The Richest Woman in America (28 page)

The case against the trustees of Edward Robinson’s estate was first brought about by the sale of property in Cicero, near Chicago, in 1888. The executors had insisted on selling the vacant land for $650,000 although they had been offered $800,000 for the same acreage. The sale roused Hetty’s suspicions: she accused the men of investing her father’s money with their own interests in mind. Fees they charged for managing the trust seemed excessive and included payments to their own relatives. Money they paid to public officials “for improving the morals of the city” went toward procuring improvements on the trustees’ property. Improvements they made had no effect on her land but clearly enhanced their own. Claims were made for repairs but no vouchers were produced. And no accounting of the trust had been made in more than a decade. When Hetty asked to see the papers, they balked at bringing them forth.

It was true that while the land around it had been improved, hers had remained untouched. Like John Jacob Astor almost a century earlier, her strategy on land was to let the weeds grow while others planted flowers; when the flowers bloomed and the surrounding property increased in market price, the value of her land went up too. And, most important to Hetty, as unimproved property, it stayed untaxed.

The next lawsuit, which began in 1891, was countered by the defendant, and reached a crucial point at the end of 1894, when Hetty filed her papers with the Superior Court of New York. She had long been apprehensive about the three original executors of her father’s estate: Thomas Mandell and Abner Davis, both deceased, and the one still surviving, Henry Barling. The only other current trustee was her husband, Edward Green. Hetty brought no personal charges against Edward; indeed, she even paid his law fees, and had moved into his bachelor building for ten days while she nursed him through an attack of gout. But she was deeply suspicious of Barling.

She always believed her father and aunt had been murdered and worried that the executors were determined to do her harm as well. She stated in an affidavit that Edward Mott Robinson told her on his deathbed that he had been poisoned; he warned her to be careful and
take precautions to protect herself. In the affidavit she included testimony from an elderly woman who had cared for her father. The former servant claimed that just before Edward Robinson took ill, some of his food had been fed to a dog: soon after, the animal died in agony. Hetty was wary of what she ate.

She was certain her aunt’s death, two weeks after her father’s, had also been planned. “I do believe that they were put out of the way by people who wanted to take control of the property and cheat me out of it,” she said. Her suspicions were not without support. Her lawyer, William Slayton, told the
New York Tribune
in 1895: “It is common talk to this day among the older citizens of New Bedford that her will was juggled with. It was just as much a surprise to New Bedford people when they heard that Miss Howland had left half of her estate to an unknown doctor and lawyer,” he said, “as it would have been for New York City people to find after Hetty Green’s death that she had bequeathed half her estate to Tammany Hall.”

The court assigned a referee, Henry Anderson, to oversee the examination of the accounts. Asked if she would attend the hearings, many of which took place in 1895, Hetty replied that she “never missed a session.” Nor did she miss a chance to make a comment. She arrived one morning at the Mills Building, a huge structure across from the Stock Exchange, where Collis Huntington and other railroad moguls retained their offices, and entered the book-lined rooms of the referee. In her dark dress and dainty bonnet, she walked over to Henry Barling, the trustee. As reporters watched, she slapped him on the back, extended a friendly hand, and said, “How d’you do, Mr. Barling?” But a few minutes later, she changed her tone.

Questions arose about the late executor Abner Davis, who had been declared incompetent while serving as a trustee. Hetty once told him of her concerns about a conspiracy. “If you are not careful,” he snapped, “you will be taken out of the house, feet foremost, just as your father was.” Shortly afterward, Davis’s doctors ordered him to a sanitarium, though he remained a paid trustee. As they sat in the referee’s offices, his colleague Barling was asked to describe it: “An institution for repose—repose of mind and body,” he said. Hetty drew a different picture: “An insane asylum for gibbering idiots, you mean.”
When Barling said he had been there, Hetty broke out in a loud laugh. The referee begged her to be quiet. It wasn’t the first time he made such a request.

      
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ater, in the hall, with her daughter Sylvie by her side as usual, Hetty told the waiting reporters her opinion of the referee. “He didn’t do much sleeping today,” she jibed, promising to keep things lively with her new lawyer. Before she hired this forceful advocate, she noted, the hearing was so calm the referee could hardly stay awake. She spoke in the rough style she had picked up as a girl on the docks: “On one day he slept nineteen times, snored fourteen, and struck his nose on the desk three times. He wants me to stop talking, and I want him to stop snoring. He makes his noise with his nose, and I make mine with my mouth. It’s nearly the same, ain’t it?”

At a session when her lawyer was questioning Barling’s counselor, Hetty interrupted. “No use lying,” she snapped at the distinguished Joseph Choate.

The referee admonished her. “Now, Mrs. Green, I do not like to speak to a lady of your age in this way,” he said.

“Oh,” she answered, “you needn’t mind me. I know I am in my second childhood, but you can’t muzzle—”

“Mrs. Green!” the referee cried out in disgust. “You must not talk. I will keep order, and you have lawyers to talk for you.”

But Hetty was right; she couldn’t be muzzled. When Barling’s attorney stated he “always tried to be accommodating,” she called out again: “Oh, no one thinks so, but you.”

On another occasion when her new lawyer, Charles Ogden, who had represented her against Collis Huntington, arrived from Texas, he began his presentation by saying, “This is not a small estate.” Hetty quickly jumped in. “But it is getting smaller,” she quipped, winking at the reporters.

Henry Barling’s reluctance to cooperate tested the patience of Hetty’s attorneys. When Ogden questioned him about the past, he repeated over and over again that he could not remember. Finally Ogden gave up: “I very much regret that I cannot remain with you in
the case to its conclusion,” he wrote to Hetty, “both because our relations have been so exceedingly pleasant, and because the facts already disclose a most shameful state of affairs in the administration of the estate, facts which, if made known to any honest jury, will invoke the most severe condemnation of every one connected with the administration of the estate or in any manner responsible for it.”

Ogden was one of several counsels so frustrated they resigned from the case. But Hetty never quit. In the summer of 1895, in the office of the referee, a three-month adjournment was called. Hetty walked over to the window, and to the amusement of her daughter and the astonishment of the reporters, she fell to her knees, folded her hands, raised her eyes to heaven, and moved her lips in silent prayer. Minutes later, she stood up, brushed off her dress, took Sylvie’s arm, and marched out.

A few days afterward, a reporter asked her what she was going to do for the summer. “I am going to get together all the religious persons I can,” she said in a solemn voice, “and go to some quiet place, where we can all pray that my litigations with Mr. Barling may be ended within the next twenty years.” In fact, she spent the summer in Bellows Falls, where she was interviewed in her garden, and Barling died one year later. Hetty took some credit for the event. “I’m a Quaker,” she noted afterward. “In just a year after my prayers, that executor was found stone dead in his bed.”

      
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f lawsuits were her road to justice, lawyers were bumps along the way. Hetty saw them as obstructions that took up too much time and cost too much. More than once she found herself up against them in court, where they sued her for refusing to pay their fees. She often repeated one of her favorite riddles: “Why is a lawyer like a man who is restless in bed? Because both lie first on one side and then on the other.”

Hetty expressed her venom to a reporter from the
Brooklyn Eagle
who visited her in a suite at the St. George Hotel. She greeted him in a dress of black brocaded silk with puffed black velvet sleeves, a plain wedding band on her left hand. Although she was often described as
“a dowdy old creature,” the writer declared she was “comfortably stout,” with gray hair “stylishly curled.” She looked like “a woman of quiet and refined tastes,” he said.

During the interview Hetty proved “a voluble, intelligent, agreeable conversationalist.” Other reporters agreed. On a visit to Fall River, Massachusetts, when she was featured in a story in the local paper, she sent the writer a thank-you. Years later, working for a major paper in New York, the same reporter met her at the Chemical Bank. He had come on assignment to interview someone else, but when he saw Hetty he turned his attention to her. He may have lost the scheduled interview, he said, but he was glad for the “extremely delightful chat I had with that brilliant and kind hearted woman.”

Those who spent time with her admired her intelligence and industry. Yet stories persisted that she was miserable and malevolent, heartless and cruel. Instead of giving away her money lavishly like Annie Leary, she handed it out meagerly, providing jobs, not welfare, avoiding the publicity that led to more requests. “I believe in discreet charity,” she said. “I wish I could show you the begging letters I receive.” James Gerard, one of her lawyers, later explained: “
Because she devoted her surplus income, and it was large, to the development of the country rather than to frivolous expenditures, [she] attracted the constant attention of the Press.” C. W. de Lyon Nichols, an Episcopal chaplain who knew her, said, “
Hetty Green has in secret done a vast deal more of philanthropy than the public can give her credit for.”

Not so different from the modern Warren Buffett, who resides in a simple stucco house, eats his lunch in a local diner, and takes his pleasure in making money, she shunned the spendthrift ways of the rich. Like Buffett, she reveled in watching her money grow. “
For him, it is a vocation,” said the
New York Review of Books
. “He is called to it. If it’s for anything, it is for getting more of. The man’s a collector. He just happens to collect dollars. Getting money interests Buffett more than having money or spending money. It’s an intellectual and moral pursuit.” And so it was for Hetty. But as much as the press smiles at Buffett’s habits, they smirked at Hetty’s behavior.

What she wore, where she lived, how she did or did not spend her money were all fuel for the anti-Hetty fire. “I have been maligned, abused, and laughed at in the papers until nothing can injure me now,”
she said. Her reported habits of stuffing her clothes with newspapers to ward off the cold, of chewing onions and spewing bad breath, of cooking her pot of oatmeal on the office heater, of hiding in dingy rooms consumed the press, whether the reports were valid or not. Her penny-pinching ways left those who hoped to bask in the warmth of her wealth shivering in the chill of her thrift. If such a well-heeled woman did not live lavishly, why was she rich? Instead of providing the public with glamorous dreams, she offered them shadowy nightmares.

“Sensationalist newspapers made her notorious as a cranky, miserly old woman who hoarded her millions,” wrote the
Eagle
. Disreputable publishers made her angry, but nothing goaded her more than lawyers. “Just because I dress plainly and do not spend a fortune on my gowns, they say I am cranky or insane,” she complained. Her face hardened, her lips pursed at the thought. “All this is the fault of these lawyers,” she groused. For thirty years, she said, she had been trying to get the lawyers to give her justice, “and I am as far off now as ever. I have gone over the books myself and I am pretty fair at accounts. I could make nothing of them.” She added a note about the trustee’s well-known attorney: “If I could save Choate’s soul, I would earn my crown.”

While Hetty was trying to save the soul of Joseph Choate, he was trying to save the marriage of Alva Vanderbilt. Although he advised Alva against her proceedings, after twenty years of marital misery, in March 1895 she officially ended her alliance with William K. Vanderbilt. “Divorces are a bad thing,” declared Hetty Green.

As difficult as her own marriage may have been, she never discussed divorce. Indeed, as she and Edward grew older, they spent more of their time together. During the winters they sometimes lived in her quarters, and in summers they stayed with their daughter in Bellows Falls. Whether they dwelled high on the hill overlooking the mills and the river in their own Tucker House or took rooms in a local hotel, the Greens were a familiar sight: Sylvie out on the tree-lined streets of the town; Edward drinking and smoking with pals on the porch; Hetty striding the few blocks to town to purchase a sack of flour.

She was known by all for her frugal habits, her earthy tongue, and her impatience with snobs. When an English visitor crossed her farmland
and was chased by a cow, he knocked at the door to protest. Hetty made no response. “Madam, do you know who I am?” he demanded. “I’m the Honorable Vivian Westleigh, of London.” Hetty looked at him with her piercing eyes and replied, “Go tell that to the cow.”

But as little time as she had for the snooty, she had plenty of patience with family and friends. When Edward suffered inflammation in his joints, Hetty took on the role of nurse, rubbing his sore spots with a mix of raw eggs and shells, vinegar, and alcohol, a remedy that sometimes seemed to work. But as hard as she may have massaged, as much care as she may have given, she could not rub away reality: their days together were coming to an end.