Chapter Fourteen

The Constant Companion

Hadassah Peri was becoming much more than Huguette’s nurse. She was her gatekeeper, her confidant, and her new best friend. As the bond between caregiver and patient grew, Hadassah and her husband, Daniel, found that they had stumbled into a fairy-tale existence in which a benevolent and otherworldly figure was willing to fulfill their every materialistic desire. But as with all fables, there was a price to be paid, a price that the couple likely did not anticipate as they began to insinuate themselves in Huguette’s life—and she insinuated herself in theirs. The couple’s bargain, swapping a normal family life for immense riches, was only made possible by the quiet yet indomitable nature of their patroness.

In marked and perhaps conscious contrast to her penny-pinching father, Huguette enjoyed her identity as a kind and generous woman who liked making other people happy. She received a tsunami of grateful thank-you notes for the cash gifts that she granted to loyal friends and retainers. She saved and treasured these cards as tangible evidence of how much she was appreciated. But Huguette lived in a world of willful obliviousness. Rooted in her lifetime of privilege, it never occurred to her to consider her impact on other people’s lives—their needs were irrelevant when compared to her own desires. She wanted what she wanted whenever she wanted it. Surrounded during her childhood by live-in nannies who were there for her round the clock, Huguette now had a desire to replicate that constant intimacy.

Huguette’s adult relationships never involved compromise, at least not on her part. Many of them had a transactional undercurrent. She had abruptly changed her painting lessons with Tadé Styka from mornings to afternoons without asking whether it would interfere with his artistic routine. In recent years, she frequently called decorator Robert Samuels and carpenter Rudolph Jaklitsch at home on nights and weekends; it did not dawn on her that such interruptions were rude. Her money gave her the license to be inconsiderate, and no one dared rebuke her. To be rich is to be narcissistic. To be old is to be narcissistic. Huguette had become narcissism squared. And now what she wanted was Hadassah Peri’s undivided attention. There was something about Hadassah’s radiant smile, eagerness to please, and fierce willingness to protect her patient that proved irresistible to Huguette.

After enduring years of struggle with an unpredictable income based on private nursing assignments and tips from the backseats of cabs, Hadassah and Daniel Peri reveled in her new job with its six-figure income and promise of long-term security. To accommodate Huguette’s demand for daily twelve-hour companionship, the couple obediently rearranged their lives. In 1992, Daniel quit driving a cab to become “Mr. Mom,” as the Peris’ three children came to call him. “I told him to stay home and watch the kids,” Hadassah bluntly explained. The couple believed that Daniel’s transformation to househusband made more economic sense than hiring a nanny. “I stop working because of the tax bracket,” recalled Daniel Peri in fractured English. “Whatever I making is going to pay taxes.” This decision meant that all five members of the Peri family were now utterly dependent on Huguette’s goodwill.

Huguette quickly became the sun around which the Peri family’s daily existence revolved. Not only did Hadassah work eighty-four hours per week (seven days of twelve-hour shifts) at the hospital, but when she arrived home at the family bungalow in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn, after an hour commute, she spent her evenings doing chores for Huguette, such as washing her hospital gowns and making vegetable soup to replace unappetizing hospital food. In ways that only prisoners can imagine, Hadassah’s free time was never free. She could not put her job out of mind for even a few hours. The lonely Huguette called the nurse every night to make sure that she had gotten home safely and to wish her good night. Hadassah’s children often answered the phone. The sound track of their childhood was Huguette’s high-pitched voice, asking for their mother.

For Huguette, this was the closest and most intense relationship that she had experienced in three decades. Hadassah was caring and comforting, interested in hearing about the tiniest minutia of Huguette’s pampered life. Huguette frequently told Hadassah that she loved her and left messages saying so on Hadassah’s answering machine. But for Huguette, love was frightening. Love carried with it the possibility of loss. To be out of eyesight or earshot of her beloved made her anxious, so Huguette kept Hadassah close by. Hadassah’s family inevitably became part of the package. This was a mutually beneficial—and mutually manipulative—pas de deux. Huguette craved loyalty; Hadassah coveted financial security. The balance of power began with everything tilted Huguette’s way, but it shifted over the years as the nurse realized just how dependent Huguette had become—and that those feelings could be used as leverage.

Daniel Peri began to do errands for Huguette, taking on an expanding series of tasks that had him stopping by the hospital several days a week. At Huguette’s request, he purchased a television and VCR and installed them in her room. He shopped for Huguette’s Christian Dior stockings, Daniel Green slippers, cashmere sweaters imported from Scotland, new Barbie dolls, doll accessories, and other toys. He steamed artichokes for Huguette plus bought and dropped off her favorite brioche at the hospital.

Still intrigued by animation, Huguette asked Daniel Peri to take over the responsibility for taping cartoons, photographing the videos, and putting the pictures into albums. She wanted the former cabdriver to capture every frame of each video, and in exasperating fashion, she would often make him redo the work. “Sometimes I take twenty [photos] and if she want thirty I go back and take thirty,” Daniel Peri said. Huguette bought Hadassah’s husband a used car so that he could transport objects for her. She would later give the family enough money to upgrade to a Lincoln Navigator Luxury Sedan, a Hummer, and a $210,000 Bentley. Daniel Peri never kept a time sheet but was rewarded by Huguette with checks for as much as $60,000, often several times a year.

Huguette’s every whim was treated as a command by Hadassah and Daniel Peri—and that extended to their children, too. Huguette decided to share her love of cartoons with Hadassah’s children: Abraham, born in 1982 and known as Avi; David, born in 1985; and daughter Geula, born in 1987. The kids were required by their parents to watch cartoons that Huguette had taped, and then tell her, by phone or in person, what they thought. As Daniel Peri described the situation, “She make video, she give to the kids… Hadassah come home, okay, the kids have to watch The Flintstones.” This was not hardship duty for three children, but it was an impingement on the children’s time and yet another reminder of who ruled their household.

The Peri children were brought to the hospital frequently to entertain Huguette. “They visit in holidays, Jewish holidays, American holidays, sometimes in midweek,” recalled Daniel Peri. At least going to the hospital allowed the children a chance to see their mother during the day. Some of their school artwork hung on Huguette’s hospital walls rather than in their own home. Middle child David recalled bringing his violin to the hospital and performing for his mother’s employer. Huguette promised to give the six-year-old a relevant gift when he grew up. David said he would prefer to get Barbies now, just like his sister, but Huguette smiled and told him to be patient.

When Hadassah began working for Huguette in 1991, the nurse and her family lived in a modest 1,300-square-foot bungalow, all five of them crammed into two bedrooms. The residence was located in the middle-class enclave of Manhattan Beach, home to a mixture of Ashkenazi Jews and Italians. In 1993, their basement was damaged. “We have a big flood in our first house, and Madame told us to take a picture and I show it to her, and that’s how it started,” Hadassah explained. Huguette offered to buy the family a new home. Hadassah sent her husband house hunting, but Daniel Peri was baffled about how to proceed since “she didn’t give us a price range.”

He was not sure how high to aim or if he needed to sell their old place for a down payment. After looking at a handful of houses in their neighborhood, the couple chose a spacious $525,000 home, at 3,676 square feet more than double the size of their old property but only three blocks away. Daniel Peri says he did not know that Huguette was willing to pay for the entire purchase until the closing. The couple held on to their bungalow and turned it into a rental.

That home purchase began Hadassah’s transition into one of the highest-paid nurses in human history. “I knew that Hadassah was devoted to Mrs. Clark, but what was the motivation behind her devotion?” says Wallace Bock, Huguette’s lawyer. What Hadassah learned was that if she simply mentioned her problems to Huguette, her wealthy and healthy patient would reach for her checkbook. “What do you do when you are in the room for twenty years, you talk about your family, what is your life,” Hadassah said in a legal deposition, when asked about the unending flow of gifts. “She ask you how your kid is doing, what is the problem. What you going to say—you tell your life story and that’s how it begins. We don’t ask Madame to give us.”

The secret of Hadassah’s salesmanship was that she never had to directly ask for anything. All she had to do was discuss her concerns over the high cost of private school (and then college) for her three children; Huguette began paying not only the tuition bills but the cost of after-school activities. When Hadassah’s brother Ramon Oloroso and his wife and daughter, Michelle, came from California for a visit and stayed past their welcome, Hadassah confided to Huguette about how crowded her home had become. Huguette bought the nurse a $775,000 Brooklyn house, for use by Hadassah’s relatives. A broker called Hadassah when a bungalow, located next to her first home, became available. The nurse mused out loud about how she would love to buy it now for her children to use when they grew up. Huguette made that dream come true, too.

For Hadassah, this was astonishing—the equivalent of dealing with the Make-A-Wish Foundation on steroids. The more Hadassah got, the more she wanted. It was irresistible to see just how far Huguette would go to make her constant companion happy. Hadassah never held back in discussing her problems during her long hours in Huguette’s hospital room. When Hadassah’s niece Michelle was diagnosed with breast cancer, Huguette paid the medical bills. After Hadassah’s middle son reached his teens and had a car accident, the nurse confided in her employer. “We tried to fix the car but Madame said, ‘No, it is not safe. You better get a new one,’ ” Hadassah insisted. Huguette bought David a $21,000 Isuzu.

For Huguette, this was Monopoly money—deriving from her robber-baron father’s actual monopolies—and had no meaning for her other than allowing her to buy Hadassah’s loyalty and time. During the first five years of their relationship, Huguette wrote checks for $874,000 to Hadassah and her family on top of the real estate and cars. And that was just a taste of the largesse yet to come. Huguette often confided in her friend Suzanne Pierre about “poor Hadassah’s” problems and what she was doing to help. Suzanne, who had hired Hadassah, became alarmed that the nurse was taking advantage of her position. Suzanne’s granddaughter, Kati Cruz, recalls, “Hadassah was constantly complaining: she needed a summer home, a new car, there was constant bellyaching. It made my grandmother so angry. Hadassah knew that Madame Clark adored her and she wouldn’t say no.”

Blinded by dollar signs, Hadassah and her husband ignored the warning signs of distress in their own home. For the three Peri children, their lives were forever marked with a dividing line: their mother all but vanished once she began working for Huguette in 1991. Day after day, week after week, year after year, Hadassah was perpetually unavailable to her own children. As much as the children appreciated Huguette’s generosity, they missed their mother and resented their stolen childhood.

Geula, who was just four years old when her mother started her unrelenting routine, began weeping years later when asked in a legal deposition about her upbringing, saying, “My mother was always working, so I didn’t grow up with my mother.” Her oldest brother, Avi, recalls their mother as a fleeting presence, saying, “She was working all the time. I didn’t really see her. She had long shifts from early in the morning to late at night. My dad would take care of us at home, or other family members.” Asked whether he was upset by his mother’s long hours, Avi replied, “She had to do what she had to do. It is what it is. Looking back, what can you say as a kid? My parents came here with nothing—my parents just worked and came to America.”

Daniel Peri admits to feeling guilty that his children suffered. “I try my best to give to the family, do everything for the family, but is no mother in the house,” he says. “Hadassah is always, always working.” The nurse could have asked for—or even insisted on—reduced hours for the sake of her family. It is inhumane to work 365 days a year, with scarcely enough time to sleep between shifts. But if Hadassah had requested time off, she might have risked giving someone else the opportunity to gain Huguette’s confidence and affection.

“The suggestion that Mrs. Peri was an uncaring or inferior mother is false,” insists Fraser Seitel, a spokesman for the nurse. “Obviously, Mrs. Peri regrets that she couldn’t spend more time with her children, but just like lots of parents, she was committed to her work primarily so that her children might enjoy a better life.”

Aware of her family’s sacrifices, Hadassah felt entitled to every gift that she extracted from Huguette. The petite nurse was later defiant as she described what she did for love—and money. “I dedicate my life to Madame. For almost fourteen years I stayed more in Madame room than in my house,” Hadassah insisted. “I work twelve hours, my husband is mother and father while I’m working with Madame. Family vacation I miss when the kids were growing up. She never wants me to take off. She is uncomfortable with other people. I give my life for her…”

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.”

In denial about her own mortality, she was confronted with the inevitable every time a friend died. In early June 1993, Dr. Jules Pierre passed away at the age of one hundred. Huguette spent hours on the phone trying to comfort his wife, Suzanne. The tactless hospital staff viewed the death of Dr. Pierre, who had been affiliated with Doctors Hospital, as a moneymaking opportunity. They decided to ask Huguette to make a $1 million donation in the physician’s honor. Dr. Singman had the temerity to bring up the subject with Huguette just a week after Dr. Pierre’s death. A few days later Cynthia Cromer and Dr. Rudick met with her in the hope of closing the deal. “The very mention of his death appeared to make her uneasy and she refused to be engaged in any further discussion of her gift,” Cromer wrote. “She mentioned that she heard of someone who lived to be 120 and that she hopes to do the same.” And in a sign that Huguette was reading the newspaper, she came up with another reason to deflect the crass suggestion. Cromer added, “She said she needs to save her money because of Clinton’s health plan.” Huguette gave the hospital $80,000 that year, a generous gift by most standards but significantly below the hospital’s expectations.

Huguette did not want strangers barging into her room and tried to insist that would-be visitors ask for permission in advance. She requested that either Hadassah or Dr. Singman be present when any newcomers including medical personnel wanted to see her. When Patricia Balsamini became the vice president for development at the hospital, Dr. Singman agreed to introduce her to Huguette, but he was vague about her identity. “I spoke to Mrs. Clark and asked if she would mind if this young lady would visit her,” Dr. Singman later recalled. “I didn’t exactly describe what her position is or that she was going to ask her for any money or donations. I said she ran the public relations at the hospital, and was interested in meeting with her.” Dr. Singman had balked at bringing in a psychiatrist to evaluate Huguette without her permission, but had no qualms about being coy about the identity of someone who sought her money.

As a well-bred woman of her era, the ladylike Huguette rarely expressed anger, but two events triggered her ire. After she donated $60,000 to the hospital in 1994, the development staff dropped off a formal thank-you scroll inscribed with her name. That simple gesture set her off. “She said she doesn’t want her name printed anywhere,” wrote development staffer Tricia McGinley. Turning down an offer by McGinley to retrieve the offending document, Huguette announced that she was “going to tear it into little pieces.”

She still cared deeply about her privacy, and the second incident was also provoked by her concerns about loose lips. Like a woman juggling two rival suitors, Huguette took turns giving money to the hospital in the names of Dr. Singman and Dr. Rudick. (These donations give physicians influence, since they can help direct how the money is spent.) But she did not want the men to know that she was playing off one against the other in love-me-love-me-not fashion. Huguette became distressed when the development office alerted Dr. Singman about a $100,000 gift that she had bequeathed in honor of his rival for her affections, Dr. Rudick. Huguette made her anger known to Tricia McGinley, who chronicled the awkward conversation. “She was terribly upset… she did NOT want Dr. Singman to know about her donation… I apologized profusely…”

Huguette still treasured the memories of her early years in Paris and Montana and frequently reminisced about those times with her nurses. She felt that her Montana pioneer father had never been given his proper due in the history books. So Huguette was pleased to renew her contact with her Clark relative André Baeyens, who had returned to Manhattan in 1992 as the consul-general of France and was working on a biography of her father. With Suzanne playing intermediary, they resumed their phone calls. After Baeyens published his book in France in 1994 about William Andrews Clark, Le Sénateur Qui Aimait La France, he sent her a copy. “She was delighted, calling me to say that she was totally delighted that a book had been written about him,” Baeyens recalled. She sent him a Christmas card that year with photos enclosed, writing, “Enclosed is a brochure on the living room of Papa who was so francophile.”

Suzanne Pierre let slip to André that Huguette was in the hospital, but he never tried to see her, following the protocol that she had established. Huguette also took walks down memory lane with distant cousin Paul Clark Newell Jr., a California Realtor working on his own Clark family history. Newell, a grandson of William Andrews Clark’s sister Ella, first wrote to Huguette in October 1994, requesting an interview. Huguette asked André Baeyens whether the Realtor was a legitimate relative, and after the diplomat confirmed Newell’s bona fides, she agreed to make herself available by telephone. Newell relied on Huguette’s lawyers to set up phone calls. He taped their phone conversations.

At Beth Israel North, the nurses and staff occasionally asked Huguette about her family, since it seemed odd that no relatives visited. She had a stock answer: her half siblings had not been kind to her mother, and she had no desire to see their descendants. Whatever happened years ago, whatever slights occurred, she had long ago closed the door to a rapprochement.

Yet a number of Clark relatives attempted to stay in touch, sending her holiday cards, flowers, and invitations to events that she would never attend, all posted to 907 Fifth Avenue. Huguette still spoke to her California niece, Agnes Albert, every Christmas Eve and chatted with New York relative John Hall and his wife, Erika, once a year to thank them for a Christmas floral arrangement. Huguette shied away from talking about her life and asked about their families instead. “She knew every child by name, and she would ask how the children are, what they are doing,” Erika Hall recalled. “I always asked how she was, of course, and she would always say she was fine.” Their conversations were noteworthy for ending abruptly. “She would suddenly break off after talking very happily with me for a while, and then she would just say good-bye… it was different than [the way] the normal person would do that.” Niceties were not Huguette’s strong point with her relatives; she had given all that she was willing to give.

On rare occasions, Huguette sent gifts to family members, but she was much more generous to outsiders. In 1992, she was delighted to receive a letter from Jean-Loup Brusson, the son of the French children’s book illustrator Felix Lorioux. Huguette had loved and collected Lorioux’s illustrations, corresponding with him and his wife until their deaths (in 1964 and 1972, respectively).

With plans under way for a traveling exhibit of his father’s illustrations, Brusson contacted Huguette. She was so enthusiastic about the show that she arranged to reframe and loan her collection. Brusson, an executive with the fragrance company Lancôme, was surprised to receive a large Christmas check from Huguette, which became a yearly event. In return, he would send her one of his father’s illustrations for her birthday. At least once a year, Huguette called him in France. As Brusson recalled, “They were very short phone calls, four to five minutes, and she would ask me about the children, if they were growing, if they were good, if they were kind, etc.…” Huguette declined to give him a photograph of herself or her phone number. She wanted to remain in control of the means of communication.

Although the heiress had a strong constitution for her age, health problems occasionally materialized. In 1998, doctors found a lump in her abdomen. As Dr. Jack Rudick recalled, “I got an emergency phone call late at night at home. I had to see her, and I found that she had an abdominal problem which could have turned out to be life-threatening.” Huguette was frightened. “She thought she had cancer,” Geraldine Coffey says. “She was worried about the surgery, but she wanted to have the surgery… I worked with her that night and she said to me, ‘I haven’t made arrangements for you, Geraldine.’ ” Huguette never mentioned the word will. Dr. Rudick operated, and the lump turned out to be noncancerous, allowing Huguette to go back to acting as if she would live forever.

For nearly thirty years, Huguette spoke several times per week with her lawyer, Donald Wallace. She never met him in person but trusted him implicitly. When he suffered a heart attack in early 1997, her longtime accountant, Irving Kamsler, who had always communicated with her by letter, nervously called Huguette. “First time I talked to her was when Don wound up in the hospital in a coma. I was the bearer of bad news,” Kamsler recalls. “It was scary on my part to call her. I know she knew my name and who I was. Steps had to be taken. I told her that Wally [Bock] would be handling her affairs until Don came back. She was very polite, surprised, upset, and concerned for Don.”

The accountant made a good first impression by phone on Huguette. Kamsler, a Bronx native, came from a hard-luck background. When he was five years old, his carpenter/cabdriver father was permanently disabled in a car accident, and as a result, his mother eked out a living as a billing clerk to support Kamsler and his two older sisters. With tuition to a top college out of reach, Kamsler attended Bronx Community College and then Baruch College, gravitating to bookkeeping as a secure profession. Kamsler had worked for Donald Wallace’s other clients, including Jane Bannerman, the wife of Huguette’s former lawyer Charles Bannerman. Kamsler began handling Huguette’s accounting and taxes in 1977, but all communication up until now had been by mail.

Ever since she had entered the hospital, Kamsler had been taken aback by the size of the bonuses that Huguette was paying to Hadassah, night nurse Geraldine, and others. As early as 1993, he had expressed his concern in a letter to Donald Wallace, writing, “Mrs. Clark appears to be somewhat vulnerable to the influence of people around her. This is evidenced by her extraordinary gifts to her nurses and their families.” But this was not the kind of sentiment that Kamsler dared express directly to Huguette.

His new legal counterpart, Wallace Bock, had previously taken care of bits and pieces of Huguette’s legal work, but now he was in charge. Although Donald Wallace eventually returned to the office, he was able to work only sporadically until his death in 2002. “I was the guy at the end of the telephone line,” says Wallace Bock. “When she needed something, she called me. She was very, very private. I rarely asked questions.” Bock and Kamsler, both observant Jews, got along well although their personalities were different: the lawyer was brusque and businesslike, while the voluble accountant liked to schmooze.

Four months after Donald Wallace’s heart attack, Bock wrote to Huguette to point out that she was spending $30,000 per month to take care of former staff members (retired cooks, maids, the widow of a caretaker) and that she ought to consider setting up a trust or writing a new will. He cautioned that “should you for some reason be unable to provide the support that these people have to rely upon” they could become “destitute.”

Huguette ignored the suggestion, but she did ask for an estimate of her current net worth. Kamsler informed her that she had roughly $300 million in assets, much of them tied up in real estate, paintings, tapestries, jewelry, silver, and antique musical instruments. Reassured that she had plenty of money, she continued to casually spend it. Huguette maintained her own checking account—and frequently wrote checks for tens of thousands of dollars—but did not balance it. She never bounced a check, but that was solely because bank managers would alert her lawyer that she was overdrawn and Bock would transfer cash (as much as $200,000 at a time) into her account.

Huguette’s extreme aversion to publicity and confrontation made her a difficult client to represent aggressively. Even when she was wronged, she refused to sue. Citibank had informed the heiress several years earlier that more than five million dollars’ worth of jewelry, including her mother’s wedding ring and a magnificent bracelet adorned with sapphires and diamonds, had been pilfered from a custodial account at a bank branch. “Somebody walked out of the vault with the jewelry,” says Kamsler. “Everything wasn’t taken but the majority was taken.” Unwilling to file suit for the full amount, she accepted the bank’s offer of a $3.5 million settlement. Citibank put the remainder of the jewelry in a safe deposit box in her name, with the agreement not to charge her.

Several years later, Citibank managed to make yet another extraordinary mistake. Citibank listed the box as abandoned. “They opened it up, sold the jewelry at auction, and then realized what they had done,” Kamsler recalled. “She wanted them to recover the jewelry. They said, ‘Can you describe it?’ ” Huguette had not seen the gems in decades. Once again, rather than fight, she told Wallace and Kamsler that she would accept significantly less money than the jewelry was worth.

The transition from the gentlemanly and cultured Donald Wallace, an opera and art lover, to the blunt Wallace Bock was jarring for Huguette’s inner circle. Acknowledging their personality differences, Bock says, “He was a WASP, I was a Jewish boy from Brooklyn.” Agnes Albert, Huguette’s niece, was accustomed to relying on Donald Wallace to pass along messages asking Huguette to call her. But after Agnes spoke to Wallace Bock in 1998 requesting a call with Huguette, she got off the phone in tears, complaining to her daughter Karine, “He is a dreadful man.” Karine would file that incident away in her memory bank for a later date.

Bock does not recall his conversation with Agnes Albert but says that he was in an awkward position as the middleman. “I probably treated her as I treated everyone who wanted to talk to Mrs. Clark directly,” he says. “My usual practice was to call and ask Mrs. Clark if she wanted to speak to that person, and either call them directly or set up something. She did not want to give out her phone number.”

Suzanne Pierre tried to intervene to find Huguette another lawyer. “My grandmother never liked him,” said Kati Despretz Cruz of Wallace Bock. “She wanted Huguette to change lawyers. She found lawyers but Huguette said, ‘It’s too late, I’m going to stay with him.’ ” Huguette had always been passive about hiring retainers. Rather than switch to a white-shoe full-service firm like Sullivan & Cromwell or use a well-known accounting firm, she accepted without question whoever took over her legal and financial affairs.

However, one constituency was pleased with Huguette’s new representatives. Donald Wallace had shied away from overtures by Beth Israel’s executives, but Bock and Kamsler proved amenable, charming two members of the hospital development staff during lunch at the kosher restaurant Abigael’s on February 17, 1998. In a two-page memo, Patricia Balsamini and Michelle Gelber gushed about the “fascinating” things they had learned about Huguette, from descriptions of her valuables to the fact that she insisted on keeping $8 million in a non-interest-bearing checking account.

The two men blurted out tales of Huguette’s generosity: she supported a ninety-year-old bookkeeper at Bellosguardo and gave cash to a temporary secretary who had expressed interest in studying opera in Europe. And they told the hospital staffers that Huguette did not have a current will. “Wally and Irving have been creative in the ideas they have suggested to her, for example turning the Santa Barbara property into a private foundation for scholarly pursuits, such as musical studies,” the two women noted in a memo. “The mayor of New Canaan approached them about donating the Connecticut property as a museum. Miss Clark is averse to change and will not follow through on any of these ideas.”

It was indiscreet for two of Huguette’s lawyers—first Donald Wallace and then Wallace Bock—to tell outsiders that their client refused to update the will that she had signed nearly seventy years ago. Their legal strategy was apparently trying to find allies willing to convince Huguette to reconsider any rational form of estate planning. Part of it was their professional responsibility, but there was also obvious self-interest involved. If she named her lawyer and accountant as executors, they would reap millions in fees after her death.

The money shimmered, just out of reach for so many supplicants. By then Huguette had given Beth Israel $695,000, a paltry sum given her net worth. After the two development officers reported back on the lunch conversation, hospital CEO Robert Newman immediately called a staff brainstorming session, which was followed by a flurry of e-mails including such suggestions as “we should strategize on how to get Hadassah to help us…”

Development staffer Stefanie Steel sent a cheeky e-mail to Dr. Newman on May 20, 1998: “So, has your mom had a chance to talk to Ms. Clark about the joy of making a will? Please advise.” Dr. Newman replied: “Yes, she spent an hour with her. My mother told Mrs. C of the great joy and spiritual satisfaction of preparing her will to ‘ensure care of those who loved her.’ ”

Unwilling to discuss this topic with Dr. Newman’s mother, Huguette instead insisted that they watch a tape of Christmas with the Smurfs. “I kid you not!” Dr. Newman wrote. “My mom spent thirty minutes watching the Smurfs. She deserves a medal—the lack of outcome not withstanding.”