Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [95]
Hetty observed wistfully, “People said I was good looking then,” and the words lingered for a while and died in the hot thick air.
But for each of the pleasant memories of balls and parties and sleigh rides, there were sterner memories that reminded Hetty of her life’s great struggles. Rummaging through one chest she came across a pile of newspaper clippings she had saved about Collis P. Huntington. “That old Hyena thought I’d die before him,” she said. “But he’s long in his grave.” Then she named other financiers, part of the endless gallery of enemies. She signaled to Marshall it was time to leave. She bent down and refastened the black thread that was her bulwark against prying eyes. She got up and shook her fist in the gloom.
“They’ll never murder me! I’ll outlive all of them!”
As she entered her eighties, Hetty began conducting much of her business from a four-story brick house at 7 West Ninetieth Street, near Central Park. Ned was living next door, at 5 West Ninetieth. Both homes had been owned by Hetty’s father, and left to her as part of the estate. She visited Ned, Sylvia, and Annie Leary frequently at their respective New York homes, but she refused to move to the city herself. On May 10, 1915, the Jersey Journal reported that Hetty was living in Hoboken as a guest of Jacob Van Twisk and his family. Van Twisk was the janitor of the Yellow Flats Building, and lived nine blocks south of the building. “The noted woman financier is positively incognito,” the article stated. Even so, Hetty couldn’t help but be recognized, the reporter added. A young girl approached her and asked, somewhat impertinently, how to become rich. Hetty looked at the girl’s fancy dress and replied, “The first thing, don’t spend so much money on your clothes.”
She returned to New York for her eighty-first birthday, in November, which she spent quietly with Ned and Sylvia. On November 22, 1915, the New York Sun ran a brief account of Hetty’s day:
Mrs. Green came to the city early from her residence “somewhere in Hoboken” and took a Madison avenue street car. She transferred to the Eighty-sixth street crosstown branch and journeyed over to Central Park West. With brisk strides, apparently with the fourscore years resting but lightly upon her, Mrs. Green walked north to her son’s residence.
In the afternoon she went motoring through Central Park and returned about 6 o’clock to her daughter’s residence in Madison avenue. Of course there was nothing ostentatious about the party. Mrs. Green’s birthday parties never are. She took this one so much as a matter of course that hardly any one knew she was having a party at all.
On April 17, 1916, while staying on Fifth Avenue with Annie Leary, Hetty suffered a stroke. Ned would later say that Hetty had had an argument with one of Leary’s cooks—a woman given to drink. Hence the legend, handed down through the years and given permanence by the Guinness Book of World Records, that she “died of apoplexy in an argument over the virtues of skimmed milk.” Whether the stress of that argument actually contributed to Hetty’s stroke is unclear. But the stroke left her partially paralyzed on the left side. Hetty was taken to Ned’s home on West Ninetieth Street to recuperate.
When newspaper reporters caught wind of her illness, Ned denied there was anything seriously wrong with his mother. On April 26, nine days after the initial stroke, he told the New York Times that Hetty had suffered a cold, but was quickly cured by “simple remedies.” “Mother was rather brave last Sunday and went for a ride,” Ned dissembled. “As a result she contracted a slight cold. When she came back home, hot-water bags were put to her feet and she was given a glass of hot toddy. If we had given her a larger glass it would not have been necessary even to call a doctor. As it was, she was up yesterday attending her usual heavy routine of business.”
The reality of the situation at 5 West Ninetieth Street