As usual, Allene wouldn’t think of giving up. In the summer of 1947, she managed to acquire departure papers for Heiner on the grounds of a completely fictional story that said he wouldn’t be able to withstand the horrors he would have to contend with in both German and Russian captivity. She arranged accommodation for him with a friend in Lausanne, Switzerland, and from New York instructed him like an experienced diplomat about what he should do when he arrived in America:
Be very polite, but use all the arguments you can. Say that in Washington they told your mother that once you got out of Germany, they could and would do something. Say I am a big tax payer and will guarantee your financial position there. Use these same words . . . TELL them you were put in a German prison as Anti-Nazi and that you have suffered horrors with the Soviets. Be patient, be polite, but insist on help. Make as strong a case as possible for yourself and say as little as possible about the German efforts to have you back.
While Allene moved heaven and earth in New York that winter to arrange Heiner’s visa and traveled several times to Washington for it despite the severe weather, Heiner didn’t seem to be in any hurry to reach America. He was enjoying his freedom and the exceptionally comfortable—certainly compared to the poverty he’d suffered in Berlin—house of Allene’s Swiss friend. Even after his stepmother had managed to secure his visa, he continued to delay his departure. “It is not necessary at all to wait for the biggest luxury liner,” she wrote with unusual cattiness. “You are a bit spoiled!”
But Allene forgot all her efforts and irritations when she was able to embrace her prodigal son on the docks of New York in March 1948, after almost nine years of separation. She put him up at Beechwood, where he hoped to find a job and build an independent life, an article in the local newspaper informed its readers. After a while, she returned to Europe herself, to Paul and their French life, which they soon picked up again even though their houses had been damaged and partly plundered during the war.
It turned out that Heiner’s “escape” from Berlin that Allene had orchestrated had indeed been just in time. Several months after Heiner’s departure, the Russians blocked all access to the German city’s western part, which was occupied by the British, French, and American forces. This rang in the start of the Cold War, which would divide the world for decades into a communist power bloc on one hand and a capitalist power bloc on the other. For a while it seemed as if a new world war might break out at any moment, and American expats left Paris en masse to seek a safe haven in their own country. This time, Paul and Allene weren’t among those departing. In July 1948, Allene wrote to Heiner in her characteristic staccato style that she didn’t think that the Russians wanted a war: “Do not feel the Russians want war, they will get all possible too without.” But she also wrote: “How lucky you got out when you did.”
You often hear about people with a happy childhood, but you seldom hear about people with a happy old age. And yet Allene had this, particularly in the years after she turned seventy-five—officially seventy-one, since she never regained the four years she’d deducted from her age almost twenty years earlier. Just as she’d often trodden unconsciously in the footsteps of her compatriot Edith Wharton before, she did this again with respect to the last phase of her life, which according to the writer certainly had its own charms:
The farther I have penetrated into this ill-famed Valley, the more full of interest, and beauty too, have I found it. It is full of its own quiet radiance, and in that light I discover many enchanting details which the midday dazzle obscured. As long as I love books and flowers and travel—and my friends—and good food, as I do now, I want no allowances made for me!
A fervent reader Allene was not, but she certainly loved flowers. Her gardens in Suisnes were featured in France’s leading gardening magazines, and in Newport she won first prize in the annual flower show for her fuchsias in 1949. And in France, when lilies of the valley were sold everywhere on May Day, she was genuinely upset about the unthinking manner in which the woods were robbed of their wildflowers. “It made me so sad, thousands torn up by the roots, the forests will be denuded soon, so thoughtless and cruel.”
Allene fully enjoyed her houses, particularly the one in Suisnes. “Each day I grow to appreciate my lovely home here more, and I am grateful for the years I have enjoyed it . . .” She looked forward to every planned boat trip—“I will enjoy the rest on the boat”—and she liked to write about food, such as “the spaghetti I like so much.” As far as her health went, she had little to complain about aside from some rheumatism and, in the words of a Newport admirer, was a “very vibrant woman.”
In fact, Allene’s only concession to her age was the fact that she released herself from the self-imposed obligation to stay slim at any cost:
The new man Dior is marvelous, but mostly for young, very slender people. I am too fat for the new models but will have to have them made as well as possible to suit me.
The American economy, stoked by the war, was experiencing yet another period of growth, and Allene had enough money not to have to worry about it. She had enough houses never to feel bored anywhere and enough cars to be able to come and go as she pleased. Her fleet in France alone included a Lincoln Continental, a Chrysler, a Buick, and a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, which she had shipped over from Newport. And she had the warm and comforting company of her dogs. During those years she was inseparable from “Mademoiselle Zaza,” a Maltese that afforded her a childish kind of pleasure. Without exception, the animal traveled to New York every fall with a new trousseau—an outfit purchased in Paris, consisting of some kind of little sweater and a harness with her name on it.
But most of all, Allene enjoyed the company of other people. Later, a family chronicler of the Kotzebues would describe Paul and Allene’s marriage as “a very social life, entertaining and being lavishly entertained.” The Château de Suisnes’s guest book, which Allene had brought into use in May 1932 with Henry—the first official guest had been the famous Nazi prince Stephan zu Schaumburg-Lippe—was dusted off after the war. In the years since then, the book, bound in heavy black Moroccan leather and inscribed with golden crowns, was filled with pages and pages containing the signatures of the most powerful, rich, frivolous, and amusing people on earth.
Among the many great names to enjoy the Kotzebues’ hospitality were famous journalists and writers such as Walter Lippmann and W. Somerset Maugham, as well as leading American politicians like Ambassador Jefferson Caffery; his successor, David Bruce; Warren Austin, a United Nations representative, and future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. George Marshall, the father of the Marshall Plan—an American aid initiative to help prevent Europe from sliding toward communism—was a regular visitor to Suisnes. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, so greatly admired by Allene, was also part of their extended circle of colorful acquaintances. “Saw him at the station when I went for Olive, he looked happy and gay,” she once wrote.
Allene had tea in Versailles with the former commander-in-chief of the Allied forces and later president Dwight Eisenhower. Her dance card was filled with all kinds of (deposed) royalty, such as the former king of Italy, the Norwegian crown prince, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, Princess Kira of Prussia, and Princess Ghislaine, the widow of the prince of Morocco. “Regular” Americans were often behind the grand titles in the guest book. Princess Emily Cito-Filomarino di Bitetto had been the all-American-sounding Emily Taylor before her marriage to an Italian prince, and the elderly but irrepressible Baroness Bateman of Shobdon had come into the world in New York as Marion Graham.
An unusual case was Allene’s friend Valerie, Duchess von Arenberg. She had grown up as a commoner, adopted by Jewish foster parents in Hungary, and her real father, Duke von Schleswig-Holstein, only recognized her as his lawful daughter on his deathbed. That recognition rendered her one of Queen Victoria’s great-grandchildren.
In fact, Allene seemed to have just one real requirement of her companions, and that was that they wer
e entertaining. In this respect, the Duke of Windsor—former British king Edward VIII, who had given up the throne in 1936 to marry American divorcée Wallis Simpson—committed a mortal sin in her eyes:
Went last night to the American Embassy to dine, 22 at table for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. She so tiny but lovely figure and white silk dress, tight. No jewels except sapphire ring, white earrings and tiny black cape of many little black lace ruffles. I sat next to him and think him a bore.
When a dinner was not entertaining enough for Allene’s tastes, she would jolly it up herself, as her friend George Post Wheeler later recalled:
My friend of other years, Allene Burchard, later Princess Henry 33rd of Reuss and at present Countess Kotzebue, was lunching at the Dutch Legation in Paris (she being godmother, with the Countess of Athlone, to Queen Juliana’s oldest daughter) and was seated next to King Gustav. He carried a cigarette box mounted with topazes and set it on the table beside his plate. It happened that Allene had one almost exactly like it in size and mounting, and when he was looking the other way she laid hers close beside him. When he turned and saw the two he started violently, put his hand to his forehead, and exclaimed in a scared voice: But this is not possible! It’s getting me, I’m seeing double!
After many years, the ice had even been broken between Allene and the old Dutch queen, who had withdrawn almost entirely from the public eye by then. “No one could work harder for [her] country than Queen Wilhelmina,” Allene wrote. Aside from this, Allene was particularly fond of Bernhard’s younger brother, Aschwin, for whom she’d arranged a work permit and a job as a Far Eastern art specialist in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. In recognition of her efforts, Wilhelmina would later bestow on her the title of Honorary Lady to the House of Orange—“which I thought most kind of her,” according to the lady in question.
Naturally Allene was also an honorary guest at Juliana’s inauguration on September 6, 1948, in Amsterdam. She gave Heiner an extensive and opinionated account. Bernhard, she wrote with almost maternal pride, was “a perfect show” in his admiral’s uniform, while Juliana garnered her approval by having lost a lot of weight for the occasion:
She is so THIN now and truly looks lovely and such jewels . . . her hair well done, the crowd went wild with excitement. All too beautiful and perfectly done . . . Everyone is extremely nice to me and I was given same rank and courtesy and attention as the Royalties here and they were very charming as well.
If one thing is clear from Allene’s letters that have been preserved, it is that as an old woman, she was still essentially the same excitable girl from Jamestown, looking at the world and people around her with an open mind, full of curiosity. At the same time she took pleasure in the simple things of life, like a vacation with Paul and with Alice Brown, her secretary-cum-lady-companion and friend, in a “tiny lovely house in the woods” in New Hampshire. “I do the cooking, Miss Brown the garden and Paul the wood.” Or in an evening in, with just Alice for company. “When we’re alone, we dine in the little round salon, it’s so cozy and peaceful, I like it so much when she reads and I write.”
Perhaps this was Allene’s greatest achievement, above her wealth, her titles, her many houses, and her impressive guest book: that despite everything she’d experienced and endured, she always clung to her ability to enjoy life and be grateful for it.
Allene had been and remained the Queen of Loose Ends. Every time a hole developed in the fabric of her life, she’d tie together the loose ends and get on with it. Her past was useful for this—other people may have spent more and more time immersed in their memories as they aged, but Allene kept the cabinet of her personal history firmly locked. In this respect, she proved herself a child of Victorian times. She had no need for modern ideas about mourning or the expression of feelings. Her philosophy was to keep going and not look back.
It was the attitude that had made America great, it was the mentality that allowed Allene to survive, and it was also the spirit that she tried to instill in her stepson, who made little effort in Newport to build himself an independent life:
Strength of character has to be worked on, hard . . . Always try many things. Try every way one can think of, when you truly need something important and if you do not see the way, get help . . . All girls and boys, no matter what position they have should be brought up to work these days, or at least know how to. I should think every effort should be to get work for your own dignity . . .
TRY to make friends, everyone can with an effort. Everyone has sadness and much trouble and likes a gay pleasant friend about. COURAGE ALL THE TIME.
Heiner’s part of the correspondence has not survived, but from Allene’s reactions, the contents can be guessed at. Above all else, he felt himself to be a victim of his times, of circumstance, and of other people. The fact that he never managed to find work or friends or have a relationship but continued to camp out in Beechwood, cared for by Allene’s servants, was never down to him but always to others, who had fallen short in his eyes in some way or other.
Allene tried in vain to convince him that being hard on yourself didn’t mean you had to be hard on others. On the contrary, she told him:
It is thoroughly stupid to harbor resentments to anyone, I WILL NOT DO IT, it would hurt me more than the other person . . . You MUST, MUST not always think the worst. I could take offense daily with people but personally think it stupid not to have a friendly feeling to all. It is a better character disposition in life . . . show tolerance.
I like people and you MUST, also it is true that we get from people very MUCH WHAT WE GIVE THEM. Look for their good qualities and ignore their faults, that way one is happier [. . .] Take people as they are, know yourself [. . .] If we took people for their true count, we would have few friends.
Allene practiced her own recipe for happiness with verve. Indeed, she seemed not to want or be able to see certain things taking place around her. Like the fact that, despite all her assistance and urgings, Heiner kept putting off any plans for a career or marriage indefinitely, preferring the company of young men with a “dubious reputation” in terms of their sexual preferences. Or the fact that her own husband, Paul, often went out with his much younger nephew George, who went through life with the cheerful nickname of “Gogo.”
In this sense, Allene may have had a pseudo husband in Paul, just as she had a pseudo son in Heiner and pseudo daughters in Kitty Cohu and Jane Moinson. But she saw that as no reason to love them any less unconditionally than if they’d been genuine. Just as the amputees from the First World War had learned to live with artificial limbs and even become used to them, Allene made do with an artificial family. There was no space in her philosophy of life for wasting time contemplating lost loves or becoming a captive of her own past.
Allene preferred to look ahead—as in the summer of 1951, when, approaching eighty, she bought a house on the coast “in a whim,” as she wrote. She had gone to the south coast of France to visit her old friend Marion Bateman in Monte Carlo and, once there, had fallen back in love with the Riviera. “It’s so lovely here, all the roses out now and the perfume of flowers everywhere.” On the way, she visited a summerhouse that Kitty and Wally Cohu had rented earlier. It was in Cap d’Ail, a village between Nice and Monaco. She decided to make an offer on it at once. In early July she wrote to Heiner:
Have been very foolish and extravagant, as cannot afford it, but have bought a tiny villa at Cap d’Ail, about twenty minutes’ walk from Monte Carlo, right on the sea. No furniture in it, but if you like could get three beds and six chairs and a bridge table and picnic there within a week. And I do the cooking and we all wash dishes, and we can swim off the place. Let me know if you would like this!
Until the end of the nineteenth century, Cap d’Ail had been a farming village built into a steep, rocky mountainside, visited only by goatherds. But the construction of a railway between Nice and Monaco had transformed the village into a hot spot for the international jet set, including the B
ritish royal family and Winston Churchill, who liked to set up his easel and paint in the famous Hotel Eden. It was also popular as a winter resort since the Maritime Alps formed a natural barrier against the cold winds from the north. It was the ultimate place to enjoy la douceur de vivre—the gentle life.
Castel Mare, as Allene’s new house was called, was not big, but it was wonderfully situated—right on the seafront, at the end of the Boulevard de Mer. A small pebbled beach could be reached via a flight of stairs with the poetic name l’Escalier de la Solitude—the steps of solitude. The summerhouse was built in 1909 for a rich manufacturer from Monaco and was so tightly nestled into the rock face that you could see its roof from the boulevard. It was the ultimate seaside house, with an uninterrupted view of the Mediterranean Sea on three sides. On the shallow terrace at the front of the house you might almost imagine yourself aboard a ship, there was so much splashing foam and so omnipresent was the sound of the waves constantly pounding the rocks below.
A month after Allene had signed the purchase agreement, in August 1951, she organized her first little dinner “just in a picnic fashion.” In the months that followed, she busied herself with setting up her new Mediterranean life. The Buick was replaced by a Ford Vedette because it was much more practical for the narrow, winding roads. The house was equipped with a telephone connection, modernized, and redecorated. Allene had furniture sent over from both Paris and New York and bought the rest of her furnishings at the Parisian department store Galeries Lafayette and other exclusive stores.
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