An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(16)

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.



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.