An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(22)

Perhaps the Gilded Age mansions on the Long Island coast were replete with the hedonism F. Scott Fitzgerald immortalized in The Great Gatsby, but here in the countryside in 1913, there was clearly no longer any interest in the frivolities and snobbery that had colored the lives of the previous generation of the wealthy. Even “new” communities like the Italians and Jews were welcome, as the membership register of the Piping Rock Club testifies. After all the excesses of the previous decades, people longed for the simplicity and moral values of America’s old pioneering society, the kind Allene and Anson had experienced in their childhoods.





6

Dogfight

Teddy Hostetter was a strange fish, the freshmen at Harvard University agreed. One of his fellow students would later write:

Teddy was an unusual fellow . . . He had all the traits of a genius. His mind was active, alert and keen, especially so along mathematical and scientific lines. Although he had a sunny disposition, a man had to know him to see his true worth. Teddy had idiosyncrasies with which all uncommon men are possessed, and which, when found in a freshman, would not be appreciated by his classmates. Those of us who knew him valued those finer qualities which made him the unusual fellow he was.

At the Pomfret School, the expensive boarding school in New England Teddy had attended from the age of fifteen onward, both his behavior and grades had been so substandard that, in the end, he was expelled. Not that anyone considered this a serious problem—elite preparatory schools like Pomfret guaranteed their pupils automatic entrance to one of the country’s Ivy League universities, however badly behaved, unintelligent, or lazy they might be. And in Teddy’s case, there was no question of the latter.

Teddy had inherited his father’s love of sailing and his mother’s love of horseback riding. He shared a passion for technology, cars, and generally anything that moved at speed with his new stepfather, with whom he got along significantly better than he had with the previous one. Teddy was also a cheerful young man, and handsome—the spitting image of Allene, in a slightly darker version. The only thing he didn’t like was being dictated to—not by teachers, not by fellow pupils, and certainly not by what people expected of him. And he didn’t have much need to be, with an inheritance of more than $3 million to his name.

Although his sister, Greta, seemed much more conformist than her younger brother, when it came down to it, she had exactly the same kind of willfulness. While her mother probably wanted to turn her back on Pittsburgh for good, Greta didn’t. She had been eleven at the time of her father’s death and their abrupt departure for New York—old enough to remember her happy father and the good times in her parents’ marriage and old enough, too, to feel a permanent part of the Hostetter clan.

In particular, she was extremely close to her uncle Herbert and his family of five children, who had moved to New York. At her request, her uncle even bought back the Hostetter House on Raccoon Creek, which had been sold in 1905, seven years later so she would have her own place in the Pittsburgh vicinity, where she could easily remain in contact with the rest of her father’s family. It was probably not very surprising that after being dragged halfway across the globe by her mother in search of a husband for her, Greta found one, in the end, in the smoky industrial city on three rivers and, in the early spring of 1914, brought home a Pittsburgher.



It is hard to imagine that Allene and Anson would have been genuinely happy with Greta’s choice. Glenn Stewart was the only son and heir of self-made millionaire David Stewart, who had begun his career as a clerk and built up one of the largest grain empires. The towering Glenn was known to be fairly eccentric at a young age. During his studies at Yale, he’d crafted his own explosive to frighten a couple of girls who had opted to go to a friend’s party instead of his. The bomb prematurely exploded in his face, costing him his left eye and scarring half of his face. Since then, he’d worn a monocle in front of his glass eye and adorned himself with a golden cigarette holder and a moustache so thin it almost seemed penciled on his face.

In the six years since Glenn had left the university, nothing had come of his plans to enter the diplomatic service. He didn’t show any interest in the family business, either; his father simply sold the business in 1919, in the absence of a successor. Instead, Glenn traveled around the world in a spendthrift, unconventional manner. As a newspaper would write: “He was embarking on a globe-trotting and, by all accounts, eccentric and luxurious life.” By the time he met Greta—in February 1914 at the wedding of one of her cousins in Allegheny—he was already in his thirties and in possession of a serious reputation. He was, as a family member once succinctly put it, “a liar, a womanizer, and a no-account.”

A liar, a womanizer, and a no-account—not exactly the kind of man Allene and Anson would have wanted to entrust their naive daughter and stepdaughter to. But what were the alternatives? Greta was already well into her twenties and had little more to occupy her time than some charity work. She devoted herself to New York children who had become invalids when they suffered from tuberculosis and trained as a social worker at the New York School of Philanthropy. She dreamed of having children of her own, so no one would have wished the life of a bluestocking spinster—as single women were seen in those times—upon her.

And so on May 10, 1914, Mr. and Mrs. Burchard announced their daughter’s engagement to Mr. Glenn Stewart in the New York Times. The couple, the paper wrote, would leave after the wedding for the Cuban capital, Havana, where Glenn had been given a post as second secretary at the American embassy. The appointment was undoubtedly due to an intervention by his future father-in-law, who as a high-ranking figure at one of the largest companies in the United States had excellent connections with the government in Washington.