The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (35 page)

In denial about her own mortality, she was confronted with the inevitable every time a friend died. In early June 1993, Dr. Jules Pierre passed away at the age of one hundred. Huguette spent hours on the phone trying to comfort his wife, Suzanne. The tactless hospital staff viewed the death of Dr. Pierre, who had been affiliated with Doctors Hospital, as a moneymaking opportunity. They decided to ask Huguette to make a $1 million donation in the physician’s honor. Dr. Singman had the temerity to bring up the subject with Huguette just a week after Dr. Pierre’s death. A few days later Cynthia Cromer and Dr. Rudick met with her in the hope of closing the deal. “The very mention of his death appeared to make her uneasy and she refused to be engaged in any further discussion of her gift,” Cromer wrote. “She mentioned that she heard of someone who lived to be 120 and that she hopes to do the same.” And in a sign that Huguette was reading the newspaper, she came up with another reason to deflect the crass suggestion. Cromer added, “She said she needs to save her money because of Clinton’s health plan.” Huguette gave the hospital $80,000 that
year, a generous gift by most standards but significantly below the hospital’s expectations.

Huguette did not want strangers barging into her room and tried to insist that would-be visitors ask for permission in advance. She requested that either Hadassah or Dr. Singman be present when any newcomers including medical personnel wanted to see her. When Patricia Balsamini became the vice president for development at the hospital, Dr. Singman agreed to introduce her to Huguette, but he was vague about her identity. “I spoke to Mrs. Clark and asked if she would mind if this young lady would visit her,” Dr. Singman later recalled. “I didn’t exactly describe what her position is or that she was going to ask her for any money or donations. I said she ran the public relations at the hospital, and was interested in meeting with her.” Dr. Singman had balked at bringing in a psychiatrist to evaluate Huguette without her permission, but had no qualms about being coy about the identity of someone who sought her money.

As a well-bred woman of her era, the ladylike Huguette rarely expressed anger, but two events triggered her ire. After she donated $60,000 to the hospital in 1994, the development staff dropped off a formal thank-you scroll inscribed with her name. That simple gesture set her off. “She said she doesn’t want her name printed anywhere,” wrote development staffer Tricia McGinley. Turning down an offer by McGinley to retrieve the offending document, Huguette announced that she was “going to tear it into little pieces.”

She still cared deeply about her privacy, and the second incident was also provoked by her concerns about loose lips. Like a woman juggling two rival suitors, Huguette took turns giving money to the hospital in the names of Dr. Singman and Dr. Rudick. (These donations give physicians influence, since they can help direct how the money is spent.) But she did not want the men to know that she was playing off one against the other in love-me-love-me-not fashion. Huguette became distressed when the development office alerted Dr. Singman about a $100,000 gift that she had bequeathed in honor of his rival for her affections, Dr. Rudick. Huguette made her anger known to Tricia McGinley, who chronicled the awkward conversation. “She was
terribly upset… she did
NOT
want Dr. Singman to know about her donation… I apologized profusely…”

Huguette still treasured the memories of her early years in Paris and Montana and frequently reminisced about those times with her nurses. She felt that her Montana pioneer father had never been given his proper due in the history books. So Huguette was pleased to renew her contact with her Clark relative André Baeyens, who had returned to Manhattan in 1992 as the consul-general of France and was working on a biography of her father. With Suzanne playing intermediary, they resumed their phone calls. After Baeyens published his book in France in 1994 about William Andrews Clark,
Le Sénateur Qui Aimait La France
, he sent her a copy. “She was delighted, calling me to say that she was totally delighted that a book had been written about him,” Baeyens recalled. She sent him a Christmas card that year with photos enclosed, writing, “Enclosed is a brochure on the living room of Papa who was so francophile.”

Suzanne Pierre let slip to André that Huguette was in the hospital, but he never tried to see her, following the protocol that she had established. Huguette also took walks down memory lane with distant cousin Paul Clark Newell Jr., a California Realtor working on his own Clark family history. Newell, a grandson of William Andrews Clark’s sister Ella, first wrote to Huguette in October 1994, requesting an interview. Huguette asked André Baeyens whether the Realtor was a legitimate relative, and after the diplomat confirmed Newell’s bona fides, she agreed to make herself available by telephone. Newell relied on Huguette’s lawyers to set up phone calls. He taped their phone conversations.

At Beth Israel North, the nurses and staff occasionally asked Huguette about her family, since it seemed odd that no relatives visited. She had a stock answer: her half siblings had not been kind to her mother, and she had no desire to see their descendants. Whatever happened years ago, whatever slights occurred, she had long ago closed the door to a rapprochement.

Yet a number of Clark relatives attempted to stay in touch, sending
her holiday cards, flowers, and invitations to events that she would never attend, all posted to 907 Fifth Avenue. Huguette still spoke to her California niece, Agnes Albert, every Christmas Eve and chatted with New York relative John Hall and his wife, Erika, once a year to thank them for a Christmas floral arrangement. Huguette shied away from talking about her life and asked about their families instead. “She knew every child by name, and she would ask how the children are, what they are doing,” Erika Hall recalled. “I always asked how she was, of course, and she would always say she was fine.” Their conversations were noteworthy for ending abruptly. “She would suddenly break off after talking very happily with me for a while, and then she would just say good-bye… it was different than [the way] the normal person would do that.” Niceties were not Huguette’s strong point with her relatives; she had given all that she was willing to give.

On rare occasions, Huguette sent gifts to family members, but she was much more generous to outsiders. In 1992, she was delighted to receive a letter from Jean-Loup Brusson, the son of the French children’s book illustrator Felix Lorioux. Huguette had loved and collected Lorioux’s illustrations, corresponding with him and his wife until their deaths (in 1964 and 1972, respectively).

With plans under way for a traveling exhibit of his father’s illustrations, Brusson contacted Huguette. She was so enthusiastic about the show that she arranged to reframe and loan her collection. Brusson, an executive with the fragrance company Lancôme, was surprised to receive a large Christmas check from Huguette, which became a yearly event. In return, he would send her one of his father’s illustrations for her birthday. At least once a year, Huguette called him in France. As Brusson recalled, “They were very short phone calls, four to five minutes, and she would ask me about the children, if they were growing, if they were good, if they were kind, etc.…” Huguette declined to give him a photograph of herself or her phone number. She wanted to remain in control of the means of communication.

Although the heiress had a strong constitution for her age, health problems occasionally materialized. In 1998, doctors found a lump
in her abdomen. As Dr. Jack Rudick recalled, “I got an emergency phone call late at night at home. I had to see her, and I found that she had an abdominal problem which could have turned out to be life-threatening.” Huguette was frightened. “She thought she had cancer,” Geraldine Coffey says. “She was worried about the surgery, but she wanted to have the surgery… I worked with her that night and she said to me, ‘I haven’t made arrangements for you, Geraldine.’ ” Huguette never mentioned the word
will
. Dr. Rudick operated, and the lump turned out to be noncancerous, allowing Huguette to go back to acting as if she would live forever.

For nearly thirty years, Huguette spoke several times per week with her lawyer, Donald Wallace. She never met him in person but trusted him implicitly. When he suffered a heart attack in early 1997, her longtime accountant, Irving Kamsler, who had always communicated with her by letter, nervously called Huguette. “First time I talked to her was when Don wound up in the hospital in a coma. I was the bearer of bad news,” Kamsler recalls. “It was scary on my part to call her. I know she knew my name and who I was. Steps had to be taken. I told her that Wally [Bock] would be handling her affairs until Don came back. She was very polite, surprised, upset, and concerned for Don.”

The accountant made a good first impression by phone on Huguette. Kamsler, a Bronx native, came from a hard-luck background. When he was five years old, his carpenter/cabdriver father was permanently disabled in a car accident, and as a result, his mother eked out a living as a billing clerk to support Kamsler and his two older sisters. With tuition to a top college out of reach, Kamsler attended Bronx Community College and then Baruch College, gravitating to bookkeeping as a secure profession. Kamsler had worked for Donald Wallace’s other clients, including Jane Bannerman, the wife of Huguette’s former lawyer Charles Bannerman. Kamsler began handling Huguette’s accounting and taxes in 1977, but all communication up until now had been by mail.

Ever since she had entered the hospital, Kamsler had been taken aback by the size of the bonuses that Huguette was paying to Hadassah, night nurse Geraldine, and others. As early as 1993, he
had expressed his concern in a letter to Donald Wallace, writing, “Mrs. Clark appears to be somewhat vulnerable to the influence of people around her. This is evidenced by her extraordinary gifts to her nurses and their families.” But this was not the kind of sentiment that Kamsler dared express directly to Huguette.

His new legal counterpart, Wallace Bock, had previously taken care of bits and pieces of Huguette’s legal work, but now he was in charge. Although Donald Wallace eventually returned to the office, he was able to work only sporadically until his death in 2002. “I was the guy at the end of the telephone line,” says Wallace Bock. “When she needed something, she called me. She was very, very private. I rarely asked questions.” Bock and Kamsler, both observant Jews, got along well although their personalities were different: the lawyer was brusque and businesslike, while the voluble accountant liked to schmooze.

Four months after Donald Wallace’s heart attack, Bock wrote to Huguette to point out that she was spending $30,000 per month to take care of former staff members (retired cooks, maids, the widow of a caretaker) and that she ought to consider setting up a trust or writing a new will. He cautioned that “should you for some reason be unable to provide the support that these people have to rely upon” they could become “destitute.”

Huguette ignored the suggestion, but she did ask for an estimate of her current net worth. Kamsler informed her that she had roughly $300 million in assets, much of them tied up in real estate, paintings, tapestries, jewelry, silver, and antique musical instruments. Reassured that she had plenty of money, she continued to casually spend it. Huguette maintained her own checking account—and frequently wrote checks for tens of thousands of dollars—but did not balance it. She never bounced a check, but that was solely because bank managers would alert her lawyer that she was overdrawn and Bock would transfer cash (as much as $200,000 at a time) into her account.

Huguette’s extreme aversion to publicity and confrontation made her a difficult client to represent aggressively. Even when she was wronged, she refused to sue. Citibank had informed the heiress
several years earlier that more than five million dollars’ worth of jewelry, including her mother’s wedding ring and a magnificent bracelet adorned with sapphires and diamonds, had been pilfered from a custodial account at a bank branch. “Somebody walked out of the vault with the jewelry,” says Kamsler. “Everything wasn’t taken but the majority was taken.” Unwilling to file suit for the full amount, she accepted the bank’s offer of a $3.5 million settlement. Citibank put the remainder of the jewelry in a safe deposit box in her name, with the agreement not to charge her.