An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(42)
The wedding took place on January 7, 1937, in The Hague. Guest of honor Allene adorned herself with a tiara that day that was apparently rather tight: to the horror of the aristocratic guests, she simply removed it during dinner and laid it on the table in front of her. As a wedding gift, the Kotzebues gave the couple an antique Russian icon, encased in gold, depicting Our Lady of Perpetual Help, a very fitting image given Allene’s role in the establishment of the union.
And Allene continued to provide assistance, even during the couple’s honeymoon. It soon became clear to Juliana that her young husband did not intend to give up the company of his bachelor friends or attractive women after the wedding. The Dutch princess had no idea how to make the most of herself as a woman. Her mother had sent her to her wedding night in flannel underwear. American women, on the other hand, were famous for leaving nothing to Mother Nature where their physical appearance was concerned, and Allene was no exception.
When the royal couple spent a week on the Piazza d’Aracoeli at the end of March, Allene, always softhearted when it came to the underdog, took it upon herself to give the Dutch woman more self-confidence. She had her beauty specialist come over to Europe on a boat from New York and made appointments with Worth and Molyneux, the two Parisian fashion houses where she was a regular customer herself. In early April, Juliana—who had lost several pounds on her honeymoon—was fitted with a new contemporary and, in particular, flattering wardrobe. The hastily shipped-over American beautician completed the metamorphosis of “a plump, placid, pleasant lass into an almost dashing young woman of the world,” as the stylist told one newspaper.
Later, Wilhelmina, as frugal and averse to ostentation as ever, would have almost all of the clothes her daughter ordered from the Paris fashion houses sent back. In the meantime, Juliana’s Parisian transformation, as remarkable as it was short-lived, was put down to Bernhard’s influence, both by his biographers and himself. Like all good honeymoons, this one too ended in Paris where Bernhard promptly telephoned Aunt Allene. “What’s the best fashion house at the moment? Lanvin?” he asked.
“No, Lanvin is passé,” Countess Kotzebue cried. “Nowadays you need to be at Worth and Molyneux.”
“Wonderful,” said the prince, “would you like to go there with us tomorrow? We’ll order a few things for Juliana that don’t look like they’ve been made by the local dressmaker, eh?”
Nevertheless, Allene’s efforts paid off—and very concretely, too, in the form of an heir to the throne who came into the world in late January 1938, exactly nine months after the Paris shopping spree, thus rescuing the Dutch monarchy from extinction. The grateful couple insisted that the American benefactor become one of the five godparents of little Princess Beatrix. And so Allene, the girl from the livery stables, sat in the front row along with Europe’s nobility at the baptism on May 12, 1938.
She sat there bored to tears—as film footage of the hours-long ceremony, held in what was to her unintelligible gibberish, shows. Her face only betrayed signs of pleasure again when, after it was over, she was able to wave to the enthusiastic crowds together with the princely couple.
For the Netherlands, still in deep economic crisis, the birth of Princess Beatrix, “bringer of joy,” was a welcome glimmer of happiness in dark times. In America, where all the misery had started nine years earlier with the Wall Street Crash of 1929, hope and light were glowing on the horizon. The country had Franklin Roosevelt to thank for this—the Democratic president who, during his inauguration in 1933, declared he would fight the malaise as he would the invasion of a foreign enemy: “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.”
The economic recovery program Roosevelt began that year, nicknamed the New Deal, was based on the ideas of British economist John Keynes. It consisted of a large number of employment projects, a social safety net for the poorest, pensions for widows and the unemployed, and higher taxes for higher income brackets. Monitoring of banks was tightened, and Prohibition was abolished. As early as 1936, it began to become clear that this program was indeed breathing new life into the beached economy. In November that year, Roosevelt was reelected with the largest majority since the days of the Founding Fathers.
Almost simultaneously, the tide began to turn for the grandiose apartment complex on Park Avenue. John D. Rockefeller Jr., scion of one of the richest families in America, bought the twenty-four-room penthouse. So many buyers followed in his footsteps that the shares the existing owners had been given in exchange for property ownership became profitable. Share prices on Wall Street rose again, too, and Allene’s fortune—she’d managed to cling to most of her shares—grew in line with it. By 1938, the market was back at full steam, and a newspaper described Allene as one of the wealthiest of American women once again.
In November that year, Allene exchanged her old, relatively small flat in the dark C wing for an eighteen-room apartment in the D wing, the most attractive side of the complex. There she had her own ballroom and a splendid view of both Park Avenue and Seventy-Fifth Street, with light from the southwest. The space and the lovely evening light probably weren’t the only reasons for the move. It wasn’t inconceivable that she and Paul might have to use their New York address as their main residence and say farewell to their beloved Paris for an indeterminate period of time.
By 1938, with his annexation of Austria and part of Czechoslovakia, Adolf Hitler had shown that he wasn’t planning to accept the subordinate role the allies had assigned to Germany in Versailles. After a desperate Jewish refugee shot an employee of the German embassy in Paris on November 7, 1938, the German dictator proved to the world that he was serious in his campaign against Jews. During the Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, thousands of Jewish shops were trashed, synagogues were set on fire, and Jewish citizens were abused, humiliated, and murdered.