The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (31 page)

Huguette managed to simultaneously come across as an introvert and an extrovert. While her father the copper baron had been parsimonious with his employees, Huguette reveled in giving away his money to total strangers. She acted as if inspired by the 1950s television series
The Millionaire
, in which the mysterious John Beresford Tipton Jr.—never seen, only heard—played benefactor to random Americans. “She used to direct Don Wallace to make anonymous charitable gifts,” says Wallace’s former law colleague, who recalled outgoing checks of up to $50,000. “People she saw on TV, or read about in the paper, who had problems. She liked to take care of people in trouble. She would see some story, and tell him to get money to those people.”

Each Christmas, Huguette would outdo herself, devoting months to planning her gift giving, spending tens of thousands of dollars. She ordered hundreds of dolls and toys from the Parisian children’s specialty shop, Au Nain Bleu. Decorator Robert Samuels would send his company van and two employees to pick up the precious cargo at JFK, charging $486 on December 29, 1978, for that service alone. Huguette would hand-wrap the packages and send them to a French orphanage in Manhattan. She was enchanted by cutting-edge technologies, and employees and friends would receive the latest electronic gadgets—tape recorders, home video cameras, new television models.

Artists often try their hands at different media in search of a new way of expressing themselves. Huguette’s artistic impulses and talents gravitated in unexpected directions. She began designing and making
gold jewelry, and tried to teach herself cartoon animation. Her self-taught approach to animation was revealing of how her mind worked. As she later explained it to Chris Sattler, she would tape cartoons on her VCR (or have the maids tape them) and then watch them very slowly, constantly stopping the tape in order to photograph the scenes. “She’d take quick-lapse photos,” Chris says. “She would have hundreds of photos. Then she would practice by drawing them herself, and then flipping the pictures to see how the animation worked. She did that for a few years in the 1980s and then stopped doing it. There were hundreds of thousands of single-shot frames of cartoons in her apartment.”

What began as an artistic project turned into an obsession that filled Huguette’s empty days with calming activity. She made list upon list of programs that she planned to tape. She could then spend hours with her camera in front of the television screen, filing away hundreds of snapshots of the NBC peacock, along with other Polaroid photographs.

Was Huguette, with her quirky behavior, a psychiatric case study? On the one hand, it is easy to pile up the symptoms—refusing to see people or leave her apartment, eating the same sardine lunches every day, obsessing about tiny imperfections in dollhouses, mesmerized by cartoons. This is so at odds with the adventurous and outgoing persona she displayed as a young woman, those light spirits conveyed in her letters to Tadé. Yet those who spoke to Huguette during her two decades of exile from the world insist that they never got the sense that she was depressed or longed for a different existence. “She was happy,” says Wanda Styka. “She was always upbeat.”

Wanda conveyed her love to Huguette one year by taking a four-hour round-trip from the Berkshires, where she worked as an archivist at the historic estate Chesterwood, to Manhattan to drop off a birthday gift at 907 Fifth Avenue. Wanda wanted to make sure the present arrived on June 9, the actual date. But it never occurred to Wanda to ask the doorman to ring upstairs to Huguette, whom she had not laid eyes on for nearly three decades. “I was merely delivering it, I didn’t ask to see her. I didn’t think she’d say, ‘Oh, come up right now,’ ” Wanda says. “I didn’t want to put her in a position where she was uncomfortable.”

Huguette had created her own alternate universe based on disembodied connections, and other people humored her, giving her as much human contact as she could tolerate. Everyone knew that the way Huguette conducted herself was not normal. Yet she never came across as a danger to herself or others, because she appeared to be functional despite her phobias. No one in her life felt they had a right—or an obligation—to intrude.

Her wispy voice masked a demanding personality. “People make her out to be crazy, but she wasn’t like that,” says Neal Sattler. “She was discerning, she had the money and wanted things perfect, and so you did it.” Adds Caterina Marsh, “She was always in the same mood, steady. I’m Italian, my moods go up and down like a firecracker. She never ever sounded unhappy.”

The years passed: Lyndon Johnson had been president when Huguette had last been seen out of her apartment by her Clark relatives; Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan had rotated through 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue while Huguette remained in self-imposed exile as a phantom, sequestered eight stories above Fifth Avenue. Every now and then, someone from Huguette’s past would try to break through to her. Frustrated and desperate to connect, Agnes Clark Albert, her California-based niece, concocted a plan to see Huguette during a 1982 visit to spend Thanksgiving in Manhattan with her granddaughter Geraldine McCall, a student at Barnard.

Agnes invited Huguette to lunch with them at the Plaza Hotel. When Huguette declined yet again with a flimsy excuse, the exasperated Agnes told Huguette that they would stand in front of her building at 3 p.m. and wave up at her eighth-floor apartment. And that is what they did, standing on the sidewalk at Central Park and Seventy-Second Street, squinting and trying to glimpse a face hidden behind the glass. Over the next several years, this was Agnes and Geraldine’s annual ritual.

“I come from an eccentric family,” says Geraldine. “It didn’t seem unusual.” One of those years, a doorman at 907 Fifth saw them waving, and crossed the street to ask what they were doing. Agnes explained that they were waving at a relative who lived in the building. Perhaps he knew her—Huguette Clark? His reply: “I have worked in this building for a dozen years and I’ve never laid eyes on her.”

A
s an athletic young woman, Huguette delighted in luxuriating in the sun for hours on end, bragging to her father about her Hawaiian tan in 1921 and showing off her sun-kissed skin to Tadé in 1941. But by 1991, Huguette had not felt the sun on her face, the breeze on her cheeks, or the snow on her tongue for nearly two decades. Deprived of any firsthand encounter with nature, she could at least convince herself that she was protected from disease in her Fifth Avenue aerie.

But, of course, the nature of human life is that no one—no matter how rich or hermetic—is truly safe. Huguette’s carefree sunbathing had occurred prior to the invention of SPF creams, and now she was experiencing the delayed repercussions: she had skin cancer.

When the red blotches appeared, the heiress assumed that they would eventually go away. Then she tried Band-Aids to speed the healing. Instead, the skin cancer spread: a lesion by her right eye became unsightly, and a sore near her mouth made it difficult to eat. Her doormen, who dropped off food deliveries by her entrance, noticed that she had begun ordering ice cream, buttermilk, and bananas, and little else. Huguette knew that she needed a doctor but she no longer had a personal physician: Dr. Gordon Lyle was long dead; Dr. Jules Pierre, now ninety-eight, was confined to a wheelchair; and another physician whom she had relied on had also recently died. The idea of leaving her apartment to see a new doctor was unimaginable to
this eighty-four-year-old woman. As the cancer ravaged her skin for several years, Huguette agonized alone for a long time, too paralyzed to act.

On February 13, 1991, she called Doris Styka to apologize for neglecting to send a Christmas gift, behavior that was very much out of character. “Dearest Huguette telephoned, saying that she had not forgotten us but that she had caught a cold. So very thoughtful of her,” wrote Doris in her notes, accepting the excuse. Three weeks later, Huguette sent Wanda a check for $10,000 but could not bring herself to tell her goddaughter that anything was wrong.

Huguette would later credit Suzanne Pierre, the wife of her former physician, with saving her life. But in a real sense, Huguette saved herself by picking up the phone and asking for help. After listening to Huguette describe her symptoms, Suzanne insisted that her friend see a doctor. Suzanne even found a doctor willing to make a house call: Henry Singman, who had purchased her husband’s practice. A red-headed graduate of New York University’s medical school, Singman was an internist whose East Seventy-Second Street office was just two blocks from Huguette’s apartment.

When Huguette allowed Dr. Singman to enter her home on March 28, 1991, he was the first stranger she had seen in more than a decade. The physician was shocked by the appearance of this homebound octogenarian. In a two-page memo that he wrote five years later, Dr. Singman described his disturbing initial encounter with Huguette: a frail and frightened woman, disfigured by illness, materializing out of an unkempt room lit by a single candle.

“She weighed all of seventy-five pounds and appeared to be at death’s door,” wrote Dr. Singman. “The initial meeting was most strange because I was admitted to her apartment by the elevator operator of the posh building and came face-to-face with an ‘apparition’ in an old soiled bathrobe and a towel wrapped around her lower face. She was very thin, to the point of emaciation, and when she exposed her face, she resembled an advanced leper patient. She was missing her lower lip laterally and was unable to contain food or fluid in her mouth…”

Huguette insisted on being taken to a hospital by private ambulance, according to Dr. Singman, “because she wanted to be carried up on a stretcher when she left the building, in order to avoid being seen by the building’s staff or other residents.” At the suggestion of Suzanne Pierre, Huguette asked to go to Doctors Hospital, a storied establishment known for catering to members of the
Social Register
and the cultural elite. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Spencer Tracy had both dried out there after alcoholic binges; Georgia O’Keeffe sought help for depression; Marilyn Monroe was treated for a miscarriage during her marriage to Arthur Miller; lyricist Lorenz Hart, who wrote “You Took Advantage of Me,” died on the premises. Dr. Jules Pierre had been affiliated with the hospital, where the staff was used to cosseting well-to-do patients.

The trip from Huguette’s apartment by ambulance was short, less than a mile. The genteel Upper East Side, with its handsome 1890s brownstones and 1930s Rosario Candela–designed apartment buildings, is a landmarked historic district, and little had visibly changed in the decades since Huguette had last walked the neighborhood. But this journey through the monied streets of Manhattan to Eighty-Seventh Street and East End Avenue abruptly thrust Huguette into a jarring and alien environment—with bright lights, sickly strangers in the corridors, hordes of white-coated doctors and nurses bustling about, and a complete lack of privacy.

Nurse Marie Pompei, a motherly veteran with an outgoing manner, was standing by after receiving a call that an ambulance was en route with a woman who appeared to be a “recluse.” That word struck a chord. Pompei had spent vacations at the Brittannia Hotel in the Bahamas, where the staff told tales about their famous reclusive resident Howard Hughes. The nurse was eager to put Huguette at ease. “When she got off the elevator and she had her face covered, it didn’t strike me as being odd. I was familiar, just like anybody, with Howard Hughes,” recalls Pompei. “She didn’t want anyone to see her, so she had a shawl. But she made sure it was cashmere.”

Memories differ on how dire Huguette’s condition was at the time. Pompei recalls that Huguette had a serious case of skin cancer but
disagrees with Dr. Singman’s description of the heiress as a malnourished wraith. “She looked like a leper? No!” exclaims Pompei, recalling that Huguette weighed more than seventy-five pounds. “Her hand was like a man’s hand. She was a tall, big-boned woman, but not a fat woman. Did she come in looking like she was well-groomed and everything? No. But it didn’t take her very long until she had a bath and washed her hair, she was fine.”

For Huguette to disrobe in front of another person was a huge step—the first time that anyone had seen her naked in many years—but that simple act created an emotional bond. During the next few days, the overwhelmed Huguette was hostile to most of the staffers who entered her room, urging the nurses and orderlies to leave her alone. But Huguette was comfortable with Pompei. “I could then go into her room at any time because she had exposed herself to me,” says Pompei. “As time went on, if no one was there, I would go in—‘Are you okay, do you need anything?’ We would talk and get to know each other. She trusted me.” Huguette had made new friends by phone in the past, but now the strange world of the hospital provided a new venue to do so in person. Marie Pompei was assigned by the hospital to care for Huguette for only a short period of time, but the nurse paid her social visits for the next two decades. As Pompei says now, “I loved her dearly.”

Huguette did not have health insurance and had not signed up for Medicare, so her lawyer, Donald Wallace, rushed over a certified cashier’s check for $10,000 to cover her initial costs at Doctors Hospital. (The facility had recently been purchased by the much larger Beth Israel Medical Center and three years later was renamed Beth Israel North.) Three days after she entered the hospital Huguette had surgery; the lesions were sufficiently advanced that she needed additional plastic surgery to repair the damage. Dr. Jack Rudick, the South African–trained chief of surgery, took the lead in handling her problems and ingratiated himself with Huguette by virtue of his diplomatic bedside manner.

Word traveled quickly through Doctors Hospital about this reclusive patient who had arrived under mysterious circumstances from an enormous Fifth Avenue apartment. Dr. Singman informed the
hospital’s development office that she was a VIP patient worth cultivating. He treated her like a pet project, making a special effort to befriend her. “I taught her to play Solitaire and she learned every game in the book, improving and inventing new games,” Dr. Singman wrote in his memo. “She has a ‘steel trap’ mind but remains shy and reticent, avoiding most people.”

Suzanne Pierre, however, was not most people—she now felt responsible for Huguette. The two friends had never met before, but Suzanne came to the hospital to visit regularly. Although Huguette’s medical condition was never serious enough to require around-the-clock private nurses in addition to the hospital staff, Suzanne thought that Huguette should never have to ring a bell and wait for assistance. After consulting with Huguette’s lawyer, Suzanne concluded that private nurses would give Huguette the control she wanted over who could enter her room.

After asking the Hilaire Nursing Registry for job candidates, Suzanne interviewed and hired private nurse Hadassah Peri, a petite Filipino immigrant in her early forties. Hadassah had lived in the United States for nearly two decades—she had moved to Arkansas in 1972 to work in a small county hospital—but her English was still stiltled. Hadassah, whose maiden name was Gicela Oloroso, had a melting-pot marriage. Her husband, Daniel Peri, was a native of Israel, a tenth-grade dropout who had fought in the Yom Kippur War and now drove a yellow cab.

Just as Huguette’s wispy voice belied her strong-willed persona, Hadassah’s manner was unassuming and deferential, but at her core the nurse could be fiercely determined, with a quick-witted ability to think three moves ahead on life’s chessboard. When her husband, Daniel, later described the dynamics of their marriage in a legal deposition, he portrayed Hadassah as the family decision maker, while his role was to obediently handle the daily minutiae of their lives.

In those early weeks, the $30-per-hour job appeared to be a brief assignment since Huguette needed minimal medical care. With little to do but talk, the two women hit it off despite Hadassah’s linguistic difficulties. A sympathetic listener, Hadassah was treated to stories
about Huguette’s childhood and “her dear father, her dear mother, her dear sister, Aunt Amelia.” Relieved to have someone around who put her at ease, Huguette asked Hadassah to work seven days a week, twelve hours a day.

The idea of working an eighty-four-hour week is daunting, exhausting even to contemplate. Add in commuting time and the situation can be summarized by two words: no life. With three children under the age of eight, Hadassah would be sacrificing her time with her family. No more weekends together, no time to supervise play dates, help with homework, or attend school events. Nonetheless, aware of Huguette’s wealth and its potential, the nurse agreed to put her patient first.

Within a month after starting her new post, Hadassah brought her husband and children to the hospital to meet Huguette, who had previously shied away from contact with new people. It is unusual for a nurse to become so personally involved with a patient, especially at such an early stage. But sensing Huguette’s loneliness, Hadassah stepped in to fill the void. Daniel Peri described his wife’s work life as the equivalent of being on call twenty-four hours a day: “Madame can call anytime if she need anything, miss anything.”

Now that Huguette was ensconced at the hospital, her three apartments at 907 Fifth Avenue were receiving a steady stream of curious visitors. Huguette dispatched Suzanne Pierre and her granddaughter, Kati Despretz Cruz, to retrieve dolls to brighten up her antiseptic hospital room. Their walk-through offered a sad glimpse at how Huguette had been living. “It was a mess,” recalls Kati. “It was beautiful but it looked like someone went away on vacation a hundred years ago and never came back. The telephones and intercoms were so old. There were cabinets full of beautiful dishes and silver but it wasn’t polished. She just lived in her room.”

Anticipating her return home, Huguette decided to renovate and soon she was happily looking at parquet floor samples and paint color displays. Although in the hospital she was encountering many new people, she still refused to meet with her decorator, Robert Samuels, or the two Sattler brothers charged with making the improvements, insisting instead on phone consultations. Neal Sattler spoke
to Huguette frequently, recalling, “She amazingly knew where everything was, like a lawyer who has paper all over his desk but knows exactly where his case is.” His younger brother, Chris, built display cases to store her doll collection. “There was so much stuff, but it was piled up in her neat way,” Chris says. “There was a method to her madness. One type of doll would be piled up in the bedroom doorway, six feet high.” This was a rush job so that the work could be done by the time she was ready to leave the hospital.

Within the cozy confines of her hospital room, Huguette was becoming a mini-celebrity among the solicitous staff. Outside her eleventh-floor window, Huguette had a view of historic Gracie Mansion and the boats plying the East River. But she usually kept the shades closed during the day, mindful that sunlight was believed to have caused her skin cancer. After avoiding doctors for decades, she was now seeing them daily. The plastic surgery on her face had left minimal scarring (“Her complexion was peaches and cream,” says Marie Pompei), but her right eyelid drooped and that eye remained sensitive to light.

After spending so many years on her own, Huguette was initially reticent with strangers, but she came to enjoy the attention, pleased that people seemed concerned and interested. When surgeon Dr. Jack Rudick came by to visit, Huguette kept the conversation going by offering up tidbits about her life. “Early on, she told me about her father, who had apparently been a senator,” recalled Rudick. The physician chatted with Huguette about her childhood and discovered that they had shared a common pastime: “We both played the violin.”

After two months at Doctors Hospital, Huguette was pronounced well enough to leave. A hospital social worker spoke to her about a discharge plan to return home attended by private nurses or go to a longer-term care facility. But Huguette was in no rush to depart. First she announced that her renovation was not finished and asked to stay a few more weeks. The weeks passed and the hospital staff began pressing her about her plans. Huguette finally became explicit: she did
not
want to go home. In fact, she liked her new life so much that she had decided to stay at Doctors Hospital indefinitely. She announced her plans as if it was a fait accompli. “She refused to leave,” says Ted
Poretz, an attorney who worked with Donald Wallace at the time. “She asked to speak to the director of planned giving and made a deal to stay.” Huguette made it clear that she would be generous if she got her way.