Hetty Green - Later Life

Later Life

Ned moved away from his mother to manage the family's properties in Chicago and, later, Texas. Ned became an ardent philatelist and assembled one of the finest private stamp collections ever. In middle age he returned to New York; his mother would pass her final months with him. Ned ultimately married Mabel, his long-time "housekeeper" (a former prostitute he met in Texas), of whom Hetty wholeheartedly disapproved. Although it has often been said that Ned spent the rest of his life spending most of his share of Hetty's fortune, according to Hetty's biographer Charles Slack, although Ned was a spendthrift, the $1 million yearly income he made on the approximately $100 million fortune he inherited was adequate to his most expensive needs. Slack estimates that at his death Ned left about the same amount of wealth that he had inherited. Most of Ned's estate went to his sister Sylvia, while Mabel had been provided for (significantly less generously) during Ned's lifetime. One of his more infamously extravagant purchases was a diamond-encrusted chamber pot.

Green's extreme respect for her own privacy aside, she entered the lexicon of turn-of-the-century America with the popular phrase, "I'm not Hetty if I do look green;" this phrase is quoted in O. Henry's 1890s story "The Skylight Room" when a young woman, negotiating the rent on a room in a rooming house owned by an imperious old lady, wishes to make it clear she is neither as rich as she appears nor as naive.

Her daughter Sylvia lived with Hetty until her thirties. Hetty disapproved of all of Sylvia's suitors because she suspected they wanted only to get their hands on her money. When Green finally let Matthew Astor Wilks marry Sylvia on February 23, 1909, after a two-year courtship, the groom waived his right to inherit Sylvia's fortune, and received US$5,000 for signing this prenuptial agreement. (Wilks, a minor heir to the Astor fortune, entered the marriage with US$2,000,000 of his own, enough to assure Hetty that he was not a gold digger.)

When her children left home, Green moved repeatedly among small apartments in Brooklyn Heights and Hoboken, New Jersey, mainly to avoid establishing a residence permanent enough to attract the attention of tax officials in any state.

In her old age, Hetty Green began to suffer from a bad hernia, but refused to have an operation because it cost $150. She suffered many strokes and had to rely on a wheelchair. She also became afraid that she would be kidnapped and made detours to evade the would-be pursuers. She began to suspect that her aunt and father had been poisoned.