Empty Mansions (36 page)

After breakfast, it was time for Huguette’s morning walk, three or four times around the room. She and Hadassah called this their “
walk in Central Park.” Then it was personal time for Huguette. She made phone calls on her Princess telephone with the lighted dial, calling Madame Pierre sometimes three to five times a day. “
Mrs. Clark liked to speak French with my grandmother,” said Suzanne’s granddaughter Kati Despretz Cruz, “because she didn’t want her nurses to understand what they were talking about.”

Huguette called her coordinator of art projects, Caterina Marsh, in California to make changes in a Japanese castle. She read
The New York Times
and followed the financial markets on CNN. “
She would watch the stock,” said one of the night nurses, Primrose Mohiuddin, “and she would say to me, ‘Oh, NASDAQ has gone down. That’s terrible!’ ” She paid particular attention to news of presidents and royalty. “
When President Clinton was in trouble,” her assistant Chris Sattler said, “she was asking Mrs. Pierre and me about the Monica Lewinsky thing. She didn’t get it, and she wanted us to explain it to her. And we sort of let it go, if you know what I mean.”

She kept a few personal items in shopping bags on the floor by the window. Her address book and recent correspondence. A deck of cards.

Dr. Singman taught her solitaire and bought her a book of rules of card games, which she used to learn many variations. Because Huguette kept information about herself tightly controlled, on a need-to-know basis, Dr. Singman knew little of her art projects and her correspondence
with friends in France. To his view, solitaire was her main activity. “
She was a wiz,” he said. “She could shuffle a deck like I haven’t seen anybody except in a gambling house.”

She no longer painted but would watch her videotapes of cartoons, studying the animation and enjoying the stories. She liked to make flip books of still images captured from videotapes, so she could see the animated stories in her hands. Her favorite cartoons were
The Flintstones
,
The Jetsons
,
The Smurfs
, and a Japanese series called
Maya the Bee
. These cartoons came in particularly handy when Huguette tired of a conversation with a doctor or hospital official. She’d start up
The Smurfs
as if to say,
No, I’ve made up my mind
.

And she would look at her photo albums, which contained snapshots from her early days with her father, mother, and sister. She’d show her nurses and doctors the photos: Andrée on a bicycle. Huguette on a horse at château de Petit-Bourg outside Paris. (She told them how the Germans had burned the house down.) The girls visiting their father’s copper mine in Butte. One of herself at her First Communion, and also surrounded by dolls on the porch of her father’s first mansion, in Butte, where she remembered the pansies on the stoop. Anna smiling as she sat on a park bench during a summer sojourn in Greenwich, Connecticut. Huguette’s Aunt Amelia, her mother’s sister, standing on the grand marble staircase at the old Clark mansion on Fifth Avenue. The rooms and gardens at Bellosguardo. Anna and W.A. on the beach at Trouville, laughing. Little Huguette in her Indian costume and headdress, hugging her father.

She would talk, Hadassah said, mostly about “
her dear father, her dear mother, her dear sister, Aunt Amelia.” Huguette liked to tell the nurses about the summers at the beach in Trouville, how her father built the beautiful Columbia Gardens so the people of Butte could have something to enjoy, how Duke Kahanamoku carried her on his shoulders on a surfboard. And she would share somberly how her sister had died on the trip to Maine. “She talked dearly about that,” Hadassah said. “Talked all the time about her sister and parents. Yes, that affected her very much.”

Huguette’s eyesight had declined, but she was able to read with eyeglasses and then a magnifying glass until past age one hundred. Her
hearing was poor in the right ear, but she could hear well out of her left if one talked right at it, and she refused a hearing aid. She didn’t deny that her hearing was poor, but she didn’t want anything put into her ears, nothing like her mother’s primitive squawk box. Hadassah bought a telephone with big numbers and adjustable volume, but Huguette refused to use it, saying she could hear fine with the regular phone.

Doctors and nurses described Huguette as a woman who knew her own mind. “
She was remarkably clear,” said Karen Gottlieb, a floor nurse who brought her warm milk at bedtime. “Clear in her wants, and things she didn’t want. Yes meant yes, and no meant no.” Gottlieb said that she never saw any family try to visit, that Huguette’s real family seemed to be Hadassah.

The regular hospital staff rarely saw Huguette. One exception was in 2000, when Hadassah herself was in the hospital for back surgery. Huguette arranged for Hadassah to be in a room just down the hall, two or three doors away. Huguette then went to visit Hadassah, dressing up in street clothes and walking down the hall. She wore her favorite Daniel Green shoes.

“
That’s one day everybody in the floor almost dropped dead,” Hadassah said. “They saw Madame coming out of the door with heel shoes.”

• • •

Hadassah described Huguette as “
a beautiful lady. Very loving. Very respectful. Love people. Very refined lady. Very cultured. Good heart—good soul and good heart. Never hurt anybody. Very, very generous, Madame.”

Dr. Singman said he saw that Hadassah and Huguette were very close. “
Hadassah was very good to her and was a good nurse for her and worked hard with her.”

Huguette’s first question in the morning would be “When is Hadassah coming?” She would call nearly every night to make sure Hadassah got home safely and to be reassured that Hadassah would be coming in the next day. Sometimes she’d call just as Hadassah got home, and the answering machine would pick up first. Here is a recording from about 2007, when Huguette was 101. We hear Huguette’s sweet, high-pitched
French, and Hadassah’s Filipino accent, shouting to make sure she is heard.

A REASONABLE PRICE
 

H
UGUETTE KEPT HER LOCATION SECRET
for nearly twenty years, never telling any relative or anyone outside her inner circle that she was in the hospital. All of her outgoing correspondence showed 907 Fifth Avenue as her return address.

Though she was no longer living in Apartment 8W, Huguette set to work remodeling it—not to modernize it, but to furnish it so it looked more like her old apartment, 12W. Her main focus was on making her bedroom identical to her mother’s old bedroon from the 1920s, which remained undisturbed in the apartment upstairs.

For fifty dollars in tips, she could easily have gotten the doormen to carry the bedroom furniture from the twelfth floor to the eighth. But then, well, the furniture would no longer be in 12W.

Instead,
Huguette approached a French furniture company, the renowned Pernault Workshops, with a request that it find original French pieces of the Louis XV period. Yes, the company explained, it might be able to find matching furniture, but the cost would be “staggering.” A rolltop desk in the Louis XV style could cost 10 million francs, or about $1.8 million. An alternative plan was offered by Pernault, one that could be accomplished for “a reasonable price.” It could make reproductions. Huguette agreed.

The invoices from 1991–92 show the enormous expenditures for “the making and delivering of the copies of your own furniture.” For a Louis XV dressing table with three oval mirrors, a three-drawer commode table, two bedside tables, and a rolltop desk, all in solid oak, lavishly engraved and gilded, with floral inlaid wood and bronze trim, Mrs. Huguette M. Clark paid 2,497,000 francs, or $445,893. And those are 1991 dollars, equal to nearly $800,000 today.

This was merely the beginning. For her bedroom, she ordered green silk draperies and a sumptuous green silk damask bedspread with matching cover for a bolster pillow, in a pattern showing Japanese musicians, just like her mother’s. These items cost 897,000 francs, or $160,178. The
Louis XV mantelpiece in the bedroom of Apartment 12W was removed, copied, and reattached, with the copy installed in Apartment 8W.

All told, over three years, she spent $4.3 million on the renovation, equal to more than $7 million today. Without updating the bathrooms or kitchens.

For nearly two decades, you could walk into the bedrooms of 12W and 8W, both overlooking the corner of Fifth Avenue and Seventy-Second Street, and see the same oak furniture, the same elaborate mantel, the same luxurious green silk damask bedspread. Aside from a slight difference in the placement of the doors and the radio cabinet in the closet, you couldn’t begin to guess what floor you were on.

During that time, Huguette never spent a night there, never walked into either bedroom, seeing the results of the renovation only in photographs brought to her hospital room.

CHRIS
 

H
UGUETTE
, who could have anything money could buy, had found one of the keys to true contentment: a personal assistant to help with her art projects and hobbies. Chris Sattler was Huguette’s greatest luxury. With an oval door-knocker beard and the sturdy build of a linebacker, the father of two young daughters spent his late forties and his fifties arranging Huguette’s dolls.

The son of a family that did high-end painting and construction,
Chris first visited her apartment at 907 Fifth Avenue as a volunteer in the 1970s, helping bag three hundred Christmas gifts. He said Huguette ordered the gifts each year from Au Nain Bleu and then had them delivered, anonymously, to an orphanage in Greenwich Village. In the mid-1990s, after Huguette had moved into the hospital, Madame Pierre arranged for Chris to create an inventory of everything in Huguette’s apartments. In 2000, Huguette called to offer him a full-time job as her personal assistant.

Every workday for a dozen years, Chris began his morning by walking through each room of Huguette’s three apartments at 907 Fifth Avenue. With forty-two rooms, not counting the bathrooms, that was quite a chore. The daily walk was necessary, especially in the twelfth-floor dining room, where a portrait of a rose-cheeked girl dressed in a striped shirt with a bow tie and holding a parasol was signed “Renoir.” Across from it hung one of Monet’s Water Lilies, which hadn’t been seen in public since Huguette bought it in 1930. Beside the fireplace was another Monet, of poplar trees by the Epte River. This wasn’t the best place to keep the paintings, because old pipes up on the roof frequently leaked.

The median size of a new home in the United States in 2010 was 2,169 square feet. Huguette had 15,000 square feet that she used as a warehouse, a lending library for her projects.

Only a few rooms were still set up as Huguette had left them, with furniture arranged for regular occupancy: the dining rooms in both
apartments, her mother’s bedroom in 12W, and Huguette’s identical bedroom in 8W.

To keep Huguette’s documents in order, Chris found a use for Huguette’s third apartment, 8E, which she bought in 1963, protecting her borders so she had no neighbors on the eighth floor. (She was preparing to move down to her mother’s old apartment.) But what to do with another five thousand square feet, the size of a basketball court? Chris sorted her financial records, using the unused servants’ bedrooms for different years.

In 12W, the living room, with its dark Jacobean wood walls and wood beam ceiling, was filled with rows of simple wooden bookcases with floor-to-ceiling shelves full of items from Japan. Each shelf was carefully labeled and numbered: musical instruments, kimonos, wigs, hair ornaments, traditional footwear, fans, silk costumes, butterflies, art books. A large painting of a geisha with a dragonfly hairpin was hidden behind a three-part Japanese screen with dragons and swans. A Japanese castle with a moat sat on a table by the Steinway grand piano.