An American Princess

by Annejet van Der Zijl

  The house’s pièce de résistance, and the part Allene paid the most attention to, was the room the workmen respectfully termed “la Chambre de Madame.” She decorated her bedroom—which took up more than half of the first floor and had large, high windows on two sides and doors opening onto a balcony—with the finest satins and the softest silks in delicate shades of blue—almost as though she wanted the room to dissolve into the azure sea, of which she had such a magnificent view from her bed.

  12

  How not to Die

  The last act of the play in which Allene had the leading role began in Newport’s court of law on a lovely spring morning in 1955, some weeks after her death. Two years earlier, Heiner Reuss had sworn an oath of allegiance to the American flag in this rather pompous building dating from the Gilded Age and had become a naturalized American citizen. And now he was here again—but this time as a man who was publicly being made out to be somebody who had cheated money out of the dying elderly stepmother for whose care he was responsible. The amount in question was an impressive $23.6 million. The court case was the largest ever to take place in Newport. “A live court room drama such as no summer theater could hope to offer,” the Chicago Daily Tribune promised its readers.

  And a drama it was, if only because of the unclear family relationships at the root of the conflict. The plaintiffs were a group of a dozen or so of Allene’s nephews and nieces, coming from all four corners of America: New York, San Francisco, Berkeley, Miami, and Palm Beach. Among them was Lucy Dadiani, the young niece whose marriage to a Russian prince Allene had once arranged but with whom Allene had quarreled when she found the house she’d left in the Dadianis’ care plundered when she returned to it in the summer of 1945. Allene had written to Heiner, disillusioned:

  Lucy stole all the good things that were at Barbet-de-Jouy. I trusted her and Georges and they turned out to be only thieves. I fear both will go to jail. I have no sympathy for them, they betrayed all my trust.

  Allene never did take them to court, since it became clear that the Dadianis hadn’t so much stolen the things themselves as allowed German occupiers to. But the matter had been covered extensively in the international press and hadn’t helped the already cool relations between Allene and her biological family grow any warmer.

  Another famous name in the Tew camp was Julia Rosewater, the young relative with whom Allene had been so close in the years around Anson’s death. Their relationship had been so close that in 1928, Julia had even gone so far as to have her then-seventeen-year-old son Seth’s name officially changed to Burchard. In doing so, his mother, according to an article in the New York Times titled “Took Burchard Name, Inherits Millions,” believed that he would not only have a right to Anson’s millions but also, in due course, to Allene’s. Clearly Julia had jumped the gun a bit, because although Allene financed Seth’s, or “Burchard’s,” Harvard education and later helped him find work at General Electric, he wasn’t named at all in her will.

  On the first day of the trial, May 22, 1955, the “heirs at law and next of kin” provided a list of ten arguments why the document purported to be Allene’s last will and testament should be declared invalid. To summarize,

  [T]he will was made as a result of undue, illegal and improper influence, and as a result of duress, the testator was not of sound mind and sufficient mental capacity, the instrument was not the last will, and was not executed with all formalities required by law.

  In a nutshell, Allene’s family wanted to have her declared insane retroactively.

  It didn’t seem that this would prove much of an obstacle to the Tews. The contents and the circumstances surrounding the creation of Countess Kotzebue’s will were suspicious, to say the least. In their eyes, it was remarkable that she would leave the lion’s share of her fortune to what a journalist later described as “a retinue of servants and hangers-on,” in particular the men who’d functioned as her son and her husband in the last years of her life. Not only were both gentlemen of “dubious sexual orientation,” they had backgrounds that, in those years of the Cold War and witch-hunting of Communists, made alarm bells ring.

  Heiner Reuss was German born and, naturalized or not, after two world wars could only be seen by those with prejudices as a long-established enemy of the United States. Paul Kotzebue, no less than twelve years younger than his deceased wife and suspect enough for this reason, was actually a Russian and, in this, the embodiment of the new enemy. There were even questionable aspects to Kitty Cohu, the third-largest beneficiary in the will. She was certainly American, but she was also married to the lawyer who had drawn up the contested will and who was now acting as its executor. To make the conflict of interest even greater, it turned out that the deceased had been a silent partner in Wally Cohu’s legal firm, albeit not under her own name but as A. T. Burchard.

  The most suspicious thing of all was the course of events surrounding Allene’s death. Why, the nieces and nephews asked, hadn’t their terminally ill aunt returned to New York the previous fall, as was her custom? She would have been able to await the end in her comfortable apartment on Park Avenue with America’s best doctors and hospitals at her fingertips rather than having to die in a kind of summerhouse on the coast, assisted solely by an old French doctor in his eighties. Why hadn’t she wanted to see anyone anymore, far away in France—not even the family members with whom she was still on good terms? And why had she been buried immediately after her death in that foreign country, in complete silence, so that no one had been able to say goodbye to her?

  This was what the Newport Court had to determine: What had actually happened to Allene Tew during those last years?

  The symptoms had actually begun in the fall of 1951, just after she’d bought the villa at Cap d’Ail. Allene had been suffering from stomach complaints for a while and had an unusual lack of appetite, certainly for her. “Zaza is gobbling up her dinner here beside me in the boudoir,” she said in a letter to Heiner, “wish I had some of hers and Paul’s appetite.”

  In October, the pain became so severe that after returning home from a canasta evening at a friend’s house in Paris, she didn’t even manage to finish her weekly letter to Heiner. The assistance of Dr. Louis Moinson—the father of the French girl whose marriage Allene had once arranged at Birchwood and whom she’d always watched over with maternal care—was called for. The famous Paris surgeon, in his advanced age, had retired, but he still served as a personal physician to friends and family.

  “I think she was fighting it for a long time & hope after Dr. M.’s treatment she will be better,” Alice Brown wrote later that evening to Heiner in Allene’s place. Four days later, Allene did indeed feel better and was already feeling chatty again, as her next letter to Heiner reveals:

  I know it was a liver attack, but Dr. wrongly said it was intestinal poisoning and kept me miserable longer than necessary.

  The Kotzebues spent that winter in New York, as usual. Allene reigned over the overseas part of her kingdom by letter with her habitual discipline, but she still didn’t feel completely fit. “Try to keep cheerful and hope all will last out my life,” she wrote to John Burnet, a British war veteran who worked as her handyman in France and was keeping an eye on the refurbishments at Cap d’Ail.

  Nothing came of her plans to journey to the Riviera in March to admire the results of the renovations. Instead, she ended up in New York’s Roosevelt Hospital, where a malignant tumor was removed from her stomach. It appears the doctors didn’t give Allene much hope of recovery, because on Monday, April 7, 1952, still in the hospital and in the company of Wally Cohu, she drew up her will. She endorsed the document with a signature that was as firm and self-assured as when she’d first signed herself “Allene Tew Hostetter” at age nineteen.

  A few days later, Allene put Beechwood up for sale. As earlier correspondence showed, she hadn’t felt at home for years in the mausoleum-like country house that had once belonged to Mrs. Astor. It really only served as a place for Heiner to l
ive—Heiner, who four years after his arrival in America still hadn’t been able to find work or accommodation of his own.

  It wasn’t very difficult to find a buyer for the legendary Astor mansion in Newport in this time of economic prosperity, and on May 3, the house, including much of its contents, was sold to a New York yarn manufacturer. Allene had smaller pieces of furniture shipped to France to further furnish Castel Mare; the crockery and textiles were shared out among friends and acquaintances such as Bernhard’s brother: “China and glass given to Prince Lippe.”

  But Allene hadn’t had her fill of the view of the sea or Rhode Island’s bay. As soon as she was released from the hospital, she rented a house on the farthest tip of the Newport peninsula, surround on three sides by the Atlantic Ocean. Again she was following in Edith Wharton’s footsteps—the writer had lived at precisely this spot for years, before her departure to Paris—seduced by “the endlessly changing moods of the misty Atlantic” and “the night-long sound of the surges against the cliffs.”

  In 1927, the famous architect John Russell Pope built a summerhouse for himself and his family near Edith Wharton’s former home Land’s End. The Waves, as the result was befittingly named, was surrounded by rocks overgrown with wild roses and polished by the ocean, so typical to Rhode Island’s bay. Just as in Cap d’Ail, the sound of the sea and the smell of seaweed were everywhere, but here the atmosphere was more peaceful, with swallows nesting in the stone walls around the garden.

  At the back of her new living quarters, Allene had a view of Bailey’s Beach, where, in 1953, Jacqueline Bouvier, one of her neighbors at 740 Park, celebrated her engagement to the young, very promising senator John F. Kennedy. At the front, she had a seascape that stretched out all the way to Ireland.

  “Trust you are quite yourself again,” wrote Allene’s Cap d’Ail handyman, John Burnet, in June 1952 to his employer, whom he was clearly very fond of. Allene was indeed more or less herself—in any case, enough of herself to take the boat to Europe the following month and to resume her life as a wealthy nomad. That summer she lunched with W. Somerset Maugham, had drinks with one of Churchill’s daughters, and was given a new puppy to replace Mademoiselle Zaza, who had died and was sorely missed. She and Paul also bought a television set, the new invention that was taking over the world at high speed and that played a major role in the election victory of Allene’s friend “Ike” Eisenhower later that year.

  In September, Allene hosted the Dutch royal family for a short vacation in Cap d’Ail. Juliana had, coincidentally, just arrived in New York for her first American state visit when Allene had surgery there in April. The queen had immediately made space in her busy schedule for what the Dutch newspapers discreetly called “a visit to an old, ailing friend.” Bernhard did not accompany her, even though he was in New York at that point, too. The relationship between the queen and prince consort had been strained for years due to his extramarital escapades and Juliana’s deepening friendship with the faith healer Greet Hofmans. During this state visit, the relationship sank to a new low point when Juliana made a pacifist speech at Congress, expressly against Bernhard’s wishes.

  It seems that Allene did what she could to bring the estranged couple back together again, since she spent a remarkable amount of time with them that fall. After their vacation, she had lunch with them at the embassy in Paris several times; she also had Bernhard and his two eldest daughters to stay a few times separately. This delighted her fourteen-year-old goddaughter, Beatrix, who, like her father, was unusually attached to the decisive American, so different from her often-doubting and passive mother.

  The attempts at reconciliation didn’t amount to much—the discord in the marriage would lead to a publicly fought royal battle shortly after Allene’s death. It was, as an American paper remarked during that period, a pity that Countess Kotzebue was no longer there “to mediate or offer Bernhard sage advice.” Allene herself spoke pithily of marital crises like the Oranjes’ in a letter to Heiner: “It is so tiresome that people are not kinder to each other.”

  “Don’t play any more tricks like last year,” wrote John Burnet to Allene in the spring of 1953. He got his way, because that year his employer did return to Cap d’Ail in March after her winter in New York to see how things were going with her impulse purchase of two years earlier. She carried her complete set of New York silverware in her luggage because “picnic fashion” or not, she liked to dine in style. She wrote enthusiastically to Heiner:

  Weather, sea, sky and flowers: all wonderful and I do appreciate being here [. . .] IT IS VERY RESTFUL and doing me good.

  For her health, she could consult Dr. Moinson, who lived with his wife in nearby Monte Carlo. He provided her with more than enough pain-killing pills and injections and came by almost every day to check on her:

  He feels if he watches constantly my blood count, pressure and general condition he can get me strong and well. I know his heart is in it & hope he is right.

  But in the meantime, the guest list for Allene’s upcoming birthday celebration in Suisnes, an event she’d had so much pleasure organizing the previous year and had celebrated so exuberantly, grew shorter and shorter. Her social diary became emptier, too. She often opted for a “little supper with Miss Brown” and then went to bed early—only, the next day, to hide in her seasoned, hardy manner the fact that she’d been in too much pain to sleep: “The moon is again too beautiful over the sea, I watched it quite a while in the night.” Traveling was also becoming more difficult:

  The trip up [to Paris] tired me far too much, could hardly move for 48 hours, now have taken the strongest pill and will surely be better soon.

  As Louis Moinson prescribed stronger and stronger painkillers over the course of 1953 and 1954, the life Allene had always liked to keep so free and spacious slowly shriveled. But the way she’d always refused to let the ghosts of her past into her life was also the way she behaved toward death, the other shadow creeping ever closer.

  Allene’s homemade recipe for happiness in life had always worked well. Again and again, she’d confronted adversity and despair with her favorite mantras. “If one has the will and persistence, one CAN do things . . . always try every possible way, and if you don’t see a way, ask for help . . . COURAGE ALL THE TIME.” And each time she had managed to turn the course of events her way, force fate’s hand, and find a new form of happiness.

  But this philosophy didn’t work in the face of her new enemy. The illness that was eating away at Allene from the inside could not be banished with all the willpower and persistence in the world, and denying it only backfired.

  How not to die? This question began to dominate Allene’s thoughts more and more as the year 1954 progressed. And because she’d learned never to give up hope, she reached for ever more unorthodox treatment methods—and in so doing lost what had always been her strength, in combination with her courage: her common sense. At the beginning of the summer, she wrote hopefully to Heiner of “cures in England without a medicine [. . .] sounds foolish but Hope has known some marvelous results, so why not try?”

  In July, she visited two German “miracle” doctors in Montreux, Switzerland, who had promised to heal her with ferrous serums containing placenta cells. As her letters show, initially Allene trusted blindly in her new therapists and their treatment: “Have taken two doses of Dr. Niehans’s cells and he thinks I takes them very well”—although it didn’t escape her still-sharp mind that both gentlemen were raking in a fortune with their revolutionary treatments:

  All this very expensive but if it cures worthwhile [. . .] I feel like guinea pig with all sorts of [stitches], medicines, etc. but Dr. Niehans feels some can help.

  Six weeks later, there was not a single improvement in Allene’s condition, reason for Niehans’s colleague to make her life as their patient real hell now:

  Dr. Ackermann took away all cigarettes and all medicine . . . very strict diet . . . too miserable to write, more soon.

  After this, the l
etters with which Allene kept her stepson in America updated on her ups and downs became shorter, the handwriting ever jerkier. “Had serum from second placenta . . . still suffer plenty,” she wrote on August 30. Six days later the letter followed that would be her last to Heiner: “Bad day for me but much love. When do you think you can leave?”

  Shortly after this, Allene, by now completely exhausted, traveled back to her summerhouse on the Riviera, the closest of all of her houses. She’d lost her last wager with life—traveling on to New York or even Paris was not even thinkable. And so her odyssey finally ran aground in the fall of 1954 on the rocks of Cap d’Ail. The only thing she could do was wait for the winter and the inevitable in her Blue Room, surrounded by her self-selected family, and try to find an answer for her final challenge: How to die?

  On July 12, 1955, less than six weeks after the start of “Case 9400”—as the suit the Tews had launched against the heirs was called—the court in Newport came to the conclusion that Allene’s testament met all the requirements of legality and could therefore be considered legitimate. The results of the hearings with the nursing staff from Roosevelt Hospital were completely clear: Allene Kotzebue had been completely compos mentis when she’d signed her will in April 1952, and there had been no question of “undue influence.”

  Yet it would be another eight years before the file was finally closed and the inheritance could be shared out definitively. The long judicial process could not be based on the strength of the claims—aside from accusations, the Tew family could raise no concrete incriminating facts or witnesses, and newspapers soon lost interest in the case. It seems more likely it was because of the Cold War, which held America in its grip. As open-minded toward foreigners as Americans had been during Allene’s youth, when the country still needed to be built, they proved to be xenophobic and intolerant now, in a period when there was so much wealth to lose.