An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(20)
The psychological impact of the shipwreck on the night of April 14–15 was enormous. For years, people had imagined themselves more powerful than nature and trusted blindly in the wonders of technology—but now the same technology had proved fallible in a terrible manner, shaking people’s view of the world. Many saw the wreck of the Titanic as an apocalyptic harbinger of greater disasters, punishment for modern man’s arrogance and presumption. Even the always self-assured New York began to doubt itself.
There was little room in this climate for the worries of rich girls in search of husbands. Society parties were canceled for the time being or kept as modest as possible. Greta’s coming-out had hit the rocks—thanks to the unsinkable Titanic. Yet the party at Sherry’s at the end of 1912 did lead to a marriage—though not for the debutante herself but for someone who, given her age and her past, would hardly have seemed eligible for new love. Namely, her mother.
It wasn’t a rich heir this time—not a big-city boy, either. There was no impressive posh name, and he wasn’t a gambler. If one had to devise a husband in every way different from his predecessors, this was he. Anson Wood Burchard was a calm, stable, self-made man who had worked his way up entirely on his own strengths to become one of the country’s leading engineers. And engineers, as everybody knew, were America’s unsung heroes—the quiet motors behind the former colony’s transformation into one of the wealthiest countries in the world.
Anson’s background resembled Allene’s in many respects. He was born and raised in a small town north of New York City, which, like Jamestown, had blossomed during the Industrial Revolution. The manufacture of agricultural implements had pushed Hoosick Falls toward the march of progress—it was no coincidence the main road was called Mechanic Street.
As a young child, Anson had absorbed a love of technology from his surroundings. In 1881, at the age of sixteen, he went to study electrical engineering at the best technical college in America at that time, the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. After that he spent almost twenty years at his childless uncle’s furniture and steam engine factory. The factory gave Anson all the space he needed to develop better machines for industrial uses such as heating, ventilation, and plumbing. After a brief adventure in Mexico—where he worked as the manager of a copper mine—in 1901 he was taken on as financial officer at the merely eight-years-old but already very promising General Electric on the recommendation of his brother-in-law and childhood friend GE vice president Hinsdill Parsons.
GE was the brainchild of Charles Albert Coffin, a former shoe manufacturer who in 1892 had the idea of uniting the many private electricity companies in America at that time into one large national network. With support from the inventor Thomas Edison and banking tycoon J. P. Morgan, who financed the plans, he was able to create an internationally operational electricity group within a relatively short time.
Like many successful entrepreneurs, Coffin had a keen eye for talent, and the technical and financial abilities of the big, quiet man from Hoosick Falls didn’t go unnoticed. Within a few years, Anson had risen in the ranks to Coffin’s personal assistant. When Parsons died in a car crash in April 1912, Anson replaced him as vice president. Strangely enough, the accident took place just after the same Hinsdill Parsons dragged the still-unmarried Anson to the coming-out party of a certain Greta Hostetter.
In October, Anson went to Europe on a business trip. He was accompanied by his newly widowed sister and Edwin Rice, a brilliant engineer who had built up GE from its early days. Once they’d arrived in London, the trio took up residence in Claridge’s. And by chance, acquaintances from New York were staying there, too—the widow Hostetter and her daughter.
That fall Teddy had started at an expensive boarding school near Boston, and Allene and Greta were in London “spending their time shopping and doing the theatres,” according to the New York Times. But the glamour of the London department stores and theaters was clearly overshadowed by their new companions from General Electric—and in particular by the tall figure of its forty-seven-year-old vice president.
On November 22, 1912, the New York Times published a remarkable story on its front page. GE senior official Anson Wood Burchard had apparently requested a license to marry Mrs. Hostetter, “well known in society,” but had withdrawn it a few hours later. The duty correspondent caught whiff of a romantic intrigue and posted himself in the lobby of the hotel, determined to stay there until he knew exactly what was going on.
“Widow Is Not Yet Certain” was the headline the paper ran later. The industrious journalist had even managed to get a few words out of Allene on the matter:
In answer to a question as to whether she was going to marry Mr. Burchard, Mrs. Hostetter replied: “I don’t know.”
When told that Mr. Burchard had applied for a license, fixing the event for Dec. 5, and afterward withdrew the application, Mrs. Hostetter laughed, said it was all very embarrassing, and she might have something to tell later.
The next day, the newspaper was able to report that the businessman and the widow had spent the evening in each other’s company but that the former had left for Berlin the next day. A few days later, the paper informed its readers that despite the rumors, the engagement hadn’t been broken off.
In early December, Anson returned from Germany and married the widow—although not in Saint George’s church in Mayfair, which he’d initially supplied as the location, but at a registry office, with a blessing afterward in a small parish church on Onslow Square. Only then was it clear what had caused the problem: the minister at Saint George’s had refused to execute the marriage because Allene wasn’t formally a widow, but a divorcée.