An American Princess Read online

  The debutante’s party took place on April 9, 1912, at Sherry’s. More than a hundred guests were invited for the dinner alone, including Greta’s many girlfriends, family members from Pittsburgh, and all kinds of friends and business relations of Allene’s. A further hundred guests were invited to the after-dinner ball, held in a room lavishly decorated with fresh white and yellow spring flowers. Greta was radiant in white satin with pearls; her mother was stunning in dark blue satin with diamonds, and the New York Times gave a trusty account of what seemed to be a very promising debutante’s ball in all respects, even if it was a little on the late side.

  Less than a week later, any thought of high society and parties or the reporting thereof was wiped away with one blow by shocking reports that the brand-new deemed-unsinkable flagship of the White Star Line, the RMS Titanic, had hit an iceberg on its way to New York and sunk. Fewer than 700 of the more than 2,220 people on board survived. Among the victims were many prominent New Yorkers, such as steel magnate Benjamin Guggenheim, Macy’s owner Isidor Straus, and John Jacob Astor. The papers had castigated Astor, a divorced man of forty-seven, for marrying an eighteen-year-old classmate of Greta’s, but now “Colonel Astor” was exalted by the same papers as a heroic figure.

  The psychological impact of the shipwreck on the night of April 14–15 was enormous. For years, people had imagined themselves more powerful than nature and trusted blindly in the wonders of technology—but now the same technology had proved fallible in a terrible manner, shaking people’s view of the world. Many saw the wreck of the Titanic as an apocalyptic harbinger of greater disasters, punishment for modern man’s arrogance and presumption. Even the always self-assured New York began to doubt itself.

  There was little room in this climate for the worries of rich girls in search of husbands. Society parties were canceled for the time being or kept as modest as possible. Greta’s coming-out had hit the rocks—thanks to the unsinkable Titanic. Yet the party at Sherry’s at the end of 1912 did lead to a marriage—though not for the debutante herself but for someone who, given her age and her past, would hardly have seemed eligible for new love. Namely, her mother.

  It wasn’t a rich heir this time—not a big-city boy, either. There was no impressive posh name, and he wasn’t a gambler. If one had to devise a husband in every way different from his predecessors, this was he. Anson Wood Burchard was a calm, stable, self-made man who had worked his way up entirely on his own strengths to become one of the country’s leading engineers. And engineers, as everybody knew, were America’s unsung heroes—the quiet motors behind the former colony’s transformation into one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

  Anson’s background resembled Allene’s in many respects. He was born and raised in a small town north of New York City, which, like Jamestown, had blossomed during the Industrial Revolution. The manufacture of agricultural implements had pushed Hoosick Falls toward the march of progress—it was no coincidence the main road was called Mechanic Street.

  As a young child, Anson had absorbed a love of technology from his surroundings. In 1881, at the age of sixteen, he went to study electrical engineering at the best technical college in America at that time, the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. After that he spent almost twenty years at his childless uncle’s furniture and steam engine factory. The factory gave Anson all the space he needed to develop better machines for industrial uses such as heating, ventilation, and plumbing. After a brief adventure in Mexico—where he worked as the manager of a copper mine—in 1901 he was taken on as financial officer at the merely eight-years-old but already very promising General Electric on the recommendation of his brother-in-law and childhood friend GE vice president Hinsdill Parsons.

  GE was the brainchild of Charles Albert Coffin, a former shoe manufacturer who in 1892 had the idea of uniting the many private electricity companies in America at that time into one large national network. With support from the inventor Thomas Edison and banking tycoon J. P. Morgan, who financed the plans, he was able to create an internationally operational electricity group within a relatively short time.

  Like many successful entrepreneurs, Coffin had a keen eye for talent, and the technical and financial abilities of the big, quiet man from Hoosick Falls didn’t go unnoticed. Within a few years, Anson had risen in the ranks to Coffin’s personal assistant. When Parsons died in a car crash in April 1912, Anson replaced him as vice president. Strangely enough, the accident took place just after the same Hinsdill Parsons dragged the still-unmarried Anson to the coming-out party of a certain Greta Hostetter.

  In October, Anson went to Europe on a business trip. He was accompanied by his newly widowed sister and Edwin Rice, a brilliant engineer who had built up GE from its early days. Once they’d arrived in London, the trio took up residence in Claridge’s. And by chance, acquaintances from New York were staying there, too—the widow Hostetter and her daughter.

  That fall Teddy had started at an expensive boarding school near Boston, and Allene and Greta were in London “spending their time shopping and doing the theatres,” according to the New York Times. But the glamour of the London department stores and theaters was clearly overshadowed by their new companions from General Electric—and in particular by the tall figure of its forty-seven-year-old vice president.

  On November 22, 1912, the New York Times published a remarkable story on its front page. GE senior official Anson Wood Burchard had apparently requested a license to marry Mrs. Hostetter, “well known in society,” but had withdrawn it a few hours later. The duty correspondent caught whiff of a romantic intrigue and posted himself in the lobby of the hotel, determined to stay there until he knew exactly what was going on.

  “Widow Is Not Yet Certain” was the headline the paper ran later. The industrious journalist had even managed to get a few words out of Allene on the matter:

  In answer to a question as to whether she was going to marry Mr. Burchard, Mrs. Hostetter replied: “I don’t know.”

  When told that Mr. Burchard had applied for a license, fixing the event for Dec. 5, and afterward withdrew the application, Mrs. Hostetter laughed, said it was all very embarrassing, and she might have something to tell later.

  The next day, the newspaper was able to report that the businessman and the widow had spent the evening in each other’s company but that the former had left for Berlin the next day. A few days later, the paper informed its readers that despite the rumors, the engagement hadn’t been broken off.

  In early December, Anson returned from Germany and married the widow—although not in Saint George’s church in Mayfair, which he’d initially supplied as the location, but at a registry office, with a blessing afterward in a small parish church on Onslow Square. Only then was it clear what had caused the problem: the minister at Saint George’s had refused to execute the marriage because Allene wasn’t formally a widow, but a divorcée.

  The necessarily modest character of the ceremony didn’t prevent the bride from celebrating her third wedding in style: her wedding dress was cut from virginal white velvet and lined with white sable. Greta, as bridesmaid, was dressed in white, too. Aside from Anson’s sister and his colleague Edward Rice, only Allene’s friend Lady Olive Greville and her husband, along with Greta’s friend Mary and her mother, attended. After the service, the small company lunched at Claridge’s and the newly married couple left for a honeymoon in Monte Carlo and Nice, where Allene could introduce her parents to her new partner in life.

  Clearly Greta didn’t feel like visiting her maternal grandparents, who were so absent from her life that days after her coming-out the New York Times had mentioned “the late Charles H. Tew.” A few days after the wedding, she took a boat back home to spend Christmas and New Year’s with her younger brother. Anson and Allene rang in the New Year—1913—and their new life in the Ritz Hotel in London.

  Looking back, that year with the unlucky number in it might be considered one of the best in the history of the world. The tw
entieth century was still young and promising. Never before had citizens of the world been able to travel and communicate so easily with one another; never before had permanent world peace seemed so attainable. There was political stability, there was prosperity, and, perhaps most important, there was a widespread optimism that everything would become even better. Bloody wars and devastating famines seemed things of a barbarian past, banished for good by the achievements of modern times. It was, in the words of writer Stefan Zweig, “the golden age of security.”

  In New York, the Woolworth Building, the tallest building in the world at an impressive fifty-six stories, was completed. It was designed by Cass Gilbert, who had built Allene’s elegant house on East Sixty-Fourth Street. That same year, New York Harbor surpassed London’s as the busiest in the world. And as always, the almost thirty-year-old Statue of Liberty beckoned to immigrants, who were still arriving by the thousands in the land of unprecedented opportunities: “Come to me, to the best country in the world, where everyone, regardless of their past, background, or gender, has the chance to make something of their life.”

  More than ever, this was genuinely the case. In 1913, the United States was one of the first countries to introduce income tax and to start building up a welfare system. The enormous differences in income were reduced, and capital was generated to lay roads and build schools, hospitals, libraries, and other institutions that would benefit every American citizen, rich or poor.

  For Allene, 1913 was mainly a year of unprecedented happiness. An end had come to her restless travels across the world’s oceans, to the endless series of parties and dinners with bored European aristocrats, and to the need for her constant efforts to clamber her way up the social ladder. An end had also come to difficult marriages and their accompanying dramas and loneliness. She had finally found a stable companion in this calm engineer, so different from her in character but so similar in background. “He was the one,” as a niece of hers would later say.

  It didn’t matter that Allene’s figure wasn’t as girlishly slender as before; she’d said farewell to the latest fashions. In New York, she barely showed herself, and she disappeared from the society columns almost entirely. Anson sold his house on Madison Avenue and gave Allene’s house on East Sixty-Fourth Street as his New York address from then on. But the center of their life was on Long Island, in a house that Anson had had built some years before beside a dirt track near the village of Lattingtown.

  Long Island, the 120-mile-long peninsula east of Manhattan with the ocean lapping at both its sides, had counted as New York’s Gold Coast for as long as human memory could recall. More than half of America’s richest families had a country or beach house there. The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, who set his famous novel The Great Gatsby there, described it as “the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world.”

  With the completion of a rail link and, in particular, the Queensboro Bridge in 1909, the journey time between the peninsula and Manhattan was reduced so much that “ordinary” commuting became possible. The still-rural countryside was taken over by “the wealthy aristocrats of Long Island who make their living shearing lambs on Wall Street and who want to play at the country life on weekends and holidays,” in the words of one concerned local. The rich aristocrats who spent their weekdays “shearing lambs” on Wall Street mainly bought up ranches around picturesque spots like Oyster Bay and Glen Cove. There they built large country houses surrounded by landscaped gardens and parks.

  Lattingtown, the village where Anson built Birchwood (the name he gave his country house), lay in the heart of Locust Valley, a still relatively unspoiled area in the center of Long Island, less than an hour by train from Manhattan. From there it was just a short drive to Matinecock, where Portledge, the country estate of Anson’s boss and friend Charles Coffin (who withdrew from the daily management of General Electric in 1913), was situated. Birchwood, built in neocolonial style, had twenty-three rooms, a swimming pool, a tennis court, its own farm, and a garage for eight cars. There were no ballrooms or reception rooms—it was clearly more of a place to enjoy than to impress.

  Life on “Longuyland,” as the inhabitants affectionately called the peninsula, was just as relaxed and uncomplicated. People met up at the Piping Rock Club, the country club that Coffin had set up, where barbecues, dances, hunting weekends, and car rallies, as well as swimming, tennis, and sailing competitions, were organized in the summer. In the winter, when Locust Valley was covered in a thick layer of snow and the many lakes and pools froze over, people entertained themselves with skating and bobsledding. Aside from this, both Coffin and Anson were active members of the Matinecock Neighborhood Association, which liaised with the local farming community and set up all kinds of services for the common good, such as free medical clinics, a library, a fire department, and a committee that implemented measures against the plagues of mosquitoes in the summer.

  Perhaps the Gilded Age mansions on the Long Island coast were replete with the hedonism F. Scott Fitzgerald immortalized in The Great Gatsby, but here in the countryside in 1913, there was clearly no longer any interest in the frivolities and snobbery that had colored the lives of the previous generation of the wealthy. Even “new” communities like the Italians and Jews were welcome, as the membership register of the Piping Rock Club testifies. After all the excesses of the previous decades, people longed for the simplicity and moral values of America’s old pioneering society, the kind Allene and Anson had experienced in their childhoods.

  6

  Dogfight

  Teddy Hostetter was a strange fish, the freshmen at Harvard University agreed. One of his fellow students would later write:

  Teddy was an unusual fellow . . . He had all the traits of a genius. His mind was active, alert and keen, especially so along mathematical and scientific lines. Although he had a sunny disposition, a man had to know him to see his true worth. Teddy had idiosyncrasies with which all uncommon men are possessed, and which, when found in a freshman, would not be appreciated by his classmates. Those of us who knew him valued those finer qualities which made him the unusual fellow he was.

  At the Pomfret School, the expensive boarding school in New England Teddy had attended from the age of fifteen onward, both his behavior and grades had been so substandard that, in the end, he was expelled. Not that anyone considered this a serious problem—elite preparatory schools like Pomfret guaranteed their pupils automatic entrance to one of the country’s Ivy League universities, however badly behaved, unintelligent, or lazy they might be. And in Teddy’s case, there was no question of the latter.

  Teddy had inherited his father’s love of sailing and his mother’s love of horseback riding. He shared a passion for technology, cars, and generally anything that moved at speed with his new stepfather, with whom he got along significantly better than he had with the previous one. Teddy was also a cheerful young man, and handsome—the spitting image of Allene, in a slightly darker version. The only thing he didn’t like was being dictated to—not by teachers, not by fellow pupils, and certainly not by what people expected of him. And he didn’t have much need to be, with an inheritance of more than $3 million to his name.

  Although his sister, Greta, seemed much more conformist than her younger brother, when it came down to it, she had exactly the same kind of willfulness. While her mother probably wanted to turn her back on Pittsburgh for good, Greta didn’t. She had been eleven at the time of her father’s death and their abrupt departure for New York—old enough to remember her happy father and the good times in her parents’ marriage and old enough, too, to feel a permanent part of the Hostetter clan.

  In particular, she was extremely close to her uncle Herbert and his family of five children, who had moved to New York. At her request, her uncle even bought back the Hostetter House on Raccoon Creek, which had been sold in 1905, seven years later so she would have her own place in the Pittsburgh vicinity, where she could easily remain in c
ontact with the rest of her father’s family. It was probably not very surprising that after being dragged halfway across the globe by her mother in search of a husband for her, Greta found one, in the end, in the smoky industrial city on three rivers and, in the early spring of 1914, brought home a Pittsburgher.

  It is hard to imagine that Allene and Anson would have been genuinely happy with Greta’s choice. Glenn Stewart was the only son and heir of self-made millionaire David Stewart, who had begun his career as a clerk and built up one of the largest grain empires. The towering Glenn was known to be fairly eccentric at a young age. During his studies at Yale, he’d crafted his own explosive to frighten a couple of girls who had opted to go to a friend’s party instead of his. The bomb prematurely exploded in his face, costing him his left eye and scarring half of his face. Since then, he’d worn a monocle in front of his glass eye and adorned himself with a golden cigarette holder and a moustache so thin it almost seemed penciled on his face.

  In the six years since Glenn had left the university, nothing had come of his plans to enter the diplomatic service. He didn’t show any interest in the family business, either; his father simply sold the business in 1919, in the absence of a successor. Instead, Glenn traveled around the world in a spendthrift, unconventional manner. As a newspaper would write: “He was embarking on a globe-trotting and, by all accounts, eccentric and luxurious life.” By the time he met Greta—in February 1914 at the wedding of one of her cousins in Allegheny—he was already in his thirties and in possession of a serious reputation. He was, as a family member once succinctly put it, “a liar, a womanizer, and a no-account.”

  A liar, a womanizer, and a no-account—not exactly the kind of man Allene and Anson would have wanted to entrust their naive daughter and stepdaughter to. But what were the alternatives? Greta was already well into her twenties and had little more to occupy her time than some charity work. She devoted herself to New York children who had become invalids when they suffered from tuberculosis and trained as a social worker at the New York School of Philanthropy. She dreamed of having children of her own, so no one would have wished the life of a bluestocking spinster—as single women were seen in those times—upon her.