Green Grist

Peg-legged, pleasure-loving Edward Rowland Robinson Green died at the Lake Placid Club last June at 67, his wealth estimated between $40,000,000 and $100,000,000. He was the son of Hetty Green, once the world's richest woman--the penny-pinching "Witch of Wall Street" who used to shuttle between Brooklyn and Hoboken to avoid establishing residence and paying taxes while she was making millions in the stockmarket. Hetty conducted her affairs from any desk she chose in Manhattan's old Chemical National Bank, often ate a lunch of sliced Spanish onions while sitting on the bank's floor at noon. When she died in 1916 at 81 she had increased tenfold, to $67,000,000, the fortune founded by her New England whaling and ship-owning ancestors.

Sole heirs to Hetty's residuary estate (grown to nearly $100,000,000 before it was divided 50-50 in 1926) were Son Ned and Daughter Hetty (Mrs. Harriet Sylvia Ann Howland Green Wilks). She kept Ned from marrying while she was alive and approved only of Daughter Hetty's marriage at 38 to John Jacob Astor's 63-year-old great-grandson, Matthew Astor Wilks, in 1909.

Fond as Hetty was of Son Ned, she was too stingy to call in a doctor when he was injured in a childhood coasting accident and one leg eventually had to be amputated. Ned was schooled at Fordham College and in real-estate law in Manhattan and Chicago before Hetty sent him to Texas at 24 to see what he could do with himself.

Green's Flats. It was an early spring day in 1893 when Ned Green arrived in the sleepy Texas town of Terrell, the owner of a wretched little railroad his mother had foreclosed on. He announced he would turn two streaks of rust into "one of the best railroads in the Southwest." First thing he did after depositing $500,000 in Terrell's bank was to buy uniforms for a baseball team and start a brass band.

Ned Green did everything he said he would. He made his Texas Midland a model railroad boasting the first electrically-lighted coaches in the State. Any promising enterprise attracted his backing: cattle and farm lands, business buildings, oil wells, mines. And in nearly every venture he was successful. His hobbies were innumerable: racing automobiles, photography, boll-weevil eradication, stamps (his collection was the world's largest), astronomy.

Colonel Green* became a life member of the Odd Fellows and the Knights of Pythias, but the upright Masons refused him membership. "Green's Flats," his bachelor quarters above Terrell's old Harris Opera House, were one of the town's gay places. Once the Town Marshal had to tell the Colonel to get rid of the women staying there. Barked the Marshal: "I don't care if you are the son of the richest woman in the world, you can't do such a thing in this town." The Colonel gulped, did as he was told.

Green Ways. After 1910, Colonel Green spent more & more time away from Texas tending to his own scattered financial interests and those of his mother. In 1917, after his mother's death, he married redheaded Mabel Harlow, two years his junior, and long his close friend, in Chicago, and then built a fortress-like, 100-room mansion on Buzzards Bay at South Dartmouth, Mass. He maintained a palatial retreat on Star Island near Miami Beach and a penthouse atop the swank Sherry-Netherlands Hotel in Manhattan. He was at Lake Placid for his health last June. At the time of his death he had a blank will form in his pocket.

Since Colonel Green's widow could find no executed will, she sent to Texas a lawyer who asked for her appointment as administratrix of the estate at a $1,000,000 fee. Since Colonel Green was a Texan to Texans, this request was granted in ten minutes.

Tall, sharp-nosed, bespectacled Mrs. Wilks, now 66, found an old will of her brother's in the offices of Green Estates, Inc. at No. 111 Broadway in Manhattan. Drawn in Texas in 1908--nine years before his marriage -- the 180-word document left Colonel Green's entire estate to Mother Hetty, or in case of her death, to Sister Hetty." This will Mrs. Wilks filed for probate in the Surrogate Court of Essex County, N. Y. in which Lake Placid is located. Represented by the potent Manhattan law "firm of Milbank, Tweed, Hope & Webb, Sister Hetty said that her brother had not been a resident of New York, but owned property there.

Mrs. Green's Pepper. Lines were drawn then & there between widow and sister, never good friends, for a legal fight that promises to be historic. To his little office above a grocery store in small Port Henry (pop. 2,040) came a bigger estate case than Surrogate Harry E. Owen had ever thought of in his 20 years on the bench. As administrator he appointed Essex County's youthful District Attorney, bulky, bespectacled Thomas W. McDonald.

Widow Green's lawyers, headed by one-time U. S. Senator George Wharton Pepper of Pennsylvania, objected to the probate on general grounds that the 1908 document was not a last will & testament. Sister Hetty's counsel moved to dismiss the objections, alleging Mrs. Green was no interested party in the probate because of a prenuptial agreement in which she waived dower rights for $1,500 per month for life.

Uberrima Fides. Widow Green's lawyers answered that the prenuptial agreement is not valid because 1) it was not properly executed; 2) under Texas law such a pact is against public policy of the State; 3) circumstances which attended the signing render it invalid. Under the doctrine of uberrima fides (utmost good faith) common law presumes that there is a relationship of confidence between the parties entering into such an agreement and there must be the fullest disclosure by the pact's proponent of its nature and legal effect. Widow Green told Surrogate Owen at an initial probate hearing last autumn that she did not know what she was doing when she signed away her dower rights, thinking the $18,000-per-annum allowance was just to be pin money.

With the filing of these objections it became more & more necessary to determine Colonel Green's domicile. It might be Texas, Massachusetts, New York or Florida. If it is Texas, Surrogate Owen has already ruled, Widow Green will be judged an interested party in the proceedings.

Texan to Texans. In Dallas fortnight ago at a hearing to ascertain facts about the Colonel's domicile many a loyal old Texan went before Surrogate Owen's Commissioner, Raymond C. Prime, to vouch for Hetty Green's London-born son as a Texan. Among them was a tall, lanky Negro named William Madison ("Gooseneck Bill") McDonald, 70 and rich. He was Colonel Green's political lieutenant between 1897 and 1909 at a salary of $575 per month. Recalled he:

"Back in 1896 Colonel Green walked into a Republican State Committee meeting at Terrell and announced he wanted to be a delegate to the national convention. Hetty Green had told him to get some publicity. The convention told him nothin' stirrin' . . . but the people of the town put on the pressure. ... I told Colonel Green it would 'take 75' to cover expenses for the delegate he replaced. He handed me a check for $7,500. I had to explain I only needed $75."

After Hetty Green threatened to disinherit him if he accepted the gubernatorial nomination in 1906, the Negro related, Colonel Green dropped out of politics except to return to Terrell to vote in each Presidential election. Said "Gooseneck Bill" McDonald of himself: "I quit being a Republican in 1928." When hearings moved to Miami last week, testimony showed that Floridians had tried without success to make the Colonel a Floridian. Said Colonel Green's onetime Star Island neighbor, Webb Jay: "He said he wouldn't consider transferring his domicile."

Death & Taxes, No matter what State gets Colonel Green as a resident by Surrogate Owen's ruling, the U. S. Supreme Court will be the court to settle once & for all the question of domicile for tax billing purposes. The tax schedule which Texas' Attorney General William McCraw filed with the Supreme Court placed the gross value of Colonel Green's estate at $44,384,500. This may be as much as $50,000,000 short of the final figure, for as yet nobody knows exactly how much Hetty Green's big cub did leave. According to Texas arithmetic, the Federal Government will collect $20,812,905 in inheritance taxes. Other tax bills: $7,132,000 (New York); $5,809,000 (Massachusetts); $5,335,000 (Florida); $5,326,000 (Texas). Total asked by Federal and State Governments: $44,414,905. If administration of the estate costs $2,000,000, Mr. McCraw figured that the estate will fall short of meeting taxes, but certainly some of the tax bills will be pared when the Supreme Court finally determines the domicile of the late Edward Rowland Robinson Green, son of onion-eating Hetty, who hated lawyers.

*A Republican, Ned Green was made a Colonel on the staff of a Democratic Governor of Texas in 1910 after turning down the post of director of Texas A. & M. College.

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