An American Princess Read online

  The young couple must have been aware of their status as the less successful branch of the family. After the wedding, Charles and Jennette settled down in the sparsely populated countryside of Wisconsin, where there was still free land to be had for aspiring farmers. There, in the tiny village of Janesville in Rock County, Allene was born on July 7, 1872. Hers was an unusual name, probably a variant of the Irish Eileen, and one that might have sounded more chic to Charles and Jennette.

  Charles wasn’t cut out to be a pioneer, it transpired, and soon the young couple returned to Jamestown and moved into Jennette’s father’s livery stable on West Third Avenue. Charles’s father, William, had given up his business on Main Street to take over his late brother George’s role as president of the family bank. He had passed the stove and hardware store to his daughter, who had married his former helper. Charles was found an unchallenging job as assistant cashier in the bank.

  And thus Allene spent the first years of her life in the commotion and equine stench of a livery in the center of Jamestown, unlike her many cousins who lived in expensive mansions on the leafy outskirts of the town. Only later, when her grandfather William withdrew from the bank, moved to a detached house on Pine Street, and had his youngest son and his wife and child come and live next to him, did she get a more distinguished place of residence.

  It was clear that Allene would remain an only child—an unusual phenomenon in a prolific clan like the Tews. Also clear was that her father would never make it beyond cashier. He would be the only second-generation Tew male in Jamestown never to be lauded in the almanacs in which the era’s most prominent citizens of the region were portrayed.

  On July 4, 1876, Americans celebrated one hundred years of independence. And celebrate they did, with a passion; seldom had a country been able to offer its inhabitants as many opportunities as the United States could at that moment. It was a massive, still largely virgin country full of valuable resources like wood, rivers, and ore. New technologies and inventions were the order of the day, and there was an almost unequaled mentality of ambition and daring. Everything seemed to be conspiring not only to give Americans the “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” as set down in the Declaration of Independence, but also to make that happiness genuinely possible.

  The continent was bursting at the seams with revelry, and Jamestown proved itself up to the task. “We will celebrate!” the local newspaper had announced, months in advance. The city was dolled up like a factory girl on her wedding day, and on the great day itself, an immense parade of bands, the fire brigade, and sports associations passed through triumphal archways decorated with flowers. There were concerts, dance parties, and picnics everywhere, and in the evening a large fireworks display over Lake Chautauqua propelled the country into the next century. “How we celebrated,” the Jamestown Journal sighed the next day. “Twenty thousand people come to the front—and go home happy!”

  In subsequent years, new inventions like the combustion engine and developments like the large-scale application of steel heralded the arrival of a second Industrial Revolution, and prosperity in North America became unstoppable. The United States’ share of worldwide industrial output grew to 30 percent, almost as much as that of its former motherland, England, which had considered itself the undisputed leader of the world’s economy up to that point.

  The Americans, who had been dependent on Europe for many of their resources before the Civil War, now began to export products back to the Old World at competitive prices. Entrepreneurs, still unhindered by limiting factors like income tax or trade regulations, made unprecedented fortunes in a matter of years. Origin had become unimportant—only individual ambition, cleverness, and daring mattered. The number of millionaires grew, in a few decades, from twenty to forty thousand. The American population tripled between 1865 and 1900 but became, as a whole, a whopping thirteen times richer.

  Everything seemed possible in the Gilded Age, as Mark Twain called this period of national expansion and unbridled optimism. Paupers came in rags on boats from Europe and worked themselves up to being millionaires. The attraction of this country of unlimited opportunities had never been greater for fortune hunters than it was now. During the first half of the nineteenth century, around two and a half million immigrants risked the ocean crossing; during the second half, the stream swelled to a dazzling eleven million.

  So perhaps Allene’s father wasn’t a success story like the rest of her family, and perhaps her rich cousins and classmates at the Jamestown Union School considered that a reason to treat her with a certain pity, but young as she was, she held her head high. And for good reason, in the scarce childhood photographs of her that are known, it is apparent that Allene Tew inherited one thing that couldn’t be obtained with money: beauty. She grew up with something better than wealth, a dream—the American dream, in which you could become whatever you wanted, wherever you came from. In which, as her great-uncle George and her grandfather had proved, you could start out in a primitive cabin in the middle of the hostile wilderness and end up in a marble bank building in a booming city, a city that you had wrested from the woods with your bare hands.

  2

  The Glittering Paradise

  Years later, when she was an old woman and no longer needed or was able to worry about her own children, Allene wrote of the possessive urge parents often felt and how important it was not to succumb to it:

  Everyone has the right to live her own life, NO parent can destroy the youth and joy of their child. They use all kinds of excuses to try and cover their selfishness but if the daughter or son do take the bit in their teeth and LIVE the mother always gets on allright.

  “Everyone has the right to live her own life . . .” And it sounds as though Allene had personal experience testing that. And so she had. If there was ever a girl in Jamestown who gave her parents reason to worry, it was Allene.

  Charles and Jennette Tew may have been able to keep their beautiful, impetuous daughter in check if Jamestown had remained the rugged yet uninspiring pioneer community it had been during their youth. That this didn’t happen was, ironically enough, the fault of Methodists and other religious groups who, halfway through the 1870s, discovered in Chautauqua the earthly paradise of their dreams.

  On the northern side of the still lovely and unspoiled Lake Chautauqua, the Methodists built the Chautauqua Institution, a kind of permanent summer colony created to promote all sorts of edifying subjects, such as art, science, religion, patriotism, and education. The institution soon attracted important visitors, such as the inventor Thomas Edison, the writer Rudyard Kipling, and, in 1880, even President James Garfield. When he left, Garfield devoted a lyrical speech to the place: “It has been the struggle of the world to get more leisure, but it was left for Chautauqua to show how to use it.”

  Rich inhabitants of big cities like Cleveland, Chicago, and Pittsburgh didn’t need to be told twice. They’d show the world how people should put their free time to good use. From the early 1880s, the banks of Lake Chautauqua were gradually clad in wood—in hotels and summerhouses built in neo-Gothic style, each more expensive and luxurious than the next, intended for “the Wealth and Fashion from leading American cities.” And along with flirting men in their carefree straw boater hats and women in their elegant summer outfits, Glamour and her little sister Frivolity also arrived in Chautauqua.

  The city dwellers came by train, followed by streams of servants and stacks of travel trunks. On the Jamestown docks, they transferred to the white steamboats, elegantly decorated with filigree, of the Great White Fleet that sailed across the lake from six o’clock in the morning until midnight without interruption. In the evening, the boats, romantically lit by oil lamps, were used for moonlight cruises and transportation to and from the many dance parties, concerts, theater shows, vaudevilles, straw rides, dinners, and other forms of entertainment organized for the summer guests.

  And so Allene grew up in a world with two faces. In early May, whe
n nature burst out from under the last remains of the snow, the shutters of lakeside fairy-tale palaces would open and everything would be readied for the short, hot, festive summer season. At the end of August, when the trees began to change color, the party would end as abruptly as it had begun. The shutters would be closed; the lake would again become the quiet domain of flocks of migratory birds and a few solitary fishermen. And Jamestown would return to its mundane, wintery self: an essentially sober, God-fearing town, moderate in everything except its ambitions.

  The inhabitants of Jamestown looked on the annual summer invasion with mixed feelings. It was true that holidaymakers brought money and prosperity, and the townspeople were businesslike enough to take advantage of this down to the last cent. But the summer visitors also introduced to Chautauqua all the ailments of modern city life that the townspeople, as true Victorians, were so very afraid of: godlessness, gambling, alcohol, promiscuity, and—heaven forbid—fallen women and unwanted pregnancies. The rich young bachelors who treated the lake as their favorite playground during those years were particularly regarded with suspicion. They gambled and they drank; they swam in money and seemed to have little else to do than turn the heads of as many local girls as possible.

  Girls such as Allene Tew, for example. Perhaps because it was unclear which class she belonged to, always floating from the livery stable of her mother’s family on the one side to the Tews’ bank building on the other. Perhaps, too, because she was the only child of rather passive parents and lacked the tight harness of a larger family. In any case, she was different, freer than her female cousins and peers and considerably less inclined to act like a lady as it was then defined.

  Her grandfather Andrew Smith, the coachman, had instilled in Allene a great love of horses. She could ride like a boy—and often better than one. And she was clever; she had, a friend would later attest, “a quick wit and a daring that became her.” Quick wit and daring weren’t the only things that suited her. With her dark blond hair, pale blue eyes, and elegant figure, she was unmistakably a young woman every man would look at—“a blue-eyed blonde with defiantly arched eyebrows,” as she once was described.

  Allene’s gaze indeed contrasted with the humility and modesty preached as typical feminine virtues during that period. Perhaps, those eyes said, her parents weren’t endowed with the unbridled dynamism of the Tews, but she was. She longed for pleasure, for adventure, and particularly for a world that was larger than the essentially small-town Jamestown.

  In short, Allene Tew had everything anyone might need to get into trouble. And that is what she did.

  Theodore “Tod” Hostetter was the nightmare incarnate of every father in Jamestown. “Charming . . . rakish . . . a gay Lothario, as reckless as he was handsome” was how a journalist friend of his characterized him. He could amply afford his arrogance because even though this heir from Pittsburgh was scarcely twenty years old the first time he met Allene, he had already received such an improbably large fortune that all he had to do for the rest of his life was spend it as creatively as possible.

  Tod had his father, David Hostetter, to thank for the excess of dollars. David’s life story contained precisely the magical mix of elements that convinced immigrants all over the world to jump on boats to America. Raised as the son of a village doctor in a sparsely populated, poor farming region in Pennsylvania, David had tried to make his fortune as a young man during the gold rush in California. When gold turned out to be more difficult to find than first thought, he opened a grocery store, which soon burned down. After that, he returned home, his tail between his legs, with no other future before him than the heavy, physically exhausting existence of a railway laborer.

  But David never abandoned his dream of becoming rich, and when he was thirty-four, he came up with the idea of commercially exploiting his father’s home-brewed herbal elixir. Dr. J. Hostetter’s Celebrated Stomach Bitters proved a resounding success right from its introduction in 1854. It was sold as a remedy for ailments as diverse as stomachaches, bowel complaints, nervousness, and depression, and the Union Army even purchased it on a large scale as a cure for diarrhea during the Civil War.

  Years later, when its secret recipe was finally analyzed, it would become clear why it made every patient feel significantly better. In addition to containing some herbs and water, the potion turned out to be loaded with alcohol—estimates vary from 32 to a whopping 47 percent. At a time when antialcohol campaigners such as Allene’s grandfather William were managing to banish liquor from public life, the herbal remedy became an attractive alternative.

  For David Hostetter, the elixir was a gold mine. The ingredients cost next to nothing, and because he had patented the concoction as a medicine, he didn’t need to pay any tax on the profits. In the early 1860s, he was selling more than 450,000 bottles of herbal elixir a year. He kept away suspicious inspectors and teetotalers by publicly making himself known as a devout supporter of prohibition, and he kept his competitors at an appropriate distance with incentives such as a free almanac he produced and made available every December at American grocery stores.

  Aside from weather forecasts, agricultural tips, astrological information, and cartoons, Hostetter’s United States Almanac for the Use of Merchants, Mechanics, Farmers, Planters and all Families was full of anecdotes about the miraculous healing powers of Hostetter’s Bitters. During this period, it was the only book in many American households, aside from the Bible. “They can talk about Shakespeare, but in my opinion old Hostetter . . . had more influence on the national life than any of ’em,” an influential columnist wrote.

  By the early 1870s, David was selling more than a million bottles a year. He invested the gigantic profits he made in all kinds of rising industries in and around Pittsburgh, such as railways, mining, the banking sector, and oil extraction, something for which his failed adventures in the Wild West came in handy. The former railway laborer now moved as an equal alongside such famous Gilded Age millionaires as Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie. He was on the boards of various prestigious companies like the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad, the Fort Pitt National Bank, the Pittsburgh Natural Gas Company, and the South Pennsylvania Railroad.

  But all those herbal elixirs and all the prestige and money in the world couldn’t protect David Hostetter from his own mortality. In 1888, he died at age sixty-nine in a Park Avenue hotel from complications following a kidney operation. He left his widow and three children a fortune of $18 million. Aside from this, all four of them received from the company an annual dividend of $810,000 each—this in a period when the average hourly wage of an American worker was exactly twenty-two cents.

  In Jamestown, Hostetter’s Almanac had long been in every household. And there were frequent articles with provocative headlines in the Jamestown Journal that, upon closer examination, turned out to be veiled advertisements for the eponymous herbal elixir. It could hardly have escaped Allene’s notice that the handsome dark-haired young man she met at a dance in the summer of 1890, and who courted her with his mercurial charm, was heir to one of the largest fortunes in Pittsburgh.

  The chance that this Tod Hostetter would reveal himself to be a serious marriage candidate was negligible. America was the land of unprecedented opportunity, but this didn’t mean class consciousness didn’t exist. On the contrary, now especially, as the country was flooded with millionaires, the existing elite withdrew into a social fortress in which lineage and name were of utter importance. Caroline Astor, the uncrowned queen of New York society, refused to host in her salon even the Vanderbilts, at the time the richest family in the United States—only because their forefather, Cornelius, had begun his career as a ferry boy and his descendants behaved in a fashion too unorthodox in her eyes for them to be classified as ladies and gentlemen.

  “Mrs. Astor,” as all of America knew her, was descended from the Knickerbockers, the British and Dutch pioneers who had set the tone of American society since colonial times. She c
onsidered it her personal mission to prove that she and her countrymen were more than the tobacco-chewing illiterate bumpkins the world took them for. After Georges Clemenceau—who would eventually become French prime minister—announced in 1889 that America had gone from barbarism to hedonism “without achieving any civilization between the two,” Mrs. Astor drew up a list of the four hundred people who in her view counted as a kind of American aristocracy. The chosen ones could boast of not only an impeccable way of life but also fortunes that could be traced back at least three generations.

  As happens when anything can be bought except social status, trying to prove themselves in Mrs. Astor’s eyes became a true mania among the wives of the nouveaux riches. Handbooks like The Laws of Etiquette, or Short Rules and Reflections for Conduct in Society were studied closely, and any decent American town had its own social register, or blue book—a directory of families who were worthy of being received in polite society. Even Tod’s mother had acted in this race to respectability. Although her husband’s money was certainly new and smelled just a little too strongly of alcohol to be respectable, she still managed to have her two oldest children marry scions of old, prominent Pittsburgh families.

  The last thing Rosetta Hostetter needed was a liaison between her son and a girl without social status, means, or useful connections and from a region that, compared to metropolitan Pittsburgh, counted as the sticks. For this reason, the lovers kept their budding summer romance on Lake Chautauqua strictly secret at first. It remained so—even in the late summer, when the season’s visitors had left Chautauqua and Tod was expected to resume his medical studies. And even after Allene, in the heart of the cold winter of 1891, discovered that the clandestine meetings with her Pittsburgh admirer had not been without consequence. She was pregnant.