Empty Mansions (34 page)

In the same period,
she expanded her collection of Impressionist paintings, which already included two Renoirs,
In the Roses
and
Girl
with Parasol
, Manet’s
Peonies
, the Degas
Dancer Making Points
, and two by Monet, a Water Lilies and
Poplars on the Epte
. She added a third Renoir, the spectacular
Girls Playing Battledore and Shuttlecock
, depicting fashionable young women playing badminton in the French countryside: vivid blue and yellow against a green countryside. No doubt she had seen it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1937, when she had lent one of her own paintings to the museum for a Renoir show. It has many figures (similar to
The Bathers
) and is from his greatest period: The dealers call it a perfect Renoir. She asked the Knoedler gallery to send it over, and after a week she decided to keep it, paying the list price of $125,000.

Not all her fine paintings were French. She owned two by the American painter John Singer Sargent: In
Rooftops of Capri
, a young woman dances the tarantella to entice an older man, and in
Girl Fishing at San Vigilio
, the fisherwoman seems far overdressed for the occasion.

Huguette also bought Apartment 12W, which was her own residence, and also 8W, her mother’s, as the building at 907 Fifth Avenue converted from rentals to co-op apartments at the end of 1955. She paid less than $120,000 for the pair, or about $1 million in today’s dollars.

In each of these purchases, Huguette proved to be a shrewd investor.

“DID YOU EVER REPLACE SNOOPY?”
 

T
HROUGH ALL THE YEARS
, among all her secrets, Huguette had kept up a friendship with a man who was about her age and living in France, a man other than Etienne. She was not one to let things go, not one to end an old friendship.

In the spring of 1964, she sent this friend a telegram at his home on the French Riviera, consoling him on a loss:

This Bill was her former husband. Though they couldn’t make it through the honeymoon, the former Mr. and Mrs. William Gower carried on an affectionate correspondence for decades.

Two years after Huguette divorced him, Bill Gower remarried, choosing in 1932 another daughter of a wealthy politician from the western states. Constance Toulmin was the child of George White Baxter, former territorial governor of Wyoming. She already had two failed marriages. Bill and Constance had no children together, but they raised her daughter from an earlier marriage, Cynthia, who drove an ambulance in the Second World War. Bill was unable to fight in that war, having developed an awkward gait since his track team days, so he put his legal training to work as the American Red Cross delegate to Europe, briefing Churchill and Eisenhower. After the war, Bill ran the Paris office of the company that published
Look
magazine. Here he was in his element, hobnobbing with society figures, including author Somerset Maugham.

“
Everything was sketchy with my uncle,” recalled his niece, Janet Perry. He was a womanizer, a gregarious big talker, irrepressibly lovable. He sent his niece a huge framed photograph of himself, too large to
display, but she put it out on the piano when he came to the New York area to visit. He always had tickets to the newest hit play, a table at the finest restaurant. “He was a huge name-dropper, but he really knew all the people.”

Through all the years after their divorce, Bill and Huguette stayed in touch. He sent her birthday wishes. She kept him up on family news and illnesses. Their warm correspondence shows a relationship completely at odds with the Clark family suggestion that she had been traumatized by her brief marriage.

In February 1964, she checked on his health and suggested he visit her on his next trip to America:

She made plans to meet him a few weeks later, after his arrival at New York’s oldest private club:

She checked on him that August:

And the following year, in 1965, she worried after he took a spill at age sixty:

Bill’s wife, Constance, had died in 1951, and he retired in 1960 to the coastal resort town of
Antibes on the French Riviera. He owned a classic, antique-stuffed Mediterranean house, which he called La Sarrazine. His yard had a huge mirror at one end to make the estate look twice as large.

Huguette wrote checks to Bill, $3,000 at a time, well into the 1970s.
He died of consumption, or pulmonary tuberculosis, in December 1976 in Antibes, at age seventy-one. His ashes were buried beside his parents in North Elba Cemetery outside Lake Placid, New York, in a shady spot with
a mossy headstone.

Even until her death, eighty-three years after their brief marriage, Huguette still had in her apartment her Cartier gold wedding band with its thirty-two small diamonds, as well as her Tiffany wedding presents with the monogram “H.C.G.”

SPOOKY
 

T
HOUGH SHE NOW OWNED
a country house in Connecticut, in addition to her apartments in New York and the California estate, Bellosguardo, Huguette’s staff was dwindling. As old employees died or retired, she didn’t hire new ones. She apparently wasn’t comfortable interviewing new people. After her mother died, and then her Aunt Pauline, who had also resided at 907 Fifth Avenue, Huguette was the only resident of the forty rooms there.

One of her last full-time caretakers,
Delia Healey, was an Irish immigrant six years older than Huguette. During the 1960s until the late 1970s, Delia’s main duties were threefold.

She brought in fresh bananas every morning and made Huguette’s lunch, usually crackers with sardines from a can.

She looked after Huguette’s collection of French dolls, carefully washing and ironing their clothes. She also ran out to buy new dolls as soon as they became available at FAO Schwarz.

She managed the recording of TV shows for Huguette to watch, particularly cartoons, so that Huguette could study the individual frames of animation. (In the 1960s, Huguette kept a library of French films, stored on early reel-to-reel tape, which she studied frame by frame.) Huguette purchased a newfangled Sony video recorder for recording the shows and had it delivered to Delia’s apartment. Delia’s assignment at one point was not only to record but also to transcribe every word of every episode of
The Flintstones
.

Delia’s grandchildren remember Huguette as kind and generous. In 1975, she sent them Home Pong, an early videogame. She also sent them a custom-made dollhouse from Germany, which had exquisite detail, including toilet seats that went up and down and human figures that matched each member of their family. They recalled being surprised, a few weeks later, when Huguette sent the dollhouse back to Germany for repairs, because she said the floors needed to be refinished.

After seventy-nine-year-old Delia became too infirm to take the train
into the city from Larchmont, in Westchester County, Huguette sent a driver in a town car to pick her up every morning. Never at ease with strangers, Huguette was forestalling having to hire someone new. When Delia died in 1980, her family was surprised to learn that Huguette was not an older woman but was actually younger than she.

With no more full-time staff, Huguette called on a circle of part-time helpers.
Out in Yonkers, New York, several evenings a week in the 1980s, the phone would ring at the home of Huguette’s antiques dealer, Robert Samuels. His daughter, Ann Fabrizio, remembers Huguette’s small voice insisting that he come right away to fix some item in her mother’s apartment: an inlaid table that had cracked, a chair that needed to be reupholstered, new cases for the dolls. In twenty-five years of fixing and furnishing her apartments, Samuels never talked face-to-face with her.

In 1970, Huguette had a staff of eight. By 1990, she had
only one part-time maid and a handyman to maintain her forty-two rooms at 907 Fifth Avenue.

Then there was a frightening incident at the apartment. Huguette described a day in the late 1980s when a water delivery boy, or someone pretending to be a delivery boy, came to 8W. Huguette was up in 12W, getting something for one of her art projects. When she came back downstairs, she found the maid locked in the bathroom, with no sign of the delivery boy.

As Huguette described it much later, “
It was spooky.”

MADAME PIERRE
 

H
UGUETTE
C
LARK
had been outliving her doctors.

When the cancers on her face ate away at her lip, nearly causing her to starve in March 1991, it was her friend Suzanne Pierre whom she finally called with an SOS. Suzanne was the wife of Huguette’s longtime doctor, Jules Pierre, but he was quite elderly and no longer seeing patients. After he retired, Huguette had seen Dr. Myron Wright, but he died in 1990. Huguette didn’t find a new doctor, so her skin cancers had gone untreated.

Madame Pierre called Dr. Henry Singman, who was seeing some of her husband’s former patients. The internist that evening discovered Huguette, an “apparition” in her own apartment, and persuaded her to go to the hospital immediately. And that’s how she began her long seclusion, choosing Doctors Hospital because it was near Suzanne’s Upper East Side apartment.