An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(28)
Once home, Allene bought a country house with a large plot of land and its own little harbor in Roslyn, a coastal village not far from Lattingtown. She had it refurbished as a holiday resort and put the Greta-Theo Holiday House, as she named it, at the disposal of a New York association for single working young women. Over the following summers, she would be a familiar sight at the wheel of a truck filled to the brim with live chickens or cabbages and other vegetables from the farm at Birchwood, all intended for her protégées.
Greta’s widower, Glenn Stewart, had found his own way of picking up the pieces of his life. In November 1919, barely a year after the death of his first wife, he quietly married Cecile “Jacqueline” Archer, the daughter of a wealthy missionary and businessman from Arkansas. Over the years, Glenn had become a thorn in the side of the diplomatic service. He came and went as it suited him, and the only time he handed in anything resembling a report, its quality was so abominable that his manager complained, “This is without exception the most careless and almost illiterate document I have ever seen.” Not long after his second wedding, Glenn was fired. Anson evidently saw no need to protect his son-in-law anymore.
Incidentally, this time Glenn had chosen a woman who trumped him in terms of eccentricity. Jacqueline was in the habit of dying her poodles the same colors as the interiors of her Cadillacs, and in 1926, she’d make the society pages by giving the famous film star Rudolph Valentino a 177-pound Irish wolfhound she’d bred, valued at $5,000. In the end, the wealthy couple would withdraw in increasing paranoia to a fake castle on Wye Island, on the coast of Maryland, they’d designed themselves. It was from there that one day Glenn sailed off on his yacht into the deep blue sea and was never seen again.
And so began a new decade as the Roaring Twenties burst out in all their vitality. In New York both skyscrapers and skirts reached new heights. Flappers—as fashionable young women would become known—cast overboard the corsets, long skirts, long hair, and social and sexual conventions of their Victorian predecessors. They went to jazz clubs to dance the Lindy Hop in honor of Charles Lindbergh, the first pilot who managed to fly across the Atlantic Ocean.
Twentieth-century consumerism spread to the farthest corners of America, and luxury goods that up to the First World War had been reserved for the very rich, like cars and refrigerators, were now within reach of the great masses. For $290 you could buy yourself a Ford Model T. Industry and prosperity grew, and New York definitively replaced London as the world’s financial center. America was now, indeed and indisputably, the greatest nation.
These were busy years for Anson. In 1922, he was appointed vice chairman of the board of directors and CEO of the international branch of still-expanding General Electric. Aside from this, he had dozens of ancillary and volunteer roles in organizations, including the Automobile Club of America and the New York Chamber of Commerce and Industry, where he was chairman of the selection committee. Allene, too, kept herself busy. If she wasn’t accompanying her husband on one of his many business trips to Europe, she was active on the charity circuit, raising money in particular for veterans’ organizations and hospitals. She also made her name as an art collector; in 1921, she became a sustaining member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That same year, she made a comeback to the society columns from which she’d been practically absent for more than three years.
Just as disabled war veterans were being fitted for artificial limbs or having masks painted to cover their mutilated faces, Allene seemed to be filling the hole in her heart with surrogate children—young people to whom she could offer the love she could no longer give Greta and Teddy. She became a kind of replacement mother for Jane Moinson, a young woman she and Anson had met in France in the summer of 1919. The only daughter of Paris surgeon Louis Moinson, Jane had just lost her own mother and could do with some care and diversion.
In May 1921, after two consecutive winters with the Burchards, Jane was presented to the New York social scene, marking her coming-out as a debutante with a whole series of lunches, dinners, and even a ball organized by her hostess. Soon a suitable marriage candidate for the young Parisienne announced himself in the form of Cyrus W. Miller, a young engineer from General Electric. They married in June at a large wedding at Birchwood attended by more than three hundred guests.
A year later it was the turn of another “daughter” of Allene and Anson. Kitty, who’d returned to the United States, had found new love in the person of banker and war veteran Henry Wallace Cohu. Wally, as everyone called him, had been one of the groomsmen at Jane Moinson’s wedding. They married in the summer of 1922 at Kitty’s parents’ house on Long Island. With the financial backing of the Burchards, who acted as silent partners in his firm, Wally then set up his own investment bank.
And then there was the family of Allene’s cousin Julia Warner, the daughter of one of Allene’s father’s sisters. She and Allene were only a couple of years apart in age and practically grew up together in Jamestown. Later, Julia married Charles Rosewater, the son of newspaper owner Edward Rosewater, who after a number of setbacks in business had decided to settle with his family in New York.
The Burchards were particularly fond of the Rosewaters, and, curiously, their friends’ children were strikingly similar to the ones they had lost themselves. Julia’s elder child, Charlotte, was by a twist of nature the spitting image of Greta—the two could have been sisters. And her younger, Seth, was just as interested in engineering as Teddy had been and was determined to start work as an engineer at General Electric like his uncle Anson.