Empty Mansions (38 page)

Strasheim said Huguette was similarly unrealistic about her own situation. “Dr. Wright said her reaction to her mother’s passing was quite irrational, and he thinks that led to her being so much of a recluse. She never really dealt with it. Dr. Wright tried many times to tell her she needed to get out, she needed sunlight, vitamin D. She had a way of switching that off. She didn’t want to see the ugliness of things around her. She could divert the conversation in a million ways: ‘I’m very busy right now, it’s a busy time of year, but I will get back to you on that.’ She was a shy ten-year-old throughout her life.”

Ninta Sandré died in March 2000. Huguette did not attend the funeral Mass. She sent Lyn Strasheim $50,000.

Strasheim said she once visited Huguette unannounced at Doctors Hospital, but Hadassah shooed her away. Huguette “
looked like a bag woman. In a teeny, tiny little room, all the shades drawn.”

“YOU’D BETTER SIT DOWN, MOTHER”
 

Y
OU DIDN
’
T HAVE TO BE
a longtime friend or employee of Huguette’s to benefit from her generosity. In fact, you didn’t have to know her at all.

A lawyer showed up at Gwendolyn Jenkins’s apartment, way out in Queens, bearing a mystery. It was 1982. The lawyer said he had a letter for her, but he wouldn’t let her open it unless she promised to keep a secret. “This lawyer told me not to tell no one. He made me swear.”

Yes, she said, she went to church every Sunday and Bible study on Wednesdays. She wouldn’t tell. The lawyer handed over the letter that changed her life.

Gwendolyn was a nurse’s aide, a fifty-seven-year-old immigrant from Jamaica, living in a working-class area off Jamaica Avenue. Early every morning, she had taken the Q2 bus and the F train into Lower Manhattan, to Greenwich Village, more than an hour and a half each way. Even in the snow, she had walked the last blocks to an apartment at 1 Fifth Avenue, an Art Deco building overlooking Washington Square Park. Her patient was Irving Gordon, a Madison Avenue stockbroker, who had recently died of cancer.

And now this lawyer was at her door, with his black-rimmed owl eyeglasses and every hair in place, saying his name was Don Wallace, trying to explain that he didn’t know Gwendolyn, that he didn’t know Irving either, but he had a client whose investments Irving had handled. Word of this nurse’s aide and her dedication had gotten around.

“I was telling my daughter that night,” Gwendolyn recalled in her Jamaican accent, “I couldn’t believe how this woman, an older woman she was, had written such a nice card, a proper note. She thanked me for taking care of poor Mr. Irving. And she included a ‘little gift,’ she said, a check for three hundred dollars! I couldn’t believe it. I was going to tell them all about it at Bible study. I’ve been blessed!

“And my daughter, she said, ‘You’d better sit down, Mother, and let
me read this letter over to you. This check is for
thirty thousand
dollars!’ ”

The check was written out with a blue felt-tip pen in a distinctive handwriting, an artist’s script, with every lowercase letter formed slowly, precisely, the same height. Gwendolyn didn’t recognize the name. “Never met her. Never heard of her.”

Gwendolyn used the check to move south, putting a down payment on a house outside Atlanta, her retirement home. No more Q2 bus to the F train in the snow.

Thirty years later, when asked by a reporter who had a copy of the canceled check for $30,000, Gwendolyn reluctantly confirmed the story. Still, she was mindful of her vow, protective of her benefactor’s privacy.

Gwendolyn Jenkins still has the thank-you card in her bedroom, tucked away in her hosiery drawer, and she’s not going to tell anyone who sent it.

AN ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS SITUATION
 

T
HOUGH HE NEVER SAW
his client’s face, attorney Don Wallace would scold her from time to time via letters and phone calls.

“
Every year since you have been in the hospital, now for almost three years,” he wrote to Huguette in September 1994, “your total expenses for each year have exceeded your total income for each year. This is an absolutely ridiculous situation.” He cited her unoccupied three apartments, her Connecticut house, “which has never been occupied,” and the “completely wasted expense” of Bellosguardo, which she had not visited in more than forty years. He urged her to sell all of her properties. She also had expenses for the storage of dresses at Bonwit Teller and an automobile stored out in Westchester County, which she no longer called a driver for. As Wallace put it, “None of these expenses benefit you in any way.”

She went right on spending, soon drawing up plans for an $87,000 teahouse to be made by the artist in Japan and giving him, over a period of five years, gifts totaling $290,000.

Huguette had a fairy-tale checkbook, one that was refilled whenever it ran out of magic beans. She had been
careful with her checking accounts, well into her seventies, balancing her checkbook and marking a balance after each check. The
overdrafts had started around 1985, when she was nearly eighty. She wasn’t out of money; she just didn’t bother to tell her attorney or accountant that she had written checks.

For the next twenty-five years: Huguette would write the checks. The bank would call the attorney to say the account was overdrawn. And the attorney would transfer in money from another account, $50,000 or $100,000 at a time, guessing blindly at how much she might spend in the next few weeks. Irving Kamsler, the certified public accountant that Wallace had brought on in 1979 to handle Huguette’s finances, said Huguette knew the value of money but thought the checks would be covered without her involvement. And they were. Although this arrangement
troubled her bankers, who had never met Huguette, they never charged her an overdraft free.

Huguette was not poor. She was never poor. But what worried Wallace was that she was starting to eat into her savings.

Most of her income came from dividends paid by blue chips, stocks in the solid cornerstones of American industry: AT&T, American Airlines, Conoco, Exxon, General Electric, General Motors, Gulf Oil, RCA, Texaco. Her smallest were shares in two of her father’s old companies, Tonopah Banking Corporation and Clark Holding Company, which were no longer paying dividends. She engaged in no tax shelters or other schemes, paying more than 40 percent of her income in federal taxes through most of the Carter and Reagan years. (Ronald Reagan’s Tax Reform Act of 1986, which cut income tax rates on the highest earners, saved Huguette about $1 million a year.) Her income had its ups and downs with the stock market, but it was generally increasing, as shown on her tax returns: $725,734 in 1975, $1,000,010 in 1979, $3,092,147 in 1981, $5,827,446 in 1987.

Her spending, however, was increasing even faster, even from a hospital bed. During the 1970s, she had given away only about $35,000 a year, much of that to Etienne’s family, but her generosity increased when Ninta Sandré went into the nursing home in 1987 and accelerated again when Huguette herself went into the hospital in 1991. By the mid-1990s, she was giving away nearly a million dollars a year.

Each spring, her money men chased after her, seeking the information needed to report her gifts to the IRS. As the giver, Huguette owed the gift tax. It was a puzzle. Her attorney and accountant knew every penny spent on her properties and medical care, because they paid those bills. But for her personal account, which she used for most of her gifts, they had only the check numbers and amounts as listed on her bank statements. Well into the 2000s, her money men didn’t know the names of the recipients, because only she received the canceled checks, and she refused to give them up.

• • •

For a banker’s daughter, Huguette was not much interested in investing her capital either. Summit Bank of New Jersey held millions for her in an
uninvested account. For example, on February 4, 1997,
Huguette’s balance in that account was $5,899,133, earning nothing. The bankers, fearing they’d be sued for acting irresponsibly, wrote to her repeatedly, pleading with her to put the money in an interest-bearing account. Her attorneys and accountant urged the same, time after time. She told them she’d think about it, but she did nothing. Perhaps she preferred to keep the money where she could get at it quickly.

If she had put that $5,899,133 balance into a one-year certificate of deposit, then earning 5 percent, she would have earned $294,957 in interest, nearly enough to pay for a Louis XV rolltop desk.

BLOND HAIR AND A DIMPLE
 

H
UGUETTE RECEIVED
a plea for help in 1988 with a familiar postmark—Butte, Montana—and bearing the name Clark. Though the letter was too polite to say so, it was raising a philosophical question: Do children owe an obligation to the place where their parents got their start?

W.A.’s youngest son, Francis Paul Clark, known as Paul, was just sixteen when he died in March 1896. He was a student at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, preparing to attend Yale University. Paul was a shy boy, whose hobby was writing to famous artists to ask for their autographs. He died from a bacterial infection, erysipelas, which causes a painful rash known as Saint Anthony’s fire. W.A. was in Paris and came back to New York for the funeral. Paul was entombed at Woodlawn Cemetery alongside his mother.

As a memorial, W.A. donated $50,000 for the Paul Clark Home, which opened in Butte in 1900. The Associated Charities of Butte took care of children in the handsome three-story brick home on Excelsior Street, less than a mile from the Clark mansion where Paul had grown up. W.A. also left the home an endowment of $350,000 in his will.

Anna visited the home with young Andrée and Huguette and gave money for a grand piano for the children to play. She left the home $5,000 in her will, one of her smallest bequests.

The Paul Clark Home wasn’t strictly an orphanage; it also took in children whose parents were still living but couldn’t care for them anymore. In addition, the home provided free medical care for any child from Butte and day care for children of working mothers. It was not in a bad part of town; directly across the street were three identical homes for managers of Clark’s mines.

In 1988, the Paul Clark Home reached a crossroads, and the board of directors reached out to W.A.’s surviving daughter, Huguette, who was born ten years after Paul died. During the 1960s, it had been converted
into a home for developmentally disabled young adults, whom the state was moving out of institutions. Now this Clark legacy needed a new mission, and it had bills to pay. The trust set up by W.A. in his will was providing only $29,000 of the $60,000 budget each year, and the home’s board hoped to raise $200,000 for a renovation. W.A.’s will had set up the home to exist for as long as his children and grandchildren should live. Well, his grandchildren were nearly all dead, but his daughter lived on. Was it Huguette’s wish, the home’s attorney asked, that it continue?

Huguette sent back, through her attorney, questions about the home’s finances, but she didn’t send any money.

In December 1988, the Paul Clark Home was converted into a Ronald McDonald House, providing a temporary home for families who have a child or family member in the hospital. So it continues today.