An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(21)
The necessarily modest character of the ceremony didn’t prevent the bride from celebrating her third wedding in style: her wedding dress was cut from virginal white velvet and lined with white sable. Greta, as bridesmaid, was dressed in white, too. Aside from Anson’s sister and his colleague Edward Rice, only Allene’s friend Lady Olive Greville and her husband, along with Greta’s friend Mary and her mother, attended. After the service, the small company lunched at Claridge’s and the newly married couple left for a honeymoon in Monte Carlo and Nice, where Allene could introduce her parents to her new partner in life.
Clearly Greta didn’t feel like visiting her maternal grandparents, who were so absent from her life that days after her coming-out the New York Times had mentioned “the late Charles H. Tew.” A few days after the wedding, she took a boat back home to spend Christmas and New Year’s with her younger brother. Anson and Allene rang in the New Year—1913—and their new life in the Ritz Hotel in London.
Looking back, that year with the unlucky number in it might be considered one of the best in the history of the world. The twentieth century was still young and promising. Never before had citizens of the world been able to travel and communicate so easily with one another; never before had permanent world peace seemed so attainable. There was political stability, there was prosperity, and, perhaps most important, there was a widespread optimism that everything would become even better. Bloody wars and devastating famines seemed things of a barbarian past, banished for good by the achievements of modern times. It was, in the words of writer Stefan Zweig, “the golden age of security.”
In New York, the Woolworth Building, the tallest building in the world at an impressive fifty-six stories, was completed. It was designed by Cass Gilbert, who had built Allene’s elegant house on East Sixty-Fourth Street. That same year, New York Harbor surpassed London’s as the busiest in the world. And as always, the almost thirty-year-old Statue of Liberty beckoned to immigrants, who were still arriving by the thousands in the land of unprecedented opportunities: “Come to me, to the best country in the world, where everyone, regardless of their past, background, or gender, has the chance to make something of their life.”
More than ever, this was genuinely the case. In 1913, the United States was one of the first countries to introduce income tax and to start building up a welfare system. The enormous differences in income were reduced, and capital was generated to lay roads and build schools, hospitals, libraries, and other institutions that would benefit every American citizen, rich or poor.
For Allene, 1913 was mainly a year of unprecedented happiness. An end had come to her restless travels across the world’s oceans, to the endless series of parties and dinners with bored European aristocrats, and to the need for her constant efforts to clamber her way up the social ladder. An end had also come to difficult marriages and their accompanying dramas and loneliness. She had finally found a stable companion in this calm engineer, so different from her in character but so similar in background. “He was the one,” as a niece of hers would later say.
It didn’t matter that Allene’s figure wasn’t as girlishly slender as before; she’d said farewell to the latest fashions. In New York, she barely showed herself, and she disappeared from the society columns almost entirely. Anson sold his house on Madison Avenue and gave Allene’s house on East Sixty-Fourth Street as his New York address from then on. But the center of their life was on Long Island, in a house that Anson had had built some years before beside a dirt track near the village of Lattingtown.
Long Island, the 120-mile-long peninsula east of Manhattan with the ocean lapping at both its sides, had counted as New York’s Gold Coast for as long as human memory could recall. More than half of America’s richest families had a country or beach house there. The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, who set his famous novel The Great Gatsby there, described it as “the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world.”
With the completion of a rail link and, in particular, the Queensboro Bridge in 1909, the journey time between the peninsula and Manhattan was reduced so much that “ordinary” commuting became possible. The still-rural countryside was taken over by “the wealthy aristocrats of Long Island who make their living shearing lambs on Wall Street and who want to play at the country life on weekends and holidays,” in the words of one concerned local. The rich aristocrats who spent their weekdays “shearing lambs” on Wall Street mainly bought up ranches around picturesque spots like Oyster Bay and Glen Cove. There they built large country houses surrounded by landscaped gardens and parks.
Lattingtown, the village where Anson built Birchwood (the name he gave his country house), lay in the heart of Locust Valley, a still relatively unspoiled area in the center of Long Island, less than an hour by train from Manhattan. From there it was just a short drive to Matinecock, where Portledge, the country estate of Anson’s boss and friend Charles Coffin (who withdrew from the daily management of General Electric in 1913), was situated. Birchwood, built in neocolonial style, had twenty-three rooms, a swimming pool, a tennis court, its own farm, and a garage for eight cars. There were no ballrooms or reception rooms—it was clearly more of a place to enjoy than to impress.
Life on “Longuyland,” as the inhabitants affectionately called the peninsula, was just as relaxed and uncomplicated. People met up at the Piping Rock Club, the country club that Coffin had set up, where barbecues, dances, hunting weekends, and car rallies, as well as swimming, tennis, and sailing competitions, were organized in the summer. In the winter, when Locust Valley was covered in a thick layer of snow and the many lakes and pools froze over, people entertained themselves with skating and bobsledding. Aside from this, both Coffin and Anson were active members of the Matinecock Neighborhood Association, which liaised with the local farming community and set up all kinds of services for the common good, such as free medical clinics, a library, a fire department, and a committee that implemented measures against the plagues of mosquitoes in the summer.