An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(52)
In July 1963, Newport’s court of law pronounced its final verdict. All of the Tews’ claims were refused, and the legacy, which for the most part was made up of shares in American companies and by then had a total value of almost $24 million, could finally be allocated. “Now I am really rich,” Paul said to a family member when he returned to Paris after the verdict.
The bulk of Allene’s wealth was divided into three parts, according to her final will, each to be put into a trust fund. The proceeds from the first fund went to Paul, and those of the second, to Kitty. The third fund was given in its entirety to the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey on the condition that it be used to set up a department named after Anson Wood Burchard.
Allene’s impressive jewelry collection went to a range of friends and female family members. Aside from this, she left dozens of bequests to friends, staff, and other people who, for whatever reason, had a special place in her heart. Her secretary, Alice Brown, who had followed her around the world like a faithful shadow for more than twenty-five years, received the sum of $50,000, which was more than enough for her to go and live off her private means in the Virgin Islands.
Shortly after the verdict, Paul sold the house on the Rue Barbet-de-Jouy. He and his nephew George moved to an apartment in the elegant and discreet Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. Two years later he officially adopted his nephew as a son, making George the heir to both his title and his personal possessions.
Later, another nephew would write that, despite severe diabetes and asthma, Paul remained a proud man right up to the end of his life, “standing upright whatever the circumstances”—just as he’d learned in the Page Corps. Attempts to lure the czar’s former guard into revealing details about his past came to nothing. “I have secrets and they’ll go with me to my grave,” he said.
Paul took his secrets to his grave in September 1966, after he’d been fatally injured in a traffic accident near the northern Italian city of Vercelli while on his way to the Adriatic coast. He was buried next to his mother and his sister in the English cemetery in Nice, a few hundred meters from the place where Allene had been laid to rest in 1955. It was thus a matter of “lying apart together”—in fact, just as they had done during their almost-twenty-year marriage.
Heiner, who inherited the proceeds of his designated trust fund after Paul’s death, as Allene’s will dictated, never became the man his stepmother had tried to make of him. In the days following her death, he sealed off the top floor of Castel Mare, closed all the windows, and shut himself up in his room on the ground floor. There he lived like a hermit, only going out to stock up on coffee and perfume—possibly a reaction to his traumatic war experiences in Berlin—visiting from time to time Morocco’s gay capital, Marrakesh. Each year, he had a bouquet of pink and white carnations laid on Allene’s grave to mark the anniversary of her death. Heiner died in 1993, seventy-seven years old and practically blind from his heavy smoking. He left Castel Mare to the daughter of his by-then-deceased sister, Marlisa.
And then, decades after Allene’s death, it became clear just how clear minded she had been on the day she’d signed her will in Roosevelt Hospital. The trust fund that had gone to Heiner after Paul’s death could not be left to his niece, just as Paul had not been able to bequeath his to his “Gogo.” Instead, it went to the family of the only family member Allene apparently hadn’t felt was after her money: Charlotte Rosewater, Seth’s, or “Burchard’s,” older sister.
Charlotte was a young lady after Allene’s own heart: she had studied chemistry, and she was independent and incredibly enterprising. In 1937, in her early thirties at the time and visiting Allene, she had fallen head over heels in love with a British man, who, just like Allene’s son, had fought as a pilot in the First World War. The couple had married in Allene’s house and moved back to England after a few years, and there Charlotte’s husband had played an important role in the British army’s information network.
Later, their daughter Anne would still remember vividly her mother and Allene reuniting in the Ritz Hotel in London directly after the war. At the time just ten years old, she formed her own impressions of this American auntie who had initiated the tea party. “I found her slightly intimidating and rather awe-inspiring: she told my mother I was very weedy, and I was terribly insulted.”
Anne could hardly have guessed back then that the formidable old lady would bequeath her parents $200,000. And neither could she have guessed that she and her family—after Kitty’s death in 1977 and again in 1993, after Heiner’s death—would be buried under a waterfall of dollars from the two trust funds that had turned out to be destined for them.
Allene, unpredictable and strong willed to the end, had left her fortune to somebody for whom money really had no importance when they met: a little girl who was deeply offended because she’d been called “weedy.”
EPILOGUE
The Blue Room II
Spring 1955
How to die? Well, the same way a person has lived. And in Allene’s case, this meant in style. However difficult that may have been in a drafty, awkward house with lots of stairs. However turbulent it may have been as the sea lost more and more of its summery friendliness and charm with the advance of fall. The shutters of the neighboring houses had closed up one after the other—the winter visitors preferring to tuck themselves away in the comfortable villas and hotels higher in the hills and not down there, right on the seafront, exposed to all the elements.