An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(17)
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.