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

by Meryl Gordon

  One odd thing stood out: Huguette had expressly signed her previous will in March for only one reason, and that was to insure that Hadassah would receive $5 million in case Huguette inconveniently died before her Connecticut estate was sold. But this new document eliminated that clause, making absolutely no mention of that sum or any special obligation to Hadassah. Bock would later admit that this was a mistake, saying, “I had failed to put it in.” Pressed on how he could have forgotten such a significant sum and whether he subconsciously intended to thwart the nurse, Bock mused out loud, “It might have very well been subconscious. It’s a complete blank to me whether I forgot it or made an assumption that it should be left out because Hadassah was getting so much in the will. I was a little embarrassed, to say the least.”

  There were other losers: Suzanne Pierre and Marie-Christine DeMarchez, who had both stood to inherit under the 2001 draft of Huguette’s will, had been cut from the list. Suzanne had already received $10 million from Huguette. The heiress still exchanged letters with Marie-Christine, the daughter of Etienne de Villermont, but Huguette’s emotional tie to that family had lessened.

  Huguette never explicitly mentioned her family members by name in any draft of her will. This new will included the primal-scream paragraph disowning her relatives that had initially appeared in the 2001 draft. Just a few weeks earlier, Huguette had signed a new will that gave her distant family members virtually all of her money, by default. But she had apparently had a change of heart.

  In memory of the tension between Huguette’s mother, Anna, and her stepchildren, Huguette was prepared to punish their descendants. She did not want them to receive any of her inheritance. Huguette had repeated this refrain so often to the members of her circle including Suzanne, Hadassah, and Chris that it was treated as gospel. Irving Kamsler insists that she pointed out to him yet again that she and her half siblings had all received equal shares from William Andrews Clark’s estate. “She clearly said that she doesn’t want anything to do with her family, hasn’t for years. They had been taken care of,” he recalls. “Whatever happened or has not happened over the years, they got their money. She felt that certain family members had not treated her or her mother very nicely when she was younger.”

  On March 30, Dr. Singman suggested to Huguette that she sign a Do Not Resuscitate order. Her recent health woes made this a timely consideration. But Huguette was not receptive. Hadassah, who was present for the conversation, remembers, “She really don’t want to hear about this, you know… She wants to be resuscitated.” Huguette had a tremendous will to live. She had books to read, dolls to buy, and art projects to work on. She was eager to take another look at her collection of French children’s illustrations, to read up on Queen Elizabeth I’s coronation, and arrange for a new project using her antique Japanese Hina dolls. She kept Chris running to and from her apartment and the hospital to fulfill her wishes. If she stayed busy enough, she could avoid brooding about the terrifying inevitable. To sign a DNR order would be to give in.

  Six weeks after Huguette signed her first new will, Wally Bock, Irving Kamsler, and Lewis Siegel again made their way to Huguette’s room on the third floor, document in hand. Siegel was along to supervise the signing ceremony. He would later admit that he had not read the document beforehand and assumed that Huguette already knew what was in it. A copy had been sent to her a few days earlier.

  Under estate law, beneficiaries are not supposed to be in the room when someone signs a will, to insure that no arm-twisting or pressure is applied. It is not illegal to stick around, but if the will is later contested, such behavior gives opponents a potent weapon—the ability to charge that undue influence occurred.

  Bock’s secretary, Danita Rudisill, accompanied him to Beth Israel to serve as a witness, but he would have to recruit a second person from the hospital staff. For a signing ceremony that Kamsler and Bock had been anticipating for years, there was a slapdash quality to the April 19 event.

  Hadassah and Chris were chatting with Huguette when the others arrived. Huguette had been up until 4 a.m. the night before, as usual, but appeared alert. “We exchanged pleasantries,” Bock says. “I introduced Danita to Mrs. Clark. She had spoken to her many times over the phone, but she had never met her personally.”

  Since Hadassah, Chris, Wally, and Irving were all slated to receive money from Huguette, they were supposed to make themselves scarce. Hadassah went out into the hallway and recruited nurse Steven Pyram to serve as the second witness. Pyram was preoccupied with other patient responsibilities, but agreed to take a few minutes for the task.

  Memories would later differ on what occurred next in Huguette’s room. In Wallace Bock’s version: “I then asked Mr. Kamsler, Chris, and Hadassah to leave the room, and I left the room and we closed the door and we were out in the corridor.”

  However, his secretary, Danita Rudisill, who subsequently had a falling out with Bock and left his law firm, would later insist that things played out quite differently. Speaking in a deposition probing the details of the signing ceremony, she stated that Hadassah not only remained in the room but helped guide Huguette’s hand when she initialed the pages and signed the will. Rudisill also claimed that Irving Kamsler and Wallace Bock had remained by Huguette’s side. Steven Pyram, who was there for less than five minutes, recalled seeing “an Asian” woman and also thought that another man had been present. Hadassah testified that she could not remember whether or not she was in the room, but was certain of one thing: she had not helped Huguette sign the will.

  Lewis Siegel later acknowledged in a deposition that if he had read the will and had known that Hadassah was going to inherit, “I might have asked her to leave.” He also said that he did not confirm with Huguette that she was aware of all the provisions in the document. She did not study it line by line in front of him and the other witnesses.

  Nobody videotaped the signing ceremony, which would have made it easier later on to determine what actually happened. Had a large, established law firm handled the paperwork for a woman leaving a multimillion-dollar estate—especially one who was cutting out her relatives—no doubt this would have been a far more prolonged process. But Wallace Bock was a member of a small firm, and he thought what he had done was sufficient.

  “Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” Bock said in December 2013. “I should have taken more precautions. I’ve been writing wills for umpteen years and I have a set procedure. I have the person initial the pages, I ask if they’ve read it before they initial it. Lewis has observed me doing it.” But Bock claims that this situation was unusual for him: he says it was the first time that he prepared a will in which a client left him money, requiring him to leave the room rather than preside over the signing ceremony. If he could have a do-over, Bock says, “I might have made a videotape of it. The witnesses were the male nurse and my secretary. If I had called in a couple of doctors, I would have been better off. I had two independent witnesses who could not remember what happened. In hindsight, I could have done other things.”

  In Hadassah’s official nursing notes that day, she described Huguette as “alert and oriented x 3”—which in nursing shorthand means that she knew who she was, where she was, and what time it was. In other words, Huguette was mentally competent to sign a will enriching Hadassah.

  Three days later, Huguette felt the urge to revisit her past; the nursing notes state that she spent a few hours paging through a photo album depicting her childhood in Montana with her parents and Andrée. She gazed at a picture of her sister, her father, and herself putting on hard hats to descend into the mines. Those mines had produced the copper fortune that she had just arranged to give away. Irish and Chinese immigrants working in brutal conditions had wrested the copper from the earth. None of that money would be returning to Montana to benefit the regions ravaged by William Andrews Clark.

  In the yin and yang of Huguette’s relationship with Hadassah, their shifting emotional balance often played out in tangible fashion, as witnes
sed by the entries in the heiress’s check registry. The nurse had become accustomed to receiving large gift checks as often as twice a day, but Huguette had slowed down the pace and now was reaching for her checkbook only twice a month. Hadassah still didn’t have her $5 million in hand. Huguette appeared to be holding the money tantalizingly out of reach, shrewdly dangling it in front of the nurse to make sure that she did not quit.

  Yet for Huguette, the reverberations lingered from those ten frightening days in January when the nurse had gone AWOL. Huguette was eager to avoid a recurrence. One day that spring, Hadassah came to work wearing a pair of inexpensive but attractive earrings. And that gave Huguette an idea.

  She called Chris and asked him to open up her home safe and bring the contents to the hospital. The Cartier and Van Cleef and Arpels boxes were vintage, filled with treasures dating back to Huguette’s debutante days—necklaces, rings, bracelets, and earrings that she had either bought for herself or been given as gifts. Huguette opened up the boxes and dumped the contents onto her hospital bed. It was a dazzling display—diamonds, emeralds, rubies, gold, platinum—a shimmering array of colors lighting up the hospital room. This was not even Huguette’s “important” jewelry, which remained locked away in a bank vault.

  A half century had passed since Huguette had fastened the clasps of the necklaces and bracelets and adorned herself to go out to the opera or a fashion show. The sight of her possessions evoked old times. “She was having so much fun, she loved it,” Chris recalls. Huguette not only wanted to show off her jewelry—she wanted to give it away. Rather than ask Hadassah to pick out a few pieces, Huguette decided to hand it all over to the nurse. But with Chris standing by, Huguette thought that he and his wife and two daughters might like a handful of mementoes, too. Huguette picked up a gold cross with red rubies and said to him, “Hadassah is Jewish now, would you like this? Your girls might like it.” Unaware of Huguette’s intentions when he brought the jewelry to the hospital, Chris later realized that he had better tell Wallace Bock, recalling, “He always got exasperated when these things happened.”

  As for Hadassah, she could now be the envy of almost any best-dressed room in Manhattan, dripping in diamonds after receiving eighty-seven pieces of antique jewelry valued at $667,300. The nurse called her husband and urged him to drive over to the hospital immediately to pick up the baubles. “I was afraid to carry it,” recalls Daniel Peri. He worried that even just en route back to his car, somebody could “hit me on the head, take it.” Back in their Brooklyn home, he waited for his wife to return; they opened up all the boxes together and gazed at the sparkling loot. Daniel Peri then hid the jewelry around the house.

  Huguette loved watching Hadassah light up with a smile, overcome with gratitude. Happy days were here again in her hospital room. Why not keep the good mood going? After all, Huguette had two homes full of expensive possessions that she had not seen in years. She called Bock in June and told him that she wanted to give a Renoir to Hadassah. The lawyer recorded his blunt reaction in his monthly bill: “Told her she couldn’t.” Huguette still owed taxes on her previous gifts to Hadassah; this would just further pile up her indebtedness to the IRS.

  Huguette nonetheless was determined to make another grand gesture. She asked Chris to bring a Stradivarius violin from her apartment to the hospital. Crafted in 1686 and known as “the Cremona,” the violin was insured at $1.2 million. Fourteen years earlier, Hadassah’s six-year-old son David had played a few tunes on an inexpensive violin for Huguette at the hospital. At that time, the heiress had promised him that one day she would give him a gift. But David, now twenty years old, had long since given up the instrument.

  Yet Huguette decided to make good on her long-ago promise. Hadassah later insisted that she warned Huguette the instrument would not get much use: “I told Madame that he doesn’t play anymore, but she insist maybe he will go back to learn again.”

  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 se
ems 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.