Empty Mansions

by Bill Dedman

  To keep Huguette’s documents in order, Chris found a use for Huguette’s third apartment, 8E, which she bought in 1963, protecting her borders so she had no neighbors on the eighth floor. (She was preparing to move down to her mother’s old apartment.) But what to do with another five thousand square feet, the size of a basketball court? Chris sorted her financial records, using the unused servants’ bedrooms for different years.

  In 12W, the living room, with its dark Jacobean wood walls and wood beam ceiling, was filled with rows of simple wooden bookcases with floor-to-ceiling shelves full of items from Japan. Each shelf was carefully labeled and numbered: musical instruments, kimonos, wigs, hair ornaments, traditional footwear, fans, silk costumes, butterflies, art books. A large painting of a geisha with a dragonfly hairpin was hidden behind a three-part Japanese screen with dragons and swans. A Japanese castle with a moat sat on a table by the Steinway grand piano.

  One bedroom, an artist’s studio, was crammed with easels, canvases, and frames. Paintings included those of a Japanese doll, a self-portrait of the blond artist in a string of pearls, a harlequin, a doll in wooden shoes, and several female nudes.

  In a sitting room, there was a filing cabinet full of childhood mementos next to another one with bank statements from the 1970s. Boxes on shelves were marked “personal correspondence.”

  Shelves in cedar closets were filled with hatboxes, satin bed jackets, and dozens of boxes of shoes, many variations on the same styles: pumps from the Bonwit Teller department store of the 1930s and 1940s, casual slippers with a felt lining from Daniel Green. The white, glass-front kitchen cabinets displayed silver and fine china from the 1920s, and there was an old black Garland six-burner stove. The coat closet was stuffed with pink women’s housecoats and white cashmere cardigan sweaters, still in the package, as though the owner were away for a weekend.

  • • •

  Being Huguette’s personal assistant really meant that Chris, with an undergraduate degree in history and literature from Fairfield University in Connecticut, found himself enrolled in the Huguette Marcelle Clark Graduate School of Japanese History.

  Huguette called each morning from the hospital room, telling Chris which items she needed him to bring over for the day’s project. He kept a diary to record every day’s assignment. He answered her calls on one of the vintage black phones with a rotary dial and labeled with old-style phone numbers: BUtterfield 8 1093 and BUtterfield 8 3453.

  One morning in 2003, when Huguette was ninety-seven, she rattled off to Chris six books on Japanese theater history, calling each one by title. She was deep into a two-month project on Kabuki, creating a mock-up of a theater to be sent to the elderly artist in Japan, who would make a tabletop theater to her specifications. Everything had to be perfectly to scale and historically accurate. Her instructions for Chris:

  Find all the ladies-in-waiting of medium size.

  Find all the emperors in casual attire.

  Find all the court ladies who are playing cards.

  Huguette sent Chris searching through hundreds of boxes of dolls and figurines, looking for a particular Japanese historical character. Just as Americans would know a figure of Abraham Lincoln immediately from his top hat and beard, Huguette would know the figures from the Tokugawa shogunate, specifically those from the 1770s.

  Chris also had to find figures for the audience members, then the right scenery to go with them. “I wasn’t an expert on Kabuki theater,” Chris said. “I tried my best.”

  When he thought he had it all just right, he would measure the scenery, pose the figures in scenes from twelve or fourteen different plays or stories she selected, photograph it all from every angle, often including a ruler to show the measurements, and take the hundreds of snapshots to Huguette at the hospital.

  “Chris,” she would say, “that has nothing to do with it.” That was her gentle rebuke, a polite way of saying he had it all wrong. He’d mixed up a shogun with a daimyo. He’d placed a major character at the back of the stage.

  Finally, when she approved a set of photos, he would bring the full setup to the hospital room, all the delicate scenery and rare figures, just one time, for her to hold them and arrange them for a few hours or a couple of days. “Then,” Chris recalled, “she would be in heaven there for a while.” To her doctors, Huguette appeared to be merely playing with dolls. “But that wasn’t it,” Chris said.

  He would finally ship a full set of designs and photos to Mrs. Marsh in California, and she would send them along to the artist in Japan. In a couple of years, the finished model would come back, at a price of $50,000 to $80,000. Huguette would give it a look, then it would go into storage at 907 Fifth Avenue. By then, she would have started half a dozen other projects. She went through a French Revolution phase and a religious house phase. She had Chris give photos of Bellosguardo, her Santa Barbara house, to a French designer so that he could make a miniature Bellosguardo as a French château dollhouse.

  “I never saw her unhappy,” Chris said. “She never appeared bored.”

  Not all the art projects were highbrow. Huguette gave Chris strict instructions about how to arrange her expensive antique Barbie dolls at the apartment for photo sessions. “She liked to have them set up in a certain way, certain poses.” Chris had to “dress and undress them in certain ways, have the furniture set up a certain way.” He would photograph the dolls in these scenes. It was too confusing, Chris said, to have too many dolls at the hospital, so she usually wanted him to bring only the photos.

  Chris stopped himself in the telling, protective of Huguette, realizing that he may be creating a certain impression. Clarifying, he said people might assume “because she liked these Barbie dolls, that there was something wrong with her. If you could have spoken with her, you wouldn’t think that. The most important thing here is that people respect Madame Clark.”

  • • •

  Chris also would bring Huguette her French magazines and newspapers: Paris Match for the European news and celebrities, Point de Vue for news of the royal courts of Europe. She had a soft spot for royalty, swooning over old photos of Grace Kelly, following closely the Japanese tizzy in the 2000s over the lack of a male heir to the Chrysanthemum Throne, and expressing sorrow for France’s last queen, Marie Antoinette.

  Every day, Chris brought her French baked goods, usually brioche, the classic sweet bread made from flour, yeast, egg, butter, and milk. It seems like a simple recipe, but it’s tricky. The key is to chill the rich, buttery dough so it becomes elastic. “Believe me,” Chris said, “there is only a very small amount of stores in New York that sell fresh brioche and madeleines.”

  Chris also brought the mail from the apartments: bank statements and such, but what Huguette asked for was the auction catalogs for antique dolls and the new toy catalogs from Au Nain Bleu in Paris.

  Auction days for Huguette were “like a day at the racetrack,” Chris said. After every auction, her attorneys would write her a letter informing her that she had won. Like her father, Huguette was always the highest bidder. One attorney learned this lesson when he failed to win for her an antique Japanese painted screen; he ended up having to buy it with her money from the winning bidder at a higher price.

  And yet, when the dolls arrived and she would get a good look at them, she would often give them away to a doctor’s grandchild. Some of the dolls, she never unpacked. “She loved the auctions, the thrill of the auction,” Chris said. But she already had plenty of dolls.

  Chris said he counted at one point 1,157 dolls in her apartments, including more than 600 antique Japanese dolls, more than 400 French and German dolls, and dozens of the highly prized mechanical automatons: a nurse, a dwarf, clowns, giraffes, parrots, marionettes. One automaton owned by Huguette, made by the Jumeau Company in 1880, was a nineteen-inch girl who had blond hair and was wearing an ivory French frock. When a lever was pulled, the girl fanned herself and raised a book of fables to read.

  She had modern dolls, too: Barbie
teenage fashion dolls from the 1950s on and Family Corners multiracial dolls from the 1990s. And she had the accessories, carefully organized by Chris on numbered shelves: Shelf 771 in her apartment was packed with minuscule lawn chairs and umbrellas. Shelf 772 had bedroom wardrobes and kitchen stoves.

  Chris was fiercely protective of Huguette’s privacy, screening her mail according to her instructions. Letters from friends went straight through. Others he would ask her about or send to the lawyers. He screened visitors, too. When one of her old friends started asking questions about the value of her estate, “Mrs. Clark didn’t like it,” Chris said, and that friendship cooled. Even Chris could overstep the bounds of Huguette’s privacy. Once he used his cellphone to take a photograph of Hadassah at the hospital. When he asked to take a photo of Huguette, he said, “Madame flatly refused.”

  As for why she chose to abandon luxuries to stay in the hospital, Chris said that he, even after sixteen years of taking care of her precious possessions, “was never able to figure it out.”

  Huguette trusted Chris with the keys to her dear possessions: her castles and dolls and books, not to mention millions of dollars’ worth of rare paintings and violins. He described himself as “pathologically honest.” She paid him $90 an hour, a figure he suggested and she approved. In 2006, for example, he was paid $187,920, plus $18,000 for health insurance, $9,000 for his two daughters’ tuition to Catholic schools, and a $60,000 Christmas gift. Chris brought his wife and children to visit her once in the hospital, and she seemed to enjoy the conversation.

  “She was,” Chris said, “a sweetheart.”

  NINTA

  THE RECIPIENT of Huguette’s greatest charity was a memory from her childhood.

  Her governess, Madame Sandré, had a daughter, Ninta, who was just six months older than Huguette. Like Huguette, Ninta had an artistic spirit, studying dance in the 1920s with the celebrated Japanese dancer and choreographer Michio Ito and performing to Chopin at Carnegie Hall. Her Broadway debut at age twenty-five was reviewed by The New York Times less than eagerly: “Nearly all the numbers were extremely brief, occupying less time in some instances than the costume changes that preceded them. Miss Sandre has an agreeable manner and a youthful freshness, but she is scarcely ready as yet to subject her work to comparison with the standards of the metropolitan dance field.”

  Ninta worked for the Clarks off and on as a cook, and taught dance and French at a private school in Flushing, Queens, but later she was off on her own in New York City. By the time she was about eighty years old, Ninta had fallen on hard times. Living in Astoria, Queens, she had dementia and was often found digging through trash bins on the street.

  One evening in January 1987, before Huguette moved to Doctors Hospital, eighty-two-year-old Ninta was picked up by New York police and taken to Bellevue Hospital. She had Huguette’s home phone number in her possession, and Huguette was called. In turn, Huguette called her doctor, Myron Wright, arranging for him to take care of Ninta. At first Huguette paid for round-the-clock nursing care for Ninta at home, then for an apartment, then for Ninta to move into Amsterdam Nursing Home. She paid Ninta’s medical bills and sent flowers to Ninta’s nurses. Huguette had supported other friends and former employees, but this was a great deal more. For thirteen years, Huguette paid more than $200,000 a year for Ninta’s care. She also bought Ninta’s co-op apartment, although Ninta never recovered enough to return to it.

  Huguette’s go-between for these arrangements was Dr. Wright’s office manager, Lyn Strasheim. Huguette called often, courteous but insistent, wanting to know how Ninta was eating, what clothing she needed. She sent Ninta a television and French magazines, even though Ninta could no longer read or talk. Strasheim said Huguette never seemed to comprehend the severity of Ninta’s dementia. “Mrs. Clark wanted everything and anything done for her. Ninta had no quality of life, no pleasure in eating, no enjoyment of TV. She couldn’t get her hair cut because she behaved badly at the salon. When you explained that to Mrs. Clark, her solution to everything was to fix it, hire more staff, spend more. She thought that everything came with a price, that if you just paid more, everything could be solved.”

  $329,000 A MONTH

  Huguette Clark entered Doctors Hospital on March 26, 1991. The following expenditures, as documented in periodic reports sent to Huguette by attorney Don Wallace, cover a period of just over three and a half years, or forty-three months, from May 1991 through December 1994. Each dollar in 1992 had the buying power of about $1.70 today, so her monthly costs would be about $560,000 in 2013 dollars.

  EXPENSE TOTAL PER MONTH

  Medical expenses and payroll taxes $2,226,745 $51,785

  Le Beau Château, Connecticut $146,377 $3,404

  Bellosguardo, California $1,725,945 $40,138

  Servants’ wages at Fifth Avenue $12,080 $281

  Household bills at Fifth Avenue $62,167 $1,446

  Apartment renovation at Fifth Avenue $4,306,121 $100,142

  Apartments for employees $605,211 $14,075

  Doll purchases and castles $954,277 $22,192

  Insurance and storage $149,746 $3,482

  Federal and state income taxes $1,959,851 $45,578

  Federal gift taxes $738,599 $17,177

  New York State gift tax refund -$274,910 -$6,393

  Connecticut real estate taxes $156,791 $3,646

  Miscellaneous $487,354 $11,334

  Gift: Ninta Sandres medical care $769,580 $17,897

  Gift: Ninta Sandre’s apartment $17,504 $407

  Gifts: Hadassah Peri $455,100 $10,584

  Gifts: Beth Israel Medical Center $285,000 $6,628

  Gift: Trust for Museum Exhibitions $110,892 $2,579

  Gift: Corcoran Gallery of Art $50,000 $1,163

  Gift: Music association, Santa Barbara $10,000 $233

  Transfer to her personal checking account (mostly for more gifts) $1,200,000 $27,907

  Total $14,167,346 $329,473

  Strasheim said Huguette was similarly unrealistic about her own situation. “Dr. Wright said her reaction to her mother’s passing was quite irrational, and he thinks that led to her being so much of a recluse. She never really dealt with it. Dr. Wright tried many times to tell her she needed to get out, she needed sunlight, vitamin D. She had a way of switching that off. She didn’t want to see the ugliness of things around her. She could divert the conversation in a million ways: ‘I’m very busy right now, it’s a busy time of year, but I will get back to you on that.’ She was a shy ten-year-old throughout her life.”

  Ninta Sandré died in March 2000. Huguette did not attend the funeral Mass. She sent Lyn Strasheim $50,000.

  Strasheim said she once visited Huguette unannounced at Doctors Hospital, but Hadassah shooed her away. Huguette “looked like a bag woman. In a teeny, tiny little room, all the shades drawn.”

  “YOU’D BETTER SIT DOWN, MOTHER”

  YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO BE a longtime friend or employee of Huguette’s to benefit from her generosity. In fact, you didn’t have to know her at all.

  A lawyer showed up at Gwendolyn Jenkins’s apartment, way out in Queens, bearing a mystery. It was 1982. The lawyer said he had a letter for her, but he wouldn’t let her open it unless she promised to keep a secret. “This lawyer told me not to tell no one. He made me swear.”

  Yes, she said, she went to church every Sunday and Bible study on Wednesdays. She wouldn’t tell. The lawyer handed over the letter that changed her life.

  Gwendolyn was a nurse’s aide, a fifty-seven-year-old immigrant from Jamaica, living in a working-class area off Jamaica Avenue. Early every morning, she had taken the Q2 bus and the F train into Lower Manhattan, to Greenwich Village, more than an hour and a half each way. Even in the snow, she had walked the last blocks to an apartment at 1 Fifth Avenue, an Art Deco building overlooking Washington Square Park. Her patient was Irving Gordon, a Madison Avenue stockbroker, who had recently died of cancer.

  And now this lawyer was at her door, with his black-rimme
d owl eyeglasses and every hair in place, saying his name was Don Wallace, trying to explain that he didn’t know Gwendolyn, that he didn’t know Irving either, but he had a client whose investments Irving had handled. Word of this nurse’s aide and her dedication had gotten around.

  “I was telling my daughter that night,” Gwendolyn recalled in her Jamaican accent, “I couldn’t believe how this woman, an older woman she was, had written such a nice card, a proper note. She thanked me for taking care of poor Mr. Irving. And she included a ‘little gift,’ she said, a check for three hundred dollars! I couldn’t believe it. I was going to tell them all about it at Bible study. I’ve been blessed!

  “And my daughter, she said, ‘You’d better sit down, Mother, and let me read this letter over to you. This check is for thirty thousand dollars!’ ”

  The check was written out with a blue felt-tip pen in a distinctive handwriting, an artist’s script, with every lowercase letter formed slowly, precisely, the same height. Gwendolyn didn’t recognize the name. “Never met her. Never heard of her.”

  Gwendolyn used the check to move south, putting a down payment on a house outside Atlanta, her retirement home. No more Q2 bus to the F train in the snow.

  Thirty years later, when asked by a reporter who had a copy of the canceled check for $30,000, Gwendolyn reluctantly confirmed the story. Still, she was mindful of her vow, protective of her benefactor’s privacy.

  Gwendolyn Jenkins still has the thank-you card in her bedroom, tucked away in her hosiery drawer, and she’s not going to tell anyone who sent it.

  AN ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS SITUATION

  THOUGH HE NEVER SAW his client’s face, attorney Don Wallace would scold her from time to time via letters and phone calls.