Hetty (13 page)

Whether consciously or not, Hetty courted the reputation that followed her throughout her life. The more outrageous tales were merely extensions of her habits and behavior and the way of life she followed. More than most people, she had the resources to create for herself any life and any reputation she chose. For her children it was another matter entirely. Ned and Sylvia spent their early years living an odd double life as rich kids whose mother behaved as if they were poor. They wore ill-fitting clothes and got used to being pointed to and whispered about, not out of jealousy, but out of pity.

Ned’s awkwardness was accentuated by a pronounced limp, the result of a childhood sledding accident. The accident is generally believed to have occurred in Bellows Falls during one of the family’s first winters there. But Mary Nims remembered Hetty saying the accident took place earlier, in New York, shortly after they returned from England. “She told my mother that during their first winter in New York there was a snow storm and they bought Edward a sled so that he might slide with the other boys in the park. He had never before seen
snow so his enthusiasm over the sport was so great that he injured his knee jumping onto his sled.” As for the nature of the injury, it does not seem to have been a fracture, because Edward continued to walk on the leg after it happened. According to some reports, he dislocated his kneecap. At any rate, the problem was chronic and worsened over time.

Of all of the myths and legends about Hetty’s miserliness handed down from generation to generation, the most persistent and unflattering is that she allowed her son’s leg to worsen over the years because she was too cheap to seek the care of doctors. As with most myths, the actual story is more complex. It is true that Hetty’s contempt for doctors and their bills, exceeded only by her contempt for lawyers, led her to take advantage of doctors in ways that were unseemly. Fearful of being charged a millionaire markup should she and Ned use their real names and visit doctors in their offices, Hetty was not above hauling her son to a free clinic, dressed in tattered clothes, where those same doctors volunteered their time. For her to take advantage of doctors’ goodwill in this manner was of course reprehensible. For her to even think of money when her son’s well-being was at stake was inexcusable, except to say that Hetty Green never thought of anything without evaluating its cost, and never received a bill that she did not question.

And yet the suggestion that Hetty stood by cavalierly while Ned’s leg withered away is both inaccurate and unfair. In fact, Hetty did seek medical care, repeatedly. Her son was the principal love of her life. Looking across the broad canvas of their odd but loving relationship, their devotion to one another until the day Hetty died, it is inconceivable that Hetty would have endured Ned’s suffering in order to save money. It is equally inconceivable that Edward, for all of his acquiescence to Hetty in other matters, would have allowed Hetty to neglect Ned’s condition. Without knowing the exact nature of the injury it is impossible to say whether this treatment or that might have saved the leg. But the Greens did try. When not seeking formal medical
opinions, Hetty, who always fancied herself a nurse, tried innumerable home remedies in her futile effort to make her son whole again. The first time Mary Nims met the Greens, Hetty was on just such a mission.

“We heard much gossip about the fabulous Mrs. Green and her peculiar way of living, so when the Greens in their ancient carriage drove into our yard, there was considerable excitement,” she recalled in memoirs written decades later. “It was a warm day and the blinds on the south side of the living room were closed. From behind this screen a little girl friend and I, with our maid, had a good view of the visitors and made appreciative comments. Mr. Green, who was driving, did not get out of the carriage. His wife did, and attended to the errand on which they came, while two children, a girl my age and a very lame boy, played about the yard.

“My father raised tobacco and Mrs. Green had heard that tobacco leaves bound on Edward’s leg would loosen the contracted ligaments,” Mary recalled. “He furnished Mrs. Green liberally with the dry tobacco leaves and had an interesting talk with Mr. Green about Manila and his experiences with earthquakes.”

Hetty’s homegrown tobacco remedy failed to correct Ned’s condition, as did all of the other cures suggested by laypeople and physicians alike. Ned was tall, like his father, and as he grew his weight put added strain on the weakened leg.

For all of the oddities that others saw in Hetty and her family, these years in Vermont were the most outwardly conventional of her life. Edward traveled frequently to New York on business by train, leaving Hetty behind with the children. Hetty was still a relatively obscure figure on Wall Street in comparison with her husband. He was an active trader in railroad stocks and bonds, and for a time served on the board of directors of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, in which he was a heavy holder. He conducted his transactions through John J. Cisco and Son, a prominent Wall Street financial house. When
Edward traded, he did so with his own money. Hetty had laid down the law in no uncertain terms that he was not to use her principal in his transactions. Hetty did her banking with Cisco as well. She had a little over a half-million dollars in cash deposits with the bank, a fraction of her overall wealth but enough to make her Cisco’s largest depositor. The rest of her fortune, now totaling more than $26 million in mortgages, bonds, and other securities, and growing all the time, was stashed safely in Cisco vaults, away from the hands of Edward, Cisco partners, or anyone else. She visited New York only on occasion, and concentrated on keeping her house and raising her two children. All of that was about to change.

SEVEN
HETTY STORMS WALL STREET

I
n late January 1885, what had been an unusually mild winter in New York suddenly took a turn for the worse. The temperature dropped seventeen degrees in a single day to well below freezing, and gale force winds battered the coast. Ships, unable to approach the harbor, rode out the storm just offshore. The brig
W.N.H. Clements
finally limped into the Atlantic Dock under tow after a terrifying night at sea with her sails shredded, her anchor cables snapped, her crew nursing frostbitten hands and feet, and her entire length encased in ice. On shore, winds whipped angrily around the banks and brokerage houses of lower Manhattan, kicking up clouds of sand and dust from the street that temporarily blinded carriage drivers and pedestrians and lodged into every fold of clothing. Brokers and traders could be seen dashing down streets chasing high hats blown from their heads. But Hetty, who had arrived in New York a few days earlier, alone, was far more concerned about the financial storm raging in the offices of John J. Cisco and Son at 59 Wall Street.
Some celebrities burst onto the scene so suddenly and with such force that the Before and After of their fame is as obvious as two cities separated by a fissure in the earth. For Hetty Green, the precipitous time was that January, when Cisco and Son, where Edward invested and where Hetty kept her securities, collapsed. She was two months past her fiftieth birthday, a time of life when most people have already settled into the routines that will define the rest of their lives. But Hetty’s life would never be the same. After the Cisco failure, she would declare independence from her husband, and war on the world.

Both Hetty and Edward had a long history with the bank. John J. Cisco was an erstwhile dry goods merchant who had served as assistant United States treasurer before starting the bank in 1867. Edward had done his banking with Cisco for quite some time. Hetty trusted the bank’s conservative, staid reputation enough to place her securities there for safekeeping. Cisco was amused by Hetty’s eccentricities when she came to New York from Bellows Falls to check on her holdings or add something to them. He loved to tell of the day he was looking out the window of the company’s building at 59 Wall Street and saw Hetty stepping off of a public coach on Broadway, carrying a bulky parcel. He went to the front door to greet her, and learned that the parcel contained $200,000 in negotiable bonds.

“Don’t you think it was risky for you to have brought these bonds downtown in a public stage? You should have taken a carriage,” Cisco said.

Hetty arched her eyebrow. “Perhaps you can afford to ride in a carriage. I cannot.”

Since Cisco’s death in March 1884, the firm’s business had been handled by his son, John A. Cisco, and his partner Frederick W. Foote. As managers, the junior Cisco and Foote were less cautious and conservative than the elder Cisco. The bank had been financial agents for the Houston and Texas Central Railroad. Cisco and Foote didn’t just handle the financial
arrangements; they bought heavily in the railroad’s bonds, both personally and on behalf of the bank. In 1884, a conglomerate bought the railroad as a possible link in a new transcontinental railroad, one that would mirror and augment the northern route. The man behind the conglomerate was Collis P. Huntington, the forceful, fiery, and headstrong leader of the Big Four, the cadre of tycoons that had carved the Central Pacific Railroad, the western portion of the first transcontinental line, through mountains and forests. But no sooner had the sale gone through than Huntington and his associates shocked investors by defaulting on a bond payment due January 1. The Houston and Texas Central, Huntington announced, was in far worse shape than originally thought. The railroad’s bonds plunged. The bank’s Houston and Texas Central holdings dropped in value from $304,000 to $182,400. Foote and Cisco had also invested heavily in another railroad, the Louisville and Nashville, which had run into trouble as well. In a short time, Cisco’s personal assets dropped in value from $77,000 to $32,000. Foote’s decline was even more dramatic, from $153,500 to $21,500.

Word that Cisco and Son was in trouble spread around Wall Street and made its way up to Hetty in Bellows Falls. She wasted no time in writing a letter to the principals. The bulk of her fortune—her securities—was not exposed, but her cash deposit of more than $550,000 might be in jeopardy if the bank failed. She demanded that the entire deposit be transferred at once to the Chemical National Bank. Cisco and Foote gulped when they read Hetty’s letter. She was not the only one to ask for a withdrawal as the rumors spread. But the desperate partners could not afford to lose their largest single depositor.

Hetty had every right to expect Cisco and Foote to do as she had asked. But there was a complication, which the partners cited in refusing to honor her demand. It seemed that while Hetty was the largest depositor at John J. Cisco and Son, Edward Green was its largest debtor. The pride of Bellows Falls, Far East trader extraordinaire, owner of thirty-one suits, generous tipper,
and man-about-town, owed the bank no less than $702,000. Green had been a close associate of Foote and Cisco’s, and had been involved with them in a variety of investments. Like them, he had been a major investor in the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, serving on its board of directors and even for a short time as its president. Doubtless the collapse of the L&N had hurt him badly, but the overall economy of the early 1880s offered any number of opportunities for a speculator to lose money. Whatever Edward’s specific investments, his performance during this time tells an all too familiar tale of a man chasing one doomed investment after another in a desperate bid to recapture a lost fortune. As Edward sank further and further into debt, John J. Cisco and Son was only too willing to continue extending credit to him. Edward never explicitly offered Hetty’s fortune as collateral—at least, the bank presented no evidence of this. Nevertheless, creditors did not hesitate lending money to a man whose wife sat on a pile of $25 million. Now, Cisco and Foote asked Hetty to make good on the debt.

It’s not clear just when Edward’s serious troubles began, but a quitclaim deed, buried in an old record book in the town clerk’s office in Bellows Falls, provides a clue. It is dated June 19, 1884, three months after the death of John J. Cisco. The deed, signed by Cisco’s son, relinquished the elder Cisco’s claim to the Tucker House, for the sum of one dollar. The new owner specified in the deed is Hetty Green. There seems only one reasonable (and utterly poignant) inference to draw from this document: Edward had put up his house, either as collateral or as direct repayment of a loan, and lost it. The New York bankers, with little practical need for a house in Vermont, in turn agreed to hand the house over to their largest depositor, as a gesture of goodwill. As of June 1884, Edward was living in his ancestral family home as a guest of his wife.

Hetty was sitting in that very house, seething, when she wrote a second, and much sterner, letter to Cisco and Foote. Her husband’s finances were his own affair. She had no intention
of covering loans she had not taken out. Should the bank refuse to release her money at once, she would sue. When Foote and Cisco received this missive, they took what they saw as their only remaining recourse.

The New York Stock Exchange had already closed for the day on January 15, 1885. Moneymen from the city’s banks and trusts were already bundling on their coats against the winter chill in wind-whipped lower Manhattan. Cisco and Son issued a terse announcement that it was suspending operations. Then as now, bad news was usually relayed after the close of the business day, to allow traders to mull and sift and sleep on news before reacting to it.