Hetty (25 page)

Although Hetty had lived her entire life as a repudiation of what others thought or expected of her, she was not entirely immune to their barbs. She may have had Daggett’s description of her as a “shabby little old woman” in mind when, in a reflective moment, she turned to her friend Annie Leary one day and said, “Oh, Annie, am I really as awful as they say I am?” It could be, too, that Leary’s influence was rubbing off just a few of Hetty’s hard edges. Like Sylvia, Hetty was a periodic guest at Annie’s Fifth Avenue home, where she no doubt chided her friend for her extravagant living. Hetty and Sylvia had visited Leary in Newport in October of 1907, when Leary held a dinner in Hetty’s honor, inviting twenty-six guests. Her friend
seemed determined that Hetty should enjoy her money more, live a little among the community of her peers.

Whatever her motivation, Hetty made news one spring day in 1908 by walking, not into another bank or brokerage house, but into an establishment altogether different: a beauty parlor. The salon she chose was on Fifth Avenue and was described by one newspaper as “a Mecca for dowagers with waning charms.”

She stepped cautiously into the salon where, beyond the reception room, women surrendered themselves to treatments such as mud masks, steam baths, and facial massages with exotic, scented oils. As Hetty glanced cautiously about the room, the attendant looked with equal caution at the odd woman wearing a long, worn, black dress and unfashionable bonnet.

“What do you do here?” Hetty asked. The attendant, quickly assessing the woman’s needs, offered a program of twenty-one sessions, stretched across several weeks.

Hetty said, “What do you charge?”

“Three hundred dollars,” the attendant said.

Hetty may have reached for a chair for support as the calculations whirled in her head: Three hundred dollars … how many months’ rent in Hoboken or Brooklyn? How many rides on the ferry? She considered for a moment. Then she lifted the skirt of her dress, reached into a pocket, and produced a wad of bills. She counted out six $50 bills and handed them to the surprised attendant.

“I’ll pay for this now,” she said.

Minutes later she was being whisked to a backroom, where she held her face before a steam bath as long as she could stand it, then sat still as thick layers of black mud were applied. The attendant advised her to relax her muscles and let all of her thoughts and cares drift away.

But there was another reason for Hetty’s sudden awakening to personal refinement—Sylvia, at last, had a beau whom Hetty considered worthy of her daughter’s hand in marriage. Hetty had been through a number of scares regarding Sylvia’s suitors
over the previous several years. A procession of Europeans with impressive-sounding titles had come looking for a union that would exchange lineage to this or that royal house for cold American cash.

In early April of 1900, Sylvia had been briefly linked with one Francesco Serrano y Dominguez, otherwise known as the duke de la Torre. The duke had traveled from his native Spain in order to study American military methods. Annie Leary introduced Sylvia to the duke, and within six weeks rumors were spreading around town about a romance between the two, with open speculation that Sylvia was on her way to becoming a duchess. “The Duke is tall and distinguished looking,” the
Times
reported on its front page on March 19. “He speaks English badly.” Despite his lineage, the duke was said to get by on an income of about $4,000 per year—hardly enough to support an ambitious young man in a style befitting his title. The newspaper reported that the duke was planning a trip to Mexico, during which he would stop off in Texas and pay his respects to Ned, in advance of a June wedding.

Both Sylvia and the duke discreetly declined to answer any questions about their reported romance. Hetty, clearly annoyed with the whole idea, did not decline to comment. “This is the first I ever heard of such a thing. It’s just one of them lies they are always starting about me and my children,” she told a reporter who knocked on her door in Hoboken.

A year later, in the spring of 1901, Sylvia was linked romantically with one Charles Francis Seymour, earl of Yarmouth, who, despite that fancy title, was hungry and unemployed and seeking his fortune as an actor when he arrived in the United States in June 1899. The earl, who went by the stage name Eric Hope, had parlayed his title into introductions at Newport to the As-tors, the Vanderbilts, and other leading families—and it was at Newport that, again through Annie Leary, he met Sylvia.

The newspapers pegged the earl for a gold digger, and one day a particularly strident article appeared in the
New York Telegraph
,
including the following line: “Speaking of Dukes and such things reminds one that the Earl of Yarmouth is in dire straits these days. The Earl is hard up.” The article also intimated that any young American heiress in search of a title might pick up the earl at a bargain rate.

The earl sued for $25,000, claiming that the article “caused great damage in his profession and brought this plaintiff into public scandal and ridicule in his said profession.” An unrepentant
Telegraph
responded that “it was generally understood in the United States of America that Earls and other English noblemen without means had been fortunate by reason of their titles in marrying rich American heiresses, and that by reason of the conduct of said Earl, it was the general belief that he was in search of an heiress.” The defendants added that the earl “then was and still is shopworn and damaged in reputation.”

Sylvia was subpoenaed by the defense, apparently to confirm the newspaper’s allegations that the earl was aggressively seeking to marry an heiress. But she was never called to testify. The earl, whom a sympathetic jury awarded $2,500, publicly apologized for having indirectly involved Sylvia in the case. The earl later married an heiress in Pittsburgh, bestowing on her a royal title in exchange for a life of leisure, thanks to an industrial fortune.

Having thus been linked romantically to a duke and an earl, all that remained was for Sylvia to find herself a handsome prince. This came about three years after the earl had left the scene, in the person of Prince Don Giovanni del Drago, of Rome. Here’s how the Times explained the prince’s claim on the Italian throne: “The del Drago family is an ancient one of Rome. They are related collaterally to royalty, as the great-grandmother of Prince Giovanni was the daughter of Maria Christina, Queen of Spain, by her second husband, the Duc de Rianzares. Consequently Prince Giovanni is a cousin several times removed of the present King of Spain, whose great-grandmother was also Maria Christina, he descending from the
King, Prince Giovanni, from the Due.” But this romance proved to be just as short-lived as the others, and in 1909 the prince married American Josephine Schmid, the widow of a beer magnate, whose husband had left her some $10 million. At the time of the wedding, Josephine was fifty, the prince, twenty-seven.

In 1908, Sylvia was in her late thirties, at the time an age of confirmed spinsterhood. By then, even the newspapers had pretty much stopped speculating on possible matches for her, and potential suitors had drifted away. It was generally assumed that she would spend the rest of her life—and the millions she stood to inherit—alone. It was then that she met (again, through her angel, Annie Leary) a man so painfully proper, so mild, so inoffensively correct, that not even Hetty Green could object. His name was Matthew Astor Wilks. Wilks was a great-grandson of John Jacob Astor, who had made a fortune in the fur business. Matthew Astor Wilks was a relatively minor heir, and not one who showed any particular ambition or skill in business—he “has never done any very active work,” a newspaper reported. But he had enough of a fortune (about $2 million) that he could not rightly be suspected of gold-digging. When not at the family compound in Gait, Ontario, Wilks lived in fashionable comfort at 440 Madison Avenue and was a member of most of the best clubs, including the Knickerbocker, Metropolitan, Turf and Field, Fencers, Badminton, and the New York Yacht Club. He spent much of his time at Edward Green’s old haunt, the Union Club. Moreover, he was fifty-seven years old—two decades Sylvia’s senior, so it was highly unlikely that one of Hetty’s worst fears would be realized—that one of her children would marry, and die before the spouse, sending all those millions of hard-earned dollars into the greedy arms of another family. If the odds played out, Sylvia would outlive her intended by years.

Hetty did put up a bit of a fight when word of the romance began to leak. She claimed to know nothing about it. But by the spring of 1908 she was clearly growing resigned to the fact
that her only daughter would soon be wed. Perhaps at Sylvia’s insistence, in early May Hetty surprised everyone by abandoning her Hoboken apartment and taking up residence across the river in a spacious second-floor suite at the Plaza Hotel, overlooking Central Park. Perhaps Sylvia and Annie Leary, working in tandem, convinced Hetty that Hoboken was no way for the mother of a millionaire bride-to-be to live. In May, Hetty even hosted an elegant dinner for twenty in honor of Sylvia and Wilks at the Plaza. The ten-course meal, with wine, was served in a special suite known as the “state apartment”—a large drawing room, a dining room decorated in green and gold, flanked by a series of dressing rooms. When Hetty stood with Sylvia to receive their guests, she wore, not her customary frumpy black dress, but a black satin gown trimmed with old point lace. Sylvia wore a gray dress that set off a string of pearls. The party was widely seen as confirming the engagement between Sylvia and Wilks, although no announcement was made. Guests took home their embossed place cards as souvenirs of one of society’s rarest events—a party thrown by Hetty Green.

Guests, hotel staff, and curious reporters were as stunned by Hetty’s appearance as they were by the fact that she was splurging on a party. By June, though, she abruptly checked out of the Plaza, tiring, perhaps, of the expense or of the attention that her comings and goings always drew. She and Sylvia moved into a modest but decent two-room apartment in a boardinghouse on Madison Avenue. They would stay just a month or so, before joining Annie Leary in Newport, and then heading on to Bellows Falls for a summer visit.

In August, Hetty returned to Hoboken, taking another apartment in the same building at 1309 Bloomfield Street where she had lived before. Rumors of the impending marriage between Sylvia and Wilks grew and swirled through the fall. Hetty, Sylvia, and Wilks continued to guard the plans like a state secret, but their reticence only fueled the speculation. In early
February, Katherine L. Wilks, Wilks’s sister in Ontario, sent an announcement to family friends:

But Hetty herself made no public announcement to her own acquaintances, and when this one inevitably made the society columns, Hetty’s only response was to vigorously deny it and to question where the Wilks family was getting its information. Reporters camped outside her building at all hours, determined not to be scooped. At one point, the city posted a police officer in front of the building to keep reporters at bay. Rumors flew regarding the date and location of the wedding, and whether, perhaps, the couple had already been married, in secret. These rumors were in part fostered by Hetty herself, who, for all of her stated dislike for reporters, seemed to enjoy the cat and mouse game, and brought her customary wit and ingenuity to it.

Hetty knew that reporters were plumbing her neighbors in the building for information, and that neighbors were natural gossips and could not resist spreading information, especially if reporters were offering cash for tips. The building’s dumbwaiter was a natural conduit; the women of the building would exchange gossip with those on other floors. Hetty, aware of this, began holding informal daily briefings near the dumbwaiter, to be sure that her messages were spread around.

“Mind you, although I say I’d like to kill all reporters, I wouldn’t murder them. But, oh! I would like to pull their hair a little bit now and then.” That comment duly made the papers, as did her answer when a neighbor asked when the wedding might occur.

“When? Now, I will tell you a secret, and you mustn’t
breathe it to a soul,” Hetty said. “Just to spite some people, Sylvie and Mr. Wilks and I went over to Morristown last Wednesday and—exactly! It was our own business and nobody else’s. My, but Sylvie looked fine in her new gown, but she caught a dreadful cold wearing it.”

The
New York Times
reported on page one the following day, under the headline “Wilks Already Wed to Silvia
[sic]
Green?”:

The newspapers sheepishly recanted their stories a couple of days later when they re-reported Sylvia’s wedding, this time for real. The scene was, in fact, Morristown, New Jersey, where Hetty and Sylvia had occupied a boardinghouse during one of their frequent moves. To keep the actual date as secret as possible, they had sent no formal invitations. Just before nine o’clock on the morning of February 23, a cab pulled up in front of the building. Hetty and Sylvia emerged and dashed for the cab without a word. Reporters and other curious onlookers scrambled to follow the cab on the short ride to the railroad station, where at precisely 9:20 a special reserved car took them and
other members of the wedding party on a short trip to Morristown. Sylvia and Wilks were married at noon at St. Peter’s Protestant Episcopal Church. The simple ceremony, performed by the Reverend Philemon F. Sturges, included no bridesmaids. Curiously, Ned does not appear in the newspaper accounts. Perhaps Hetty had told him to stay away, in order to put off speculation. The wedding party was small, not quite filling the front pews of the church. If anything, they were outnumbered by the reporters and curious onlookers who filled the back pews.