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By Root 815 0

trustee of her father’s $5 million estate. Barling had worked as her father’s clerk in New York shortly before Robinson’s death. He was, by definition, the kind of person Hetty was predisposed to hate—yet another man appointed to handle money that was rightfully hers. She believed Barling had mismanaged the trust, allowing investments to languish and wallow while creating for himself a life of luxury. She had a point. The principal in the trust had barely increased in nearly thirty years. The $350,000 Hetty received each year was roughly the same amount that she had received the year after her father died. Hetty’s lawyers charged that Barling squandered thousands of dollars each year in salaries for clerks, one of whom was Barling’s son. They charged that Thomas Mandell, a cotrustee from New Bedford, had drawn $80,000 in fees over two years, without once setting foot in New York, where the trust was being managed. They charged that Abner Davis, another trustee, had continued to draw thousands of dollars in fees years after being committed to a sanitarium in Connecticut. Barling, collecting generous fees as trustee, emerged from his clerk’s salary and New York flat to the life of a country squire, owner of a large house across the Hudson River in Highwood, New Jersey. Unfortunately for Mr. Barling, he spent much of his time in that fine home worrying about what Hetty Green might do next.

The dispute erupted in 1888, when the trustees decided to sell a 651-acre parcel of Chicago real estate Hetty’s father had purchased during the 1860s. The trustees claimed the time was ripe to sell at a profit. Hetty’s philosophy on real estate was simple, its wisdom borne out over and over in her experience. Hold on to property.

Hetty responded with a typically audacious move. In June 1889, when Barling was off on an extended vacation in Europe—paid for, Hetty no doubt fumed, with her money—she arrived at his New York office at 46 South Street in the company of several men from Chemical National Bank.

Hetty did all of the talking. She stood in the middle of the office and demanded that the clerks turn over all the securities on hand. As the clerks demurred, Hetty grew more loud and insistent. She had come for what was rightfully hers. With Barling gone, the clerks’ resistance crumbled. They turned over stacks of bonds and stock certificates, worth a total of $3 million. Nobody said a word as Hetty and her companions stuffed the securities into several large bags and marched out the door to a waiting carriage. When Barling, in Paris, received the news by cable, he immediately cut short his vacation and returned to New York. He went straight to the Broadway offices of Chemical Bank and demanded that the cashier return all of the securities and papers immediately. “This the cashier did with due gravity, but promptly, and now the executor is once more in charge of the affairs of the Robinson estate,” the New York World reported on June 9.

A reporter found Barling sitting on the verandah of his home in Highwood a day or two later, and asked if he intended to return to Europe to finish his trip.

“No,” Barling said nervously. “I shall be obliged, the way things look, to remain on this side, for the present at least, and look personally after the interest entrusted to me.”

All of that merely served as prelude to a series of suits and countersuits filed by both sides that became so entangled that a New York judge named H. H. Anderson was appointed to serve as referee, to attempt to straighten out the mess of accusations. For two years, the litigants filed into Anderson’s offices at 35 Broadway for a seemingly endless series of hearings whose arcane minutiae were leavened only by Hetty’s antics. Anderson didn’t appreciate the show, but the reporters did.

In the winter of 1895, Hetty set the tone for one day’s hearing by marching into the room, slapping Barling on the back, and exclaiming, in a hearty voice, “How d’ye do, Mr. Barling?”

Hetty’s attorney began questioning Barling about Abner Davis and why he would continue to receive commissions