An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(35)
Shortly after this depressing house exchange, in April 1931, Allene took Henry to the city where she’d been raised. Jamestown hadn’t even needed the Great Depression to fall into decline. Around 1910, the rise of the automobile had put an end to Chautauqua’s brief popularity as a vacation destination. The large wooden hotels on the lake had as good as vanished—most of them had burned to the ground, perhaps in fires set intentionally to reap the insurance premiums.
In subsequent years, the furniture industry had kept local business going in Jamestown, but now that the American economy had practically come to a standstill, one factory after the next was forced to close its doors. Even Proudfit, the eighty-year-old clothing shop on Main Street, could no longer be saved by its lucky number; shortly before Allene’s visit, it had filed for bankruptcy. Jamestown had returned to what it had once been: a quiet and actually rather ugly town, surrounded by endless woods, where lumberjacks, hunters, and farmers came to purchase their supplies.
On July 8, 1932, Wall Street finally hit rock bottom. Share values were now nearly 90 percent less than they had been in September 1929. A few weeks later, on a stuffy summer’s day, a chambermaid at The Pierre hotel on Sixty-First Street detected a strange smell coming from a room with a “Do Not Disturb” sign on its door. A little while later, the lifeless body of Morton Colton Nichols, Allene’s second husband, was discovered. He had sniffed chloroform, taken cyanide, and then hanged himself, and had already been dead for a few days.
According to a family member—probably his second wife, from whom he was long estranged—persistent stomachache was the cause of the suicide. And bellyache is something Morton Nichols would certainly have had. After his death, it was discovered that he hadn’t just lost his own money in the crash but had run through the entire family trust fund, including the fortune of his niece Ruth Nichols, who had become a national celebrity as one of the first female pilots—“The Flying Debutante.”
Poor Henry. It was as if the devil was playing games with him. The losses and disappointments had piled up for as long as he could remember. First the Dutch throne, whipped from under his family’s nose by the birth of Princess Juliana. Then the war, so ignominiously and unfairly lost in the eyes of members of the German aristocracy. Then the revolution, which had taken from him and his family all that they had considered their birthright for centuries: political power, social status, and money.
And when he finally thought he might have gotten the better of fate by marrying a wealthy American, less than half a year later, the stock market crash and the rapid depreciation of Allene’s fortune began to rub all the shine off their fairy-tale marriage. Even his artistic career had ended in failure: an exhibition Allene had organized in the prestigious New York Wildenstein gallery had drawn neither buyers nor admiring critics, and his work had received the designation “painfully wrought.”
Allene herself, scratched and scraped by fate as she was, could handle the loss. She had gone from incredibly rich to a little less wealthy. Her Victorian childhood had given her enough self-discipline, and her marriage to Anson enough financial savvy, to be able to bear a blow like this one. As she once complained in a letter, “There is so much sadness and trouble in the world, one’s heart is torn all the time, also one’s purse, but this life is a school.” She cut back dramatically on her own spending, kept a keener-than-ever eye on her accounts, and economized on everything. She rented out her apartment on Park Avenue when she wasn’t there and would buy a new hat instead of a new wardrobe. In her own words, “I think a hat most important for a woman, you can wear an old dress if the hat is new.” But she still didn’t sell her shares, and certainly not for a few cents to an errand boy.
For her highborn husband, on the other hand, the Great Depression was one setback too many. Henry sought refuge in drinking and gambling as of old, and in peevishness he unleashed on his wife more and more frequently in public. He may have once come into the world with a proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, but no one could say he had been born under a lucky star.
9
The Fifth Man
Rache, Rache, und nochmals Rache! Revenge, revenge, and once again revenge. That was what Henry and his brothers had sworn in 1924 as they revealed a monument in Ostritz, near Trebschen, for the Germans killed in the war. Revenge for the lost war, which they were convinced could have been won if the country hadn’t been sabotaged, inside out, by international Jewry. Revenge for the downfall of the German empire and their monarchy. And in particular revenge for the Treaty of Versailles, which had condemned their country to an existence as Europe’s hapless pauper.
At the time, the United States was the only nation that had rejected the peace treaty signed in Versailles on June 28, 1919. The Americans felt, in part, that the reparations the Germans had to pay as instigators of the war were too draconian; the restrictions imposed on the country were too humiliating. They seemed to be the only ones to realize that you always have to give a person or a nation the opportunity to be a good loser.
During the postwar years, it was mainly Americans who had dared to invest heavily in ravaged and traumatized Germany. Thanks to them, the German economy had slowly been able to scramble to its feet again over the course of the 1920s. But when those same Americans were forced to hastily recoup their money after the 1929 stock market crash, the bottom fell out of Germany’s still-fragile economic market. The Great Depression, which had spread across the planet like a viscous oil slick, hit the world hard but nowhere as hard as it did in Germany.