Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [69]
“A place for howling lunatics,” came a cheerful voice from the audience.
“Mrs. Green!” said Judge Anderson.
A couple of weeks later, Barling’s attorney, J. Evarts Tracy, said Barling’s books had always been open for Hetty and her lawyers to examine.
“No use lying,” came the voice.
“Mrs. Green!” said Judge Anderson. “I do not like to speak to a lady of your age in this way.”
“Oh, you needn’t mind me,” she responded. “I know I am in my second childhood, but you can’t muzzle—”
“Mrs. Green!” Anderson snapped. “You must not talk. I will keep order, and you have your lawyers to talk for you.”
When the proceedings were less lively, Anderson sometimes nodded off. Hetty, on the other hand, was always on alert, especially when reporters followed her out into the hall at the end of a long afternoon, looking for a quote. She rarely disappointed: “The referee on one day slept nineteen times, snored fourteen, and struck his nose on the desk three times. He wants me to stop talking, and I want him to stop snoring. He makes his noise with his nose, and I make mine with my mouth. It’s nearly the same, ain’t it?”
On June 14, 1895, as the lawyers, reporters, and others in the room organized their papers and headed for the door, Hetty quietly walked to a window, dropped to her knees, and folded her arms in prayer. The noise in the room stopped at once. Everyone seemed taken aback except for Sylvia, who often attended the hearings with her mother, and now looked on impassively.
Hetty stayed in that position for several minutes, moving her lips without uttering a sound. Then she got up, dusted off her dress, and headed for the exit. When reporters asked what she prayed for, Hetty declined to answer, took Sylvia by the arm, and left the room.
Hetty developed a particular distaste for Barling’s lead attorney, Joseph Choate, a prominent New York attorney who would later serve as United States ambassador to Great Britain. She took to making public pronouncements against him, one of which almost got her into trouble the same month. “Did you ever see such a set of buzzards?” she reflected on Choate and other lawyers on his team. “Why, it is sad to think of poor Irene Hoyt. Choate and the other buzzards got hold of her, and she is in an asylum now.”
Her words did not escape the eyes of Miss Mary Irene Hoyt, who on June 5 filed a $100,000 slander suit against Hetty. Editors, reporters, readers, and court observers could barely contain their glee at the prospect of a Hetty Green and Irene Hoyt squaring off in court. If Hetty was the most colorfully litigious woman in New York, Irene Hoyt probably came in second, having spent several years in a legal battle with trustees over the estate of her own father, steamboat magnate Jesse Hoyt. Choate had represented the trustees in the Hoyt case, so Hetty and Irene should have been sympathetic with each other’s causes. But Hetty’s mortifying statement put an end to any camaraderie.
The newspapers fairly licked their lips. “As both of these distinguished women are millionairesses, and as in times past they have demonstrated their undoubted capacity to make things interesting, a lively time may be expected when this slander suit comes to trial,” the New York Times predicted. Three weeks later, reporters did not mask their disappointment when the suit was suddenly settled out of court, the details kept secret. “The trial had been looked forward to as one of the events of the age,” the Times lamented.
Just when the Barling case looked as though it might drag out forever, Henry Barling obligingly dropped dead in April 1896. He had been handling the estate of Edward Mott Robinson for nearly thirty-one years. A short time later, Hetty triumphantly solved the mystery of her public prayer that had perplexed the reporters: “What I prayed for was that the wickedness of that executor might be made manifest to New York,” the New Bedford