An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(41)
While their Rue Barbet housemate worked on his career in his wholly original manner, Allene and Paul spent their honeymoon in their favorite city, Rome. They rented an apartment in the ancient Palazzo Fani Mignanelli, which belonged to a couple they knew—the American banker Cécil Blunt and his aristocratic Italian wife, Anna Pecci, who enjoyed international fame as art collectors and patrons of modern artists like Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau. This Roman pied-à-terre, which Allene and Paul would also keep in the following years, was on the Piazza d’Aracoeli, a small square between the Capitoline Hill and Piazza Venezia.
After a few weeks in the Italian spring sun, the Kotzebues traveled on to New York. They were accompanied by Heiner Reuss, Allene’s stepson from her former marriage. Henry’s son was nineteen and had grown into a slender, humorous young man who was keen to please. To his father’s dismay, he did not in any way fit the national-socialist ideal of tough masculinity that had become a standard in Germany, so following the divorce, he veered more and more toward “Mama,” as he called his stepmother.
At the beginning of the summer, the trio returned to Paris, where in the meantime, houseguest Bernhard had made good progress in his quest to conquer a place in the world through the Dutch royal family. After a total of three visits lasting several days each—during which he had indeed become acquainted with the famed shuffleboard—on July 10, 1936, he asked for Juliana’s hand in marriage.
The princess was now head over heels in love with the charming, worldly young man who had appeared in her life so unexpectedly. Wilhelmina, too, had received “a very good impression” of him, as she wrote to a diplomat. The fact that neither of them had yet met any of the potential husband’s family members or friends was of little consequence given the relief that there was finally a serious candidate for Juliana’s hand. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” as the Dutch ambassador in Berlin summed up the matter.
For the rest of the summer, frenzied plans were made behind the scenes to introduce Bernhard in the Netherlands and to establish a marriage contract. The prospective husband had already stated that he didn’t want to be financially dependent on his wife after their wedding. On August 5, a constitutional amendment was shepherded through Dutch parliament in which it was laid down that a future prince consort would receive an annual income of a very respectable 200,000 gulden. Given that this sum could hardly come from national coffers already hit hard by the economic crisis, Juliana donated the money from her own income as heir to the throne.
Several days earlier, Allene had invited the Dutch queen and her ministers to Chateau de Suisnes to negotiate the marriage contract. The invitation was turned down—Allene’s country house was too close to civilization, Wilhelmina thought. Instead, the parties met on August 13 in a remote hotel in the Bernese Highlands of Switzerland. Allene, Paul, and Bernhard, who’d driven there together, were met by a visibly nervous Juliana, who had a bad cold; her thrifty mother; and ministers who—given the prehistory—were undoubtedly hoping matters would be settled swiftly so they could resume their vacations.
Later, Paul Kotzebue would tell one of Bernhard’s biographers how nerve-racking the atmosphere had been for the three long days during which Allene tried to get as good a price for her protégé as she could from Wilhelmina and the ministers. “Juliana, Bernhard, and I sat in the lobby of the hotel to wait until my wife returned,” he said. “We didn’t manage to conduct a polite conversation.” It wasn’t until the evening of August 15 that white smoke spiraled out of the negotiation room: an agreement had been reached.
The next day, the Kotzebues offered the Dutch delegation a farewell lunch in Lucerne. In the spirit of the festivities, Wilhelmina, normally a fervent teetotaler, deigned to take a very small sip of wine. She also refrained, with visible difficulty, from commenting when her daughter, in imitation of the rest of the cheerfully smoking company, suddenly lit up a cigarette, albeit rather clumsily.
The engagement of the Dutch princess was made public on September 8, 1936. It was considerably earlier than had been intended, but Bernhard and his mother clearly didn’t want to run any risks that the union might be called off, and they’d had the news leaked through a journalist friend. The entire Netherlands celebrated, while Juliana and her mother met Armgard, Bernhard’s mother, for the first time. She came to The Hague for the occasion and filled her role as future royal mother-in-law with panache.
Allene remained in the background during the celebrations. Within the Bernhard cult that was now developing, she was just an aunt with whom he’d happened to be lodging for career reasons when he’d lost his heart to Juliana. The fact that there was no family connection remained unnoticed. Just as it was in no one’s interest to check the future husband’s credentials now that one had finally been found, there was no reason to look into the woman he had been staying with.
And so Allene went down in Dutch history as Bernhard’s somewhat mysterious American aunt, about whom little was known other than that she’d had a number of wealthy husbands and, as a consequence, had grown very rich. The presence of such a large fortune belonging to a “close relative” provided Bernhard with an aura of wealth missing from his own family, one he could really use. For his entire life, he would continue to deny having married for anything as vulgar as money. Nor did anyone bring up the article that had appeared half a year earlier in various Dutch newspapers under the headline “The Princess with the Record Number of Marriages.”