The American Nobody Who Became a European Princess: Allene Tew

In May 1955, a document arrived at the Newport Probate Court that the clerks would remember for the rest of their careers. It valued the estate of a woman named Allene Tew at $20,113,000 — the largest will ever filed in that court at the time — and it set off a small war among the living. Six cousins from a furniture-manufacturing town in western New York filed claims contesting the document, certain that so much money could not possibly be meant to leave the family. They were wrong about that. The primary beneficiary was a German prince none of the six had ever met, not related to Allene by a single drop of blood, who had come into her life only because she had once been briefly married to his father before divorcing him. By the time she died at a villa on the French Riviera, Allene Tew had accumulated five surnames the way other women accumulated jewelry. She had buried four husbands and three of her four children. She had been a Pittsburgh bitters wife, a New York divorcée, the widow of a General Electric titan, a German princess, and a Russian countess — and she had outlived nearly everyone who could have told the story of how she did it. In this documentary, we explore the life of Allene Tew — the bank cashier's daughter from Jamestown, New York, who married a Pittsburgh bitters heir at 18, buried him at 30, married a New York socialite and divorced him inside seven years, married a vice-chairman of General Electric who left her one of the richest women in America, married a German prince and became Princess Reuss, divorced him, married a Russian count, outlived both her surviving children, purchased Mrs. Astor's Beechwood in Newport in 1940, stood as godmother to a future Queen of the Netherlands, and left her Newport estate to a stepson she had inherited along with her fourth marriage. ------------------- Gain FREE access to secret full-length documentaries on wealthy families "too scandalous for YouTube" by joining our newsletter: https://www.substack.com/@oldmoneyallure ------------------- We open in Jamestown, New York, in the 1870s — the livery stable on West Third Street, the rented house on Pine Street, the three-story Tew Mansion at 413 North Main with the Mansard roofline and third-floor ballroom, and a child who could see exactly what money looked like in her own town and never had any of it. We meet Charles Henry Tew, cashier and assistant at the City National Bank of Jamestown — a bank founded by his own uncle — and Janet Smith Tew, the mother whose father had run the livery business that fixed the family's exact rung on the town ladder. We trace Allene's Jamestown education — the presentability curriculum, the horses she loved because she had watched other people ride them, and the beauty that a provincial 1880s town interpreted as a career. We follow the 1891 elopement with Tod Hostetter — the Pittsburgh bitters heir whose family had built one of the great post-Civil War patent-medicine fortunes — and the marriage that pulled a 19-year-old bank cashier's daughter into one of the most closed social circuits in America. We reconstruct the 1902 death of Tod Hostetter, the widow at 30 with two surviving children, and the Hostetter trust maneuver that stripped her out of the family fortune and delivered the whole of the estate into the hands of the Pittsburgh cousins who had never accepted her. We follow her to New York — the brief second marriage to Morton Nichols, the 1912 divorce, and the long apprenticeship in the machinery of trusts, wills, and settlements that had first been used against her and would eventually work in her favor. We trace the 1912 London wedding to Anson Wood Burchard, vice-chairman of General Electric — the Park Avenue apartment, the Paris residence, and the fortune that made Allene Tew one of the richest women in America on her own account. We reconstruct the two great losses of 1917 and 1918 — her daughter Verna and her son Teddy both dead within a single week, the Spanish flu and the First World War taking her surviving children before she was 50 — and the household emptied of everyone she had once been raising the money for. We follow Burchard's 1927 death, the lunch he never came home from, the widowed inheritance, and the marriage that made her Princess Allene Reuss — the German prince with no kingdom, the child stepson Heinrich II Reuss she brought back to America and treated as her own, and the stepdaughter Marie Luise who refused her every warmth. We trace the 1935 divorce from Prince Reuss, the 1936 marriage to Count Pavel Kotzebue — the Russian count of Baltic-German descent whose family had served the Romanovs before 1917 — and the Geneva circle of exiled aristocrats and diminished American fortunes she moved through in the interwar years.