The process dragged on endlessly—stalled and delayed by the Tews, who might not have stood to gain anything but could at least ensure that the people Allene had left her money to couldn’t get at it. They may have realized their case was hopeless from the start, a fact possibly evident in the radical way one of them decided to cut his losses on December 22, 1955. On that day, a cousin of Lucy Dadiani’s, forty-two-year-old James Dinsmore Tew Jr., drove onto the tracks of the Florida East Coast Railway and pulled on his hand brake. A few minutes later, his vehicle was snatched by a train and dragged along for a mile and a half. The handwritten note left behind in his inside pocket revealed that this nephew of Allene’s had retained a certain sense of decency. “The driver is not to blame,” he had written.
James Tew Jr.’s suicide had no effect on the court case: his place in the Tew camp was immediately taken over by his ex-wife, who demanded $150,000 from the legacy for her son and litigated just as hardheadedly as the rest.
Paul and Heiner were lucky in one respect: Allene turned out to have already apportioned her French possessions in a separate, undisputed will written in November 1951. In it, she had stated that the house on Rue Barbet-de-Jouy would go to Paul, Heiner would get the villa in Cap d’Ail, and Château de Suisnes would go to Kitty and Wally Cohu.
Paul and Heiner returned to France for good, and Wally sold the apartment on Park Avenue in January 1956; as executor, he’d been given permission by the court to handle any ongoing business. Among the many people interested in Allene’s flat was a young actress named Elizabeth Taylor. The cooperative’s board turned her down as a potential occupant because of the supposedly frivolous nature of her profession. Instead, the apartment went to a Mr. Walter Chrysler Jr., the heir to the automobile empire of the same name. A few months after he had moved in, the contents were auctioned, including the art collection Allene and Anson had built up together.
In July 1963, Newport’s court of law pronounced its final verdict. All of the Tews’ claims were refused, and the legacy, which for the most part was made up of shares in American companies and by then had a total value of almost $24 million, could finally be allocated. “Now I am really rich,” Paul said to a family member when he returned to Paris after the verdict.
The bulk of Allene’s wealth was divided into three parts, according to her final will, each to be put into a trust fund. The proceeds from the first fund went to Paul, and those of the second, to Kitty. The third fund was given in its entirety to the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey on the condition that it be used to set up a department named after Anson Wood Burchard.
Allene’s impressive jewelry collection went to a range of friends and female family members. Aside from this, she left dozens of bequests to friends, staff, and other people who, for whatever reason, had a special place in her heart. Her secretary, Alice Brown, who had followed her around the world like a faithful shadow for more than twenty-five years, received the sum of $50,000, which was more than enough for her to go and live off her private means in the Virgin Islands.
Shortly after the verdict, Paul sold the house on the Rue Barbet-de-Jouy. He and his nephew George moved to an apartment in the elegant and discreet Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. Two years later he officially adopted his nephew as a son, making George the heir to both his title and his personal possessions.
Later, another nephew would write that, despite severe diabetes and asthma, Paul remained a proud man right up to the end of his life, “standing upright whatever the circumstances”—just as he’d learned in the Page Corps. Attempts to lure the czar’s former guard into revealing details about his past came to nothing. “I have secrets and they’ll go with me to my grave,” he said.
Paul took his secrets to his grave in September 1966, after he’d been fatally injured in a traffic accident near the northern Italian city of Vercelli while on his way to the Adriatic coast. He was buried next to his mother and his sister in the English cemetery in Nice, a few hundred meters from the place where Allene had been laid to rest in 1955. It was thus a matter of “lying apart together”—in fact, just as they had done during their almost-twenty-year marriage.
Heiner, who inherited the proceeds of his designated trust fund after Paul’s death, as Allene’s will dictated, never became the man his stepmother had tried to make of him. In the days following her death, he sealed off the top floor of Castel Mare, closed all the windows, and shut himself up in his room on the ground floor. There he lived like a hermit, only going out to stock up on coffee and perfume—possibly a reaction to his traumatic war experiences in Berlin—visiting from time to time Morocco’s gay capital, Marrakesh. Each year, he had a bouquet of pink and white carnations laid on Allene’s grave to mark the anniversary of her death. Heiner died in 1993, seventy-seven years old and practically blind from his heavy smoking. He left Castel Mare to the daughter of his by-then-deceased sister, Marlisa.
And then, decades after Allene’s death, it became clear just how clear minded she had been on the day she’d signed her will in Roosevelt Hospital. The trust fund that had gone to Heiner after Paul’s death could not be left to his niece, just as Paul had not been able to bequeath his to his “Gogo.” Instead, it went to the family of the only family member Allene apparently hadn’t felt was after her money: Charlotte Rosewater, Seth’s, or “Burchard’s,” older sister.
Charlotte was a young lady after Allene’s own heart: she had studied chemistry, and she was independent and incredibly enterprising. In 1937, in her early thirties at the time and visiting Allene, she had fallen head over heels in love with a British man, who, just like Allene’s son, had fought as a pilot in the First World War. The couple had married in Allene’s house and moved back to England after a few years, and there Charlotte’s husband had played an important role in the British army’s information network.
Later, their daughter Anne would still remember vividly her mother and Allene reuniting in the Ritz Hotel in London directly after the war. At the time just ten years old, she formed her own impressions of this American auntie who had initiated the tea party. “I found her slightly intimidating and rather awe-inspiring: she told my mother I was very weedy, and I was terribly insulted.”
Anne could hardly have guessed back then that the formidable old lady would bequeath her parents $200,000. And neither could she have guessed that she and her family—after Kitty’s death in 1977 and again in 1993, after Heiner’s death—would be buried under a waterfall of dollars from the two trust funds that had turned out to be destined for them.
Allene, unpredictable and strong willed to the end, had left her fortune to somebody for whom money really had no importance when they met: a little girl who was deeply offended because she’d been called “weedy.”
EPILOGUE
The Blue Room II
Spring 1955
How to die? Well, the same way a person has lived. And in Allene’s case, this meant in style. However difficult that may have been in a drafty, awkward house with lots of stairs. However turbulent it may have been as the sea lost more and more of its summery friendliness and charm with the advance of fall. The shutters of the neighboring houses had closed up one after the other—the winter visitors preferring to tuck themselves away in the comfortable villas and hotels higher in the hills and not down there, right on the seafront, exposed to all the elements.
At first, Allene stubbornly tried to patch up the pieces of her old life. “If one has the will and persistence, one CAN do things.” Early in the morning, she went downstairs and woke up her stepson in order to go through the stock prices in the morning papers. She had manicures and pedicures every week so that she stayed, in Heiner’s words, “the most elegant in the world,” despite the ravages the illness was perpetrating on her insides. She drank pink champagne. And sometimes, on good days, she had herself carried in a wicker deck chair up from the terrace to the boulevard for a trip to Monaco, where she’d entertain herself by gambling and playing card games in a p
rivate dining room.
At the same time, she made arrangements for things like her own funeral. She wanted to be buried between her two parents in the English part of La Caucade, with its magnificent view of the sea and, already in those years, the continuous taking off and landing of airplanes. Her grave monument was to be of white marble, with space left open for plants and flowers. Her name would be carved on it: “Countess Allene de Kotzebue, born Tew,” with the date of birth she had invented for herself—1876—underneath, and the year of her death. And at the foot of her tomb, the following words would be chiseled: “Widow of Anson Wood Burchard.”
For this was something Allene had always known herself: her first two husbands had married her mainly for her looks and the last two mainly for her money; the middle husband was the only one who had genuinely loved her for herself.
The year 1955 dawned. In Eastern Europe, preparations were in full swing for the Warsaw Pact, a counterpart to NATO. In the French colonies of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, violent uprisings against the colonial governments broke out. The United States had launched its first nuclear submarine. In Èze, a village close to Cap d’Ail, filming was wrapping up on Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief. The lead roles were played by Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, who a year later would become another American princess, in Monaco.
But Allene cared less and less about such things. Her universe was shrinking to the blue boudoir on the first floor of Castel Mare, where she spent her days in her blue silk bed, drowsing in a haze of morphine and champagne. From time to time, though not very often, she managed to write a letter, usually to offer some final maternal advice to one of her protégés. “Take life as easy as you can,” she wrote to Bernhard in January, “health is the best of all gifts.” But when he was in the area in early April and wanted to visit her, he wasn’t granted access to her sickbed. Allene felt that her humiliation was great enough already.
Outside was a foreign country—foreign in terms of its language and smells, foreign, too, in the rugged, rocky landscape so different from the gentle rolling hills of her youth. Outside was the raging sea, and in the hearth, in which a fire was kept burning day and night, the flames danced as they once had in her grandfather’s smithy in Jamestown.
Yet Allene did not die. Perhaps after such a long and eventful life, she needed that whole long winter to think everything over. Perhaps it was the morphine, which Louis Moinson administered in ever larger quantities, that broke open the locks on the closets where she had stowed away her past, causing the memories to come tumbling out.
On the nightstand next to her bed, the photos piled up—Greta in her wedding dress, Teddy in his uniform, herself as a young girl with her cousin, looking into the photographer’s lens with her usual impertinence.
Or perhaps Allene had simply resolved to make it through to the spring.
The end came on Sunday, May 1, at half past six in the morning. Outside, the mimosa was blossoming, and down below, the white prows of the first wooden speedboats plowed through the blue, now quieted Mediterranean Sea. Young, beautiful people had fun together in Riva motorboats, unaware of their own mortality, of the shutters closed up there above the rocks or the struggle that was taking place behind them.
That morning, all the women who had once been inside Allene, like matryoshka nesting dolls from Paul’s Russian childhood, died, too. The ambitious blond girl from the tough pioneering town and the young mother practicing endlessly with her children on the horse-jumping course beside a large log cabin on the Ohio River, the independent businesswoman from New York’s high society, Anson’s happy spouse on Long Island, and the American princess with her sad past. And, after that, the countess with the Russian name who became a godmother to royalty and crafted her own form of happiness.
Allene’s very last car ride was along the Route du Littoral—the road that snakes along the Mediterranean between Monaco and Nice, often called the most beautiful in the world. Only a few minutes after her body had been carried out and started on its final journey, the doors of the Blue Room were locked—to remain so for forty years.
It wasn’t until 1993, when Heiner Reuss died in the self-enforced solitude he’d preferred in life, that keys grated in the lock once more and strange voices sounded throughout the room. The shutters that had rusted were forced open, and for the first time in years, sunlight fell upon Allene’s final décor: her clothes, her dressing table at the corner window, the figurines of monkeys and dogs she’d liked to surround herself with, the photos next to the bed, and the bed itself, the blue fabric still covered in bloodstains, witnesses of her final illness. A side table, its top a tiled picture of Suisnes. Letters. Chairs covered in silk that was so rotten it pulverized at the touch. The small Hermes typewriter.
Fresh air streamed into the Blue Room through the high windows and the open balcony doors. The faded curtains swayed in the sea wind. The fabric was blown upward, and with it, all of Allene’s dreams, pain, and memories flowed out across the sea and into the wide world.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
It was there in that world that I discovered parts of the marvelous adventures of Allene Tew. My treasure hunt took me to all kinds of places, such as New York City, Paris, Jamestown, Pittsburgh, and Newport; to many libraries and newspaper archives; to all kind of historians and other people I never would have met otherwise.
But it all began on the terrace of Allene’s seaside house in Cap d’Ail, which in the summer of 2009—still writing my dissertation on the young Prince Bernhard—I visited for the first time. That very afternoon I thought: I’m going to write a book about this woman. The billion-dollar question is why? Why do you decide to dedicate years of your own life to someone you never knew, whom at that moment you know very little about, and of whom you’ve never even seen a good photograph?
In retrospect, I think that in the first instance, it was mainly a romantic notion. For years I’d had the idea of writing a book about an old woman in a coastal house, looking back over her life. When the current owner of Castel Mare told me that Allene had been forced to spend the last six months of her life in this house, I immediately sensed that I’d found my protagonist. There was also the fact that Allene was an American. After covering mainly Dutch and German history in my previous books, I felt like taking on something bigger, in particular America.
The latter had to do with something I’d often said in interviews—which was that I look for the answers to life’s questions through my books. It was the same this time. I had long been fascinated by the fact that some people allow their past to determine their lives—frequently as victims—while others are inspired by the possibilities that lie ahead. I’d been saving a 2011 interview with Professor of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Frank Koerselman for years. It was about what he called “the pampered society.” He wrote that modern man suffered from too much vanity and a lack of self-reflection and had forgotten how to deal with frustrations and setbacks in a healthy way. As an illustration, he cited a study of a group of schoolboys who were followed far into their adult lives. He concluded:
From this study, it becomes clear that . . . good luck accumulates, as does bad luck. People are in poor health and are poverty-stricken and get let down, and vice versa. It is totally unfair. And the only real predictor of good or bad luck is the ability to deal with setbacks. Those who can best cope with setbacks have the greatest chance of fortune.
My conclusion was that it’s clearly worth looking into the way you deal with bad luck. And where better than in America, the country that has traditionally put a high value on “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”? My unknown old lady at the coast seemed like a suitable case study, since although I knew little about her, I did know that in her life she had experienced things I couldn’t possibly imagine being able to overcome.
In that sense, Allene was my American dream. In the end, there are three books in An American Princess. It’s an amazing life story, so full of twists and turns it almost feels like
an adventure novel. It can also be read as a brief history of America. And, finally, it is my personal investigation into the question of how to deal with loss.
When it comes to Allene, I think the answer is provided by biologist Charles Darwin, who is purported to have said: “It’s not the strongest of the species that survives, neither is it the most intelligent that survives. It is the most adaptable to change.”
Naturally you might ask yourself, Is the adaptability Allene exhibits with so much conviction the consequence of her perseverance or a learned mentality? Or was it simply a question of character, which not everyone is born with, so you can’t expect it from everyone? I don’t know the answer. I do think that her story has taught me something about the circumstances in which that kind of survival mentality can arise and the different ways in which misfortune can be faced.
What I also realized is the extent to which culture determines the ways matters of life and death are handled. For me, a child of the 1970s, it was only natural that talking and “letting things out” was paired with “processing” disappointments and grief. But while I was working on this book, certain aspects of the Victorian mental legacy began to seem rather refreshing to me. To my surprise, nineteenth-century folk, always presented as Puritan and narrow-minded, turned out also to be energetic, tough, and sociable. It made me realize that there are major social and personal advantages to be had if people are capable of controlling themselves, being disciplined, and, if necessary, sacrificing themselves for the greater good. In that respect, we people of today might be able to learn more from the Victorians than we think.
An American Princess Page 17