The Richest Woman in America (21 page)

      
I
know of no profession, art or trade that women are working on today as taxing for mental resources as being a leader of Society,” said Alva Belmont at the time. Married first to the grandson of Cornelius
Vanderbilt and then to Oliver Perry Belmont, son of the Rothschilds’ agent in New York, Alva led an exhausting life, an endless round of fittings and coiffures, lunches, teas, dinners, and social calls. Snubbed by the upper class, she worked hard to snub them back. Turned down for a box at the Academy of Music, she helped found the Metropolitan Opera Company; on opening night in October 1883, the scent of money was as strong as the strains from
Faust
. Rebuffed by Mrs. Astor, Alva commissioned Marble House, one of the most spectacular mansions in Newport, replete with Siena marble and a Titian-style ceiling, right next door to her. Excluded from the smart parties, she spent $3 million and transformed her New York château to host the most glittering fancy dress ball America had ever seen.

Mrs. Astor practically had to beg to be invited. Not that it would have mattered so much, she might have said, except for the fact that her daughter Carrie was of marriageable age. Heaven forbid, if she did not attend the ball of the decade. The party consumed the thoughts, the dreams, the conversations of the upper crust. For weeks before the event, guests obsessed over what costume to wear: men could not decide between Cardinal Richelieu and the Count of Monte Cristo; women anguished over whether to appear as Mary Stuart or Marie Antoinette. In the end, they ranged from kings and queens to monks and dairymaids, the hostess herself a glittering Venetian princess.

In truth,
no one could outshine Caroline Astor. The pudgy girl who married William Backhouse Astor Jr. the year Hetty made her debut now ruled as the queen of New York society. Wearing a wig of black hair topped by a diamond tiara, dripping in ropes of diamonds, rubies, and pearls, swathed in a royal purple gown by Worth, she flew into a room like a shooting star, perched with aloofness on a ballroom divan, and reigned over the groveling rich.

In the drawing rooms and dining rooms of New York’s aspiring aristocracy, social acolytes whispered her name in awe, sought her approval with trepidation. Some, like Collis Huntington, paid thousands of dollars to be in her company. Mentored by Ward McAllister, who organized the Patriarchs, for twenty years she decided New York’s Four Hundred and deemed who was worthy of inclusion. But as magnificent as her houses were, as gorgeous as her dresses were, as dazzling as her jewels were, Mrs. Astor could not electrify her own
husband. William stayed with her long enough to father five children and then escaped from her overwhelming ambitions, fleeing to Ferncliff, his mansion on the Hudson, or to the
Ambassadress
, his yacht.

If Mr. Astor did not appear at his wife’s glittering balls, neither did many of his colleagues. While their wives and daughters, wearing Parisian gowns (and paying a 50 percent import tax for the privilege), descended from their brownstones and townhouses in the dark of night and, under the gaze of the gossip columnists, partied with idle males till 2 a.m., the men who made the money supped early and went to sleep. Jay Gould, James Lenox, and William Vanderbilt, recoiling at the word “cotillion,” retreated to their private clubs. Henry James understood: “
The highest luxury of all, the supremely expensive thing, is constituted privacy,” he declared.

Hetty agreed with the men. She shunned the trivial entertainment, the exorbitantly expensive clothes, the aura of excess, and favored a simple life. Her Quaker God shone his smile on her fortune; she dared not risk his wrath on frivolity. She weighed her wealth and balanced the brilliant gold on one side with a leaden social life on the other.

But if her evenings were unexciting, her mind was certainly not dull. Henry Clews, the famed investment banker, wrote that Wall Street “
is not the place for a lady to find either fortune or character.” Women, he claimed, were “impulsive and impressionable, and not able to reason in the way that is indispensable to a successful speculator.” With one exception, however: Hetty Green. “Her unaided sagacity has placed her among the most successful of our millionaire speculators. She is, however, made up of a powerful masculine brain in an otherwise female constitution. She is one among a million of her sex.” In other words, suggested Clews, she thinks like a man.

Like many men, she had no interest in keeping house.
Instead, Hetty boarded. She lived in houses with snug rooms, comfortable parlors, and home-cooked food, owned by women who could have been her. Like William Dean Howells’s Mrs. Leighton, who faced the loss of her fortune, thousands of ladies in financial ruin opened their private homes and quietly offered rooms for respectable people. For gentlemen, single women and widows, newlyweds, and families not ready to live in one of the new apartment flats, the boardinghouse allowed them to reside with others of similar mind. Many doctors,
lawyers, and wealthy businessmen took their warm breakfasts and hot suppers at their boardinghouse table, including Henry Hyde, founder of Equitable Life Assurance Society, the largest insurer in the world; James Alexander, president of the company; Frank Leslie, publisher of
Popular Monthly
, and his wife, Minnie Leslie, editor of the
Illustrated Ladies Gazette
; and Adolph Ochs, publisher of the
New York Times
, and his family.

While some fashionable places, furnished by people who had lived in wealth, welcomed their genteel guests, or “family,” as they preferred to call them, with plush sofas and polished silver, others were upholstered in the tears and tatters of their impoverished owners; faded and threadbare, the quarters were small, the meals measly, and the food badly cooked, and the boarders were working class. These dingy places gave boardinghouses a bad name. Responding to a nasty piece in the
New York Times
,
a young woman defended her residence: “That ‘cheerless’ boarding house is often a much happier home and the business girl more contented than very many of those who have decided to become ‘queens of homes.’ I don’t object for one minute to any girl’s choosing to be a ‘queen’ if she wishes to, but I do solemnly object to her saying that the boarding house girl misses all the fun of life and is cheerless and discontented.” It was far less lonely, she wrote, to be in the company of others than to wait at home alone while one’s “companion” was out at his private club. “There are some girls who prefer to be in boardinghouses and some who prefer to be queens,” she said. “I prefer the calm comfort of the boardinghouse to the tie that binds uncomfortably.”

Hetty had little desire to be a queen or to be tied down. Nor did she wish to concern herself with the daily problems of domesticity. But the press, deprived of a monarch and bewildered by her ways, made fun of her meager quarters and scorned her for her boardinghouse tastes. That other millionaires, like James Lenox or Edward Schermerhorn, hid in seclusion or lived amid clutter, did not matter. Reporters rarely mentioned them; Hetty, a woman, was fair game.

Ignoring her wish for privacy, often not even sure where she lived, they hunted down her address, hounded her doorway, and, whenever possible, revealed her residence. Disclosure drew hundreds of letters begging for money, or suggesting ransom, or threatening murder.
Suspicious to begin with, afraid to settle in, she constantly felt forced to flee. She was Ishmael; she was the Wandering Jew. She was used to shuttling between places; she moved like a nomad from boardinghouses to flats to hotels, from Brooklyn to the Bowery, Hempstead to Hoboken, changing her name, evading the press, the public, and also the tax man. Like thousands of New Yorkers then and now, she escaped state and city taxes by refusing to establish a residence. Where she lived mattered little to her. Days were a whirlwind of transactions; at night all she wanted was refuge. More important issues occupied her thoughts.

Railroads were constantly on her mind: they were costly, conspiratorial, competitive, cutthroat, and corrupt. Those who ran them were like thirsty men near a bar, elbowing their way to the front, imbibing all they could, gobbling up fare along the way. No better example existed than the Louisville and Nashville. As many of the smaller railroads were swallowed up in the early 1880s, the L&N consumed or controlled or leased, among others (and sometimes in secret): the Great Southern Railroad; the Mobile and Montgomery Railroad; the New Orleans and Mobile Railroad; the Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis Railroad; the Western and Atlantic Railroad; and the Georgia Central Railroad. Through these transactions, the L&N gained a monopoly on the produce, the provisions, and the passengers traveling through South Carolina and Georgia and on to the West.

Railroad men like Colonel E. W. Cole, former president of the Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis, could almost taste the profits. Organizing a group of friends, he put together the financing to form the East Tennessee Railroad, and took on the L&N. Despite strong opposition, he obtained a charter from the state of Georgia for the new line, and with millions of dollars and in minimum time, blasted through the mountains and laid tracks to the sea.

But expenses overwhelmed the income, and shortly afterward the East Tennessee found itself in receivership. That, however, spurred it to slash its fees, just to spite the L&N. The East Tennessee behaved like a monster toward the Louisville and Nashville and menaced the harmony that prevailed among the Southern roads, said the
New York Times
. “Freight rates have been frozzled out time and again.” By September 1885 both lines were offering free delivery of cargo in Atlanta
and both cut their passenger rates more than once. The rancor had reached the point of siege; even the L&N’s allies were set to fight the East Tennessee. “It will be war to the knife and knife to the hilt,” said the
Times
. “This is the way the rails are laid and the wires are working in the South.”

The way that railroad stocks were trading seemed hardly better. In 1886 when word leaked that the Richmond Terminal Railroad wanted to expand its lines and consolidate its position in the South, its stock bounded out of control. When the opening bell rang at the Stock Exchange on the morning of November 20, no one could figure out how much the shares cost: a dozen different opening prices were quoted at the same time. The same brokers were selling the same stock at anywhere from 68 to 76. The hurly-burly was driving the investing public to distraction.

Hetty Green owned a considerable number of Georgia Central shares. When the Richmond Terminal Railroad made its move to take control, Hetty’s stock was in demand. Two officers of the Richmond Terminal paid her a visit at the Chemical Bank, where her office was a few desks at the back of the room. She may have been one of the largest shareholders of the bank, but hers was a simple bureau. In the area where the cashiers, tellers, and clerks sat behind their gilded barriers, she sat in the open, in a corner, at her rolltop desk. Bonds, stocks, cash, letters, and notes were stuffed in the desk’s side drawers, overflowed its pigeonholes, and sat chock-a-block in a black tin box on the top. Here, where light streamed in from a skylight in the roof, she dictated letters to her stenographer or clipped coupons from her bonds. On a typical day, Hetty, dressed in a black silk shirtwaist trimmed with rusty velvet and a black sateen skirt dotted in white, met with businessmen who called on her by the hour.

The two men from the Richmond Terminal made her an offer that seemed too good to refuse. She had bought the stock at $70; now it was selling at $100. The officers of the railroad offered to buy her 6,400 shares at $115, fifteen dollars over the market; to seal the deal they showed her a certified check. Hetty wrinkled her nose at the cash and declared she would be willing to sell, but only if they paid her more: she would accept the deal at $125 a share. They declined and left, but soon appeared again. This time they said that if she would
agree to support their candidate for president of the railroad, they would sign a contract secured by collateral to buy her shares at $125. Oh no, she sniffed, dismissing their bid, she could not do that: their offer was not in cash. If they wanted her vote, they would have to pay her $130. Further negotiations led to triumph: in true Hetty style, she sold her stock for $127.50.

It was hard to know which Hetty enjoyed more: making money or outsmarting men. Around this time she achieved another coup. Once again, as the stock market retreated and the Louisville and Nashville headed downward, Hetty went against the trend. The bears were selling, and she was buying. One of the best-known bears was Addison Cammack, a former stockbroker who earned the nickname “Ursa Major” for his negative positions in the market. Cammack had heard that the Louisville and Nashville would report a loss and sold the stock short, that is, he borrowed shares he did not own, sold them at what he thought was the high, and then waited for the stock to fall so he could buy it at a lower price. Gleefully he watched the shares plummet. But Hetty was cornering the market, aggressively buying up stock; with fewer shares available, the market started to turn.

Cammack tried to buy shares to cover his short sale, but the more he tried to buy, the more the price went up. The words of the infamous Wall Street bear Daniel Drew hissed in his ear: “He who sells what isn’t his’n, must buy it back or go to prison.” Worried that the stock would go even higher and he would be squeezed even more, he approached Hetty: he wanted to buy forty thousand shares. She was willing to sell, she said, if he would pay her a difference of ten dollars per share. Cammack considered it a reasonable offer; he had expected her to demand a higher price. Surprised that she didn’t ask for more of a profit, he gladly wrote her a check for $400,000. Cammack had treated her with respect and Hetty returned the favor. But those who acted condescendingly to her were treated with disdain.

Lewis May was one who had behaved badly. In January 1887, Hetty filed a lawsuit against May, the assignee for the Cisco bank. In the course of the suit, which lasted more than a year, Hetty often ignored her own attorney and interrogated May at the hearings. She charged him with taking illegal commissions and implied that he had committed fraud. When she had no success with May, she attacked
John A. Cisco, who had proved to be far more of a gambler than his cautious father.