The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (30 page)

But to preserve life as Mommy had created it required allowing strangers into her apartments. In 1973, Neal Sattler, whose family ran a high-end apartment renovation firm, was hired by Robert Samuels to make repairs in Huguette’s three apartments, from installing a new bathroom to replacing a parquet floor that had buckled from a leak. “We would have meetings with her, and we would be in the kitchen,
and she’d be in the hallway, on the other side of the door,” says Neal Sattler. Huguette, simultaneously absent and ever present, was a very involved client to the point of fussing over every detail. “She wanted drawings made to scale—she was very precise,” Neal Sattler says. “She asked me to get an architectural ruler for her. She would come down at night after the workmen had left, look at the tiles.”

But Huguette abruptly stopped using the firm after an unexpected encounter with the workmen. As Neal’s younger brother, Chris Sattler, tells the tale: “The men had worked overtime and they were in the middle of changing, putting on their clothes when she came in. She was a little stunned. She turned around and left.” That night, Robert Samuels received a call from Huguette, who said, “Please have the Sattlers figure out their bill and send it to me. I don’t want them around anymore.” It would be many years before the Sattlers were asked to return.

Her behavior was strange but, in its own way, signified her desire to live forever. Huguette frequently spoke by phone to her California cousin, Anna La Chapelle, who complained of bronchitis and other ailments, underlining that going out in the world was fraught with germs and peril. By staying away from people, talking to them from the other side of doors, Huguette hoped that she would be safe, protected from harm. As a teenager after her sister Andrée’s death, Huguette had learned to be self-sufficient and keep herself company. Her list of “Happy Moments” back then had included the thrill of traveling by boat or train away from New York, but now her biggest voyage was the four-floor trip between her apartments.

There was a rare exception to her no-visitors rule: Helen Garrett, the daughter of Huguette’s Irish maid, Delia Healey, was permitted an audience. “My mom loved her,” recalled Garrett in an e-mail to me. “They talked a lot. Mrs. Clark had never worked a day in her life, and she was fascinated with my mom’s life—always working, having five kids.” In 1973, Huguette had her heart set on acquiring a special doll, and her maid spent a day unsuccessfully searching Manhattan for the prized object. Helen Garrett, then working at the discount store Alexander’s, saw one on display and bought it, and then stopped
by 907 Fifth Avenue to drop it off. “My mom brought the doll to Mrs. Clark and she came into the kitchen to thank me in person,” said Garrett, who remembered that Huguette was wearing a lovely vintage 1940s designer dress. “My mom said I should feel special, ’cause she didn’t come out of her room very often. My mom was preparing her lunch, crackers and sardines still in the can, placed on a silver tray. Mom said she had that for lunch every day.”

But this was a brief interlude before Delia Healey disappeared from Huguette’s life. By 1978, Healey had developed Alzheimer’s and stopped working; she died in January 1980. As Huguette’s household employees—primarily hired by her mother—retired or died, she did not replace most of them and did not want to engage directly with newcomers. One maid later confided to decorator Robert Samuels that she had worked for Huguette for several years but had never met her, cleaning rooms after Madame vacated. Once Delia Healey retired, an employee left meals on a tray in a pass-through where Huguette could retrieve them. In a pinch, Huguette could call down and ask a favorite doorman to pick up food and supplies and leave them by her service door.

She kept paying the expenses of her staff even after they retired. In 1980, Huguette confided to Doris Styka about the ailments of a former employee, as well as annoying leaks from the ninth floor into her eighth-floor apartment. Doris jotted down some notes afterward:

For Huguette, the telephone remained her lifeline, and she even managed to make a new friend by telephone: Suzanne Pierre, the wife of Dr. Jules Pierre. The couple lived on Park Avenue, just a few blocks from Huguette. Born in 1893, the physician was thirteen years older than Huguette. After he retired, Dr. Pierre had a heart attack and was unable to leave his home. Calling frequently to check on his welfare, Huguette wound up having lengthy and intimate conversations in French with his second wife, Suzanne. But the heiress declined repeated invitations over more than two decades to get together in person. “They were phone friends for years,” says Kati Despretz Cruz, Suzanne Pierre’s granddaughter. “They talked every day. She wouldn’t receive anyone. My grandmother was always worried about her.”

Proud of her friendship with the heiress, Suzanne was instrumental in connecting Huguette with one of her French Clark relatives. Huguette had attended Spence with Mary Clark, the daughter of Huguette’s half brother Charles Clark. Mary subsequently married a French baron and diplomat, James Baeyens. When their son André Baeyens became the chief press attaché at the French Consulate in New York in 1977, Suzanne introduced herself to him at a lecture, and then arranged for André to speak to Huguette by phone. Huguette would not see him and declined to hear from him directly, but Suzanne would pass along his messages and Huguette would contact André. Then seventy-one years old, she insisted on a buffer separating herself from her family.

“Our calls were usually brief,” André recalled. “We would discuss my duties at the Press office, about which she appeared very interested, as she was pleased that a Clark had what she considered to be such an important position.” He dropped off French magazines with her doorman and sent her flowers, adding, “She was sorry when my mother died and expressed her condolences.” But their contact ended
when Baeyens left Manhattan in January 1982 to become the French ambassador to Korea.

That spring, Huguette lost yet another tie to the outside world: Etienne de Villermont died in France at age seventy-seven. There would be no more pink roses delivered on Huguette’s birthday or affectionate letters from her married Frenchman. Huguette graciously continued to send checks to Etienne’s wife and daughter, just as she had done after Tadé Styka died by helping Wanda and Doris. But now the heiress had lost all three men who had mattered to her during the past half century.

A woman who inherited a cavalier attitude toward money from her mother, Huguette recoiled from the idea of estate planning almost as much as she recoiled from seeing strangers in her apartment. But the death of Anna Clark created a legal conundrum. When Huguette had written a new will in 1929, she made her mother her sole beneficiary. Now with her mother gone, her assets would go by default to descendants from her father’s first marriage, relatives whom she shied away from seeing in person. Without the tax avoidance schemes favored by the wealthy, the federal and state governments would seize a sizable portion of her inheritance.

And so began an effort by several generations of lawyers to convince Huguette to write a new will. She consistently refused to do so, but would never explain her reasoning. Huguette turned down the entreaties of Charles Bannerman, the Harvard-educated lawyer of the firm Clark, Kerr and Ellis, who had drafted her mother’s will and her aunt Amelia’s will. “My husband enjoyed working with her,” recalls Jane Bannerman. “He liked her. He was interested in her peculiarities, but in a nice way. I said to my husband, ‘Why don’t you just walk in and see her?’ He wasn’t that kind of person.” Huguette also worked closely with Frederick Stokes, another partner at Clark, Kerr and Ellis who handled Anna’s estate; he, too, struck out in his efforts to get the heiress to consider the future of her fortune.

After Bannerman’s death in 1976, his patrician partner, Donald Wallace, took over Huguette’s legal affairs. Wallace then spent more than two decades trying to convince Huguette to put her final wishes
on paper. She would not see him, either, or countenance writing a new will. He wrote a series of letters to her through the years conveying his growing irritation at her irrational behavior.

On June 15, 1978, Wallace wrote:

Seven years later, Wallace was losing his patience, writing to Huguette on March 7, 1985, that dealing with her on this topic was “one of the most frustrating experiences I have ever had.” He pleaded with her to take action, writing, “You have received and ignored or avoided advice given to you almost every year from 1942 to date outlining all of the reasons why it is essential that you have a current up-to-date will.” He sent her a list of Clark family members who would inherit if she did nothing, and even estimated how much money they might receive. Huguette kept his letters but declined to respond to his requests.

But she did rely on Donald Wallace for tasks that, to her, were infinitely more important than writing a new will. He was her proxy in bidding at auctions for antique dolls, many from France. “Don Wallace was a very nice man, very old school,” says Ted Poretz, a lawyer who was briefly affiliated with the same firm. “He was Mrs. Clark’s go-fer. The standing joke around the office was that anytime you walked past his office, you could hear him saying, ‘Yes, Mrs. Clark. Yes, Mrs. Clark.’ He had unlimited authority to spend money to get the dolls. The one time she was upset was when he didn’t get one—maybe he was unaware that the bid had gone up. She couldn’t understand how he missed.”

Huguette’s free-spending attitude gave her broad latitude with her employees. Tradesmen who accommodated her incessant demands were rewarded with large checks. She called Robert Samuels at home on nights and weekends, but he kept doing her bidding, as did others.
“My father thought she was nuts,” says Linda Kasakyan, whose father, Rudolph Jaklitsch, built and repaired Huguette’s dollhouses. “He didn’t understand why she didn’t want to see him, why she had all this privacy and secrecy. She drove my father crazy, because she lived in a fantasy world with the dolls and the dollhouses. The measurements had to be just so, or the people in the dollhouses were going to bump their heads.” The carpenter stopped sending bills because Huguette wrote generous checks without requesting an invoice or a time sheet. “Sometimes after my father delivered things to her house, he’d get four or five phone calls back and forth,” Kasakyan recalls. “She’d be examining things and seeing little things that had to be changed.”

The joy for Huguette was in the act of creation, but once the work was done, she lost interest. “One year, after one dollhouse had gone back and forth a lot with a lot of work, she told my father to keep the dollhouse,” Kasakyan recalls. “I had it for many years.”

As a lonely adult, Huguette was drawn back on a river of memory to her childhood, that innocent period before her sister Andrée died. This before-and-after dividing line in her life took on more emotional resonance every year. Her dolls loomed large as objects of beauty and totems of the past. “She never lost the magic of childhood,” says Wanda Styka. “She kept that all of her life. When we grow up, we say we’ve lost that, but she preserved it.”

Huguette did not want to be seen but she did want to be heard. Hungry for human contact, she spent hours each day on the phone. Her artistic projects gave her a reason to call suppliers such as Caterina Marsh, of the California import firm Marsh and Company. “I talked to her sometimes three times a day,” says Marsh, who dealt with Huguette for nearly four decades, dating back to 1971. “I wouldn’t call myself her friend, but we had a very nice relationship. She was such a gracious woman, she was of an era that doesn’t exist anymore.” Marsh was touched by Huguette’s ongoing enthusiasm for the Japanese miniatures, adding, “She was an amazing artist in a way to envision creating these projects. It had to be done properly. There were no shortcuts that she would allow.”

Though she could be imperious at times, Huguette usually took an interest in her retainers, quizzing them about their families, especially
their children. “She sent us presents, she lived vicariously,” recalls Ann Fabrizio, the older daughter of decorator Robert Samuels. Adds carpenter’s daughter Linda Kasakyan, “She was very pleasant. She had a timid voice, nervous high-pitched voice. When I got married and had children, she’d ask about the kids, she’d ask about me and my husband. She’d ask for pictures and I’d send them every year.” Huguette gave elaborate dolls and dollhouses to little girls, and forts equipped with toy soldiers to little boys. When these children became teenagers, she still sent them the same gifts, as if oblivious to the fact that children outgrow these interests.