An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(37)
But there was a reason Allene’s motto was “Courage all the time.” If there was one thing she could call herself a real expert in by now, it was cutting her losses. On July 26, 1935, Allene’s secretary in Paris, Alice Brown, announced that Allene and Henry were separating. For Henry, this was the perfect moment for a new start: not only had he been accepted as an NSDAP member almost two months earlier, but his eldest brother had died, leaving him Trebschen and whatever else remained in the family’s possession.
As for Allene, she simply refused to comment. In fact, no comment was necessary. That summer and fall, she frequently appeared with a new companion at her side—one who was even younger and more handsome than the previous one—her eyebrows raised provocatively as in her younger years on Lake Chautauqua.
In a certain sense, the man who would become Allene’s fifth and final husband was a kind of legacy from Henry. Or better still, from Trebschen, where Allene’s experiences had primarily been ungratifying. She had made friends with one of Henry’s neighbors, who was almost as much a pariah to the German aristocracy as she herself. Armgard zur Lippe-Biesterfeld lived in a rather dilapidated former hunting lodge on the Reckenwalde lake, a few miles from Trebschen. She was a fanatical horse lover and an avid smoker and was renowned for not giving a damn. A widow, she now always appeared in public with her five-years-younger horse trainer, a Russian exile by the name of Alexis Pantchoulidzew.
“Tschuli” as the Reckenwalde horseman was known, came from a prominent Russian family and had trained at the Saint Petersburg Page Corps, the most elite military academy in czarist Russia. After the revolution in 1917 and the subsequent civil war, like many others, he had been forced to flee the country and had ended up with the zur Lippe family in 1922. The former students of the Page Corps were known to maintain close contact with each other in exile, and the chance is therefore great that he was the person who introduced Allene to Pavel Pavlovitch Kotzebue—or Paul, as he was known in French.
Just like Tschuli, Paul had been in the Page Corps and after that had been employed in the czarist court as a cavalryman and bodyguard; both had fought on the side of the counterrevolutionaries in the civil war, and both—made destitute by the communist seizure of power—had been forced to seek refuge in Europe. But there was an unusual story attached to Paul, since in March 1917, right after the revolution, he had for a short time guarded none other than Nicholas II, the newly deposed czar. Allene may have been able to read about her future husband in 1917, since he had given an extensive interview about this to the New York Times.
The reason the revolutionary government had entrusted thirty-three-year-old Paul Kotzebue with guarding the most important prisoner in the country in early March 1917 probably had something to do with a youthful error. Once, when he was still one of Czarina Alexandra Feodorovna’s bodyguards, Paul had appeared at a masked New Year’s ball dressed as a woman and turned the heads of all the men present. When the identity of the elegant guest who had jumped into a waiting sleigh just before midnight and disappeared without a trace was later revealed, he was fired from the court on the spot.
Paul worked for a few years as personal assistant to Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin, who was murdered in 1911 by a political opponent. In 1912, Nicholas II took pity on Paul and hired him again. He was appointed captain in the czar’s family’s favorite residence, the Alexander Palace, near Saint Petersburg. There he witnessed the glory days of Rasputin, a faith healer originally from Siberia whose help was called in regarding the poor health of Alexei, the heir to the throne. In those days, Russia abounded with rumors about the sexual debauchery of the miracle doctor—Rasputin held the view that in order to regret one’s sins, it was first necessary to have committed a lot of them—and the unhealthy power he exercised at court, particularly over the czarina.
Meanwhile, the world war that had broken out in 1914 ended dramatically for the czarist empire, already exhausted from its earlier war with Japan. The underfed and barely armed Russian soldiers didn’t stand a chance against the slick German fighting machine, and dissatisfaction with the czarist administration and hatred of Rasputin grew by the day. On the night of December 29–30, 1916, a group of aristocrats tried to turn the tide by murdering the faith healer, to the deep sorrow of the czar and his family. Alexandra had him declared a saint, and Nicholas II carried the monk’s embalmed body in his own arms to its last resting place in a chapel on the outskirts of the palace gardens.
But Rasputin’s death came too late to restore the trust of the Russian population in its leaders. A few weeks later, food riots broke out in Saint Petersburg, and soon afterward in the rest of the country, too. On March 15, 1917, Nicholas II found himself forced to give up the throne. Together with his family and a number of faithful followers, he waited for history to take its course in his residential palace, guarded by Paul, a man the provisional government felt would be sympathetic to the revolutionaries’ cause since he had once been fired from the czarina’s regimental guard.
Later, various members of Nicholas II’s court would testify that this certainly wasn’t the case:
The new War Minister, Guchkov appointed Captain Kotzebue of the Cavalry, Commandant of the Palace, hoping that he would act like a real jailer, as he had promised, but, Kotzebue, to his honor, accepted this post only that he might be able to come to the help of the prisoners and mitigate the hardships of their existence as far as possible. He allowed them to have uncensored correspondence, sent off telephone messages for them, bought for them secretly the things they needed.