The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (33 page)

But the tale was not complete. It turned out that Wingender had initiated the affair by telephoning the newspaper and asking how much her story might be worth. She was promised fifteen hundred marks for telling her tale and for confronting and making a personal identification of the claimant. The Grand Duke of Hesse’s role in the episode became more visible. Information collected by Detective Knopf was making its way to Darmstadt before it reached the newspaper. “It is now known that the detective was hired by Darmstadt and not by the
Nachtausgabe
,” said Grand Duke Andrew. The Duke of Leuchtenberg, where Mrs. Tschaikovsky was staying at that time, heard from the writer of the newspaper series that the Grand Duke of Hesse had paid the paper twenty-five thousand marks for its “research” into the Anastasia affair. This allegation, printed in a different Berlin paper, led to libel suits. Meanwhile, Doris Wingender’s confrontation with her mother’s “lodger” took place. Mrs. Tschaikovsky,
faced with charges of assuming a false identity, had no choice. According to the writer for the Berlin
Nachtausgabe
, who was present with Martin Knopf, this was what happened:

To add corroboration, Franziska Schanzkowska’s brother Felix came a few weeks later to identify the claimant. They met in a Bavarian beer garden. As soon as he saw her, Felix declared, “That is my sister Franziska.” Mrs. Tschaikovsky walked over and began to talk to him. That night, Felix was handed an affidavit identifying the claimant “beyond any doubt” as his sister. He refused to sign. “No, I won’t do it,” he said. “She isn’t my sister.” Eleven years later, in 1938, the claimant had a final confrontation with the Schanzkowski family. A decree from the Nazi regime in Berlin summoned her to a room where four Schanzkowskis, two brothers and two sisters, were waiting. She walked back and forth while the Schanzkowskis stared at her and spoke in low voices. Finally, one brother announced, “No, this lady looks too different.” The meeting seemed at an end when suddenly Gertrude Schanzkowska hammered her fists on the table and shouted, “You are my sister! You are my sister! I know it! You must recognize me!” The policemen present stared at Mrs. Tschaikovsky, and, calmly, she stared back. “What am I supposed to say?” she asked. The two brothers and the other sister were embarrassed and tried to quiet Gertrude, who shouted louder, “Admit it! Admit it!” A few minutes later, everyone went home.

As the 1920s came to a close, the personal confrontations were mostly over. Both sides were exhausted. Prince Waldemar of Denmark, the brother of the Dowager Empress Marie, who, despite his sister’s disapproval, had been paying Mrs. Tschaikovsky’s hospital and sanatorium bills, was obliged by family pressure to stop. The Danish ambassador to Germany, Herlauf Zahle, the claimant’s staunchest official supporter in Berlin, was commanded by his government to terminate his activity on her behalf. “I have done my utmost so that my [Danish] royal family may be blameless in the eyes of history,” Zahle said bitterly. “If the Russian Imperial family wishes one of its members to die in the gutter, there is nothing I can do.”

With Zahle’s support withdrawn, the claimant was offered refuge by Duke George of Leuchtenberg, a distant member of the Romanov family and the owner of Castle Seeon in Upper Bavaria. The duke adopted a middle ground: “I can’t tell if she is a daughter of the tsar or not. But so long as I have the feeling that a person who belongs to my tight circle of society needs my help, I have a duty to give it.” The duke’s wife, Duchess Olga, had no such sentiments. For eleven months, she quarreled with their guest over the food, the servants, the linen, the tea service, and the flower arrangements. “Who does she think she is?” the duchess demanded. “I am the daughter of your emperor” came the imperious reply. The Leuchtenberg family divided: the eldest daughter, Natalie, passionately championed the claimant’s authenticity; the son Dimitri and his wife, Catherine, were adamantly hostile. Floating up and down the halls, an English governess, Faith Lavington, saw “the Sick Lady” every day and admired her “purest and best English accent.” Miss Lavington had an opinion: “I feel certain it is she.”

When Princess Xenia offered Mrs. Tschaikovsky rest and quiet at her Long Island estate, she accepted. Six months later, this new hostess and her guest were quarreling and the pianist Sergei Rachmaninov arranged for the claimant to live in a comfortable hotel suite in Garden City, Long Island. Here, to avoid the press, she registered as Mrs. Anderson; later, she added the first name Anna, and no more was
heard of Mrs. Tschaikovsky. Early in 1929, she moved in with Annie B. Jennings, a wealthy Park Avenue spinster eager to have a daughter of the tsar under her roof. For eighteen months, the onetime Fräulein Unbekannt was the toast of New York society, a fixture at dinner parties, luncheons, tea dances, and the opera. Then the pattern of destructive behavior reasserted itself. She complained about her room and the food. She developed tantrums. She attacked the servants with sticks and ran back and forth naked on the roof. She threw things out the window. She stood in the aisle of a department store and told a crowd how badly Miss Jennings was treating her. Finally, Judge Peter Schmuck of the New York Supreme Court signed an order, and two men broke down her locked door and carried her off to a mental hospital. She remained in the Four Winds Sanatorium in Katonah, New York, for over a year.

While Anna Anderson was in America, the possibility arose of a hidden tsarist fortune in the Bank of England.

The claimant’s trip to America had been, primarily, the idea of Gleb Botkin, a younger son of the doctor murdered with the Imperial family. Working on Long Island as a writer and illustrator, Gleb had been asked to write articles for newspapers about the tsar’s youngest daughter, whom he had known as a child. Princess Xenia read these articles and invited the woman who might be her cousin to stay with her at Oyster Bay. While the claimant was with Xenia, Gleb became her primary adviser and visited frequently. By then, Gleb and his older sister Tatiana, who had met the claimant in Europe, were convinced that she was the grand duchess. Already a skillful artist as a boy, Gleb had drawn caricatures of animals, mostly pigs, wearing elaborately detailed Russian court dress that had delighted the young grand duchesses, especially Anastasia. When he first visited the claimant at Castle Seeon, her question before receiving him was “Ask him if he has brought his funny animals.” He had, and when she looked at them, apparently remembering, she laughed nostalgically. Thereafter, believing absolutely in her identity, Gleb had urged the claimant to turn her back on the hostile family in Europe and cross the Atlantic.

In America, Gleb hurled himself into her cause. When the Romanov Declaration was published, he volleyed back with a stinging letter to Grand Duchess Xenia, the older of Anastasia’s two Romanov aunts:

Gleb’s letter was the final stroke in the permanent alienation of the Romanovs. Grand Duke Andrew was dismayed. “All is lost,” he wrote to Gleb’s sister Tatiana. “Does he realize what he has done? He has completely ruined everything.” “Grand Duke Andrew also remarked that the case was beginning to take on the aspect of an intrigue for the tsar’s fortune,” Tatiana Botkin wrote. “This profoundly disgusted the grand duke and he did not further wish to involve his name in it.”

In truth, Gleb Botkin had become concerned about money—the claimant’s money, he believed—and had hired a lawyer to help her obtain it. Rumors existed of a Romanov inheritance, of millions of rubles of tsarist gold deposited in the Bank of England. In July 1928, while the claimant was a guest at Oyster Bay, Botkin asked an American lawyer, Edward Fallows, to investigate the matter. Fallows agreed, obtained the claimant’s power of attorney, and commenced a search which consumed the remaining twelve years of his life. He began by having his client sign a statement declaring that, in Ekaterinburg shortly before the murders, Tsar Nicholas II had told his four daughters that before the war he had deposited 5 million rubles in the Bank
of England for each of them. Next, in order to pay his own fees and provide other sums required in the case, Fallows formed a Delaware corporation under the acronym Grandanor, for “Grand Duchess Anastasia Nicholaevna of Russia.” Miss Jennings’s wealthy friends were invited to invest. Thus equipped, Fallows went off to London to tackle the Bank of England.
^*

The bank responded that it could not reveal information having to do with private deposits, including whether or not such deposits existed. First, said the bank, Mr. Fallows should go to the Court of Chancery and obtain an order that his client was indeed Grand Duchess Anastasia. Fallows went back and forth to and from Europe, spending the sums supplied by Miss Jennings and brought in by Grandanor, then working without fees, cashing in his insurance; selling his stocks, his bonds, and his house; moving his family to rented rooms. In the end, said his daughter, his efforts “killed him.”

Controversy over the Romanov fortune in English banks continued after Fallows’s death in 1940. In 1955, Mme. Lili Dehn, who had been one of Empress Alexandra’s closest friends, declared under oath that, after the Imperial family had been arrested at Tsarskoe Selo and was expecting to be sent to England, the empress said to her, “At least we shan’t have to beg, for we have a fortune in the Bank of England.” This fortune has never been located. There is evidence that, during the First World War, Nicholas II brought home whatever private money he and his wife had in British banks and used it to help pay for hospitals and hospital trains. A number of aristocratic and wealthy Russian families, following the tsar’s example, did the same.

After the revolution, Nicholas II’s mother and two sisters lived on what they could earn from the sale of their jewelry and on the
charity of their Danish and English relatives. Anna Anderson’s supporters argued that the money Nicholas II set aside for his four daughters—to be used, perhaps, as dowries—would not have been brought back to Russia or distributed to aunts or a grandmother. This hope that money for the daughters still might be in safekeeping was diminished in 1960, when Sir Edward Peacock, a director of the Bank of England between 1920 and 1946, declared, “I am pretty sure there never was any money of the Imperial family of Russia in the Bank of England, nor in any other bank in England. Of course, it is difficult to say ‘never,’ but I am positive at least there never was any money after World War I and during my long years as director of the bank.”

Even today, British bankers are accustomed to being disbelieved on this subject. John Orbell, archivist of Baring Brothers, a private London bank which held deposits of the Imperial Russian government after the revolution, is wearily polite when questioned about Romanov family money.
^*
“People keep asking,” he says. “They will not take no for an answer. It’s frustrating. Listen, if there had been family money here, the fact would have come out long ago. There would have been a piece of paper, a bank statement, something. Some little clerk would have found it and stepped out and made his fortune by telling the newspapers. But nothing has ever turned up.”