by Meryl Gordon
Huguette had outlived many of her contemporaries, and in 2002, she lost one of her last childhood playmates: her niece Agnes Albert. Agnes, the daughter of Huguette’s half brother Charles Clark, died on June 19, 2002, at the age of ninety-four. A lengthy obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle praised the music-loving philanthropist for her donations to the San Francisco Symphony and her own talent as a pianist. The symphony’s musical director, Michael Tilson Thomas, described Agnes as “witty, charming, vivacious, and full of humor.” The article described her exploits, from rafting down the undammed Colorado River in 1941 to picketing the San Francisco Opera to force the group to put up busts of the great composers on the walls.
Ever since Agnes had been Huguette’s classmate at Spence, they had shared a special connection. Huguette had cared enough to remember Agnes’s ninetieth birthday in 1998 and called to wish her well. Afterward, Agnes sent off a note to her: “It was lovely to speak to you this morning and quite like old times!” But the two women had fallen out of touch in recent years: Agnes stopped leaving messages after what she felt was an acrimonious conversation with Wallace Bock; Huguette did not spontaneously pick up the phone, as had once been the case.
Upon learning of the death of Agnes Albert and the existence of a will, Huguette’s accountant tried to use this information as leverage. Irving Kamsler wrote to Huguette: “Your closest relative, Agnes Albert, who passed away last year leaving a substantial Estate, made her wishes known…” He obviously thought that where there was a will, there must be a way. But Huguette paid him no mind.
At ninety-six, an age when many grow fearful, Huguette was worried about being abandoned by her nurses and doctors. Night nurse Geraldine, who had already worked for the heiress for eleven years, recalls that Huguette made a point of specifically asking her to make a commitment to stay. “She didn’t say until she died, she said until the end… She also wanted Hadassah Peri to be her nurse until the end. We would both be with her until the end,” said Geraldine, adding that Huguette implied that a reward would be forthcoming. “She said she had instructed her counsel to take very good care of me and my husband and my five children.”
Geraldine, perhaps naïvely, placed her faith in Huguette’s future munificence, while Hadassah followed the credo of “get it while you can.” Huguette would still not allow Hadassah to cash the $5 million check yet. But the heiress tried to paper things over by funneling money to Hadassah in smaller increments. Moving beyond two-check days, Huguette put Hadassah into a certain kind of Nursing Hall of Fame by writing her three separate checks ($5,000; $40,000; $5,000) on the same lucrative day, February 5, 2002.
By that date, the nurse with the golden touch had assembled, courtesy of Huguette, a small real-estate empire. Hadassah and her husband owned two Manhattan apartments in the Gatsby, two Brooklyn homes, and a Brooklyn bungalow (plus their original Brooklyn bungalow). But there was a yawning gap in Hadassah’s real estate portfolio; she lacked a country house. In the panicked atmosphere after September 11, many wealthy New Yorkers were deciding that rural retreats could serve as a refuge from terrorists.
Hadassah had mastered the art of hinting her wish list into reality. But in this case, Hadassah insists with some plausibility that it was Huguette who suggested that the nurse set out on another house-hunting venture. “Madame said we should have a place to go vacation together as a family,” said Hadassah, in her fractured English, “and so if anything happened here, our place, like she did when she bought the Connecticut [house] we have place to go…” Still insistent on tightly controlling Hadassah’s schedule, Huguette told the Peris to find a retreat near Manhattan. The couple settled on a $599,000 house in Ocean, New Jersey, in 2002. As Daniel Peri explained, “We are one hour, maybe one hour and a half away in case Madame call for emergency.”
Pleased by her good fortune, Hadassah could not resist bragging about her patient’s generosity to Dr. Rudick, the plastic surgeon who originally operated on Huguette’s skin cancer. His medical services were no longer necessary, but the physician frequently stopped by to visit. Small wonder since Huguette, who appreciated his erudition and plummy South African accent, rewarded him with generous bonuses. “I was on the floor,” he later explained. “If you see, for instance, your neighbor’s outside gardening, you walk by and you say hello to them, and it was in that same kind of situation.”
Dr. Rudick recalls learning from Hadassah that Huguette “had bought her a house and I think she bought an apartment in Manhattan as well.” The helpful Hadassah offered to put in a good word with Huguette, suggesting that the surgeon might like an apartment, too. Rudick’s reply: “That would be nice.”
The physician later insisted that he never asked Huguette for anything, but that much to his surprise, she offered him $1 million with no strings attached. Huguette’s attorney, Wallace Bock, has a wildly different recollection. According to Bock, Huguette informed him that Dr. Rudick had financial problems and needed $500,000 to buy out his partners. In September 2001, she loaned the physician the money at 6 percent interest on a one-year promissory note. In March 2002, she threw another $500,000 into the pot on the same terms. Bock drew up the papers; Dr. Rudick never paid interest on either note. In mid-2002, Huguette told her lawyer that the gold-plated physician wanted to open up a new office and needed another $500,000 to buy an apartment.
Convinced that the doctor was taking advantage of the elderly Huguette, Bock became irate after speaking to Dr. Rudick. Bock wrote an impassioned two-page letter to Huguette on December 31, 2002, stressing that the doctor appeared to be issuing a threat: she could either pay up or learn to live without him. According to Bock’s letter, Dr. Rudick had explicitly stated that if “you would not give him the money that he needed to buy an apartment in New York City, he would no longer be available to you, as he had in the past.” As Bock wrote to Huguette, “I was aghast at his attitude, as was Mr. Kamsler…”
All these questions were later argued in dueling depositions. Dr. Rudick portrayed himself as selfless and misunderstood. In his version, he never had financial problems or partners, never wanted a Manhattan apartment, and certainly never threatened Huguette. As he put it in his deposition, “What I said to her was that since I was retiring, I would not be available to see her frequently.” Dr. Rudick retired on December 31, 2002; the day before, Huguette gave $50,000 to the physician and his wife.
Huguette probably had more doctors dancing in attendance than any other aging but healthy woman in America. Dr. Rudick continued to include her on his retirement rounds. “I did not go see any other patients because I was no longer in practice,” he admitted. But Huguette was special. She not only forgave the principal and the interest of the $1 million loan to him, but gave Dr. Rudick and his wife, Irene, an additional $280,000 during the next few years.
Huguette’s personal physician, Dr. Singman, had also learned that his obliging patient was happy to help out. All he had to do was ask. In May 2003, Huguette gave $25,000 to Dr. Singman’s son Paul. “He was having some financial problems,” recalled Dr. Singman, who referred to Huguette as his “fairy godmother.”
Wallace Bock received a surprising nonfinancial reward in 2003 for his efforts on behalf of his client: Huguette decided to meet with him in person rather than communicate by letter or phone. This was a major concession. For at least a half century, she had refused to meet with any of her lawyers. Bock arrived at Huguette’s hospital room with a legal file and brought Irving Kamsler along to notarize some documents.
This would prove to be one of Bock’s rare visits to her inner sanctum at Beth Israel. But Huguette took a liking to the shambling Kamsler. Eager to please, the accountant became a frequent visitor, even bringing along his new bride, Judi, to meet the heiress. Huguette called him at night and on weekends, relying on the accountant as a one-man help line. When Huguette needed to appoint a medical proxy, she chose Kamsler. “She was very clear that she wanted to be kept alive by any means possible,” Kamsler recalls. “I explain
ed to her, ‘You need to understand, I don’t want to sound gruesome, but if your heart stops beating they are going to pound on your chest, put tubes into you, hook you up to a machine.’ I said, ‘If you ever want to change your mind about what you want to happen, it’s easy to change.’ One of the things she said over the years was, ‘I’m not going to die.’ ”
After taking early retirement, Montana reporter Steve Shirley became interested in writing a biography of William Andrews Clark. He had covered the state capital in Helena for many years for the Bee newspapers. Shirley wrote to Huguette at 907 Fifth Avenue requesting an interview, stressing that he believed Senator Clark had been given a raw deal by other authors and portrayed in a one-dimensional way.
Shirley had limited hopes for an interview. So he was startled on April 24, 2003, to receive a phone call from Chris Sattler, who told him, “I’ve got Mrs. Clark on the line and she wants to talk to you.” Huguette began to reminisce with this total stranger about her childhood. “She talked briefly about her father, but she seemed very enamored of her sister, and talked mostly about their time in France,” Shirley recalled. “She said her sister was very sorry that they had to leave all of a sudden in 1914 and couldn’t spend the summer at the Château.” Huguette told that story eighty-nine years after the outbreak of World War I and eighty-four years after Andrée’s death. It was a small but telling illustration of the emotional hold that her childhood in France and her sister Andrée still had on Huguette, even after so much time had passed.
The heiress sent the reporter some favorite family photographs—a 1915 photo of Huguette dressed as an Indian with her father, a photo of William Andrews Clark leaving a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a photo of her aunt Amelia descending the stairs at the Fifth Avenue mansion. She called Shirley three more times during the next few months, eager to talk about her early years.
What was frustrating for Steve Shirley, however, was the one-sided nature of their calls. “It wasn’t really a conversation because she was quite hard of hearing,” says Shirley, who did not end up writing a book. “When I said I’d like to ask her questions, she did not seem to hear. She did speak softly, had a French accent, seemed articulate.”
Huguette’s French relative, André Baeyens, had also noticed that phone conversations were becoming increasingly difficult. He was uncertain whether the problem was her age or her hearing. “Starting in 2002 I noticed our calls became more perfunctory as Aunt Huguette began to have difficulty forming full sentences,” Baeyens recalled. “Even the forms of politeness became more difficult. Her hearing became impaired. Her telephone conversations consisted of a few polite words… This feebleness became more acute in 2003 and worse in 2004.”
Huguette had feared losing her hearing ever since she was a child and watched her mother drag around unwieldy hearing aid boxes with earpieces. Now that her own hearing was failing, Huguette chose to be in denial. She balked at being seen by an audiologist and then resisted using a hearing aid. Her staff purchased an amplified telephone but she refused to use it. In her presence, her nurses and confidants learned to make a point of standing by her left ear. The handful of people whom she spoke to every day—Hadassah, Chris, Wally Bock, and Irving Kamsler—insisted that they could still communicate with her by phone because she was so familiar with their voices. But occasional callers like Steve Shirley and André Baeyens had a more difficult time making themselves understood.
Even as her remaining connections with her relatives dwindled away, even as her days were filled with retainers whose services she purchased, Huguette’s affection for Wanda Styka remained undiminished. They had a mutual interest in art and history, and never ran out of things to discuss on the phone. Wanda appreciated the chance to talk about her father with someone who had known him well. Whenever Wanda sent a gift package or a note, Huguette brightened at the sight of her goddaughter’s distinctive calligraphy-style handwriting, showing it off to her nurses.
For Huguette, her relationship to Wanda kept her implicitly connected to one of the happier periods of her life—the time when she had not only studied painting with Tadé but spent evenings by his side. But now Wanda’s mother, Doris, the woman whom Tadé had chosen to marry, was dying. Just as Huguette had hovered protectively over her mother, Anna, in her final years, Wanda was devoted to assisting her mother. Wanda worked as a museum archivist in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, but her real occupation during those years was caretaker. “My mother went to a nursing home, and I went with her and had a bed right in her room,” recalls Wanda.
When Doris Styka died in September 2003, Wanda was concerned about how to break the news to her godmother, whom she referred to as Marraine. She was sensitive both because of Huguette’s age and because of the bond that Huguette had forged with Doris. Suzanne Pierre recommended that Wanda send a letter. Upon receiving it, Huguette immediately picked up the phone to offer comfort.
Her godmother’s emotions were so intense that Wanda felt as if Huguette was reliving her own anguish when Anna Clark passed away. “I knew she was using how devastated she had been and was applying it to me,” says Wanda. “She knew that I was very close to my mother. My dear friend mother.” In the midst of their shared grief, Huguette offered the hard-won wisdom of experience, telling Wanda, “I know it’s going to be very hard for you, the first Christmas and the first Easter.”
The next night around 9 p.m., Huguette phoned Wanda again. That was unusual; they did not talk that often. Wanda was so touched by her godmother’s concern that she jotted a note in her appointment calendar: “Dearest Marraine called. She said that I ought not to live alone. It was difficult for each of us to hear each other.”
Even though the two women were separated by distance and hearing loss, Huguette would not give up on her fears about Wanda’s safety. Huguette called again a few weeks later, and Wanda recorded her thoughts in her calendar. “She wishes to know the layout of the property and specifically, how far I am from the people next to me,” Wanda wrote. “She said she thinks of me.”
The emotional thermostat in Huguette’s hospital room rarely needed adjusting: she was even tempered and got along with her chosen attendants. Yet roiling emotions lurked beneath the surface. Even though Huguette could have developed writer’s cramp from all the checks that she was writing to Hadassah, the nurse was likely becoming frustrated since she was still unable to cash the $5 million check. A promise was a promise, even if by then Hadassah had already received more than $20 million from Huguette. The long hours had begun to grate on Hadassah, as Huguette became frail and needed to be monitored more closely.
Hadassah and Dr. Newman, the CEO of Beth Israel, remained united in what seemed to be a quixotic cause—convincing Huguette to write a new will. On January 4, 2004, Dr. Newman visited Huguette, and when he returned to his office, he jotted down his thoughts. “Stopped to see H. Clark, she seemed same, Hadassah much more anxious re lack of will. I’m trying to think of options.”
The financially beleaguered Beth Israel Hospital was running out of options, too. Beth Israel was hemorrhaging money as it operated the former Doctors Hospital overlooking the East River. A year earlier, Dr. Robert Newman had written a blunt letter to Huguette alerting her of the “excruciating plight” of the hospital. But after donating her Manet in 2000, Huguette had become less interested in propping up the hospital. Her last check to Beth Israel had been written on Halloween, October 31, 2002, for $35,000—more trick than treat, given what executives expected.
Aware that Huguette abhorred change and that she was firmly attached to her perch at the hospital, in the spring of 2004, Dr. Newman and his colleagues decided to test her I-will-not-be-moved attitude. Consulting with his colleagues, Dr. Newman made an offer that was unusual in the annals of medicine: suggesting that Huguette buy the hospital where she was living. He made it clear that if she balked at writing a nine-digit check, the hospital would be sold to a developer and torn down. On May 11, 2004, Dr. Newman and Beth Israel chairman Morto
n Hyman met with Huguette to describe what they had in mind. Afterward, Dr. Newman summarized the conversation in an e-mail.
Mort basically told her exactly where we are at—almost sure to sell the building, offers in hand… Also told her that a contribution in the neighborhood of 125 million would obviate the need to sell. Her only comment: “That’s a lot of money.” She responded the same way when we asked her for several million a few years ago, and that time she came through with the Manet. We’ll see. We also assured her we’d never abandon her…
The executives had suggested that several weeks earlier Huguette make a gift in the form of an annuity, which they promised would pay her more than $1 million each month. But that would have meant selling and handing over all of her stocks and T-bills. Huguette had always been so conservative with her investments that her returns were substandard. Intrigued by the million-dollar number, she called Wallace Bock two days later to ask him about the feasibility of selling her country estate in New Canaan and using those funds to buy the hospital. But the house was not worth that kind of money. At the urging of Bock and her accountant, Irving Kamsler, Huguette refused the hospital’s offer.
But after spending thirteen years in the same place, it was wrenching to contemplate relocating to a new neighborhood. The hospital was her home. She had lived on the Upper East Side ever since her father had opened the doors of his mansion in 1911. Beth Israel’s main facility was located in a downscale busy commercial neighborhood, at First Avenue and Sixteenth Street. She did not want to go there.
At Huguette’s direction, her attorney, her accountant, and Chris Sattler began to research other possibilities on the Upper East Side. Going back to her Fifth Avenue apartment was not on the table. As Bock recalled, she was adamant about one other thing: “She didn’t want a nursing home.” Huguette talked the situation over with her night nurse, Geraldine. “She wanted quietness and a river view,” says Geraldine. “She liked where she was, she just liked the location… the beauty of it.” The Hospital for Special Surgery and New York Hospital, both situated on the East River, were considered as options, but Mount Sinai, less than a mile from her current abode, seemed to be the best alternative.