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By Root 857 0

Mabel Potter Daggett, began: “If you have been a part of the hurrying throng that daily jostles down lower Broadway, you may have seen her. Such a lonely little figure! A withered leaf, it seems strangely tossed in the great financial current. Follow this little old woman in rusty black and see her enter the Chemical National Bank. She is not the scrubwoman. The scrubwoman has no clothes of such ancient date as hers, the alpaca gown that has weathered many seasons, the black woolen cape that has shaped itself to the shoulders as they have bowed through the last ten years, and the tousled bonnet with its little bunch of flowers that faded with the millinery of many summers past.”

Daggett continued: “The shabby little old woman who has just passed from view is worth $60,000,000, even $100,000,000, some estimates say. She is Hetty Howland Robinson Green, greatest mistress of finance the world has ever seen. Seated atop of her huge yellow millions, a wrinkled old woman, the financial limelight of a continent plays about her as she directs the destinies of men and of corporations. There is power in the pen stroke of her aged fingers, the thin old fingers that are busy, busy all day long cutting coupons and signing checks. She has more ready money at her command than any other one individual. Wall Street waits on her coffers. To the old-fashioned mahogany desk comes a procession of bank presidents, hat in hand, railroad magnates, bowing low, and rich directors humbly making obeisance. Even the city of New York in need has brought its plea to her, its richest citizeness.”

Yet for all of her power, Daggett wrote, “Hetty Green is really a bankrupt to-day, bankrupt in desire! With money to buy all that the world has for sale, it holds nothing that she would like. She has mortgages strewn in acres from Boston to San Francisco. She owns railroads and steamboat lines, copper mines in Michigan, gold mines in Nevada, iron mines in Missouri, telegraph and telephone securities and government bonds, and in her safe is locked a pint of diamonds and one of the finest collections of pearls on earth. Yet the girl stenographer who takes her dictation probably has a lighter heart under a new spring gown, the butcher from whom she buys chuck steak at twelve cents a pound has a better Sunday dinner, and her neighbors in a Hoboken flat, when they go on a Coney Island outing, brighten the monochrome of existence with more of color than varies her drab days.”

Although Hetty had lived her entire life as a repudiation of what others thought or expected of her, she was not entirely immune to their barbs. She may have had Daggett’s description of her as a “shabby little old woman” in mind when, in a reflective moment, she turned to her friend Annie Leary one day and said, “Oh, Annie, am I really as awful as they say I am?” It could be, too, that Leary’s influence was rubbing off just a few of Hetty’s hard edges. Like Sylvia, Hetty was a periodic guest at Annie’s Fifth Avenue home, where she no doubt chided her friend for her extravagant living. Hetty and Sylvia had visited Leary in Newport in October of 1907, when Leary held a dinner in Hetty’s honor, inviting twenty-six guests. Her friend seemed determined that Hetty should enjoy her money more, live a little among the community of her peers.

Whatever her motivation, Hetty made news one spring day in 1908 by walking, not into another bank or brokerage house, but into an establishment altogether different: a beauty parlor. The salon she chose was on Fifth Avenue and was described by one newspaper as “a Mecca for dowagers with waning charms.”

She stepped cautiously into the salon where, beyond the reception room, women surrendered themselves to treatments such as mud masks, steam baths, and facial massages with exotic, scented oils. As Hetty glanced cautiously about the room, the attendant looked with equal caution at the odd woman wearing a long, worn, black dress and unfashionable bonnet.

“What do you do here?” Hetty asked. The attendant, quickly assessing the woman’s needs, offered a program of