The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (44 page)

Hadassah could have quit then, and walked away. But she, in turn, fulfilled her promise to Huguette to continue to care for her and do everything possible to keep her alive. The nurse cajoled Huguette to take her medication, and was seen begging on her knees to get
her obstinate patient to comply. Chris Sattler watched her curl up in bed next to Huguette and hug her, comforting her patient with the warmth of human touch. When another nurse asked Huguette if she could be of help, the heiress proudly replied, “Hadassah is my right hand, she can take care of me.”

The heiress and the nurse had always been close, but now there was a visible sweetness to their relationship. Others praised Hadassah for her devotion. “Hadassah did everything to keep her healthy and motivated,” recalls Marie Pompei, noting that Huguette never suffered from bed sores thanks to Hadassah’s care. “Her body was in perfect condition.”

At the end of 2009, Huguette turned over her Christmas gift check-writing duties to Wallace Bock. This was a momentous step. She was unusually generous that season, even telling Bock to give himself $60,000, although he had never received a holiday bonus before.

With efforts by her Clark relatives to pierce the veil of privacy around Tante Huguette stymied, a journalist was taking the first steps that would shatter the serenity of Huguette Clark’s life. Investigative reporter Bill Dedman, of msnbc.com, was scanning upscale real estate listings when he came across a description of Huguette’s New Canaan home. “I read in the zoning minutes online that her attorney said it had not been lived in for fifty years,” Dedman later recalled in an e-mail exchange published in 2010 by the Poynter Institute, a journalism forum. “Then I saw an online discussion in Santa Barbara about her empty mansion there. And her father’s political history was interesting. So I was hooked.”

After spending several months gathering photographs and documents, and conducting interviews with Ian Devine, André Baeyens, and others, Dedman published his results online on February 26, 2010, in a forty-eight-page slideshow entitled, “The Clarks: an American story of wealth, scandal and mystery.” In captions, he raised such questions about Huguette as: “Where is she? And what will become of her fortune?” By July 29, the reporter had tracked Huguette down at the hospital, and he announced on the
Today
show: “I went there and it’s drab, patient names written on the board in a hallway. It couldn’t
be more ordinary. She wasn’t sick. She made Howard Hughes look outgoing.”

His stories began a media feeding frenzy. The
New York Daily News
headlined an article:
A 42-ROOM EMPTY PALACE SITS ON FIFTH AVENUE. 104-YEAR-OLD HEIRESS HAS GORGEOUS MANSES BUT PREFERS TO BE A RECLUSE PLAYING WITH HER DOLLS
. In August, Dedman, who had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for a series in the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
, published a two-part investigative series on nbc.com delving into Huguette’s life and her retainers, Bock and Kamsler.

Dedman chronicled his reporting, including showing up unannounced at the apartment building of Suzanne Pierre. Afflicted with Alzheimer’s, she had twenty-four-hour care. Dedman told her aide that he wanted an interview, and was admitted an hour later. (“Suzanne was easily distracted by the television and the conversation lagged.”) After Irving Kamsler did not reply to Dedman’s messages, the reporter turned up at the Kamslers’ co-op in the Bronx and called from the doorman’s station; Judi answered and hung up.

Dedman went to Beth Israel to try to see Huguette. Arriving at the third floor, Dedman asked for Huguette and a hospital employee inquired, “Who are you to her?” (“That’s as far as I got,” he wrote. “I wasn’t going to barge into her room, and won’t divulge the name of the hospital.”)

The reporter took on the role of advocate in the story by listing the legal steps that a bank, Huguette’s family members, or total strangers could take to investigate her affairs, such as contacting Adult Protective Services or filing a guardianship petition. He helpfully offered questions that they could put to Huguette.

Dedman wrote his stories in a tone that suggested he could not imagine Huguette reading the articles or having them read to her, referring to her as an “old lady” five times in such passages as, “Who protects an old lady who secluded herself from the world, limiting her life to a single room, playing dress-up with her dolls and watching cartoons?”

As other reporters turned up at Beth Israel, trying to get into Huguette’s room, a security guard was posted outside to rebuff intruders. Her name was changed to a pseudonym, Harriet Chase, in the hospital computer system. The
New York Post
blared:
NY’S HERMIT
HEIRESS & HER SAD SECRETS—CENTURY OF MYSTERIES
. Huguette had spent her life trying to avoid attention, but now her divorce, her love for dolls, and her personality quirks were being dished up to a voyeuristic public. She had identified with the unassuming cricket in her favorite fable, but now she had been transformed into the colorful butterfly torn apart by the media.

Huguette’s inner circle agonized and decided that the lucid 104-year-old needed to know what was being said about her. Irving Kamsler met with Huguette to tell her about the articles. “She was upset, she did not want to be in the newspapers,” Kamsler recalls. He had printed out the series and believes that he left her a copy.

On August 25, the
Post
ominously reported that the Manhattan District Attorney’s office had launched a criminal investigation into Huguette’s welfare and fortune. The D.A.’s office had received a tip, but Dedman’s stories added fuel to the fire. That same day, Gerald Gray, Huguette’s great-nephew and a California social worker who specialized in treating torture victims, submitted a request to New York Adult Protective Services for an investigation. Bock and Kamsler went to the hospital to tell Huguette about the D.A.’s legal inquiry, informing her that she would have to answer questions and they would have to hire lawyers for themselves. They asked her to pay their legal fees, and she agreed to pick up the bill.

As the chief of the district attorney’s elder abuse unit, Elizabeth Loewy had developed a national reputation as a champion for the elderly after winning the conviction in 2009 of Anthony Marshall for stealing from his mother, Brooke Astor, who suffered from dementia. Ever since then, Loewy had experienced a sharp jump in new cases. The Astor case encouraged more people to report suspected abuse.

After alerting hospital executives that she would be coming and brushing up on her French, Loewy went to see Huguette, bringing along a genial detective, Donald Kennedy, who had worked with her on the Astor case. She met Dr. Newman at his office, and he escorted the prosecutor and detective to Huguette’s room. Hadassah was on duty, but Loewy asked the nurse and Dr. Newman to leave the room so that she could have a private conversation.

Loewy took a low-key approach, trying to first ascertain whether
the hard-of-hearing centenarian was able to hold a conversation—she was—and then asking whether she was doing well. Sitting up in bed, Huguette responded thoughtfully to each question, conveying that she knew about the allegations but that she was fine and that no one had threatened her in any way. She did not appear to be confused or sad.

Even though the family was aware that the D.A. was investigating, they felt pressure to act. On September 1, Bill Dedman sent an e-mail to Gerald Gray:

This email was later produced in discovery during the legal battle over Huguette’s will. On Friday, September 3, Carla, Ian, and Karine filed legal papers in Manhattan requesting that a guardian be appointed to protect Huguette from potential financial abuse, the same initial step that had been taken in the Astor case. “Her mental abilities are uncertain,” the petition stated, “but on information and belief as a result of her physical condition, she has limited ability to understand and manage her financial affairs…”

Wallace Bock called the trio “nothing more than officious interlopers” in his legal response and insisted that Huguette was not mentally incapacitated. A week later, Supreme Court Justice Laura Visitacion-Lewis turned down the guardianship request, ruling that the relatives were acting on “hearsay, conclusory, and speculative assertions.”

Huguette was disturbed that her relatives were trying to hijack her life. “It was the first time I ever saw her angry,” Chris Sattler recalls. She was convinced that her relatives were motivated by greed. “Why
do they want my money?” she asked Chris. Adds Wallace Bock, “She was not the type of person who starts screaming and ranting and raving. She’d show her displeasure in her tone of voice. She might say a few harsh words like, ‘What do these people want?’ ”

On December 9, Ian and Karine tried to visit her at the hospital. Ian called ahead to tell the hospital’s legal counsel that they were en route. “There was a security guard,” Ian recalls. “We said, ‘We’re here to see our aunt.’ He knocked on the door and Hadassah Peri came out.” Karine adds, “She wasn’t happy to see us. I found her very confrontational. I was tongue-tied.” The nurse berated them for turning up after so many years had passed, demanding, “Why are you here?” Hadassah refused to accept their flowers, but Karine insisted that she take in a note to Tante Huguette, which stressed that the family cared about her and were acting out of concern.

Elizabeth Loewy visited Huguette two more times as her investigation continued. Each time, they spoke in French and Huguette repeated that she had not been coerced by anyone. The prosecutor examined Huguette’s financial and medical records and interviewed her employees and her relatives. Some of Huguette’s magnanimous gifts raised the specter of undue influence. Loewy kept digging, searching to see if a crime had been committed.

Huguette had never been religious, but as she approached the twilight of her life, she fondly remembered the Catholic prayers that she had uttered as a child. When Marie Pompei stopped in to see the heiress, Huguette asked, “Do you know the Our Father? Would you like to sing it with me?” As Marie, a practicing Catholic, recalls, “I’ve got my arm around her back, she’s holding my hand with her other hand, and we’re singing Our Father together. See me, God? It was so lovely, so unusual.”

On Marie’s next visit in early 2011, Huguette teased her about how out of tune they had been. Marie suggested that Huguette come to her grandson’s upcoming wedding and they could sing it together. Huguette laughed, replying, “I’m not going to make a fool of myself and you shouldn’t, either.” She asked questions about the wedding—asking for a description of the bride’s gown and inquiring about whether the couple had planned their honeymoon yet.

If not, Huguette had a suggestion. Even now, her birthplace called to her, that romantic and beautiful city of lights where her mother and father had fallen in love, where she and Andrée had played together in the family’s apartment on the Avenue Victor Hugo. With a smile that spoke of happy memories, Huguette declared: “They should go to Paris.”