From early 1929 Anderson lived with Annie Burr Jennings, a wealthy Park Avenue spinster happy to host someone she supposed to be a daughter of the Tsar. For eighteen months, Anderson was the toast of New York City society. Then a pattern of self-destructive behavior began that culminated in her throwing tantrums, killing her pet parakeet, and on one occasion running around naked on the roof. On 24 July 1930, Judge Peter Schmuck of the New York Supreme Court signed an order committing her to a mental hospital. Before she could be taken away, Anderson locked herself in her room, and the door was broken in with an axe. She was forcibly taken to the Four Winds Sanatorium in Westchester County, New York, where she remained for slightly over a year. In August 1931, Anderson returned to Germany accompanied by a private nurse in a locked cabin on the liner "Deutschland". Jennings paid for the voyage, the stay at the Westchester sanatorium, and an additional six months' care in the psychiatric wing of a nursing home at Ilten near Hanover. On arrival at Ilten, Anderson was assessed as sane, but as the room was prepaid, and she had nowhere else to go, she stayed on in a suite in the sanatorium grounds.