The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (32 page)

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.