The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (29 page)

With so much time on her hands, Huguette became addicted to watching television. She had eclectic viewing habits: she favored
The Dick Cavett Show
and
The Forsyte Saga
but also had a deep fondness for cartoon shows such as
The Flintstones
and
The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle
. Once early television recorders were developed, she taped shows for her ex-husband, shipping thirty-seven boxes of tapes to Bill in the South of France; he sent a grateful but startled note requesting a valuation for customs.

Throughout this period, the calls and letters kept coming from Huguette’s married Frenchman, Etienne de Villermont. The tone of his letters varied markedly. Sometimes he wrote deeply romantic letters: “I join you through my thoughts and neither distance nor time alters the bond of love of half a life, which will never disappear.” He often thanked her for innumerable gifts. But he frequently devoted page after page to complaining about his wife Elisabeth’s ailments—a lump in her breast, lumbago, eczema—and the difficulties of caring for her and their adopted daughter, Marie-Christine. Etienne’s notes often exude a world-weary companionship, rather than sensuality. “I do more food shopping, I change Elisabeth’s bandages, empty Marie-Christine’s pot, she is still having accidents often,” he wrote in one long letter. “If I enumerate all this, it is to show you that I’m not ‘twiddling my thumbs’ and that genuinely, dear Huguette, the sincere desire to write to you is, alas, often interrupted. I am often tired.” Etienne sent Huguette photos of his house and mentioned the sleeping arrangements—“Elisabeth has her room on the side, for I don’t
sleep well in the same room”—but this was done in matter-of-fact rather than suggestive fashion.

But Etienne did make a point of remembering important dates, writing to Huguette in February 1968: “It’s Valentine’s Day and my thoughts are on you today, especially and affectionately. I would like to write to you everyday [
sic
] but with this bad weather, we all caught colds and I go out as little as possible.” He added that he and his wife and daughter would see her soon in New York.

If Etienne did not hear from Huguette for a few weeks, he wrote her letters with an undertone of panic: “I am very very worried about not having heard from you. I wouldn’t be if you tell me you are doing well.” Undoubtedly, Etienne cared about Huguette, but losing her as the family’s financial patroness would have made his life much less comfortable.

For Huguette, her inheritance was forever an undercurrent in her relationships. She was insecure, worrying about how others perceived her. She often wrote drafts of letters in pencil, tinkering with minor word choices before taking the bold step of putting pen to paper. She fretted: should she thank Bill “many times” or “a million times,” wish him a “joyous” birthday or a “very happy one.” Writing to a vendor to complain about a bill, Huguette initially planned to say that she was “very much surprised” but then upped the ante to “amazed.” This was a woman afraid of spontaneity.

Once Huguette passed her sixtieth birthday, her losses began to mount up. Her half sister Katherine Morris, now eighty-nine, remained a living link to her past, but Katherine’s daughter, Katherine Morris Hall, who had been Huguette’s childhood playmate and a Spence classmate, died in March 1968. Huguette made a rare appearance at the funeral, held at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. She chatted pleasantly with her relatives and then left. They would never see her again.

Huguette was now preoccupied with the lingering illness of her aunt Amelia, confined to her home at 575 Park Avenue, just a dozen blocks from Huguette’s Fifth Avenue home. The childless Amelia had been the equivalent of a second mother to Huguette, a calming and loving presence. Huguette worried constantly about her aunt, and
both Etienne and Bill Gower sent supportive notes trying to buck up her spirits. On September 24, 1969, Etienne wrote to say that he would be coming to Manhattan in November. “I apologize for not having written earlier,” he said in his letter. “It’s not that I am not thinking of you, as you suspect, but like you, I have family members with health problems and it has shaken me… I will soon be in New York and I am eager to see you again, and knowing you are worried bothers me very much.”

Amelia La Chapelle Hoyt Turner Semple died on October 18, 1969. As Huguette poignantly wrote in an affidavit filed with Amelia’s will, “I knew her all of my life.” Amelia bequeathed the bulk of her $757,000 estate to her third husband, lawyer Thomas Darrington Semple. He soon moved to Alabama to join relatives.

Huguette was so devastated by Amelia’s illness that she once again virtually stopped eating. Just as in 1942 when she began to waste away from stress, her weight plummeted. She kept track of her weight, weighing herself every three weeks and writing down the number. In 1967, the five-foot-six heiress weighed 131 pounds, but she had dropped to a too-slender 114 pounds by April 1969. (She made a note to herself: “120 pounds is good weight.”) Huguette often jotted thoughts on scratch paper. One day she made a note to herself: “My get up and go got up and went.”

Wanda and Doris Styka had been the first people to feel the cool breeze of Huguette’s physical absence in their daily lives, but now Huguette’s retreat turned into full-scale isolation. In her grief over the deaths, six years apart, of her mother and now her aunt, Huguette turned visitors away, an emotional reaction that became an entrenched habit. She limited her contact to the telephone.

Leontine Lyle, the wife of physician William Gordon Lyle, had been a family friend for forty years, yet Huguette declined repeated invitations to get together. As Leontine Lyle’s granddaughter Lucy Tower recalls, “My grandmother tried to see Huguette, but she wouldn’t see her. And they were close—they talked by phone two or three times a day. My grandmother would say, ‘It’s such a pretty day, I think I’ll take a walk downtown, why don’t I drop in and see you
and we could chat over tea?’ Huguette would say something like, ‘No, I have to take a nap this afternoon.’ ” As Tower puts it, “There was always an excuse.”

Huguette had been friendly with her aunt Amelia’s husband. His son, T. Darrington Semple Jr., a lawyer who lived in Manhattan, made numerous efforts to visit Huguette. She had sent the younger Semple numerous gifts—her antique Pierce-Arrow automobile, an apartment’s worth of air conditioners—as a tribute to his devotion to Amelia. (Semple Jr. even chose “La Chapelle” as the middle name for his daughter Sarah.) “My father said he felt obligated to try to meet Huguette, as a family member, and he tried,” recalls Sarah La Chapelle Thompson. “But after the sixteenth time she had to wash her hair, he gave up. But he talked to her on the phone. He stopped saying ‘Let me come visit,’ because that made her upset.”

Since Huguette was chatty and engaging on the telephone, friends and acquaintances tried artful wiles to see her. Jane Bannerman, whose husband, Charles, was Huguette’s lawyer, recalls. “At my husband’s firm, they sort of passed her along down the line. None of them ever met her, but they talked to her on the telephone. I talked to her many times on the telephone.” Huguette enjoyed reminiscing about her childhood ocean crossings and sent vintage ship menus with unusual artwork to Jane. “When we went out to Bellosguardo with the partners,” Jane Bannerman says, “I said to Mrs. Clark, ‘Why don’t you show us the place yourself, that would be really nice.’ She said, ‘Oh, no, I couldn’t do that because it would make me sad.’ ”

There may have been a final event that pushed her into solitude—a traumatic incident with her chauffeur. Many years later, her accountant, Irving Kamsler, recalls being told that “she had been in the car with her chauffeur and he had a heart attack. She got scared of people coming around the car.” Several other people referred to their own versions of this story. Huguette had often dispatched her chauffeur on errands or to take her staff home, but by 1975 she had an account with Carey Car Service to handle those chores.

During the formative years of her life, Huguette and her family had been subjected to relentless scrutiny by the newspapers. She could not put up a moat around her castle, but in a white-glove Fifth
Avenue doorman building she could now do the next best thing: keep the world out. Huguette refused to see virtually anyone face-to-face other than a housekeeper; her mother’s former social secretary, Adele Marié; and a few maids.

It was as if every frightening moment, every heartbreaking event, that had happened in her life had now come back to haunt her—Andrée’s sudden death, the illness that caused her mother to go deaf, her parents’ phobia about germs. There was nothing wrong with Huguette’s own appearance, no ugly scars to make her ashamed of showing herself to others. She had never been particularly vain, so a few wrinkles and other signs of aging would not have been enough to matter. But Huguette did not want to look people in the eye or allow them to get physically close to her. She acted as if most human contact was dangerous.

She was wealthy enough to be able to delegate tasks that might otherwise have required her to leave the house. If she needed money, she would fill out a check and send Adele Marié to cash it at the nearest branch of the First National City Bank (which would eventually become Citibank). Huguette had accounts at nearby Winters Market on Lexington Avenue, and her maids could pick up anything that local stores would not deliver. If she wanted to go from her twelfth-floor apartment down to her eighth-floor apartment, she could use the back stairs and avoid the elevator and her neighbors.

Even though she had ample space, Huguette appeared to live within narrow parameters. The decorator Robert Samuels Jr. took his daughter Margaret to see one of Huguette’s apartments, after insuring that the heiress was in the other one. “She lived down at the end, in the maid’s quarters,” recalls Margaret Hoag, who joined her father’s firm in 1968. “They had put in a little kitchenette so she could heat up food. The thing that struck me about the apartment was the paintings on the walls—all Impressionist paintings.” Hoag was stunned by the sight of Huguette’s carefully organized shoe collection. “The shoes were in boxes all marked with dates. When she had worn them, descriptions of what they were—100 boxes of shoes all stacked up, probably every one she ever had. I was amazed.” Huguette’s debutante dancing high heels, the sensible lace-up leather shoes she wore to
Tadé’s studio, the hiking footwear from her Colorado vacation—all these tangible reminders of the socially active life that she had once led, now all irrelevant.

Yet Huguette remained engaged enough in the world to continue to follow current cultural trends, reading the newspapers and the latest books. She scribbled down the names of two books published in 1969 that she wanted to read:
The Kingdom and the Power: Behind the Scenes at the New York Times
by Gay Talese, as well as the explicit sex manual
The Sensuous Woman
by J. At age sixty-three, she remained curious about the mechanics of sex.

As the years passed, Huguette continued to lose other precious relationships. On December 21, 1976, a telegram arrived: “Bill died at 10 p.m. on December 21rst, please phone to Gerard.” She mattered enough to Bill Gower that he had told his valet to alert her when the moment came. They had lived together in her apartment on the twelfth floor. She could remember what it was like to see him coming through the door, what he looked like when he slept, how he smelled after a shower and a shave, the warmth of his smile.

In her isolation, Huguette chose to become the curator of her own life and that of her parents. She wanted to preserve every remnant of family history, turning Bellosguardo and her Fifth Avenue apartments into her personal equivalent of Colonial Williamsburg, a shrine to her own past. She relied on Robert Samuels to track down vintage fixtures and fabrics. If furniture needed to be reupholstered, she demanded the same material that had been used when she moved into the apartment in the late 1920s or when her mother decorated Bellosguardo in the 1930s. Even the lightbulbs had to be antiques. “Anything related to her mother, she wanted to preserve,” recalls Ann Fabrizio, Robert Samuels’s older daughter. “She would tell my father, ‘I want it just like Mommy.’ ”