Surprise Ending

In the '90s, society editors all over the world knew the name of Eugene Higgins. After attending Columbia University, where he was a classmate of Nicholas Murray Butler, he became a full-time playboy, with a $50 million carpet fortune to spend. Almost everything he did made news--his winning of the U.S. fencing championship in 1890; the time his 1,520-ton steam yacht was wrecked in the Madeira Islands (he won a medal for saving his guests); his fabulous parties ("sumptuous pleasure campaigns," the papers called them); his romance with Emma Calve, the opera star. "Mr. Higgins," wrote one society editor in 1898, "is not only the richest, but the handsomest unmarried New Yorker. He is a devoted golfer, an expert cross-country rider, a 'good gun,' a skillful fisherman, and a yachtsman of no mean seamanship. Sartorially, he is all that can be desired."

After World War I, when he went to live in Europe, Higgins' name all but dropped out of the news. It turned up once more in the papers in 1921 when, out of an amateur interest in physics, he offered $5,000 for the best simple explanation of the law of relativity.* Last week, when his lawyers opened his will (he died last month at 90), they learned that Bachelor Eugene Higgins had left $40 million to four universities (Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia) "for the general advancement of science through investigation, research, and experimentation."

*The winner: a clerk in the British patent office.

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