The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (42 page)

In the autumn, Huguette’s health deteriorated. Hadassah wrote on October 25 that Huguette was “awake, sitting on bed, confused” and rambling out loud about the sinking of the
Titanic
and the drowning death of her cousin Walter Clark. The 1912 disaster had been one of the defining and frightening events of Huguette’s life. She was filled with angst all day, imagining tragedies, fearful of being abandoned. After visiting Huguette, Dr. Singman wrote in his notes that “she was concerned that she heard that I had died in an auto accident as well as her divorced husband.” Bill Gower had died in 1974 of an illness, but this imaginary figment so many decades later conveyed what a loss his death had been for Huguette.

That night, night nurse Geraldine Coffey wrote in her notes that Huguette had become “totally delusional” and fearful that there were “people in her room.” As if anticipating her death, Huguette was reviewing her life. “Reminisced about older golden days, talked about her family already gone, rest in peace. Patient tried to sleep, looks very tired and worn out.”

But two days later, Hadassah wrote that Huguette had bounced back: “No further episodes of confusion, patient doing great.” Huguette was so relieved that she picked up the phone and called Suzanne Pierre, Chris Sattler, and Irving Kamsler to let them know that everything was fine again. Huguette’s good days would continue to outnumber her bad days, but the ninety-nine-year-old was feeling her age.

She became fretful and ignored medical advice when Hadassah was off duty. Erlinda Ysit, a Filipino aide who worked weekends, would often call Hadassah at home for guidance and then pass along instructions, such as telling Huguette “to do her Central Park”—walk around the room for exercise. One night Huguette missed Hadassah so much that she wanted to call her at midnight, but Erlinda dissuaded her, insisting that the nurse was asleep. Huguette might as
well have been singing the Cole Porter song to Hadassah: “Night and day, you are the one.”

On February 9, 2006, Wallace Bock wrote to Huguette to tell her about a surprising discovery: her long-lost Degas pastel of a dancer, stolen from her apartment more than a decade ago, had been found. “Through a contact in the art world, we have now discovered a reputable collector has somehow acquired ownership of the Degas,” the lawyer wrote, “and apparently has entered into a contractual agreement to donate it to a museum.”

The collector was Henry Bloch, the founder of the tax preparation firm H&R Block. He lived in Mission Hills, Kansas, and had promised to bequeath the painting to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City after his death. Bloch explained that he had purchased the painting in 1993 from a well-known Manhattan dealer, Susan L. Brody, and was unaware that it had been stolen. When Brody was asked how the Degas came into her hands, she replied, “With bad information from the person who sold it.” The trail had gone cold; no one was ever charged with the theft.

Huguette wanted her Degas back. Negotiations went on for several years. Even though she had reported the theft to the FBI, she had not filed an insurance claim or listed the Degas on the Art Loss Register. Bloch and his lawyers asserted that by neglecting those steps, she had abandoned the painting. Terrified as always of publicity, Huguette did not want to embark on a fight. “She was a very private person, and it would have meant a lawsuit,” says Kamsler. “It would have meant the FBI taking possession of the painting and holding on to it for years as evidence. It was ultimately acknowledged as her painting.”

Under a settlement, the wealthy tax maven was allowed to keep the painting on his wall at home, with the promise that it would eventually go to the Nelson-Atkins. “The day we reached an agreement with Ms. Clark was a great day for Kansas City,” Bloch boasted in a statement posted on the museum’s website. It was, in truth, a great day for Bloch, since he did not have to pay off Huguette and could keep the art for the remainder of his lifetime. Huguette won a small personal
victory, insisting on a clause that permitted the Corcoran to borrow the Degas for exhibitions.

When Dr. Newman visited Huguette in April 2006, he was so concerned about her health that he wrote to her lawyer and accountant afterward. “She seems considerably more frail than a few weeks ago, lying in bed not able or willing to try to sit up, although she knew I was going to come by. Her hearing has deteriorated to the point that communication is impossible.” Others insist that they could still be understood. “Madame is comfortable with my voice, she doesn’t really have difficulty with my voice,” Hadassah later said.

Huguette had once again regained her zest as she celebrated her hundredth birthday on June 9, 2006, with more than twenty people in her room to honor the occasion. She had been born in Paris but the decorations were as American as could be. Huguette was smitten with the animated cartoon series
SpongeBob SquarePants
, so Chris brought an oversized SpongeBob balloon with wiggly arms and legs. Huguette laughed and tapped it, sending the balloon floating around the room. “She was very quick and clever, she was joking with everybody, she was one hundred but she was saying she was twenty-one,” recalls Geraldine Coffey, who had come in early even though she worked the night shift. “She was really happy. She looked great, she was the center of attention. I think she was able to blow out her candles.”

At Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, William Andrews Clark’s family mausoleum was showing the ravages of time. Rodney Devine, the senator’s great-great-grandson, noticed the problems with the 1896 structure during a 2007 visit. “It was really in a state of decay,” recalls Devine, a retired investment analyst based in Connecticut and a descendant of Clark’s oldest daughter, Mary. He discussed the problem with his younger brother, Ian, and other family members including Carla Hall, a great-great-granddaughter of the senator. His mother and his aunt Edith MacGuire, also a Clark descendant, agreed to absorb the $150,000 cost.

But any changes to the mausoleum required the permission of all of William Clark’s descendants. Susan Olsen, the family liaison and resident historian at Woodlawn, offered to get in touch with them. Olsen was startled to see the name of William Clark’s daughter on the list. The copper mogul had been born in 1839: who could imagine that 168 years later, his child would be still walking the earth? “That was the first time we realized Huguette was still alive,” Olsen recalled. “We had no clue.” Huguette had succeeded in her quest to be invisible.

Wallace Bock and Irving Kamsler told Huguette about the needed Woodlawn renovations and then broached a verboten topic: where she wanted to be buried when the time came. “We were very delicate about it,” Bock recalls. Her reply: “I want to be in the mausoleum with my mother and sister.” But there was a structural problem—there was no room. Huguette was adamant, repeating, “I don’t care, I want to be in the mausoleum.” Engineers determined that since the mausoleum was located on a hill, they could tunnel in from the back without damaging the structure. Susan Olsen, who supervised the efforts on behalf of Woodlawn, recalls, “Floor tiles were removed, a camera set down inside, which exposed that the foundation was made of brick vaults. We knew there was room for a below-ground tomb.” Andrée’s casket now rested on top of Anna’s casket; a space could be made underneath Anna for another coffin.

But to do the work, Bock had to get permission from the Clark descendants, so he needed to ingratiate himself. When Carla Hall wrote to the lawyer and asked to visit Bellosguardo in the summer of 2007, he urged Huguette to let her do so. “This was a visit Mrs. Clark originally refused to consent to, and I convinced her that she should,” Bock says. He thought that Carla seemed “to be acting as a spokesman or spokesperson for the cousins, and I thought it was important for Mrs. Clark to accommodate her.” Bock wrote to Bellosguardo caretaker John Douglas to stress, “Carla Hall is, in fact, very important to us as a member of the Clark family… having her indebted to us cannot hurt.”

Even now that she was over one hundred, Huguette continued to pursue one of her favorite pastimes: writing checks. She agreed to pay Dr. Singman’s malpractice insurance at his request, an unusual
doctor-patient arrangement, and bumped up his monthly retainer to $3,000. One day the physician began chatting with her about repairs to his country house, built in 1927, and he spontaneously threw out an invitation. “I told her, why doesn’t she come with me and stay at the beach house for awhile, the two weeks, stay by the water, everything would be fine,” he recalled. This was about the safest invite ever offered, since at this point Huguette had not left a hospital room for sixteen years. The physician mentioned that the paint job and home improvements were going to cost him $20,000. She promptly sent him a check for that amount. Dr. Singman later said he thought he was doing Huguette a favor by taking her money: “She felt good about it, so I wouldn’t want to disappoint her.”

Hadassah was facing new financial obligations as well that arose from a serious family crisis. Her oldest son, Avi, an NYU graduate who worked at Goldman Sachs, lost his position, then went into a spiral that landed him in the hospital. Huguette had known Avi since he was a child and was fond of him, paying $35,000 of his medical expenses. When Avi was about to be discharged from the hospital, the doctors insisted that someone needed to be with him for the first two weeks of home recovery. Once again, asked to choose between caring for her own child or assisting her wealthy patient, Hadassah, now a multimillionaire, made a character-revealing decision: she chose to stay with Huguette. Hadassah hired her sister-in-law Nonie Oloroso to keep Avi company. Huguette paid the $10,000 tab.