regular people.A historical study that Donovan cites in his text and that navigated similar terrain, Beth L. Bailey’s From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore,1988), employs a better methodology. In addition to consulting sources like advice and etiquette manuals that prescribed dating rules, Bailey incorporated the voices of young women by conducting research in college newspapers and in letters to the editors of popular magazines. In Bailey’s telling, women were not just victims of popular culture; they both interacted with it and acted of their own volition. American Gold Digger is insightful, but Bailey’s approach would have strengthened it.