The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (39 page)

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 Morton Hyman met with Huguette to describe what they had in mind. Afterward, Dr. Newman summarized the conversation in an e-mail.

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.

The effort to find a new home for Huguette triggered a new round of panic along the executive corridors of Beth Israel. On June 2, 2004, Dr. Newman sent a dejected e-mail to colleagues, lamenting, “I visited HC this afternoon. She was her usual determined self and her determination is to go to another hospital on the Upper East Side.” Paying lip service to her wishes, Dr. Newman subsequently wrote a letter of recommendation to New York Hospital on her behalf: “She is a lovely person, highly educated, totally oriented and in remarkably good health. She makes almost no demands on the hospital staff, having her own round the clock nursing staff.”

But Beth Israel was desperate to hold on to this wealthy patient, who had proved to be a major profit center for the hospital. She was about to slip away. Her caregivers tried a startling tactic. Hadassah and Dr. Singman both announced to Huguette that if she did not move to Beth Israel’s downtown facility, they would cease playing any medical role in her life. Their threat touched on Huguette’s two great fears: being abandoned and being unable to care for herself. For Huguette, the prospect of losing her two medical protectors was terrifying.

Dr. Singman later offered explanations that strained credulity. He insisted that his threat was motivated by the rigors of a long commute to Mount Sinai, even though that facility was no more than a five-minute drive from the old Doctors Hospital.

As he said later, “Apparently Hadassah Peri also told her that she wouldn’t go up to Mount Sinai to see her, and that she would only come down to Beth Israel, so basically we were like a team…” After receiving that one-two punch, Huguette had an abrupt change of heart and agreed to go to Beth Israel’s downtown facility after all. Presumably, she felt she had no choice.

The deft nurse-doctor teamwork between Hadassah and Dr. Singman came in handy six weeks later when Dr. Singman fell down a
flight of stairs during a vacation in Italy and insisted on being medevaced back to the United States for treatment of his injuries. He informed Hadassah that the trip cost $65,000. The nurse rushed to tell this hard-luck story to Huguette, who reached for her checkbook.