The Witch of Wall Street

During the Gilded Age, Hetty Green was the richest woman in America. She grew a $6 million inheritance into a fortune worth over $100 million, became New York City's largest individual lender, and during the Panic of 1907, wrote a personal check for $1.1 million to keep the city solvent. J.P. Morgan came to her for advice.

She ate cold oatmeal for lunch.

Green conducted her empire from a borrowed desk in the back of Chemical National Bank, rent-free, in the same black dress she wore every day until it disintegrated. She instructed her laundress to wash only the hems. She heated her lunch on a radiator. She walked blocks out of her way to find shops that sold broken cookies at a discount. When her father bought her fashionable dresses to attract a husband, she sold them all and bought government bonds. She then married anyway, with a prenup.

One does wonder what the suitors made of that.

She rented apartments under assumed names, slept with a loaded revolver tied to her hand, and once spent half the night tearing her rooms in Vermont apart looking for a two-cent stamp. When the railroad magnate Collis Huntington threatened her son, she gestured at the revolver and told him she'd put a bullet through his heart. He fled so fast he left his silk hat behind.

She kept it.