The Unfit Heiress

Bulbs flashed as the socialite, sporting rouge and fur, took her seat alongside her attorney, who had called a press conference in his San Francisco office. The image of the solemn-faced, perfectly coiffed twenty-one-year-old would appear in newspapers across the country. Some, like the New York Times, would print nearly fifty stories detailing the woman’s private life—her childhood, romantic relationships, spending habits, even the lingerie she was wearing. (It was imported from France.) It was January 1936, and heiress Ann Cooper Hewitt was suing her mother, Maryon Cooper Hewitt, in court for half a million dollars. The plaintiff claimed that her mother paid two doctors to “unsex” her during a scheduled appendectomy in order to deprive her of an inheritance from her millionaire father’s estate.

Ann’s father was Peter Cooper Hewitt, whose invention of the mercury-vapor lamp in 1901 earned him more than $1 million. 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. Cooper was behind a slew of inventions in the nineteenth century, including gelatin dessert and the steam locomotive. 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’s children and grandchildren dutifully expanded the family wealth with their own business enterprises. When Ann’s father died in 1921, his estate was worth over $4 million (the equivalent of $59 million today).

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. The will also stipulated that Ann’s share reverted back to her mother if she died childless. Knowing this, Ann asserted in her civil complaint, her mother had secretly paid two California doctors to remove her fallopian tubes. Mrs. 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.

The plot was set in motion in August 1934, when Ann and her mother were at the Coronado beachside resort outside San Diego. Over lunch, Ann talked of becoming an adult and finding a man to marry when she was suddenly struck with stomach pains. Their driver rushed them back to San Francisco, where Ann’s private physician, Dr. Tilton Tillman, was waiting for her at Dante Sanatorium on Broadway. “Well, Ann, I understand you have appendicitis,” said Tillman, upon her arrival at the hospital.

According to the plaintiff, Tillman never examined her abdomen. 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?

“I didn’t pay much attention or know what it was about,” Ann recalled at the press conference. “Four days later, I returned to the hospital for my appendectomy, which was performed by Dr. Samuel Boyd. No one told me anything else.”

The heiress reported that she stayed at the hospital for several weeks to recover from the procedure. During this time, she overheard a few staff members asking her nurse how the “idiot patient” was doing. Ann also heard her nurse make several phone calls to Dr. Tillman assuring him that his patient “didn’t suspect a thing.”

“I learned then that my mother and Dr. Tillman had told everyone that I was a mental case,” Ann testified. “I discovered that I had undergone a salpingectomy, having my tubes removed along with my appendix.”

After her discharge, she went home and was kept a prisoner in her room. “My mother made me act as my own maid,” Ann claimed. “Not one housekeeper entered my room during my convalescence. I was forced to live with little more than the bare necessities or comforts of a poorhouse waif.”

When a reporter asked what she meant by the second statement, Ann explained that the telephone and reading lamp had been removed from her room. She couldn’t communicate with anyone or even read the newspaper after dusk—not that one had been delivered to her. At mealtime, she’d hear a knock at the door and open it to find a maid holding some paltry, unappealing dish. Perhaps a biscuit without butter or jam, or a cold leg of chicken with a few lifeless spears of asparagus. The maid would wait for her to take the plate and then re-lock the door behind her.

The reporter hurried to record these details. Only in fiction did people encounter little rich girls imprisoned and made to live a miserly existence.

The Little Princess treatment was not new, the young heiress told reporters. “I was locked up all the time,” she said. “In fact, as a baby, I was put in a crib with very tall sides. That was so I couldn’t climb out of it. We were living in Paris then.” The heiress recalled how her father, who was not yet married to her mother at the time, would visit the apartment and pick her up. “He was the only one who ever let me out of that cage. My mother never came near me. The maid would come and dress me in the morning, then leave me there for the day. I would often go to sleep in my clothes.”

“So you remember your father?” one journalist inquired. “What was he like?”

“I remember my father very well,” said Ann. “He was one of the few precious gifts of my life. He was a tall man, very kind and gentle. I think of him walking beside me, suiting his long gait to mine. It seems to me I spent all my happy times with him. He died when I was seven.”

After her father’s death, Ann related, she hardly ever left their apartment. She was forbidden from making friends or having boyfriends when she grew older. “Mother didn’t have one spark of affection for me, and she refused to permit others who did. She always called me an ‘imbecile’ and an ‘ugly duckling.’ She hated my buck teeth and my humped shoulders. And the way my eyes cross when I am tired. She sometimes struck me when she noticed my eyes were going.”

The reporters looked around in disbelief. They knew wealthy women weren’t keen on parenting, but Ann’s claims were truly extraordinary. What would Maryon have to say for herself?

Ann revealed a small scar on her forehead, where she claimed to have been cut with a wineglass. She said her mother had smashed a glass of Cabernet over her head one evening, when a gentleman did not appear for a dinner date with the two of them. “She blamed me whenever things didn’t work out with a man.”

The slight, ninety-pound heiress also revealed a burn on her forearm, where she claimed her mother had extinguished a cigarette. “That was for telling her I didn’t like one of her suitors.”

Even had it not been for Ann’s claims of abuse, some present might have turned against her mother, believing that female smoking was a sign of modern women’s depravity. Men could withstand the habit; but in women’s bodies, cigarette smoke compromised judgment, inflamed the imagination, and unleashed all sorts of profane desires. Women knew this and still puffed away.

Ann contended that, for many years of her life, she didn’t realize that her situation was extraordinary. “I thought all mothers treated their daughters the way mine treated me. Until I went to school, I thought that was the usual way people behaved.”

“You mean you’ve never had anyone else to love you? Besides your father?” a reporter asked.

“Well, most of the men my mother married were kind to me. I suppose that’s one of the few things she has done for me—seen that I had nice stepfathers,” said Ann. “I’ve also had a few people paid to take care of me who were kind. I did have this one maid, Nini, who was especially affectionate. My father hired her. She was there the night he died and comforted me when Mother sent me away from his bed.”

“Did any of the help mistreat you?” this same reporter pressed. “Perhaps because your mother told them to?”

“No one ever struck me like Mother did. Though there was one maid in Paris, Eugenie, who used to follow along when my father would take me around the city. Every time I’d turn around, she’d make faces and obscene gestures at me.”

“Why would she do such a thing?”

“I don’t know,” said Ann. “Probably because she was devoted to Mother. She used to clean my mother’s shoes with her fur coats. Ordinary rags weren’t good enough, she said.”

“Do you believe your mother hatched a plot to kill you?” another reporter asked. “Your suit claims your mother would benefit if you died without any children. But one would expect your mother to die before you. How do you explain this?”

Ann froze for a moment, then bowed her head to wipe a tear from her cheek. Her attorney, Russell P. Tyler, put his hand on her shoulder and answered the question for her. “Mrs. Cooper Hewitt has always said that her daughter is sickly,” he explained. “She has also refused to acknowledge her own aging. The woman probably presumed her life expectancy exceeded her daughter’s.”

The reporter looked to Ann to corroborate this, but the heiress refused to look up. Tyler added, “My client hasn’t seen her mother since the day she turned twenty-one. As soon as she came of age, she demanded to live independently. She contacted me to set her up financially, and that’s when I learned of this whole tragedy.”

“Before you discovered you were sterilized, had you planned to marry?” someone else asked.

“No,” Ann replied, finally raising her head.

“What you mean to say, Ann,” said Tyler, “is that you had no specific man in mind. But you did hope to marry someone someday, didn’t you?”

“Yes, that’s right,” said the heiress. “But I don’t know if anyone will have me now.”

Wanting to lighten the mood—and also to get a sense of the young woman’s intellect—another correspondent asked what book Ann was currently reading. The heiress told him that she was enjoying a title by a contemporary of William Thackeray. “It’s called Ten Thousand a-Year,” she said. “I like it so well because of the sarcasm in it. It just reveals to you what the world really is.”

“Have you read Voltaire?” the man asked.

“I peeked into Voltaire and found him insipid,” Ann replied. “One author I love is Arthur Conan Doyle. He is so real.”

“Have you read his ghost stories?”

“Yes,” said Ann.

“Do you believe them?” The other journalists looked up with raised eyebrows.

“Of course not,” Ann disappointed. “I don’t read them to believe in them. I just read them.”

“What will you do with the money if you’re awarded it?” the same reporter pressed. “Take a holiday? Buy a new wardrobe?” The fur on Ann’s coat was matted. Shortly after leaving her mother’s home with a single trunk, the heiress had purchased the coat for $1 from a laundress, along with a few other items patrons had neglected to retrieve. Ann had since re-acquired many of her belongings, but Tyler had instructed her to dress modestly. He didn’t want people to be distracted by her fancy clothes.

Before Ann could answer, Tyler interrupted to say that such a question was irrelevant and inappropriate. Ann was pursuing this lawsuit to protect others, not because the money was needed or wanted. The attorney explained that, in addition to sterilizing her daughter, Maryon had squandered hundreds of thousands of dollars from Ann’s trust fund at gambling resorts across the world, including the Villa d’Este in Italy, the Deauville in France, and the Monte Carlo in Mexico. This showed clear disregard for her daughter’s well-being, and Mrs. Cooper Hewitt now needed to compensate her daughter for the losses.

Ann elaborated that her mother had been gambling for as long as she could remember. “Mother always left me in the hotel suite with a maid when she went downstairs to roll the dice,” she recalled. “I once told her, ‘No, I’m not staying here another night. I want to come with you.’ She promised me a nice moleskin coat if I stayed. I said, ‘I don’t want that,’ and she called me a brat and slammed the door in my face.”

According to Ann, her mother promised many gifts that she never received—a rocking horse, a dollhouse, a baby pram. This was despite the fact that Maryon often made money from gambling with her daughter’s inheritance. “I always woke up when she came back to the suite, usually around two or three in the morning. If she’d done well, she’d turn on all the lights and begin to count her money, saying how clever she was.”

“And if she lost?” Ann’s attorney asked for the benefit of reporters. “What then?”

“Then she would be very angry. She’d turn over the furniture and break things. She once called her broker in the middle of the night and threatened to kill him if he didn’t make better trades. Mother always assumed he made bad deals to spite her. She suspected many people in her life of conspiring against her.”

In connection with her civil suit, Ann had demanded a full accounting of her mother’s spending for the last ten years. Though this accounting had not yet been produced, her attorney indicated that the court would be appalled by the handling of the money bequeathed to her from the Cooper family trust.

Tyler explained to the reporters present that a lawsuit was his client’s only recourse—and that lawsuit needed to be filed hastily. The statute of limitations for filing a complaint related to malpractice was one year.

The reporters peppered the attorney with questions. When these ended, Ann powdered her nose and readied herself for the cameramen again. She endured over one hundred flashes of light, prompting one photographer to observe that she couldn’t be feebleminded—she didn’t have a fit. A few approached to say how awfully sorry they were about what happened. One told her she had really lovely blue eyes. Another gave her his card, in case she wanted to talk off the record.

Ann went home feeling satisfied. After months of fretting, she’d finally told her story, and people were horrified to learn what she’d endured. It was plain to them that Maryon, not she, was the one unfit to be a mother. Ann figured it wouldn’t be long before Maryon agreed to settle the lawsuit, allowing her to move on with her life.

The heiress had no idea that her mother would respond by telling the court—and the world—about Ann’s own private life, saying Ann had given her no choice. Nor did she have a clue how dramatically her lawsuit would change her life and those of untold numbers of women for decades to come. What seemed to her a personal matter to be settled by the courts would spark a nationwide debate on the changing nature of womanhood, the purpose of sexuality, and the merits of allowing doctors to decide who did and didn’t reproduce.