An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(51)





Allene’s homemade recipe for happiness in life had always worked well. Again and again, she’d confronted adversity and despair with her favorite mantras. “If one has the will and persistence, one CAN do things . . . always try every possible way, and if you don’t see a way, ask for help . . . COURAGE ALL THE TIME.” And each time she had managed to turn the course of events her way, force fate’s hand, and find a new form of happiness.

But this philosophy didn’t work in the face of her new enemy. The illness that was eating away at Allene from the inside could not be banished with all the willpower and persistence in the world, and denying it only backfired.

How not to die? This question began to dominate Allene’s thoughts more and more as the year 1954 progressed. And because she’d learned never to give up hope, she reached for ever more unorthodox treatment methods—and in so doing lost what had always been her strength, in combination with her courage: her common sense. At the beginning of the summer, she wrote hopefully to Heiner of “cures in England without a medicine [. . .] sounds foolish but Hope has known some marvelous results, so why not try?”

In July, she visited two German “miracle” doctors in Montreux, Switzerland, who had promised to heal her with ferrous serums containing placenta cells. As her letters show, initially Allene trusted blindly in her new therapists and their treatment: “Have taken two doses of Dr. Niehans’s cells and he thinks I takes them very well”—although it didn’t escape her still-sharp mind that both gentlemen were raking in a fortune with their revolutionary treatments:

All this very expensive but if it cures worthwhile [. . .] I feel like guinea pig with all sorts of [stitches], medicines, etc. but Dr. Niehans feels some can help.

Six weeks later, there was not a single improvement in Allene’s condition, reason for Niehans’s colleague to make her life as their patient real hell now:

Dr. Ackermann took away all cigarettes and all medicine . . . very strict diet . . . too miserable to write, more soon.

After this, the letters with which Allene kept her stepson in America updated on her ups and downs became shorter, the handwriting ever jerkier. “Had serum from second placenta . . . still suffer plenty,” she wrote on August 30. Six days later the letter followed that would be her last to Heiner: “Bad day for me but much love. When do you think you can leave?”

Shortly after this, Allene, by now completely exhausted, traveled back to her summerhouse on the Riviera, the closest of all of her houses. She’d lost her last wager with life—traveling on to New York or even Paris was not even thinkable. And so her odyssey finally ran aground in the fall of 1954 on the rocks of Cap d’Ail. The only thing she could do was wait for the winter and the inevitable in her Blue Room, surrounded by her self-selected family, and try to find an answer for her final challenge: How to die?



On July 12, 1955, less than six weeks after the start of “Case 9400”—as the suit the Tews had launched against the heirs was called—the court in Newport came to the conclusion that Allene’s testament met all the requirements of legality and could therefore be considered legitimate. The results of the hearings with the nursing staff from Roosevelt Hospital were completely clear: Allene Kotzebue had been completely compos mentis when she’d signed her will in April 1952, and there had been no question of “undue influence.”

Yet it would be another eight years before the file was finally closed and the inheritance could be shared out definitively. The long judicial process could not be based on the strength of the claims—aside from accusations, the Tew family could raise no concrete incriminating facts or witnesses, and newspapers soon lost interest in the case. It seems more likely it was because of the Cold War, which held America in its grip. As open-minded toward foreigners as Americans had been during Allene’s youth, when the country still needed to be built, they proved to be xenophobic and intolerant now, in a period when there was so much wealth to lose.

The process dragged on endlessly—stalled and delayed by the Tews, who might not have stood to gain anything but could at least ensure that the people Allene had left her money to couldn’t get at it. They may have realized their case was hopeless from the start, a fact possibly evident in the radical way one of them decided to cut his losses on December 22, 1955. On that day, a cousin of Lucy Dadiani’s, forty-two-year-old James Dinsmore Tew Jr., drove onto the tracks of the Florida East Coast Railway and pulled on his hand brake. A few minutes later, his vehicle was snatched by a train and dragged along for a mile and a half. The handwritten note left behind in his inside pocket revealed that this nephew of Allene’s had retained a certain sense of decency. “The driver is not to blame,” he had written.

James Tew Jr.’s suicide had no effect on the court case: his place in the Tew camp was immediately taken over by his ex-wife, who demanded $150,000 from the legacy for her son and litigated just as hardheadedly as the rest.



Paul and Heiner were lucky in one respect: Allene turned out to have already apportioned her French possessions in a separate, undisputed will written in November 1951. In it, she had stated that the house on Rue Barbet-de-Jouy would go to Paul, Heiner would get the villa in Cap d’Ail, and Chateau de Suisnes would go to Kitty and Wally Cohu.

Paul and Heiner returned to France for good, and Wally sold the apartment on Park Avenue in January 1956; as executor, he’d been given permission by the court to handle any ongoing business. Among the many people interested in Allene’s flat was a young actress named Elizabeth Taylor. The cooperative’s board turned her down as a potential occupant because of the supposedly frivolous nature of her profession. Instead, the apartment went to a Mr. Walter Chrysler Jr., the heir to the automobile empire of the same name. A few months after he had moved in, the contents were auctioned, including the art collection Allene and Anson had built up together.

Annejet van Der Zijl's Books