Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [86]
Guests, hotel staff, and curious reporters were as stunned by Hetty’s appearance as they were by the fact that she was splurging on a party. By June, though, she abruptly checked out of the Plaza, tiring, perhaps, of the expense or of the attention that her comings and goings always drew. She and Sylvia moved into a modest but decent two-room apartment in a boardinghouse on Madison Avenue. They would stay just a month or so, before joining Annie Leary in Newport, and then heading on to Bellows Falls for a summer visit.
In August, Hetty returned to Hoboken, taking another apartment in the same building at 1309 Bloomfield Street where she had lived before. Rumors of the impending marriage between Sylvia and Wilks grew and swirled through the fall. Hetty, Sylvia, and Wilks continued to guard the plans like a state secret, but their reticence only fueled the speculation. In early February, Katherine L. Wilks, Wilks’s sister in Ontario, sent an announcement to family friends:
Mrs. Hetty Green, New York, announced the engagement of her only daughter, Miss Sylvia, to Mr. Matthew Astor Wilks of New York, eldest son of the late Matthew Wilks of Cruickston Park, Galt, Ontario.
But Hetty herself made no public announcement to her own acquaintances, and when this one inevitably made the society columns, Hetty’s only response was to vigorously deny it and to question where the Wilks family was getting its information. Reporters camped outside her building at all hours, determined not to be scooped. At one point, the city posted a police officer in front of the building to keep reporters at bay. Rumors flew regarding the date and location of the wedding, and whether, perhaps, the couple had already been married, in secret. These rumors were in part fostered by Hetty herself, who, for all of her stated dislike for reporters, seemed to enjoy the cat and mouse game, and brought her customary wit and ingenuity to it.
Hetty knew that reporters were plumbing her neighbors in the building for information, and that neighbors were natural gossips and could not resist spreading information, especially if reporters were offering cash for tips. The building’s dumbwaiter was a natural conduit; the women of the building would exchange gossip with those on other floors. Hetty, aware of this, began holding informal daily briefings near the dumbwaiter, to be sure that her messages were spread around.
“Mind you, although I say I’d like to kill all reporters, I wouldn’t murder them. But, oh! I would like to pull their hair a little bit now and then.” That comment duly made the papers, as did her answer when a neighbor asked when the wedding might occur.
“When? Now, I will tell you a secret, and you mustn’t breathe it to a soul,” Hetty said. “Just to spite some people, Sylvie and Mr. Wilks and I went over to Morristown last Wednesday and—exactly! It was our own business and nobody else’s. My, but Sylvie looked fine in her new gown, but she caught a dreadful cold wearing it.”
The New York Times reported on page one the following day, under the headline “Wilks Already Wed to Silvia [sic] Green?”:
According to neighbors of Mrs. Hetty Green, reputed to be the richest woman in the world, who lives at a flat at 1309 Bloomfield Street, Hoboken, Mrs. Green confided to them yesterday that she had outwitted the newspapers in concealing from them the fact that her daughter, Miss Silvia [sic] Green, had already married Matthew Astor Wilks, great-grandson of the original John Jacob Astor.
The ceremony, according to the statement attributed to Mrs. Green, took place in Morristown, N.J. last Wednesday. Mrs. Green said her daughter wore a wedding dress upon which they had been at work for several weeks, and had caught cold as a result. Mrs. Green also described the cake of