The Heiress

MANNERS & MORALS

When she was growing up in the gaslit, rococo elegance of post-bellum New York, Mary Bullock Powers seemed an extremely lucky child. She was not only healthy and pretty, but certain to be rich. Her father was brother, partner and heir of Hollis Lyman Powers, a millionaire friend of Vanderbilts and Goulds, and director of the storied Grand Central Hotel. Mary lived in a Fifth Avenue mansion, rode behind gleaming carriage horses and had lovely clothes.

But all that was simply window dressing. Mary was an unwanted child of an unhappy marriage. Her father had married through a family "arrangement" when he was middleaged; his young wife was an embittered, sharp-tongued and domineering woman. Both Mary and her younger brother, Ellis, were kept secluded; she was not allowed to play with boys, and even when she was attending the Gardner School for young ladies, she had to hurry home immediately after classes.

Lonely Millionaire. She was 35 when her mother died; she had never had a beau, was so painfully shy that she would hide in a bedroom when her cousin, Hollis Gale, came to visit. She and her brother had been kept under their mother's thumb in a suite in the Buckingham Hotel for years; though they inherited millions they stayed on in the familiar rooms.

In 1922, when Mary was 46, the Buckingham was torn down. Brother & sister moved to a seven-room, $30-a-day suite at the faintly seedy Hotel Seymour on West 45th Street. The brother died in 1925. Mary went out seldom after that--usually only around the corner to the ancient, prim Fifth Avenue Bank where she kept a checking account of $1,000,000. In 1927 Mary shut herself into her suite for good.

She kept her door bolted. She allowed her banker and her lawyer to call only at long intervals. On rare occasions she received her cousin Hollis Gale--usually asking him to bring a collection of menus from other hotels to be sure the Seymour was not cheating her on the prices of meals. Though she loved beef and cheese she felt they were too expensive, and never ordered them; a bellboy brought one meal a day to her suite. She refused to let anyone see her sign her name, and never made a will.

She took no newspapers, had no radio. She got her whole view of the changing world from the hotel windows over one traffic-jammed Manhattan street. She wore clothes designed in 1900. When the Seymour was modernized ten years ago she refused to let decorators enter her rooms; they went untouched. Finally, in the summer of 1948, Mary grew ill. Hotel employees and a doctor invaded her suite, found her lying amid squalor.

Friendly Pillow. The walls of her rooms were worn down to the bricks; in 23 years upholstery had become infested with beetles, maggots and moths. Hairpins were found rusted into her hair; she had not washed it for 15 years. On her deathbed, the 72-year-old recluse told a nurse stories of her bitter childhood: of running to her mother when she was hurt, of being rebuffed, and then of seeking out her grandmother and crying "Nobody loves me." Her grandmother had replied coldly, "Nobody loves a crybaby." "After that," said the dying old woman, "I knew my only friend was my pillow."

Though she had been lonely and unloved in life, more than 200 people came forward after her death to claim her $5,000,000 fortune. Two men insisted that they were her illegitimate sons. Manhattan courts spent almost a year and a half in sorting out improper claims and weighing evidence. To disprove the claims, lawyers produced a family tree on a chart 32 feet long. Last week her estate was award ed to her cousin, Hollis Gale, her closest of kin, and one of the few people who had ever tried to befriend her.

Gale is a quiet, 58-year-old sales executive, who was in China as a Red Cross director in 1940, and was captured by the Japanese during World War II. After inheriting Mary's long-hoarded money, he said he hoped with it "in some small way" to help improve U.S. foreign relations. He also resolved to erect a monument on the grave of the recluse's mother. Unforgiving Mary Bullock Powers had left it unmarked for 37 years.

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