by Meryl Gordon
Huguette wanted to blend in at the medical facility, insisting on wearing a hospital gown although there was no medical reason to do so. “I buy her a nice gown,” says Hadassah. “She never wear the gown that I bought her. She prefer the hospital gown, she very down-to-earth.”
Yet in this peculiar hospital environment, she was blossoming. Huguette regaled her new companions with tales of her adventures in Montana, Paris, Hawaii, and Manhattan. Huguette told Hadassah and Geraldine about surfing with Duke Kahanamoku and described to Chris taking her first plane ride in 1919, an unauthorized trip courtesy of the pilot boyfriend of her nanny. “They flew over the house, over Central Park, in an open cockpit,” says Sattler. “The senator was very, very, very, very angry.”
Chris and the others were baffled by the conflicting images of Huguette’s fearless childhood and her homebound adult years. “She was an outgoing person, brave, try anything. Nothing like the kind of person she became,” he says. “She never talked as if anything had gone wrong with her life, you got the impression that nothing was wrong with it. Obviously, something did.” Her life was an enigma to her new circle of intimates. Huguette never discussed why she had retreated into solitude, but she appeared to be at peace in the hospital, able to finally let down her guard.
Chapter Fourteen
The Constant Companion
Hadassah Peri was becoming much more than Huguette’s nurse. She was her gatekeeper, her confidant, and her new best friend. As the bond between caregiver and patient grew, Hadassah and her husband, Daniel, found that they had stumbled into a fairy-tale existence in which a benevolent and otherworldly figure was willing to fulfill their every materialistic desire. But as with all fables, there was a price to be paid, a price that the couple likely did not anticipate as they began to insinuate themselves in Huguette’s life—and she insinuated herself in theirs. The couple’s bargain, swapping a normal family life for immense riches, was only made possible by the quiet yet indomitable nature of their patroness.
In marked and perhaps conscious contrast to her penny-pinching father, Huguette enjoyed her identity as a kind and generous woman who liked making other people happy. She received a tsunami of grateful thank-you notes for the cash gifts that she granted to loyal friends and retainers. She saved and treasured these cards as tangible evidence of how much she was appreciated. But Huguette lived in a world of willful obliviousness. Rooted in her lifetime of privilege, it never occurred to her to consider her impact on other people’s lives—their needs were irrelevant when compared to her own desires. She wanted what she wanted whenever she wanted it. Surrounded during her childhood by live-in nannies who were there for her round the clock, Huguette now had a desire to replicate that constant intimacy.
Huguette’s adult relationships never involved compromise, at least not on her part. Many of them had a transactional undercurrent. She had abruptly changed her painting lessons with Tadé Styka from mornings to afternoons without asking whether it would interfere with his artistic routine. In recent years, she frequently called decorator Robert Samuels and carpenter Rudolph Jaklitsch at home on nights and weekends; it did not dawn on her that such interruptions were rude. Her money gave her the license to be inconsiderate, and no one dared rebuke her. To be rich is to be narcissistic. To be old is to be narcissistic. Huguette had become narcissism squared. And now what she wanted was Hadassah Peri’s undivided attention. There was something about Hadassah’s radiant smile, eagerness to please, and fierce willingness to protect her patient that proved irresistible to Huguette.
After enduring years of struggle with an unpredictable income based on private nursing assignments and tips from the backseats of cabs, Hadassah and Daniel Peri reveled in her new job with its six-figure income and promise of long-term security. To accommodate Huguette’s demand for daily twelve-hour companionship, the couple obediently rearranged their lives. In 1992, Daniel quit driving a cab to become “Mr. Mom,” as the Peris’ three children came to call him. “I told him to stay home and watch the kids,” Hadassah bluntly explained. The couple believed that Daniel’s transformation to househusband made more economic sense than hiring a nanny. “I stop working because of the tax bracket,” recalled Daniel Peri in fractured English. “Whatever I making is going to pay taxes.” This decision meant that all five members of the Peri family were now utterly dependent on Huguette’s goodwill.
Huguette quickly became the sun around which the Peri family’s daily existence revolved. Not only did Hadassah work eighty-four hours per week (seven days of twelve-hour shifts) at the hospital, but when she arrived home at the family bungalow in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn, after an hour commute, she spent her evenings doing chores for Huguette, such as washing her hospital gowns and making vegetable soup to replace unappetizing hospital food. In ways that only prisoners can imagine, Hadassah’s free time was never free. She could not put her job out of mind for even a few hours. The lonely Huguette called the nurse every night to make sure that she had gotten home safely and to wish her good night. Hadassah’s children often answered the phone. The sound track of their childhood was Huguette’s high-pitched voice, asking for their mother.
For Huguette, this was the closest and most intense relationship that she had experienced in three decades. Hadassah was caring and comforting, interested in hearing about the tiniest minutia of Huguette’s pampered life. Huguette frequently told Hadassah that she loved her and left messages saying so on Hadassah’s answering machine. But for Huguette, love was frightening. Love carried with it the possibility of loss. To be out of eyesight or earshot of her beloved made her anxious, so Huguette kept Hadassah close by. Hadassah’s family inevitably became part of the package. This was a mutually beneficial—and mutually manipulative—pas de deux. Huguette craved loyalty; Hadassah coveted financial security. The balance of power began with everything tilted Huguette’s way, but it shifted over the years as the nurse realized just how dependent Huguette had become—and that those feelings could be used as leverage.
Daniel Peri began to do errands for Huguette, taking on an expanding series of tasks that had him stopping by the hospital several days a week. At Huguette’s request, he purchased a television and VCR and installed them in her room. He shopped for Huguette’s Christian Dior stockings, Daniel Green slippers, cashmere sweaters imported from Scotland, new Barbie dolls, doll accessories, and other toys. He steamed artichokes for Huguette plus bought and dropped off her favorite brioche at the hospital.
Still intrigued by animation, Huguette asked Daniel Peri to take over the responsibility for taping cartoons, photographing the videos, and putting the pictures into albums. She wanted the former cabdriver to capture every frame of each video, and in exasperating fashion, she would often make him redo the work. “Sometimes I take twenty [photos] and if she want thirty I go back and take thirty,” Daniel Peri said. Huguette bought Hadassah’s husband a used car so that he could transport objects for her. She would later give the family enough money to upgrade to a Lincoln Navigator Luxury Sedan, a Hummer, and a $210,000 Bentley. Daniel Peri never kept a time sheet but was rewarded by Huguette with checks for as much as $60,000, often several times a year.
Huguette’s every whim was treated as a command by Hadassah and Daniel Peri—and that extended to their children, too. Huguette decided to share her love of cartoons with Hadassah’s children: Abraham, born in 1982 and known as Avi; David, born in 1985; and daughter Geula, born in 1987. The kids were required by their parents to watch cartoons that Huguette had taped, and then tell her, by phone or in person, what they thought. As Daniel Peri described the situation, “She make video, she give to the kids… Hadassah come home, okay, the kids have to watch The Flintstones.” This was not hardship duty for three children, but it was an impingement on the children’s time and yet another reminder of who ruled their household.
The Peri children were brought to the hospital frequently to entertain Huguette. “They visit in holidays, Jewish holidays, American holidays, some
times in midweek,” recalled Daniel Peri. At least going to the hospital allowed the children a chance to see their mother during the day. Some of their school artwork hung on Huguette’s hospital walls rather than in their own home. Middle child David recalled bringing his violin to the hospital and performing for his mother’s employer. Huguette promised to give the six-year-old a relevant gift when he grew up. David said he would prefer to get Barbies now, just like his sister, but Huguette smiled and told him to be patient.
When Hadassah began working for Huguette in 1991, the nurse and her family lived in a modest 1,300-square-foot bungalow, all five of them crammed into two bedrooms. The residence was located in the middle-class enclave of Manhattan Beach, home to a mixture of Ashkenazi Jews and Italians. In 1993, their basement was damaged. “We have a big flood in our first house, and Madame told us to take a picture and I show it to her, and that’s how it started,” Hadassah explained. Huguette offered to buy the family a new home. Hadassah sent her husband house hunting, but Daniel Peri was baffled about how to proceed since “she didn’t give us a price range.”
He was not sure how high to aim or if he needed to sell their old place for a down payment. After looking at a handful of houses in their neighborhood, the couple chose a spacious $525,000 home, at 3,676 square feet more than double the size of their old property but only three blocks away. Daniel Peri says he did not know that Huguette was willing to pay for the entire purchase until the closing. The couple held on to their bungalow and turned it into a rental.
That home purchase began Hadassah’s transition into one of the highest-paid nurses in human history. “I knew that Hadassah was devoted to Mrs. Clark, but what was the motivation behind her devotion?” says Wallace Bock, Huguette’s lawyer. What Hadassah learned was that if she simply mentioned her problems to Huguette, her wealthy and healthy patient would reach for her checkbook. “What do you do when you are in the room for twenty years, you talk about your family, what is your life,” Hadassah said in a legal deposition, when asked about the unending flow of gifts. “She ask you how your kid is doing, what is the problem. What you going to say—you tell your life story and that’s how it begins. We don’t ask Madame to give us.”
The secret of Hadassah’s salesmanship was that she never had to directly ask for anything. All she had to do was discuss her concerns over the high cost of private school (and then college) for her three children; Huguette began paying not only the tuition bills but the cost of after-school activities. When Hadassah’s brother Ramon Oloroso and his wife and daughter, Michelle, came from California for a visit and stayed past their welcome, Hadassah confided to Huguette about how crowded her home had become. Huguette bought the nurse a $775,000 Brooklyn house, for use by Hadassah’s relatives. A broker called Hadassah when a bungalow, located next to her first home, became available. The nurse mused out loud about how she would love to buy it now for her children to use when they grew up. Huguette made that dream come true, too.
For Hadassah, this was astonishing—the equivalent of dealing with the Make-A-Wish Foundation on steroids. The more Hadassah got, the more she wanted. It was irresistible to see just how far Huguette would go to make her constant companion happy. Hadassah never held back in discussing her problems during her long hours in Huguette’s hospital room. When Hadassah’s niece Michelle was diagnosed with breast cancer, Huguette paid the medical bills. After Hadassah’s middle son reached his teens and had a car accident, the nurse confided in her employer. “We tried to fix the car but Madame said, ‘No, it is not safe. You better get a new one,’ ” Hadassah insisted. Huguette bought David a $21,000 Isuzu.
For Huguette, this was Monopoly money—deriving from her robber-baron father’s actual monopolies—and had no meaning for her other than allowing her to buy Hadassah’s loyalty and time. During the first five years of their relationship, Huguette wrote checks for $874,000 to Hadassah and her family on top of the real estate and cars. And that was just a taste of the largesse yet to come. Huguette often confided in her friend Suzanne Pierre about “poor Hadassah’s” problems and what she was doing to help. Suzanne, who had hired Hadassah, became alarmed that the nurse was taking advantage of her position. Suzanne’s granddaughter, Kati Cruz, recalls, “Hadassah was constantly complaining: she needed a summer home, a new car, there was constant bellyaching. It made my grandmother so angry. Hadassah knew that Madame Clark adored her and she wouldn’t say no.”
Blinded by dollar signs, Hadassah and her husband ignored the warning signs of distress in their own home. For the three Peri children, their lives were forever marked with a dividing line: their mother all but vanished once she began working for Huguette in 1991. Day after day, week after week, year after year, Hadassah was perpetually unavailable to her own children. As much as the children appreciated Huguette’s generosity, they missed their mother and resented their stolen childhood.
Geula, who was just four years old when her mother started her unrelenting routine, began weeping years later when asked in a legal deposition about her upbringing, saying, “My mother was always working, so I didn’t grow up with my mother.” Her oldest brother, Avi, recalls their mother as a fleeting presence, saying, “She was working all the time. I didn’t really see her. She had long shifts from early in the morning to late at night. My dad would take care of us at home, or other family members.” Asked whether he was upset by his mother’s long hours, Avi replied, “She had to do what she had to do. It is what it is. Looking back, what can you say as a kid? My parents came here with nothing—my parents just worked and came to America.”
Daniel Peri admits to feeling guilty that his children suffered. “I try my best to give to the family, do everything for the family, but is no mother in the house,” he says. “Hadassah is always, always working.” The nurse could have asked for—or even insisted on—reduced hours for the sake of her family. It is inhumane to work 365 days a year, with scarcely enough time to sleep between shifts. But if Hadassah had requested time off, she might have risked giving someone else the opportunity to gain Huguette’s confidence and affection.
“The suggestion that Mrs. Peri was an uncaring or inferior mother is false,” insists Fraser Seitel, a spokesman for the nurse. “Obviously, Mrs. Peri regrets that she couldn’t spend more time with her children, but just like lots of parents, she was committed to her work primarily so that her children might enjoy a better life.”
Aware of her family’s sacrifices, Hadassah felt entitled to every gift that she extracted from Huguette. The petite nurse was later defiant as she described what she did for love—and money. “I dedicate my life to Madame. For almost fourteen years I stayed more in Madame room than in my house,” Hadassah insisted. “I work twelve hours, my husband is mother and father while I’m working with Madame. Family vacation I miss when the kids were growing up. She never wants me to take off. She is uncomfortable with other people. I give my life for her…”
During the decades that Huguette was home alone on Fifth Avenue, she led a life in the shadows, sheltered from scrutiny. What time she got up in the morning or went to bed at night, whether she spent hours chatting on the phone or practicing her animation techniques, was nobody’s business but her own. Her existence played out behind closed doors and out of sight.
Now Huguette’s routines were chronicled in meticulous detail by an array of notetakers. Hadassah and night nurse Geraldine recorded their patient’s daily life (“listened to radio, conversant and cheerful, settled for sleep @ 3 a.m.”) and her ailments. Huguette was in good health during her early years in the hospital, though she suffered through chicken pox and bouts of insomnia.
Unbeknownst to Huguette, many of her offhand remarks to other hospital personnel were being transcribed for posterity. The executives and development officers at Doctors Hospital, which changed its name in 1994 to Beth Israel North, wrote hundreds of candid memos and e-mails describing their behind-the-scenes efforts to cajole Huguette into making donations—memos that in hindsight w
ould be embarrassing for their authors. Hospital CEO Dr. Robert Newman wrote a note acknowledging, “Madame, as you know, is the biggest bucks contributing potential we have ever had…” A Beth Israel development staffer later wrote an e-mail that would subsequently raise red flags about the institution’s conduct: “Does Legal know about Mrs. Clark’s situation? I guess they do, but my fear is that if we raise the issue with them, they might push the question of whether she should even be living at the hospital. If we were forced to ‘evict’ her, we’d certainly have no hope of any support.” Each time staff members visited or spoke to Huguette, they would race to their computers afterward to analyze her comments and circulate the latest soundings.
The other notetaker chronicling Huguette’s life was Chris Sattler. He kept a daily log recording the tasks he performed for his employer, often referred to by her initials, HMC (Huguette Marcelle Clark). His entries included such details as: “Deliver Flowers for Mrs. Clark to Mrs. Pierre”; “Find Missing Photo of HMC’s bedroom in Bellosguardo”; “Reassembling Rapunzel House with Newly Discovered Pieces, Photograph and Deliver to the hospital and confer with HMC.”
For a woman who treasured privacy, Huguette had put herself into a situation where there was a paper trail charting her moods, her conversations, her spending, her health, and her dawn-to-dusk existence—a rising mountain of documents.
Oblivious to these watchers, Huguette was quietly pursuing a passion that virtually no one in her purview understood. In fact, behind her back, hospital executives mocked her activities. But just like the eighty-eight-year-old Helen Hooven Santmyer, who found late-in-life success with the publication of her best-selling novel, And Ladies of the Club, Huguette was still trying to create art.