An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(18)
Things became quiet around the couple after this never-solved theft—Morton accused their Canadian butler, who was later proved innocent—just as quiet as they had been during the later years of Allene’s marriage to Tod. The only member of the family to pop up in the press briefly was her son, Teddy, and that was on September 30, 1909, the day New York got to see a flying machine for the first time.
The entire city had turned out to stare at the invention of Orville and Wilbur Wright, two bicycle mechanics from Ohio. Their twin-engine airplane made a lap around the Statue of Liberty before swooping down over the RMS Lusitania, a British passenger ship on its way to Europe, to loud cheers from the crowds on the shore. At the same time, the many yachts anchored around the Statue of Liberty sounded their horns. One of those boats, according to a report in the New York Times, was the Seneca, owned by T. R. Hostetter Jr.
More surprising than the fact that Tod’s extravagant craft was still in the family was the name by which its youthful owner was identified. After five years of going through life as Teddy Nichols, Allene’s son was suddenly using the name of his biological father again.
During Allene’s Victorian youth, divorce still counted as an ultimate deadly sin. But Queen Victoria had been dead and buried since 1901, and the period named after her—which included the rigid, overly prudish morals of the time—had become a thing of the past. In 1909, millionaires who wanted to end their marriages had more reason to fear the press—the self-appointed kings of the world—than the wrath of God or the disapproval of those around them.
For the muckrakers, as President Roosevelt had called the intrusive press corps three years earlier, reporting on a society divorce counted as the absolute pinnacle of their careers. Court records were public in America, so the unfortunates who appeared in the newspaper columns would see their private lives dissected to the last unsavory detail. This was why John Jacob “Jack” Astor, the son of Caroline Astor, did everything he could to end his famously unhappy marriage as quietly and inconspicuously as possible after his mother’s death. When the press found out anyway, he was subjected to angry criticism and taunts in the newspapers for years on end.
Like many rich Americans, the Nichols couple resorted to a so-called Paris divorce. In France, court records weren’t public. What’s more, divorces there could be granted on the grounds of simple infidelity, while in America that only counted if the extramarital affair had taken place in the marital home. In that day and age, divorcées kept their former husband’s name, which helped keep a divorce hidden from the outside world. When “Mrs. Morton C. Nichols” was extensively photographed for the society pages of the New York Times in the spring of 1909, she was in fact no longer that.
The photos show that Allene was still an exceptionally handsome woman at the age of thirty-seven. But the challenging, spirited look she’d had in her eye as a girl had totally disappeared. Two failed marriages in a row had taken their toll and taught her that while will and persistence might have been enough for her pioneering predecessors to create their own paradise, in her case, real life kept getting in the way of her dreams and she would have to apply her persistence to making the best of things yet again.
After the divorce, Morton seems to have disappeared completely from the city for a while. From time to time, his name was mentioned in connection with society parties in Palm Beach, a place in Florida that the American elite had taken over as their new vacation paradise a few years earlier. He didn’t turn up again in New York until February 1911, surprisingly enough as the brand-new fiancé of a certain Ethel Dietz. This debutante compensated for an obvious lack of physical charms with her youthful years—she was seventeen years younger than Morton—and the large fortune awaiting her as the sole grandchild of hurricane lantern manufacturer R. E. Dietz.
A month after the engagement announcement in the paper, Allene made an application to the New York courts, asking to take her first husband’s name again. She did not want to be confused with her former husband’s new wife, she claimed. The courts honored her request, and when Greta and her classmates celebrated their high school graduation on May 24, 1911, in the same ballroom of Sherry’s where Billings had wanted to give his infamous Horseback Dinner eight years earlier, both she and her mother were using their old last name.
Allene might have seemed to be back to square one—but this wasn’t entirely true. The details of her divorce may have been safely hidden away in the archives of the tribunal de grande instance in Paris, but the 1910 census shows that she learned a thing or two from the earlier collapse of the Hostetters’ glittering paradise. According to documentation, in addition to being the head of a household that included seven servants and her two children, she was also the owner of the substantial house at 57 East Sixty-Fourth Street. She also owned another two houses on Park Avenue, numbers 604 and 606, which a rental agent managed for her.
Clearly the deal Allene had made five years earlier with the old gold dealer who had begged her to marry his son had been highly lucrative. “Her fortune was largely augmented by her alliance with the Nichols family,” the Washington Post wrote later. Allene had become a businesswoman.
5
The Happy Island
Whatever had changed in high society at the beginning of the new century, one thing had stayed the same, and that was the importance of finding a suitable husband for a marriageable daughter. Allene had taken her chances and used them. Now, having celebrated her twentieth birthday in September 1911, it was Greta’s turn.