Hetty (33 page)

The causes of the panic of 1907 were legion, and my description is by necessity greatly simplified. Alexander Noyes’s Forty
Years of American Finance
(1865–1907), published just as the country was emerging from the crisis, offers an excellent view of the crisis as it unfolded. More modern perspective can be found in John Steele Gordons
The Great Game
, and Charles P. Kindleberger’s
Manias, Panics, and Crashes.
The solution to the crisis, worked out by J. P. Morgan and others including, apparently, Hetty, was supposed to stabilize the banking system by ensuring a flow of cash to forestall panics. The ensuing establishment of the Federal Reserve system did, in fact, stabilize the banking system, but not so much as Morgan and the others had hoped. A little over two decades later, of course, the markets collapsed again and hundreds of banks failed, leading to the Great Depression. Hetty’s plaintive question to Annie Leary on page 171 originally appeared in
The Witch of Wall Street.
The story of Hetty’s beauty treatments was detailed in the
New York Times
of May 28, 1908. The description of the Earl of Yarmouth lawsuit appeared in several Times articles in 1901.

According to popular legend, Hetty’s beloved dog, Dewey, is buried in the Hartsdale Canine Cemetery in Westchester County, New York. Founded in 1896, it claims to be the nation’s oldest pet cemetery, and its roster of departed dogs includes many owned by entertainers, politicians, and other celebrities. Given Hetty’s love for Dewey, she might well have splurged on a fine resting place for the animal. Unfortunately, the cemetery’s roster of permanent guests includes none named “Dewey.” Even with Hetty’s penchant for secrecy, it is hard to imagine her burying the animal under a pseudonym. And so Dewey’s final resting place, like many other Hetty legends, remains an intriguing mystery.

Walter Marshall, Colonel Ned Green’s personal secretary in Terrell, came with Ned to New York in 1911. It’s safe to say that Marshall liked his New York job less well than the Texas one—a major reason being his rather contentious relationship with Hetty. Marshall’s unpublished memoirs include a chapter detailing his trips with Hetty to her locked vault containing her prized possessions. Barbara Fortin Bedell, who at this writing is preparing Marshall’s memoirs for publication, shared with me a chapter describing Marshall’s trips with Hetty to the locked vault.

It is difficult to spend much time around Colonel Ned Green and not be impressed with his insatiable curiosity, his scale of living, his humor, and, in his own way, his large heart. Condensing his later years into a single chapter was a difficult task. The Noel Hill collection, referenced in my acknowledgments, yielded many interesting details, including correspondence between Ned and Sylvia, a list of items at Round Hill and cars kept on the property, contracts, financial records, and photographs.

Arthur Lewis’s 1963 book,
The Day They
Shook
the Plum Tree
, and John M. Bullard’s
The Greens As I Knew Them
(1964) also provided interesting and quite different perspectives on the Colonel. Bullard was a New Bedford attorney who worked with Ned and was interviewed by Lewis. Bullard’s privately published book counters the fairly cynical and dismissive portrait of Ned offered in Plum
Tree.
I also consulted Bullard’s papers and notes for the book, which are on file at the Harvard Law School Library.

A note on the name “Round Hill”: Over the centuries, the property has been referred to as both “Round Hill” and “Round Hills” to such an extent that either choice can be considered correct. Ned used the singular on virtually everything relating
to the property, and for consistency I have done the same throughout the book.

The descriptions of Sylvia’s friendship with Helen Guild both as children in Bellows Falls and as elderly women in Greenwich came from a lengthy interview Guild gave to Boston
Globe
reporter Frances Burns shortly after Sylvia’s death (“She Loved Toys Because She Hadn’t Had Them as Child,” March 4, 1951). The description of her friendship with Mary Nims Bolles came from letters between the two from the Rockingham Free Public Library in Bellows Falls, and from Mary’s memoirs. The distribution of Sylvia’s estate was widely covered in newspapers nationwide.

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Because Hetty Green was so widely covered during her own time, period newspapers and magazines were a vital resource, not just for the details they recount, but for the light they shed on how her contemporaries viewed her. I amassed hundreds
of articles from dozens of newspapers, with the following newspapers providing the bulk of the material:
New York
World;
New-York Daily Tribune, New York Sun, New York Times
, Brooklyn Daily
Eagle, New Bedford (Mass.) Morning Mercury, New Bedford
(Mass.)
Evening Standard, New-Bedford Gazette and Courier
, the New Bedford (Mass.)
Standard-Times
, Bellows
Falls (Vt.) Times.
The
New York Times
proved to be a particularly valuable resource, thanks mainly to a marvelous computer search engine enabling researchers to search every issue from 1851 on, according to a word or phrase, and to print out a facsimile of the article. Professional researcher Roger D. Joslyn conducted the search on my behalf, sending me fat packets of articles every few days crammed not just with lengthy profiles, but obscure details on real estate deals, financial transactions, and even racehorses named for Hetty—few if any of which would have turned up in a traditional search of the
New York Times Index.