The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (34 page)

During the decades that Huguette was home alone on Fifth Avenue, she led a life in the shadows, sheltered from scrutiny. What time she got up in the morning or went to bed at night, whether she spent hours chatting on the phone or practicing her animation techniques, was nobody’s business but her own. Her existence played out behind closed doors and out of sight.

Now Huguette’s routines were chronicled in meticulous detail by an array of notetakers. Hadassah and night nurse Geraldine recorded their patient’s daily life (“listened to radio, conversant and cheerful,
settled for sleep @ 3 a.m.”) and her ailments. Huguette was in good health during her early years in the hospital, though she suffered through chicken pox and bouts of insomnia.

Unbeknownst to Huguette, many of her offhand remarks to other hospital personnel were being transcribed for posterity. The executives and development officers at Doctors Hospital, which changed its name in 1994 to Beth Israel North, wrote hundreds of candid memos and e-mails describing their behind-the-scenes efforts to cajole Huguette into making donations—memos that in hindsight would be embarrassing for their authors. Hospital CEO Dr. Robert Newman wrote a note acknowledging, “Madame, as you know, is the biggest bucks contributing potential we have ever had…” A Beth Israel development staffer later wrote an e-mail that would subsequently raise red flags about the institution’s conduct: “Does Legal know about Mrs. Clark’s situation? I guess they do, but my fear is that if we raise the issue with them, they might push the question of whether she should even be living at the hospital. If we were forced to ‘evict’ her, we’d certainly have no hope of any support.” Each time staff members visited or spoke to Huguette, they would race to their computers afterward to analyze her comments and circulate the latest soundings.

The other notetaker chronicling Huguette’s life was Chris Sattler. He kept a daily log recording the tasks he performed for his employer, often referred to by her initials, HMC (Huguette Marcelle Clark). His entries included such details as: “Deliver Flowers for Mrs. Clark to Mrs. Pierre”; “Find Missing Photo of HMC’s bedroom in Bellosguardo”; “Reassembling Rapunzel House with Newly Discovered Pieces, Photograph and Deliver to the hospital and confer with HMC.”

For a woman who treasured privacy, Huguette had put herself into a situation where there was a paper trail charting her moods, her conversations, her spending, her health, and her dawn-to-dusk existence—a rising mountain of documents.

Oblivious to these watchers, Huguette was quietly pursuing a passion that virtually no one in her purview understood. In fact, behind her back, hospital executives mocked her activities. But just like the
eighty-eight-year-old Helen Hooven Santmyer, who found late-in-life success with the publication of her best-selling novel,
And Ladies of the Club
, Huguette was still trying to create art.

Huguette continued to commission Japanese miniatures through Marsh and Company. Huguette treated as her bible a book published by the Japanese Board of Tourist Industry in 1935,
Castles in Japan
, by Prof. N. Orui and M. Toba. Enraptured with the Tokugawa Shogunate, she read every English-language book she could find about the era from 1603 to 1867. She was fascinated by the tales of the samurai warriors who unified the country and established the capital, Edo, which would later become Tokyo, as well as the warriors’ relationships with the emperors.

But now that she had an assistant, Huguette made an imaginative leap: she wanted to bring her inanimate objects to life. Her artistic vision was to stage scenes using her kabuki theatres and Japanese castles, peopled with miniature costumed characters and accessories. Like a set designer, she would tell Chris Sattler how to arrange these installations at her apartment and instruct him to photograph her choreographed visions. Occasionally he would bring the entire work-in-progress to the hospital for her approval or to enable Huguette to take her own photographs of the scenes.

“She worked on these projects almost every day,” says Chris. “Everything had to be perfect. If we were doing a scene of the emperor holding court, she might tell me to move the ladies-in-waiting because they were standing too close to royalty. Sometimes she would get annoyed with me because I didn’t know enough about it. She’d send me right back to the house to do it again.” Once Huguette was satisfied with the photographs, she would give them back to her assistant, who labeled and stored these projects in closets in her apartment. These were not her only artworks. Huguette envisioned the deconstruction of cartoon television shows as a frame-by-frame investigation and interpretation of the medium. Just as Jeff Koons hired assistants to produce his sculptures and paintings, Huguette relied on Chris Sattler and Daniel Peri to produce her creations, following her discerning directions.

In an art world where Damien Hirst’s cow preserved in formaldehyde sells for millions, it is impossible to know whether Huguette’s photographs of staged scenes and her binders of cartoon images would have been embraced or dismissed by critics if shown in a Soho gallery. Art is so subjective that she might have been acclaimed as an original or ridiculed as a dilettante. Trained by Tadé Styka as a painter, surrounded by Monets and Renoirs on her own walls, Huguette had an eye and a distinct vision. Her mother had been a talented amateur photographer, and her art-collector father had marched Huguette through the museums of Europe to see the paintings he was unable to bring home with him. Her parents might not have understood their daughter’s works, but they would have applauded Huguette’s artistic determination to express herself.

Other than the 1929 show of her paintings at the Corcoran Gallery, Huguette had never sought public acclaim. What continued to give her pleasure even as she headed into her nineties was the act of creation. Up until the year before she died, Huguette spent her days planning and executing new work, slowing down only when her assistant was temporarily sidelined by health problems. She had a reason to wake up each day with anticipation and a sense of purpose that animated her life.

It bothered Chris when others joked that Huguette was “playing” with her doll collection as if she had regressed to childhood. But he did not think it was his place to explain what Huguette was truly up to, and Huguette was certainly not prone to making pretentious announcements. As Chris puts it, “She would never say, ‘I’m making an artistic statement.’ She didn’t have to say it. She just did it.” Huguette’s goddaughter, Wanda, adds, “She was an artist and a scholar. That was her whole life. She was astonishingly good. She knew Japanese culture backwards and forwards.”

An elderly woman who shows quirky photos of miniature castles to visitors and is fascinated by cartoons can be easily mistaken for a doddering eccentric, rather than treated as an artist in residence. At Beth Israel North, the staff failed to understand their most prized patient. Noting that Huguette had amassed toy soldiers, castles, and dolls in her room, Dr. Henry Singman was patronizing in his
description of Huguette’s activities, writing in a memo, “She is an excellent photographer and her room is a model occupational therapy setting.”

Huguette’s relationships with internist Dr. Singman, who supervised her care, and surgeon Dr. Jack Rudick, who continued to visit, were complicated by the financial agendas of both physicians. Not only were the two doctors working closely with the hospital’s development staff to convince Huguette to donate money early and often; they were also padding their own pockets with her cash. Grateful for the physicians’ care and attention, Huguette gave them bonuses: Dr. Rudick and his wife, Irene, initially received roughly $40,000 per year; Dr. Singman and his wife, Grace, got roughly $50,000, on top of his monthly $2,400 retainer. Those sums would escalate exponentially through the years as the doctors, just like Hadassah, began to mention their problems and desires to Huguette.

At every major hospital, the development staff has a mandate to shake the money tree, but the techniques that executives use to sweet-talk or arm-twist patients are confidential. At Beth Israel North, the staff was willing to take extraordinary measures to convince Huguette to give away her inheritance.

Disappointed by Huguette’s initial $80,000 donation in 1991, the staff immediately began to plan a fresh assault. Dr. Rudick had no apparent medical reason to drop by Huguette’s room on a regular basis, but he was in attendance so often that he fancied himself an expert on her state of mind. As Cynthia Cromer of the development office wrote in a March 4, 1992, memo: “Dr. Rudick feels she has no ‘concept’ of money, and that without an amount mentioned, we are likely to receive another five-figure gift. He felt $5 million was the minimum gift we should be asking for.”

Dr. Rudick marched into Huguette’s room that afternoon and made his pitch, according to notes taken by the development office. Huguette hesitated, saying that she needed to speak to her lawyer. A few days later, she gave $65,000 to the hospital. In a consolation note to the development staff, hospital executive Jane Blumenthal wrote, “I believe that this saga will continue! Here’s hoping we end up with even bigger bucks.”

To research Huguette’s life, a hospital staffer tracked down a copy of the William Mangam book about her family and circulated a CliffsNotes–style summary of the more salacious stories, noting that Huguette was described as having a “mother complex” and as “hopelessly spoiled.” Keeping his eyes on this financially prized patient, hospital CEO Dr. Robert Newman convinced his own elderly mother, just a year younger than Huguette, to visit her regularly in an effort to strike up a friendship. The two senior women shared a love for France; the doctor’s mother spent part of each year in Nice.

Hospital staffers could not resist joking about Huguette’s love of cartoons. On March 4, 1993, development officer Stefanie Steel sent her colleagues a note suggesting asking Huguette for yet another donation: “She hasn’t made one in some time and it seems that she should be asked again (even if she changes the subject to the Smurfs or the Flintstones).”

Hadassah seemed to be playing a role as a double agent—as Huguette’s confidant and the hospital’s advocate. The nurse was recruited by the hospital executives to inform on her patient and use her influence. “Dr. Rudick and I agree that of all the players involved, Hadassah has the closest relationship to Mrs. Clark and has her trust,” wrote Cynthia Cromer in 1993. “She has also in the past been supportive of the requests made of Mrs. Clark and there is no reason to think she would not be now.” Cromer and Dr. Rudick met with Hadassah privately to discuss how to wheedle a third donation out of Huguette. However, in scripting their proposed pitch, Cromer noted that Dr. Rudick “is very uncomfortable discussing any kind of estate gift with Mrs. Clark because of her reluctance to discuss death.”

Ever since Huguette was a young child, death had been a frequent and frightening specter, appearing without warning. One cousin had drowned on the
Titanic
, another young cousin died from appendicitis, her grandmother perished within hours of feeling ill, an airplane crash killed another cousin, and looming above it all was the death of her sister Andrée. Huguette learned early about the unexpected knock on the door, the cries in the night. To hold the heartbreak at
bay, she had consistently chosen not to dwell on death. As she passed the milestones—eighty, ninety—she always behaved as if she had a lot of living yet to do. When anyone broached the topic of death, Huguette abruptly changed the subject. Religion is often a comfort to the elderly with death on the horizon, but Huguette was uninterested, rebuffing offers for visits by the hospital chaplain. As an adult she had never embraced faith, although she enjoyed the rituals of celebrating Christmas and Easter.

Like death, estate planning was an unpleasant topic that she declined to discuss. Her lawyer, Donald Wallace, complained repeatedly to Corcoran Gallery director David Levy about Huguette’s unwillingness to face the future. The Corcoran hoped to be a major beneficiary in Huguette’s will. “The great frustration that Don had with her was that she wouldn’t write a will,” says David Levy, who joined the museum in 1991. “She wouldn’t say the
D
word. Don felt there was going to be a terrible fight, and it would wind up in the wrong hands and half would go to the state of New York, and he thought it was a travesty. But every time he raised it with her, she would shut him down.”