An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(13)
In practice, this meant Tod belonged to the so-called Waldorf Crowd, an illustrious group of gamblers to which steel magnate Henry Clay Frick and industrialist John W. “Bet-a-Million” Gates also belonged. Gates was known for betting between poker games on such things as the route certain raindrops would take on the windows of his expensive hotel. Tod was in no way inferior to Gates in terms of creativity in gambling. If a fly landed on the table, he’d bet on which direction it would take off. If he saw a waiter coming over, he’d lay money on whether or not he’d drop his tray. And if he saw a beggar on the street, he’d bet on whether, if he gave him a hundred-dollar bill, he’d thank him profusely or make a swift getaway.
“If one has no steady belief and foundation to one’s life, it is all hopelessness and tears,” Allene would later write, clearly from personal experience. Tod had no belief or foundation in his life, and the hopelessness and tears were her own. After a while, she gave up organizing parties: the chance was great that her husband wouldn’t be there, and his absence would only raise more embarrassing questions. She wasn’t invited anywhere herself much, either. “Society, always fearful of Tod’s wild ways, never bothered much about his pretty young wife,” a journalist acquaintance would later write. Her hard-fought place among the Pittsburgh social elite would ultimately do her no good at all.
More and more often, the young Mrs. Hostetter was spotted with her children in the “log cabin” that had been built with so much pleasure on Raccoon Creek. She taught Teddy to ride and practiced with Greta for days on end on the obstacle course next to the house. Or she’d trot along on her horse, completely alone, spending hours in the dark woods around them. The glittering paradise she’d married into, and which she’d had all kinds of dreams about, had turned into a lonely place.
In the spring of 1901, Tod bought a new yacht. The Seneca was a whopping 330 feet long and had both a player piano and a roulette wheel below deck so that he could receive and entertain his gambling friends on the boat. He also bought an automobile, a “self-driving” car, the latest rage among the rich in those years. It was just “a small affair with no top,” in the words of a servant, but small and open topped as it was, the car ensured that Tod was no longer dependent on the availability of horses, coachmen, or trains to New York. And that he could escape the watchful eyes of his wife and family whenever he wanted.
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.