New Yorkers in Exile

[BullNBear52]

The Death of a Countess in Exile

By VIVIAN YEE


They knew her as the slender, straight-backed woman with an independent streak and a head for numbers. She told them she had immigrated from Hungary, and her colleagues at Merrill Lynch did not pry with more questions.

What most of them did not know was that their colleague, the quiet market analyst with the Italian name and the Hungarian accent, had been born a countess and grew up in a castle. They had no idea that Ilona DeVito, as they knew her, had had little formal education before arriving on Wall Street, or that she and her family had fled to New York with no more than few small suitcases to escape the Romanian Communist government.

The death of Ilona DeVito di Porriasa last week, at 73, went largely unnoticed beyond her family and friends. But if nothing else, her story, as recounted by surviving relatives, peels back the hard shell of the city, proving, perhaps, that even the most anonymous apartment dweller can be a countess in exile.

Born in 1939 in a Transylvanian Baroque-style castle given to her parents as a wedding present by her grandmother, Countess Ilona Teleki de Szek spent the first years of her life surrounded by nannies, maids and cooks. Her mother was a baroness, her father a count who served as Transylvania’s representative to Hungary; one of his cousins, Pal Teleki served as prime minister of Hungary on two occasions and was said to have been responsible for the passage of a number of anti-Semitic measures.

Pal Teleki was said to have fatally shot himself when Hitler’s troops crossed the Hungarian border heading to Yugoslavia; the Hungarian Army joined in the invasion. Winston Churchill called Teleki’s suicide “a sacrifice to absolve himself and his people from guilt in the German attack on Yugoslavia.”

Ilona’s daughter, Elisa DeVito, said this week that her mother had not expressed embarrassment about her relative’s place in Hungarian history, believing, as other members of her family had, that he had not been anti-Semitic and might not have committed suicide.

But the family was vulnerable in the waning months of World War II, when the Soviets took control of Hungary and Romania, to which Transylvania then belonged.

As recounted by Ilona’s daughter this week, the government imprisoned Ilona’s father, whom she would not see for another 20 years, seized the Telekis’ properties and eventually pushed her, her siblings and her mother out of their castle. (It is now a clinic and botanical garden.)

The Telekis moved into a converted stable with no running water. The baroness took in laundry and sewing; Ilona worked in a shoe factory, her brother Paul on a farm. Ilona wore shoes made out of her grandfather’s old bedroom slippers, and her older sister’s dresses were made of old curtains.

At one point, Ilona lived with her grandparents in a library her family had founded. It was so overrun by rats, she would later recall to her daughter, that they would sling wooden planks over the bookshelves at night to sleep.

As anti-Hungarian sentiment rose in Romania, the government repeatedly pulled the Teleki children out of school and opened the family’s mail.

Count Teleki finally escaped and sought asylum in the United States. His family joined him in 1964 after the count had bribed the Romanian authorities to allow them to leave.

Ilona spoke no English, but she took a series of jobs — first at a hosiery factory in the Bronx, eventually as a teletypist at a financial firm.

And though her father continued to advocate for Hungarian people across Central Europe, she rarely mentioned her past.

“She didn’t really want people to know, because people think of nobility as having something, and my mother really had nothing when she came here,” her daughter said.

Once on Wall Street, she showed enough aptitude that despite having no college degree, she was promoted to market analyst, studying trends and making investment recommendations. She joined Merrill’s securities research department in the early 1970s and stayed until retiring in 2005, developing a reputation for quick calculations and prescient recommendations — as well as a certain reserve.

“She worked very hard at it, and she didn’t suffer fools,” said Robert Farrell, one of her managers. “She had no trouble disagreeing about what was going to happen or voicing her own opinion.”

But she never acknowledged her background to most colleagues until they read her mother’s obituary in the 1990s. Some did not find out until her death.

“In all the time I talked to her every day, we talked about Hungary and everything, but she never said a word about her being royalty,” said Tom Webster, a Merrill Lynch broker.

In 1975, she married Lino DeVito di Porriasa, who came from an Italian noble family.

Mr. DeVito died in 2008, a few months after his wife learned she had breast cancer. Even while ill, she loved to follow the stock market, even making a profit after the 2008 financial crisis, her brother said.

She died on April 15.

Elisa DeVito remembered hearing stories from her grandmother about the family’s past and lavish lifestyle. But her mother usually dismissed such talk, saying, “That’s ancient history. We never need to talk about that anymore.”

As her cancer metastasized, however, the former countess changed her mind. To her daughter’s surprise, she asked to have her title engraved on her gravestone.

“The last few years,” Ms. DeVito said, “she started to remember good things, not just bad things — where she came from, and what she became.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/nyregion/in-new-york-the-death-of-a-countess-in-exile.html?pagewanted=print