The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (6 page)

The situation was unorthodox. Huguette’s living expenses ballooned as the years went by. The tab in 2007 alone was nearly $5 million: $850 per day for room and board at Beth Israel for a total of $3.1 million a year; and an additional $300,000 for round-the-clock private nurses plus doctors’ bills. Huguette held on to three luxury properties, paying $260,000 a year in maintenance for her Fifth Avenue apartment complex, more than $1.2 million a year on her Santa Barbara estate, and $150,000 a year on her secluded twenty-two-room mansion in New Canaan, Connecticut. In noblesse oblige fashion, Huguette was still sending generous Christmas tips to the doormen at her apartment building even though she had never met most of them.

After her first few years in residence at the hospital, staffers no
longer asked why she was still there—it was simply a fact of life. Thousands of patients rotated through Beth Israel, but Huguette was that rare constant, the woman who never left. She had become an urban legend. Dr. Louise Klebanoff, a neurologist at Beth Israel, had heard about this phantom figure for many years before she was asked by another doctor to examine Huguette in 2005. As Klebanoff recalled, when she met her patient, “I put two and two together, that the person I was consulting on was, in fact, the little old lady who lives in the hospital.” Her impression of the patient? “She seemed, you know, cute as pie, little old lady, perfectly content…”

Life in a hospital room could have been dreary and claustrophobic. But Huguette had created a self-contained and busy life within these four walls. Ever since her parents had given her Jumeau and Bru dolls from France as a child, she had been a passionate doll and toy collector. She owned more than six hundred antique French porcelain dolls, and her interests had expanded to include wind-up antique automatons, Japanese Hina dolls, toy soldiers, Smurfs, and even Barbie dolls, plus all available accessories. Her collection encompassed nearly 1,200 dolls. She relished the thrill of the chase, the acquisitive urge. When catalogues arrived from Theriault’s, the premier American doll auction house, she would page through them with anticipation, and then instruct her lawyer, Wallace Bock, to bid, spending up to $120,000 for a single doll. Auction days were exciting, and her staff got caught up in the drama, too. “She would wait by the phone for the outcome,” says Chris Sattler. “She really enjoyed the outcome.”

Bock found the bidding to be an unusual experience, since his client refused to specify a price limit. “Whatever it was, that was what we were going to pay for it,” says Bock. He recalls Huguette’s reaction when he put in an offer to Sotheby’s for three times the asking price for a Japanese screen and was nonetheless outbid. “She was very upset. I had to go buy it from the person who bought it at the auction.” Yet once her craving for possession had been satisfied, she usually did not feel the need to see what she had bought. “The screen was sent
right to her apartment,” Bock says. “All she saw was the picture in the catalogue. But she knew what she wanted.”

Huguette had become the patron of an unusual art form: commissioning miniature historical French châteaus and Japanese castles. These complex projects could take years to finish, since Huguette had an idealized idea of perfection. “We were taking a real castle in Japan, which is a fortified building, and making it to scale down to one-sixteenth of an inch and everything had to be accurate,” says Caterina Marsh, who runs the California import firm that Huguette used to hire artisans in Japan for this specialized work. Huguette scrutinized photos of works-in-progress and requested changes. “There were some interior panels in a Japanese home which are called fusuma,” Marsh explained. “So we hired an artist to paint the fusuma, and Mrs. Clark didn’t like the particular design on these doors, so we had to send drawings and find out which particular pattern she would like.”

As part of her historical research for these projects, Huguette would ask Chris Sattler to bring her books from her vast home library or purchase new ones. She was perfectly happy spending hours reading her books or perusing the
New York Times
,
Newsweek
, and French magazines like
Paris Match
to stay au courant. Her interests were eclectic: she followed the Olympics but also had an ongoing interest in Japanese and European royalty, especially Princess Grace. As Chris Sattler marvels, “She never appeared bored.”

With twenty-four-hour shifts of private nurses, Huguette was never alone and had turned her caretakers into a surrogate family. She would pepper the nurses and doctors with questions about their children. “She is the one always asking about our family,” recalls Hadassah Peri. Huguette initially kept to herself when she first entered the hospital in 1991 but had become more outgoing as the years passed, taking an interest in anyone in the vicinity. As Peri added, “Not only us, everybody who is involved with Madame, even the housekeeper, even the person who come just to fix Madame television and keyboard.”

For Huguette, her hospital room was her sanctuary. She wanted
advance notice and control over who was allowed to cross the threshold. Dr. Henry Singman noted with a mixture of admiration and exasperation that she would refuse to meet hospital personnel—from medical specialists to interns—if she wasn’t in the mood. “She would chase them away, she wouldn’t see anybody,” he said. “She was very particular who she allowed to talk to [her] and who she wouldn’t.”

So the surprise visit to Huguette’s room by Ian Devine and Carla Hall was as welcome to her as a screeching car alarm. They had breached her fortress. Huguette was upset, and her protectors felt responsible for letting her down. She viewed the sudden interest in her by Carla and Ian as suspect. William Andrews Clark had bequeathed money to all of his children, but now Huguette was the only one left, and she believed these distant family members had an ulterior motive. Or as Huguette plaintively said to Chris Sattler, “They got their money. Why do they want mine?”

The money, it always came back to the money, that coppery patina that cast a shadow over William Andrews Clark’s family, their friends, and their associates. The millions amassed by this American buccaneer had a life of their own, spawning tentacles of greed and corruption, multiple lawsuits over a century, and so many dysfunctional relationships that the boughs of the family tree had splintered. It sometimes seemed as if anyone who had even come into proximity to the Clark millions experienced an adverse reaction.

Rather than be grateful for any largesse, recipients consistently wheedled for more. Huguette had experienced money grabs before. She had established a $750,000 trust in 1964 ($5.6 million in today’s inflation-adjusted terms) to support a California cousin on her mother’s side of the family—Anna La Chapelle, her mother’s namesake. The divorced cousin sent Huguette frequent letters asking for more cash and finally showed her appreciation in the late 1980s by hiring lawyers to try, albeit unsuccessfully, to break the trust. The heiress wrote frequent checks to Beth Israel’s development office, but staffers also constantly cajoled her for more.

“She was a soft touch,” says her lawyer, Wallace Bock. “Nobody ever asked her for money, but they would come with a hard-luck story and she would volunteer.” Sharing her wealth was a bittersweet
experience. Each year she gave large bonuses to her nurses for their loyalty but responded awkwardly when they expressed gratitude. As her night nurse, Geraldine Coffey, recalls, Huguette would always say the same thing: “Don’t thank me, thank my father. I never earned a cent.”

T
he fortune that would become twenty-first-century tabloid fodder came into being some 150 years earlier in Montana, nearly two thousand miles away from Huguette’s New York hospital bed. It tells you everything that you need to know about a played-out Western mining town when one of its major tourist attractions, complete with a $2 admission fee, is America’s largest toxic waste site. The Berkeley Pit, the grim environmental legacy of open-pit copper mining, sits less than a mile from Butte’s downtown city center. The vast mile-long man-made lake is filled with 40 billion poisonous gallons of metal residue and chemicals that continue to rise every year.

As seen from the viewing platform, the scene is ominously beautiful: the mysterious, murky depths that drop down a quarter of a mile, the striated rock outcroppings etched by explosives, the snow-tipped mountains in the distance. Muted clanking sounds can be heard from the operations of a copper mine nearby, still exploiting the earth’s bounty.

Mining camps sprouted up here in the 1860s, and the street names attest to the city’s metalcentric history: Gold Street, Copper Street, Quartz Street, Mercury Street, Silver Street, Platinum Street, Aluminum Street, and Iron Street. Walk around downtown and it’s quiet—very quiet. Butte’s population peaked at 100,000 in 1910, but now there are fewer than 34,000 residents. It is not a ghost town, but
it feels that way after dark. Many street lots are eerily empty, abandoned and strewn with weeds, the result of suspicious fires during tough times when businesses were torched for the insurance money.

William Andrews Clark once reigned in Butte, controlling every vital city service. He came here in 1872 to inspect several mines believed to be played out and made fortuitous purchases that produced millions in copper riches. He became the city’s dominant employer. He built the trolleys and owned the water system, the electric light company, prime real estate, and the newspaper, the
Butte Miner
. His merchant bank doled out loans on favorable terms to friends and denied them to enemies. Clark built and ran Columbia Gardens, a sixty-eight-acre amusement park with a carousel, a zoo, and greenhouses. Butte citizens might draw a salary from Clark’s operations as his employees, but they paid it back to him for city services. His influence extended statewide as he spent lavishly to convince the Montana legislature to embrace his goals.

Clark’s power—and how he used and abused it—made him an irresistible character not only for newspaper writers but for novelists. Clark is portrayed as the ill-concealed villain in Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel
Red Harvest
, in which Butte is named “Poisonville.” Hammett describes the smelters that had “yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city… between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining.” Clark’s doppelganger owns the town “heart, soul, skin and guts.”

Residues of Clark’s past still endure in modern-day Butte. On a corner lot near the top of a hill at 219 West Granite Street is the Copper King Mansion: Clark’s grand thirty-four-room redbrick Victorian completed in 1888 for the then-astonishing sum of $250,000, more than $6 million today. The Clark mansion remained in the family until the 1934 death of the senator’s son William Clark Jr. Now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the home is open for tours and operated as a bed-and-breakfast.

The house is imposing from the street, but it’s the elaborate craftsmanship inside that shouts
robber baron
. Sunlight streaks through colorful stained-glass windows, illuminating an ornately carved wooden staircase featuring flowers and birds from many nations,
ceilings with painted frescoes, parquet floors, and European chandeliers. The house was designed for entertaining with a sixty-two-foot ballroom.

Clark built this showplace with his first wife, Katherine, relocating from the town of Deer Lodge, thirty-seven miles away. The Clark family then included five children: Mary (born 1870), Charles (1871), Katherine (1875), William Jr. (1877), and Paul (1880). (A sixth child—Katherine’s twin sister, Jessie—had died at age three, and another child died at birth.) The Clarks ventured far afield, sailing off for lengthy travels in Europe and establishing a second residence in Garden City, Long Island. After his wife passed away in 1893, Clark was mostly on his own in Butte, his children either grown or off in boarding schools, when he became involved with the plucky teenage girl, Anna La Chapelle, who would become his second wife and the mother of two more daughters.

Those girls, Huguette Clark and her older sister Andrée, never lived full-time in the house on Granite Street—they grew up in Paris and then Manhattan—but visited Butte well into their teenage years. Compared to the family’s treasure-filled 121-room Fifth Avenue mansion, the Butte house was informal and relaxed, a place where children could be seen and heard. Later in life, Huguette always cast a honey-colored glow on her reminiscences as she paged through scrapbooks of family photos. She often told Irving Kamsler about “how much she loved her father, how he took good care of her, how close she was to her mother.”

Still, Butte was an odd place for a wealthy child: there were no trees, bushes, or flowers in the Clark backyard, although the copper king could certainly afford a gardener. The reason? The fumes from William Clark’s mining operations had killed all the vegetation in the city. “There is a hell on earth; it is Butte, Mont.,” declared the
Philadelphia Record
in 1904. “Why do they call Butte the early realm of Satan? Chiefly because roasting ores give off fumes of sulphur. This smoke—the color of watered milk—sometimes gets as thick as a London fog. Not one green leaf ever flutters in Butte; nor does a sprig of grass grow there.”

Mines dotted residential neighborhoods in Butte. Just a few blocks
from the Clark mansion, the remnants of a mine have been preserved as a historic structure, a distinctive huge black metal frame resembling an oil derrick. Miners called them by the evocative name “hanging gallows,” since the mechanism lowered them hundreds of feet into the dark earth. Death came quickly in mines, via an explosion or a fire underground, or slowly from damage to miners’ lungs, silicosis.

Small children are innocents, but as she grew up, Huguette could not help but become aware that her parents occupied a rarified world. The grimy miners coming off a shift passed right by the house where Huguette, in a frilly white dress and oversized white hat, smiled shyly as she posed for a photograph on the front porch with her dolls, the most reliable companions in her life. She lined up her dolls in a row as if giving them their marching orders and arranged them in mother-and-children scenes. Like a theatre director orchestrating the onstage action, Huguette took joy in the imaginary world of her dolls and her ability to control their inanimate lives. Just as other children invent make-believe friends, she gave her dolls names, a habit she would continue into her adult life.

Huguette had enough pride in her family heritage and fond memories of her time in Butte that many years later—in 1964—Huguette and an older half sister, Katherine Clark Morris, unsuccessfully tried to buy back their father’s Granite Street home from a new owner, Anna Cote, who had turned it into a boardinghouse. They hoped to transform it into a historic monument, but Cote declined to sell.

Just two blocks from the Copper King Mansion is the second most famous house in Butte: a French-style château that William Clark built for his oldest son, Charles; it is now a museum. After graduating in 1893 from Yale—where he was notorious for “spending more money in one year at Yale than any man who had ever attended,” according to the
Washington Post
—Charles Clark went to work for his father, holding well-paid positions in the mining conglomerate. But he was always best known as a rich man’s spoiled son. A gambler who was fond of women and liquor, Charlie lost $20,000 in one night at roulette in Los Angeles in 1908, complaining to the police when gangsters
harassed him to pay. He built a racetrack at his California estate, buying thoroughbreds (splurging $125,000 for Harry Payne Whitney’s colt Whiskaway) and racing the horses under copper-colored silks. No matter how much money he had, it was never enough; he was sued repeatedly for nonpayment of bills. Even his indulgent father joked about his son’s free-spending ways: William Andrews Clark once gave a shoeshine man a quarter tip. The ungrateful man complained that was a meager sum compared to the $5 tip left by Charlie Clark. According to oft-repeated Butte lore, William Clark replied, “Well, that’s all right for Charlie. You see, Charlie has a rich father and I haven’t.”

William Andrews Clark was a regular presence in Butte until his death in 1925. His family then severed business ties to the city, selling Clark’s holdings in 1928 to the Anaconda Copper Company (the company later responsible for the Berkeley Pit catastrophe).
Montana American
reporter Byron Cooney once asked Clark why he did not build a monument to himself in Butte. “Columbia Gardens is my monument,” Clark replied. “Of the many business enterprises, it is the one I love best and it is practically the only one on which I lose money.” The amusement park could have been donated to the city by William Clark’s children in his memory, but they included it in the sale. Despite civic protests, Anaconda Copper later shut down Columbia Gardens, and a mysterious fire destroyed the remains.

Visitors to the Copper King Mansion in Butte are treated to an expurgated version of the family history. The owners, Anna Cote’s children Erin Sigl and her brother John Thompson, have created a script for the tour guides. A recent version recites Clark’s accomplishments and his “reputation as one of the hundred men who owned America.” There is no mention of the darker elements of Clark’s life. An unapologetic racist, as a senator he opposed efforts to allow more Chinese immigrants into this country, stating, “We should not allow what we call coolie labor to come into this country unrestricted.”

The master of political backroom deals, a man willing to engage in bruising industrial battles, Clark was envied for his riches and reviled for his tactics. There are corrupt moguls who are charming enough to be forgiven, but Clark built a reputation for being just
plain unlikable. “If the element of failure or near-failure ever touched him, it was in human relationships,” wrote Mary Montana Farrell in her 1933 University of Washington master’s thesis. (Her mother, a Butte native, was well versed in Clark lore.) “He seemed unable to make and keep friends, due to an innate penuriousness which characterized all his contacts with the public. If men admired his keen mentality, they hated his tight-fistedness.”

For William Andrews Clark, the ultimate self-made man, his millions were the tangible symbol of his intelligence and cunning, and how he kept score. He relished recounting early tales describing how hard he worked to earn each copper penny. The grandson of Scots-Irish immigrants, Clark was born, literally, in a log cabin on January 8, 1839, near the town of Connellsville, Pennsylvania. His father, John, was a thirty-nine-year-old second-generation Presbyterian farmer, while his mother, Mary Andrews, twenty-three, was the daughter of a member of the Pennsylvania State Legislature.

As the second-born of eleven children, William Clark watched his family suffer when three younger siblings died, two as infants and then three-year-old George from whooping cough. As an adult, Clark was often described as cold and uncaring, but he learned at an early age the survival skills of stoicism and carrying on.

Like many children of nineteenth-century farmers, William Clark attended school for three months during the winter and spent the rest of the year helping out on the farm. Once he showed academic promise, his ambitious parents were willing to invest in his future, sending him and his older sister Sarah to the local Laurel Hill Academy.

In 1856, John Clark bought a larger farm near Bentonsport, Iowa, more than seven hundred miles away. As a seventeen-year-old, William helped his father till the new land and found paid work teaching at a local school. He used his savings to study law for two years at Iowa Wesleyan University in Mount Pleasant. His next stop was teaching school in rural Missouri. The Civil War erupted in 1861, but Clark did not feel obligated to join the Union cause. Instead he fled to Colorado in 1862 to join the gold rush.

He learned the rudiments of mining by working on another man’s claim in the countryside near Denver. Rumors of lucrative spots in Montana led Clark and several companions to buy two yokes of cattle, a wagon, picks, shovels, and gold pans and set off for a sixty-day trip through the wilds. Shoshone Indians had recently attacked settlers in Wyoming. “Quite a number of emigrants had been killed,” he later recalled in a speech to the Society of Montana Pioneers in 1917, “and afterwards, passing through that country we saw the newly-made graves of a number.”

In Bannack, Montana, Clark and his partner, Lloyd Selby, ran into a saloon keeper who offered to pay them to trek alcohol to a new camp where gold had just been discovered. This request had profound repercussions for William Andrews Clark. As he watched the thirsty miners grab the marked-up booze, he realized just how much money could be made by selling supplies to men living miles from what passed as civilization. He filed away that observation as he and Selby purchased a claim in a small gulch and began prospecting, excavating dirt and hauling it to the Colorado Creek to wash in sluice boxes for the gold residue.