Empty Mansions (42 page)

Beare remembers telling Fulton, “
I have in hand the very best Strad that will ever be available to you, almost certainly the finest Stradivari that’s not in a museum and certainly the best preserved. This is the last chance you’ll ever have to get a fiddle this great. Are you interested?”

Fulton couldn’t travel then to New York, but he
agreed to buy La Pucelle at the asking price, sight unseen.

There was another hitch. Beare said the confidentiality agreement proposed by Bock was so onerous that not only would it forbid him to disclose whom he had bought the violin from, or even the seller’s gender, but it would prevent him from revealing that he owned the violin at all. He could not play it in the presence of anyone, ever.

Fulton responded that either the violin was for sale or it wasn’t. A less restrictive arrangement was negotiated: Fulton agreed to a ten-year ban on revealing the previous owner.

Beare went to 907 Fifth Avenue to pick up the violin for Fulton. He was allowed in the side service entrance and up the freight elevator to Huguette’s kitchen. And there, on a stainless steel counter, in a leather case, was La Pucelle, with its famous frontpiece of Joan of Arc. Chris Sattler also showed Beare the well-worn Strad that Huguette called her Traveler, explaining that she had kept La Pucelle untouched.

La Pucelle is indeed
an extraordinary instrument, said the acclaimed violinist James Ehnes, who played a sad, sweet tune with a French name, “Salut d’Amour,” for the instrument’s first recording, in 2007. “
It really has an amazing purity of tone,” Ehnes said. “But purity with incredible breadth as well. I think that it’s like a beam of light that is very strong and very wide.… I’ve never seen another violin like it.”

Huguette was disappointed in the selling price. She’d said the violin might be worth $10 million. La Pucelle had cost her $49,500 in 1955, equivalent to about $327,000 in the inflated dollars of 2001. But she was entirely right about keeping it out of the auctions. She received $6 million, at that point a record price for a Strad, multiplying her investment eighteen times.

SHAKEDOWN
 

H
OW TANTALIZING
this eccentric patient was for the leaders of a nonprofit hospital dependent on fund-raising. Here was a woman, well into her nineties, with something more than $300 million, and she was living in their hospital.

The hospital’s doctors and managers could have treated the patient and sent her home, then follow up with a request for a donation. But they allowed her to stay in the hospital for twenty years, repeatedly coming back to her for larger and larger donations. They knew who was living in the darkened hospital room: the girl who could spin straw into gold.

A month into her stay, Dr. Henry Singman alerted the brass at Doctors Hospital that his patient “
was quite wealthy, the scion of a multimillionaire copper industrialist.” When the doctor told Huguette that it was costing him $20,000 to paint his house, a few days later she gave him a check for $20,000. When an air ambulance from Italy cost him $65,000 after he broke his hip, Huguette gave him that amount. Singman proposed to help the hospital develop an “appropriate cultivation approach” to seek donations. When a woman from the development, or fund-raising, staff met with Huguette, Dr. Singman introduced her as a member of the “public relations” staff.

Doctors Hospital soon became part of Beth Israel Medical Center, in 1991, becoming known colloquially as Beth Israel North. The hospital president, Dr. Robert Newman, took the lead in internal discussions about how to persuade Huguette to give the hospital some of the wealth she so obviously was not using. In a memo to the fund-raising staff, he stated bluntly, “
Madame, as you know, is the biggest bucks contributing potential we have ever had.” A specialist in treating addiction and well known for establishing methadone clinics, Dr. Newman started visiting Huguette three months after she checked in.

The hospital worked on Huguette from the classic donor-development playbook.

Step one: research.

At the New York Public Library, officials researched W. A. Clark, trying to estimate how many millions Huguette may have had. From her advisers, the hospital learned that she hadn’t signed a will.

Step two in the playbook: strategic cultivation. Show the donor that you know her and care about her.

Dr. Newman sent Huguette cashmere sweaters, balloons, and gourmet chocolates from Paris. He had lived in Japan for three years, so they had much to discuss, and his wife, who is Japanese, visited Huguette several times. He introduced Huguette to his mother, who was in her nineties and had lived in France for many years.
The mother wrote to Huguette and visited her in the hospital. They watched ice-skating on TV together, as Huguette explained the backstories of the Olympic figure skaters in their princess costumes. Huguette also shared a Smurfs television special with her. “
I kid you not!” Dr. Newman wrote to colleagues. “My mom spent 30 minutes watching the Smurfs celebrate Christmas; she deserves a medal.”

In January 1994, Dr. Newman wrote to Huguette:

Huguette appeared to enjoy the visits by the hospital staff and insisted that they send her photographs of their children and grandchildren. She remembered their names and asked about their activities.

Behind her back, hospital officials made fun of Huguette for her delight in cartoons and dolls. They advised anyone soliciting her to keep the focus on donations,
“even if she changes the subject to Smurfs or
Flintstones.” When she complained that the hospital had included her name on a list of benefactors, piercing her veil of privacy, one hospital official quipped that they should give her “
one Smurf to make amends.”

Step three in the development playbook: solicitation. Make specific appeals based on the donor’s interests. Huguette seemed to take the most interest in making gifts that honored her doctors. When she gave $300,000 for a cardiac lab, the hospital put Dr. Singman’s name on it in appreciation for helping raise the money from his patient. She gave $80,000 to the hospital as a tribute to both Dr. Singman and her surgeon, Dr. Jack Rudick. In her first decade in the hospital, she gave $940,000.

Hospital leaders sought advice from Dr. Rudick, who urged them to make larger, specific requests, because
“she has no ‘concept’ of money.”

Dr. Rudick followed his own advice, borrowing $1 million from his patient. Though he signed promissory notes agreeing to pay the money back with interest,
he made no payments. When Rudick asked for another $500,000, he told Huguette he wouldn’t be able to continue as her doctor otherwise. Her attorney, Bock, called this “almost blackmail,” warning Huguette that Dr. Rudick was misleading her by claiming that he needed the money to open an office in the city, when in fact he was retiring. She was not resentful, signing documents forgiving his loans entirely.
Dr. Rudick denied this account, saying he never misled Huguette or even asked her for the money. He said that he and Huguette agreed from the beginning that the $1 million was actually a gift, though it was described as a loan in the documents.

Her nurse, Hadassah Peri, encouraged Huguette to make gifts to the hospital. The hospital waived some of
Hadassah’s fees when she had back surgery.

Hospital officials said they had no idea that Huguette was giving gifts to her doctors or nurses. Internal emails show that gifts to Hadassah, who was not a hospital employee, were discussed at a 1998 meeting in the office of the board chairman, shipbuilding tycoon Morton Hyman.

Hospital correspondence shows that officials were disappointed with their own results. “
I think her gifts,” Dr. Newman said, “considering what she could have given, considering what other people had given, … 
had been relatively, relatively modest.” He lamented in an email to fund-raising staff, “
Without knocking her past gifts, the potential has been overwhelmingly unrealized.”

• • •

Hospital officials knew from Huguette’s advisers that she had not signed a will. Dr. Newman urged her to sign one, then sent his mother to share with her “
the great joy and spiritual satisfaction of preparing her will.”

Hospital officials considered having their legal department scope out what would happen to Huguette’s money at her death if she died without a will. There was a problem, however. One official raised in a memo the fear that if the hospital leaders asked for advice from their own lawyers, “
they might push the question of whether she should even be living in the hospital.”

Indeed,
Huguette was hidden away from hospital inspectors, according to two former employees at Doctors Hospital, a nurse and a social worker.
The Joint Commission, which accredits hospitals, made regular visits to Beth Israel to ensure it met standards. One of its standard investigative techniques was to choose a “tracer” patient, going through all of a patient’s file, evaluating each department that had worked on that patient’s case. Patients with long stays might attract particular attention, as Huguette did on at least one occasion. With more than twenty thousand pages of medical records, Huguette would have been the ultimate tracer. The nurse and social worker said that her name was left off the daily patient census and they were told to hide her file when inspectors came. In later years, every new page in her hospital chart was stamped with an admission date of January 1, 2003, which was nearly twelve years after her actual date of admission. As one fund-raising official noted in the file, “
If we were forced to ‘evict’ her, we’d certainly have no hope of any support.”

The hospital
encountered financial difficulties, spurred on by a couple of high-profile malpractice cases in obstetrics. By 1995, Moody’s Investors Service had lowered the hospital company’s bond rating, and in 2000 dropped the rating again as its liquidity reached “an extremely low level,” with only six days’ worth of cash on hand. Beth Israel in 1997 became part of a hospital super-company, Continuum Health Partners,
with Dr. Newman the CEO over Beth Israel, as well as St. Luke’s-Roosevelt and the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary.

Huguette came to the hospital’s rescue. In 2000, when Hyman asked her for a donation, she decided to
give a painting by Edouard Manet,
Peonies in a Bottle
. Sotheby’s appraised it at $6 million, and she instructed Chris Sattler to deliver it to Dr. Newman’s apartment, insisting as always that her gift be anonymous. Yet the hospital was foiled again. Only $3.5 million was bid at Christie’s in November 2000, including the commission for the auction house; the hospital declined to sell it at that price.

In Huguette’s hospital room, Dr. Newman discussed with her what to do with the painting. It was mid-November 2000, as the disputed presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore remained in doubt. Huguette lamented the “
terribly confused political situation,” telling Dr. Newman she was strongly for Gore. (She was a Democrat, just like her father, though in the intervening years the Republicans and Democrats had switched sides on nearly every political issue.) She also spoke of the volatile situation in the stock market, which was falling, and of the generally poor results in art auctions. The Picasso that had recently sold for $50 million, she told Dr. Newman, was “ugly.” When he stressed that the hospital needed the money from the Manet painting, Huguette urged him to wait until the political situation resolved and to see what the market was doing before making any decisions. He said waiting could cost the hospital money if art prices continued to decline.