The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (4 page)

At Carla’s behest, Newell called Suzanne Pierre, who told him that Huguette was “well taken care of” and was “always in a good mood.” Newell then sent Carla a lengthy e-mail, describing the conversation and cautioning Carla to keep her distance.

Newell summarized what he had learned about Huguette’s family history on her mother’s side—that she had no living relatives—and wrote that Huguette’s attorney, Wallace Bock, had been consistently “pleasant” to him. Newell recalled that Huguette had been alert and lucid during their last conversation. But the Realtor noted that he was not privy to information about her finances.

The bright blue sign over the entryway at Beth Israel Medical Center looks garish against the backdrop of the sweeping white concrete columns of the silolike structure, which sits on the busy corner of First Avenue and Sixteenth Street. Inside the bustling ten-floor, 1,100-bed hospital, one serene third-floor area has been set aside to cater to well-to-do patients. The suites offer views overlooking Stuyvesant Square, concierge service, flat-screen televisions, fluffy bathrobes, unrestricted visiting hours, and in-room sleep sofas for family members. “The unit is more reminiscent of a luxury hotel than a hospital,” notes the facility’s promotional material. Nonetheless, this teaching hospital, located in a noisy commercial neighborhood, lacks the cachet of its Upper East Side competitors.

Founded in 1890 as a clinic for poor Jewish immigrants working in the sweatshops of the Lower East Side and living in tenements, Beth Israel was for many decades a charity hospital. From that inauspicious beginning, the hospital has morphed into a busy urban modern medical facility with such gritty units as a methadone clinic for drug addicts. This is not the kind of place where William Andrews Clark could have imagined one of his descendants spending the night, even in an emergency. If by some accident of fate an heiress to one of the great American fortunes was admitted to Beth Israel, the obvious place for her would be the VIP floor, where a chef creates gourmet meals and suites begin at $450 per night on top of regular hospital costs.

On Friday, December 5, 2008, Ian and Carla arrived at the hospital and headed toward the upscale third-floor wing. But Huguette Clark was not there. Instead, William Clark’s youngest child was right around the corner in the Karpas Pavilion, down a dreary corridor
to Room 3K01, next to a utility closet. Huguette’s room had an old-fashioned radiator with peeling paint and a window overlooking the industrial air-conditioning unit.

Ian and Carla knocked on the door. The private nurse on duty, Christie Ysit, a Filipino immigrant, came out to greet them. Christie was chatty and told them that Huguette was sleeping but was doing well for her age. The nurse reported that Huguette still had a good appetite and was able to get up and walk around the room, albeit with assistance. Looking for an excuse to enter, Carla seized on a friendly mention of religion. “I asked if I could go in and give her a blessing,” Carla said. “Ian and I entered the room. She was sleeping peacefully.” They stayed for scarcely a minute, standing at the foot of Huguette’s bed. Ysit suggested that if they wanted more information, they might want to return the following day to talk to Huguette Clark’s primary nurse, Hadassah Peri.

A Filipino immigrant married to an Israeli cabdriver, Hadassah Peri was so devoted to her patient that she sometimes put in twelve-hour days taking care of Huguette. Her own children complained that the nurse was never home. Her maiden name had been Gicela Oloroso, but after moving to New York and marrying Daniel Peri, she had converted to Judaism and changed her name. Hadassah’s native language was Tagalog, and although she had lived in the United States since 1972, she still spoke in fractured English, with lapses in grammar and awkward sentence structure.

At Beth Israel, the doctors were aware that the patient and her chief nurse were unusually close. “Mrs. Peri was very caring, and she couldn’t do enough for Mrs. Clark,” says Dr. Jack Rudick, a surgeon, adding that the heiress “related to her as her very best friend.” Every night when Hadassah returned to her home in the unfashionable Brooklyn neighborhood of Manhattan Beach, within minutes after she walked in the door she would get a phone call from her patient. Huguette wanted to make sure the nurse got home safely. Sometimes Hadassah would get another call later in the evening. Huguette wanted to say, “Good night.”

When Carla and Ian arrived for their second visit to the hospital twenty-four hours later, they were hoping to see Huguette and brought
a bouquet of flowers. This time, when they knocked on Huguette’s door, Hadassah Peri came out to speak to them in the hallway. The pint-sized nurse was furious. She told them that Huguette Clark was “very upset” that they had turned up uninvited on Sunday and barged into her room. Carla and Ian could not see into the hospital room but heard Huguette in the background, calling out for Hadassah in a shrill, high-pitched voice. The nurse demanded that they leave the hospital immediately.

For scions of a WASP family who had attended elite schools—Ian was a product of the Palm Beach Day School, Deerfield Academy, and the University of Pennsylvania; Carla had attended the Ethel Walker boarding school followed by Middlebury College—it was quite a turnabout to be ordered out by a paid-by-the-hour immigrant employee. “We were worried,” says Ian. Carla was startled by the nurse’s behavior, saying, “Hadassah Peri was very belligerent.” These two well-connected New Yorkers had been joking between themselves about feeling like Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys as they tried to learn more about Huguette, but this confrontation made them feel like they had stepped into something noir.

As soon as the uninvited duo left, Hadassah picked up the phone and called Irving Kamsler, who immediately got in touch with Wallace Bock. By the time Carla returned to her Upper West Side office, a threatening e-mail awaited her from Bock, warning her and Ian that if they tried to visit Huguette Clark again, they would be removed by force. “Your attempt to invade her privacy, which she guards so carefully and is guarded so scrupulously by those of us on whom she relies on a daily basis, was not appreciated,” he wrote. “In fact, she was quite disturbed about it.”

Carla asked to meet with Bock, to explain why they had gone to the hospital. “We had never met but we had been conversing for years and with this e-mail and the situation, we thought it best to sit down face-to-face,” she says. The next day, she and Ian went to Bock’s office on Lexington Avenue. Rather than the gleaming premises of a high-end Manhattan law firm, the place exuded a frayed-around-the-edges quality, with worn carpeting and furniture.

A rotund Brooklyn native whose father had worked in the garment
business (“He was a schmatta dealer,” Bock says), the lawyer had served in the Army during the Korean War and attended Columbia Law School on the GI Bill. Bock’s original specialty was an obscure area of real estate law. He had shared office space with Huguette’s longtime attorney Donald Wallace, who suffered a serious heart attack in 1997. As a result, Bock took over Huguette Clark’s legal affairs, making himself so indispensable that she did not seek other counsel.

For Wallace Bock, dealing with the Clark descendants was yet another part of his mandate to shelter his client from outsiders. Huguette Clark had repeatedly told him that she did not want direct contact with these relatives. During a back-and-forth of letters with Clark family members in 2007 about repairs to the William Andrews Clark mausoleum, Bock came away with the strong impression that they were not genuinely interested in Huguette. “I don’t think anyone really inquired other than saying, ‘I didn’t think she was still alive,’ ” he says. Bock has a personality that runs hot and cold: he can be grandfatherly with a wry sense of humor or acerbic and adversarial.

Given the angry tone of Bock’s e-mail to Carla, she was surprised to discover that in their face-to-face meeting the lawyer was initially quite friendly and open in discussing Huguette’s life, her finances, and her friendships. “We found out about Madame Pierre, that Huguette wrote many checks much to his chagrin,” Carla recalls. “We found out what her days were like.”

But his tone changed when the duo handed the lawyer a newspaper account of Kamsler’s criminal conviction. “He turned many shades whiter,” says Carla. “We said, ‘Step into the shoes of her father—would you be proud to have a convicted felon representing your daughter?’ ” Bock appeared to them to be unconcerned, saying it was just a sting. “He made the decision to cover on the spot for Kamsler,” says Ian. “I knew in my bones that there was something rotten going on.”

The lawyer admits that he was taken aback by Carla and Ian’s insistence that he fire the accountant. “I was upset they were raising it,” Bock said. He takes pains to add that he was unhappy about the accountant’s conviction but did not want to take punitive action. “There was no question that Kamsler was in the wrong, but to what extent was he in the wrong? He claims he was just playing around on
the computer and had no intention of going through with it,” Bock explains. “As far as I was concerned, he was a good accountant and concerned about Mrs. Clark. It didn’t interfere with his functioning as her accountant.”

At the end of the meeting, Carla penned a note of apology to Huguette, saying that they did not intend to invade her privacy and just wanted to make sure she was well taken care of. She asked Bock to deliver it.

The lawyer was aware that Huguette Clark relied on Irving Kamsler and their relationship went beyond the client-accountant hierarchy. For the first twenty years that Kamsler handled her taxes, she refused to even speak to him and conducted all business by mail. But she had finally relented and now saw and spoke to Kamsler on a regular basis. He was such an integral part of her life that she had given him control of her day-to-day well-being. “I believe that she trusted me implicitly,” Kamsler says, “because over the course of time she named me as the medical proxy to make health-care decisions for her or to carry out the ones that she expressed.”

Now that the Clark family members were aroused, they were determined not to back down. They saw themselves as Huguette’s saviors—whether or not she needed or wanted to be saved. The circle of those family members involved kept getting larger, well beyond the original group who met at Karine McCall’s house in Washington. The initial conspirators brought in their siblings, and the group would eventually expand to include nineteen descendants of William Andrews Clark.

Karine McCall’s older brother Paul Albert, a retired California lawyer, had skipped the family reunion but he now joined the e-mail chain, writing to Ian Devine. “I agree with what you said that Huguette wants nothing in her life to change… She has chosen to be a recluse her entire life and to cut herself off from the family.”

A month after the hospital incident, Carla wrote to Wallace Bock, demanding that he draft a notice to Huguette Clark that described Irving Kamsler’s conviction. She wanted an “unbiased witness” to present the document to Huguette, and request her signature to confirm that she still wanted to employ Kamsler. The lawyer acceded to
Carla’s request, although the witness who handled the next stage—Kamsler himself—was not exactly unbiased.

Irving Kamsler hand-delivered a letter, dated February 9, 2009, to Huguette Clark.