The Richest Woman in America (35 page)

Hetty’s attitude may not have surprised those who knew her, but the note about her in
Town Topics
took the public aback. On February 27, 1908, society’s favorite rag ran its scoop: Countess Leary and Mrs. Hetty Green, it said, “have managed one of the greatest matrimonial engagements of the decade.” After successive failures at arranging a marriage for the spinsterly Sylvie, who stood timidly in her mother’s shadow, the gossip sheet congratulated Annie Leary for introducing the new couple and proclaimed Sylvia Green, age thirty-seven, and Matthew Astor Wilks, age fifty-six, to be engaged.

“Despite Miss Green’s lack of modern proclivities in her indifference to week-end parties, bridge, and cigarettes,” said
Town Topics
, she had the “proper appreciation of her family’s ramifications” in the choosing of a husband. As for her lover, it approved: “Though Mr. Wilks is no longer in the first blush of adolescence, he is still very nimble on his legs, and able to hold up a figure in a cotillion with many of the men not half his age.”

Matthew Astor Wilks, great-grandson of John Jacob Astor and longtime bachelor, was shy in the eyes of some, but “suave of manner with a store of small talk that enables him to bewitch many from more ambitious places than Hoboken,” said the paper.
A scion of a real estate family with an eponymous building on Wall Street, he maintained
his own house on Madison Avenue, was well known in New York and Newport, and belonged to all the right clubs. He was a Patriarch; an officer of the Knickerbocker; a member of the Union Club, the Metropolitan Club, Turf and Field, Fencers, Badminton, and the New York Yacht Club; and a long-standing member of the New York Society Library, where every Christmas he gave the librarian a pair of gloves. He was a friend of the late Arthur Leary, a guest at fashionable dinners and balls, and had often dined at Annie Leary’s home. He had been acquainted with Ned and Sylvie for years. And one night in Newport, Sylvie told her friend Mamie Bolles, she and Matthew took a walk in the moonlight through the Trinity Churchyard. The two, who had circled each other for years, were now entwined. But when asked about the story, all involved denied it.

      
A
stors, Goulds, Vanderbilts, and other prominent members of New York society were among the first to entertain at the new Plaza Hotel or to ensconce themselves in its suites. Mrs. Waldorf Astor hosted lavish dinners; Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt was the first to sign the hotel’s register; George Jay Gould resided there with his family; and Diamond Jim Brady lived in the hotel with Lillian Russell. But of all the rich who stayed at the Plaza, no one ever dreamed that Hetty Green would be in their midst.

The French Renaissance fortress, with dormers, gables, turrets, and towers, was drenched in old-fashioned elegance and modern luxury. The $12 million palace on the park featured a vast restaurant and summer dining room facing Fifth Avenue where guests drank their wine from Baccarat crystal and ate their food off china crested in gold. Ladies nibbled cucumber sandwiches and sipped their afternoon tea in the Tiffany-skylighted tearoom; men drank stronger stuff in the oak-paneled bar; couples danced in the white and gold wedding-cake ballroom; and all could speculate with their money in the six branches of stock brokerage firms on the first floor.
Financed in large part by the Wall Street gambler John Gates, managed by Fred Sterry, the country’s best hotelier, it was the most sumptuous lodge in America.

On May 1, 1908, Hetty Green had arrived at the Plaza. She had come, at Annie Leary’s urging, to reassure Matthew Astor Wilks—to
enhance Sylvie’s standing, to pay her daughter’s social debts, to entertain the couple’s friends, to prove her own worth. She may have lived in a Hoboken flat, but she was the Queen of Wall Street.

Accompanied by her daughter and maid, with the aid of a uniformed footman, she emerged from a cab at the hotel’s columned entrance and stepped inside. Welcomed by gold-braided doormen, she swirled through the revolving doors, rushed across the Oriental rugs, and, after registering at the desk, was sped by the elevator boy in a bronze-doored lift to her suite on the second floor. Several rooms with views of the park were fitted with plush furnishings to sit on, Irish linens to sleep on, marble baths to bathe in, telephones in every room, and buzzers to summon waiters and maids. What do all these people do? she wanted to know when she saw the size of the staff.

The surprises just kept coming. “
A woman has failed to do her duty to humanity when she fails to be attractive,” proclaimed
Good Housekeeping
magazine. Readers regularly found their pages filled with tips such as standing for twenty minutes after meals to aid digestion and prevent the flesh from settling around the waist. Newspaper ads promoted plastic surgery, beauty potions, and other cures. But no one expected the headline “Hetty Green Taking Beauty Treatments,” which appeared in the
New York Times
.

Walking across Fifth Avenue soon after her arrival at the Plaza, wearing a black wool dress and modest hat, Hetty entered the well-known world of Madame LeClair. “What do you do here?” she asked as she peered inside the mecca of beauty. A young woman escorted her into a drawing room and showed her to a seat. Among potted palms on pedestals and green silk walls filled with portraits of pretty women, the beautician assured her of the artful ways of Madame LeClair. Peeling away the layers, they could erase her wrinkles and reinstate her youth. Hetty wanted to know the price. A series of sessions would cost her $300. Undaunted, she demanded to know what the regime entailed. Informed of the wondrous results of miraculous potions, she declared at last, “I think I’ll try this treatment.” With that, she reached under her skirts, pulled out a thick wad of bills, and announced, “I’ll pay for this now.” Asked her name and address, she identified herself as Mrs. Green and gave her residence as the Plaza.

With that she was led from the reception area to a private room in
the rear. Wrapped in a dustcoat and reclined in a chair, she succumbed to the magical hands of the cosmetician. Steam puffed onto her face and perspiration saturated her skin as the hot air opened her pores. Next, thick layers of black unguent were smoothed on and left for twenty minutes to do their work. Ordered to abandon her thoughts, she lay in the chair and tried to relax as much as she could. When at last the mud was removed and her skin refreshed with scented oils, she was allowed to look in the mirror. Pleased enough with the results, Hetty returned five more times to the salon.

The rejuvenated Hetty showed herself off at a series of small dinners; toward the end of May, she entertained on a grand scale in her suite. She invited friends to dine on Tuesday, May 26, 1908, in the Plaza’s state apartments. That evening, dressed in a fashionable directoire gown of black satin trimmed with lace, but no jewels, her hair newly thickened and coiffed in a modish manner, her skin gleaming, she took her place to receive her guests in the green and gold suite. Sylvie, dressed in gray with a string of pearls, stood beside her.

Promptly at 7:30, the guests arrived, dropped off their wraps in the dressing rooms, straightened their clothes, smoothed their hair, and entered the drawing room. In the swirl of frescoed panels and Louis XVI furnishings, they spoke with their hosts, sipped their drinks, and chatted. One of the men gushed over the transformed Hetty: “You resemble an eighteenth century Marquise,” he said, to his hostess’s delight.

Hetty led the guests into the Louis XIV dining room. Embossed cards filled out in her own hand marked their places. Their names a roster of society, their fortunes rooted in finance, real estate, and railroads, they included Mr. and Mrs. Howland Pell; Mr. and Mrs. Amory Carhart; Rear Admiral and Mrs. George Ide; Mr. and Mrs. Philip Livingston; Mr. and Mrs. A. F. Eno; and Annie Leary. The array of young heirs and heiresses included Miss Louise Hoyt, Miss Margaret Waldo, Miss Ruth Lawrence, Mr. Shipley Jones, Mr. Stephen Pell, and Mr. Matthew Astor Wilkes.

The Plaza’s gold service glittered, its crystal sparkled, its silver shone on the hotel’s crisp damask cloths. The hostess had gone all out: asparagus at sixty cents a plate, a ten-course feast, and three kinds of wine. After partaking of the soup, the fish, the meat, and the fowl and
conversing with their chosen partners on the left and the right, and having swallowed the last bite of dessert, at 10 p.m. the guests left. Slipping their place cards into their pockets, they savored the proof that anything, indeed everything, was possible.

“Dinner was said to have cost $200 a plate,” declared the
Washington Herald
. The story appeared in newspapers from New York to New Zealand. Hundreds of letters poured in, most of them pleading for money, but Hetty pushed them aside. Instead,
she hired a clipping service and a secretary to paste the articles into a scrapbook: at a nickel apiece, one newspaper estimated, it was costing her a thousand dollars a month.

After almost six weeks at the Plaza, on June 12, 1908, she paid her bill and left. She returned to the boardinghouse on Madison Avenue where she and Sylvie had stayed the year before, where well-respected guests dwelled in comfortable rooms and dined on comforting food. George, the black man in the starched white jacket who stood at the door, smiled and welcomed her back. She was always generous, he told a reporter, tipping the maid two dollars and often giving him a coin or two. The location, in walking distance of Matthew Wilks’s house, was convenient, the two rooms fine, but when hot weather arrived, the women left for Newport and later headed for Bellows Falls; by October they were on their way back to a flat in Hoboken.

Hetty was tired of living in hotels, she said, hounded by people begging for money, accosted by men with business ventures or philanthropy schemes. “
I’m back, Twink,” she told the janitor of her old building on Washington Street, “and I’m mighty glad to be back. I want my old flat. When can I move in?” To her terrible disappointment he informed her that two women had taken the apartment; Hoboken, thanks to her, had become a popular place to live. Despite her offers to pay $100 for the key, Twink could not help. Instead, she took an apartment around the corner on Bloomfield Street.

She returned to her old routine. But instead of the Chemical Bank, she had moved to the National Park bank and set up her office next to that of Stuyvesant Fish, former head of the Illinois Central Railroad and an officer of the bank. Asked why she had changed venues, she accused her old allies of trying to poison her. She had been at the Chemical, she said, to collect nearly $4 million due her, and after she
signed some papers she stayed for lunch. “There were a dozen others at the table, set in the directors’ room, and the funniest thing was that there was no one else but me taken sick. I thought I was going to die,” she disclosed. The doctor said it may have been ptomaine poisoning, or, as her son suggested when he came up to visit, indigestion. Nonetheless, she collected her money and left. The fear of being poisoned plagued her all her life.

For several months rumors of Sylvie and Matthew continued to swirl, but no reliable news was released. Except for the passing of Mrs. Caroline Astor, marking the end of an era, and the noting of Matthew Astor Wilks as one of the pallbearers at her funeral, the couple’s names did not appear in the papers—until Matthew’s sister broke the silence.

“Mrs. Hetty Green, New York, announces the engagement of her only daughter, Miss Sylvia, to Matthew Astor Wilks of New York, eldest son of the late Matthew Wilks of Cruickston Park, Galt, Ontario,” declared newspapers around the world.

The announcement, made on February 12, 1909, by Katherine Wilks, who lived on the family’s estate in Canada, was simply not true, said Hetty; she had not even given her approval. But the word was out: Matthew Astor Wilks had given Sylvia Green a solitaire diamond ring, and the wedding would be in June. When Hetty was questioned, she shook her head with vigor; but in a moment of weakness, she slipped and said she and Sylvia were busy at home sewing clothes.

The soap opera continued. Reporters stalked the neighborhood, hoping to catch Hetty and toss her a question. But she knew how to dodge the press: she slipped out of basement doors and scurried through alleys, while Sylvie wore a disguise when she went out to walk the dog. The neighbors kept watch through the peepholes. Several times Matthew Wilks appeared in the vestibule and waited for Sylvie to come down; the two often stayed there and chatted.

In the mornings when the housewives compared notes, calling out through the building’s dumbwaiter from one floor to another, Hetty heard them and sometimes joined in. When were they getting married? the women asked. Where would the wedding be? Who would be invited? Knowing the press had offered the neighbors money for their news, Hetty had a laugh: “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,” she divulged, and was duly quoted in the papers.

A few days later it was learned that Matthew and Hetty had had a meeting at the Chemical Bank. Unbeknownst to the outside world, a prenuptial agreement had been arranged. When the question was asked once more, “When will they be married?” Hetty repeated the words with a chuckle. Finally she gave an answer: “Now, I will tell you a secret,” she said. “You mustn’t breathe it to a soul.” The week before, she revealed, she and Sylvie and Mr. Wilks had gone over to Morristown and had the wedding. She described the event and the cake and exclaimed: “My, but Sylvie looked fine in her new gown! But,” she reported, “she’s caught a dreadful cold wearing it.”

The neighbors spread the story like busy bees. More reporters swarmed the house and police were called to stand guard. On February 23, 1909, at 9 a.m., a cab arrived in front of the building on Bloomfield Street. Hetty, Sylvie, and a female friend rushed down to the cab and hopped in; reporters quickly followed their trail. Twenty minutes later the threesome arrived at the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad station and, with a dash for the platform, joined friends who were already waiting on the Ivorydale, a private Pullman attached to a regular train. When they emerged at Morristown they rode by carriage to the local inn. At noon the group, including Matthew Astor Wilks, was driven to St. Peter’s Episcopal Church.