An American Princess Read online

  Allene and her children joined him on the Seneca that summer of 1901. But Tod barely saw them: he was below deck day and night playing roulette with his friends. At a certain point, Allene must have realized that even with all the will and persistence in the world, she still wouldn’t be able to compete with the demons that had taken possession of Tod. And neither would love. She left the yacht and her husband and traveled with her children to her in-laws’ at Narragansett Pier. Greta was nine when her mother officially divorced her father, and Teddy was just four. Their parents’ marriage had lasted ten years.

  Later it would be estimated that Tod went through an average of nearly $100,000 a month during that last winter. He cut “one of the widest swaths of the sporting fraternity,” as the Washington Post would later write with fitting understatement. The fact that his brother Herbert had become the trustee of his funds after Allene left him didn’t hold him back at all. He simply borrowed money from Davy Johnson, who had him sign IOU after IOU, one friend to another.

  Canfield’s Club became Tod’s regular hangout. It was a casino that had opened in 1899 on Forty-Fourth Street, right next to the world-famous Delmonico’s restaurant and opposite the chic Sherry Hotel. Its owner, Richard Canfield, had been a porter at the prestigious Union Club in a former life and knew exactly what men with too much money and too few challenges needed in their lives. His club breathed luxury and privacy, whether for men who wanted a place to take women they weren’t married to or for millionaires wanting to try their luck with baccarat or at the roulette table.

  A New York newspaper would later write expressively, “Canfield’s was the scene of many a wastrel heir’s downfall.” Among the wastrel heirs were two grandsons of Cornelius Vanderbilt. One of them managed to lose $120,000 in a single evening, while his cousin Reginald “Reggie” Claypoole Vanderbilt managed to amass gambling debts of more than $400,000 in the space of six months. And then of course there was Tod, the young Pittsburgher who drowned his sorrows about his failed marriage and lost life evening after evening, and at the end of an evening would sign any paperwork put before him.

  Tod was not present on Allene’s thirtieth birthday, July 7, 1902. She spent the day with her children at her in-laws’ at Narragansett Pier. Earlier that year she had rented a small house on East Seventy-Third Street as a New York pied-à-terre for herself and her parents, who had come over from Jamestown to support their daughter through these difficult times. She also sought consolation and distraction in her horses. She garnered high praise on August 21 with what the New York Times described as a “handsome pair of piebald ponies” during Narragansett Pier’s first horse show.

  In the meantime, Tod made half-hearted attempts to make amends with his family and wife between bouts of gambling. On July 30, he sailed the Seneca to the Larchmont Yacht Club’s harbor to visit his brother Herbert. His breathlessness on this occasion was put down to his weight—he was short and had always tended toward plumpness, but by now he was simply fat. That evening, at the Waldorf Astoria, he complained of a cold, which he believed he’d caught that day on board his ship.

  On Friday, two days later, he paid a short visit to the Duquesne, where he gave his steward instructions for the installation of a new roulette wheel to be placed the following day. Saturday night he spent at his house on East Sixty-Fifth Street, playing poker with friends. As usual, the game was played with great enthusiasm, and when the host became dangerously short of breath around midnight, no one thought to fetch a doctor.

  And so the Lucky Plunger died in the early morning of the third day of August, of what would later be diagnosed as a neglected case of pneumonia, among the playing cards and friends who weren’t friends and, ultimately, entirely alone. He was only thirty-two years old.

  Tod’s body was taken by train to his birthplace the next night. Allene, who had rushed from Rhode Island to New York that morning, was with her parents at East Seventy-Third Street. The next morning, when the printers’ ink announcing the death of the young Pittsburgh millionaire in the newspapers was barely dry, casino owner Richard Canfield knocked on her door. He presented the astonished widow with a pile of promissory notes amounting to more than a quarter of a million dollars.

  The funeral took place on Tuesday, August 5. For most of the day, Tod’s body, surrounded by wildflowers, was laid out in the reception hall of his sister’s house on Western Avenue. In the afternoon, the service was held there, too. The attendance was overwhelming. Whatever his weaknesses may have been, Tod had always been generosity and cheerfulness themselves and had never harmed a fly.

  At the end of the afternoon, Tod was laid to rest next to his brothers, his father, and his little daughter in the Allegheny Cemetery. His coffin was carried by childhood friends, including the nephews of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and train tycoon Joshua Rhodes—young men who, unlike him, hadn’t succumbed under the weight of too much money and their fathers’ successes.

  At first, the Hostetter family successfully managed to keep the circumstances surrounding the death of the family’s black sheep out of the press. According to the official line, he was said to have died in a sanatorium on Park Avenue of an unspecified illness. The papers managed to get wind of the story in the winter of 1903 thanks to Davy Johnson, who launched a court case against Tod’s heirs on January 20 of that year. At stake was a sum of $115,000 that he claimed to have won from Tod during his favorite game of flipping coins.

  Coincidentally or not, the New York police raided Canfield’s Club that same day and arrested the business manager. The charge was that on the night of April 15, 1902, the manager had deliberately gotten the young Hostetter drunk in order to have him sign a promissory note of $30,000. Earlier attempts to close the famous casino—in particular after the young Vanderbilts suffered painful losses—had failed. But this time it worked. The detectives from the metropolitan police force ascertained that Canfield’s employed large-scale deceit: trick wheels, fake faro card layouts, and “false and clogged dice.” The club’s death warrant had been signed.

  The raid on Forty-Fourth Street also meant the end of the hope that Tod’s pitiful death could be kept out of the public eye. On February 8, 1903, the New York Times opened with the headline “Theodore Hostetter—‘The Lucky Plunger’—Lost a Million in a Year.” According to the story, papers left behind showed that at the time of his death Tod owed Davy Johnson a massive $620,000. Aside from this, he was said to have $300,000 outstanding at Canfield’s and other casinos, which brought his total debt to nearly $1 million.

  The next day, speaking through his lawyer, Richard Canfield denied any involvement or even having known Tod. Davy Johnson, on the other hand, gave interviews to just about any journalist who came knocking. He said that his lawyers had instigated the case in Pittsburgh without his knowledge and that he’d suspended it as soon as he heard. It was unsporting to settle gambling debts in the courts, he said. He seemed genuinely shocked by the death of his young friend:

  I loved Tod. He was the best sport I have ever seen. I regret the publicity that rose out of this matter on account of the widow and children of “Tod” Hostetter. I believe that Mrs. Hostetter will say that I always treated her husband on the level, that I was his sincere friend, that I liked him personally and that I was of more value than expense to him when it is considered what a wild plunger he was. But it is hard to keep track of a man who would bet $1,000 a game on polo at Narragansett Pier.

  A few weeks later, Johnson would announce that his racing stables were for sale and that he was quitting any kind of betting for good. He had settled any claims on Tod Hostetter’s legacy behind closed doors.

  Ultimately, Johnson was as unable to cope with life without betting as his dead friend had been: eight years later he would die the inveterate gambler he’d always been. In one newspaper, his obituary was given the befitting headline “Famous Plunger Accepts Last Bet.”

  As for Tod’s pretty young widow, as the Evening World called Allene, she wisely held her tongue
. It seems that after his death, Allene didn’t stay a day longer than necessary in the city she’d called her home for more than eleven years but where she’d never felt truly welcome. She left behind her husband and youngest daughter in their hillside graves, she left behind the Hostetter clan with its veiled alcohol empire, and she left behind Pittsburgh with its black clouds of smoke. She took her son and daughter with her and left via the same route she’d come in 1891, only now in the opposite direction, from Pittsburgh to New York.

  And she never looked back.

  4

  New York, New York

  If Allene had been searching for a suitable anthill to disappear into, she couldn’t have thought of a better place than Empire City, as New York now proudly nicknamed itself. Four years earlier, Manhattan had combined with its surrounding districts, including Queens and Brooklyn, and the city with 3.5 million inhabitants had become the largest in the world after London. And it was still an unrivaled magnet for immigrants: on some days, the border post on Ellis Island welcomed no fewer than twenty-one thousand newcomers.

  Manhattan had grown into a physical symbol of what human ingenuity and energy could achieve. The deployment of steel construction and the “safety hoister”—the elevator—meant that buildings were growing ever taller, with the twenty-two-story Flatiron Building counting as the provisional high point in 1902. The once-so-dark Broadway became a “Great White Way” where the general public feasted its eyes day and night on the giant floodlit shop windows of exclusive department stores and boutiques—this thanks to the invention of a “small ball of sunlight, a true Aladdin’s lamp”: Thomas Edison’s light bulb.

  Some writers, such as Edith Wharton and Henry James, emigrated to Europe, disgusted by the raw concrete, harsh light, and vulgarity of industrialized America; other writers and artists were drawn en masse to the most modern and lively and least bourgeois city in the world. In the words of writer Charles Eliot Norton:

  This is a wonderful city. There is a special fitness in the first syllable of its name, for it is essential New and seems likely always to remain so. The only old things here are yesterday’s newspapers.

  Pedestrians, carriages, horse-drawn carts, donkey carts, and cyclists fought for a place in the streets with automobiles, omnibuses, and the electric streetcars that had been deployed as public transport since 1900. The smell of horse dung mixed with exhaust fumes, and everywhere horns were tooted, bells were rung, and voices were raised, with, above it all, the screaming of the “els”—the elevated trains that ran along the entire length of Manhattan and were intended to reduce the chaos but somehow only managed to add to it.

  Allene experienced herself just how dangerous the confrontation between old and new could be on May 14, 1903, when an omnibus so frightened the horses pulling the carriage she was in that they bolted. Both horses and passengers escaped with just shock, but because of these kinds of accidents and the alarming number of traffic fatalities, that year work was begun on an underground train tunnel that would grow into the New York subway network.

  There was no city more hospitable and none more capricious than New York, with her “pull-down-and-build-all-over-again spirit,” as poet Walt Whitman succinctly put it. Now that automobiles were rendering horse stables superfluous and it was becoming easier to commute between country house and city, luxurious apartment complexes were becoming increasingly popular.

  The big, fancy town houses the nouveaux riches had recently built to withstand all eternity fell prey to wrecking balls, one by one. In most cases, their interiors, bought in Europe along with priceless art objects of great historical value, ended up in the trash heap. In answer to the question of whether they couldn’t be preserved, one demolition contractor summarized the mood in New York in those days with “I don’t deal in secondhand goods.”

  In retrospect, Tod had literally gambled himself to death at nearly the same moment that the period his life unintentionally symbolized came to an end. While in the spring of 1903 the newspapers were still full of stories about his gambling mania, a new wave of public indignation was welling. Its new target: the eccentric Chicago industrialist C. K. G. Billings, who had rented out a floor of the Sherry Hotel to stage a dinner for thirty-six costumed guests on horseback. This time, public opinion was too powerful for big money: the dinner went ahead but at a different, strictly confidential location, and the Billings Horseback Dinner went down in history as one of the death throes of the Gilded Age.

  The frenzied hedonism and absurd luxury that had given the last decade of the nineteenth century its gaudy overtone simply went out of fashion. Even such a spoiled society doyenne as Alva Belmont was searching for a better way to give her life meaning, joining the suffragette movement. At the same time, the filthy rich had become less filthy and less rich, thanks to the young politician Theodore Roosevelt, who had succeeded as president after McKinley was assassinated in 1901. Roosevelt may have been a Republican, but he was a lot more sensitive to the changing times than his predecessor. He started regulating banks, the food industry, and railway trusts; introduced higher taxes; and for the first time consulted the trade unions, which the government had looked upon with suspicion up to then.

  The changing times had an effect on the lives of the Hostetters, too. Both tax authorities and prohibitionists had firmly set their sights on the family’s bitters empire, and in some places, pharmacists who still dared to sell the controversial herb drink as a medicine were prosecuted. In 1905, Hostetter’s Bitters was officially added to the list of alcoholic drinks and taxed as such.

  Greta and Teddy Hostetter inherited what was left of Tod Hostetter’s possessions, including the hunting lodge at Raccoon Creek, but they no longer received the annual Niagara Falls’ worth of dollars to which their father had succumbed. As far as Allene was concerned, she seemed not to have inherited anything except her husband’s personal gambling debts and a last name that had been dragged through the mud. Her brother-in-law Herbert, with whom she’d never really gotten along, was in charge of the settlement of Tod’s estate and of his children’s inheritance.

  This meant that for every important decision, Allene had to go to her detested Pittsburgh. If she was so keen to live in New York, she’d have to make do with her barely twenty-foot-wide rental house on Seventy-Third Street. When her former mother-in-law died in the summer of 1904 at the age of seventy-five, Allene didn’t get a cent. The $5 million Rosetta left behind was shared out among her one remaining son, her daughter, and Tod’s children.

  There was only one way in which a woman without profession or means could take her life in a new direction in those days, and that was through a man. And Allene found one—and incredibly quickly, too. On August 28, 1904, at the third annual Narragansett horse show, Allene showed herself in public for the first time with the New York stockbroker Morton Nichols, the man who was to become her second husband.

  Nichols was a dream partner, at least on paper. He was the youngest son of the wealthy gold merchant William Snowden Nichols, who had worked on the New York Stock Exchange for more than fifty years and counted as one of the country’s most important authorities on financial matters. With his dark blond curls and blue eyes, Morton wasn’t unattractive, although his chin was described on his passport application as “not heavy”—which, in the thinking of the times, might have been seen as a sign of a weak character. Aside from this, he also had the reputation for being rather surly and not keen to marry.

  A society magazine had characterized him early that summer as follows:

  Morton Colton Nichols is one of the club bachelors who is seen a great deal in society. Mr. Nichols is a member of the Metropolitan Club, which he practically makes his home. He was graduated from Harvard in 1892. Besides the Metropolitan he belongs to the Union League, the Racquet, and the University. He is a stock broker and comes from an old New England family. He is currently one of the house party staying with Mr. and Mrs. Reginald C. Vanderbilt at Newport.

  Indeed, Morton,
who was thirty-four years old when he met Allene, had until that moment shown little sign of a burning need to give up his comfortable life in the gentlemen’s clubs for the commitments of marriage. He had been engaged to Vivian Sartoris, the pretty British granddaughter of former president Ulysses S. Grant, for more than five years, with some gaps. However, that had never resulted in marriage, and in 1903 she’d married somebody else.

  Morton’s lightning romance with Allene seems to have mainly come about under pressure from his eighty-two-year-old father, who had recently been diagnosed with an incurable form of cancer. His two eldest sons were literally and figuratively taken care of: they worked for him in the family business and had been respectably married for years. William Nichols was therefore keen to guide his until-then rather directionless youngest son into a safe harbor before his death. The New York Times later wrote that the elderly gold merchant had begged Allene to marry his son so that he could be there.

  The wedding took place on December 27, 1904, at Saint Thomas Church in London, in private—this, it was claimed, was because of Morton’s father’s physical state. The fact that the ceremony took place on the other side of the ocean suggests that those concerned were doing their best to keep this notable union between the proverbial eternal bachelor and the widow with a tale as far from the searchlights of the press as possible.

  Nevertheless, a British correspondent for the Washington Post managed to gather a few interesting details, such as the fact that Morton didn’t arrive at the church until the very last minute. According to the official statement, he hadn’t wanted to leave his father’s sickbed.