The Richest Woman in America (22 page)

The heat of New York City in July 1888 hardly compared with the sizzling atmosphere of the hearings. Wearing a black dress and a battered hat, Hetty faced the younger man: Did he know his father was writing to her? she demanded. Did he know his father had said that none of her money would be used in anything, and yet Mr. Green was using it all the time? Why did he send someone to follow her in Bellows Falls? she wanted to know. Her nostrils flaring, her eyes burning, she hurled out her suspicions: “Did you think I had a tendency to heart disease, and you would put me out of the way and get all the money?” she asked. “
She went for him like a tigress and nothing could hold her back,” one observer said.

Although she lost the case and was forced to pay all costs, Hetty took pleasure facing her enemies in court. When Cisco denied any knowledge of her claims, she defended herself: “I come of good old Quaker blood. All I care for is to do right. Then I am sure to go to heaven,” she said. The judge’s decision may have gone against her, but the court was her meetinghouse, and she had been heard by the High and Mighty.

A few weeks after she initiated the lawsuit, the Reading Railroad, which had suffered severe losses, announced a reorganization plan. Satisfied that the idea would succeed, Hetty agreed to support it. In February 1887 she marched into the offices of Brown Brothers and handed over a satchel filled with a million dollars’ worth of stock certificates; in line with the plan, she would exchange her old shares for the new. Would there be any costs for the transfer? she asked. Yes, she was told, the transfer charges from New York to Philadelphia would be $100. “A hundred dollars!” she screeched. “Why, I can go to Philadelphia and return for four dollars.” The bankers neither denied her claim nor offered to lower the cost. Dismayed, Hetty picked up her securities, stuffed them back in her bag, rushed to the Grand Central Station, and bought a ticket for the next train to Philadelphia.

When word of her dealings reached the Stock Exchange, the Wall Street men were taken aback. What surprised them was not that Hetty took the train to save the money; rather, it was that she had secretly acquired far more shares of Reading than anyone knew. She was a rare
woman who could hold her tongue, they said, and they sheepishly had to admit she managed her business far better than most men.

Hetty accepted reorganization of the Reading Railroad, but she refused to go along with such a scheme for the Houston and Texas Central Railroad. When Collis Huntington, still in control, offered to exchange existing bonds of the defaulting railroad for new bonds yielding 2 percent less, some bondholders resigned themselves to the plan. But Huntington had hurt Hetty once in 1885 when he stopped paying dividends on the railroad’s bonds, causing the price to plunge; two years later she would not let him get away with it again. With her large holding of first mortgage bonds, she could take control of the railroad if it went into total bankruptcy.

The “Queen of Wall Street,” as Hetty was called by the
Times
and other papers, opposed the Central Railroad reorganization. When Huntington said that he did not care whether or not she went along and that he would proceed as planned, the paper scoffed at him. “Other big men have talked in just this way about Mrs. Green in times past, but somehow she usually contrives to come out ahead whenever the fighting notion strikes her.” Indeed, after almost a year of hard negotiation, Huntington caved in to Hetty’s demands and she agreed to the reorganization. But Huntington stuck like a thorn in her side. Several years later, she would outbid him to take control of part of the railroad.

      
H
etty’s life extended well beyond her New York City office. Besides visits to Vermont and Massachusetts, in the summer of 1887 she and her son resided in Hempstead, New York, and later, in the autumn, the
Chicago Daily Tribune
reported that they were living in Chicago. She was working out of her agent’s office on Dearborn Street and sometimes arrived as early as 7 a.m. to oversee her properties, such as the Howland block. Known as the Honore and erected after the Great Fire, the block was a massive stone building that housed the Real Estate Exchange. Hetty had loaned its well-known owner, H. H. Honore, $250,000 some years before, but when he became overextended and was unable to make his payments, she took the property back. A local broker told the
Tribune
he’d like to own it now and could sell it for three times the price.

Hetty also held a $250,000 mortgage on the Major Block, a large office building that housed the National Weather Service. Her properties included, along with an aggregate of mortgages worth around $3 million, the Gower Block, the Reed Block, and other block-long buildings downtown that became a significant part of the Loop. Whenever interest on a loan could not be met, Hetty claimed the property.

In early 1888, when the managers of her father’s trust insisted on selling 650 acres in nearby Cicero, Hetty was furious. She believed the land was worth far more and saw no reason to sell it. She filed suit and the matter was brought to court. When the case was heard, Hetty sent Ned to represent her in Chicago. But Judge Collins, who was in charge of hearing the case, refused to stop the transaction, and the acreage was sold to the Grant Locomotive Works. Hetty vowed revenge.

Few knew exactly how much money Hetty really had or what exactly she invested in. “No broker or operator who is not very new at the business ever attempts to get the better of Mrs. Green,” said one observer. “Her methods are so quiet and straightforward that she mystifies the very elect among railroad men.” So secretive was she that for a while they did not even know where she lived. In January 1888 the
Brooklyn Eagle
discovered the peripatetic woman was residing in its own backyard, and had been living there for several months. Her companions were her daughter and her Newfoundland dog, which had recently produced a litter of pups. Her son Ned was still in Chicago, her husband still in New York; on Sundays, Edward visited his wife and daughter in Brooklyn.

Hetty’s choice of Brooklyn was not as surprising as it sounded. The third-largest city in the nation, Brooklyn offered a gentle alternative to Manhattan’s hullabaloo. It was “as quiet as New York is bewildering and noisy,” wrote Fredrika Bremer years before. “On Broadway,” she said, one finds “endless tumult and stir, crowds and bustle … and the most detestable fumes poison the air.” New York, she wrote, is “the last place on earth I would live. But thank Heaven! I know Brooklyn!”

The Brooklyn Bridge, the longest bridge in the world, gave easy access to Manhattan. Completed in 1883, its span of steel cables suspended across the East River competed with the continuous ferries that
rushed back and forth on the water. At a penny a ride, six hundred passengers crammed each steamer for the five-minute trip, and seventy-five thousand people commuted on the floating platforms every day. With its leafy streets and numerous churches, Brooklyn, independent until 1898, provided a civilized place for wage earners and Wall Street bankers alike; “
a kind of sleeping place for New York,” wrote Charles Dickens.

Although she lived in Brooklyn Heights, a neighborhood of elegant Gothic Revival houses with expansive views over the East River, Hetty was seeking neither sophistication nor luxury. “She has a modest room in a comfortable boarding house on Pierrepont Street, and lives in a quiet, unpretentious manner,” said the
Brooklyn Eagle
. Indeed, few she passed going up and down the steep front steps of her brownstone or walked by on her way to Wall Street knew who she was. Not more than half a dozen people in the neighborhood, and “not one in a hundred who brush by her on the ferry” each day, recognized the famous lady, said the
Eagle
. “This shrewd operator” and “keen financier” is a “well preserved looking woman, with a rather pleasant face, and dresses very plainly,” the paper reported. At fifty-four, on her morning walk along the cobblestone streets to the ferry, Hetty looked like an ordinary woman doing ordinary chores.

It came as a surprise to Alice Bonta, the owner of the boardinghouse, when a well-known millionaire came to call. Mary Garrett, whose friends included several Quaker women, was a shrewd businesswoman and heiress from Baltimore who had served as her father’s assistant when he was head of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. She had inherited several million dollars from his estate, and, with the proviso that women be allowed to enroll as students, donated some of the money to help create the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Together with the president of the university, Mary Garrett was on a national campaign to raise funds for the medical school. Now she was calling on Hetty Green in Brooklyn.

The following evening the two visitors hosted a dinner in Hetty’s honor. To the surprise of the boardinghouse owner, Hetty emerged from her room dressed in an elegant evening gown and exquisite jewels. Her gift to the university may not have been made public, but when Mrs. Bonta realized that the hardworking lady living in her
house was the rich and famous Hetty Green, she made her tenant’s presence known to all.

Hetty and Sylvie spent three months in Hempstead in the summer of 1887; the following year they stayed at the Ocean Hotel in Far Rockaway. When Hetty returned to the city, she faced a long-dreaded situation. Limping across the busy thoroughfare of Ninth Avenue, Ned was struck by a fast-moving cart. Dragged to the ground and pinned down by the boy driver and his St. Bernard dog, Ned suffered further damage to his leg.

Soon after, at the Union Club, where he was celebrating the Fourth of July with his father, he hurried to the window to watch the festivities, twisted his leg, and fell down some stairs. The young man was carried to a room and confined to the club until Edward’s doctor arrived. The distinguished physician Charles McBurney examined the leg and saw the onset of gangrene; he declared he had no choice but to amputate, ending all hopes for a recovery. The operation at Roosevelt Hospital severed Ned’s leg above the knee. But it did not stop Ned from living a life as rich and full as those of his parents: he was as robust and outgoing as his father, as shrewd and astute as his mother, and most important, as self-reliant as they all wished him to be.

Ned’s recuperation took place in Bellows Falls, where he and his father and sister spent several weeks that summer. Happy to be back in the bucolic countryside where she could roam freely and ride her horse, Sylvie invited some friends to the Towns Hotel for a party. Dressed in a gray crepe dress, she entertained some of the young people she had known at school and took a fancy to one of the males in her class. When a friend accused him of being facetious, Sylvie showed surprise. “Never with me,” she replied, indicating that he fancied her too. But the romance never went far and Sylvie soon returned to her mother.

Hetty never stayed in one place very long. In October 1887 she was discovered by the
Chicago Herald
, which announced she had been in the city for several weeks, her son at her side. Countering reports that she was thin, angular, and poorly dressed, “she is a big, plump woman,” the paper declared, “and her togs are first class.” She declined to stay in hotels, and instead paid rent to reside with her business
agent, who lived on the South Side. She left his house at dawn to ride the streetcar and arrived downtown early in the day. After spending time at her desk one morning, at nine o’clock she left to go down the street and encountered a broker, who assumed that, like the stream of workers filing into their offices, Hetty was on her way to work. Certain of a coup, he told her about a mortgage he could arrange. But Hetty harrumphed. “That was offered to me at seven o’clock this morning,” she snapped, “and I refused it.” With that she shrugged him off and marched away.

Hetty had brought Ned along to train him in real estate investing. The best way to understand what a mortgage was really worth, she believed, was through hands-on experience. She wanted him to know the cost of a building and what it involved, not just from a financial aspect, but in terms of materials and labor. She assigned him work on a warehouse she was building. “I bought a pair of overalls for him, gave him a brush and a keg of white lead, and hired a man to teach him to paint,” she told a friend.

Unfortunately, it was at the time of the anarchists’ riots in Chicago. When one of the laborers saw Ned, he accused him of taking the bread out of the workingman’s mouth; what’s more, he threatened to throw him into Lake Michigan. Hetty was protective of her son, but she also sympathized with the poor and understood their rage. “I reasoned with the man and showed him that Ned was not getting any money for his work; that the job had already been let out by contract, and that the painters would get all there was in it,” she explained. As a result, she said, “he went away satisfied.” And Ned, she said, “got along fine with the anarchists.”

Years later, when the trolley workers went on strike in Brooklyn, Hetty took the side of the workers. “The poor have no chance in this country,” she said. “No wonder Anarchists and Socialists are so numerous. The longer we live, the more discontented we all get, and no wonder, too. Some blame the rich, but all the rich are not to blame.”

Hetty was determined to educate her children on the value of money. Her approach was similar to that of the
modern billionaire Alice Walton, the third-wealthiest woman in the world. “One of the great responsibilities that I have is to manage my assets wisely, so that
they create value,” says the heiress to the Walmart fortune. “I know the price of lettuce. You need to understand price and value. You buy the best lettuce you can at the best price you can.”

Intent on teaching her children to be clever investors, from time to time Hetty brought them to the Chemical Bank in New York or asked them to join her in meetings elsewhere. Sylvie trudged along, wearing a faded frock and a sad expression. Investing sparked no interest in the girl; if anything, it made her more eager to be with her school friends in Bellows Falls than with the moneymen on Wall Street. For Ned, however, the downtown adventures served as a fantasy peek into the world of finance: “I sometimes thought that it would be nice if mother made me president of the Chemical Bank of New York,” he confessed. But he had only “a vague idea concerning the future.” He dabbled on Broadway, investing in plays, and dabbled with showgirls, playing at night. Hetty took control of things: worried that her son would fall for a pretty young thing who would quickly consume his fortune, she extracted a promise from Ned that he would not marry for twenty years. What’s more, she made him swear he would never speculate on Wall Street.