An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(33)

In December, the society widow traveled alone to New York—in all probability to arrange the business side of the forthcoming union. In early January, she returned to Europe again. From here she would continue on to Egypt, according to the newspapers, where she’d chartered a boat for a four-week cruise along the Nile. Among the seven guests she had invited were the British Lord and Lady Greville and the German prince with whom she’d been so often sighted the previous fall.

Less than two weeks after the luxurious Indiana—a floating palace, according to the papers—had set sail, an industrious news hunter at the Washington Post was quicker than his peers at the Times. “Prince is to Marry 300 000 Widow” ran the headline. Inaccurate as the report was—in reality, Allene was many times richer, of course—it sent the message to the home front that she had picked up the pieces of her life again and was living it to the full.

The day after that, the New York Times extensively covered the fairy tale of the tragic New York widow who’d been kissed awake by a real prince in an article richly illustrated with photographs. That this was indeed a fairy tale—although undoubtedly an unintentional one—was further emphasized by the pictures the couple put at the newspaper’s disposition. In particular, the pictures of the now-blond, heavily made-up, and retouched Allene were so flattering that she was barely recognizable to her friends and acquaintances.

Allene’s fourth wedding took place as planned on April 10 in her home on the Rue Barbet. The bride was given away by an acquaintance from the American embassy; apart from that, Henry’s two brothers were the only other witnesses at the ceremony. His children weren’t there—perhaps they hadn’t come to such excellent terms with their new mother as he had earlier suggested—but they were taken along on the honeymoon, during which the brand-new family toured America in grand style. On the program were a visit to Sing Sing prison and its electric chair, the festive reopening of the St. Regis Hotel in New York, and a lunch at the Princeton Club organized in honor of the prince’s visit.

The German prince accepted the respect for his status with visible pleasure, as a society reporter rather maliciously remarked, “Prince Henry was apparently not displeased with the concern his presence incited.” It was true that the prince was “not at all bad looking, but somewhat more youthful than his wife,” the item continued even more maliciously.



That summer, Trebschen’s debts disappeared as if by magic, and a large-scale renovation of the estate was put into motion. Part of this was a new riding stable, designed by Henry himself. But during Allene’s first visit to Germany in July 1929, she discovered that her husband might not have fully informed her of the degree of benevolence with which his family would greet her.

The German aristocracy may have lost practically all of its money and power, but it had given up none of its arrogance and snobbery. In general, the fact that one of their own had been driven by circumstances to marry so far beneath himself was experienced as an outrage. Allene’s new in-laws weren’t at all interested in the “great inner distinction” they’d attributed to her according to Henry’s letter a year earlier. She was, as a relative said, not at all welcome in the family. They continued to blatantly speak German in Allene’s presence even though they knew their new family member didn’t understand a word of it.

But the greatest disappointment for Allene was undoubtedly her relationship with Henry’s fourteen-year-old daughter, in whom she had hoped to find a new Greta. Marlisa used every opportunity she had to show that she wanted nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with her stepmother. Her own mother, Princess Viktoria Margarethe of Prussia, was Wilhelm II’s niece and had been considered among Europe’s highest nobility. How could this overly made-up, smoking American with her noisy friends ever think she could follow in her mother’s aristocratic footsteps?

At first, Allene, optimistic as ever, didn’t allow her fairy tale to be taken away from her. Of course Henry’s family and children still had to get used to the new situation, and trust and love needed time to grow. And to demonstrate once again how serious she was in her resolve to do everything she could to make her husband happy—and without a doubt to prevent too many visits to Trebschen in the future—at the end of the summer she bought a romantic country house at Fontainebleau, around eighteen miles southeast of Paris.

Chateau de Suisnes had been built in 1684 as a hunting lodge for a mistress of Louis XIV, the Sun King. During the nineteenth century, it had come into the possession of explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, who built an observatory and an artificial grotto and landscaped its seventeen-acre park with the beautiful Yerres River running through it. In these idyllic surroundings, Henry, who had set about painting fanatically during their Egyptian cruise and their American honeymoon, would finally have the time and space to indulge his lifelong artistic ambitions.

The fact that the landscape resembling the Swiss-Italian alps with which Henry covered the walls of the north salon in the Chateau de Suisnes the following winter could hardly be classified as great art can’t have escaped even the love-stricken Allene. Her taste was too well developed due to the years she’d spent traveling the world with Anson and collecting art; she’d also been involved with the renowned Metropolitan Museum of Art for too long. But the many-foot-long wall painting was certainly unique, and, more important, painting kept her youthful husband occupied and distracted him from the alarming newspaper headlines that would soon overshadow their married life.