The Richest Woman in America (37 page)

      
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etty felt safe with Ned. At nearly seventy-eight, she placed her holdings in a joint trust with her son and agreed to move their offices to the Trinity Building on lower Broadway. On a Saturday afternoon in July 1912, at their new Westminster Company, she straightened her papers and rose from her desk. Together with her son and the Reverend Augustine Elmendorf, she left the office and rode in a chauffeured limousine to Jersey City. For five or six years, her husband’s nephew said, he had been trying to get her attuned to a more spiritual life. At the Holy Cross Episcopal Church, with no one else as witness, the woman so proud of her Quaker heritage was baptized. Her confirmation in her husband’s Episcopal church would allow her to be buried beside him.

For the moment, she had no intention of joining him. On the eve of her birthday that November, she sat in her office and spoke with a reporter. Her mouth was full and odorous, and she apologized for the smell. “Pardon this onion I’m chewing,” she said, “but it’s the finest thing in the world for health. Perhaps that’s why I live so long. I had a big tenderloin steak for breakfast, with fried potatoes, a pot of tea, and the top of a bottle of milk.” Questioned about her rosy cheeks, she answered angrily, “That’s not rouge and don’t you think so for a minute. That’s because I always chew a baked onion.” When the writer asked if anything else helped her maintain her health, she replied, “Well, I walk all I can.”

She continued to walk to work for several more years, holding on to the myth that she was in charge. Birthdays took on more significance, and instead of brushing them aside as she had in the past, she savored them with her children. Asked a year or two earlier if she planned to celebrate by taking time off, she exclaimed, “What! Waste a whole day? I guess not. I’ll be in my office before 10 o’clock tomorrow morning, and I shall remain there until 4 o’clock.”

But on her eightieth birthday she breakfasted with Ned and told him, “Colonel, you will have to look after everything today. I’m going to have a real holiday. My friends are to give me a birthday party.
Maybe,” she teased, “the girls will let you attend when you come uptown.” Lighthearted, she went for her morning walk, hosted some friends at Ned’s place, motored with Annie Leary in Ned’s limousine, and lunched with friends at Annie’s Fifth Avenue house.

As Hetty celebrated her birthday in November, Americans played their phonographs and danced to Irving Berlin’s new ragtime song, “Society Bear”: “Millionaires, so the papers tell / learned a dance we all know well.… / Doing that Society Bear / Hetty Green and Rockefeller / Threw their shoulders up in the air / Rocking like a big propeller … / It’s a bear, it’s a bear.”

Not everyone was making merry. The sinking of the Cunard line’s
Lusitania
by German torpedoes earlier that year brought shivers down America’s spine. Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, son of the Commodore, was among the 130 Americans killed on board. In Europe, the German attacks on Russia and France and their invasion of neutral Belgium shrouded the continent in war. “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime,” said the British foreign minister Sir Edward Grey.

The fighting in Ypres that November marked the start of the four years of trench warfare that would keep them in the dark. The following year, as the Great War in Europe worsened, Hetty bought a
million dollars’ worth of war bonds to support the Allies against the Central powers. She would have bought more if her enemy Joseph Choate were not spearheading the drive.

Strong-minded and stalwart, it was reported she showed “a firmness of carriage, a quickness of movement, a poise of the head and a flash of the eye that belie her age.” She ferried from Hoboken, took the streetcar up Madison Avenue to Eighty-sixth Street, transferred to another car to Central Park West, and walked briskly up to Ned’s to celebrate her eighty-first birthday. Afterward, she headed back to Sylvie’s at Madison Avenue and Forty-ninth Street. Still “hale and hearty,” she tried to continue working as Americans danced to a new tune, “At the Million Dollar Tango Ball”: “Millionaires gave a tango ball / the other night at the Wall Street Hall / Hetty Green and old John D / Vanderbilt and Carnegie.” But Hetty was slowing down. Ned moved her office to West Ninetieth Street in the brownstone next to his. Sylvie and Matthew bought a townhouse a few blocks
away. Age was creeping up on their mother and her heart was growing frail.

In April 1916, when reporters asked if she was ill, Ned assured them in his protective way that his mother had only caught a cold. In fact, after an argument with Annie Leary’s cook, who drank a little too much for Hetty’s liking, his mother had suffered a stroke. A series of smaller strokes left her paralyzed on one side. With Ned’s help, Hetty spent her days in comfortable rooms in the brownstone on Ninetieth Street. The professional nurses he hired—he asked them to wear regular clothes so as not to upset his mother—wheeled her about. Sitting at the window, she watched life go by.

On better days she was lifted into Ned’s limousine for a drive around the park. Her son insisted she was feisty as ever. Asked if she still concerned herself with business, he said with a laugh, “If you heard her put me over the jumps every day, you’d think so. She scolds me for the way I handle her affairs and says she surely made a mistake in my education or I would be doing things better.” But the strokes had taken their toll.

Early in the morning of July 3, 1916, Ned and Sylvie were called to her bed. She was not worried, she had said; she had led a good, clean life. In the Quaker spirit, she added, “I do not know what the next world is, but I do know that a kindly light is leading me, and that I shall be happy after I leave here.” With her children by her side, eighty-one-year-old Hetty bade farewell. Her body, placed in a plain coffin wrapped in a simple cloth, was put on a private train, and with her son and daughter, along with Matthew Wilks and Mrs. Bancroft to accompany her, she made her final trip to Bellows Falls.

The Texas Midland Railroad honored her with a five-minute rest. The town of Terrell stopped its business for an hour. Two hundred people turned out for her funeral in Vermont. Flowers poured in, pinned with cards from friends and business colleagues around the country. Headlines around the world told the tale: Hetty Green—the “Wizard of Finance,” the “Feminine Croesus,” the “Queen of Money,” the “Richest Woman in America”—was dead.

A millionaire a hundred times over, she had made her mark beside Carnegie and Morgan, Vanderbilt and Rockefeller. But she was different: she was a woman. She was an enigma, a blue-blooded heiress
who identified with the common folk; an interloper, a female who triumphed in the male world of finance; an independent who answered to no one but herself; a renegade, a moneymaker who thumbed her nose at what money could buy; a pariah, like Ishmael, cast out in her youth. Now her family and friends in the pews of the Immanuel Church heard the organist play “There Is a Blessed Home.” The woman who had wandered all her life from place to place could rest in peace. At long last, Hetty was home.

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f a man had lived as did Mrs. Hetty Green,” wrote the
New York Times
, “devoting the greater part of his time and mind to the increasing of an inherited fortune that even at the start was far larger than is needed for the satisfaction of all such human needs as money can satisfy, nobody would have seen him as very peculiar—as notably out of the common. He would have done about what is expected of the average man so circumstanced, and there would have been no difficulty in understanding the joys he obtained from participation in the grim conflicts of the higher finance.”

“To the popular attention, she was ‘the richest woman in the world’ and nothing else,” said the
Times
. “Yet it was known that the great experiences of wifehood and motherhood had been hers, and there were occasional rumors of kindly and generous acts.… Probably her life was happy. At any rate, she had enough of courage to live as she chose and to be as thrifty as she pleased, and she observed such of the world’s conventions as seemed to her right and useful, coldly and calmly ignoring all the others.”

Added the
New York Sun
, “Mrs. Green matched her wits with the sharpest and made her way. The magnitude of her interests, their situation in widely separated sections of the country, index her vigor, mental and physical. She contributed to the development of the country, a service not to be held ‘in contempt.’ ”

• • •

      
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undreds of people and dozens of individuals benefited from Hetty Green’s wealth. Her estate had been clearly laid out before her death: The trust fund left by Aunt Sylvia, worth just over $1 million in 1916, was divided among hundreds of descendants of Gideon Howland; some received as much as one forty-fifth, others a minuscule one 8,640th. The rest of Hetty’s money, the equivalent of some $2 billion today, was distributed as stipulated in her will: aside from the $25,000 to friends, it all went to her offspring.

With no heirs to inherit their money, the solid fortune that Hetty made was scattered like confetti in the wind. The bequests were as random as $10,000 to Robert Moses, in appreciation of his work creating public parkways, to $1.2 million to the church where Sylvia and Matthew were married; half a million dollars to the Boston Public Library, and gifts for the library in New Bedford; a new hospital in Bellows Falls; and donations to schools of higher learning, including Harvard, Vassar, Columbia, and Yale.

Hetty Green’s money is long gone, and with it, her fame. What remains is her legacy: a woman who stood her ground, who defied the crowd and refused to follow its whims. Making her way in a hostile male world, she was never hesitant to look a man in the eye, never reluctant to say what she thought, never afraid to act as she saw fit.