The Richest Woman in America (36 page)

The small party of family and friends, including Matthew’s sisters and brother, but lacking Sylvia’s brother Ned, scarcely filled the front rows of the church. A flock of reporters and curious townsfolk crammed the rear. The organ rumbled, heads turned, and, escorted by Howland Pell, the bride appeared. Sylvie, thirty-eight, tall and stout, wearing a brown dress and huge white feather boa, and a large white hat and veil, made her way down the aisle. The mustachioed groom, fifty-seven, in a dark vested suit, stood at the altar with his best man and the priest. After Reverend Sturges said the appropriate words and pronounced the couple man and wife, the stodgy pair marched off to the carriages and rode to the Morristown Inn.

A wedding brunch welcomed the two dozen guests. The menu, printed in French, included filet de boeuf and pigeons grille, and champagne from Moët et Chandon. After the toasts the couple posed
for pictures on the porch of the hotel: the balding Matty stood stiffly between his bride and her mother; a frowning Hetty, formidable in a black silk gown covered with white lace, was seated on his right, while Sylvie, smiling slightly, bespectacled, and clutching a big bouquet, sat on his left.

The following day the official announcement appeared:

“Wilks-Green On Tuesday, February 23 at St. Paul’s Church, Morristown N.J. by the Reverend Sturges, D.D., Sylvia Howland, daughter of the late Edward H. and Hetty Robinson Green, to Matthew Astor Wilks.”

Mrs. Green, said the
New York Times
, “seemed in excellent spirits.” After so many tries and disappointments, Sylvie had married an acceptable man. Asked if she approved of the marriage, Hetty replied, “I am happy if my daughter is happy.”

H
etty Green wasn’t happy. The daughter she had glued to her side for so many years had finally come unstuck. The marriage that marked the start of a new life for Sylvie marked the start of the end for Hetty. Her health declined; her spirits dropped; her drive decreased. She bit her lip and did the best she could.

When Sylvie and Matty came back from their honeymoon to live in his house on Madison Avenue, Hetty took a room close by. She stayed first at the Plaza, then around the corner from the couple, at the St. Regis. But as much as she yearned to be near her daughter, hotel life felt wrong. She returned with her dog to Hoboken, glad to be back with her friends. She still commuted by ferry to Wall Street, and still made loans at favorable rates. At the end of the year she was lending New York much of the money it needed at below the market cost. And she was generous to Annie Leary: in March 1910 it was reported she was donating half a million dollars to help her build an art school on Fifth Avenue near the Metropolitan Museum. When asked, Annie Leary’s lawyer revealed that an anonymous donor had given the land. But neither woman divulged any news. What’s more, rumors spread that all was not well, that Hetty was ill.

Come to New York, she wrote to her son. She needed his help. Ned, dubbed a Texas Colonel by the new Democratic governor, arrived in his private railroad car. “I just dropped everything in Texas, when mother wrote for me to come and relieve her of some of her financial cares,” he told reporters at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Denying
stories she had been seriously ill, he said she had just been out for a ride in his automobile.

In truth, wistful over the loss of her husband, alienated by the distance of her son, alone after the marriage of her daughter, and, most recently, despondent over the death of her beloved dog, Hetty was weighed down with grief. Nonetheless, as Ned had promised, she was on the mend. By summer 1910 she was off to Bellows Falls, spending the days at Tucker House and the nights at the home of her friend Mrs. Herbert Bancroft. In August she was out and about in Newport, shuttling between the houses of her daughter and Annie Leary.

She seemed to have regained her full strength. And the
Times
declared a few months later that Hetty Green had given the lowest-rate loan in many months on a mortgage in New York City. She offered the money to the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola—the place, the paper neglected to mention, where Annie Leary went to pray. But Hetty was executing far fewer deals than before. Although no one may have been surprised at news the following spring concerning the sale of some land in Chicago for five times what she had paid, the story came with a twist. “Million for Hetty Green,” the headline said. The arrangement had been made, not by Hetty, but by her son. “Colonel Green is now in complete control of all his mother’s vast interests,” said one of the men involved in the sale.

Ned left behind his new Wright Brothers flying machine and brought his secretary, Walter Marshall, his parrot, Toper, and his Pierce Arrow car up from Texas. He moved with his girlfriend, Mabel, to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and kept her away from Hetty. He managed the deals for his mother, negotiating the loans in real estate, collecting the interest on her holdings, seeking opportunities to buy and sell. And while he did all that, she handed out a
list of “Don’ts”:

      
F
or years Hetty boasted her healthy habits would help her live to be eighty-five. Now, at seventy-seven, her heart was weak and a hernia she had had for years was making her wince. She wrapped herself in anonymity, put on a faded old dress, and went to see a doctor. He advised the impoverished woman that an immediate operation was needed; she shuddered when he told her the cost. “You’re all alike. You’re just a bunch of robbers,” she said. Instead, she took the stick she had used for years to press against the swelling and put it back inside her underwear to keep it in place. Some weeks later at a party at Annie Leary’s, the same physician noticed the elegant woman in the fine-looking dress.

The pain had diminished but the threat of mortality increased. She asked Ned to send for their lawyer in Texas, and in her son’s elaborate suite at the Waldorf, she and Mr. Ogden spent several days drawing up her will. Aside from a few thousand dollars she left as “tokens of esteem”—to Amory Lawrence, a banker friend from Boston; Mrs. Herbert Bancroft, her friend from Bellows Falls; Miss Ruth Lawrence, a longtime friend in New York; and Matthew Astor Wilks, her son-in-law, who had relinquished rights to his wife’s estate—Hetty left all her money, jewelry, property, paintings, and personal effects to her children, including a ten-year trust for Sylvia. The trust fund would be overseen by her son, the income would go to her daughter, and after ten years they would divide the principal.

The $5 million trust included bonds in the Main Line Houston and Texas Central Railroad, the Great Northern Railroad, and New York City, and a mortgage on property at 572 Fifth Avenue. True to herself,
she left no money to charity; her children would do that in years to come. Worried the public might learn the details, she insisted on signing the papers in Hoboken. She put on a proper dress, fixed her hair, filled a bowl with sugar cookies, and invited her friends James Smith, the neighborhood butcher, and his brother Michael, the city treasurer, to serve as witnesses in her flat.

Stories of Hetty changed from tales of financial hell-raising to snippets of fashion tastemaking. When an acquaintance, Mrs. George Kemp, held a hat-trimming contest for a children’s charity, Hetty snubbed her nose at the fussy styles. “I like simple hats for children,” she said. “I wouldn’t like to send children out into the streets with all those filigree things on them.”

Still, she was
not averse to something pretty. When Mrs. Kemp showed her some pearls being sold for a raffle, Hetty took a second look at the fakes. “I must have those pearls, although it would not do for me to wear anything imitation,” she confessed. After a moment thinking it over, she said: “But they are going so cheap. Please hand me the raffle book. I will take two chances.”

In an interview with a female reporter, she talked about her clothes: “This hat,” she pointed out, “isn’t in style. I’ve worn it for nearly ten years and it’s going to do ten more years’ service. I’m too old a lady to care about clothes. You know,” she said, explaining her priorities, “when it comes to spending your life, there have to be some things neglected. If you try to do too much, you can never get anywhere. As I was naturally made for work, I just as naturally wasn’t made for a fashion plate. I have never bothered about what to wear.” But, she confessed, “I like to see what other people are wearing. It does me good sometimes and gives me a laugh.”

She dismissed the notion of fashion but had a sentimental need to keep the effects of her youth. She stored them in
a wooden loft on Broad Street: like so many of her holdings, run-down and neglected, she left the building unimproved to avoid paying property taxes. Up the rickety flights of stairs she climbed with Walter Marshall to the sixth floor. In a dirty, dusty, airless room she kept locked, she showed her secretary the remembrances of her past: the white muslin dress and pink sash she had worn to the ball for the Prince of Wales; dancing shoes, ballet programs, opera tickets, jewelry, and photographs
of herself as a girl, all tucked away. “People said I was good looking then,” Hetty recalled as she riffled through the boxes.

An old sleigh with a buffalo robe thrown inside sat on one side of the room. “That sleigh was my father’s,” she explained. “I used to ride with him behind a black horse that beat anything on hoofs in New Bedford. Black Hawk Robinson’s daughter was the envy of all the other girls in town.” She found a daguerreotype of her father that displayed his sharp eyes and determined jaw. Her face turned pale. “He was murdered, Marshall,” she said as she lowered her voice. “As sure as you were born. With poison. He told me so on his deathbed. And so was my Aunt Sylvia. It was all part of a conspiracy to get their money and cheat me out of it. They intended to kill me, too, but I fooled ’em.”

Her fear of being killed was heightened by the real death threats and blackmail notes she received in the mail. An attempted murder of Russell Sage years before, the assassination of President McKinley, and an attempt to assassinate Teddy Roosevelt increased her fears. Scary incidents, her son said, kept her up at night and drove her to live under assumed names. True or imagined, she claimed she found ground glass in her coffee when she was living on Pierrepont Street; that burglars had tried to enter a house she had rented in Hempstead; that strangers were following her in New Bedford; that a fallen brick from a building in downtown New York had been deliberately dropped on her; that her dog had been poisoned; that a train she was on had been sabotaged.

She was even suspicious of the call for women to vote; she had no use for the suffragists. The president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association announced the
presidential Cabinet of her dreams: Jane Addams as secretary of state and Hetty Green as treasurer. Said Hetty, without explanation: “I don’t believe in suffrage, and I haven’t any respect for women who dabble in such trash.” Later, Ned told the
Dallas Times Herald
that although he approved of women’s suffrage, he was wary of making it universal: “If our wives and sisters and mothers vote we can easily trust them with the ballot,” he said. But big cities, like Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York, populated with “foreign and unintelligent women,” as well as “occupants of the underworld,” made the situation untenable. “There must ultimately be someone there to control this class of people.” However,
he added, “in cities the size of Dallas, and in all rural sections of the nation, woman suffrage would be safe.”