An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(53)
At first, Allene stubbornly tried to patch up the pieces of her old life. “If one has the will and persistence, one CAN do things.” Early in the morning, she went downstairs and woke up her stepson in order to go through the stock prices in the morning papers. She had manicures and pedicures every week so that she stayed, in Heiner’s words, “the most elegant in the world,” despite the ravages the illness was perpetrating on her insides. She drank pink champagne. And sometimes, on good days, she had herself carried in a wicker deck chair up from the terrace to the boulevard for a trip to Monaco, where she’d entertain herself by gambling and playing card games in a private dining room.
At the same time, she made arrangements for things like her own funeral. She wanted to be buried between her two parents in the English part of La Caucade, with its magnificent view of the sea and, already in those years, the continuous taking off and landing of airplanes. Her grave monument was to be of white marble, with space left open for plants and flowers. Her name would be carved on it: “Countess Allene de Kotzebue, born Tew,” with the date of birth she had invented for herself—1876—underneath, and the year of her death. And at the foot of her tomb, the following words would be chiseled: “Widow of Anson Wood Burchard.”
For this was something Allene had always known herself: her first two husbands had married her mainly for her looks and the last two mainly for her money; the middle husband was the only one who had genuinely loved her for herself.
The year 1955 dawned. In Eastern Europe, preparations were in full swing for the Warsaw Pact, a counterpart to NATO. In the French colonies of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, violent uprisings against the colonial governments broke out. The United States had launched its first nuclear submarine. In èze, a village close to Cap d’Ail, filming was wrapping up on Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief. The lead roles were played by Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, who a year later would become another American princess, in Monaco.
But Allene cared less and less about such things. Her universe was shrinking to the blue boudoir on the first floor of Castel Mare, where she spent her days in her blue silk bed, drowsing in a haze of morphine and champagne. From time to time, though not very often, she managed to write a letter, usually to offer some final maternal advice to one of her protégés. “Take life as easy as you can,” she wrote to Bernhard in January, “health is the best of all gifts.” But when he was in the area in early April and wanted to visit her, he wasn’t granted access to her sickbed. Allene felt that her humiliation was great enough already.
Outside was a foreign country—foreign in terms of its language and smells, foreign, too, in the rugged, rocky landscape so different from the gentle rolling hills of her youth. Outside was the raging sea, and in the hearth, in which a fire was kept burning day and night, the flames danced as they once had in her grandfather’s smithy in Jamestown.
Yet Allene did not die. Perhaps after such a long and eventful life, she needed that whole long winter to think everything over. Perhaps it was the morphine, which Louis Moinson administered in ever larger quantities, that broke open the locks on the closets where she had stowed away her past, causing the memories to come tumbling out.
On the nightstand next to her bed, the photos piled up—Greta in her wedding dress, Teddy in his uniform, herself as a young girl with her cousin, looking into the photographer’s lens with her usual impertinence.
Or perhaps Allene had simply resolved to make it through to the spring.
The end came on Sunday, May 1, at half past six in the morning. Outside, the mimosa was blossoming, and down below, the white prows of the first wooden speedboats plowed through the blue, now quieted Mediterranean Sea. Young, beautiful people had fun together in Riva motorboats, unaware of their own mortality, of the shutters closed up there above the rocks or the struggle that was taking place behind them.
That morning, all the women who had once been inside Allene, like matryoshka nesting dolls from Paul’s Russian childhood, died, too. The ambitious blond girl from the tough pioneering town and the young mother practicing endlessly with her children on the horse-jumping course beside a large log cabin on the Ohio River, the independent businesswoman from New York’s high society, Anson’s happy spouse on Long Island, and the American princess with her sad past. And, after that, the countess with the Russian name who became a godmother to royalty and crafted her own form of happiness.
Allene’s very last car ride was along the Route du Littoral—the road that snakes along the Mediterranean between Monaco and Nice, often called the most beautiful in the world. Only a few minutes after her body had been carried out and started on its final journey, the doors of the Blue Room were locked—to remain so for forty years.
It wasn’t until 1993, when Heiner Reuss died in the self-enforced solitude he’d preferred in life, that keys grated in the lock once more and strange voices sounded throughout the room. The shutters that had rusted were forced open, and for the first time in years, sunlight fell upon Allene’s final décor: her clothes, her dressing table at the corner window, the figurines of monkeys and dogs she’d liked to surround herself with, the photos next to the bed, and the bed itself, the blue fabric still covered in bloodstains, witnesses of her final illness. A side table, its top a tiled picture of Suisnes. Letters. Chairs covered in silk that was so rotten it pulverized at the touch. The small Hermes typewriter.