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Green Ways. After 1910, Colonel Green spent more & more time away from Texas tending to his own scattered financial interests and those of his mother. In 1917, after his mother's death, he married redheaded Mabel Harlow, two years his junior, and long his close friend, in Chicago, and then built a fortress-like, 100-room mansion on Buzzards Bay at South Dartmouth, Mass. He maintained a palatial retreat on Star Island near Miami Beach and a penthouse atop the swank Sherry-Netherlands Hotel in Manhattan. He was at Lake Placid for his health last June. At the time of his death he had a blank will form in his pocket.
Since Colonel Green's widow could find no executed will, she sent to Texas a lawyer who asked for her appointment as administratrix of the estate at a $1,000,000 fee. Since Colonel Green was a Texan to Texans, this request was granted in ten minutes.
Tall, sharp-nosed, bespectacled Mrs. Wilks, now 66, found an old will of her brother's in the offices of Green Estates, Inc. at No. 111 Broadway in Manhattan. Drawn in Texas in 1908—nine years before his marriage — the 180-word document left Colonel Green's entire estate to Mother Hetty, or in case of her death, to Sister Hetty." This will Mrs. Wilks filed for probate in the Surrogate Court of Essex County, N. Y. in which Lake Placid is located. Represented by the potent Manhattan law "firm of Milbank, Tweed, Hope & Webb, Sister Hetty said that her brother had not been a resident of New York, but owned property there.
Mrs. Green's Pepper. Lines were drawn then & there between widow and sister, never good friends, for a legal fight that promises to be historic. To his little office above a grocery store in small Port Henry (pop. 2,040) came a bigger estate case than Surrogate Harry E. Owen had ever thought of in his 20 years on the bench. As administrator he appointed Essex County's youthful District Attorney, bulky, bespectacled Thomas W. McDonald.
Widow Green's lawyers, headed by one-time U. S. Senator George Wharton Pepper of Pennsylvania, objected to the probate on general grounds that the 1908 document was not a last will & testament. Sister Hetty's counsel moved to dismiss the objections, alleging Mrs. Green was no interested party in the probate because of a prenuptial agreement in which she waived dower rights for $1,500 per month for life.
Uberrima Fides. Widow Green's lawyers answered that the prenuptial agreement is not valid because 1) it was not properly executed; 2) under Texas law such a pact is against public policy of the State; 3) circumstances which attended the signing render it invalid. Under the doctrine of uberrima fides (utmost good faith) common law presumes that there is a relationship of confidence between the parties entering into such an agreement and there must be the fullest disclosure by the pact's proponent of its nature and legal effect. Widow Green told Surrogate Owen at an initial probate hearing last autumn that she did not know what she was doing when she signed away her dower rights, thinking the $18,000-per-annum allowance was just to be pin money.