The Richest Woman in America (30 page)

The amalgamation had special significance for Hetty. It meant that residents of all the boroughs would be subject to New York personal property tax. Hetty made a dash across the Hudson River to Hoboken and never looked back. But business was business. In June of that year, when New York needed funds, she loaned the city $1 million at 2 percent interest on a four-month bond. “Two percent is considered a low rate,” said the
Times
. “Three and a half percent are usually obtained by the city’s bondholders.” She kept the city tax men off her back, and the city benefited from her favorable rates.

Fine accommodations, friendly people, and an easy ferry ride to Wall Street made Hoboken a pleasant place for her to live. She chatted with neighbors and looked after them when they were ill, helped out local businessmen and sometimes loaned them money, made friends with children, and gave them piggy banks on their birthdays. Wherever she was, children held the highest place in her heart. She was seen one summer day in Bellows Falls on her way to buy her daily provisions: walking snappily down the street, she stopped to kiss a baby, gave advice to a mother about her sick child, and chatted with a group of curious youngsters who formed a circle around her.

Aside from her travels, her routine was as regular as the opening and closing of the Stock Exchange. The sky still dark, she awoke in her Hoboken flat, scarfed down her breakfast, and scurried to the boat slip two blocks away. Joining the throng of workers on the ferry, she debarked at Fourteenth Street and clambered aboard the crowded streetcar clanging its way downtown. At City Hall, hordes of men—merchants in derbies, clerks in caps, financiers in top hats—crammed the cavernous, narrow streets. Hetty brushed past the men, stepping away from the horse dung, steering clear of the carriages, her hem sweeping up the dust on the sidewalk as she strode the few blocks to the Chemical Bank on Broadway.

With a nod to the gentlemen tellers in their three-piece vested suits, she moved past the brass rails, slipped into the small office she used for storage, changed from her faded dress into another one she
sometimes used at work, and walked out into the long, narrow counting room. Beyond the rows of starched collared clerks, near the window at the rear, she smoothed her long skirts, sat down at her rolltop desk, and began her business.

Four times a day the letter carrier brought stacks of mail to the bank. Hetty slid her knife across the envelopes, read the letters, scanned the tabloids and broadsheets, sifted through piles of papers, checked the mounds of coupons to clip, tracked her lawsuits, decided which railroads, real estate, and bonds to buy or sell, and oversaw the scores of payments on loans and mortgages to collect. As much as she relished all that, she reveled in conversations with the officers of the bank and the frock-coated men who came to call. Some days she bundled herself up, took her bunch of keys, and went off to check on her properties or visit investor friends like Russell Sage or Chauncey Depew or Clarence Kelsey. Her eyes bright, her cheeks rosy, she bent her square head toward them, asked their opinions, and learned the news of the street. It was an opportunity she recognized as rare.

“
A woman hasn’t as many chances for making money as men have,” she told the
Woman’s Home Companion
. “She isn’t around or among men, as a rule, and she doesn’t hear of the opportunities for investment which are talked of day by day, in Wall Street and other financial centers.” Her years with her father had given her the confidence to confront this world. “
Most women are afraid to venture into the regions where man reigns supreme,” she said, calling it “foolish timidity.” If a woman conducted herself properly, and looked out for herself, she believed, she could get along well. “I am able to manage my affairs better than any man could manage them, and what man has done, women do. It is the duty of every woman, I believe, to learn to take care of her own business affairs.”

Her single-minded resolve helped her make her fortune. But it also made her a target of the press. “
She has reduced money-making to a fine art and let avarice replace some of women’s highest attributes,” said one paper. “This seems severe language in speaking of a woman, but Mrs. Green has usurped the place of men and does not seek the privileges of her sex.”

True, she did not speak coyly, or flutter a fan flirtatiously, or pretend to be innocent to win help. Instead, she used her intelligence to
increase her wealth, her independence to live as she wished, and her strength to battle anyone who stood in her way. From her personal friends to the French lace maker to her father’s lawyers, anyone who knew her knew how intense she was and how hard she worked. As for her appearance, the clothes she owned were of good quality, but, she explained, “If a thoroughbred were harnessed to an omnibus for forty years, it would begin to look like an ordinary hack. Taking care of a fortune,” she said with a smile, was “something like omnibus work.”

For as many years as she toiled at making money, she brought to it the passion of a woman for her lover. And at the end of another long day, she parted from the bank leaving behind the feel of crisp new bills, the sound of bonds being clipped, and her concerns over finance. “Business never disturbs me after business hours,” she said. “I never worry about things. I do the best I can every day as I go along.”

She strode to City Hall, climbed onto the streetcar that took her to the dock slip, and boarded the boat back to Hoboken. She loved the fresh air and the sail, and sometimes she even ferried on Sundays to attend the Quaker service on Fifteenth Street. Sitting silently on a bench in the spare meetinghouse of the Friends, she could contemplate the fate of her enemies and consider the future of her daughter and son.

A
s much as Hetty was mocked, her son was admired. “Texans say there is no more popular man in the Lone Star State than Edward H. R. Green, son of Mrs. Hetty Green,” wrote the
New York Times
. In August 1899, he joined Republicans from around the country convening in New York. Reporters waited near his suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, eager to catch a word. He was said to be spending money liberally in hopes of winning the governor’s chair; from there he would try for a turn at the U.S. Senate. His popularity and his wealth afforded him a good chance to fulfill his political aspirations. “He is said to have $1,000 a month from his mother for pocket money and he spends it,” said the
Dallas Morning Times
. But his mother soon put an end to his dream. He couldn’t run for politics and run a railroad, she said.

His mother restrained him from marriage too, but she could not prevent him from pursuing romance. Soon after he moved to Texas, his former girlfriend Mabel Harlow, deemed a chorus girl by some, a call girl by others, arrived from Chicago. Ned made arrangements for her to live in an apartment in Terrell, but, at his neighbors’ urging, he soon moved her to Dallas. The booming town, with electric streetcars, a six-story skyscraper, and a population of thirty thousand, was the largest city in the state and big enough for Mabel. At the Grand Windsor Hotel, a favorite of railroad men, his red-haired flame kept the rooms clean and her man happy. To Hetty’s disdain, she was the love of Ned’s life. Children adored her; Hetty called her “Miss Harlot.”

With his usual aura of showmanship, Ned caused a sensation, driving the first horseless carriage in Texas from Terrell, where he still maintained his headquarters, to Dallas, where he established his home. At the sight of the automobile, the
Dallas Morning News
reported, cotton pickers abandoned their sacks and flew to the fences, pigs raced the machine, and horses reared on their hind legs. Ned sped along at the fast clip of fifteen miles an hour, his straw hat tilted back, his mustache bristling in the breeze; but a sudden jolt from a farm wagon pushed the car off the road and threw it into a gulley: the two-hour trip took five hours. By the time he arrived in Dallas, dusty but triumphant, the word was out: “Nothing that has passed along the streets of Dallas since the parade of the Kaliphs has attracted greater attention,” said the
Morning News
. When a friend told Hetty he heard she had let her son buy a car, she replied, “Yes, it’s cheaper than a wife.”

      
W
hile Ned dallied with Mabel, Sylvie still longed for a man. Despite her mother’s prayers, no one seemed to spark her interest. Or vice versa. Until she met the Duc de la Torre. Tall, dark, and distinguished looking, the son of a revolutionary general who overthrew the queen of Spain, he arrived in New York at the start of 1900. Francisco Serrano y Domínguez spoke little English and claimed little money, but he had the dash of a Spanish nobleman and a swooning effect on the ladies.

Set to make his mark in the military and assume a role in society, he befriended Howland Pell, a captain in the National Guard. Pell’s father was Hetty’s cousin, a penurious man who seated his guests on rickety chairs and served them expensive wine poured into broken mugs. His son, well mannered, with an interest in warfare and weapons, was among the friends who introduced Hetty’s daughter to the Duc de la Torre. The aristocrat’s interest in the affluent Sylvie, said the
Evening World
, “was keen from the start.”

Assiduous in his attentions, he organized numerous dinners in her honor, hosted her at theater parties, joined her at the Knickerbocker Bowling Club, and soon had his name linked with hers in the social news. Within two months of their meeting, rumors of their engagement ruffled New York.

The pairing of a European title and American wealth waltzed through the dreams of ambitious mothers and eager daughters. Role models already existed, the precedent set when Leonard Jerome paid Lord Randolph Churchill 50,000 pounds to wed his daughter Jennie. Jay Gould’s daughter Anna married the French count Boni de Castellane, who spent her money at the rate of a million dollars a year. And only recently Consuelo Vanderbilt, daughter of Alva, had married the Duke of Marlborough after her father agreed to pay him $2.5 million in railroad stock with a guaranteed yield of 4 percent. The Duc de la Torre had an income of $4,000 a year; Sylvie Green was heiress to one of the world’s largest fortunes.

The wedding of Sylvie and the duke, it was said, would take place in June in Newport or Bar Harbor. Before that, he was on his way to Mexico and would stop in Texas to meet her brother. But as quickly as the wick was sparked, the flame went out. Asked about her daughter’s romance, Hetty replied curtly that she had never met the man. It was just another lie about her and her children. Indeed, she sniffed, “Dukes may be all right, but for my part, I’d rather my daughter would marry a good wide awake newspaper reporter than any duke in the world.”

Soon after, Hetty was on the ferry to Hoboken when she was approached by a reporter for the
Ladies’ Home Journal
. “Excuse me, are you Hetty Green?” he asked. She glared at him with the piercing look that turned full-grown men into short-pantsed boys. He apologized and moved away. For a fortnight he followed her to Hoboken, but like a cat being chased by a dog, she disappeared through an alley and scooted up the back stairs to the third floor of her yellow brick apartment house. A kind word and a dollar to the janitor revealed that the brass plate on her buzzer said “C. Dewey.” After several evenings of knocks on her door, Hetty decided to answer. Dewey, her dog, barked, the reporter bent down, petted the animal, and pleaded with her not to scold it. She scowled at the familiar face: “Who are you, and what do you want?” she grumped and let him in.

Her tone belied the soft spot she had for the press. “Newspapers help the light in,” she told one writer. “The press in law matters is to my mind like sunlight among spiders.” She was glad to have reporters in the courtroom and answered their questions freely, but rarely did she give them interviews at home. Too many newsmen ran in packs,
repeated rumors, scorned her as a miser, sneered at her quarters, or scoffed at her clothes. Still, she enjoyed speaking to those who paid her respect; she liked seeing her name in the papers and, for all her protests, she enjoyed the press; in later years, she hired an assistant to cut out her clippings.