The Richest Woman in America (29 page)

S
omething remarkable happened to Hetty Green. She became more sociable, her wardrobe became more stylish, and her words became more subdued. In February 1896 she appeared in court wearing a new silk dress, a fur-trimmed wrap, and a jaunty bonnet. “She looked many years younger for her finery and did not interrupt the proceedings once,” reported the
New York Sun
. “She was as sedate as possible.”

Perhaps it was the influence of her son. A larger-than-life figure in Texas, Ned thought and acted on a grand scale. Taking the advice of his mother, he soon became involved in local politics and won favors and influence for the Texas Midland Railroad. When he announced to Bill McDonald, an influential black man in the Republican Party, that he wanted to be a delegate to the convention, his friend advised him it would “take 75” to pay off the man he replaced. Ned handed him a check for $7,500. “
I only need $75,” said the startled McDonald.

An opportunity arose in 1896 to become state chairman of the Republican Party, and Ned leaped at the chance. But he needed his mother’s help to gain the party leaders’ support. With McKinley in the White House and Mark Hanna pulling the strings, the newly revamped Hetty traveled to Washington to lobby for her son. The richest woman in the country worked to win them over. Her words and money had an effect. Ned led the Texans at the Republican convention and told reporters his party would throw their electoral votes to the president.

In Washington an astonished hotel owner exclaimed at how much Hetty had changed. “Her whole nature has been revolutionized,” he said. “I never knew anybody to loosen up as Mrs. Green has of late.” Eight months earlier she had been in the city on her own for a lawsuit. “When she came here, she haggled with me over the price of one of the cheapest rooms in the house,” he recalled. This time, “she had on the finest sort of a dress, such a one as nobody had ever seen her wear, and this time my house was not good enough for her.”

Instead, she went with Ned to the Shoreham, the most expensive hotel in town, and never asked the rate. Nonetheless, she could never resist a negotiation. When Ned’s pet canary escaped from the room, she offered a five-dollar reward for its return. To her delight, a newsboy brought back the bird in a wooden cage. Hetty offered the freckle-faced boy one dollar for his efforts; reminding her of her pledge, he shook his head and refused. After futile attempts at bargaining, Hetty bestowed the five dollars and the boy handed over the bird.

      
H
etty returned to Brooklyn, took a sun-filled, five-room suite at the St. George Hotel, rented a separate suite for Sylvie, and, at her daughter’s urging, invited Edward to move in upstairs. After years of shuttling between them, Sylvie was pushing Hetty to reconcile with her husband. Hetty agreed to have Edward nearby, but she still maintained her independence.

While she went off to work, Edward, often confined to his chambers with gout, spent much of his time reading his books and smoking cigars. And although he took his meals upstairs, Hetty preferred the dining room, which was adorned with her favorite pineapple plants. Despite her previous cries for privacy,
after dinner she held court, amusing the ladies in the lobby. Dressed in plain black while the others wore pale, frilly frocks, she looked, said the writer Beatrice Fairfax, who was staying at the hotel, “like a very dark chocolate drop in a box of pastel-tinted candy.”

When she wasn’t gossiping about society, which she loved to do, she griped about the lawyer Joseph Choate. The year before, she claimed, one of Choate’s assistants had thrown Sylvie against the door of a safe and left her an invalid. It may have been more a case
of shattered nerves, but Hetty often presented her daughter as weak and frail, an unacknowledged reminder of her own mother and aunt. As a result of the lawyer’s aggression, Hetty said, she was nursing her daughter as well as her husband, who suffered from a number of ailments. She admitted she enjoyed the role and noted that she helped other guests as well. Wherever she stayed, children with colds, neighbors with fevers, and the infirm elderly testified to her skills. “I never had a greater pleasure than seeing them get well under my care,” she declared.

Her calm demeanor came in handy when a train she was on derailed. The surgeons who came for the wounded needed help and she was quick to volunteer. She borrowed the gloves of an engineer and held a passenger’s leg while the doctors performed an amputation. Afterward the physicians praised her coolness. “The secret of good nursing is common sense,” she said, “just as common sense is the secret of making money. Common sense I believe is the most valuable possession any one can have.”

Ensconced in a chair in the hotel foyer, her Scotch terrier nestled in her arms, she was asked by Beatrice Fairfax why she loved the dog so much. She narrowed her eyes and replied: “He doesn’t know how rich I am.” Her money served as a constant source of conversation, as popular a subject at farmhouse tables as it was in formal boardrooms. Estimates were made that she had increased her wealth to somewhere between $40 million and $50 million. But her riches came at a price: the energy she spent on her work left little time for amusements. “I’m too busy to go to theaters or mingle in society. When I get home I am too tired as a rule to do anything but rest,” she told a friend. “
We are all slaves,” observed Jay Gould, “and the man who has one million dollars is the greatest slave of all, except it be he who has two million.”

Hetty may have been a slave to money, but she was determined to master her daughter’s fate. The time had come, she said, for Sylvie to “come in closer contact with New York society.” Even Hetty socialized more. She traveled to Newport as a guest of Annie Leary, and one evening accepted an invitation to a musical performance. Women in white décolleté dresses chatted in groups around the flower-filled room while Hetty stayed in the rear. She admired the bouquets of tuberoses on the tables and the banks of flowers along the far walls.
She enjoyed the music, took pleasure in the atmosphere, and wished that Sylvie were there.

In New York, she dined with friends and discussed her philosophy with George A. Plimpton, a well-regarded member of New York society. She quoted her favorite poem, “My Symphony,” by William Henry Channing: “To live content with small means; To seek elegance rather than luxury, And refinement rather than fashion; To be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich.” Plimpton, treasurer of the board of Columbia University, urged her to use her wealth to support a new college for women. Hetty responded with a challenge.

On letterhead from the Chemical National Bank, under the name “Wm. J. Quinlan jr. Cashier,” dated July 1, 1896, Plimpton wrote: “I will give Barnard College twenty thousand dollars on condition that the treasurer Geo. A. Plimpton raises twenty thousand dollars additional by August 1st 1896.” Under the note was written, “To be signed by Hetty Green.” On August 1, the college received a gift of $20,000 from a donor in North East Harbor, Maine. Hetty’s match is not recorded. A few years later Plimpton wrote her another note.
“I am coming down to ask you for a lot of money for Barnard College. I hope you and Miss Green are well this summer, a pleasant visit from your boy. Sincerely Yours.”
Once again, her gift is unrecorded.

Hetty criticized her friend Annie Leary for her charitable ways: “She gives so much away needlessly and uselessly too, I tell her.” Annie provided two suits of wool underwear to every man released from the Tombs city jail. “And she pays four dollars a suit!” Hetty exclaimed. “They only pawn the suits as soon as they get them. And goodness knows what they do with the money they get.”

Her son was one of the few people who could convince his mother to give money away, either to him personally or for public purposes. He asked for her support for a group of physicians in New York, and Hetty not only loaned them funds, she helped find patients for their pediatric practice. It was reported that she donated $100,000 worth of lakeshore land in Chicago on which to build a home for aging and infirm actresses, an institution whose mission accorded with Ned’s interests. And with the 1896 presidential campaign under way, Hetty contributed $100,000 to the Fusion Party in Texas.

Under Ned’s direction as state chairman, the party, which combined
Republicans, Populists, and National Democrats, worked to defeat William Jennings Bryan. The Democratic candidate supported the silver movement and favored a federal income tax. Bryan made Hetty Green a target: “She owns property estimated at $60 million and enjoys an income scarcely less than three million dollars,” he railed in a speech. “This woman, under your indirect system of taxation, does not pay as much toward the support of the federal government as a laboring man whose income of $500 is spent upon his family.” Hetty would pay anything to defeat him.

As eager as she was for McKinley to win, her support came at a price: she wanted something for Ned in return. “Green is said to be reasonably sure that he will be made a foreign Minister of some sort, or get something that will do to hand down to future generations of the Green family,” said the
New York Times
. He may not have been made a foreign minister, but Ned had the privilege of riding a white horse at McKinley’s inauguration. Soon after, Hetty took the train again to Washington to request the president’s help. Ned was given full control of federal patronage in Texas.

Toward the end of March, Hetty traveled to Chicago with her bachelor son. In the Great Northern Hotel the skylighted lobby buzzed with financial talk, but some of the chatter spilled over to an ongoing trial. The city’s headlines screeched about the actions of Adolph Luetgert: the butcher had poisoned his wife, ground up her body, and turned her into sausage. Meeting at the hotel with her real estate agent, Frank Chandler, Hetty ruminated on marriage: “I believe when persons get married it’s for life,” she said. “There wouldn’t be any wives made into sausage if people were a little careful about whom they married.”

She had great concern about the marriage of her children, keeping Ned to his pledge not to marry for twenty years, and wishing, at the same time, that Sylvie would find the right spouse. Young people needed a place to meet their future mates, she said to Chandler. “That’s where society comes in. Lots of folderol and foolishness, but it’s a pretty good thing. Not for me, understand. Too many people depending on me.”

“But it’s nice,” she acknowledged, “especially at Newport. All flowers and music and a lot of nice girls like Sylvie and young men like
Ned. That’s what it’s for, you know.… How are they going to know what kind of life partner they are getting if they don’t go out to these things and look each other over? If people were better acquainted with each other before they married, there wouldn’t be so many divorces.” Her daughter, she said, went to lots of parties and dinners in Newport. “I think she ought to,” Hetty noted. “All young people ought to. That’s where they find out who they ought to marry.” A few days later, she returned to Brooklyn hoping to help her daughter find a mate.

She held Thanksgiving dinner in her apartment at the St. George Hotel with a reception afterward for friends: Annie Leary, her sister, and her niece Anna; Ruth Lawrence and her niece Ruth; and Miss Justine Cutting, whose father, Bayard Cutting, was a major investor in railroads and real estate. At other times
Hetty arranged dinner parties or card games and invited Sylvie’s friends, like Philip and Juliet Livingston, and eligible bachelors like James Gerard. Hetty may have been pursuing Gerard for Sylvie, but the lawyer, who came from a prominent family, had no interest in pursuing her daughter. Nonetheless, at the end of an evening of cards, Hetty presented him with a gift. When he reminded her he had not won, she dismissed his protests. “Never mind, I bought it for you,” she said, and handed him a silver calendar. With that, he recalled, she brought out supper, “with all the delicacies of the season and a bottle of vintage champagne.”

Once again under Annie Leary’s patronage, Sylvie was launched. She was seen with the social set at the horse shows at Madison Square Garden, at the opera, at private dinners, and chaperoned by a relative, Mrs. Howland Pell, at the Knickerbocker Bowling Club, where, it was noted, Sylvie scored well. Her confidence increased, her wardrobe refreshed, hosted by Annie Leary or Amy Pell, she summered in Newport, coming into contact once again with New York’s leading bachelors. Her mother approved.

To establish herself on her own, Sylvie moved away from Hetty to the Park Avenue Hotel in Manhattan. While she enjoyed her distance from Brooklyn, the third-largest city in the United States was mourning its loss of independence. The merger of Brooklyn with New York, the Bronx, Staten Island, and Queens in 1898 made Greater New York, with a combined population of 3.5 million residents, the largest city in America, second only to London in the world. Many Brooklynites
saw it as their darkest hour, but most New Yorkers marked it as the start of a brilliant era. “The sun will rise this morning on the greatest experiment in municipal government that the world has ever known,” declared the
Tribune
on January 1, 1898.