Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [100]
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