Hetty (21 page)

Her words did not escape the eyes of Miss Mary Irene Hoyt, who on June 5 filed a $100,000 slander suit against Hetty. Editors, reporters, readers, and court observers could barely contain their glee at the prospect of a Hetty Green and Irene Hoyt squaring off in court. If Hetty was the most colorfully litigious woman in New York, Irene Hoyt probably came in second, having spent several years in a legal battle with trustees over the estate of her own father, steamboat magnate Jesse Hoyt. Choate had represented the trustees in the Hoyt case, so Hetty and Irene should have been sympathetic with each other’s causes. But Hetty’s mortifying statement put an end to any camaraderie.

The newspapers fairly licked their lips. “As both of these distinguished women are millionairesses, and as in times past they have demonstrated their undoubted capacity to make things interesting, a lively time may be expected when this slander suit comes to trial,” the
New York Times
predicted. Three weeks later, reporters did not mask their disappointment when the suit was suddenly settled out of court, the details kept secret. “The trial had been looked forward to as one of the events of the age,” the Times lamented.

Just when the Barling case looked as though it might drag out forever, Henry Barling obligingly dropped dead in April 1896. He had been handling the estate of Edward Mott Robinson
for nearly thirty-one years. A short time later, Hetty triumphantly solved the mystery of her public prayer that had perplexed the reporters: “What I prayed for was that the wickedness of that executor might be made manifest to New York,” the New Bedford Morning
Mercury
quoted her as saying that August. “I’m a Quaker. In just a year after my prayer that executor was found stone dead in his bed.”

At long last, Hetty was in a position to assume direct control over the fortune she had always considered rightly hers. Six weeks after Barling’s death, Hetty persuaded a New York Supreme Court judge to name a more favorably disposed replacement for Barling: Ned Green.

Not all of Hetty’s lodgings were cheap tenements. While she avoided the high-priced rent of fashionable Manhattan hotels, she wasn’t altogether averse to comfort. Tops on her list of requirements were ease of access to lower Manhattan, and a management that respected her privacy. In December of 1894, she found both at Brooklyn’s Hotel St. George. Built in 1888 and located on Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights, just a few blocks from the famous promenade overlooking the East River, the St. George was one of Brooklyn’s newer and larger hotels, ten stories tall. In contrast to the Hetty legend of living in mean flats down dingy hallways, the St. George had a large, sunny dining room decorated by live pineapple plants—Hetty’s favorite fruit. She and Sylvia occupied a fifth-floor suite. They registered under pseudonyms (“Mrs. H. Gray” and “Miss Gray”). The owner, J. W. Tumbridge, and the head clerk, Frank Niblo, went out of their way to protect their privacy, telling inquisitive reporters that Hetty and Sylvia had checked out when they hadn’t.

Hetty was accustomed to getting around Brooklyn and into Manhattan using public transportation. With nearly a million residents spread throughout Brooklyn’s horizontal vastness, the electrified streetcars were the most reliable and efficient mode of transportation. They squeaked, popped, and clanked across a
network so intertwined that dodging the cars in the street became an unofficial pastime, and, as every baseball fan knows, gave the local professional team its name, the Trolley Dodgers, later shortened to the Dodgers. During that winter of 1894–95, the city came to a virtual standstill when the trolley workers went on strike. Drivers and conductors of the city’s six trolley companies were looking for concessions that by today’s standards are remarkable only for their modesty—a 24-cent-per-day pay raise on salaries that topped out at a meager two dollars per day, and a reduction in the shift length from twelve to ten hours. A sort of tense peace prevailed amid the eerie silence during the first couple of days of the strike. But soon moods turned as ugly as the January weather. Angry mobs threw stones, bottles, and garbage at the legions of scab drivers and conductors, who poured into Brooklyn from around the country. Most of the scabs were themselves desperate for work following an extended financial panic of 1893.

Charles A. Schieren, Brooklyn’s mayor, took the side of management, calling out first the police and then the National Guard to quell protests and keep the trolleys moving. He said he just wanted to keep the peace. Critics noted that Schieren’s New York-based company manufactured electric belts used by the trolley companies. An occupying force of some seventy-five hundred federal soldiers turned Brooklyn into an armed camp. Many strikers and sympathizers were arrested. Two men died; one, a roofer, was struck from his perch by an errant warning fired over the heads of protesters. A second man was shot after he approached too close to a car stable and ignored warnings to stop. In the face of overwhelming power, and with hungry mouths to feed, the strike petered out a month after it began, with the defeated drivers and conductors returning to work.

But the strike had succeeded in stirring up passionate sympathy among many observers. Theodore Dreiser, who covered the strike as a New York reporter, immortalized it five years later in his novel
Sister Carrie
through the eyes of a conflicted
scab named George Hurstwood. Hetty, too, came out on the side of the strikers. This may seem an odd position for a famous capitalist to take, but Hetty never sympathized with management. While the public didn’t quite perceive her this way, Hetty considered herself a populist.

“The poor have no chance in this country,” she told a reporter for the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
at the time of the strike. “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.”

She added, “The law must be upheld, must it? Then why don’t they begin at the right end? Who begins to break the law? The great railroad magnates. There is Huntington. He and his railroads and the men about him have been grinding wealth out of the poor for years and years and defying the authorities. But the militia are never sent against him…. Let the poor man break the law and see how soon he gets into jail.”

Sylvia, Hetty’s quiet companion during these years, was entering her mid-twenties, a period of life when, in those days, a young woman not busy raising her own family might inspire sympathetic comments from friends and relatives and panic on the part of the mother. Not so with Hetty. Hetty perceived protecting her daughter and protecting the family fortune as synonymous. And so Sylvia accompanied Hetty everywhere, to court, to Chemical National Bank, to one apartment or hotel after another. Hetty and Sylvia frequently spent their summers at Bellows Falls. They would stay at the Tucker House sometimes; other times, when Hetty had rented the house out, they stayed at one of the downtown hotels.

Sylvia loved Bellows Falls. It was the one place where she had friends and felt a certain degree of freedom. She loved the rural setting, loved riding horses. She hated when the fading summer carried the first faint chill of autumn. It meant it was time to return to some claustrophic room in Brooklyn. A batch
of letters from Sylvia to her childhood friend, Mary Nims, survives. The letters are written on cheap, plain stationery. Some bear the return address of the Chemical National Bank, 270 Broadway. Those mailed from Brooklyn bear no return address, as if she wished to blot out that portion of her existence.

Sylvia writes to thank Mary for a bottle of perfume at Christmas, to send her regrets for not having stopped in to see her before leaving Bellows Falls. The letters are full of a sort of muted longing, and not a great deal of joy. “Please accept many thanks for the lovely photograph and calendar,” she wrote from Brooklyn one January. “I would have thanked you before but have been sick in bed. I am just going down to my meals…. Papa is about the same. Mother as busy as usual. Ned is still in Texas, so you see we do not change much. Hoping this will find you all well. Do tell me what all of you are doing.” She enclosed a photograph of herself, saying, “I hope to have some better pictures taken as soon as I get a little stouter. I have got so thin since I came down [to New York]. I wish I could stay in the country all the year round as country life seems to agree with me.”

Despite her inherent awkwardness and shyness, and her mother’s best attempts to keep predators at bay, Sylvia still attracted her share of admirers. The millions she stood to inherit sharpened her appeal for any number of suitors, legitimate, scheming, and lunatic. Articles about Hetty made their way overseas, and when one mentioning Sylvia and her presumed millions appeared in a Berlin paper, hundreds of letters arrived from would-be German suitors, about a quarter of whom directly proposed marriage. One persistent fellow, named Kaufman, claimed to be poor but well-born, a generational link or two removed from European royalty. If the Greens would but forward him a draft for 1,000 marks, this Prince Charming promised to board the next available steamship for New York and throw himself “at the feet of this esteemed angel, Sylvia.” If Sylvia should fail to be duly impressed, Mr. Kaufman vowed
(upon receipt of another 1,000 marks) to purchase a second ticket for a steamship bound in the other direction, thus to rid Sylvia forever of this heartfelt intrusion. The letters might have amused Sylvia or flattered her, had she read them; but Hetty took charge and turned some two hundred of them, unopened, over to her lawyers.

A bit closer to home, and more unsettling, was the case of one Thaddeus McDonald, who burst wild-eyed into a Washington police headquarters, claiming that Hetty Green was trying to break up his engagement to Sylvia, and had threatened to kill him. “I’m going to marry her daughter,” McDonald told the officers on duty. “And the mother has conspired against me. She has men and women after me all the time.” The man claimed to have written “a bushel” of letters to his beloved, although he conceded he had yet to receive a response. McDonald believed his life was in peril and demanded police protection. He turned out to have recently emerged from an asylum in Newark, New Jersey.

Not all of the suitors were frauds or lunatics. Hetty’s friend, Annie Leary, attempted to bring Sylvia out from Hetty’s shadow, to introduce her into society and free her from her seclusion. At her home on Fifth Avenue, and in Newport, Rhode Island, where Annie maintained a cottage, she continued to hold dinners and dances on behalf of Sylvia, inviting eligible sons of other wealthy families. Sylvia rarely spoke up or engaged the attention of potential suitors. Still, her family’s money proved to be an aphrodisiac, even in circles where people had plenty to begin with. But Hetty, who trusted no one, trusted least of all the “idle rich,” and would let young men get only so far before she clamped down.

The
New York Tribune
in December 1894 reported that an unnamed suitor, described as “a young man well known in fashionable clubs, the son of a conspicuous banker,” had attempted to woo Sylvia. According to an “informant,” the young man had shown a good deal of attention to Sylvia at Newport. The
reporter described Sylvia as “plain, quiet, intelligent,” and showing a “decided preference for the young man with whom her name has been connected recently.”

Hetty, who had remained behind in New York, got wind of the budding Newport romance, and called Sylvia home, cutting her vacation short. When Sylvia arrived back at the Brooklyn hotel room that she and her mother called home, Hetty told her:

The authority on which this remarkable speech was rendered, verbatim, in the
Tribune
, is unclear. The “informant” who provided the details would have had to have an incredibly keen ear and good memory, not to mention unusual access to what one assumes would have been a private conversation. And yet the words are Hetty through and through, from the matter-of-fact directness to the witty quip at the end, to the barely concealed contempt for a young man who had inherited a fortune and failed to seize the reins and increase the fortune through hard work, as she herself had done.

TWELVE
ACROSS THE RIVER