The Count Got the Blame for Anna Gould's Fortune. In Court, She Blamed Her Brother.

The Count Got the Blame for Anna Gould's Fortune. In Court, She Blamed Her Brother. In March 1895 Anna Gould, youngest daughter of Jay Gould, married Count Boni de Castellane in her brother's house on Fifth Avenue. Before the wedding the count signed an antenuptial agreement: neither the capital of her trust under her father's will nor the income it paid would be his. Eleven years, a pink marble palace in Paris and somewhere between five and ten million dollars later, she divorced him. The official version is that a plain American heiress bought a French title and a French count spent her fortune. This film follows the documents: Jay Gould's will and its six trusts, the antenuptial agreement, the Palais Rose, the 1901 New York case in which a London art dealer's creditor tried to seize her trust income (Dittmar v. De Castellane, 69 N.Y.S. 708), the 1906 divorce, her marriage to the count's cousin, the Vatican court that refused to annul the first marriage, and the suit Anna and her brother Frank brought in 1916 against the trustees of their father's estate, which ended with a finding that their brother George had mismanaged it. A note on accuracy: sources disagree on the wedding date (4 or 14 March 1895) and on how much the count spent; the film gives ranges and says whose figures they are. The size of the 1916 judgment and settlement are as reported at the time. The press mocked Anna Gould's appearance for decades; the film reports that, and does not repeat it. CHAPTERS 0:00 The agreement 1:10 Jay Gould's daughter 2:35 The will 4:33 The heiress 4:59 Boni 5:46 Fifth Avenue 6:39 The papers he signed 7:16 Paris 7:43 The palace 8:23 Where the money came from 9:02 The deputy 9:16 The guardian 9:46 The courts 11:33 The children 11:48 The other women 11:56 1906 12:34 The cartoons 13:07 Sagan 13:41 Rome 14:16 The trustee 15:13 The suit 16:40 The dealer 17:03 Lyndhurst 17:58 The pink palace 18:08 Close Thirty-fourth film in a series on Gilded Age America. Same method as the rest: the official version, then the documents. SOURCES The will of Jay Gould (1892) and contemporary reporting of it. Dittmar v. De Castellane, 69 N.Y.S. 708 (App. Div. 1901). Frank Kintrea, "The Realms of Gould", American Heritage, April 1970. "Sublimed Gould", Time, 24 July 1933. Boni de Castellane, How I Discovered America (1924). Lyndhurst, National Trust for Historic Preservation. IMAGE CREDITS Library of Congress; Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica); Historic American Buildings Survey; Leslie's Weekly; Puck; Le Pilori; DPLA. All public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. #AnnaGould #JayGould #GildedAge #DollarPrincess #History