Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [93]
When confronted with reports of charitable acts, she was quick to deny them. In 1904, rumors surfaced that Hetty had given $500,000 to the Nurses’ Home in New York City, and another $50,000 for a nurses’ settlement home. When reporters arrived at the Chemical National Bank seeking comment, she sent a terse written reply out to them: “It’s a chimera; it’s absurd; there is not a scintilla of truth in it; it’s all a dream.” When Annie Leary announced plans to build an art school on Fifth Avenue, opposite Central Park, newspapers reported that Hetty would donate $500,000 to pay for the site. Neither Hetty nor Annie ever confirmed the reports.
In 1911, Nicholls organized a contest among society ladies to trim Easter hats to be given to poor girls. The women gathered at the Madison Avenue home of a wealthy woman named Mrs. George Kemp, a friend of Hetty’s. Hetty was not only a sponsor, she helped judge the entries. Among her favorites was a wide-brimmed hat with a spray of flowers and a large green bow—a color that the contest participants christened as “Hetty green.”
In the annals of philanthropy, a hat-trimming contest is a minor event, to be sure. But Hetty’s participation made it news. Just as everything she did made news. By now, she was so familiar to Americans that she was becoming a popular icon. She seemed to be everywhere. Her name cropped up in popular songs, one of them, written in 1905 by Sidney S. Toler, titled “If I Were As Rich As Hetty Green” (Each day I’d give the poor a thousand dollars / A diamond ring to every little queen—/ O you bet your life that I would go to the limit / If I were just as rich as Hetty Green). Another song, “At the Million Dollar Tango Ball,” written in 1914 by James White, included the lines: Given by the millionaires at Wall Street Hall / John D. Rockefeller sold the tickets by the score / Andrew Carnegie was taking tickets at the door / Hetty Green was Dancing Mistress of the floor / Vanderbilt was playing every rag encore.
In 1912, a trotter named Hetty Green finished sixth in a field of seven at the Detroit’s Grand Circuit horse races. That same year, a wealthy slumlord in New York, Mrs. Pasquale Spinelli, was murdered. She had been known as “the Hetty Green of Little Italy.” At the Thirty-ninth Street Theater in Manhattan in 1914, in a play called Too Many Cooks, a character named Albert Bennett told his fiancée that he loved her and not another character named Minnie, with these words: “If Minnie was as beautiful as Lillian Russell and as rich as Hetty Green … I’d laugh in her face.” A few months later, the New York Sun reported (erroneously, as it turned out) that Hetty planned to buy the Chicago Cubs.
To the public, Hetty was ageless and timeless—people could not remember a time when Hetty could not be seen bustling along the streets of lower Manhattan. It seemed as if she might live forever. And she was determined to give that impression, working long days and weekends, ever minding her fortune. But she was beginning to contemplate her death, and in a quiet way to make preparations. In 1911, she made up her will, a straightforward document passing everything along to her children. A year later, she made another arrangement. One Saturday in July of 1912, Hetty spent the morning, as was her custom, in the offices of the Westminster Company. She worked until a man, the Reverend Augustine Elmendorf, arrived at the building. Ned was there, too. The three of them got into Ned’s chauffeur-driven car, and Ned ordered the driver to take them across the river to Jersey City, where the Reverend Elmendorf was rector. Jersey City was the next town over from Hoboken. When the car arrived at the church, located at the corner of Arlington and Claremont Avenues, the little party entered the rectory. The occasion had been kept a strict secret, to keep the ever-curious reporters away. Here, in the rectory, with only her son as witness, Hetty was baptized in the Episcopal church. She had not, however, undergone a conversion of faith or become suddenly devout.