Hetty (29 page)

A more balanced and thoughtful assessment came two days after her death in an editorial in the
New York Times
, which noted that Hetty hardly would have come in for the criticism she did had she been a man. “If a man had lived as did Mrs. Hetty Green, 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 what is expected of the average man so circumscribed, and there would have been no difficulty in understanding the joys he obtained from participation in the grim conflicts of the higher finance,” the editorial stated. “It was the fact that Mrs. Green was a woman that made her career the subject of endless curiosity, comment, and astonishment.” The most perceptive assessment may have been this: “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.”

The
New York Sun
struck a similar theme, praising Hetty for her independence and courage: “If Mrs. Hetty Green was not the richest woman in the world, as popular fancy delighted to regard her, she was one of the most sensible. What common report said of her she disdained to notice. If her frugality was painted as miserliness, well and good; if she was depicted as moving ‘twixt days to escape taxes, she refused to reply; she had her life and dared to live it without compromise or concession. And this is sensible, because no person, rich, poor, miser or spendthrift, can extract comfort, to say nothing of happiness, from the effort to live according to another’s prescription.”

On July 5, two days after her death, Hetty took a ride in luxury that she would not have afforded herself in life. For her long, last journey to Bellows Falls she rode not in a day coach, as was her custom, but in a private railroad car provided by Ned. Ned, Sylvia, and Matthew Wilks accompanied the body on the train, as did Mrs. Herbert Bancroft, an old friend of Hetty’s from Bellows Falls, who had lived for many years in New York. Out of respect for his mother’s feelings, Ned’s wife, Mabel Harlow, did not attend the funeral.

The train bearing Hetty’s body from New York arrived in the late morning, about an hour after schedule. It was loaded onto a horse-drawn carriage for the solemn procession up the hill
from the station, within view of the shuttered windows of the Tucker House, to the Immanuel Episcopal Church. About two hundred people attended the service. They included acquaintances from years past and curious onlookers. The rector, Alfred C. Wilson, presided over a traditional Episcopal service. The plain coffin was covered with broadcloth, upon which lay a mantle of white carnations. The choir sang two nineteenth-century hymns, “There Is a Blessed Home” and “I Heard the Sound of Voices.” In the latter hymn, the choir sang:

It was a simple ceremony, as plain and unostentatious as the wooden coffin that contained Hetty’s body. Annie Leary, who was unable to attend due to her own advancing age, sent a spray of lilies and orchids. On the day of the funeral, all trains along the Texas Midland Railroad line stopped for five minutes in tribute, and businesses in Terrell, Texas, ceased operations for an hour. The body was moved outside to the shady spot where Edward was buried. She was laid alongside him; they were together for eternity as they had not always been through years of turbulent marriage. They share a tombstone—a modest-sized obelisk. In death, on the memorial stone, she accepted a subordinate position to Edward that she rejected during her life. There is no mention of her financial prowess or fame. Only this, beneath Edward’s name: “Hetty H. R. Green. His Wife.”

SIXTEEN
HIGH TIMES AT ROUND HILL

B
ecause of the ever-shifting market value of real estate and securities, putting a precise dollar value on Hetty’s total estate was difficult or impossible. Hetty further complicated the guesswork by including no inventory in her will and specifically declaring that the trustees (Ned and Sylvia) not be required to file an inventory or appraisal in order to divide the spoils. The most conservative estimates put her net worth at $100 million, the highest at $200 million. According to an estimate cited by William Emery, the Howland family’s genealogist, Hetty’s holdings of New York City real estate mortgages were worth $30–$45 million; industrial and mining securities, $4o-$6o million; railroad and bank securities, $15–$25 million; farming tracts, oil properties, and other real estate in the Southwest, $10 million; and assorted other real estate in Chicago, Boston, St. Louis, and other cities, $10 million.

The will was admitted to probate, without contest, in Bellows Falls on July 22. Hetty, who had spent her life avoiding classifying
herself as a resident of any city, town, or state, in death designated herself a resident of Vermont. There was more than sentimentality toward Bellows Falls in her decision—the state levied only paltry inheritance taxes. The will was dry, unsentimental, concise, and tight. Hetty bequeathed a total of $25,000 to people other than her children. There was $5,000 to Mrs. Herbert Bancroft of Bellows Falls, $10,000 to Amory Lawrence of Boston, who had served as a trustee of Aunt Sylvias estate (and was one of the few trustees of any sort for whom Hetty felt affection); and $5,000 to Ruth Lawrence, a New York friend. The most interesting of these bequests was $5,000 put aside for Matthew Astor Wilks, Hetty’s son-in-law, in thanks for his having signed the prenuptial agreement. Hetty left nothing to charity, a fact that newspapers were quick to point out.

Everything else that Hetty owned went evenly to Ned and Sylvia. She gave the remainder of her father’s estate to Ned and, as a compensation to Sylvia, set up a ten-year trust using railroad and mortgage bonds worth a total of $4.2 million. No valuation was given for Edward Mott Robinson’s estate, but if Sylvia’s compensatory trust fund is any indication, the trust of Hetty’s father had barely increased in value in all those years. Hetty’s own money, meanwhile, had exploded in a literal embarrassment of riches. All of her remaining fortune was to be divided equally between Sylvia and Ned, and Ned served as sole executor of the estate.

Within days of Hetty’s death, New York and New Jersey both announced they would fight to have her declared a legal resident, entitling them to inheritance taxes that New York’s comptroller estimated at up to $5 million. But Hetty hadn’t been playing residential cat-and-mouse all those years for nothing. Lawyers for both states quickly learned the difficulty of proving that the elusive Hetty had lived anywhere, except as a transient.

As the battle wound through one courtroom after another, New Jersey flinched first, dropping its claim in March 1917.
The state received as consolation around $60,000 in transfer taxes on securities Hetty held in New Jersey companies. New York, stirred by the prospect of perhaps the biggest inheritance tax windfall in state history, fought on. After three years of legal wrangling, the case made its way to the United States Supreme Court. In 1919, the court sided with Hetty’s estate in declaring her a resident of Vermont, the state which, ironically, had shown the least interest in claiming her. The reason for the indifference became clear when the estate in February of 1920 doled out Vermont’s cut of just under $58,000, per the state’s lenient tax code. Defeated in the residence battle, New York turned next to Hetty’s business dealings. In May 1920, an appellate court awarded the state $1.5 million in transfer taxes, based on an estimated $38 million in investments she controlled there. In the absence of federal inheritance taxes, the estate paid out a little over $1.6 million to the three states (or, less than 2 percent of the estate), ensuring that the vast fortune Hetty had protected so jealously would pass to her children virtually intact.

With Hetty’s death, one other matter was to be cleared up at long, long last—disposition of Aunt Sylvia’s trust fund. Now the descendants of Gideon Howland would receive their share of the fortune. The original would-be recipients had, of course, long since died, and their descendants were scattered across the map. Instead of the several dozen relatives, mainly concentrated in southeastern Massachusetts, there were now 439 descendants in line to receive a share of a pie that had scarcely increased in value in the fifty-one years since Aunt Sylvia’s death. Descendants lived in Paoli, Pennsylvania, and Rochester, New York; in El Paso, Texas, and Paris, France; in Englewood, New Jersey, and Saginaw, Michigan; Richmond, Virginia, and Jet, Oklahoma. As the appointed genealogists set about to determine the rightful heirs, anticipation built among both legitimate recipients and schemers. Letters arrived from around the world from people
claiming Howland blood. Some people, misinterpreting the source of the money, wrote to the trustees claiming relationship with the Green family of Bellows Falls. A woman from Chile sent a picture of herself, claiming her face showed the stern lines of the Yankee Howlands, and she must therefore be related. A memorial monument designer wrote in hopes of getting a contract to design a magnificent stone memorial for the deceased, unaware that Aunt Sylvia had been dead and buried for more than half a century.

As it turned out, the hubbub was over an amount of money that, once divided, was in most cases modest even by the standards of the day. The estate was valued at $1,030,040.55, and each recipient received a portion carefully calculated according to his or her proximity on the family tree to old Gideon Howland. Newspapers reported that H. A. Merrill of Michigan, “a cobbler in a dingy, dirty backroom shoe repair shop,” was to receive $100,000 from the will. Unfortunately for Mr. Merrill, the reports exaggerated his take. There was, indeed, a Horace A. Merrill of Michigan listed among the recipients. But he would get only 1/1440th of the estate, or $715. Maria E. Strobeck, of Worcester, New York, received a 1/8640th share, or $120. Ned and Sylvia received a 1/90th share each, or around $11,500 apiece, which they most certainly did not need. At last, the great debate and fight over the estate of Aunt Sylvia could be put to rest. The largest shares, 1/45th, went to a half dozen Howland descendants and amounted to just under $23,000 each.

The matter of Aunt Sylvias fortune livened up the Boston Transcript’s normally staid genealogy column. One letter writer, identified only by the initials J. E. W. B., said: “If it could be supposed that Mrs. Green had a sensitive soul it must have wrung her heartstrings to think that she was the only person in the world every year of whose prolonged life added to the natural hatred and envy of a constantly increasing number of people.”
But, of course, that had been the very nature of Aunt Sylvia’s gentle revenge.

Ned was always respectful toward his mother after her death. He did what he could to protect her reputation, praising her in interviews with reporters as a financial genius, and expressing gratitude for the things she had taught him. Yet almost from the moment of her death, he embarked on a spree of spending that seemed calculated to repudiate everything Hetty Green had held sacred regarding thrift and saving. If Hetty had tried to save her way to happiness, Ned would test the opposite course.

On July 10, 1917, a year and a week after his mother’s death, Ned stepped out of the Blackstone Hotel, his favorite stopping point in Chicago, and journeyed by hired car to Highland Park, a suburb a few miles from downtown. There he exchanged wedding vows with Mabel Harlow, his housekeeper of twenty-four years, the former prostitute who had introduced him to sex when he was in his early twenties. In their wedding photo, they look like a prim, proper couple, well beyond their prime. Mabel is wearing a dress that appears to be white, and holding a large bouquet. Ned, just shy of forty-nine, wears a long black jacket, high starched collar, and bow tie, with a flower stuck in his lapel.

The wedding—a conventional consummation of a highly unconventional relationship—seems to have been an act of genuine devotion for both parties. Ned, who never concealed the relationship, showed that he didn’t fear social condemnation. And Mabel finally earned the recognition and right to call herself “Mrs. E. H. Green.”

As a wedding gift, Ned presented Mabel a trust fund for $625,000. That was her reward for cooperating on another matter—her signature on a prenuptial agreement giving up any further claim on the family fortune.

The newlyweds celebrated their union with an extended cruise aboard Ned’s newly purchased yacht,
United States
, a former Great Lakes steamship that was the first great indicator of
the life Ned was to enjoy after his mother’s death. At 255 feet in length, and with renovations totaling more than $1 million, the
United States
, with its crew of sixty-one, was widely regarded as the largest private yacht in the world. Stripped of its utilitarian furnishings for transporting freight and passengers, and reincarnated for pure luxury, the yacht contained no fewer than forty-eight staterooms, including nine master chambers, each with its own bathroom. Ned’s stateroom was decorated in Georgian style with walnut furnishings, gold-colored drapes, and silver fixtures. Mabel’s stateroom was outfitted in the style of Marie Antoinette, with light gray walls, gold fittings, and three full-length mirrors. The library was paneled in rich oak, waxed to a shine, and filled with maroon leather furniture. A living room on the main deck was furnished from the Jacobean period, with a large stone fireplace, a Welte Philharmonic self-playing organ, and a piano. The carpeted floor displayed a lion skin rug.