Chapter Fifteen

The Great Giveaway

Huguette had long been a night owl, playing solitaire until 3 or 4 a.m., soothed by the repetitive pleasures of dealing and shuffling. Now during those long hours at night, while the busy hospital was at a standstill, she wrestled with a question that had always been there in the background—what to do with her money. Writing a new will would force Huguette to deal with the troubling sense of her own mortality. She dreaded the legal complexities that would accompany writing a last will and testament to replace the 1929 document bequeathing her entire fortune to her mother.

Yet by 1999, Huguette at age ninety-three was also conscious of the noblesse oblige that comes with vast wealth. People were depending on her, or at least on her money. A shrewd if often ethereal woman, Huguette reveled in the gratitude for what she always referred to as her “little gifts.” How pleasurable to see the surprise and glow on the faces of the lucky few—her friends, her nurses, her doctors, and anyone else who wandered into the vicinity and was understanding of her needs.

Why wait for death to spread joy? Huguette decided to write larger checks right now. The beneficiaries would range from her nurses to her hospital, her retainers, and her longtime friends, and as the amounts escalated, the steps that she took to cover her largesse eventually piqued the interest of curious others outside her chosen circle.

At the top of Huguette’s beneficiary list was the one woman she could not live without, the person whom she saw every day of the year. Hadassah remained at the center of Huguette’s life. A cynic might reduce theirs to a relationship akin to a grifter and her mark, but the relationship was far more complex and tender than that. “They were so good for each other,” says Marie Pompei, who had been Huguette’s original hospital staff nurse but now visited as a friend. “They were like mother and daughter, daughter and mother.”

Suzanne Pierre, the physician’s widow who was chauffeured twice a week to the hospital by Christopher Sattler, remained Huguette’s closest friend. The two women, closer in age and spirit, spoke several times a day by phone, ending with good-night calls that reassured Huguette. “It was very sweet and precious,” recalls Suzanne’s granddaughter, Kati Despretz Cruz, who often overheard the conversations. “She’d call to see how my grandmother was doing—‘I’ve been thinking of you, all my affection, we’ll talk in the morning.’ ”

Throughout her life, Huguette had never had to think about having enough money to do whatever she wanted. But she had been running through cash at a rapid rate and did not have enough on hand to give significant sums to her two confidants. For perhaps the first time ever, Huguette would have to sell possessions—treasured objects rich with memories—that had been in her life for decades.

The copper heiress, who had maintained her Fifth Avenue apartment as if she might return tomorrow, was going to have to leave bare spots on the walls. Two Impressionist paintings were consigned to the auction block: Paul Cézanne’s Pichet Des Grès, a handsome still life of an earthenware jug and fruit, was sent to Sotheby’s. The other painting to be deacquisitioned had more personal meaning for Huguette. She had purchased Claude Monet’s Les Trois Peupliers, Temps Gris—one of a series of lush landscapes featuring poplar trees and a meandering river—at a moment that she needed the comfort of beauty. She had acquired the painting in New York from the Durand-Ruel Galleries in 1930, just as she was heading off to Reno for her divorce. The Sotheby’s catalogue for November 1999, detailing the Monet’s provenance prior to sale, discreetly listed the last owner as “Mrs. H. C. Gower.”

When Huguette learned that the two paintings had sold for $25 million in total, she celebrated by telling Hadassah that she would receive $15 million and informing Suzanne that $10 million was coming her way. The arithmetic appeared to work perfectly except for the awkward—but unavoidable—matter of taxes. Huguette, the daughter of a robber baron, did not arrogantly claim like Leona Helmsley that “taxes are for the little people.” But Huguette chose not to dwell on unpleasant details.

Her accountant Irving Kamsler informed her by letter that she would owe $10 million in capital gains and $14 million in gift taxes, plus a generation-skipping transfer tax for the gift to Hadassah of $8.25 million. (In a quirk of tax law, if the age gap between the giver and the recipient is more than 37.5 years—a generation—the IRS levies an additional 55 percent tax.) According to Bock’s calculations, if Huguette wanted to give $25 million from the sale of the paintings to her friends, she would need to come up with an additional $7.25 million out of her own pocket to deal with the tax consequences. Huguette’s lawyer Wallace Bock urged her to delay or reduce her gifts.

“She wants to give me everything,” recalled Hadassah. “But attorney Bock said installment… there is no cash, said you have to wait.” The nurse was referring to Huguette’s decision to stagger the payments. Ignoring the tax issues raised by the sale of the painting, Huguette gave $10 million each to Suzanne and Hadassah. But she was forced to tell Hadassah that the other promised $5 million would have to come later. To placate the nurse, Huguette wrote an undated check for $5 million. Hadassah’s husband called Wallace Bock to complain. As months and then years passed, Hadassah became frustrated that the $5 million check was nothing more than a worthless piece of paper as long as Huguette resisted filling in the date. Huguette’s lawyer was irked, too. “I was upset there was this $5 million check floating around,” Bock said. “I felt that this wasn’t the way to do it. But this is the way Mrs. Clark sought to mollify Hadassah, who felt she would never collect the money she was promised.”

The nurse was not alone in seeing dollar signs above Huguette’s hospital bed; the administrators and doctors running Beth Israel Hospital wanted their share, too. On Thanksgiving Day in 1999, just a few weeks after the Sotheby’s auction, Beth Israel CEO Dr. Robert Newman stopped by Huguette’s hospital room to chat. Visiting a shut-in is a laudable holiday tradition. But Dr. Newman’s goal was not to cheer her up on that occasion but rather to convince her to write a new will. Beth Israel hoped to be among the beneficiaries.

The soft-spoken Huguette listened politely to his warnings about the financial dangers that might flow from a failure to tackle prudent estate planning. Huguette ignored the hospital CEO’s advice. But eager to remain in the good graces of the hospital’s administrators, a few months later she gave $160,000 to Beth Israel.

By this time, Huguette was writing checks with the same avidity that replicated her father’s behavior when he bought out the auction houses of Europe. Huguette was already paying private school tuition for the children of her nurse Geraldine Coffey and had given her $180,000 in bonuses. Now Geraldine asked for financial help to purchase an apartment at the Gatsby, a prewar rental building being converted into a full-service condo near Beth Israel North. Geraldine expressed concern that the condo conversion might not occur because apartments were selling too slowly. Huguette’s solution: she gave nearly $100,000 to Geraldine but also spent $1.1 million for a Gatsby apartment to be co-owned by Suzanne Pierre and her granddaughter, Kati Despretz Cruz. Entranced by the convenience of the Gatsby to her hospital room, she also bought an $800,000 two-bedroom there for Hadassah.

Hadassah already owned a home in Brooklyn courtesy of Huguette, a twenty-mile trip home at night. “I work late and Madame is worried. She wants me to have a place to stay every time that I’m late from work,” Hadassah said later. That problem was solved by the Gatsby purchase, but Hadassah was disappointed once she settled into the new condo on East Ninety-Sixth Street, between Park Avenue and Madison Avenue.

Her complaint was a familiar one to New Yorkers: the view was dreary from the back of the building, featuring the sight of a city bus terminal. Huguette’s solution was to buy Hadassah another $1.4 million apartment in the front of the building, this time with Central Park sightlines. This was one of those rare moments when Huguette’s largesse troubled Hadassah’s husband, Daniel, who was concerned about paying the monthly maintenance for both apartments. He recalls telling his wife, “We have a view, why do we have to stretch?” But he had no cause to worry. Huguette picked up those costs, too.

Huguette was now writing checks as if there were no tomorrow. She had typically given Wanda checks in the $6,000 to $10,000 range but suddenly a check arrived made out for $60,000. For decades, Huguette had exchanged Christmas cards with Lucy Lyle Tower, the granddaughter of the Clark family’s beloved physician, Dr. Gordon Lyle. Lucy’s husband, Whitney Tower, a Vanderbilt heir and Saratoga racing enthusiast, died in February 1999; the New York Times ran a lengthy obituary. Rather than send a condolence note, Huguette included a little extra something in her Christmas card later that year. While spending her first Christmas as a widow at Jupiter Island, Lucy was sitting on the beach opening holiday cards and was stunned to find a $40,000 check from Huguette. “That blew my mind,” says Lucy, who for the next few years received similarly large checks. When Huguette was informed in 1999 that her great-nephew John Hall had died and the Corcoran was putting together a fund in his honor, she sent a check for $50,000.

Huguette retained fond memories of her childhood Spanish tutor, Margarita Vidal, who had traveled to Maine and Hawaii with the Clark family. Each year at Christmas the heiress gave $3,000 to Vidal’s college-professor son, Roberto Socas. As he recalls, “I would send her, every Christmas, a box of Whitman chocolates, which she loved for some stupid reason. It was cheap, not Godiva, but that was what she loved. She’d send me back a nice thank-you, or she’d call me up and we’d have a conversation about my kids.” Without any explanation, Huguette decided to make his holiday especially memorable with a check for $40,000.

By March 2000, Huguette had completed her ninth year in the hospital. Bill Clinton had survived impeachment and seven melodramatic years in the White House. But other than one trip to see a dentist, Huguette had not left the hospital and had rarely left her room. There was no medical reason for this self-imposed isolation, and no hospital psychiatrist had ever probed her agoraphobia. She could have strolled down the hallway and out to the neighboring park by the East River to breathe the fresh air at any time. But she did not want to leave the safety of her modest quarters.

People did occasionally try to coax her out on jaunts. Dr. Newman invited Huguette to his home nearby for afternoon tea. “I did suggest to her that she might want to come and visit my apartment, which is five blocks away, just to get out,” he recalls, “And she very gratefully and very determinedly thanked me and said no thanks.” Her assistant, Christopher Sattler, responded to Huguette’s stories about surfing with Duke Kahanamoku in Hawaii by urging her to go to his Long Island neighborhood. “I even tried to get her to Long Beach, get a limo, take her to the beach,” he says. “But it was never seriously considered. She laughed about it but never sounded like she was serious.”

It was treated as the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest when Huguette ventured out of her room. Hadassah required time off for back surgery in 2000, and at her request, was given a room on the same floor as Huguette at Beth Israel North. While Hadassah was recovering, she had an unexpected visitor: “That’s the day everybody in the floor almost dropped dead. They saw Madame coming out of the floor… I never forget that, and everybody had a shock.”

Beth Israel’s executives made an unusual concession to Hadassah, picking up some of her hospital bills. There was no explicit quid pro quo, but the hospital seemed to be rewarding Hadassah for helping to convince Huguette to make donations. After Hadassah stopped by the development office to drop off her remaining bills to be comped on August 1, 2000, a staffer wrote a memo detailing their conversation. “Hadassah reiterated that Mme. Clark lives in a cocoon and she doesn’t even watch the news. She says it makes her too depressed. Hadassah says she is very smart and doesn’t miss anything.” The memo also paraphrased Hadassah as saying, “Mme Clark is extremely worried about Dr. Newman leaving. She is crazy about him and is also afraid that her position at the hospital might be compromised with him gone.”

Worn down by the constant arm-twisting by Beth Israel North, worried that she might be forced out, Huguette opted to pacify the hospital with the gift of a valuable painting. She chose an Édouard Manet, Pivoines Dans Une Bouteille, a colorful still life of peonies, and told Chris Sattler to take it off her wall and deliver it to the home of Dr. Newman.

The copper heiress often tried to avoid telling her lawyer, Wallace Bock, when she gave away possessions or promised a large cash gift. Her concern was that he would try to restrain her generosity by lecturing her about the tax consequences and the repercussions on her finances. “I’d get into arguments with her, she shouldn’t be doing something,” Bock says. “She’d say, ‘That’s what I want, please do it.’ ” But Bock had a reluctant spy—Huguette’s assistant. Chris Sattler did not want to be held responsible for valuables leaving Huguette’s Fifth Avenue apartment without the appropriate paperwork. “I was in the middle,” Chris recalls. “It was awkward.” Rather than just follow Huguette’s orders, he alerted Wally Bock, who reluctantly drew up a document authorizing the gift. “From a tax point of view, giving it to the hospital didn’t make sense,” Bock says. “If she had given it to a museum, it would have been fully deductible.” To avoid taking any chances, Chris hired a bodyguard to accompany him when he dropped off the painting, which had been appraised at $6 million.

At Christie’s fall auction in November 2000, the house set a reserve price of $4.2 million for Huguette’s painting. But the bidding stopped at $3.5 million and the Manet did not sell. Afterward, Dr. Newman broke the news to Huguette and then wrote a letter on November 15 to hospital chairman Mort Hyman describing her reaction: “She was pleasant and gracious as always. She’s keenly aware that our financial problems persist and that the gift she gave has not been converted into a single penny.” Of course, had the hospital been willing to sell at the going price, the Manet would have been immediately converted into 350 million pennies.

In a written summary of his conversation with Huguette, Dr. Newman sounded irked that she wanted to discuss topics other than the financial needs of Beth Israel. The nation was riveted by the still unresolved George Bush–Al Gore presidential election as the Florida recount hung in the balance—and that was what Huguette wanted to talk about. Dr. Newman wrote: “She focused on the terribly confused political situation (she’s strongly for Gore) and also on the volatile and largely downward spiral of the stock market…”

For a ninety-four-year-old recluse, Huguettte was decidedly in touch with current events. And that extended to the international art market. The heiress, who had spent her entire life surrounded by art and creating it, had strong opinions about current tastes and prices. “She has contempt for the Picasso that went for $50 million—says it’s ugly,” wrote Newman, referring to a 1938 Cubist painting of Picasso’s mistress Dora Maar, Femme Assise Dans un Jardin.

Dr. Newman tried to steer the conversation back to what Huguette could do for the hospital, hinting that she ought to make up for the Manet price shortfall. Huguette urged patience, telling him “we should wait until the political situation is stabilized.” Dr. Newman grumbled in an e-mail to another colleague that “she didn’t take the bait and offer a half dozen more” paintings. The Manet eventually sold for the initial $3.5 million price.

Wallace Bock, keenly aware that Huguette was filling every tin cup in sight, decided that he might as well get in line. Rather than request cash for himself, the lawyer sought an expenditure for an unlikely cause that was dear to his heart. His daughter and grandchildren were living in strife-torn Israel, which was facing the uprising known as the second intifada. Huguette asked after the family’s well-being whenever another bomb attack made the news.

Bock wrote to Huguette and asked her to pay to improve security for the town of Efrat. He pointed out that “there had been shooting attacks on outlying sections of Town and on buses and cars traveling to and from Town on the main highway to Jerusalem.” In November 2000—the same month that the Manet went on sale—Huguette agreed to give $1.85 million to fund the construction of the Israeli emergency command rescue center in Efrat, a security alert system that included a barbed-wire fence, plus cameras and motion and sound detectors to screen vehicles.

The timing of Bock’s request may have been dictated by the deteriorating situation on the West Bank, but it made no financial sense. Bock knew that Huguette currently owed $12.5 million in gift taxes—and did not have the available cash to pay. In fact, just five days before he asked her to protect the town of Efrat, Bock wrote to Huguette to remind her of the tax liability stemming from her gifts to Hadassah and Suzanne. On the same day, her accountant, Irving Kamsler, sent Huguette a letter stating that she would need to sell more assets to pay those gift taxes—and copied Bock on the letter. In fact, Huguette was so cash-strapped that Bock gave the $1.85 million to the town of Efrat on the installment plan, in four separate checks over four years. (Bock declined in an interview to discuss the timing of his request.)

Ever since Donald Wallace, her lawyer from 1976 to 1997, had stepped aside due to his failing health, Huguette’s financial affairs had become increasingly muddled. The systems to manage cash flow and taxes that he had put in place were no longer operating. In the past, each year Donald Wallace would ask Huguette for a list of her gifts so he could pass along the information to Irving Kamsler, who prepared a gift tax return. Since Huguette wrote her own checks to friends and retainers and her lawyer did not have access to that account, her cooperation was needed to pay gift taxes. But once Donald Wallace no longer managed Huguette’s legal affairs, everything came to a standstill.

From 1997 through 2003—at a time when Huguette gave away more than $24 million—no gift tax returns were filed on her behalf.

Part of the problem was that Huguette, even if her sympathies were with liberal presidential candidates like Gore, found it difficult to accept that the federal government should have any say on how she spent her inheritance. After all, her copper mogul father had assembled his fortune before the Sixteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution in 1913 allowing the government to levy taxes. Huguette stubbornly ignored repeated letters from her lawyer and accountant reminding her of the tax consequences of her generosity. But having created this paper trail, Bock and Kamsler did not force the issue.

Wallace Bock would later insist that taxes were not his responsibility, although his monthly bills listed income and gift tax preparation among his legal chores. Bock’s explanation: he had carelessly copied the billing language used by his predecessor Donald Wallace. “My position was that Irving was the accountant,” says Bock. “Anything to do with taxes, I turned over to him. I really did not know. I knew she owed taxes, but I did not know he was not filing the returns.” In civil legal proceedings, Irving Kamsler later took the Fifth Amendment repeatedly in a deposition when asked about why he did not file gift tax returns.

To this day, the behavior of Kamsler as well as Bock—who as her lawyer should have been up-to-date on her obligations—remains baffling since they derived no personal benefit from Huguette’s failure to pay gift taxes. In fact, the failure left them open to charges that they had mismanaged her affairs. This was a massive and costly gaffe. The taxes plus penalties quietly multiplied each year.

With so much of Huguette’s wealth tied up in real estate and art—which she had not seen in decades—her balance sheet was turning into a bookkeeper’s nightmare. Even as her tax obligations ballooned, Huguette’s impetuous gift giving resulted in a cash crunch by 2001. Her conservative investments were bringing in only $2.2 million a year, not nearly enough to cover her life at Beth Israel, maintaining three properties, paying for her staff, and passing out large bonuses. Rather than dip into principal, Kamsler wrote a letter urging her to sell more possessions.

First to go was a Stradivarius violin, known as “La Pucelle” or “the Virgin,” which she had purchased in 1955 for $50,985. When she had the violin appraised by Sotheby’s, Huguette disagreed with the auction house’s lowball estimate. Impressed by Huguette’s business acumen, Chris Sattler recalled, “The Sotheby’s people said the most that has ever been gotten is $2.5 million, we’ll start it at that. She said, ‘No. Absolutely. Not. That’s La Pucelle, the finest violin in the world. I’m not taking less than $6 million.’ ” She used a private dealer to act on her behalf instead, and the violin sold for $6 million to a Silicon Valley collector.

Huguette also put up for sale two paintings by John Singer Sargent, both sun-dappled scenes featuring European women. At an auction at Sotheby’s on May 24, 2001, the Sargent painting Rosina-Capri, an 1878 scene of a girl joyfully dancing the tarantella on a rooftop, sold for $5.35 million. But Sargent’s haunting 1913 Girl Fishing at San Vigilio, showing a young woman in a long white dress at the seaside, did not meet the reserve price. Rather than lower the price or rehang the art at one of her homes, Huguette lent the painting to the Corcoran Gallery.

After refusing pleas by three generations of lawyers to make her final wishes known, Huguette finally expressed a willingness to at least discuss her thoughts about potential heirs with Irving Kamsler, who passed her suggestions along to Wallace Bock. Eager to seize the moment, Bock immediately drew up a draft of a will in 2001. That document gives a sense of her priorities at the age of ninety-five: Huguette’s most valuable asset, Bellosguardo, was to be turned into an arts foundation.

Her nurse Hadassah and goddaughter, Wanda, were treated as equals in Huguette’s heart, each receiving 30 percent of the residue of her estate. Her best friend, Suzanne Pierre, would receive 15 percent. Acknowledging her fond memories of the French marquis whom she almost married, Huguette left 15 percent to his adopted daughter, Marie-Christine DeMarchez. The two women still maintained an ongoing correspondence. Huguette was worth an estimated $300 million, but even after subtracting the value of Bellosguardo (an estimated $100 million) and the mounting tax liabilities, there would still be plenty of cash to spread around.

The missing names on the list were her Clark relatives. She had not seen any family members since 1968, although she had spoken to a few of them sporadically. This draft included a stark paragraph in which Huguette disowned the descendants of her half sisters, Mary and Katherine, and half brother Charles. “I intentionally make no provision in this my Last Will and Testament for any members of my family, whether on my paternal or maternal side, having had minimal contacts with them over the years.” Her feelings were unequivocal.

This draft named Wallace Bock and Irving Kamsler as executors, which would guarantee them millions of dollars in fees. The lawyer and accountant would also each receive bequests of $400,000.

Huguette did not sign this will or any of the three follow-up drafts that were sent to her during the next few years. Cynthia Garcia, who began working as a paralegal for Wallace Bock starting in the fall of 2000, prepared many of the drafts and spoke frequently to Huguette by phone. “Wally was obsessed with getting her to sign a will. He would flip out,” Garcia says. Every time Huguette received a new will, the heiress would make her feelings known with a quick, one-word reaction. “She’d call me, and say, ‘No.’ Then she’d hang up,” Garcia says. “Wally would say, ‘Bring me a Scotch.’ ”

The September 11 attacks did not affect Huguette directly, since she was living in the most protected part of Manhattan, the Upper East Side. Her view out the window across the East River was tranquil, without smoke or debris or obvious signs that anything was amiss. But as in New York and across America, Huguette felt the emotional reverberations from the toppling of the World Trade Center.

Huguette’s best friend, Suzanne Pierre, was stranded in Paris, unable to return to New York, so she asked her granddaughter, Kati, to bring food to the hospital for Huguette. Kati had spoken to Huguette by phone, but they had never met before. “My grandmother would bring Huguette asparagus and brioche every Friday, so I did that,” she says. “The first time I saw her, she was very tall, white as a ghost, beautiful porcelain skin, piercing blue eyes, lovely white sweater, and she was wearing a light blue cashmere cardigan. She was very happy to see me. She’d answer the door herself, never invited me in. She had a beautiful view of the river but had the shades drawn and the lights low.”

Several weeks later on September 30, Huguette called Wanda to talk about what had happened. “I’m so glad I didn’t see it,” Huguette told Wanda, “It would have been so upsetting. I’m so glad that I didn’t see it, live.” From the seeming safety of a hospital bed, she was just eight miles from the worst terrorist attack in American history.

For Huguette, the anthrax mailings, which paralyzed the nation in the weeks after September 11, were frightening in a way that transcended terrorism. In a symbolic way, it brought back the death of Andrée, the sanitize-the-door-handles germphobia of her mother and once again, her own intimations of death.

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.’ ”

After taking early retirement, Montana reporter Steve Shirley became interested in writing a biography of William Andrews Clark. He had covered the state capital in Helena for many years for the Bee newspapers. Shirley wrote to Huguette at 907 Fifth Avenue requesting an interview, stressing that he believed Senator Clark had been given a raw deal by other authors and portrayed in a one-dimensional way.

Shirley had limited hopes for an interview. So he was startled on April 24, 2003, to receive a phone call from Chris Sattler, who told him, “I’ve got Mrs. Clark on the line and she wants to talk to you.” Huguette began to reminisce with this total stranger about her childhood. “She talked briefly about her father, but she seemed very enamored of her sister, and talked mostly about their time in France,” Shirley recalled. “She said her sister was very sorry that they had to leave all of a sudden in 1914 and couldn’t spend the summer at the Château.” Huguette told that story eighty-nine years after the outbreak of World War I and eighty-four years after Andrée’s death. It was a small but telling illustration of the emotional hold that her childhood in France and her sister Andrée still had on Huguette, even after so much time had passed.

The heiress sent the reporter some favorite family photographs—a 1915 photo of Huguette dressed as an Indian with her father, a photo of William Andrews Clark leaving a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a photo of her aunt Amelia descending the stairs at the Fifth Avenue mansion. She called Shirley three more times during the next few months, eager to talk about her early years.

What was frustrating for Steve Shirley, however, was the one-sided nature of their calls. “It wasn’t really a conversation because she was quite hard of hearing,” says Shirley, who did not end up writing a book. “When I said I’d like to ask her questions, she did not seem to hear. She did speak softly, had a French accent, seemed articulate.”

Huguette’s French relative, André Baeyens, had also noticed that phone conversations were becoming increasingly difficult. He was uncertain whether the problem was her age or her hearing. “Starting in 2002 I noticed our calls became more perfunctory as Aunt Huguette began to have difficulty forming full sentences,” Baeyens recalled. “Even the forms of politeness became more difficult. Her hearing became impaired. Her telephone conversations consisted of a few polite words… This feebleness became more acute in 2003 and worse in 2004.”

Huguette had feared losing her hearing ever since she was a child and watched her mother drag around unwieldy hearing aid boxes with earpieces. Now that her own hearing was failing, Huguette chose to be in denial. She balked at being seen by an audiologist and then resisted using a hearing aid. Her staff purchased an amplified telephone but she refused to use it. In her presence, her nurses and confidants learned to make a point of standing by her left ear. The handful of people whom she spoke to every day—Hadassah, Chris, Wally Bock, and Irving Kamsler—insisted that they could still communicate with her by phone because she was so familiar with their voices. But occasional callers like Steve Shirley and André Baeyens had a more difficult time making themselves understood.

Even as her remaining connections with her relatives dwindled away, even as her days were filled with retainers whose services she purchased, Huguette’s affection for Wanda Styka remained undiminished. They had a mutual interest in art and history, and never ran out of things to discuss on the phone. Wanda appreciated the chance to talk about her father with someone who had known him well. Whenever Wanda sent a gift package or a note, Huguette brightened at the sight of her goddaughter’s distinctive calligraphy-style handwriting, showing it off to her nurses.

For Huguette, her relationship to Wanda kept her implicitly connected to one of the happier periods of her life—the time when she had not only studied painting with Tadé but spent evenings by his side. But now Wanda’s mother, Doris, the woman whom Tadé had chosen to marry, was dying. Just as Huguette had hovered protectively over her mother, Anna, in her final years, Wanda was devoted to assisting her mother. Wanda worked as a museum archivist in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, but her real occupation during those years was caretaker. “My mother went to a nursing home, and I went with her and had a bed right in her room,” recalls Wanda.

When Doris Styka died in September 2003, Wanda was concerned about how to break the news to her godmother, whom she referred to as Marraine. She was sensitive both because of Huguette’s age and because of the bond that Huguette had forged with Doris. Suzanne Pierre recommended that Wanda send a letter. Upon receiving it, Huguette immediately picked up the phone to offer comfort.

Her godmother’s emotions were so intense that Wanda felt as if Huguette was reliving her own anguish when Anna Clark passed away. “I knew she was using how devastated she had been and was applying it to me,” says Wanda. “She knew that I was very close to my mother. My dear friend mother.” In the midst of their shared grief, Huguette offered the hard-won wisdom of experience, telling Wanda, “I know it’s going to be very hard for you, the first Christmas and the first Easter.”

The next night around 9 p.m., Huguette phoned Wanda again. That was unusual; they did not talk that often. Wanda was so touched by her godmother’s concern that she jotted a note in her appointment calendar: “Dearest Marraine called. She said that I ought not to live alone. It was difficult for each of us to hear each other.”

Even though the two women were separated by distance and hearing loss, Huguette would not give up on her fears about Wanda’s safety. Huguette called again a few weeks later, and Wanda recorded her thoughts in her calendar. “She wishes to know the layout of the property and specifically, how far I am from the people next to me,” Wanda wrote. “She said she thinks of me.”

The emotional thermostat in Huguette’s hospital room rarely needed adjusting: she was even tempered and got along with her chosen attendants. Yet roiling emotions lurked beneath the surface. Even though Huguette could have developed writer’s cramp from all the checks that she was writing to Hadassah, the nurse was likely becoming frustrated since she was still unable to cash the $5 million check. A promise was a promise, even if by then Hadassah had already received more than $20 million from Huguette. The long hours had begun to grate on Hadassah, as Huguette became frail and needed to be monitored more closely.

Hadassah and Dr. Newman, the CEO of Beth Israel, remained united in what seemed to be a quixotic cause—convincing Huguette to write a new will. On January 4, 2004, Dr. Newman visited Huguette, and when he returned to his office, he jotted down his thoughts. “Stopped to see H. Clark, she seemed same, Hadassah much more anxious re lack of will. I’m trying to think of options.”

The financially beleaguered Beth Israel Hospital was running out of options, too. Beth Israel was hemorrhaging money as it operated the former Doctors Hospital overlooking the East River. A year earlier, Dr. Robert Newman had written a blunt letter to Huguette alerting her of the “excruciating plight” of the hospital. But after donating her Manet in 2000, Huguette had become less interested in propping up the hospital. Her last check to Beth Israel had been written on Halloween, October 31, 2002, for $35,000—more trick than treat, given what executives expected.

Aware that Huguette abhorred change and that she was firmly attached to her perch at the hospital, in the spring of 2004, Dr. Newman and his colleagues decided to test her I-will-not-be-moved attitude. Consulting with his colleagues, Dr. Newman made an offer that was unusual in the annals of medicine: suggesting that Huguette buy the hospital where she was living. He made it clear that if she balked at writing a nine-digit check, the hospital would be sold to a developer and torn down. On May 11, 2004, Dr. Newman and Beth Israel chairman Morton Hyman met with Huguette to describe what they had in mind. Afterward, Dr. Newman summarized the conversation in an e-mail.

Mort basically told her exactly where we are at—almost sure to sell the building, offers in hand… Also told her that a contribution in the neighborhood of 125 million would obviate the need to sell. Her only comment: “That’s a lot of money.” She responded the same way when we asked her for several million a few years ago, and that time she came through with the Manet. We’ll see. We also assured her we’d never abandon her…

The executives had suggested that several weeks earlier Huguette make a gift in the form of an annuity, which they promised would pay her more than $1 million each month. But that would have meant selling and handing over all of her stocks and T-bills. Huguette had always been so conservative with her investments that her returns were substandard. Intrigued by the million-dollar number, she called Wallace Bock two days later to ask him about the feasibility of selling her country estate in New Canaan and using those funds to buy the hospital. But the house was not worth that kind of money. At the urging of Bock and her accountant, Irving Kamsler, Huguette refused the hospital’s offer.

But after spending thirteen years in the same place, it was wrenching to contemplate relocating to a new neighborhood. The hospital was her home. She had lived on the Upper East Side ever since her father had opened the doors of his mansion in 1911. Beth Israel’s main facility was located in a downscale busy commercial neighborhood, at First Avenue and Sixteenth Street. She did not want to go there.

At Huguette’s direction, her attorney, her accountant, and Chris Sattler began to research other possibilities on the Upper East Side. Going back to her Fifth Avenue apartment was not on the table. As Bock recalled, she was adamant about one other thing: “She didn’t want a nursing home.” Huguette talked the situation over with her night nurse, Geraldine. “She wanted quietness and a river view,” says Geraldine. “She liked where she was, she just liked the location… the beauty of it.” The Hospital for Special Surgery and New York Hospital, both situated on the East River, were considered as options, but Mount Sinai, less than a mile from her current abode, seemed to be the best alternative.

The effort to find a new home for Huguette triggered a new round of panic along the executive corridors of Beth Israel. On June 2, 2004, Dr. Newman sent a dejected e-mail to colleagues, lamenting, “I visited HC this afternoon. She was her usual determined self and her determination is to go to another hospital on the Upper East Side.” Paying lip service to her wishes, Dr. Newman subsequently wrote a letter of recommendation to New York Hospital on her behalf: “She is a lovely person, highly educated, totally oriented and in remarkably good health. She makes almost no demands on the hospital staff, having her own round the clock nursing staff.”

But Beth Israel was desperate to hold on to this wealthy patient, who had proved to be a major profit center for the hospital. She was about to slip away. Her caregivers tried a startling tactic. Hadassah and Dr. Singman both announced to Huguette that if she did not move to Beth Israel’s downtown facility, they would cease playing any medical role in her life. Their threat touched on Huguette’s two great fears: being abandoned and being unable to care for herself. For Huguette, the prospect of losing her two medical protectors was terrifying.

Dr. Singman later offered explanations that strained credulity. He insisted that his threat was motivated by the rigors of a long commute to Mount Sinai, even though that facility was no more than a five-minute drive from the old Doctors Hospital.

As he said later, “Apparently Hadassah Peri also told her that she wouldn’t go up to Mount Sinai to see her, and that she would only come down to Beth Israel, so basically we were like a team…” After receiving that one-two punch, Huguette had an abrupt change of heart and agreed to go to Beth Israel’s downtown facility after all. Presumably, she felt she had no choice.

The deft nurse-doctor teamwork between Hadassah and Dr. Singman came in handy six weeks later when Dr. Singman fell down a flight of stairs during a vacation in Italy and insisted on being medevaced back to the United States for treatment of his injuries. He informed Hadassah that the trip cost $65,000. The nurse rushed to tell this hard-luck story to Huguette, who reached for her checkbook.

On July 27, 2004, Huguette left the hospital that had been her round-the-clock home since March 1991. Chris came by the hospital to pack up Huguette’s possessions, and then Hadassah escorted her into a waiting ambulance. Concerned that the shock of natural sunlight might be too great after so many years indoors, a staff nurse insisted that Huguette’s eyes be covered.

When she arrived at her new room at Beth Israel—an ordinary space rather than the VIP wing—there was little worth opening her eyes for, just a gritty urban scene instead of the serene East River. When her former nurse Marie Pompei came to visit, Huguette plaintively asked, “Don’t you miss the view?”