An American Princess Read online

  But money was not an object for the Burchards. Anson was a “genius in financial matters,” according to accounts from General Electric employees, and during his long career, he had accumulated assets to the tune of several million dollars. Allene, who also had her share of financial talent, was, in the words of one of Anson’s colleagues, “extremely wealthy.” In addition to the fortune she had earned in the years after her divorce from her second husband, she also had the Hostetter millions at her disposal. They had been held back when her children were alive, but now she had inherited them in turn.

  Almost at the time they bought the house on Park Avenue, they also bought a house in Paris, which had been very attractive to cosmopolitan, artistic, liberal Americans since the Belle Époque. Although it had been significantly impoverished by the war, the French capital had lost none of its allure and charm. And for Americans, the French dream had become only more accessible. Using riches gained in their own country, they bought up on a large scale the châteaus and city mansions the chic French families could no longer afford to keep. Around the time the Burchards bought their mansion in the eighth arrondissement, forty thousand of their fellow countrymen were registered at Paris addresses.

  Allene may not have been in control of fate, but she was in control of the decoration and furnishing of her houses, and she gave this her total dedication. She decorated the large house on Park Avenue from basement to garret in French style, with wall tapestries from Versailles, among other things. Anson’s large collection of English mezzotint engravings was given a place, as was the art collection they’d built up together over the years and of which a 1778 landscape by British painter Thomas Gainsborough was the undisputed high point. The result was what one of the Burchards’ many friends later described with much admiration in diplomatic and business circles as “a delightful house.”

  With their alternative family as well as new domiciles on both sides of the ocean, Allene and Anson seemed to have succeeded in making a new happy island for themselves—very different from their former one but in every way livable. They were now a more than wealthy middle-aged couple with many interests and an exciting lifestyle. True, they weren’t surrounded by their own children, but they did have the many friends they’d made through the years, both in America and abroad. And they had each other. In the fourteen years since their small wedding on Onslow Square, they’d been through the worst imaginable and survived it together; they could certainly brave old age and illness.

  It was just a regular Sunday in the cold month of January 1927, and Anson, who was in his early sixties by now, did something very much in keeping with his habits: he went to have lunch with a good friend of his, the Jewish banker Mortimer Schiff, who lived a little farther along Park Avenue and, like the Burchards, had once had a country house in Locust Valley. But for Allene, the day became a living nightmare when, later that afternoon, her friends came to tell her that Anson would never, ever return home again.

  The next day, newspapers reported that the top-ranking GE employee had become unwell halfway through lunch and been carried by his table companions to Schiff’s library. There, on the floor, the big man had simply died, without the hurriedly called doctor being able to do anything for him. The official cause of death was “acute indigestion.” In fact, it was probably a heart attack as a result of his largely sedentary lifestyle, too much work, and being overweight.

  Three days later, Anson lay in state among his mezzotints in the large hall in his house on Park Avenue. The memorial service began at eleven in the morning on January 25. For the first time in its history, General Electric closed all of its offices at one o’clock in tribute to the man who had played an important role in building up the company. Anson was extremely popular among his friends and colleagues, and there was enormous sadness at his passing.

  That afternoon, Allene buried the man who was her great love in the cemetery at the end of Feeks Lane in Lattingtown—close to his own Birchwood and the grave of the stepdaughter he had considered his own. After this, Allene was truly alone for the first time in years, with a heart that had been crippled for a second time. She was rich, but in terms of having people who truly belonged to her, she was poorer than even the simplest servants in her houses.

  Allene was “the richest and saddest of New York’s socially celebrated widows,” wrote the New York Times, shortly after Anson’s death.

  Years later Allene would attempt to cheer up someone in her social circle. “Everyone has sadness and much trouble and likes a gay pleasant friend about,” she wrote, followed in capital letters by “COURAGE ALL THE TIME.” But gay and pleasant company was not something the saddest widow of New York could offer in the spring of 1927. She was no good at being a victim or dealing with pitying looks, either. The only thing she had left was courage.

  At the end of the winter, the staff of the Greta-Theo Holiday House was told they would no longer have to open the house in the summer. Its owner, the explanation went, was planning to leave the country and would no longer be capable of managing it, let alone turning up with a truckload of cabbage and chickens. A hasty petition from the “Greta-Theo Girls,” as Allene’s holidaymakers called themselves, ensured that the entire country house would later be given to a New York charitable organization that took over the running of the resort in its founder’s spirit.

  On April 13, 1927, Allene set off. She traveled on the Cunard Line’s flagship, the RMS Mauretania, on which she’d made the ocean crossing to Europe with Anson many times. Now, aged fifty-four, she was traveling alone for the first time—away from the city where too many people knew too much about her past, away from the story itself, away, too, from the memories of almost everyone she could call family. And, as the Mauretania plowed steadily through the lead-gray waves of this still-chilly spring month, she dropped four years from her age and left her darker hair and her past in its wake.

  So many had taken the same route from Europe to America, determined to make a new start—nose to the wind, gaze focused on what lay ahead of the prow of a giant ship. Many had changed and reinvented themselves in that strange limbo between here and there on an ocean journey, preparing themselves as best they could for life on the other side. Allene did the same, but in the opposite direction, an inverse emigrant.

  There were echoes of the pioneers of Allene’s youth who had rebuilt, again and again, their burned-down settlement in the woods next to Lake Chautauqua and finally managed to erect an entire town. She had come from a family of strong men who had little time or patience for self-pity or weakness. What’s more, she was American. And if there was one thing that was truly American, it was the belief that it was always possible to start again.

  Allene, thirty-six years old, now married to Morton Nichols, portrayed in the Society section of the New York Times, March 1909.

  The Society section, New York Times, 1909.

  Greta’s wedding gown in the New York Times, October 25, 1914.

  Miss Greta Hostetter in her debutante photo in the Pittsburgh Gazette.

  Article in the Lincoln Evening Journal, February 20, 1929.

  8

  The American Princess

  About a year and a half later—it was a warm August day in 1928—a forty-nine-year-old German nobleman sent a letter from Castle Stonsdorf, in the Krkonoše mountain range in Silesia in southern Germany. His name was Henry Reuss, and he was a scion of an aristocratic German family that until 1918 had counted among the oldest and most prominent in Europe. Although there was no name at the top of the letter—the recipient had to make do with the polite “Gnädiges Fräulein” (“My dear Miss”)—its contents were intended for a governess. She had once taken care of him and his brothers and sister and now played an important role in the life of his children, who, since the death of Henry’s ex-wife five years earlier, had been left semiorphaned.

  Henry had, he wrote, news that was to be kept strictly confidential. It was a matter of a “einem tief einschneidenden Ereignis”—a life-changin
g event for him, but also in terms of the lives of his thirteen-year-old daughter, Marlisa, and twelve-year-old son, Heiner:

  I have got engaged and this to the widowed Mrs. Burchard, born Tew, from New York. She comes from a strict Protestant house which is held in high regard in America, is three years older than myself and has had three children, all of whom she has lost [. . .] My fiancée has no other close blood relatives and is alone in life. This is the reason that all of her very strong motherly love, her sensitive motherly understanding and feelings go out to my children. I know that she will become the person that both of my darlings miss without them realizing this. And I can already see how wonderfully their relationship is being built in the best harmony and with how much wise and deep understanding my fiancée attends to the two motherless children.

  According to Henry, the American widow was also everything he looked for in a woman:

  My fiancée is precisely that which I so ardently long for: a person tested by deep suffering and as a consequence, sincere, good-tempered, and though she is clement, decisive, energetic and purposeful—with a great and true feeling for art, wanting the best and seeking out the most beautiful. Naturally we are no infants and have found each other in a genuine, deep affection and our shared loneliness.

  Both Henry’s children, as well as several family members, had been informed of the happy news by now.

  I told the children the day before yesterday. At first they were a bit quiet and then they were happy in a very moving way and such warmth issued from their dear hearts. They spend a lot of time with my fiancée. They are becoming better acquainted all the time and hopefully growing fonder too. I am genuinely amazed by the amount of dependency and trust Marlisa has already developed for her; with Heiner things are becoming easier and simpler.

  My nearest relatives—the only people aside from you who know of my engagement—have welcomed my fiancée with open arms, this after a long correspondence. As I already wrote, they met in Dresden and there they grew closer harmoniously. My oldest brother is coming here tomorrow. My sister had to return to Berlin today. She, too, was very taken by my fiancée and the great inner distinction of this unique woman.

  He hoped the governess would also agree to put aside her “prononcierte Aversion gegen Ausländer”—her “pronounced dislike of foreigners”—for the sake of the children, Henry wrote. He once again assured her, perhaps unnecessarily, that his fiancée would raise the children completely in the spirit and with the love their own mother had given them and that they were in complete agreement about this. The wedding would probably take place in very closed circles the following April in Paris, where his fiancée owned a house. In the meantime, the engagement should be kept secret until the widow’s second year of mourning had passed. The news would not be made public until February or March for this reason.

  In his hope-filled letter, the German prince might not have been correct about his betrothed’s age or the high regard her family enjoyed in America. But in one aspect he had aptly characterized Allene: she was indeed downright lonely.

  After her transatlantic journey in the spring of 1927, Allene had stayed with her old friend Olive Greville, who had been party to her marriage to Anson from the very start. But she couldn’t stay with the Grevilles in England endlessly and so traveled on to Paris over the summer with the idea of building a new life there, like so many Americans who had something to run away from. She needed a new house for this, one that wouldn’t constantly remind her of the person she’d rather have been in Paris with.

  At the end of the summer, she walked around the elegant mansion that was to become hers, a grand house on the Rue Barbet-de-Jouy, for the first time. The house was in the seventh arrondissement, on the left bank of the Seine, where rich Americans with artistic tendencies had traditionally banded together. Around the corner, in the Rue de Varenne, lived the now elderly but still very successful writer Edith Wharton. Allene’s house had been built during the short reign of Emperor Napoleon III for the then Count of Montebello and now belonged to his granddaughter.

  Albertine de Montebello had been known in her youth as “one of the loveliest, most charming, most intelligent women Paris could boast of” and had hosted a renowned and fashionable political salon at the Rue Barbet for years. But this aging comtesse was yet another who found herself forced to sell her family possessions, due to lack of money and high taxes, to the Americans rolling in dollars who had alighted upon Paris like a swarm of noisy locusts. Americans who then thoroughly modernized their new possessions, because the French may have had patents on good taste and culture, but—the expats felt—they didn’t have a clue about bathrooms and other modern American amenities.

  And yet it seems it wasn’t the location, the evocative history, or even the charm of the house, decorated generously with little cherubs and flowers, that was the decisive factor for Allene. It was the house number: 33, Allene’s lucky number. This was a hangover from Jamestown, where an entrepreneurial tradesman had run a successful clothing business with the appropriate name of Proudfit at 33 Main Street. To advertise, he’d had trees and rocks painted with a double three for miles around and had even managed to claim the digits as a telephone number.

  Allene hadn’t taken much with her when she ran away as a pregnant eighteen-year-old, but she’d always kept the double three as her lucky number. Although raised Presbyterian, in this she showed herself to be as superstitious as the majority of her otherwise-so-modern compatriots—there still weren’t any thirteenth floors in New York. And as believers fall back on their religions in difficult times, so the knocked-about Allene fell back on hers: a house with the number 33 on the front door had to bring her the luck she so desperately needed.

  In early October 1927, almost to the day when Teddy would have turned thirty, she signed the purchase agreement. A few days later, she unveiled a memorial on the spot of her son’s crash in Masnières, offered to her by the townspeople as thanks for her contribution to their village’s reconstruction. The boys’ school named after Teddy opened that same day. On the plaque announcing that the school had been built in memory of “their son,” Allene and Anson were once again united in marble.

  Sure enough, just a few months after Allene began a radical modernization of the house at 33 Rue Barbet-de-Jouy, she made the acquaintance of a handsome diplomat working at the German embassy in the nearby Rue de Lille. And he—how transparent fate can be!—also had a double three in his name, since Henry bore the aristocratic title of Prince Heinrich Reuss the Thirty-Third.

  Henry had the Reuss family’s remarkable habit of naming all their sons Heinrich to thank for the XXXIII in his name. The numbering began anew at the start of each century to distinguish them from one another. Aside from this, they were each given a nickname that was a variant of their given name. In this way, Henry’s older brother went through life as Heino, his younger as Henrico, and his son—whose official title was Heinrich Prince Reuss II, because he was the second Reuss prince to be born that century—was called Heiner.

  Henry didn’t need the lucky number in his name to charm the rich but solitary American widow. He was known as a handsome and charming man. Once, when his German family could still lay serious claim to the Dutch throne—this because their relative Queen Wilhelmina threatened to remain childless—the Dutch had openly expressed their preference of him over his older, not particularly intelligent brother. During their eight-day visit to the Netherlands in 1908, Henry was enthusiastically welcomed as “intelligent, good-looking and artistically minded”—in all respects the ideal candidate for the throne.

  That kingship never came to be, since against all expectation Wilhelmina managed to produce a daughter a year later. But Henry was still handsome. In short, Allene had found herself a seven-years-younger and very presentable husband, who, like her, was very well traveled—during his diplomatic career he’d been posted in Japan and Australia—and shared her great love of art. Aside from this—no mean feat for a girl who had take
n her first steps in a livery stable in Jamestown—after the wedding she became one of the first Americans ever to be able to call herself a princess.

  And finally—and perhaps this was the most important thing of all—with Henry and his motherless children, she would again have a family she could rightly call her own.

  Incidentally, in his letter to the governess, Henry saved for last what could have been the most important detail for him: the financial consequences. In other words, money, something of which the prince had a chronic shortage.

  Like most aristocratic German families, the Reusses had become impoverished since the end of the world war. After the collapse of the German front and the humiliating flight of Kaiser Wilhelm II in November 1918, a revolution had broken out that had toppled monarchies like domino pieces. Under the Weimar Republic that replaced the fragmented empire, aristocrats had to forfeit almost all their privileges and a large part of their land, which had traditionally provided their income.

  For Henry’s family, there was also this unfortunate circumstance: the family estate, Trebschen, was located in Posen, a province in the northeastern corner of the former empire. As a consequence of the Treaty of Versailles, in which Germany was forced to give up a large part of its territory, this province came to lie right next to the Polish border. The once-wealthy area soon emptied out and became impoverished, and by the time Henry met Allene, the Reuss brothers could hardly keep their heads above water. Everything they owned that could be sold was already gone, what was left of their land had been mortgaged to the hilt, and the house itself, which had been a real pleasure ground before the war, was now so dilapidated that their sister, who lived with her reasonably solvent husband in Stonsdorf, no longer wanted to visit with her family.