An American Princess Read online

This was how Allene started the year 1905: freed from the gold-plated headlock of the Hostetters, free, too, from the name that had gained such negative connotations. Through her connection to the Nicholses—a Mrs. Astor–approved American blue-book family, she and her children now automatically belonged to the highest echelons of society. And though neither Teddy nor Greta was ever formally adopted by their stepfather, they quietly continued life with his last name.

  After a short honeymoon in Canada, in early 1905, the family moved into a temporary residence on East Seventy-Sixth Street while they waited for their own house to be built. This was one of Allene’s conditions. She’d had her fill of living in houses belonging to her in-laws.

  In the meantime and against all expectations, the elderly William Nichols managed to cling to life for another six months. He died on July 23, 1905, leaving his sons millions. Two weeks later, Morton applied for a passport for a lengthy world tour he wanted to go on with his new family. The trip would take more than a year. He was, according to the application, a retired banker now. Clearly he’d quit his job at the J.P. Morgan commercial bank right after his father’s death.

  Allene met these travel plans with open arms—if she hadn’t, perhaps, come up with them herself. Not only would the round-the-world trip bridge the period until their new house would be completed, it also seemed the ideal way to work her second life partner free of his beloved clubs and the less desirable elements in his circle of friends. However different Tod and Morton were in character, they did have one thing in common: Morton, too, was no stranger to racecourses, and he kept up intimate friendships with dyed-in-the-wool gamblers. Reginald Vanderbilt, who had lost sums almost as astronomical as Tod had in Canfield’s Club, counted among his friends, as did Joseph Ullman, the owner of a racing stables and the biggest bookmaker in America.

  Transcontinental travel was all the rage among America’s richest at the time. While the nineteenth-century elite had barely left their country—Tod Hostetter had never owned a passport—those in this exciting new century did little else. Large shipping companies like the White Star Line and the Cunard Line competed with each other in the size, speed, and luxuriousness of their majestic ocean liners. Some ships even had internal telephone connections on board.

  That Allene’s children would miss a part of their schooling was not considered a problem. A trip around the world would be good for their development and help them overcome the shocking events in their young lives. They had withstood their parents’ divorce, their father’s death and the scandal around it, the sudden move to New York, and, shortly after that, the sudden arrival of a total stranger who was their new father—although he showed little sign of considering them anything more than his wife’s necessary baggage.

  The Nichols family trip can easily be followed through the society columns, which were wont to keep the home front accurately informed about the comings and goings of the so-called Steamer Set. After boarding a ship in September, the family spent the winter in Asia, where they moored in Singapore and Batavia. In the spring, they visited Egypt. Next, they set sail for Europe for extended visits to London, Paris, and the French Riviera.

  During this part of the journey, Allene had her parents brought over from New York. She bought them an apartment in Nice, where they could spend a peaceful old age in the mild weather of the South of France, as many Russian and European aristocrats had traditionally done.

  The family continued on its travels, now to the American West Coast, where they stopped at Hawaii and Los Angeles, among other places. In the fall of 1906, they arrived back in New York, where they took up residence at 57 East Sixty-Fourth Street in their brand-new town house, which could already count itself among the prettiest and most elegant houses in the city.

  The Allene Tew Nichols House, as the building was named after its patron, was designed by one of the most fashionable architects of the period, Charles “Cass” P. H. Gilbert. He had trained at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and the cosmopolitan style that was in vogue, with its attention to symmetry and balance, fit him like a glove. The building he had built for Allene, with its pale gray stucco and curving facade, was seven stories tall and included a six-person elevator, seven fireplaces, and twelve bedrooms, each equipped with its own bathroom.

  The progress of the couple’s marriage in the meantime has not been documented, but the chances are that upon their return, Morton, a clubman at heart, immediately got back to nestling into the cozy leather armchairs and the equally cozy atmosphere of his men’s clubs, as he had in the old days. He continued to give the Metropolitan Club as his postal address, in any case.

  Allene, in turn, doesn’t seem to have suffered from the absence of her rather uninspiring husband. She had a house to furnish, children to raise—fifteen-year-old Greta was enrolled at Miss Spence’s School, an elite girls’ school on the Upper West Side, and nine-year-old Teddy was given a private tutor—and a busy life on the New York social scene where she had to put in appearances. Soon Allene was known as a fantastic, inexhaustible organizer of primarily charity benefits, raising money for schools and hospitals and other worthy causes.

  Not only was the young Mrs. Nichols good at organizing things, she could also entertain. Her talents—although she wouldn’t have told this to the chic ladies with whom she was active on all kinds of committees—were thanks to her childhood in the old-fashioned immigrant town of Jamestown, which was rife with all kinds of superstitions brought over from Europe. She had learned clairvoyance and palm reading there and had already successfully amused fellow passengers with her skills during her round-the-world trip.

  In the spring of 1906, California was hit by a severe earthquake and fire that took more than three thousand lives. The next year, Wall Street shook in its foundations; the stock market took an alarming nosedive, and a new financial crisis seemed inevitable. Once again, the panic could be attributed to a bubble in the market, a consequence of “financialization”—large institutions juggling with money. In this case, the main culprits were trusts. They were intended to manage family fortunes, but after President Roosevelt imposed restrictions on regular banks, they were being used as unregulated “pirate banks.”

  The first to collapse was the Knickerbocker Trust, which had been believed unassailable. After that, it was just a question of time before others would follow—including The Manhattan Company, in which the Nichols family’s entire fortune was housed. Subsequently the entire financial system was dragged down, just as it had been after the Panic of 1893. Anxious weeks followed, during which the American government desperately tried to get enough money together to rescue the system and save the country from a new catastrophe. The $25 million raised was put in the hands of top banker J. P. Morgan, a.k.a. the Jupiter of Wall Street.

  In early November, it became clear that Morton’s former employer had indeed managed to keep the trust afloat, and with it the financial stability of the country. Share prices made their way back up again, the population stopped holding its breath, and it was business as usual again for New York’s rich—perhaps with even more self-confidence than before, because wasn’t the Panic of 1907 ultimate proof that modern man could mold anything to his will, overcoming even the threat of financial collapse?

  What couldn’t be contrived, though, however good the intentions of both parties might have been, was a happy marriage. Allene and Morton were seen together increasingly infrequently and rarely named in newspaper columns. The last time was on November 11, 1908, as a result of a burglary at the house on Sixty-Fourth Street, in which $1,500 worth of Greta’s jewelry was stolen. Allene told a reporter that she’d placed her own valuables in a safe before going to the theater with her husband that evening.

  Things became quiet around the couple after this never-solved theft—Morton accused their Canadian butler, who was later proved innocent—just as quiet as they had been during the later years of Allene’s marriage to Tod. The only member of the family to pop up in the press briefly wa
s her son, Teddy, and that was on September 30, 1909, the day New York got to see a flying machine for the first time.

  The entire city had turned out to stare at the invention of Orville and Wilbur Wright, two bicycle mechanics from Ohio. Their twin-engine airplane made a lap around the Statue of Liberty before swooping down over the RMS Lusitania, a British passenger ship on its way to Europe, to loud cheers from the crowds on the shore. At the same time, the many yachts anchored around the Statue of Liberty sounded their horns. One of those boats, according to a report in the New York Times, was the Seneca, owned by T. R. Hostetter Jr.

  More surprising than the fact that Tod’s extravagant craft was still in the family was the name by which its youthful owner was identified. After five years of going through life as Teddy Nichols, Allene’s son was suddenly using the name of his biological father again.

  During Allene’s Victorian youth, divorce still counted as an ultimate deadly sin. But Queen Victoria had been dead and buried since 1901, and the period named after her—which included the rigid, overly prudish morals of the time—had become a thing of the past. In 1909, millionaires who wanted to end their marriages had more reason to fear the press—the self-appointed kings of the world—than the wrath of God or the disapproval of those around them.

  For the muckrakers, as President Roosevelt had called the intrusive press corps three years earlier, reporting on a society divorce counted as the absolute pinnacle of their careers. Court records were public in America, so the unfortunates who appeared in the newspaper columns would see their private lives dissected to the last unsavory detail. This was why John Jacob “Jack” Astor, the son of Caroline Astor, did everything he could to end his famously unhappy marriage as quietly and inconspicuously as possible after his mother’s death. When the press found out anyway, he was subjected to angry criticism and taunts in the newspapers for years on end.

  Like many rich Americans, the Nichols couple resorted to a so-called Paris divorce. In France, court records weren’t public. What’s more, divorces there could be granted on the grounds of simple infidelity, while in America that only counted if the extramarital affair had taken place in the marital home. In that day and age, divorcées kept their former husband’s name, which helped keep a divorce hidden from the outside world. When “Mrs. Morton C. Nichols” was extensively photographed for the society pages of the New York Times in the spring of 1909, she was in fact no longer that.

  The photos show that Allene was still an exceptionally handsome woman at the age of thirty-seven. But the challenging, spirited look she’d had in her eye as a girl had totally disappeared. Two failed marriages in a row had taken their toll and taught her that while will and persistence might have been enough for her pioneering predecessors to create their own paradise, in her case, real life kept getting in the way of her dreams and she would have to apply her persistence to making the best of things yet again.

  After the divorce, Morton seems to have disappeared completely from the city for a while. From time to time, his name was mentioned in connection with society parties in Palm Beach, a place in Florida that the American elite had taken over as their new vacation paradise a few years earlier. He didn’t turn up again in New York until February 1911, surprisingly enough as the brand-new fiancé of a certain Ethel Dietz. This debutante compensated for an obvious lack of physical charms with her youthful years—she was seventeen years younger than Morton—and the large fortune awaiting her as the sole grandchild of hurricane lantern manufacturer R. E. Dietz.

  A month after the engagement announcement in the paper, Allene made an application to the New York courts, asking to take her first husband’s name again. She did not want to be confused with her former husband’s new wife, she claimed. The courts honored her request, and when Greta and her classmates celebrated their high school graduation on May 24, 1911, in the same ballroom of Sherry’s where Billings had wanted to give his infamous Horseback Dinner eight years earlier, both she and her mother were using their old last name.

  Allene might have seemed to be back to square one—but this wasn’t entirely true. The details of her divorce may have been safely hidden away in the archives of the tribunal de grande instance in Paris, but the 1910 census shows that she learned a thing or two from the earlier collapse of the Hostetters’ glittering paradise. According to documentation, in addition to being the head of a household that included seven servants and her two children, she was also the owner of the substantial house at 57 East Sixty-Fourth Street. She also owned another two houses on Park Avenue, numbers 604 and 606, which a rental agent managed for her.

  Clearly the deal Allene had made five years earlier with the old gold dealer who had begged her to marry his son had been highly lucrative. “Her fortune was largely augmented by her alliance with the Nichols family,” the Washington Post wrote later. Allene had become a businesswoman.

  5

  The Happy Island

  Whatever had changed in high society at the beginning of the new century, one thing had stayed the same, and that was the importance of finding a suitable husband for a marriageable daughter. Allene had taken her chances and used them. Now, having celebrated her twentieth birthday in September 1911, it was Greta’s turn.

  Greta was fairly late to debut on the social scene: the average deb was sixteen or seventeen. At first glance, there would appear to be no reason for her not to have had a line of eager young suitors. She had inherited her father’s dark good looks and his friendly, pleasant nature—though, like him, she was susceptible to a certain plumpness. From her mother, she had inherited striking blue eyes and great talent as a horsewoman. And she was rich. She and Teddy were the heirs to several million dollars, still carefully managed by their uncle Herbert.

  Although the society sections report Greta’s presence at plenty of parties for debutante friends and classmates, there was no question of making her debut herself, let alone becoming engaged. This probably had something to do with her mother, or rather with her mother’s turbulent love life. If there was one thing the mothers of eligible young bachelors on the New York scene ran a mile from, it was that unfortunate combination of divorce and scandal. And those two things were present in abundance in the young life of the Lucky Plunger’s daughter.

  Allene, never to be put off her stride, abandoned the snobs in New York for what they were and left for Europe with her daughter. In doing this, she was following in the footsteps of numerous American heiresses who, for whatever reasons, were considered less than marriageable in their own country. Dollar princesses, they were called, who, in exchange for an impressive-sounding title and its accompanying prestige, would buy their way into aristocratic families on the other side of the ocean. Around 1900, the British aristocracy counted more than five hundred Americans, and there was scarcely a distinguished family to be found that didn’t have a daughter-in-law from the New World.

  The English barons, lords, and counts had little choice: as a consequence of mechanization and the competition of cheap grain and meat from America, their own rural estates were earning less and less, while taxes were rising. They would even place personal ads in New York newspapers in which they’d announce—in so many words—their search for a moneyed wife. A woman’s lack of status in her home country was something they accepted: for them, all Americans were equally socially unacceptable, and so, as the British writer Ruth Brandon pithily put it, “one might therefore pick the richest without compunction.”

  Some of these alliances worked out extremely well, such as in the case of Jennie Jerome, who married Lord Randolph Churchill in 1874 and became the mother of British prime minister Winston Churchill. The 1909 marriage of banker’s widow Olive Grace Kerr, a good friend of Allene’s, to the third Baron Greville was incredibly successful, too. “American women are bright, clever, and wonderfully cosmopolitan,” Oscar Wilde opined. They often didn’t just bring money but also welcome new blood and a breath of fresh air to the old castles.

  Other fairy-tale
weddings were less happy, such as that of Consuelo Vanderbilt, whose ambitious mother married her off to the Duke of Marlborough in 1895. Just as unhappy was the beautiful, powerful, and rich Mary Hasell, a friend of Greta’s, who married British baron George Borwick in 1908. It soon became clear to the new baroness that a title and a collection of old family portraits offered no guarantee of marital happiness. Her husband gambled, got into debt all over the place, and saw the fact that he’d married his wife for her money as a reason to treat her with as much scorn as possible. Sometimes, she admitted to Greta, he even spat at her.

  When Allene and Greta arrived in England in early June 1911, they decided to take the unhappy Mary with them. In the fall, the three women moved on to France, where Greta was the honored guest of the Duchess d’Uzès in Rambouillet and, according to the Washington Post’s correspondent, widely admired for her riding skills. Next they traveled to British India, where they took in the polo season and witnessed the “durbar”—festivities to celebrate King George V’s investiture as the official emperor of the overseas territories.

  Halfway through February 1912, the three women returned to England. Mary Hasell found herself standing in front of a locked door as access to her in-laws’ London house was rudely denied her. She moved into Claridge’s hotel and began very public divorce proceedings as revenge—this to the delight of the press hounds on both sides of the ocean and, it seemed, even to Mary herself. Dressed up dramatically, she made the most of every opportunity in the courts to glory in her role as the tragic heroine.

  Perhaps due to Mary’s bad experiences—or perhaps during the women’s nine-month trawl through the British Empire no suitable marriage candidates had announced themselves—Greta still wasn’t engaged when she and her mother returned to New York empty-handed in mid-March 1912. Once there, Allene organized an official coming-out for her daughter, sparing no cost or effort.