The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (5 page)

With shaky handwriting, Huguette signed: H. M. Clark, 3-5-2009.

Executor? What an interesting title. A position that would undoubtedly involve huge fees to probate a multimillion-dollar estate. This letter, once circulated to the Clark clan, set off new alarm bells about the future of Huguette’s fortune and the integrity of her accountant and lawyer.

As the relatives’ suspicions intensified, they pressed the Corcoran to get involved. Corcoran director Paul Greenhalgh talked things over with the museum’s chairman, and the two of them agreed to stay out of this familial dispute. They sent Wallace Bock a note saying that the museum would not take sides. “Our view was that if Huguette Clark wished to retain Irving Kamsler, we would do business with him,” explains Greenhalgh. “In terms of the family, I’m sure that Carla is a lovely person and they were quite anxious that the family
heritage was done properly. But clearly there was a lot of money there, and those two men were the gatekeepers.”

Since Huguette had passed the century mark and was believed to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the museum officials also suspected that this was the opening shot of what could become a full-fledged war. Why get involved and do anything that might upset Huguette Clark? The Corcoran hoped to be a beneficiary of her estate, too. Of course, for now, she was still among the living.

S
he was fearless as a girl. Accompanied by her older sister Andrée, Huguette Clark gleefully sledded down a snowy hillside in Central Park near their father’s Fifth Avenue mansion. At the Château de Petit-Bourg, the eighteenth-century estate her parents rented on the outskirts of Paris, she spent her days galloping about on horseback. On vacation in Hawaii, the well-traveled Huguette frolicked in the waves with Olympic swimming gold medalist Duke Kahanamoku. Afterward, the fifteen-year-old wrote to her father from Honolulu, “The surfing here is wonderful. I am learning to stand on those boards. I am so tan, I almost look like a Hawaiian.”

Gordon Lyle Jr., a childhood friend who joined Huguettte at her family’s Santa Barbara oceanfront estate, Bellosguardo, recalls, “She loved to swim.” Now in a South Carolina nursing home, Lyle can still describe one beach scene when he was a young boy and witnessed Huguette, fourteen years his senior, in the water. “There was a big wave, she jumped up to avoid being rolled. That’s where I saw her.” What made the sight so memorable? The uninhibited Huguette was skinny-dipping.

But now as a centenarian, Huguette Clark scarcely had the energy to leave her bed. A genteel white-haired woman with blue eyes, she now requested warm milk at bedtime, embracing the calming
comforts of childhood. Her weight had dropped below one hundred pounds. Each night she recited the Lord’s Prayer out loud—impressing her caregivers by doing so in French, Spanish, and English. Born into the kind of wealth that allowed her to dictate the terms of her life rather than bow to the wishes of others, she was used to getting her way.

“She wanted to be in control,” says Geraldine Lehane Coffey, an Irish immigrant who worked for Huguette as the night nurse. “She would only do what she wanted to do.” But the doctors had been adamant in their instructions: the patient had to stand up and move to keep her heart active and muscles from atrophying. It was up to the nurses to make it happen.

These responsibilities fell on the shoulders of Hadassah Peri, who had a knack for cajoling her recalcitrant patient to comply with medical directives. But this time Hadassah turned for help to Huguette’s longtime assistant, Christopher Sattler. Stationed at his employer’s warren of apartments at 907 Fifth Avenue, Chris usually stopped by the hospital at 4 p.m. to bring items that she requested such as magazines, art and architecture books, and antique dolls from her collection. He always stayed to visit for at least a half hour to entertain “Mrs. Clark,” as he called her, with news from the outside world.

The 102-year-old Huguette brightened when the handsome fifty-four-year-old with the rakish smile turned up. A graduate of Fairfield University with a passion for history, Chris had been working for her ever since his family’s construction firm renovated her apartment in 1991 and Chris had been assigned to inventory her possessions. As the years passed, Huguette had watched with pleasure as he became a father, and he occasionally brought his wife, Joan, and two daughters to the hospital to see her. Her primary physician, Dr. Henry Singman, noted approvingly that Huguette and Chris Sattler had a “very nice relationship. He got along very well with her. He would sit down with her and start talking or musing and telling her stories.”

With this convivial relationship in mind, Hadassah came up with the idea of converting Chris’s daily arrival at the hospital into a new
ritual. She asked him to come by earlier in the day, closer to noon, when her patient was likely to have more energy. When he knocked on the door of Huguette’s room, Hadassah would announce, “Chris is here. It’s time to go for a walk in Central Park.”

The park was more than two miles away, and there was no limo waiting downstairs to whisk them there. Instead, Chris, nearly six feet tall and brawny, would help Huguette out of bed and, holding her frail arm, carefully escort her around the room, doing at least three laps. He would offer descriptive commentary as if they actually were taking a walk in the park: “Now we’re going in at Sixty-Seventh Street, we’re going to see the Obelisk.”

Amused by the ruse, Huguette looked forward to these strolls. She wore a regulation-issued cotton hospital gown topped with one of her cashmere cardigans, white or a variation of blue to complement her eyes. Each day, Chris charted a different route based on the Central Park landmarks that his employer used to see from the windows of her apartment. “Maybe we should go to the bridle path? Now we’re going up to Seventy-Ninth Street, then we’ll have seven blocks to get back to your apartment.” He would gently tease her, saying, “I hope you’re not too tired from this long walk, Mrs. Clark.”

She would circle her room, slowly, very slowly, but smiling as she traced the paths of her youth in her imagination. The hospital quarters, with white walls and a window without a view, served as a blank backdrop. Ever since her family had moved into her father’s newly built 121-room Fifth Avenue mansion in 1911, the largest private residence in Manhattan, Central Park had been a constant in her life. Her vantage point changed after her father died and the house was sold. Twenty-year-old Huguette and her mother, Anna, moved five blocks south to a twelfth-floor apartment on Fifth Avenue at Seventy-Second Street, but the park vista remained a source of pleasure and inspiration.

Huguette had equipped one room in her apartment with a series of Rolleiflex cameras mounted on tripods facing Central Park. With telephoto lenses, she could zoom in to people watch, taking photos of children sailing their toy boats or couples seated on park benches. She
had painted a striking picture of Central Park at night, lights twinkling as seen from her apartment, with a Tiffany-style lamp glowing on a table by the windowsill. The painting expressed two contradictory juxtaposed longings that defined the artist: the beckoning evening and the excitement of the city, set against the quiet allure and safety of staying at home.

Before she entered the hospital, Huguette had often rhapsodized during phone calls with her goddaughter, Wanda Styka, about the glorious park views and the statues whose names she knew by heart. The daughter of Huguette’s painting instructor, Tadé Styka, Wanda called her godmother “Marraine,” the French version of the honorific. “Marraine talked about how she could see the statue of the Pilgrim from her window,” says Wanda, describing the 1884 bronze by sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward of a man leaning on a musket. Concerned that Huguette might miss that view, Wanda says, “I sent her a book on Central Park.”

In the shorthand slang of a hospital ward, the other nurses quickly picked up on this new walking ritual. Whenever they wanted Huguette to get out of bed, they’d say, “It’s time to do your Central Park.” These strolls would spark memories, a century’s worth of history from a woman who remembered being evacuated from France by ship in 1914 after the outbreak of World War I. The heiress would regale Chris Sattler and her nurses with selected stories, giving them a glimpse of the formative years of her life. As an eighteen-year-old, she had relished the sight of twentieth-century progress, writing to her father on October 15, 1924, from Manhattan:

Now Huguette kept the blinds closed in her hospital room, shutting out the world. She had changed in the intervening years from an engaging and curious young girl to a mysterious recluse. It was not just age that had caused her to retreat to solitude. So much had happened, love but also heartbreak and betrayal, notoriety in the gossip columns, visits from the FBI—so many thrilling and terrifying memories that she did not choose to discuss, a lifetime of secrets.

But when she did reveal slivers of information about the past, her recall was remarkable. Even after Huguette entered her nineties, virtually everyone who encountered her noted that she was easily able to summon up dates and places, in better mental shape than her contemporaries. “Her memory was good, she was conversational,” said her relative Paul Newell. “Unless there were issues of possibly not hearing something correctly, it was as if you were talking with a person who was maybe twenty or thirty years younger than she.” Her night nurse, Geraldine Coffey, said, “Physically, she was very strong, for her age, she was incredible. Mentally, she was very strong, very smart—she was clever, she really was.”

These days Huguette time traveled between the present and the past. Giggling like a mischievous schoolgirl, she described to Chris Sattler how she and her older sister Andrée played hide-and-seek in their father’s mansion, hiding from their nannies in their favorite place, the bell tower. She often asked to look at her favorite photo album, focusing on childhood snapshots of family visits to Butte, Montana, that rough-and-tumble Western mining city where her parents first met.

She confided to the nurses that she sometimes thought she heard the strains of someone playing the piano. It was only in her mind. But music had been important throughout her life. Her mother, who studied the harp in Paris and Manhattan, practiced regularly at home, her older sister, Andrée, had played the piano, and Huguette had taken violin lessons and tried her hand at the harp. As a young woman, Huguette and her mother maintained their own box at the Metropolitan Opera. Her sparkling accoutrements for the opera—magnificent diamond-and-emerald necklaces and bracelets from Van Cleef and Arpels and Cartier—were now stored in a bank vault. These
days, the radio in Huguette’s room was usually tuned to the all-news station 1010 WINS, but sometimes she listened to classical music. She could still pick up fragments of melody.

The average patient stay at Beth Israel is five days, according to the hospital’s statistics. Patients who need continued care are transferred to rehabilitation facilities or released to return home and to rely on private nursing care. But by 2008, Huguette Clark had been living at a Beth Israel–run hospital—initially at Doctors Hospital, the premier society medical facility on the Upper East Side, and now at Beth Israel’s main building downtown—for seventeen years. Seventeen years! In that entire time, she had gone outside only twice: first to a dentist’s appointment, and later, when Doctors Hospital closed in 2004, on a trip to the Sixteenth Street facility. The sun had not touched her face in more than a decade, and she never evinced a desire to go outdoors.

The curious thing was that for most of those seventeen years, Huguette Clark had been in good health. Only in recent years had she begun to suffer from the vicissitudes of extreme old age. She could have walked out of the hospital at any time or even left for just a few hours to go to a restaurant, see an opera, visit an art gallery, or take a chauffeur-driven jaunt around the city—all the pleasurable pastimes that she had enjoyed as a young woman. Instead, she turned down every invitation or suggestion to leave. Simply put, she was done with all that.

She had entered the hospital in 1991 to be treated for a serious case of skin cancer. Once she recovered, she decided that she wanted to stay in the hospital. This was a rich woman’s whim, but the startling thing was that the hospital chose to accommodate her wishes. She did not have insurance but was willing to pay the going rate, plus donate substantial funds to the hospital.

Her admitting physician, Dr. Henry Singman, later wrote in a memo that he “strongly urged her to go home, talking with her nurses and with the promise that I would visit her home. This was never an acceptable option for her.” Singman wrote his memo
in 1996, belatedly putting his thoughts on paper five years later to justify the unprecedented decision to let Huguette remain in the hospital. “I already knew that we were dealing with a very wealthy woman who didn’t appear to have any relatives or anybody else around her, and I suspected sooner or later there was going to be a problem,” he later explained. He wanted a record because he thought there might be “relatives coming out of the woodwork, relatives that she didn’t know coming out to look for her or to try to get money from her.”

She was hiding in the hospital; it signified safety. She told her lawyer, accountant, and assistant not to tell anyone she was there. Her doormen at 907 Fifth Avenue were instructed to accept packages and flower deliveries as if she was still on the premises; Chris Sattler would bring mail and other items to the hospital. Huguette had no outside visitors other than her friend Suzanne Pierre. Despite how much Huguette cared for her goddaughter, Wanda, she did not even inform her that she was in the hospital, although they were in regular telephone contact. “She probably didn’t tell me because she thought I’d be alarmed,” says Wanda, a museum archivist based in the Berkshires. Wanda eventually learned about Huguette’s whereabouts from Suzanne Pierre, but did not press her godmother for information out of respect for her privacy.