Empty Mansions

by Bill Dedman

  Huguette was hardly ever sick. She refused to take a flu shot—she didn’t believe in medicine, she told her nurses, and felt that “nature should take its course.” Her only persistent medical issues were mild: osteopenia, a decrease of calcium in the bones not advanced enough to be called osteoporosis; a slightly elevated systolic blood pressure (150/80); and two nutrition issues, a mild electrolyte disorder and a mild salt depletion. Her illnesses passed quickly, usually with her refusing antibiotics. She had a bout of pneumonia, the seasonal flu, and a surgery to check out a suspicious lump that was benign.

  In other words, from age eighty-five to well past one hundred, a stage when most people need elaborate pillboxes marked with the days of the week, Huguette was remarkably healthy, requiring no daily medications other than vitamins. Yet she was living in a hospital.

  • • •

  Dr. Singman said Huguette at first was “extremely frightened” of new people. She refused most medical treatments unless her day nurse, Hadassah, was there to hold her hand and talk calmingly. Hadassah and Huguette had a bond from the beginning, with Hadassah able to read Huguette’s feelings and help her overcome her distress. When they couldn’t reach Hadassah, the other nurses would sometimes pretend that they were talking with her on the phone, telling Huguette that Hadassah said that she had to eat now or she should allow them to check her blood pressure.

  “You have to convince her,” explained Hadassah later. A small, compact woman with warm, dark eyes and black hair flecked with gray, Hadassah described patience as the key to her chemistry with Huguette. “You have to explain it to her, you have to educate her who is coming, what is that for—at times we have some difficulty.”

  Hadassah Peri was born Gicela Tejada Oloroso in May 1950 to a politically prominent and eccentric family in the Philippine fishing town of Sapian. Gicela received a nursing degree before immigrating to the United States in 1972. She worked first at a hospital in Arkansas, then moved to New York in 1980. She passed her New York exams as a licensed practical nurse, then a registered nurse, and started working as a private-duty nurse. Born a Roman Catholic, she had married an Israeli immigrant and New York taxi driver, Daniel Peri, in 1982, converting to his Orthodox Judaism and using the name Hadassah Peri, although she didn’t change her name legally until 2011. Even today, she is a bit embarrassed about her English, though it’s quite good, despite some confusion over pronouns: “Madame love his favorite shoes.”

  When she was assigned to Huguette, the Peris owned a small apartment in Brooklyn. They had three children born in the 1980s, two boys and a girl.

  Private-duty nurses are temp workers, always hoping for a long-term assignment. Taking a day off means having a replacement nurse, one who might step into the regular role. So despite the Orthodox prohibition against working on Saturday, and despite having three school-age children, for many years Hadassah worked for Huguette from eight A.M. to eight P.M., twelve hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. She was up and out of the house before her children left for school and home close to bedtime. It would be several years before she took a day off. Hadassah was paid $30 an hour, $2,520 a week, $131,040 a year, but she described her self-sacrifice for Huguette as extreme. “I give my life to Madame,” Hadassah said.

  • • •

  The private hospital room was perfectly ordinary, a small room for one patient with a hospital bed, recliner, chest of drawers, bedside table, small refrigerator, TV, radio, closet, small bathroom. “She like a simple room,” Hadassah said.

  Once an outdoorsy youth, Huguette now didn’t want any daylight. The cancer had left her eyelid unable to close properly. She kept her shades drawn, though she often asked her nurses about the weather, and she did look out on the Fourth of July to watch the fireworks. The room wasn’t entirely dark, with an overhead light usually on, and Huguette had a reading lamp as well. Drawings by the nurses’ children and doctors’ grandchildren sometimes were hung on the walls. The door was closed, and Huguette would see only the visitors she knew. Dr. Singman called it a cocoon, a safe place, but not unpleasant.

  The doctor said he asked Huguette once to see a psychiatrist, not because he thought she was mentally ill but because he thought talking with another doctor might help persuade her to return home. She declined to discuss it, and neither the doctor nor the hospital ever mentioned it again.

  “The woman was an eccentric of the first order,” Dr. Singman said, but “she had perfect knowledge of her surroundings, she had excellent memory … a mind like a steel trap.… At that point she was perfectly happy, content, to remain in the situation she was in.… The hospital setting … was a form of security blanket for her.… I didn’t think there was going to be any great help from a psychiatrist to change her attitude about what she was doing.… The woman was perfectly conversant at all times, never demonstrated any … disturbances of her mind.… I didn’t think her behavior was that of one suffering from a psychiatric illness.” At most, said her doctor, she showed “eccentricity and neurotic behavior”—not exactly distinguishing characteristics in New York City.

  Huguette dressed in hospital gowns, hardly ever wearing her clothes from home. When she was cold—and she was often cold—she would wear layered sweaters, always white button-front cashmere cardigans from Scotland, her only hint of luxury.

  • • •

  The daily routine began with Huguette drinking two cups of warm milk that the night nurse, Geraldine Lehane Coffey, had left for her. Hadassah would arrive with The New York Times. (Huguette always read the obituaries, as older people do, followed the progress of wars and weather emergencies, and delighted in finding stories about Japan and royalty.) Hadassah would greet Huguette and give her kisses. Huguette could walk to the bathroom by herself and give herself a sponge bath. Then Huguette would blow into the incentive spirometer, the little plastic tube where each deep breath makes the plastic ball rise, which helped ward off pneumonia. Huguette could make the ball go up five times, sometimes eight times. She would do coughing and deep-breathing exercises. Then it was time for breakfast: oatmeal and eggs, pureed, and her French coffee with hot milk, or café au lait.

  Most of Huguette’s diet was liquid, taken through a straw because of the wound to her lip. Dinner was usually a soup that Hadassah had made at home, such as potato leek, made with eggs to provide protein. At night she would ask the nurse for a warm glass of milk before bed. Between meals, she drank Ensure nutritional drinks. For a special treat, Madame Pierre brought her steamed artichokes or asparagus with a rich hollandaise sauce, made in the classic French fashion with egg yolks and fresh butter, because Huguette said she couldn’t stand hospital food.

  After breakfast, it was time for Huguette’s morning walk, three or four times around the room. She and Hadassah called this their “walk in Central Park.” Then it was personal time for Huguette. She made phone calls on her Princess telephone with the lighted dial, calling Madame Pierre sometimes three to five times a day. “Mrs. Clark liked to speak French with my grandmother,” said Suzanne’s granddaughter Kati Despretz Cruz, “because she didn’t want her nurses to understand what they were talking about.”

  Huguette called her coordinator of art projects, Caterina Marsh, in California to make changes in a Japanese castle. She read The New York Times and followed the financial markets on CNN. “She would watch the stock,” said one of the night nurses, Primrose Mohiuddin, “and she would say to me, ‘Oh, NASDAQ has gone down. That’s terrible!’ ” She paid particular attention to news of presidents and royalty. “When President Clinton was in trouble,” her assistant Chris Sattler said, “she was asking Mrs. Pierre and me about the Monica Lewinsky thing. She didn’t get it, and she wanted us to explain it to her. And we sort of let it go, if you know what I mean.”

  She kept a few personal items in shopping bags on the floor by the window. Her address book and recent correspondence. A deck of cards.

  Dr. Singman taught her solitaire and bought her a book of rules of
card games, which she used to learn many variations. Because Huguette kept information about herself tightly controlled, on a need-to-know basis, Dr. Singman knew little of her art projects and her correspondence with friends in France. To his view, solitaire was her main activity. “She was a wiz,” he said. “She could shuffle a deck like I haven’t seen anybody except in a gambling house.”

  She no longer painted but would watch her videotapes of cartoons, studying the animation and enjoying the stories. She liked to make flip books of still images captured from videotapes, so she could see the animated stories in her hands. Her favorite cartoons were The Flintstones, The Jetsons, The Smurfs, and a Japanese series called Maya the Bee. These cartoons came in particularly handy when Huguette tired of a conversation with a doctor or hospital official. She’d start up The Smurfs as if to say, No, I’ve made up my mind.

  And she would look at her photo albums, which contained snapshots from her early days with her father, mother, and sister. She’d show her nurses and doctors the photos: Andrée on a bicycle. Huguette on a horse at château de Petit-Bourg outside Paris. (She told them how the Germans had burned the house down.) The girls visiting their father’s copper mine in Butte. One of herself at her First Communion, and also surrounded by dolls on the porch of her father’s first mansion, in Butte, where she remembered the pansies on the stoop. Anna smiling as she sat on a park bench during a summer sojourn in Greenwich, Connecticut. Huguette’s Aunt Amelia, her mother’s sister, standing on the grand marble staircase at the old Clark mansion on Fifth Avenue. The rooms and gardens at Bellosguardo. Anna and W.A. on the beach at Trouville, laughing. Little Huguette in her Indian costume and headdress, hugging her father.

  She would talk, Hadassah said, mostly about “her dear father, her dear mother, her dear sister, Aunt Amelia.” Huguette liked to tell the nurses about the summers at the beach in Trouville, how her father built the beautiful Columbia Gardens so the people of Butte could have something to enjoy, how Duke Kahanamoku carried her on his shoulders on a surfboard. And she would share somberly how her sister had died on the trip to Maine. “She talked dearly about that,” Hadassah said. “Talked all the time about her sister and parents. Yes, that affected her very much.”

  Huguette’s eyesight had declined, but she was able to read with eyeglasses and then a magnifying glass until past age one hundred. Her hearing was poor in the right ear, but she could hear well out of her left if one talked right at it, and she refused a hearing aid. She didn’t deny that her hearing was poor, but she didn’t want anything put into her ears, nothing like her mother’s primitive squawk box. Hadassah bought a telephone with big numbers and adjustable volume, but Huguette refused to use it, saying she could hear fine with the regular phone.

  Doctors and nurses described Huguette as a woman who knew her own mind. “She was remarkably clear,” said Karen Gottlieb, a floor nurse who brought her warm milk at bedtime. “Clear in her wants, and things she didn’t want. Yes meant yes, and no meant no.” Gottlieb said that she never saw any family try to visit, that Huguette’s real family seemed to be Hadassah.

  The regular hospital staff rarely saw Huguette. One exception was in 2000, when Hadassah herself was in the hospital for back surgery. Huguette arranged for Hadassah to be in a room just down the hall, two or three doors away. Huguette then went to visit Hadassah, dressing up in street clothes and walking down the hall. She wore her favorite Daniel Green shoes.

  “That’s one day everybody in the floor almost dropped dead,” Hadassah said. “They saw Madame coming out of the door with heel shoes.”

  • • •

  Hadassah described Huguette as “a beautiful lady. Very loving. Very respectful. Love people. Very refined lady. Very cultured. Good heart—good soul and good heart. Never hurt anybody. Very, very generous, Madame.”

  Dr. Singman said he saw that Hadassah and Huguette were very close. “Hadassah was very good to her and was a good nurse for her and worked hard with her.”

  Huguette’s first question in the morning would be “When is Hadassah coming?” She would call nearly every night to make sure Hadassah got home safely and to be reassured that Hadassah would be coming in the next day. Sometimes she’d call just as Hadassah got home, and the answering machine would pick up first. Here is a recording from about 2007, when Huguette was 101. We hear Huguette’s sweet, high-pitched French, and Hadassah’s Filipino accent, shouting to make sure she is heard.

  HADASSAH: Madame, I love you.

  HUGUETTE: I love you, too. Good night to you.

  HADASSAH: Have a good night.

  HUGUETTE: Have a good night.

  HADASSAH: Thank you, Madame.

  HUGUETTE: Will I see you tomorrow?

  HADASSAH: Yes, Madame.

  HUGUETTE: Thank you.

  HADASSAH: I love you.

  HUGUETTE: I love you, too.

  HADASSAH: Good night.

  HUGUETTE: Good night, Hadassah.

  A REASONABLE PRICE

  HUGUETTE KEPT HER LOCATION SECRET for nearly twenty years, never telling any relative or anyone outside her inner circle that she was in the hospital. All of her outgoing correspondence showed 907 Fifth Avenue as her return address.

  Though she was no longer living in Apartment 8W, Huguette set to work remodeling it—not to modernize it, but to furnish it so it looked more like her old apartment, 12W. Her main focus was on making her bedroom identical to her mother’s old bedroon from the 1920s, which remained undisturbed in the apartment upstairs.

  For fifty dollars in tips, she could easily have gotten the doormen to carry the bedroom furniture from the twelfth floor to the eighth. But then, well, the furniture would no longer be in 12W.

  Instead, Huguette approached a French furniture company, the renowned Pernault Workshops, with a request that it find original French pieces of the Louis XV period. Yes, the company explained, it might be able to find matching furniture, but the cost would be “staggering.” A rolltop desk in the Louis XV style could cost 10 million francs, or about $1.8 million. An alternative plan was offered by Pernault, one that could be accomplished for “a reasonable price.” It could make reproductions. Huguette agreed.

  The invoices from 1991–92 show the enormous expenditures for “the making and delivering of the copies of your own furniture.” For a Louis XV dressing table with three oval mirrors, a three-drawer commode table, two bedside tables, and a rolltop desk, all in solid oak, lavishly engraved and gilded, with floral inlaid wood and bronze trim, Mrs. Huguette M. Clark paid 2,497,000 francs, or $445,893. And those are 1991 dollars, equal to nearly $800,000 today.

  This was merely the beginning. For her bedroom, she ordered green silk draperies and a sumptuous green silk damask bedspread with matching cover for a bolster pillow, in a pattern showing Japanese musicians, just like her mother’s. These items cost 897,000 francs, or $160,178. The Louis XV mantelpiece in the bedroom of Apartment 12W was removed, copied, and reattached, with the copy installed in Apartment 8W.

  All told, over three years, she spent $4.3 million on the renovation, equal to more than $7 million today. Without updating the bathrooms or kitchens.

  For nearly two decades, you could walk into the bedrooms of 12W and 8W, both overlooking the corner of Fifth Avenue and Seventy-Second Street, and see the same oak furniture, the same elaborate mantel, the same luxurious green silk damask bedspread. Aside from a slight difference in the placement of the doors and the radio cabinet in the closet, you couldn’t begin to guess what floor you were on.

  During that time, Huguette never spent a night there, never walked into either bedroom, seeing the results of the renovation only in photographs brought to her hospital room.

  CHRIS

  HUGUETTE, who could have anything money could buy, had found one of the keys to true contentment: a personal assistant to help with her art projects and hobbies. Chris Sattler was Huguette’s greatest luxury. With an oval door-knocker beard and the sturdy build of a linebacker, the father of two youn
g daughters spent his late forties and his fifties arranging Huguette’s dolls.

  The son of a family that did high-end painting and construction, Chris first visited her apartment at 907 Fifth Avenue as a volunteer in the 1970s, helping bag three hundred Christmas gifts. He said Huguette ordered the gifts each year from Au Nain Bleu and then had them delivered, anonymously, to an orphanage in Greenwich Village. In the mid-1990s, after Huguette had moved into the hospital, Madame Pierre arranged for Chris to create an inventory of everything in Huguette’s apartments. In 2000, Huguette called to offer him a full-time job as her personal assistant.

  Every workday for a dozen years, Chris began his morning by walking through each room of Huguette’s three apartments at 907 Fifth Avenue. With forty-two rooms, not counting the bathrooms, that was quite a chore. The daily walk was necessary, especially in the twelfth-floor dining room, where a portrait of a rose-cheeked girl dressed in a striped shirt with a bow tie and holding a parasol was signed “Renoir.” Across from it hung one of Monet’s Water Lilies, which hadn’t been seen in public since Huguette bought it in 1930. Beside the fireplace was another Monet, of poplar trees by the Epte River. This wasn’t the best place to keep the paintings, because old pipes up on the roof frequently leaked.

  The median size of a new home in the United States in 2010 was 2,169 square feet. Huguette had 15,000 square feet that she used as a warehouse, a lending library for her projects.

  Only a few rooms were still set up as Huguette had left them, with furniture arranged for regular occupancy: the dining rooms in both apartments, her mother’s bedroom in 12W, and Huguette’s identical bedroom in 8W.