An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(29)
As she and Anson assembled a replacement family around them, Allene’s own family crumbled. In January 1923, her mother died, followed two years later by her father. In both cases, their daughter traveled to the South of France to take care of them for the last few months of their lives. Jennette and Charles Tew were buried in La Caucade, the old Nice graveyard high in the hills, in the area reserved for English people, so far from the village near Lake Chautauqua they’d come from.
Following the deaths of Allene’s parents, she and Anson made a new start. They sold the Allene Tew Nichols House on Sixty-Fourth Street, which was weighed down with memories, and bought instead an even larger and more exclusive building on Park Avenue, which in those years had definitively taken over from Fifth Avenue as the most desirable address in America. “If America has a heaven, this is it,” in the words of the liberal weekly magazine the New Republic in 1927.
The new house, which took over the entire southwestern corner of Park Avenue and Sixty-Ninth Street, had been commissioned eight years earlier by banker Henry Pomeroy Davison, who had a country house in Lattingtown and was well known by the Burchards. The new house had five floors, ten master bedrooms, fourteen servants’ bedrooms, two elevators, and a built-in garage. After Davison’s death in 1922, his wife put the house on the market for more than half a million dollars—an amount almost impossible to drum up in those times.
But money was not an object for the Burchards. Anson was a “genius in financial matters,” according to accounts from General Electric employees, and during his long career, he had accumulated assets to the tune of several million dollars. Allene, who also had her share of financial talent, was, in the words of one of Anson’s colleagues, “extremely wealthy.” In addition to the fortune she had earned in the years after her divorce from her second husband, she also had the Hostetter millions at her disposal. They had been held back when her children were alive, but now she had inherited them in turn.
Almost at the time they bought the house on Park Avenue, they also bought a house in Paris, which had been very attractive to cosmopolitan, artistic, liberal Americans since the Belle époque. Although it had been significantly impoverished by the war, the French capital had lost none of its allure and charm. And for Americans, the French dream had become only more accessible. Using riches gained in their own country, they bought up on a large scale the chateaus and city mansions the chic French families could no longer afford to keep. Around the time the Burchards bought their mansion in the eighth arrondissement, forty thousand of their fellow countrymen were registered at Paris addresses.
Allene may not have been in control of fate, but she was in control of the decoration and furnishing of her houses, and she gave this her total dedication. She decorated the large house on Park Avenue from basement to garret in French style, with wall tapestries from Versailles, among other things. Anson’s large collection of English mezzotint engravings was given a place, as was the art collection they’d built up together over the years and of which a 1778 landscape by British painter Thomas Gainsborough was the undisputed high point. The result was what one of the Burchards’ many friends later described with much admiration in diplomatic and business circles as “a delightful house.”
With their alternative family as well as new domiciles on both sides of the ocean, Allene and Anson seemed to have succeeded in making a new happy island for themselves—very different from their former one but in every way livable. They were now a more than wealthy middle-aged couple with many interests and an exciting lifestyle. True, they weren’t surrounded by their own children, but they did have the many friends they’d made through the years, both in America and abroad. And they had each other. In the fourteen years since their small wedding on Onslow Square, they’d been through the worst imaginable and survived it together; they could certainly brave old age and illness.
It was just a regular Sunday in the cold month of January 1927, and Anson, who was in his early sixties by now, did something very much in keeping with his habits: he went to have lunch with a good friend of his, the Jewish banker Mortimer Schiff, who lived a little farther along Park Avenue and, like the Burchards, had once had a country house in Locust Valley. But for Allene, the day became a living nightmare when, later that afternoon, her friends came to tell her that Anson would never, ever return home again.
The next day, newspapers reported that the top-ranking GE employee had become unwell halfway through lunch and been carried by his table companions to Schiff’s library. There, on the floor, the big man had simply died, without the hurriedly called doctor being able to do anything for him. The official cause of death was “acute indigestion.” In fact, it was probably a heart attack as a result of his largely sedentary lifestyle, too much work, and being overweight.
Three days later, Anson lay in state among his mezzotints in the large hall in his house on Park Avenue. The memorial service began at eleven in the morning on January 25. For the first time in its history, General Electric closed all of its offices at one o’clock in tribute to the man who had played an important role in building up the company. Anson was extremely popular among his friends and colleagues, and there was enormous sadness at his passing.
That afternoon, Allene buried the man who was her great love in the cemetery at the end of Feeks Lane in Lattingtown—close to his own Birchwood and the grave of the stepdaughter he had considered his own. After this, Allene was truly alone for the first time in years, with a heart that had been crippled for a second time. She was rich, but in terms of having people who truly belonged to her, she was poorer than even the simplest servants in her houses.