An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(40)
His only option was to look for a job. In September 1935, Bernhard started work as an unpaid intern at the Paris branch of a German chemical company. Allene put him up, and they remained in touch in the intervening years. She liked to surround herself with young, cheerful people she could help a little in finding their way in life.
After just a few weeks in the offices of IG Farben, Bernhard came to the conclusion that he wasn’t cut out to spend his days at a desk or work his way up from the bottom in the business world. His life of luxury in the beautiful home of his hospitable benefactor suited him incredibly well, though. “He was allowed to drive all her cars,” his mother later explained with pride. He revised his ambitions in the customary manner. Wasn’t marriage to a woman of wealth the age-old remedy for poverty-stricken aristocrats?
Later, the American press, never afraid to fatten a juicy story, would make the most of Allene’s role in rescuing the Dutch monarchy. It was beyond dispute, of course, that the monarchy required rescuing. Halfway through the 1930s, it was widely known in diplomatic—and journalistic—circles that Queen Wilhelmina was having great trouble finding a husband for her daughter, Juliana. And since Juliana was the only person who could provide an heir to the throne, it could mean an end to the Dutch royal house.
In general, the problem was attributed to the princess’s lack of external charms. But playing in the background, and perhaps even more dominant, was Wilhelmina’s rather off-putting reputation among the aristocracy. The old queen was reputed to be provincial, humorless, and exceptionally economical, and eligible European princes told each other with a shudder how playing shuffleboard counted as the height of frivolity at the Hague court.
After years of fruitless searching, Dutch diplomats had given up hope. There weren’t many suitable princes from Protestant houses. And now that Germany, the traditional supplier of aristocratic husbands, was coming back to life economically under Hitler’s regime, potential fiancés were less than keen to seek their futures in the still-crisis-beset country next door. By now Juliana was over twenty-five, and after years of being dragged around Europe to no avail, she was no more attractive and certainly no more self-assured.
And then came Bernhard zur Lippe-Biesterfeld—in the colorful words of an American paper, “another obscure hall-room boy until lightning struck him, with the assist of an American heiress.”
The former Allene Tew of New York and Pittsburgh decided to back Bernhard for the jackpot prize . . . At the time the American princess entered Bernhard in the sweepstakes, he was trying to keep body and soul together as an auto salesman in a Paris branch of IG Farben . . . Of course she went along to mastermind the affair. For Bernhard was everything the Dutch princess was not: gay, debonair, worldly, dashing—and slim!
Bernhard may not have been a car salesman or a hall-room boy (bellhop), but he was certainly obscure—in any case in the eyes of the sleuthing Dutch diplomatic corps, who hadn’t even known he existed, let alone ever considered him as suitable marriage material. The latter had to do with the fact that his parents’ marriage had never been formally recognized because while his father may have been high nobility, his mother had never had a title of her own and was divorced at that. Armgard and her two sons’ aristocratic credentials were, in fact, no more than meaningless consolation titles supplied by an uncle for the occasion.
From his relatives on his father’s side—in which several cousins had already been felt out as potential candidates—Bernhard knew how desperate the situation around the Dutch royal house had become. And he decided, possibly egged on by Allene, to try his chances. Juliana may not have been pretty, but she was the daughter of possibly the richest woman in Europe. Marrying her would put an instant end to all of his worries and, equally important, those of his mother, whom he adored.
Bernhard’s first documented attempt to meet the Dutch princess dated back to November 1935. On the advocacy of one of Wilhelm II’s adjutants, he was able to attend a lunch at the house of John Loudon, the Dutch ambassador in Paris. But when the young intern asked his host how he could come into contact with Juliana and her mother, the host didn’t respond. The Dutch may have been desperate, but they weren’t desperate enough to want to pair their princess with a young man who’d shown up from nowhere, without demonstrable merit or even an academic degree.
A few months later, Bernhard was given a second chance. An aunt on his father’s side tipped him off that in February 1936 the Dutch queen and her daughter would attend the Olympic Winter Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a Bavarian resort town. He requested leave from his work, borrowed a car and some money from Allene, and drove to southern Germany, armed with his skis. On the way, he couldn’t resist the temptation to make a stopover in Munich, where he’d had such a happy time as a student. He ran through all of Allene’s money in no time and had to pass a hat among his bar friends to get together sufficient funds to continue his journey at the end of the evening.
And so it came about that Bernhard arrived late, but not too late, in snowy Garmisch. He managed to come into contact with Juliana on a ski run and charmed her mother and the ladies-in-waiting to the extent that a correspondence was started after the holiday. On March 8, 1936, from his garret on the Rue Barbet, Bernhard wrote his first letter to Juliana. It was six pages long and recounted, among other things, the wedding ceremony of his “aunt” Allene and Paul Kotzebue, which he’d just attended in Geneva. He had almost crashed his car on the misty alpine roads on the way, he wrote.