What Paul did have, though, was an aristocratic title: in 1933, a cousin of his father’s, Count Dimitri Kotzebue-Pilar von Pilchau, had transferred his title to Paul with permission of the imperial family in exile. Shortly thereafter he met the American princess whose fairy-tale marriage to German Prince Henry Reuss had ended in such public disappointment. She was clearly in need of a new life partner; he, in turn, could use a wife who would give him new status and would return to the Kotzebue family the respect they had once enjoyed in Russia.
On October 31, 1935, Allene was granted her second “Paris divorce.” Less than half a year later, on March 4, 1936, she married Paul Kotzebue in a closed ceremony in the Russian church in Geneva, in the presence of Paul’s brother, Alexander, and his sons, among others. News of Allene’s fifth wedding was met with unsurprising mockery in both the American and the international press. “There is something of a perennial Cinderella about the Countess Kotzebue,” wrote Maury Paul, rather gently by his standards—but he had a soft spot for his enterprising compatriot.
A leading columnist for the Washington Post wrote a derogatory comment about the remarkable wedding—which she would have found even more remarkable if she’d known that another two marriages took place prior to the three she named:
Greatest example of name-changes leading to stark madness here is probably the case of the Countess Kotzebue, who before that was Princess Henry XXXIII of Reuss, and before that was Mrs. Anson Wood Burchard. Before that, it is probably fair to assume, she was a pranksome child who harassed her governess and teased the cat . . .
A scornful article also appeared in German and Dutch newspapers, titled “The Princess with the Record Number of Marriages.” In that piece, Allene was portrayed as a rather calculating fortune and title hunter, aside from once—“the most captivating debutante in New York” who continued her search for eternal happiness against her better judgement:
It really is never too late. During the last year of her fourth marriage, Allene, who is now in her sixties, got to know Count Kotzebue in Paris, a Baltic-Russian emigré, descendent of a famous comedy player and nephew of the last Tsarist envoy in Washington. And with her ring-adorned hand she has reached for him for—how do we say it again?—for a union for life.
But the world could tease and mock as it liked—this time Allene knew what she was doing. This time no photographs of a smoothed-out, retouched bride were sent to the media to convince outsiders that New York’s saddest widow had finally found happiness. This time Allene didn’t need to launch a desperate charm offensive on her new in-laws. She was accepted by the Kotzebues, without reservation, for who she was: an older lady with a great fortune and a big heart, both of which she liked to share with other people.
No doubt Allene’s seriously reduced—but, compared to the Kotzebues’, still-substantial—wealth played a role in this marriage, too. There must have been a reason that, days after the wedding, Paul was added to the deed as joint owner of the house on Rue Barbet. But unlike his predecessor, the Russian saw no reason to treat his wife with scorn once he’d gained financial independence. “Paul was kindness itself, a gift so rare among men,” a distant cousin characterized him.
Indeed, just as the gentle Russian had once dedicated himself to the care of the czar he was guarding, now he did the same for his twelve-years-older wife, whose life had been just as determined and marked by the history of the West as his had been by the East. Paul and Allene were both fate’s castaways, each in their own way. Both had washed up in Paris, both of them had been through too much to still cherish great illusions or dreams, and both of them were determined to make the best of whatever was left.
Almost at the same time Allene was pledging eternal fidelity for the fifth time in a church in Geneva, on the other side of the world, the last tangible reminder of her first marriage was going up in flames.
Hostetter House on Raccoon Creek, which she and Tod had built and which Greta had bought back later because she had such fine childhood memories of it, had come back into Allene’s possession following Greta’s death. Since then it had stood empty for years in the dark woods west of Pittsburgh like a Victorian haunted house—its shutters closed, the chimney cold, the park around it full of cawing crows.
Allene employed a married couple living in the brick house behind it to take care of the property, ensuring that it wasn’t broken into and that the “log cabin” remained exactly as it had been the last time Greta left it. The only function the building still had was as a beacon for ships maneuvering themselves up the Ohio River.
The caretakers had failed to take their own adopted daughter into account. After a row with her parents, she hid in one of the big house’s bedrooms and built a fire. In no time, Hostetter House transformed into an inferno that could be seen from far and wide. The only parts to survive the sea of fire were the stone chimney and the basement where Tod had his wine cellars and the servants their lodgings.
The chimney was demolished that same year due to danger of collapse. The foundations in the dark woods soon became so overgrown that all that was left of the house was a slight elevation in the landscape. The underground corridors and rooms would be filled with bricks and rubble, necessary to bear the weight of an enormous power plant that was built on top of it. But that was a few years later, when the vindictiveness of men like Henry Reuss had cast the world into a new war that in many regards was even more horrific than its predecessor.
10
The Godmother
Bernhard was his name—Prince Bernhard zur Lippe-Biesterfeld in full, but to many of his friends he was simply “Biesterfeld” and to his adoring mother, Armgard, “Bernilo.” This was also the name Allene called him, and she had done so since the first time she’d met him, in the summer of 1929, when the skies above her fourth marriage still looked relatively cloudless. Photos from the time show a very young Bernhard, wearing knickers and the round glasses that would later become his trademark, side by side with his neighbor Marlisa and the newlywed Reusses, Allene’s curly-haired white dog playing happily around them.
A lot had happened since that carefree summer. The international economy had collapsed, dragging down with it Allene and Henry’s marriage and what remained of German prosperity. Bernhard’s father had died fairly unexpectedly, and his mother had been left practically penniless. His parents’ home was on the verge of collapse; the land had been sold, and there was no money left for the law degree that had given Bernhard a good excuse for unbridled partying in Munich. He had nipped his career in the National Socialists’ aviation department in the bud by crashing an airplane beyond repair almost instantly; his weak physical constitution had made him unsuited to other paramilitary factions.
His only option was to look for a job. In September 1935, Bernhard started work as an unpaid intern at the Paris branch of a German chemical company. Allene put him up, and they remained in touch in the intervening years. She liked to surround herself with young, cheerful people she could help a little in finding their way in life.
After just a few weeks in the offices of IG Farben, Bernhard came to the conclusion that he wasn’t cut out to spend his days at a desk or work his way up from the bottom in the business world. His life of luxury in the beautiful home of his hospitable benefactor suited him incredibly well, though. “He was allowed to drive all her cars,” his mother later explained with pride. He revised his ambitions in the customary manner. Wasn’t marriage to a woman of wealth the age-old remedy for poverty-stricken aristocrats?
Later, the American press, never afraid to fatten a juicy story, would make the most of Allene’s role in rescuing the Dutch monarchy. It was beyond dispute, of course, that the monarchy required rescuing. Halfway through the 1930s, it was widely known in diplomatic—and journalistic—circles that Queen Wilhelmina was having great trouble finding a husband for her daughter, Juliana. And since Juliana was the only person who could provide an heir to the throne, it could mean an end to the Dutch royal house.
In general, the problem was attributed to the princess’s lack of external charms. But playing in the background, and perhaps even more dominant, was Wilhelmina’s rather off-putting reputation among the aristocracy. The old queen was reputed to be provincial, humorless, and exceptionally economical, and eligible European princes told each other with a shudder how playing shuffleboard counted as the height of frivolity at the Hague court.
After years of fruitless searching, Dutch diplomats had given up hope. There weren’t many suitable princes from Protestant houses. And now that Germany, the traditional supplier of aristocratic husbands, was coming back to life economically under Hitler’s regime, potential fiancés were less than keen to seek their futures in the still-crisis-beset country next door. By now Juliana was over twenty-five, and after years of being dragged around Europe to no avail, she was no more attractive and certainly no more self-assured.
And then came Bernhard zur Lippe-Biesterfeld—in the colorful words of an American paper, “another obscure hall-room boy until lightning struck him, with the assist of an American heiress.”
The former Allene Tew of New York and Pittsburgh decided to back Bernhard for the jackpot prize . . . At the time the American princess entered Bernhard in the sweepstakes, he was trying to keep body and soul together as an auto salesman in a Paris branch of IG Farben . . . Of course she went along to mastermind the affair. For Bernhard was everything the Dutch princess was not: gay, debonair, worldly, dashing—and slim!
Bernhard may not have been a car salesman or a hall-room boy (bellhop), but he was certainly obscure—in any case in the eyes of the sleuthing Dutch diplomatic corps, who hadn’t even known he existed, let alone ever considered him as suitable marriage material. The latter had to do with the fact that his parents’ marriage had never been formally recognized because while his father may have been high nobility, his mother had never had a title of her own and was divorced at that. Armgard and her two sons’ aristocratic credentials were, in fact, no more than meaningless consolation titles supplied by an uncle for the occasion.
From his relatives on his father’s side—in which several cousins had already been felt out as potential candidates—Bernhard knew how desperate the situation around the Dutch royal house had become. And he decided, possibly egged on by Allene, to try his chances. Juliana may not have been pretty, but she was the daughter of possibly the richest woman in Europe. Marrying her would put an instant end to all of his worries and, equally important, those of his mother, whom he adored.
Bernhard’s first documented attempt to meet the Dutch princess dated back to November 1935. On the advocacy of one of Wilhelm II’s adjutants, he was able to attend a lunch at the house of John Loudon, the Dutch ambassador in Paris. But when the young intern asked his host how he could come into contact with Juliana and her mother, the host didn’t respond. The Dutch may have been desperate, but they weren’t desperate enough to want to pair their princess with a young man who’d shown up from nowhere, without demonstrable merit or even an academic degree.
A few months later, Bernhard was given a second chance. An aunt on his father’s side tipped him off that in February 1936 the Dutch queen and her daughter would attend the Olympic Winter Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a Bavarian resort town. He requested leave from his work, borrowed a car and some money from Allene, and drove to southern Germany, armed with his skis. On the way, he couldn’t resist the temptation to make a stopover in Munich, where he’d had such a happy time as a student. He ran through all of Allene’s money in no time and had to pass a hat among his bar friends to get together sufficient funds to continue his journey at the end of the evening.
And so it came about that Bernhard arrived late, but not too late, in snowy Garmisch. He managed to come into contact with Juliana on a ski run and charmed her mother and the ladies-in-waiting to the extent that a correspondence was started after the holiday. On March 8, 1936, from his garret on the Rue Barbet, Bernhard wrote his first letter to Juliana. It was six pages long and recounted, among other things, the wedding ceremony of his “aunt” Allene and Paul Kotzebue, which he’d just attended in Geneva. He had almost crashed his car on the misty alpine roads on the way, he wrote.
While their Rue Barbet housemate worked on his career in his wholly original manner, Allene and Paul spent their honeymoon in their favorite city, Rome. They rented an apartment in the ancient Palazzo Fani Mignanelli, which belonged to a couple they knew—the American banker Cécil Blunt and his aristocratic Italian wife, Anna Pecci, who enjoyed international fame as art collectors and patrons of modern artists like Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau. This Roman pied-à-terre, which Allene and Paul would also keep in the following years, was on the Piazza d’Aracoeli, a small square between the Capitoline Hill and Piazza Venezia.
After a few weeks in the Italian spring sun, the Kotzebues traveled on to New York. They were accompanied by Heiner Reuss, Allene’s stepson from her former marriage. Henry’s son was nineteen and had grown into a slender, humorous young man who was keen to please. To his father’s dismay, he did not in any way fit the national-socialist ideal of tough masculinity that had become a standard in Germany, so following the divorce, he veered more and more toward “Mama,” as he called his stepmother.
At the beginning of the summer, the trio returned to Paris, where in the meantime, houseguest Bernhard had made good progress in his quest to conquer a place in the world through the Dutch royal family. After a total of three visits lasting several days each—during which he had indeed become acquainted with the famed shuffleboard—on July 10, 1936, he asked for Juliana’s hand in marriage.
The princess was now head over heels in love with the charming, worldly young man who had appeared in her life so unexpectedly. Wilhelmina, too, had received “a very good impression” of him, as she wrote to a diplomat. The fact that neither of them had yet met any of the potential husband’s family members or friends was of little consequence given the relief that there was finally a serious candidate for Juliana’s hand. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” as the Dutch ambassador in Berlin summed up the matter.
For the rest of the summer, frenzied plans were made behind the scenes to introduce Bernhard in the Netherlands and to establish a marriage contract. The prospective husband had already stated that he didn’t want to be financially dependent on his wife after their wedding. On August 5, a constitutional amendment was shepherded through Dutch parliament in which it was laid down that a future prince consort would receive an annual income of a very respectable 200,000 gulden. Given that this sum could hardly come from national coffers already hit hard by the economic crisis, Juliana donated the money from her own income as heir to the throne.
Several days earlier, Allene had invited the Dutch queen and her ministers to Château de Suisnes to negotiate the marriage contract. The invitation was turned down—Allene’s country house was too close to civilization, Wilhelmina thought. Instead, the parties met on August 13 in a remote hotel in the Bernese Highlands of Switzerland. Allene, Paul, and Bernhard, who’d driven there together, were met by a visibly nervous Juliana, who had a bad cold; her thrifty mother; and ministers who—given the prehistory—were undoubtedly hoping matters would be settled swiftly so they could resume their vacations.
Later, Paul Kotzebue would tell one of Bernhard’s biographers how nerve-racking the atmosphere had been for the three long days during which Allene tried to get as good a price for her protégé as she could from Wilhelmina and the ministers. “Juliana, Bernhard, and I sat in the lobby of the hotel to wait until my wife returned,” he said. “We didn’t manage to conduct a polite conversation.” It wasn’t until the evening of August 15 that white smoke spiraled out of the negotiation room: an agreement had been reached.
The next day, the Kotzebues offered the Dutch delegation a farewell lunch in Lucerne. In the spirit of the festivities, Wilhelmina, normally a fervent teetotaler, deigned to take a very small sip of wine. She also refrained, with visible difficulty,
from commenting when her daughter, in imitation of the rest of the cheerfully smoking company, suddenly lit up a cigarette, albeit rather clumsily.
The engagement of the Dutch princess was made public on September 8, 1936. It was considerably earlier than had been intended, but Bernhard and his mother clearly didn’t want to run any risks that the union might be called off, and they’d had the news leaked through a journalist friend. The entire Netherlands celebrated, while Juliana and her mother met Armgard, Bernhard’s mother, for the first time. She came to The Hague for the occasion and filled her role as future royal mother-in-law with panache.
Allene remained in the background during the celebrations. Within the Bernhard cult that was now developing, she was just an aunt with whom he’d happened to be lodging for career reasons when he’d lost his heart to Juliana. The fact that there was no family connection remained unnoticed. Just as it was in no one’s interest to check the future husband’s credentials now that one had finally been found, there was no reason to look into the woman he had been staying with.
And so Allene went down in Dutch history as Bernhard’s somewhat mysterious American aunt, about whom little was known other than that she’d had a number of wealthy husbands and, as a consequence, had grown very rich. The presence of such a large fortune belonging to a “close relative” provided Bernhard with an aura of wealth missing from his own family, one he could really use. For his entire life, he would continue to deny having married for anything as vulgar as money. Nor did anyone bring up the article that had appeared half a year earlier in various Dutch newspapers under the headline “The Princess with the Record Number of Marriages.”
The wedding took place on January 7, 1937, in The Hague. Guest of honor Allene adorned herself with a tiara that day that was apparently rather tight: to the horror of the aristocratic guests, she simply removed it during dinner and laid it on the table in front of her. As a wedding gift, the Kotzebues gave the couple an antique Russian icon, encased in gold, depicting Our Lady of Perpetual Help, a very fitting image given Allene’s role in the establishment of the union.
An American Princess Page 13