An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(43)
Many Jewish friends of the Kotzebues, including the Pecci-Blunts, decided not to wait for the inevitable and traveled to New York. Paul and Allene, too, seriously considered returning, an event that, as Paul wrote from Rome to an art-dealer friend in April 1939, “may be sooner than one expects. At any rate we don’t feel this is the moment to buy anything.”
In a last attempt to stem the aggression flowing from Germany, their phoenixlike traditional enemy, France and England extended a guarantee of independence and mutual assistance to Poland, the state reestablished after the First World War to keep Germany in check on the eastern border. But on August 23, 1939, Hitler made a pact with Joseph Stalin, the Russian dictator who had been in power since the 1920s. Using an iron fist, Stalin had managed to grow the Soviet Union into a global economic power.
Eight days later, in the early morning of September 1, German troops marched on Poland. Several hours later, France and England declared war on Germany. This time there was no trace of the festive eagerness with which Europe had gone to war in 1914—the atrocities of the previous conflagration were too fresh in the memory for this. The winter of 1939–1940 was known as the Phony War, a term invented by American newspapers for that strange time, fraught with anxiety, during which Europe was formally at war but there was no real fighting.
This allowed Allene and Paul to plan their departure from Europe in relative calm. The house on the Rue Barbet-de-Jouy was entrusted to the care of Allene’s second cousin, Lucy Tew, who earlier that year had managed to become the second princess in the Tew family, thanks to the mediation of the Kotzebues. She had married one of Russian Prince Dadiani’s sons, Georges, like Paul a former member of the czar’s court. Apparently Lucy and her husband didn’t believe the war would be that bad—or, as in the previous world war, that the Germans wouldn’t manage to push on to Paris—since they decided to wait in the French capital for history to take its course.
In November 1939, Paul and Allene left for Rome to clear the apartment on the Piazza d’Aracoeli. In early December, they sailed from Genoa on the SS Rex—away from the Old World, with its endless quarrels and feuds, and back to safe, orderly America and their new sun-flooded apartment in New York. A few months later, war did break out in Europe in full force. Beginning with the Netherlands on May 10, 1940, Germany overran half the continent at breakneck speed.
The German advance happened so fast that the Dutch royal family wasn’t able to seek refuge at Chateau de Suisnes, as had been agreed with Allene. Instead, “the Oranjes” fled to England aboard a British Royal Navy destroyer. On June 14, the Germans occupied Paris. England managed to hold its own at first, but the country was ill prepared for war. The Kotzebues had no idea when they would be able to return to their French life, if ever.
The Second World War was a remarkably tranquil period in Allene’s otherwise stormy life—even if it was only because the war forced her to stay in her own country without interruption for the first time in decades.
Paul, for whom this period of exile was already the third in his life, adapted to life in New York City as well as he could—far from his familiar Paris and his family, who for the most part had stayed there. He allayed his homesickness by becoming the president of the American branch of the Russian Nobility Association and by buying art and antiques, as well as with other pursuits like ballet and the opera. The tall Russian became a familiar sight in the River Café in Central Park, walking distance from 740 Park. He often lunched there with Allene, invariably accompanied by their dogs, a pair of Maltese. For a while they also had a little monkey, but it disappeared without a trace after guests got it drunk on champagne and it bit Allene’s hand.
Allene combated her own restlessness and her endless need to be active in her usual manner, namely by buying a house. And what a house it was. In October 1940, she signed a contract for the purchase of Beechwood, the imposing Newport mansion that was once the sanctuary of Mrs. Astor, the unofficial queen of America in Allene’s younger years. After her death, it had fallen to her son, John Jacob Astor, who had caused a scandal in 1911 by marrying a classmate of Greta’s who was almost thirty years younger than himself. He had died a year later in the shipwreck of the Titanic.
Since then, much had changed in and around Newport. Gone were the elegant yachts of the Great White Fleet—instead the bay was now filled with little white sails. Like so many luxury pastimes, sailing had been democratized in the working-class paradise America had transformed itself into. The exorbitant mansions the money-drunk heiresses of the Gilded Age had built were now largely abandoned, and many had been demolished. The housing market’s final blow had come from a large hurricane that had hit Rhode Island and surrounding areas in September 1938, taking hundreds of lives.
Allene bought the house and its park, in total more than twenty-two acres, from one of Mrs. Astor’s grandsons for the sum of $49,500. For this bargain price, she could now waltz around the mirrored ballroom in which the high priestess of New York society had once held her famous summer balls—and where, as a young Mrs. Hostetter, Allene hadn’t been able to get a foothold, as much as she tried.
But more important still was the fact that Beechwood, as one of the oldest country houses in Newport, was also in one of the best locations, with a wide view of the ocean both from the house and the park. Now that she could no longer turn to the comfort of transatlantic crossings, Allene could at least enjoy the straight line of the horizon from her own sitting room, something that had always afforded her peace and a sense of well-being, and fall asleep to the sound of the waves. She had bought her first seaside house when she was sixty-eight—and now she would never want anything else.