“Not one housekeeper entered my room during my convalescence. “My mother made me act as my own maid,” Ann claimed. Bettmann // Getty ImagesĪfter her discharge, she went home and was kept a prisoner in her room. “I didn’t pay much attention or know what it was about,” Ann recalled at the press conference.Īnn Cooper Hewitt, the subject of the new biography Unfit Heiress, on the witness stand during her 1936 trial.
Instead, he led her to another room, where an alienist (an early-twentieth-century term for a psychologist) named Mary Scally began to ask her civics questions: Why did the Pilgrims come to America? What is the duration of a presidential term? What is the longest river in the United States? When was the Battle of Hastings fought? “Well, Ann, I understand you have appendicitis,” said Tillman, upon her arrival at the hospital.Īccording to the plaintiff, Tillman never examined her abdomen. Tilton Tillman, was waiting for her at Dante Sanatorium on Broadway.
#ANNE SLATER SOCIALITE BIOGRAPHY DRIVER#
Their driver rushed them back to San Francisco, where Ann’s private physician, Dr. Over lunch, Ann talked of becoming an adult and finding a man to marry when she was suddenly struck with stomach pains. The plot was set in motion in August 1934, when Ann and her mother were at the Coronado beachside resort outside San Diego. In 1936, heiress Ann Cooper Hewitt sued her mother, Maryon Cooper Hewitt, claiming she had arranged for Ann to be sterilized without her consent. Cooper Hewitt had done this with money obtained from Ann’s trust fund eleven months before her twenty-first birthday-the point at which the woman would have no further say in her daughter’s medical care. Knowing this, Ann asserted in her civil complaint, her mother had secretly paid two California doctors to remove her fallopian tubes. The will also stipulated that Ann’s share reverted back to her mother if she died childless. Peter Cooper Hewitt’s will stipulated that two-thirds of his estate was to go to Ann and one-third to his wife, Ann’s mother, after his death. When Ann’s father died in 1921, his estate was worth over $4 million (the equivalent of $59 million today). Cooper’s children and grandchildren dutifully expanded the family wealth with their own business enterprises. His ingenuity, coupled with investments in real estate, railroads, and the insurance industry, made him one of the richest men in New York City before his death in 1883.
Cooper was behind a slew of inventions in the nineteenth century, including gelatin dessert and the steam locomotive.
The money from this creation supplemented an already sizable bank account, as Ann’s father was also the grandson of an even more famous engineer-Peter Cooper. Bettmann // Getty ImagesĪnn’s father was Peter Cooper Hewitt, whose invention of the mercury-vapor lamp in 1901 earned him more than $1 million. Ann Cooper Hewitt, pictured here in 1936, is the subject of the new biography The Unfit Heiress, out now.
0 kommentar(er)
