An American Princess

by Annejet van Der Zijl

  Henry made ends meet with difficulty in Paris, where he had taken up his old profession of diplomacy after being seriously wounded in the war on the Russian front. But the children, who had become his responsibility after the death of their mother, still lived in the crumbling Trebschen with his older brother, simply because Henry didn’t have enough money to send them to a decent boarding school. What’s more, his lack of money was exacerbated by his desire to keep up the life of luxury he felt his position afforded him the right to, and by the fact that he sometimes entertained himself with drinking and gambling—as was well known in Parisian diplomatic circles.

  But a permanent end would come to all of these worries, Henry elatedly wrote to the governess after his future marriage had become a public fact in the spring of 1929:

  From next year onwards, I can finally give my children a better education than what has been possible so far in the remove countryside—supplemented with all kinds of healthy, practical matters of the modern time. One of my dearest wishes fulfilled so much sooner than I’d hoped. Languages, music, arts and sport, lots of sport!

  Likewise in the deepest confidence, I would like to say, that as far as I can predict, there will be major changes at Trebschen—probably during the coming year.

  His future wife had promised to pay off the loans the family had taken out against the estate, according to Henry, and to have the house and the surrounding park renovated. After this, his eldest brother would have a comfortable home again, and even Henry’s sister—whom the governess was very fond of—would be able to come back and stay with her family. But the governess had to stay mum about all this, of course, for the time being, since, as he wrote, “these affairs are being drawn up and considered at this time in a most careful, legal fashion, in this and all other respects.” In brief, negotiations were still in full swing.

  Allene must have realized herself, however lonely and infatuated she might have been, that her German prince charming hadn’t courted her only for her pretty blue eyes and maternal instinct. Later, a friend of hers would describe the way she called a spade a spade during a joint visit to the former German emperor Wilhelm II, who lived in exile in Doorn in the Netherlands:

  During her engagement to Prince Henry of Reuss, they were dining with the Emperor Wilhelm II at Doorn when the Kaiser, whose manners were always atrocious, demanded, not at all sotto voce: “What can a Prince of Reuss get out of marriage with an American?” Allene replied quite as audibly: “Sir, his bread and butter.” And the Emperor did not pursue the topic further.

  But Allene didn’t doubt that a union partly forged upon financial motives could nevertheless be a happy one. Weren’t almost all of the marriages between British aristocrats and American heirs or heiresses based on dollars? For many of them, such as her friends the Grevilles, the results had been more than satisfactory.

  As was often the case in Allene’s life, so closely followed by the society press, the news first broke in the New York Times: “Mrs. Burchard . . . is Reported Engaged to Prince Henry,” the paper reported on October 28, 1928. Although by then the couple had appeared many times together in public at social events within the American colony in Paris, rumors about the imminent engagement had been categorically refuted. But reporters caught the whiff of a good story and closely followed all of Allene’s movements from that moment on.

  In December, the society widow traveled alone to New York—in all probability to arrange the business side of the forthcoming union. In early January, she returned to Europe again. From here she would continue on to Egypt, according to the newspapers, where she’d chartered a boat for a four-week cruise along the Nile. Among the seven guests she had invited were the British Lord and Lady Greville and the German prince with whom she’d been so often sighted the previous fall.

  Less than two weeks after the luxurious Indiana—a floating palace, according to the papers—had set sail, an industrious news hunter at the Washington Post was quicker than his peers at the Times. “Prince is to Marry 300 000 Widow” ran the headline. Inaccurate as the report was—in reality, Allene was many times richer, of course—it sent the message to the home front that she had picked up the pieces of her life again and was living it to the full.

  The day after that, the New York Times extensively covered the fairy tale of the tragic New York widow who’d been kissed awake by a real prince in an article richly illustrated with photographs. That this was indeed a fairy tale—although undoubtedly an unintentional one—was further emphasized by the pictures the couple put at the newspaper’s disposition. In particular, the pictures of the now-blond, heavily made-up, and retouched Allene were so flattering that she was barely recognizable to her friends and acquaintances.

  Allene’s fourth wedding took place as planned on April 10 in her home on the Rue Barbet. The bride was given away by an acquaintance from the American embassy; apart from that, Henry’s two brothers were the only other witnesses at the ceremony. His children weren’t there—perhaps they hadn’t come to such excellent terms with their new mother as he had earlier suggested—but they were taken along on the honeymoon, during which the brand-new family toured America in grand style. On the program were a visit to Sing Sing prison and its electric chair, the festive reopening of the St. Regis Hotel in New York, and a lunch at the Princeton Club organized in honor of the prince’s visit.

  The German prince accepted the respect for his status with visible pleasure, as a society reporter rather maliciously remarked, “Prince Henry was apparently not displeased with the concern his presence incited.” It was true that the prince was “not at all bad looking, but somewhat more youthful than his wife,” the item continued even more maliciously.

  That summer, Trebschen’s debts disappeared as if by magic, and a large-scale renovation of the estate was put into motion. Part of this was a new riding stable, designed by Henry himself. But during Allene’s first visit to Germany in July 1929, she discovered that her husband might not have fully informed her of the degree of benevolence with which his family would greet her.

  The German aristocracy may have lost practically all of its money and power, but it had given up none of its arrogance and snobbery. In general, the fact that one of their own had been driven by circumstances to marry so far beneath himself was experienced as an outrage. Allene’s new in-laws weren’t at all interested in the “great inner distinction” they’d attributed to her according to Henry’s letter a year earlier. She was, as a relative said, not at all welcome in the family. They continued to blatantly speak German in Allene’s presence even though they knew their new family member didn’t understand a word of it.

  But the greatest disappointment for Allene was undoubtedly her relationship with Henry’s fourteen-year-old daughter, in whom she had hoped to find a new Greta. Marlisa used every opportunity she had to show that she wanted nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with her stepmother. Her own mother, Princess Viktoria Margarethe of Prussia, was Wilhelm II’s niece and had been considered among Europe’s highest nobility. How could this overly made-up, smoking American with her noisy friends ever think she could follow in her mother’s aristocratic footsteps?

  At first, Allene, optimistic as ever, didn’t allow her fairy tale to be taken away from her. Of course Henry’s family and children still had to get used to the new situation, and trust and love needed time to grow. And to demonstrate once again how serious she was in her resolve to do everything she could to make her husband happy—and without a doubt to prevent too many visits to Trebschen in the future—at the end of the summer she bought a romantic country house at Fontainebleau, around eighteen miles southeast of Paris.

  Château de Suisnes had been built in 1684 as a hunting lodge for a mistress of Louis XIV, the Sun King. During the nineteenth century, it had come into the possession of explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, who built an observatory and an artificial grotto and landscaped its seventeen-acre park with the beautiful Yerres River running through it. In these idyllic sur
roundings, Henry, who had set about painting fanatically during their Egyptian cruise and their American honeymoon, would finally have the time and space to indulge his lifelong artistic ambitions.

  The fact that the landscape resembling the Swiss-Italian alps with which Henry covered the walls of the north salon in the Château de Suisnes the following winter could hardly be classified as great art can’t have escaped even the love-stricken Allene. Her taste was too well developed due to the years she’d spent traveling the world with Anson and collecting art; she’d also been involved with the renowned Metropolitan Museum of Art for too long. But the many-foot-long wall painting was certainly unique, and, more important, painting kept her youthful husband occupied and distracted him from the alarming newspaper headlines that would soon overshadow their married life.

  It began as a storm does: a gentle rumbling on the horizon in a still-sunlit landscape. On September 3, 1929—Allene’s marriage was just six months old, and she was busy with the purchase of Château de Suisnes—share prices on Wall Street reached the highest level in history. This rendered Allene, whose fortune was almost entirely in American shares, even wealthier than before.

  A year earlier, in the summer of 1928, an unexplained fall in prices had caused brief panic at the stock exchange, but the prices had soon risen again, setting new records. And America had peacefully continued settling into the “new era of prosperity” President Calvin Coolidge had promised his fellow Americans in 1927.

  But halfway through October 1929, the stock market in New York again began to waver, just like the previous time, ostensibly out of the blue. Tense days followed, even though everyone expected the situation to rapidly stabilize, if at a slightly lower level than previously. But on October 24, the day that would later be known as “Black Thursday,” the market went into a rapid and relentless nosedive, taking everything and everyone down with it. Desperate investors tried to fob off large portfolios of shares on errand boys for a few cents, entire fortunes evaporated, and dozens of despairing bankers jumped to their deaths from their luxurious offices.

  The cause of the stock market crash was actually the same as all the other financial crises in the history of Wall Street: greed and sleight of hand with money. Now, too, speculators, financiers, and banking institutions turned out to have kept prices artificially high for years on end. Shares were offered against a small down payment; the rest of the amount could be paid off later from the profit made on them. But now with share prices dropping, there was no question of profits; only the debts were left, and the entire flimflam system collapsed like a house of cards.

  The American colony in Paris was in the grip of anxiety and astonishment. Most of the expatriates took the first boat home to save what could still be saved. If they could no longer obtain enough cash to pay for their travel, they tried to sell off their French possessions for next to nothing—with revealing advertisements in the real estate publications as a result:

  For Sale, Cheap, Nice, Old Chateau, 1 hr. from Paris; original boiseries, 6 New Baths. Owner Forced Return New York Wednesday. MUST HAVE IMMEDIATE CASH. Will Sacrifice.

  On November 12, a little less than three weeks after Black Thursday, Allene also boarded a ship for New York. At that moment, share prices on Wall Street, and with them their capital, had already lost a third of their value. Immediately upon arrival, she put the large city villa on Park Avenue and Birchwood, the country house in Locust Valley, on the market. In January 1930, when the market had calmed down somewhat and the worst seemed to be over, a Chicago businessman made an offer for Birchwood that was deemed good enough to be accepted. With this, Anson’s house—the place where Allene had spent the happiest years of her life—disappeared from her possession for good.

  Anyone thinking or hoping that the worst was over would be disappointed. From April onward, share prices continued to plunge unabated. The United States’ total industrial production was reduced by half; a quarter of the population was already unemployed. A further eight hundred American banks collapsed. The construction cranes that had dominated New York’s skyline since time immemorial came to a standstill, and apple sellers appeared on the city’s street corners—former stockbrokers in expensive but already worn coats who tried to support themselves by selling fruit.

  Improvised shantytowns of wood and cardboard sprang up among the rocky outcrops in Central Park, lived in by people who no longer even had a roof above their heads. And in the middle of this “echoing tomb,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald described the crisis-hit New York, stood the new Empire State Building, the tallest building in the world, empty—as though to mock the megalomania and greed that had brought the city to its knees.

  At some point in that cheerless, hopeless winter of 1930–1931, Allene finally managed to get rid of her vastly expensive mansion on Park Avenue. In its place, she bought an apartment in a building a little farther up that had become almost as much a concrete symbol of the crisis as the Empire State Building. Like the Empire State Building, 740 Park, on the corner of Park Avenue and Seventy-First Street, also had the bad luck to have been designed at the zenith of prosperity and completed at its nadir. The building was supposed to have been the magnum opus of Rosario Candela, a Sicilian immigrant who had come to America as a teenager and evolved into the New York upper class’s architect of choice during the boom years.

  In March 1929, construction had started on what was to be the most expensive and most exclusive apartment complex in New York. Most of the thirty-one apartments in the seventeen-story building were big enough to compete with detached houses in terms of space and proportions. They had their own halls, servants’ wings, built-in refrigerators, telephone and radio sockets, marble floors, bronze window frames, fireplaces, and cedar closets to keep away moths. The basement was outfitted with rooms for chauffeurs, its own post office, laundry, storage, and wine cellars.

  But when the building was completed in October 1930, there was almost no one left who wanted or was able to pay for all that luxury. In the spring of 1931, Allene was one of the very last buyers, and even she could only afford a relatively small apartment on Seventy-First Street, the darkest and least attractive side of the building. The many remaining empty apartments were simply rented, for a fraction of what their normal value would have been.

  Shortly after this depressing house exchange, in April 1931, Allene took Henry to the city where she’d been raised. Jamestown hadn’t even needed the Great Depression to fall into decline. Around 1910, the rise of the automobile had put an end to Chautauqua’s brief popularity as a vacation destination. The large wooden hotels on the lake had as good as vanished—most of them had burned to the ground, perhaps in fires set intentionally to reap the insurance premiums.

  In subsequent years, the furniture industry had kept local business going in Jamestown, but now that the American economy had practically come to a standstill, one factory after the next was forced to close its doors. Even Proudfit, the eighty-year-old clothing shop on Main Street, could no longer be saved by its lucky number; shortly before Allene’s visit, it had filed for bankruptcy. Jamestown had returned to what it had once been: a quiet and actually rather ugly town, surrounded by endless woods, where lumberjacks, hunters, and farmers came to purchase their supplies.

  On July 8, 1932, Wall Street finally hit rock bottom. Share values were now nearly 90 percent less than they had been in September 1929. A few weeks later, on a stuffy summer’s day, a chambermaid at The Pierre hotel on Sixty-First Street detected a strange smell coming from a room with a “Do Not Disturb” sign on its door. A little while later, the lifeless body of Morton Colton Nichols, Allene’s second husband, was discovered. He had sniffed chloroform, taken cyanide, and then hanged himself, and had already been dead for a few days.

  According to a family member—probably his second wife, from whom he was long estranged—persistent stomachache was the cause of the suicide. And bellyache is something Morton Nichols would certainly have had. After his death, it was discovered t
hat he hadn’t just lost his own money in the crash but had run through the entire family trust fund, including the fortune of his niece Ruth Nichols, who had become a national celebrity as one of the first female pilots—“The Flying Debutante.”

  Poor Henry. It was as if the devil was playing games with him. The losses and disappointments had piled up for as long as he could remember. First the Dutch throne, whipped from under his family’s nose by the birth of Princess Juliana. Then the war, so ignominiously and unfairly lost in the eyes of members of the German aristocracy. Then the revolution, which had taken from him and his family all that they had considered their birthright for centuries: political power, social status, and money.

  And when he finally thought he might have gotten the better of fate by marrying a wealthy American, less than half a year later, the stock market crash and the rapid depreciation of Allene’s fortune began to rub all the shine off their fairy-tale marriage. Even his artistic career had ended in failure: an exhibition Allene had organized in the prestigious New York Wildenstein gallery had drawn neither buyers nor admiring critics, and his work had received the designation “painfully wrought.”

  Allene herself, scratched and scraped by fate as she was, could handle the loss. She had gone from incredibly rich to a little less wealthy. Her Victorian childhood had given her enough self-discipline, and her marriage to Anson enough financial savvy, to be able to bear a blow like this one. As she once complained in a letter, “There is so much sadness and trouble in the world, one’s heart is torn all the time, also one’s purse, but this life is a school.” She cut back dramatically on her own spending, kept a keener-than-ever eye on her accounts, and economized on everything. She rented out her apartment on Park Avenue when she wasn’t there and would buy a new hat instead of a new wardrobe. In her own words, “I think a hat most important for a woman, you can wear an old dress if the hat is new.” But she still didn’t sell her shares, and certainly not for a few cents to an errand boy.