After almost 15 years of marriage, he met a hotel guest, the German-American Hedwig Leythen (1889–1967),[2][3][4][5] called Hedda, at a New Year's Eve party in the Hotel Adlon, left his wife and children, and in 1922 he married her.
[6] Tilly moved with her daughter, Elisabeth, then two years old, to southern Germany, while the other children, Susanne (mother of Percy Adlon), Lorenz, and the twins Carl and Louis (Jr.), were sent to boarding school and later all four emigrated to North America.
[7] Adlon was a supporting actor and bit player in Hollywood from the late 1930s.
He became a war correspondent for International News Service in May 1945, sent by his wife's sister's lover, William Randolph Hearst, to a ruined Berlin and saw the ruins of his parents' home and a burnt-out Hotel Adlon.
His first article is about personal loss, the destroyed city of his youth and the death of his father.