The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark

by Meryl Gordon

  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.

  Why would a woman with three magnificent Fifth Avenue apartments, forty-two rooms decorated with Impressionist paintings and antiques, want to remain in a claustrophobic hospital room? Huguette would be asked this question repeatedly for the next twenty years. She would never spell out her feelings and usually dodged the issue entirely. Yet there are clues to her state of mind.

  A woman who had long clung to routines, Huguette was forced by her health to adjust to new surroundings. Once she got over the loss of her precious privacy, the experience had been a revelation. She had come to appreciate the very thing that she had avoided for so long—being with other people. Emotionally, she was turning toward the light, the warmth of human company. After growing up in a 121-room mansion, rattling around those lonely corridors after her sister died, there was something primal and satisfying about a one-room life in which she was the center of attention. Her staff at home had dwindled, but at the hospital there were many people to take care of her needs. It struck her as the ideal solution.

  Her doctors were flabbergasted by her stubborn insistence on living in the drab hospital quarters. “She never gave me a reason; she just refused to leave,” Dr. Singman said. “I told her she should go home, she had an apartment. I said I would visit her subsequently as often as she wanted, also that the nurses would probably stay with her if she wanted… and she still wouldn’t go home.” Dr. Rudick came away with the distinct impression that Huguette had been lonely on Fifth Avenue, although she never explicitly used that word. “She felt that in the hospital, at least she had people who would visit her,” said Dr. Rudick. “She had developed what she considered friends. Whereas in the apartment, she had nobody.”

  Huguette acted as if her survival depended on remaining at the hospital. She confided to Hadassah Peri that she feared returning home due to a terrifying experience years earlier: a would-be burglar had gained access to her apartment by pretending to deliver bottled water. “He locked the maid in the bathroom, but Madame says she was lucky she was not there,” recounted Hadassah. Huguette was in another one of her three apartments at the time; when she returned, the man was gone. If anything was stolen, Huguette did not mention it. Hadassah said that Huguette described the undated incident as “spooky.”

  If safety was one of Huguette’s reasons for shying away from Fifth Avenue, those concerns may have been exacerbated by a brazen theft from her apartment during the renovations. A valuable Degas pastel of a dancing ballerina in a yellow tutu, Danseuse Faisant des Pointes, inexplicably disappeared. Suzanne Pierre stopped by the apartment to pick up some things for Huguette and discovered the painting was gone. Contractor Neal Sattler recalls being summoned to 907 Fifth Avenue by Donald Wallace. Sattler remembers asking the lawyer, “Do you think we had something to do with it? Everything in this apartment goes in and out of the elevators, it wasn’t any of my people.” His firm was quickly cleared of suspicion as the search continued.

  The FBI investigated the theft, and a female agent went to Doctors Hospital to interview Huguette. But investigators ultimately put the case aside as unsolved. Distressed by the loss, Huguette did not file an insurance claim, likely due to her hope that the art would eventually be found.

  Meanwhile, the heiress’s insistence on remaining at the hospital raised an obvious question that was only briefly debated by the medical staff: was this the choice of a sane and rational person? Dr. Singman was concerned enough about what he called Huguette’s “insecurity” that he suggested that she see a psychiatrist. Upset that her mental health was being questioned, Huguette adamantly refused. He chose not to force the issue.

  “The woman was an eccentric of the first order, but as far as that, her cognition was excellent, she had perfect knowledge of her surroundings, she had excellent memory,” Dr. Singman insisted in a 2012 deposition. “At that point she was perfectly happy with the situation she was in. We tried to get her to go home, we made several attempts, many attempts, and she refused.” He believed that at Huguette’s age, therapy would not be worthwhile, saying, “I didn’t think that there was going to be any great help from a psychiatrist to change her attitude about what she was doing, so when she refused to see one, I went along with her.” His was the final word on this subject; other doctors did not challenge his decision.

  Was it the right thing to do? Huguette was never evaluated by a clinician, so it is difficult to project how things might have turned out if the hospital had tried to insist on a psych test or attempted treatment. She exhibited symptoms of an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. Huguette’s fear of germs, her rigidity about keeping her homes as unchanging museums of the past, her obsessive collecting and labeling of possessions, her perfectionism with her miniatures that drove the patient craftsmen crazy, her desire to eat the same thing every day to avoid making decisions—it all falls under that diagnostic rubric.

  But even if this is an accurate description of Huguette’s mental state, there is no simple fix. This disorder is considered incurable and is typically treated with talk therapy and a Prozac-like drug regimen. But Huguette kept telling people that she was already content. She liked her life, even if it was an existence that most people found incomprehensible. Huguette’s inheritance had always allowed her to do whatever she wanted: this safe bubble with constant human interaction was now her heart’s desire. Given her previous isolation, Huguette appeared to be making a psychologically healthy choice.

  Huguette’s insistence on playing a geriatric Eloise-at-Doctors-Hospital raised another quandary for the administrators. Insurance companies dictate the length of a hospital stay, but since Huguette was paying her own way—the top rate rather than a negotiated insurance discount—money was not at issue. She had already been flagged by the development office as a multimillionaire capable of making a significant donation. Now that Huguette had expressed an interest in becoming a permanent resident, the hospital expected a quid pro quo: help us and we’ll indulge you. That attitude was evident in a series of memos written by Cynthia Cromer, a member of the development staff.

  On June 7, 1991, Cromer wrote to her colleagues about the “strange” circumstances of Huguette’s admission to the hospital, noting that Dr. Singman had described her as “quite wealthy.” “Recently, Ms. Clark was told she could be discharged,” Cromer wrote. “She asked if she might stay in the hospital longer: she feels comfortable and safe her [sic] and her apartment is being renovated. Since she is a self-pay patient, the Hospital has agreed as long as we do not need the bed.” Three days later, Cromer excitedly wrote a memo noting that Huguette Clark “is reported to be worth $70 million” and “has no immediate family.” She added that Dr. Singman described Huguette as “extremely eccentric. She has a mind for detail and directs her own affairs… She has an extensive collection of Japanese model palaces and is a Japan-ophile. Dr. Singman suggested finding someone who could speak to her about Japan.”

  Although Hadassah Peri had been working for Huguette for only a brief time, she had assumed the role of protector. When Cynthia Cromer made a get-acquainted visit to Huguette, the nurse followed the hospital fund-raiser into the hallway afterward for a private conversation. Hadassah seized
the opportunity to convey her clout with Huguette. In a July 21, 1991, memo, Cromer wrote that the nurse confronted her to say that Huguette “had asked who I was and why I was visiting. She was concerned that I was trying to get her to leave the Hospital.”

  Offering to play intermediary, Hadassah said she had already told Huguette that the hospital “needed money” and had even taken the liberty of suggesting to Suzanne Pierre that a donation from Huguette would be appreciated. The nurse assured Cromer that Huguette “has a good heart.” For a private nurse with a supposedly temporary assignment, Hadassah was unabashed in her efforts to simultaneously make herself indispensable to Huguette and curry favor with the hospital. The ploy worked: from then on, the hospital fund-raisers frequently consulted Hadassah on how best to ask Huguette for money.

  Following up on the suggestion that Huguette was interested in Japan, hospital CEO Dr. Robert Newman stopped by to play his Japan card. He had worked in Japan as an Air Force physician and his wife was Japanese, so he could converse knowledgeably with Huguette about Japanese culture and history. “She had a particular interest in and concern for the well-being of the emperor and the family of the emperor,” Dr. Newman later recalled. CEOs rarely make hospital rounds but Dr. Newman became a regular gentleman caller.

  The wealth accumulated by William Andrews Clark had always attracted supplicants, but the hospital’s executives, doctors, and nurses would mount a full-scale twenty-year campaign to convince Huguette to hand over large chunks of her copper inheritance. Even as administrators maneuvered for hospital donations, several doctors and nurses sought—and received—hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts for themselves, ignoring hospital rules prohibiting medical personnel from taking cash from patients. Huguette became a personal ATM for a few hospital staffers, yet she did not appear to begrudge it.

  The cash crusade started off slowly. In July 1991, Dr. Singman invited Huguette to leave her sickbed to attend a fund-raiser, the President’s Luncheon, but his shy patient declined the honor. She expressed her gratitude to Beth Israel North instead by writing a check for $80,000 later that month to the hospital in honor of both Dr. Singman and Dr. Jack Rudick. Dr. Morton Hyman, the hospital’s chairman, came by her room especially to thank her. Not since her years as a wealthy debutante had she been courted by so many men. They even sent gifts—a CD player and music by Bach, Beethoven, Ravel, and Debussy—but she could not figure out how to use the machine and had it sent to her apartment.

  As the next act of Huguette’s life unfolded, ushers could have passed out programs highlighting the new cast members. Since even the indefatigable Hadassah drew the line at working more than twelve hours a day, Huguette hired another private nurse for the 9 p.m. to 8 a.m. night shift. (Huguette insisted on an hour off a day between nurses, just to have a little time alone.) Geraldine Lehane Coffey, an Irish immigrant married to a software engineer, had graduated from nursing school just three years earlier. She landed the night job after Huguette fired another nurse who was badgering her to leave the hospital. Geraldine agreed to work seven days a week but insisted on monthlong summer vacations to return to Ireland to visit her family.

  During an idyllic part of her childhood, Huguette had shared a room with her older sister, Andrée, who would entertain her with late-night stories. Now if Huguette could not sleep, she could rely on the comforting Irish brogue of Geraldine. They would chat about their lives or sit for hours in companionable silence. For Geraldine, who had a one-year-old son, this was undemanding work. “We did not do routine temperature because Mrs. Clark was very well,” recalled Geraldine, adding that her new patient was good company. “She was smart, she was strong, she was intelligent, well traveled, she was a very nice lady… She was joyful. I really never saw anger. She was even tempered.”

  Outside of the hospital, new personnel were also joining Huguette’s circle. After retiring from his law firm in 1987, Donald Wallace had rented office space from another partnership so that he could continue to serve his few remaining clients, including Huguette Clark and Jane Bannerman, the widow of his former partner. Now he was beginning to hand off some legal matters to an understudy, a lawyer down the hall named Wallace Bock. A real estate lawyer with expertise in an obscure tax specialty, Bock was initially taken aback by Huguette’s approach to most problems—heedlessly spending money to avoid confrontations.

  Although his new client was living in a situation that appeared infantilizing, Bock found her to be very strong willed. “She was very positive, she knew what she wanted, and she brooked no interference,” he says, adding, “I can’t say we became friends, but I became very attached to her. I saw what she was, and I felt that this was a mission I had, to protect her and to make her life as comfortable as possible.” Wallace Bock would become one of the few people in Huguette’s life to say the word no—insisting in writing that there were things she should or could not do—although she nonetheless often blithely ignored his legal advice.

  At 907 Fifth Avenue, the renovation had been finished but Chris Sattler remained on the premises, taking inventory of Huguette’s possessions at the request of her insurance company. This was Herculean labor, since each room was stuffed with pedigreed objects: antique furniture (an eighteenth-century Dutch game table, a Chippendale bookcase, a Queen Anne side chair); paintings by Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Cézanne; eighteenth-century chinoiserie; first editions in English and French (Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal); Cartier silverware; and hundreds of antique dolls and toys.

  For the newly married Chris, this was a pleasant change from his usual responsibilities at the upscale painting and renovation business launched by his great-grandfather in 1891. Fascinated by Huguette’s family, he felt he was finally using his college history degree, learning about the senator and tracking down the provenance of objects. Huguette began to call the affable Chris with requests, asking him to repair a damaged Japanese castle, drive Suzanne Pierre to and from the hospital twice a week, and ferry items to the hospital. Aware of Huguette’s reclusive reputation, he was startled one day when she asked to meet him, on a day when he was at the hospital waiting to take Suzanne home. As he recalls, “I thought, Holy mackerel, and went in. She’s in her gown, a little old lady, but her voice was strong and her hearing was much better in those days. She wanted to thank me. She said, ‘Why don’t you come back and we’ll start some projects.’ ” Those projects involved historical research for her miniature castles and châteaus. From then on, Chris would talk to her five days a week and make frequent hospital visits, becoming the closest man in her life. “She would call me as late as ten o’clock at night if she had an idea for a project,” says Chris, insisting that he did not mind. “It wasn’t a problem.”

  He was befriended by Suzanne Pierre, more than twenty years his senior, as they searched together at the apartment for items that Huguette wanted. “My grandmother adored Chris,” recalls Kati Despretz Cruz. “He would drive my grandmother around; they’d go out to lunch. Chris was the one who turned her on to cosmopolitans. He’s just a lovely person.”

  Huguette imported many elements of her old life to her new one. She still perused auction catalogues, instructing her lawyers Donald Wallace and Wallace Bock to buy antique dolls on her behalf. She kept ordering Japanese castles from Caterina Marsh and miniature French châteaus from Au Nain Bleu. A Francophile, she read Paris Match and other French magazines but also kept up on current events by consuming the New York Times and listening to all-news radio. After watching cartoons for so many years to master the techniques of animation, she had become fond of the characters and continued to watch The Smurfs, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, and Scooby-Doo. But now she had companions who could laugh with her at the antics. “She would show me different cartoons like the Hanna-Barbera series,” recalls Geraldine Coffey.

  Generous, as always, to loyal friends and her new employees, Huguette gave away $692,510 in 1991, according to her gift tax return. The lucky recipients:
Dr. Jules Pierre and his wife, Suzanne, received $114,000; Elisabeth de Villermont, the widow of Etienne, got $29,000 with another $10,000 to their daughter, Marie-Christine; Huguette’s childhood Spanish tutor Margarita (Vidal) Socas received $13,000; Doris Styka got $12,000; and the heiress spent $223,510 to pay the nursing-home costs for Ninta Sandre, the child of her former nanny. Huguette also gave her nurses generous gifts: Hadassah received $32,000, and night nurse Geraldine got an $18,000 check.

  Secretive about her life, Huguette did not want outsiders to know that she was now residing in the hospital. Even her doormen were instructed not to give out any information about her whereabouts. No one answered her home phone, leaving friends and family members concerned. “I tried to reach her but the phone just rang and rang,” recalls Wanda Styka. “I knew she had several apartments, so I kept thinking she was in one of the other ones or out of earshot. I finally wrote to her to say, ‘I’ve been trying to reach you.’ She called me.” But Huguette did not tell Wanda where she was living. From then on, Huguette would call Wanda regularly, but if Wanda wanted to get in touch, she learned that her best bet was to write, which would then prompt a call. Wanda was puzzled, but by now she had not seen her godmother for nearly forty years, so she did not push for an explanation.

  The silence at 907 Fifth Avenue was worrisome to others accustomed to reaching Huguette by phone. Her childhood friend Gordon Lyle Jr. stopped by her building after his calls went unanswered. “I tried to find out where she had gone, but they kept stonewalling me at the apartment,” he recalls. Her niece Agnes Albert became so frustrated by her inability to reach Huguette that she called Donald Wallace, and the lawyer passed on the message. Huguette spent hours happily chatting on the phone with friends and longtime associates, but she never gave anyone a callback number.