An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(14)
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.