She always believed her father and aunt had been murdered and worried that the executors were determined to do her harm as well. She stated in an affidavit that Edward Mott Robinson told her on his deathbed that he had been poisoned; he warned her to be careful and take precautions to protect herself. In the affidavit she included testimony from an elderly woman who had cared for her father. The former servant claimed that just before Edward Robinson took ill, some of his food had been fed to a dog: soon after, the animal died in agony. Hetty was wary of what she ate.
She was certain her aunt’s death, two weeks after her father’s, had also been planned. “I do believe that they were put out of the way by people who wanted to take control of the property and cheat me out of it,” she said. Her suspicions were not without support. Her lawyer, William Slayton, told the New York Tribune in 1895: “It is common talk to this day among the older citizens of New Bedford that her will was juggled with. It was just as much a surprise to New Bedford people when they heard that Miss Howland had left half of her estate to an unknown doctor and lawyer,” he said, “as it would have been for New York City people to find after Hetty Green’s death that she had bequeathed half her estate to Tammany Hall.”
The court assigned a referee, Henry Anderson, to oversee the examination of the accounts. Asked if she would attend the hearings, many of which took place in 1895, Hetty replied that she “never missed a session.” Nor did she miss a chance to make a comment. She arrived one morning at the Mills Building, a huge structure across from the Stock Exchange, where Collis Huntington and other railroad moguls retained their offices, and entered the book-lined rooms of the referee. In her dark dress and dainty bonnet, she walked over to Henry Barling, the trustee. As reporters watched, she slapped him on the back, extended a friendly hand, and said, “How d’you do, Mr. Barling?” But a few minutes later, she changed her tone.
Questions arose about the late executor Abner Davis, who had been declared incompetent while serving as a trustee. Hetty once told him of her concerns about a conspiracy. “If you are not careful,” he snapped, “you will be taken out of the house, feet foremost, just as your father was.” Shortly afterward, Davis’s doctors ordered him to a sanitarium, though he remained a paid trustee. As they sat in the referee’s offices, his colleague Barling was asked to describe it: “An institution for repose—repose of mind and body,” he said. Hetty drew a different picture: “An insane asylum for gibbering idiots, you mean.” When Barling said he had been there, Hetty broke out in a loud laugh. The referee begged her to be quiet. It wasn’t the first time he made such a request.
Later, in the hall, with her daughter Sylvie by her side as usual, Hetty told the waiting reporters her opinion of the referee. “He didn’t do much sleeping today,” she jibed, promising to keep things lively with her new lawyer. Before she hired this forceful advocate, she noted, the hearing was so calm the referee could hardly stay awake. She spoke in the rough style she had picked up as a girl on the docks: “On one day he slept nineteen times, snored fourteen, and struck his nose on the desk three times. He wants me to stop talking, and I want him to stop snoring. He makes his noise with his nose, and I make mine with my mouth. It’s nearly the same, ain’t it?”
At a session when her lawyer was questioning Barling’s counselor, Hetty interrupted. “No use lying,” she snapped at the distinguished Joseph Choate.
The referee admonished her. “Now, Mrs. Green, I do not like to speak to a lady of your age in this way,” he said.
“Oh,” she answered, “you needn’t mind me. I know I am in my second childhood, but you can’t muzzle—”
“Mrs. Green!” the referee cried out in disgust. “You must not talk. I will keep order, and you have lawyers to talk for you.”
But Hetty was right; she couldn’t be muzzled. When Barling’s attorney stated he “always tried to be accommodating,” she called out again: “Oh, no one thinks so, but you.”
On another occasion when her new lawyer, Charles Ogden, who had represented her against Collis Huntington, arrived from Texas, he began his presentation by saying, “This is not a small estate.” Hetty quickly jumped in. “But it is getting smaller,” she quipped, winking at the reporters.
Henry Barling’s reluctance to cooperate tested the patience of Hetty’s attorneys. When Ogden questioned him about the past, he repeated over and over again that he could not remember. Finally Ogden gave up: “I very much regret that I cannot remain with you in the case to its conclusion,” he wrote to Hetty, “both because our relations have been so exceedingly pleasant, and because the facts already disclose a most shameful state of affairs in the administration of the estate, facts which, if made known to any honest jury, will invoke the most severe condemnation of every one connected with the administration of the estate or in any manner responsible for it.”
Ogden was one of several counsels so frustrated they resigned from the case. But Hetty never quit. In the summer of 1895, in the office of the referee, a three-month adjournment was called. Hetty walked over to the window, and to the amusement of her daughter and the astonishment of the reporters, she fell to her knees, folded her hands, raised her eyes to heaven, and moved her lips in silent prayer. Minutes later, she stood up, brushed off her dress, took Sylvie’s arm, and marched out.
A few days afterward, a reporter asked her what she was going to do for the summer. “I am going to get together all the religious persons I can,” she said in a solemn voice, “and go to some quiet place, where we can all pray that my litigations with Mr. Barling may be ended within the next twenty years.” In fact, she spent the summer in Bellows Falls, where she was interviewed in her garden, and Barling died one year later. Hetty took some credit for the event. “I’m a Quaker,” she noted afterward. “In just a year after my prayers, that executor was found stone dead in his bed.”
If lawsuits were her road to justice, lawyers were bumps along the way. Hetty saw them as obstructions that took up too much time and cost too much. More than once she found herself up against them in court, where they sued her for refusing to pay their fees. She often repeated one of her favorite riddles: “Why is a lawyer like a man who is restless in bed? Because both lie first on one side and then on the other.”
Hetty expressed her venom to a reporter from the Brooklyn Eagle who visited her in a suite at the St. George Hotel. She greeted him in a dress of black brocaded silk with puffed black velvet sleeves, a plain wedding band on her left hand. Although she was often described as “a dowdy old creature,” the writer declared she was “comfortably stout,” with gray hair “stylishly curled.” She looked like “a woman of quiet and refined tastes,” he said.
During the interview Hetty proved “a voluble, intelligent, agreeable conversationalist.” Other reporters agreed. On a visit to Fall River, Massachusetts, when she was featured in a story in the local paper, she sent the writer a thank-you. Years later, working for a major paper in New York, the same reporter met her at the Chemical Bank. He had come on assignment to interview someone else, but when he saw Hetty he turned his attention to her. He may have lost the scheduled interview, he said, but he was glad for the “extremely delightful chat I had with that brilliant and kind hearted woman.”
Those who spent time with her admired her intelligence and industry. Yet stories persisted that she was miserable and malevolent, heartless and cruel. Instead of giving away her money lavishly like Annie Leary, she handed it out meagerly, providing jobs, not welfare, avoiding the publicity that led to more requests. “I believe in discreet charity,” she said. “I wish I could show you the begging letters I receive.” James Gerard, one of her lawyers, later explained: “Because she devoted her surplus income, and it was large, to the development of the country rather than to frivolous expenditures, [she] attracted the constant attention of the Press.” C. W. de Lyon Nichols, an Episcopal chaplain who knew her, said, “Hetty Green has in secret done a vast deal more of philanthropy than the public can give her credit for.”
What she wore, where she lived, how she did or did not spend her money were all fuel for the anti-Hetty fire. “I have been maligned, abused, and laughed at in the papers until nothing can injure me now,” she said. Her reported habits of stuffing her clothes with newspapers to ward off the cold, of chewing onions and spewing bad breath, of cooking her pot of oatmeal on the office heater, of hiding in dingy rooms consumed the press, whether the reports were valid or not. Her penny-pinching ways left those who hoped to bask in the warmth of her wealth shivering in the chill of her thrift. If such a well-heeled woman did not live lavishly, why was she rich? Instead of providing the public with glamorous dreams, she offered them shadowy nightmares.
“Sensationalist newspapers made her notorious as a cranky, miserly old woman who hoarded her millions,” wrote the Eagle. Disreputable publishers made her angry, but nothing goaded her more than lawyers. “Just because I dress plainly and do not spend a fortune on my gowns, they say I am cranky or insane,” she complained. Her face hardened, her lips pursed at the thought. “All this is the fault of these lawyers,” she groused. For thirty years, she said, she had been trying to get the lawyers to give her justice, “and I am as far off now as ever. I have gone over the books myself and I am pretty fair at accounts. I could make nothing of them.” She added a note about the trustee’s well-known attorney: “If I could save Choate’s soul, I would earn my crown.”
While Hetty was trying to save the soul of Joseph Choate, he was trying to save the marriage of Alva Vanderbilt. Although he advised Alva against her proceedings, after twenty years of marital misery, in March 1895 she officially ended her alliance with William K. Vanderbilt. “Divorces are a bad thing,” declared Hetty Green.
As difficult as her own marriage may have been, she never discussed divorce. Indeed, as she and Edward grew older, they spent more of their time together. During the winters they sometimes lived in her quarters, and in summers they stayed with their daughter in Bellows Falls. Whether they dwelled high on the hill overlooking the mills and the river in their own Tucker House or took rooms in a local hotel, the Greens were a familiar sight: Sylvie out on the tree-lined streets of the town; Edward drinking and smoking with pals on the porch; Hetty striding the few blocks to town to purchase a sack of flour.
She was known by all for her frugal habits, her earthy tongue, and her impatience with snobs. When an English visitor crossed her farmland and was chased by a cow, he knocked at the door to protest. Hetty made no response. “Madam, do you know who I am?” he demanded. “I’m the Honorable Vivian Westleigh, of London.” Hetty looked at him with her piercing eyes and replied, “Go tell that to the cow.”
But as little time as she had for the snooty, she had plenty of patience with family and friends. When Edward suffered inflammation in his joints, Hetty took on the role of nurse, rubbing his sore spots with a mix of raw eggs and shells, vinegar, and alcohol, a remedy that sometimes seemed to work. But as hard as she may have massaged, as much care as she may have given, she could not rub away reality: their days together were coming to an end.
Chapter 17
A New Hetty
Something 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.
Hetty 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 wh
ile 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.
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