The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (33 page)

At 907 Fifth Avenue, the renovation had been finished but Chris Sattler remained on the premises, taking inventory of Huguette’s possessions at the request of her insurance company. This was Herculean labor, since each room was stuffed with pedigreed objects: antique furniture (an eighteenth-century Dutch game table, a Chippendale
bookcase, a Queen Anne side chair); paintings by Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Cézanne; eighteenth-century chinoiserie; first editions in English and French (Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
, Charles Baudelaire’s
Les Fleurs du Mal
); Cartier silverware; and hundreds of antique dolls and toys.

For the newly married Chris, this was a pleasant change from his usual responsibilities at the upscale painting and renovation business launched by his great-grandfather in 1891. Fascinated by Huguette’s family, he felt he was finally using his college history degree, learning about the senator and tracking down the provenance of objects. Huguette began to call the affable Chris with requests, asking him to repair a damaged Japanese castle, drive Suzanne Pierre to and from the hospital twice a week, and ferry items to the hospital. Aware of Huguette’s reclusive reputation, he was startled one day when she asked to meet him, on a day when he was at the hospital waiting to take Suzanne home. As he recalls, “I thought,
Holy mackerel
, and went in. She’s in her gown, a little old lady, but her voice was strong and her hearing was much better in those days. She wanted to thank me. She said, ‘Why don’t you come back and we’ll start some projects.’ ” Those projects involved historical research for her miniature castles and châteaus. From then on, Chris would talk to her five days a week and make frequent hospital visits, becoming the closest man in her life. “She would call me as late as ten o’clock at night if she had an idea for a project,” says Chris, insisting that he did not mind. “It wasn’t a problem.”

He was befriended by Suzanne Pierre, more than twenty years his senior, as they searched together at the apartment for items that Huguette wanted. “My grandmother adored Chris,” recalls Kati Despretz Cruz. “He would drive my grandmother around; they’d go out to lunch. Chris was the one who turned her on to cosmopolitans. He’s just a lovely person.”

Huguette imported many elements of her old life to her new one. She still perused auction catalogues, instructing her lawyers Donald Wallace and Wallace Bock to buy antique dolls on her behalf. She kept ordering Japanese castles from Caterina Marsh and miniature French châteaus from Au Nain Bleu. A Francophile, she read
Paris
Match
and other French magazines but also kept up on current events by consuming the
New York Times
and listening to all-news radio. After watching cartoons for so many years to master the techniques of animation, she had become fond of the characters and continued to watch
The Smurfs
,
The Flintstones
,
The Jetsons
, and
Scooby-Doo
. But now she had companions who could laugh with her at the antics. “She would show me different cartoons like the Hanna-Barbera series,” recalls Geraldine Coffey.

Generous, as always, to loyal friends and her new employees, Huguette gave away $692,510 in 1991, according to her gift tax return. The lucky recipients: Dr. Jules Pierre and his wife, Suzanne, received $114,000; Elisabeth de Villermont, the widow of Etienne, got $29,000 with another $10,000 to their daughter, Marie-Christine; Huguette’s childhood Spanish tutor Margarita (Vidal) Socas received $13,000; Doris Styka got $12,000; and the heiress spent $223,510 to pay the nursing-home costs for Ninta Sandre, the child of her former nanny. Huguette also gave her nurses generous gifts: Hadassah received $32,000, and night nurse Geraldine got an $18,000 check.

Secretive about her life, Huguette did not want outsiders to know that she was now residing in the hospital. Even her doormen were instructed not to give out any information about her whereabouts. No one answered her home phone, leaving friends and family members concerned. “I tried to reach her but the phone just rang and rang,” recalls Wanda Styka. “I knew she had several apartments, so I kept thinking she was in one of the other ones or out of earshot. I finally wrote to her to say, ‘I’ve been trying to reach you.’ She called me.” But Huguette did not tell Wanda where she was living. From then on, Huguette would call Wanda regularly, but if Wanda wanted to get in touch, she learned that her best bet was to write, which would then prompt a call. Wanda was puzzled, but by now she had not seen her godmother for nearly forty years, so she did not push for an explanation.

The silence at 907 Fifth Avenue was worrisome to others accustomed to reaching Huguette by phone. Her childhood friend Gordon Lyle Jr. stopped by her building after his calls went unanswered. “I tried to find out where she had gone, but they kept stonewalling
me at the apartment,” he recalls. Her niece Agnes Albert became so frustrated by her inability to reach Huguette that she called Donald Wallace, and the lawyer passed on the message. Huguette spent hours happily chatting on the phone with friends and longtime associates, but she never gave anyone a callback number.

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.

H
adassah 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, sometimes 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…”