The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (38 page)

Fear and panic, which many Americans were feeling in the fall of 2001, inevitably made Huguette even more dependant on Hadassah,
the nurse whom she saw as her protector. Huguette showed her love in the most tangible way that she could—by writing more checks to Hadassah. Sometimes she would make out two separate five-figure checks to the nurse within one day. No one questioned Huguette’s mental acuity, but her behavior made it seem as if she had forgotten by the afternoon what she had given to Hadassah that very morning.

On October 3, 2001, Huguette gave the nurse two checks, each for $35,000. The sequence was repeated on October 26, when the heiress handed Hadassah a $40,000 check followed later that day by a $35,000 check. On November 28, she gave Hadassah checks for $19,500 and then $8,000. Then, of course, there was the nurse’s Christmas bonus, a $30,000 check delivered on December 14. Hadassah’s husband, Daniel Peri, received his very own checks from Huguette—$25,000, parceled out in two checks written on back-to-back days in early January 2002.

Every gift to the Peri family meant another 55 percent generation-skipping tax obligation for Huguette. The daisy chain of cash gifts during just the three months after the anthrax attacks meant that Huguette owed an additional $125,125 to the federal government, which she displayed not the slightest interest in paying. Her tax-averse father had shut down his New York mansion for five months in 1922 to legally avoid paying New York taxes, but his daughter seemed determined to ignore the pleas of her advisers to pay attention to the tax repercussions of her actions.

As the traumatic year of 2001 drew to a close, Wallace Bock’s partners decided to lighten up the law firm’s annual December holiday party by playing a practical joke. They gave Bock a beautifully wrapped box as a present: inside was a will purportedly signed by Huguette. “He was so happy, he’s thinking that he hit the Lotto,” Garcia recalls. “Everyone was laughing. It was a joke. The message was: The firm wants to get this signed. You haven’t come through.”

Bock’s allies at Beth Israel Hospital were not having any luck, either. The following spring, Dr. Robert Newman scolded Huguette in a stern letter on May 1, 2002, for her intransigence on the topic of estate planning. “I feel once more an obligation to raise once more with you an issue about which I spoke to you several years earlier—in
fact, it was on Thanksgiving Day 1999,” the hospital CEO wrote. He painted an apocalyptic picture: if Huguette did not sign a new will, “all that you possess and that is near and dear to you might be disposed of by some faceless bureaucrat of the Government.”

Huguette was smart and obstinate. She hated it when people tried to tell her what she should do: the more they pushed, the more she resisted. For now, she preferred leaving the fate of her father’s copper fortune up to a faceless government bureaucrat, rather than surrendering to those harassing her to make up her mind and sign on the dotted line.

Huguette had outlived many of her contemporaries, and in 2002, she lost one of her last childhood playmates: her niece Agnes Albert. Agnes, the daughter of Huguette’s half brother Charles Clark, died on June 19, 2002, at the age of ninety-four. A lengthy obituary in the
San Francisco Chronicle
praised the music-loving philanthropist for her donations to the San Francisco Symphony and her own talent as a pianist. The symphony’s musical director, Michael Tilson Thomas, described Agnes as “witty, charming, vivacious, and full of humor.” The article described her exploits, from rafting down the undammed Colorado River in 1941 to picketing the San Francisco Opera to force the group to put up busts of the great composers on the walls.

Ever since Agnes had been Huguette’s classmate at Spence, they had shared a special connection. Huguette had cared enough to remember Agnes’s ninetieth birthday in 1998 and called to wish her well. Afterward, Agnes sent off a note to her: “It was lovely to speak to you this morning and quite like old times!” But the two women had fallen out of touch in recent years: Agnes stopped leaving messages after what she felt was an acrimonious conversation with Wallace Bock; Huguette did not spontaneously pick up the phone, as had once been the case.

Upon learning of the death of Agnes Albert and the existence of a will, Huguette’s accountant tried to use this information as leverage. Irving Kamsler wrote to Huguette: “Your closest relative, Agnes Albert, who passed away last year leaving a substantial Estate, made her wishes known…” He obviously thought that where there was a will, there must be a way. But Huguette paid him no mind.

At ninety-six, an age when many grow fearful, Huguette was worried about being abandoned by her nurses and doctors. Night nurse Geraldine, who had already worked for the heiress for eleven years, recalls that Huguette made a point of specifically asking her to make a commitment to stay. “She didn’t say until she died, she said until the end… She also wanted Hadassah Peri to be her nurse until the end. We would both be with her until the end,” said Geraldine, adding that Huguette implied that a reward would be forthcoming. “She said she had instructed her counsel to take very good care of me and my husband and my five children.”

Geraldine, perhaps naïvely, placed her faith in Huguette’s future munificence, while Hadassah followed the credo of “get it while you can.” Huguette would still not allow Hadassah to cash the $5 million check yet. But the heiress tried to paper things over by funneling money to Hadassah in smaller increments. Moving beyond two-check days, Huguette put Hadassah into a certain kind of Nursing Hall of Fame by writing her three separate checks ($5,000; $40,000; $5,000) on the same lucrative day, February 5, 2002.

By that date, the nurse with the golden touch had assembled, courtesy of Huguette, a small real-estate empire. Hadassah and her husband owned two Manhattan apartments in the Gatsby, two Brooklyn homes, and a Brooklyn bungalow (plus their original Brooklyn bungalow). But there was a yawning gap in Hadassah’s real estate portfolio; she lacked a country house. In the panicked atmosphere after September 11, many wealthy New Yorkers were deciding that rural retreats could serve as a refuge from terrorists.

Hadassah had mastered the art of hinting her wish list into reality. But in this case, Hadassah insists with some plausibility that it was Huguette who suggested that the nurse set out on another house-hunting venture. “Madame said we should have a place to go vacation together as a family,” said Hadassah, in her fractured English, “and so if anything happened here, our place, like she did when she bought the Connecticut [house] we have place to go…” Still insistent on tightly controlling Hadassah’s schedule, Huguette told the Peris
to find a retreat near Manhattan. The couple settled on a $599,000 house in Ocean, New Jersey, in 2002. As Daniel Peri explained, “We are one hour, maybe one hour and a half away in case Madame call for emergency.”

Pleased by her good fortune, Hadassah could not resist bragging about her patient’s generosity to Dr. Rudick, the plastic surgeon who originally operated on Huguette’s skin cancer. His medical services were no longer necessary, but the physician frequently stopped by to visit. Small wonder since Huguette, who appreciated his erudition and plummy South African accent, rewarded him with generous bonuses. “I was on the floor,” he later explained. “If you see, for instance, your neighbor’s outside gardening, you walk by and you say hello to them, and it was in that same kind of situation.”

Dr. Rudick recalls learning from Hadassah that Huguette “had bought her a house and I think she bought an apartment in Manhattan as well.” The helpful Hadassah offered to put in a good word with Huguette, suggesting that the surgeon might like an apartment, too. Rudick’s reply: “That would be nice.”

The physician later insisted that he never asked Huguette for anything, but that much to his surprise, she offered him $1 million with no strings attached. Huguette’s attorney, Wallace Bock, has a wildly different recollection. According to Bock, Huguette informed him that Dr. Rudick had financial problems and needed $500,000 to buy out his partners. In September 2001, she loaned the physician the money at 6 percent interest on a one-year promissory note. In March 2002, she threw another $500,000 into the pot on the same terms. Bock drew up the papers; Dr. Rudick never paid interest on either note. In mid-2002, Huguette told her lawyer that the gold-plated physician wanted to open up a new office and needed another $500,000 to buy an apartment.

Convinced that the doctor was taking advantage of the elderly Huguette, Bock became irate after speaking to Dr. Rudick. Bock wrote an impassioned two-page letter to Huguette on December 31, 2002, stressing that the doctor appeared to be issuing a threat: she could either pay up or learn to live without him. According to Bock’s
letter, Dr. Rudick had explicitly stated that if “you would not give him the money that he needed to buy an apartment in New York City, he would no longer be available to you, as he had in the past.” As Bock wrote to Huguette, “I was aghast at his attitude, as was Mr. Kamsler…”

All these questions were later argued in dueling depositions. Dr. Rudick portrayed himself as selfless and misunderstood. In his version, he never had financial problems or partners, never wanted a Manhattan apartment, and certainly never threatened Huguette. As he put it in his deposition, “What I said to her was that since I was retiring, I would not be available to see her frequently.” Dr. Rudick retired on December 31, 2002; the day before, Huguette gave $50,000 to the physician and his wife.

Huguette probably had more doctors dancing in attendance than any other aging but healthy woman in America. Dr. Rudick continued to include her on his retirement rounds. “I did not go see any other patients because I was no longer in practice,” he admitted. But Huguette was special. She not only forgave the principal and the interest of the $1 million loan to him, but gave Dr. Rudick and his wife, Irene, an additional $280,000 during the next few years.

Huguette’s personal physician, Dr. Singman, had also learned that his obliging patient was happy to help out. All he had to do was ask. In May 2003, Huguette gave $25,000 to Dr. Singman’s son Paul. “He was having some financial problems,” recalled Dr. Singman, who referred to Huguette as his “fairy godmother.”

Wallace Bock received a surprising nonfinancial reward in 2003 for his efforts on behalf of his client: Huguette decided to meet with him in person rather than communicate by letter or phone. This was a major concession. For at least a half century, she had refused to meet with any of her lawyers. Bock arrived at Huguette’s hospital room with a legal file and brought Irving Kamsler along to notarize some documents.

This would prove to be one of Bock’s rare visits to her inner sanctum at Beth Israel. But Huguette took a liking to the shambling Kamsler. Eager to please, the accountant became a frequent visitor, even bringing along his new bride, Judi, to meet the heiress. Huguette
called him at night and on weekends, relying on the accountant as a one-man help line. When Huguette needed to appoint a medical proxy, she chose Kamsler. “She was very clear that she wanted to be kept alive by any means possible,” Kamsler recalls. “I explained to her, ‘You need to understand, I don’t want to sound gruesome, but if your heart stops beating they are going to pound on your chest, put tubes into you, hook you up to a machine.’ I said, ‘If you ever want to change your mind about what you want to happen, it’s easy to change.’ One of the things she said over the years was, ‘I’m not going to die.’ ”