Chapter Three

Huguette’s Walk in Central Park

She 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:

Dear Daddy,

… As I was having breakfast this morning, I happened to see a huge thing flying through the air that resembled a whale. It was a zeppelin, it ended its journey of 5,066 miles in 81 hours and 17 minutes. Isn’t it marvelous when we come to think that a nine day trip on a ship can be made in three days by a zeppelin. Below her the city held its breath and gazed upward. She circled so low that it seemed she must impale her fragile sides on the spires of the highest buildings.

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.

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.”