An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(49)
[T]he will was made as a result of undue, illegal and improper influence, and as a result of duress, the testator was not of sound mind and sufficient mental capacity, the instrument was not the last will, and was not executed with all formalities required by law.
In a nutshell, Allene’s family wanted to have her declared insane retroactively.
It didn’t seem that this would prove much of an obstacle to the Tews. The contents and the circumstances surrounding the creation of Countess Kotzebue’s will were suspicious, to say the least. In their eyes, it was remarkable that she would leave the lion’s share of her fortune to what a journalist later described as “a retinue of servants and hangers-on,” in particular the men who’d functioned as her son and her husband in the last years of her life. Not only were both gentlemen of “dubious sexual orientation,” they had backgrounds that, in those years of the Cold War and witch-hunting of Communists, made alarm bells ring.
Heiner Reuss was German born and, naturalized or not, after two world wars could only be seen by those with prejudices as a long-established enemy of the United States. Paul Kotzebue, no less than twelve years younger than his deceased wife and suspect enough for this reason, was actually a Russian and, in this, the embodiment of the new enemy. There were even questionable aspects to Kitty Cohu, the third-largest beneficiary in the will. She was certainly American, but she was also married to the lawyer who had drawn up the contested will and who was now acting as its executor. To make the conflict of interest even greater, it turned out that the deceased had been a silent partner in Wally Cohu’s legal firm, albeit not under her own name but as A. T. Burchard.
The most suspicious thing of all was the course of events surrounding Allene’s death. Why, the nieces and nephews asked, hadn’t their terminally ill aunt returned to New York the previous fall, as was her custom? She would have been able to await the end in her comfortable apartment on Park Avenue with America’s best doctors and hospitals at her fingertips rather than having to die in a kind of summerhouse on the coast, assisted solely by an old French doctor in his eighties. Why hadn’t she wanted to see anyone anymore, far away in France—not even the family members with whom she was still on good terms? And why had she been buried immediately after her death in that foreign country, in complete silence, so that no one had been able to say goodbye to her?
This was what the Newport Court had to determine: What had actually happened to Allene Tew during those last years?
The symptoms had actually begun in the fall of 1951, just after she’d bought the villa at Cap d’Ail. Allene had been suffering from stomach complaints for a while and had an unusual lack of appetite, certainly for her. “Zaza is gobbling up her dinner here beside me in the boudoir,” she said in a letter to Heiner, “wish I had some of hers and Paul’s appetite.”
In October, the pain became so severe that after returning home from a canasta evening at a friend’s house in Paris, she didn’t even manage to finish her weekly letter to Heiner. The assistance of Dr. Louis Moinson—the father of the French girl whose marriage Allene had once arranged at Birchwood and whom she’d always watched over with maternal care—was called for. The famous Paris surgeon, in his advanced age, had retired, but he still served as a personal physician to friends and family.
“I think she was fighting it for a long time & hope after Dr. M.’s treatment she will be better,” Alice Brown wrote later that evening to Heiner in Allene’s place. Four days later, Allene did indeed feel better and was already feeling chatty again, as her next letter to Heiner reveals:
I know it was a liver attack, but Dr. wrongly said it was intestinal poisoning and kept me miserable longer than necessary.
The Kotzebues spent that winter in New York, as usual. Allene reigned over the overseas part of her kingdom by letter with her habitual discipline, but she still didn’t feel completely fit. “Try to keep cheerful and hope all will last out my life,” she wrote to John Burnet, a British war veteran who worked as her handyman in France and was keeping an eye on the refurbishments at Cap d’Ail.
Nothing came of her plans to journey to the Riviera in March to admire the results of the renovations. Instead, she ended up in New York’s Roosevelt Hospital, where a malignant tumor was removed from her stomach. It appears the doctors didn’t give Allene much hope of recovery, because on Monday, April 7, 1952, still in the hospital and in the company of Wally Cohu, she drew up her will. She endorsed the document with a signature that was as firm and self-assured as when she’d first signed herself “Allene Tew Hostetter” at age nineteen.
A few days later, Allene put Beechwood up for sale. As earlier correspondence showed, she hadn’t felt at home for years in the mausoleum-like country house that had once belonged to Mrs. Astor. It really only served as a place for Heiner to live—Heiner, who four years after his arrival in America still hadn’t been able to find work or accommodation of his own.
It wasn’t very difficult to find a buyer for the legendary Astor mansion in Newport in this time of economic prosperity, and on May 3, the house, including much of its contents, was sold to a New York yarn manufacturer. Allene had smaller pieces of furniture shipped to France to further furnish Castel Mare; the crockery and textiles were shared out among friends and acquaintances such as Bernhard’s brother: “China and glass given to Prince Lippe.”