An American Princess Read online

  It was the end of the nineteenth century, and Victorian standards of propriety were followed to the letter. Men and women lived in completely separate worlds, and the bourgeoisie was so prudish that piano, chair, and table legs were covered and any thoughts that drifted toward sexuality were to be fended off. And if there was one sin that a respectable, unmarried girl in this age could not commit, it was to become pregnant.

  Many a young woman in Allene’s position ended her life to spare herself and her family a scandal. Young men such as Tod, in turn, usually withdrew from girlfriends who had been so stupid and wanton as to let this happen. They’d have their father, an older brother, or the family lawyer buy off their former lover and then settle down in the safety of their family fortune, their respectable future, and the unblemished wife who went with it.

  But Allene hadn’t been stupid. Her Tod might have been a gay libertine, but he was also kindhearted and genuinely crazy about her. On top of this, as a cherished and spoiled youngest child, he was accustomed to his family members ultimately letting him get away with things, however despairing they were of his antics at first. And so he and Allene resorted to the only possibility open to lovers wanting to stay together against their parents’ wishes: an elopement. They ran away, all the way to New York City, where, on May 14, 1891, they were secretly married in the Church of the Heavenly Rest on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-Fifth Street.

  In a final attempt to save the honor of the daughter who had so suddenly disappeared from town, Charles and Jennette Tew announced the news to the world in the Jamestown Evening Journal. The birth of the baby who had triggered this would be advertised in the same place exactly ten months later—conveniently failing to mention the fact that the infant was already five months old.

  Allene’s past in Jamestown was now over, but her future in Pittsburgh was just beginning. Tod’s family, suddenly confronted with a highly unwelcome, undesired, and poorly timed marriage, didn’t think for a minute of advertising this blot on the family crest in the various Pittsburgh chronicles that reported every last move made by a blue-book family.

  When, days after the marriage, the couple took the train from New York to Pittsburgh, Allene could see the black cloud hanging above her new home from a long way off. There was an actual cloud, originating from the thousands of chimneys that incessantly poured out smoke and soot. This was “Smoky Town,” after all. But there was also an invisible cloud: her rejection by her new family, who considered the baby in her belly a scandal and her a sophisticated gold digger who had managed to ensnare their naive youngest son.

  As green and fresh as had been the world in which Allene grew up, so gray and airless was the place where she arrived as the young Mrs. Hostetter. During the Industrial Revolution, Pittsburgh had—thanks to its strategic placement on the Allegheny, the Monongahela, and the Ohio Rivers and the rich coal deposits in the soil—become one of the richest cities in North America. In those years, the city housed more millionaires than even New York. But it was also one of the dirtiest and certainly one of the most dreary places on the continent.

  The so-called Golden Triangle, the plain between the three rivers where the city of Pittsburgh had been founded, was in fact a gigantic, heavily polluted industrial zone. Among the blast furnaces that burned day and night, the glass and leather factories, and the warehouses for petroleum, gas, and oil were slums and tenements. Here lived all those who had ended up on the wrong side of the American dream in circumstances that rendered downtown Pittsburgh what one inhabitant would express as “hell with the lid taken off.”

  Of course the robber barons, as the industrialists and factory owners were known because of their unscrupulous practices, did not insult their noses or spoil their views with the exploited and disenfranchised workers of the proletariat. They built their mansions in still-unpolluted small towns and villages in the hills around the city, like Allegheny City, on the north bank of the river of the same name. Predominantly since the Civil War, this former farming village had developed into a real millionaires’ mecca, complete with attractive parks, music pavilions, and its own zoo.

  There, on a Western Avenue freshly laid especially for rich inhabitants, Tod’s father had built a manor house in 1868. The house itself, with its heavy wooden wainscoting and leadlight windows, looked rather old-fashioned by now. But it still counted as one of the most attractive in the area, if only because it was on a double plot, unlike neighboring houses. Tod had been born and raised there, and perhaps for this reason, his father had left it to him in his will.

  Up to the moment when his young bride moved to Allegheny, Tod had shared his parental home with his mother and his eleven-years-older brother, David Jr., often called Herbert. Tod’s only sister lived with her husband and children on the opposite side of Western Avenue, where, with good foresight, their father had bought a couple of extra plots of land in 1868. These came in handy now, since Tod’s mother was less than keen to share the house she had ruled over for more than thirty years with the daughter-in-law she’d had forced upon her so against her wishes. She packed her bags and moved into the house next door to her daughter’s.

  The serious and responsible Herbert, who had taken on the daily running of the family business after his father’s death, wasn’t looking forward to Allene’s arrival, either. He and his wife moved near to his parents-in-law on “Millionaires’ Row,” an even richer neighborhood to the east of Pittsburgh. Later he would use the example of his brother’s marriage as a deterrent when bringing up his own children:

  A great deal of the trouble in the world comes from too early or willful romances. Therefore, if one kept a boy always with boys and away from the girls, and vice versa, “love’s disturbing element” could not enter into their lives.

  And so love’s disturbing element began her new life in Pittsburgh in the form of the now visibly pregnant Allene. She and Tod shared the large house at 171 Western Avenue with eight members of staff, most of whom had been in service to Rosetta, Tod’s mother, for years. American servants were famous for being considerably ruder than their European colleagues. That, coupled with the fact that the staff must have been aware of the details surrounding Allene’s marriage to their young master and the fact that their very young new mistress wasn’t exactly from the upper crust, must have made her role as head of housekeeping even harder.

  Allene’s reception into her husband’s family might have been icy and the atmosphere in the dark lump of stone on Western Avenue not much warmer, but it did get hot in the months that followed. The summers in the south of Pennsylvania were known for stuffy heat that often persisted for weeks, and the more temperatures rose, the more the stench and smoke from the hellhole that was downtown Pittsburgh blew toward their green town in the hills. Houses and gardens were covered in a thin layer of soot, which, however assiduously the servants washed and scrubbed, could never be entirely cleaned away.

  This was why the rich of Allegheny would prepare at the end of June for their annual exodus to cooler and fresher parts. The Hostetters usually departed for their holiday home in Narragansett Pier, a seaside resort on a Rhode Island bay. Shore Acres, which Tod’s father had built, was on Ocean Drive and had cool sea breezes galore and a panoramic view of the Atlantic Ocean. The house had sixteen rooms, but the family did not want Tod and his now very pregnant wife to stay there: Narragansett Pier was close to Newport, New York society’s regular summer colony where Mrs. Astor held her famous summer ball in her country house, Beechwood. An invitation to this indicated the pinnacle of success, since it came with automatic admission to the very highest social echelons of the country.

  And so reputations in and around Newport had to be tended with particular care. Tod must have understood that his family absolutely could not permit any suggestion of having accepted his wife as one of their own, not after the damaging spring they’d had to endure.

  Allene might have been still young and, in the beginning, still in awe of what a journalist friend of he
rs later described as “the glittering paradise of the Hostetters, where jewels were for the mere hint and money flowed like a veritable Niagara.” But even back then, she wasn’t the kind of woman to spend the entire summer closeted away in boiling-hot Pennsylvania. And so on July 5, 1891, a week before the official start of the ten-week summer season, the New York Times ran a notice that a “Mrs. Hostetter of Allegheny City” had rented a cottage on a small island facing Narragansett Pier that happened, perhaps by coincidence, to be called Jamestown.

  Summer life in “Jimtown,” as regular visitors affectionately called the windswept rocky island, was completely different than in prim and ostentatiously wealthy summer colonies like Newport and Narragansett Pier. The cottages, built in the local shingle style, were fairly primitive and furnished with lightweight wicker furniture. Entertainment was equally unpretentious and consisted mainly of simple pleasures like walking, paddling in the sea, picnics, and looking for shells. As one visitor described it:

  All guests were given free use of the resources of the house, rocks and harbor, and were expected to do exactly as they liked. Some sat inside playing the piano, some sat outside playing the guitar or banjo, some sat in rocking chairs, some on the grass . . . Some played tennis or quoits, some rowed, and a fine party of young folks went swimming off the pier, diving or jumping off its rail. And whatever we did, we sang in doing it.

  While Allene enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere, Tod spent most of his time “Grand Yachting,” a favorite sport of the Gilded Age millionaires. The spacious, deep, and sheltered bay off Rhode Island was exceptionally well suited to their very expensive steam sailing yachts equipped with all the creature comforts. America’s wealth had increased spectacularly, and in the summer the bay turned white with sails.

  Tod’s ship, the Judy, was nearly a hundred feet long, had a permanent six-man crew, and had been designed by the famous yacht builder Nathanael Herreshoff. But however elegant the $25,000 ship was, there was no question of Tod being able to moor it in Newport, where the country’s most prestigious nautical club, the New York Yacht Club, had its own jetty and clubhouse. The yacht club was as famous for protecting its waterfront from socially undesirable elements as Mrs. Astor was for her ballroom, and there was no way this young and not-all-that-respectable Pittsburgh millionaire would have gotten through the voting process.

  This was why Tod followed the example of William K. Vanderbilt, who, after being refused membership to the conservative New York men’s clubs, had set up his own Metropolitan Club. On July 14, 1891, Tod founded the Jamestown Yacht Club, together with a number of other yacht owners. He was elected first commodore—which in practice meant he was the person who paid everyone’s bills at the end of the day. And since, besides sailing, Tod was also mad about cards and other gambling games, a few weeks later, the sailing club gained a younger sister in the form of the Jamestown Card Club. The card club, according to its founding treaty, was intended to advance “Social Enjoyment among the Members.” Or rather, in the spirit of this wealthy young couple, entirely and only the pleasure of its members.

  Allene had clearly inherited one thing from her pioneering forefathers, and that was the conviction that if there wasn’t a road, there must be a detour that would get you where you wanted to go. And if there wasn’t a detour, a road had to be built. “If one has the will and persistence, one CAN do things,” she wrote later.

  She’d shown this mentality when she organized a vacation house the summer she wasn’t welcome at her in-laws’. She showed it again when her daughter Greta, born on September 27, 1891, was as stubbornly ignored by her new milieu as she was. In his official capacity as vice president of the Hostetter business, Tod was accepted as a member of one of the leading gentlemen’s clubs in Pittsburgh. But his wife and daughter didn’t even get a mention in the Pittsburgh and Allegheny Blue Book directory, in which his mother had featured for years as the embodiment of Victorian feminine virtues:

  In her tastes Mrs. Hostetter is thoroughly domestic; famous as a housekeeper, the best sort of wife, and as a mother simply adorable. Mrs. Hostetter dresses in excellent taste, in a style entirely suitable for her years.

  This meant total social isolation for Allene. She was not invited anywhere, she couldn’t leave her visiting card anywhere, and no one came to visit her. It was as though she and Greta simply did not exist.

  Again a detour was necessary, and again Allene found one. It was in the impressive form of the Daughters of the American Revolution, one of the most exclusive of the women’s clubs shooting out of the ground like mushrooms at the time. In most cases, these clubs functioned as covert vehicles to higher social positions. The DAR had been set up in 1890 with the official goal to keep alive the memory of America’s ancestors and advance education in remote areas. Membership was restricted to the descendants of people who had fought in the War of Independence.

  In December 1892, Allene signed up for the Pittsburgh branch of the DAR. She filled in her lineage on the application with great precision. Her bloodline went back to a British immigrant from Northamptonshire who had settled in Rhode Island in 1640, when America was still a British colony, and started a commercial farm. His daughter, born on the voyage over, was given the poetic name Seaborn. Several generations later, one of his great-grandsons joined those who took up arms against England and paid with his life: in 1782 Captain Henry Tew was purported to have died on the infamous British prisoner ship the HMS Jersey.

  Later, research would indicate that the captain in question had never existed, and Allene would be struck off the membership list. But at the time, the Pittsburgh branch of the DAR’s research didn’t reach that far. Energetic, wealthy members were needed, and the application was accepted. With this, Allene took her first step on the path to the respectability she had lost so radically by getting pregnant out of wedlock and eloping with her lover.

  In the meantime, it slowly began to dawn upon Tod’s mother that her new daughter-in-law was more than just a pretty face with an excess of ambition. Allene was strong and cheerful and precisely the anchor her charming but still stormy and, in essence, completely irresponsible son needed. What’s more, Tod was and remained head over heels for his wife and little daughter and more or less functioned, in any case in the eyes of the outside world, as a respectable member of the management of the family business.

  Allene and Tod spent the summer of 1892 again in their own Jimtown, where the sailing club was rebaptized the Conanicut Yacht Club and given its own accommodation in the form of a clubhouse financed by Tod, complete with a mooring jetty and a map room on the first floor. That fall, Allene became pregnant for the second time. Shortly thereafter, Tod’s mother put aside her pride and moved back into her old house. As if to emphasize to the outside world that Tod’s wife was now a proper member of the family, Rosetta and her daughter applied several years later for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution.

  For decades, Americans had been able to bask in the casual ease of their ever-growing affluence, but this changed from one day to the next in February 1893, when some alarming articles appeared in the newspapers. As a consequence of an economic depression in Europe, investors, especially British ones, were selling their overseas shares, particularly those in American railways, en masse, which drove down share prices. As a result, American banks began to get into difficulty, and the United States tumbled into a depression that would ultimately result in the bankruptcy of fifteen thousand businesses, of which seventy-four were railway companies and six hundred were banks.

  The Panic of 1893, as this serious economic depression was called, made it painfully clear how dependent the young country actually was on foreign capital. But even more painful was the way it showed how completely amoral and unscrupulous Wall Street had become. Large commercial banks such as J.P. Morgan had implemented all kinds of practices and tricks to manipulate share value. There was no governmental control or legislation, and there was no one cheated investors could turn to because e
ven judges allowed themselves to be paid off by the omnipotent banking sector.

  As often was the case, it wasn’t the instigators of the crisis who received the hardest knocks. No, it was the working class, and especially the hundred thousand unemployed. There wasn’t any work, there were no benefits, there wasn’t a single form of relief; for these people, the American dream had degenerated into a nightmare from which there was no escape.

  The millionaires, on the other hand, partied and spent money as though nothing was wrong. Mrs. Astor had already lost her battle against the new money and accompanying bad taste that had flooded New York. Her nineteenth-century old New York, with its painterly streets, sober brownstones, and romantic gas lamps, was ousted by the noisy glitter and glamour of the nouveaux riches who moved to the city from all over America to show off their fortunes.

  On Fifth Avenue in particular, pseudo-Gothic constructions, fake châteaus, and sham palazzos shot up out of the ground like dragon’s teeth, each larger and more gaudy than the next. The houses were stuffed with artworks that had been pillaged from all over Europe and transported back to America by the shipload. It was rumored that the immensely rich newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst needed two warehouses to store all of the old-world possessions he had amassed. Young, extravagant millionaires like Alva Vanderbilt, Mamie Fish, and Tessie Oelrichs outdid each other with parties that, it seemed, couldn’t be expensive or bizarre enough, such as masquerade balls with themes like Roman orgies or French court dances. And if that wasn’t enough to amuse the guests, you could always, as Mamie Fish once did, have a dressed-up monkey act as guest of honor.

  The excesses and exorbitant extravagances of the superrich were widely reported in tabloid papers like the New York Herald and Town Topics. Young America was obsessed with money, and the general public was so insatiable for details of the lives, houses, and parties of the rich that a headline like “Rich Woman Falls Down Stairs—Not Hurt” could easily make the front page.