An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(48)
Have been very foolish and extravagant, as cannot afford it, but have bought a tiny villa at Cap d’Ail, about twenty minutes’ walk from Monte Carlo, right on the sea. No furniture in it, but if you like could get three beds and six chairs and a bridge table and picnic there within a week. And I do the cooking and we all wash dishes, and we can swim off the place. Let me know if you would like this!
Until the end of the nineteenth century, Cap d’Ail had been a farming village built into a steep, rocky mountainside, visited only by goatherds. But the construction of a railway between Nice and Monaco had transformed the village into a hot spot for the international jet set, including the British royal family and Winston Churchill, who liked to set up his easel and paint in the famous Hotel Eden. It was also popular as a winter resort since the Maritime Alps formed a natural barrier against the cold winds from the north. It was the ultimate place to enjoy la douceur de vivre—the gentle life.
Castel Mare, as Allene’s new house was called, was not big, but it was wonderfully situated—right on the seafront, at the end of the Boulevard de Mer. A small pebbled beach could be reached via a flight of stairs with the poetic name l’Escalier de la Solitude—the steps of solitude. The summerhouse was built in 1909 for a rich manufacturer from Monaco and was so tightly nestled into the rock face that you could see its roof from the boulevard. It was the ultimate seaside house, with an uninterrupted view of the Mediterranean Sea on three sides. On the shallow terrace at the front of the house you might almost imagine yourself aboard a ship, there was so much splashing foam and so omnipresent was the sound of the waves constantly pounding the rocks below.
A month after Allene had signed the purchase agreement, in August 1951, she organized her first little dinner “just in a picnic fashion.” In the months that followed, she busied herself with setting up her new Mediterranean life. The Buick was replaced by a Ford Vedette because it was much more practical for the narrow, winding roads. The house was equipped with a telephone connection, modernized, and redecorated. Allene had furniture sent over from both Paris and New York and bought the rest of her furnishings at the Parisian department store Galeries Lafayette and other exclusive stores.
The house’s pièce de résistance, and the part Allene paid the most attention to, was the room the workmen respectfully termed “la Chambre de Madame.” She decorated her bedroom—which took up more than half of the first floor and had large, high windows on two sides and doors opening onto a balcony—with the finest satins and the softest silks in delicate shades of blue—almost as though she wanted the room to dissolve into the azure sea, of which she had such a magnificent view from her bed.
12
How not to Die
The last act of the play in which Allene had the leading role began in Newport’s court of law on a lovely spring morning in 1955, some weeks after her death. Two years earlier, Heiner Reuss had sworn an oath of allegiance to the American flag in this rather pompous building dating from the Gilded Age and had become a naturalized American citizen. And now he was here again—but this time as a man who was publicly being made out to be somebody who had cheated money out of the dying elderly stepmother for whose care he was responsible. The amount in question was an impressive $23.6 million. The court case was the largest ever to take place in Newport. “A live court room drama such as no summer theater could hope to offer,” the Chicago Daily Tribune promised its readers.
And a drama it was, if only because of the unclear family relationships at the root of the conflict. The plaintiffs were a group of a dozen or so of Allene’s nephews and nieces, coming from all four corners of America: New York, San Francisco, Berkeley, Miami, and Palm Beach. Among them was Lucy Dadiani, the young niece whose marriage to a Russian prince Allene had once arranged but with whom Allene had quarreled when she found the house she’d left in the Dadianis’ care plundered when she returned to it in the summer of 1945. Allene had written to Heiner, disillusioned:
Lucy stole all the good things that were at Barbet-de-Jouy. I trusted her and Georges and they turned out to be only thieves. I fear both will go to jail. I have no sympathy for them, they betrayed all my trust.
Allene never did take them to court, since it became clear that the Dadianis hadn’t so much stolen the things themselves as allowed German occupiers to. But the matter had been covered extensively in the international press and hadn’t helped the already cool relations between Allene and her biological family grow any warmer.
Another famous name in the Tew camp was Julia Rosewater, the young relative with whom Allene had been so close in the years around Anson’s death. Their relationship had been so close that in 1928, Julia had even gone so far as to have her then-seventeen-year-old son Seth’s name officially changed to Burchard. In doing so, his mother, according to an article in the New York Times titled “Took Burchard Name, Inherits Millions,” believed that he would not only have a right to Anson’s millions but also, in due course, to Allene’s. Clearly Julia had jumped the gun a bit, because although Allene financed Seth’s, or “Burchard’s,” Harvard education and later helped him find work at General Electric, he wasn’t named at all in her will.
On the first day of the trial, May 22, 1955, the “heirs at law and next of kin” provided a list of ten arguments why the document purported to be Allene’s last will and testament should be declared invalid. To summarize,