Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [72]
A bit closer to home, and more unsettling, was the case of one Thaddeus McDonald, who burst wild-eyed into a Washington police headquarters, claiming that Hetty Green was trying to break up his engagement to Sylvia, and had threatened to kill him. “I’m going to marry her daughter,” McDonald told the officers on duty. “And the mother has conspired against me. She has men and women after me all the time.” The man claimed to have written “a bushel” of letters to his beloved, although he conceded he had yet to receive a response. McDonald believed his life was in peril and demanded police protection. He turned out to have recently emerged from an asylum in Newark, New Jersey.
Not all of the suitors were frauds or lunatics. Hetty’s friend, Annie Leary, attempted to bring Sylvia out from Hetty’s shadow, to introduce her into society and free her from her seclusion. At her home on Fifth Avenue, and in Newport, Rhode Island, where Annie maintained a cottage, she continued to hold dinners and dances on behalf of Sylvia, inviting eligible sons of other wealthy families. Sylvia rarely spoke up or engaged the attention of potential suitors. Still, her family’s money proved to be an aphrodisiac, even in circles where people had plenty to begin with. But Hetty, who trusted no one, trusted least of all the “idle rich,” and would let young men get only so far before she clamped down.
The New York Tribune in December 1894 reported that an unnamed suitor, described as “a young man well known in fashionable clubs, the son of a conspicuous banker,” had attempted to woo Sylvia. According to an “informant,” the young man had shown a good deal of attention to Sylvia at Newport. The reporter described Sylvia as “plain, quiet, intelligent,” and showing a “decided preference for the young man with whom her name has been connected recently.”
Hetty, who had remained behind in New York, got wind of the budding Newport romance, and called Sylvia home, cutting her vacation short. When Sylvia arrived back at the Brooklyn hotel room that she and her mother called home, Hetty told her:
I’ve found out something about the young man who has been waiting on you at Newport, Sylvia. I find that your young man is very nice and proper, but if it wasn’t for his father, the world wouldn’t know a thing about him. He has never earned a dollar and doesn’t know the value of money. Now Sylvia, I’ve kept my eyes open all these years, and I want to say right here and now, that you shall never marry a society man with my consent. I want to see you happily married and in a home of your own, but I want you to marry a poor young man of good principles, who is making an honest, hard fight for success. I don’t care whether he’s got $100 or not, provided he is made of the right stuff. You will have more money than you’ll ever spend, and it isn’t necessary to look for a young man with money. Now you know my wish, and I hope I won’t hear anything more about your young man at Newport, who knows just about enough to part his hair in the middle and spend his father’s money.
The authority on which this remarkable speech was rendered, verbatim, in the Tribune, is unclear. The “informant” who provided the details would have had to have an incredibly keen ear and good memory, not to mention unusual access to what one assumes would have been a private conversation. And yet the words are Hetty through and through, from the matter-of-fact directness to the witty quip at the end, to the barely concealed contempt for a young man who had inherited a fortune and failed to seize the reins and increase the fortune through hard work, as she herself had done.
TWELVE
ACROSS THE RIVER
When the attention she generated in Brooklyn grew to be too much, Hetty began looking for another place to live. With Manhattans high cost of living, the alternative to Brooklyn lay on the western banks of the Hudson River. Hoboken, New Jersey, where