An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(47)

Naturally Allene was also an honorary guest at Juliana’s inauguration on September 6, 1948, in Amsterdam. She gave Heiner an extensive and opinionated account. Bernhard, she wrote with almost maternal pride, was “a perfect show” in his admiral’s uniform, while Juliana garnered her approval by having lost a lot of weight for the occasion:

She is so THIN now and truly looks lovely and such jewels . . . her hair well done, the crowd went wild with excitement. All too beautiful and perfectly done . . . Everyone is extremely nice to me and I was given same rank and courtesy and attention as the Royalties here and they were very charming as well.

If one thing is clear from Allene’s letters that have been preserved, it is that as an old woman, she was still essentially the same excitable girl from Jamestown, looking at the world and people around her with an open mind, full of curiosity. At the same time she took pleasure in the simple things of life, like a vacation with Paul and with Alice Brown, her secretary-cum-lady-companion and friend, in a “tiny lovely house in the woods” in New Hampshire. “I do the cooking, Miss Brown the garden and Paul the wood.” Or in an evening in, with just Alice for company. “When we’re alone, we dine in the little round salon, it’s so cozy and peaceful, I like it so much when she reads and I write.”

Perhaps this was Allene’s greatest achievement, above her wealth, her titles, her many houses, and her impressive guest book: that despite everything she’d experienced and endured, she always clung to her ability to enjoy life and be grateful for it.



Allene had been and remained the Queen of Loose Ends. Every time a hole developed in the fabric of her life, she’d tie together the loose ends and get on with it. Her past was useful for this—other people may have spent more and more time immersed in their memories as they aged, but Allene kept the cabinet of her personal history firmly locked. In this respect, she proved herself a child of Victorian times. She had no need for modern ideas about mourning or the expression of feelings. Her philosophy was to keep going and not look back.

It was the attitude that had made America great, it was the mentality that allowed Allene to survive, and it was also the spirit that she tried to instill in her stepson, who made little effort in Newport to build himself an independent life:

Strength of character has to be worked on, hard . . . Always try many things. Try every way one can think of, when you truly need something important and if you do not see the way, get help . . . All girls and boys, no matter what position they have should be brought up to work these days, or at least know how to. I should think every effort should be to get work for your own dignity . . .

TRY to make friends, everyone can with an effort. Everyone has sadness and much trouble and likes a gay pleasant friend about. COURAGE ALL THE TIME.

Heiner’s part of the correspondence has not survived, but from Allene’s reactions, the contents can be guessed at. Above all else, he felt himself to be a victim of his times, of circumstance, and of other people. The fact that he never managed to find work or friends or have a relationship but continued to camp out in Beechwood, cared for by Allene’s servants, was never down to him but always to others, who had fallen short in his eyes in some way or other.

Allene tried in vain to convince him that being hard on yourself didn’t mean you had to be hard on others. On the contrary, she told him:

It is thoroughly stupid to harbor resentments to anyone, I WILL NOT DO IT, it would hurt me more than the other person . . . You MUST, MUST not always think the worst. I could take offense daily with people but personally think it stupid not to have a friendly feeling to all. It is a better character disposition in life . . . show tolerance.

I like people and you MUST, also it is true that we get from people very MUCH WHAT WE GIVE THEM. Look for their good qualities and ignore their faults, that way one is happier [. . .] Take people as they are, know yourself [. . .] If we took people for their true count, we would have few friends.

Allene practiced her own recipe for happiness with verve. Indeed, she seemed not to want or be able to see certain things taking place around her. Like the fact that, despite all her assistance and urgings, Heiner kept putting off any plans for a career or marriage indefinitely, preferring the company of young men with a “dubious reputation” in terms of their sexual preferences. Or the fact that her own husband, Paul, often went out with his much younger nephew George, who went through life with the cheerful nickname of “Gogo.”

In this sense, Allene may have had a pseudo husband in Paul, just as she had a pseudo son in Heiner and pseudo daughters in Kitty Cohu and Jane Moinson. But she saw that as no reason to love them any less unconditionally than if they’d been genuine. Just as the amputees from the First World War had learned to live with artificial limbs and even become used to them, Allene made do with an artificial family. There was no space in her philosophy of life for wasting time contemplating lost loves or becoming a captive of her own past.



Allene preferred to look ahead—as in the summer of 1951, when, approaching eighty, she bought a house on the coast “in a whim,” as she wrote. She had gone to the south coast of France to visit her old friend Marion Bateman in Monte Carlo and, once there, had fallen back in love with the Riviera. “It’s so lovely here, all the roses out now and the perfume of flowers everywhere.” On the way, she visited a summerhouse that Kitty and Wally Cohu had rented earlier. It was in Cap d’Ail, a village between Nice and Monaco. She decided to make an offer on it at once. In early July she wrote to Heiner: