Empty Mansions

by Bill Dedman

  When Huguette built a two-story addition at Le Beau Château in 1951, the stairway received a touch of whimsy: paintbrushes. (illustration credit9.3)

  The only personal touch in the twenty-two rooms is in the wing Huguette had constructed in the early 1950s. A graceful wooden staircase leads from the thirteen-hundred-square-foot bedroom up to a loft, a painter’s studio with sinks for washing brushes. On the staircase, every other baluster holding up the handrail is hand-carved in the shape of an artist’s brush.

  THE VIRGIN

  AS SHE APPROACHED HER FIFTIES and her mother grew frail, Huguette bought not only Le Beau Château but also major pieces of art and musical instruments, showing her father’s eye for betting on winners.

  In May 1955, she added her third violin by Stradivari. These violins were hers, not among the four that Anna was lending to the Paganini Quartet. Huguette’s new violin was not just any ordinary Stradivarius. This was perhaps the finest violin in the world not in a museum. Huguette selected the violin herself, making sure to negotiate a discount.

  Made in 1709 in Cremona, Italy, this is the great Stradivarius violin, the one used by experts to date the beginning of his finest years. Aficionados can distinguish this violin at a great distance by sight, as easily as an electric guitar fan would know Keith Richards’s 1953 Fender Tele-caster, “Micawber.” A purchaser in Paris in the mid-1800s, seeing that the violin had never been opened for repair, exclaimed, “C’est comme une pucelle!” (It’s like a virgin!), and thereafter it was known as “La Pucelle,” meaning “the maid” or “the virgin.” That purchaser not only gave it a name but immediately added a distinctive carved wooden frontpiece representing Joan of Arc, “the Maid of France.” The asking price for La Pucelle in 1955 was $55,000 at the famed Rudolph Wurlitzer Company on Forty-Second Street, but Huguette inquired what discount she could receive for paying cash. She was told 5 percent. A week later, when the bill of sale was drawn up, she had negotiated the discount to 10 percent, making the final price $49,500, or about $450,000 in today’s dollars, for one of the finest violins ever made.

  Huguette took great care of La Pucelle, making sure it was serviced annually. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was one of her few regular adventures away from 907 Fifth Avenue. But when she played the violin, she used a lesser Strad from 1720, which she called her Traveler.

  In the same period, she expanded her collection of Impressionist paintings, which already included two Renoirs, In the Roses and Girl with Parasol, Manet’s Peonies, the Degas Dancer Making Points, and two by Monet, a Water Lilies and Poplars on the Epte. She added a third Renoir, the spectacular Girls Playing Battledore and Shuttlecock, depicting fashionable young women playing badminton in the French countryside: vivid blue and yellow against a green countryside. No doubt she had seen it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1937, when she had lent one of her own paintings to the museum for a Renoir show. It has many figures (similar to The Bathers) and is from his greatest period: The dealers call it a perfect Renoir. She asked the Knoedler gallery to send it over, and after a week she decided to keep it, paying the list price of $125,000.

  Not all her fine paintings were French. She owned two by the American painter John Singer Sargent: In Rooftops of Capri, a young woman dances the tarantella to entice an older man, and in Girl Fishing at San Vigilio, the fisherwoman seems far overdressed for the occasion.

  Huguette also bought Apartment 12W, which was her own residence, and also 8W, her mother’s, as the building at 907 Fifth Avenue converted from rentals to co-op apartments at the end of 1955. She paid less than $120,000 for the pair, or about $1 million in today’s dollars.

  In each of these purchases, Huguette proved to be a shrewd investor.

  “DID YOU EVER REPLACE SNOOPY?”

  THROUGH ALL THE YEARS, among all her secrets, Huguette had kept up a friendship with a man who was about her age and living in France, a man other than Etienne. She was not one to let things go, not one to end an old friendship.

  In the spring of 1964, she sent this friend a telegram at his home on the French Riviera, consoling him on a loss:

  Dear Bill, received your letter with sad news about Snoopy. Having had dogs I know what the heartbreak is. All my best wishes for a good Easter under the circumstances. Affectionately, Huguette.

  This Bill was her former husband. Though they couldn’t make it through the honeymoon, the former Mr. and Mrs. William Gower carried on an affectionate correspondence for decades.

  Two years after Huguette divorced him, Bill Gower remarried, choosing in 1932 another daughter of a wealthy politician from the western states. Constance Toulmin was the child of George White Baxter, former territorial governor of Wyoming. She already had two failed marriages. Bill and Constance had no children together, but they raised her daughter from an earlier marriage, Cynthia, who drove an ambulance in the Second World War. Bill was unable to fight in that war, having developed an awkward gait since his track team days, so he put his legal training to work as the American Red Cross delegate to Europe, briefing Churchill and Eisenhower. After the war, Bill ran the Paris office of the company that published Look magazine. Here he was in his element, hobnobbing with society figures, including author Somerset Maugham.

  “Everything was sketchy with my uncle,” recalled his niece, Janet Perry. He was a womanizer, a gregarious big talker, irrepressibly lovable. He sent his niece a huge framed photograph of himself, too large to display, but she put it out on the piano when he came to the New York area to visit. He always had tickets to the newest hit play, a table at the finest restaurant. “He was a huge name-dropper, but he really knew all the people.”

  Through all the years after their divorce, Bill and Huguette stayed in touch. He sent her birthday wishes. She kept him up on family news and illnesses. Their warm correspondence shows a relationship completely at odds with the Clark family suggestion that she had been traumatized by her brief marriage.

  In February 1964, she checked on his health and suggested he visit her on his next trip to America:

  Dear Bill, Thank you for your letter. Photographs very lovely. Anxious to hear the results about your foot. When are you thinking of coming to the states? Be sure to let me know in advance so I will be in New York. With affection, Huguette.

  She made plans to meet him a few weeks later, after his arrival at New York’s oldest private club:

  Thanks for your letter. So glad about the foot. Will call Union Club on 3rd or 4th of March. Bon voyage. Affectionately, Huguette.

  She checked on him that August:

  Cher Bill, Wondering what you are doing today. We are having marvelous weather. How is it over there? Did you ever replace Snoopy, not in your heart but in your household? Bien affectueusement, Huguette.

  And the following year, in 1965, she worried after he took a spill at age sixty:

  Dear Bill, am anxious to know how you are and if you have fully recovered from your fall. So do let me hear from you. With much love, Huguette.

  Bill’s wife, Constance, had died in 1951, and he retired in 1960 to the coastal resort town of Antibes on the French Riviera. He owned a classic, antique-stuffed Mediterranean house, which he called La Sarrazine. His yard had a huge mirror at one end to make the estate look twice as large.

  Huguette wrote checks to Bill, $3,000 at a time, well into the 1970s. He died of consumption, or pulmonary tuberculosis, in December 1976 in Antibes, at age seventy-one. His ashes were buried beside his parents in North Elba Cemetery outside Lake Placid, New York, in a shady spot with a mossy headstone.

  Even until her death, eighty-three years after their brief marriage, Huguette still had in her apartment her Cartier gold wedding band with its thirty-two small diamonds, as well as her Tiffany wedding presents with the monogram “H.C.G.”

  SPOOKY

  THOUGH SHE NOW OWNED a country house in Connecticut, in addition to her apartments in New York and the California estate, Bellosguardo, Huguette’s staff was dwindling. As old employees died or re
tired, she didn’t hire new ones. She apparently wasn’t comfortable interviewing new people. After her mother died, and then her Aunt Pauline, who had also resided at 907 Fifth Avenue, Huguette was the only resident of the forty rooms there.

  One of her last full-time caretakers, Delia Healey, was an Irish immigrant six years older than Huguette. During the 1960s until the late 1970s, Delia’s main duties were threefold.

  She brought in fresh bananas every morning and made Huguette’s lunch, usually crackers with sardines from a can.

  She looked after Huguette’s collection of French dolls, carefully washing and ironing their clothes. She also ran out to buy new dolls as soon as they became available at FAO Schwarz.

  She managed the recording of TV shows for Huguette to watch, particularly cartoons, so that Huguette could study the individual frames of animation. (In the 1960s, Huguette kept a library of French films, stored on early reel-to-reel tape, which she studied frame by frame.) Huguette purchased a newfangled Sony video recorder for recording the shows and had it delivered to Delia’s apartment. Delia’s assignment at one point was not only to record but also to transcribe every word of every episode of The Flintstones.

  Delia’s grandchildren remember Huguette as kind and generous. In 1975, she sent them Home Pong, an early videogame. She also sent them a custom-made dollhouse from Germany, which had exquisite detail, including toilet seats that went up and down and human figures that matched each member of their family. They recalled being surprised, a few weeks later, when Huguette sent the dollhouse back to Germany for repairs, because she said the floors needed to be refinished.

  After seventy-nine-year-old Delia became too infirm to take the train into the city from Larchmont, in Westchester County, Huguette sent a driver in a town car to pick her up every morning. Never at ease with strangers, Huguette was forestalling having to hire someone new. When Delia died in 1980, her family was surprised to learn that Huguette was not an older woman but was actually younger than she.

  With no more full-time staff, Huguette called on a circle of part-time helpers. Out in Yonkers, New York, several evenings a week in the 1980s, the phone would ring at the home of Huguette’s antiques dealer, Robert Samuels. His daughter, Ann Fabrizio, remembers Huguette’s small voice insisting that he come right away to fix some item in her mother’s apartment: an inlaid table that had cracked, a chair that needed to be reupholstered, new cases for the dolls. In twenty-five years of fixing and furnishing her apartments, Samuels never talked face-to-face with her.

  In 1970, Huguette had a staff of eight. By 1990, she had only one part-time maid and a handyman to maintain her forty-two rooms at 907 Fifth Avenue.

  Then there was a frightening incident at the apartment. Huguette described a day in the late 1980s when a water delivery boy, or someone pretending to be a delivery boy, came to 8W. Huguette was up in 12W, getting something for one of her art projects. When she came back downstairs, she found the maid locked in the bathroom, with no sign of the delivery boy.

  As Huguette described it much later, “It was spooky.”

  MADAME PIERRE

  HUGUETTE CLARK had been outliving her doctors.

  When the cancers on her face ate away at her lip, nearly causing her to starve in March 1991, it was her friend Suzanne Pierre whom she finally called with an SOS. Suzanne was the wife of Huguette’s longtime doctor, Jules Pierre, but he was quite elderly and no longer seeing patients. After he retired, Huguette had seen Dr. Myron Wright, but he died in 1990. Huguette didn’t find a new doctor, so her skin cancers had gone untreated.

  Madame Pierre called Dr. Henry Singman, who was seeing some of her husband’s former patients. The internist that evening discovered Huguette, an “apparition” in her own apartment, and persuaded her to go to the hospital immediately. And that’s how she began her long seclusion, choosing Doctors Hospital because it was near Suzanne’s Upper East Side apartment.

  Though everyone said Suzanne Pierre was Huguette’s best friend, Suzanne knew her place in the pecking order. “Her dolls,” Madame Pierre said, “are her closest companions.”

  Suzanne and Huguette loved to converse in French. Suzanne was fifteen years younger than Huguette, born in France in 1921. Her first marriage ended quickly in divorce. She left her nine-month-old son with his grandparents in Brittany and went to work. She rarely saw her son until he was a young man.

  Suzanne came to the United States in 1948 and eventually married Dr. Jules Pierre, a Frenchman, an officer in the Legion of Honor, and president of the Federation of French War Veterans. Dr. Pierre was the physician for Anna and Huguette.

  Madame Pierre and Huguette became friends. She visited 907 Fifth Avenue regularly. Over time, she began to act as sort of a social secretary and assistant for Huguette, a buffer against the world.

  • • •

  On a stormy afternoon in March 2010, serving hot tea and cookies for a visitor in her tasteful apartment at 1075 Park Avenue, eighty-eight-year-old Suzanne Pierre was dressed in a sharp blouse and jacket with a pearl stickpin. She said she couldn’t explain why Huguette was a recluse. In the years after Huguette’s mother had died, Suzanne said, she tried to get Huguette to join her for afternoons out.

  “I would ask her to go out to lunch, but she preferred to stay in. She would say she has a little cold.”

  Huguette did not want to see outsiders, even relatives, Madame Pierre said. “She thought they were just after her money. She didn’t trust people.”

  HADASSAH

  FROM DAY ONE at Doctors Hospital, Huguette had private nurses twenty-four hours a day. The nurse on the day shift, assigned randomly to Huguette in the spring of 1991, was Hadassah Peri. She would work for her “Madame” for twenty years, becoming, it seems probable, the wealthiest registered nurse in the world.

  Doctors Hospital was not the place that a New Yorker with a life-threatening illness normally would select. It was better known as a fashionable treatment center for the well-to-do, a society hospital, a great place for a face-lift or for drying out. Michael Jackson had been a patient, as had Marilyn Monroe, James Thurber, Clare Boothe Luce, and Eugene O’Neill. The fourteen-story brick structure on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, between Eighty-Seventh and Eighty-Eighth streets by a bend in the East River, gave the impression of being an apartment building or hotel, with a hair salon offering private appointments in patient rooms and a comfortable dining room where patients could order from the wine list if the doctor allowed. When it opened in 1929, it had no wards and no interns, allowed no charity care, and included hotel accommodations for family members of patients. In its early days, it was often used as a long-term residential hotel or spa, and finally in the 1970s it added modern coronary units and intensive care.

  Huguette checked in to a room on the eleventh floor with a lovely view down to a city park and Gracie Mansion, the Federal-style home that is the official residence of the mayor of New York.

  After living mostly alone at home for so many years, now Huguette was in a hospital with its constant noises and staff coming and going. At first she was a difficult patient, swathed in sheets and refusing to let anyone see her. A nurse wrote in the chart that she was “like a homeless person—no clothes, not in touch with the world, had not seen a doctor for 20 years, and threw everyone out of the room.”

  A week into her stay, Huguette was evaluated by a social worker, who filled out the standard initial assessment. The patient, just short of age eighty-five, was scheduled for surgery to remove basal cell tumors and to reconstruct her lip, right cheek, and right eyelid. She had been “managing poorly at home—reclusive—not eating recently” and was dehydrated. Her only support system was her friend Suzanne Pierre, “helping with her affairs,” and a maid—no family. Her mental status was always awake and alert, but she was skittish: “Patient refused to speak with social worker. Patient has not been to doctor in many years—had refused medications in past. Patient anxious and uncooperative at times.”

  Her plans
after treatment? “Spoke with friend, Mrs. Pierre—feels patient will need convalescent care in facility but does not want to go to nursing home which she feels would be depressing.… Patient may need to go to a hotel with a nurse to recuperate.”

  As for financial problems, “none noted.”

  Huguette did not move on to a hotel. Within just over two months, she was an indefinite patient, a tenant, with Doctors Hospital charging her $829 a day. Eventually the rent rose to $1,200, or more than $400,000 a year.

  Huguette had a series of surgeries in 1991 and 1992, with Dr. Jack Rudick removing malignant tumors and making initial repairs to her face. She was healthy, though she still needed a bit of plastic surgery, especially on her right eyelid. “It is not necessary,” she told her doctors. “I am not having any surgery. I don’t like needles.” She was not badly disfigured by the cancer. And there might have been another reason, Dr. Singman speculated. “This she has steadfastly put off,” he wrote in her chart in 1996, “I presume to avoid the final treatment and then possible discharge home.”

  A board-certified specialist in internal medicine, cardiology, and geriatrics, Dr. Singman assured her that she could have round-the-clock nurses at home, and he would visit daily. “I had strongly urged that she go home,” he said. She was, however, “perfectly happy, content, to remain in the situation she was in.” When one of the first night nurses kept urging her to move back home, Huguette fired her. In the end, Dr. Singman accepted her decision, writing in her chart in 1996, “I fervently believe that this woman would not have survived if she had been discharged from the hospital.”

  Dr. Singman’s backup, internist Dr. John Wolff, said he agreed. Huguette “was so content and so secure in the environment. There’s no question in my mind that’s really where she chose to be.” He brought her flowers on her birthday and liked to stop in. “She was a lovely woman, and we would talk. Her mind was clear. There was no confusion about her. Very warm, gracious, sweet, gentle, interested in other people, independent, guarded.”