Empty Mansions

by Bill Dedman

  “Every year since you have been in the hospital, now for almost three years,” he wrote to Huguette in September 1994, “your total expenses for each year have exceeded your total income for each year. This is an absolutely ridiculous situation.” He cited her unoccupied three apartments, her Connecticut house, “which has never been occupied,” and the “completely wasted expense” of Bellosguardo, which she had not visited in more than forty years. He urged her to sell all of her properties. She also had expenses for the storage of dresses at Bonwit Teller and an automobile stored out in Westchester County, which she no longer called a driver for. As Wallace put it, “None of these expenses benefit you in any way.”

  She went right on spending, soon drawing up plans for an $87,000 teahouse to be made by the artist in Japan and giving him, over a period of five years, gifts totaling $290,000.

  Huguette had a fairy-tale checkbook, one that was refilled whenever it ran out of magic beans. She had been careful with her checking accounts, well into her seventies, balancing her checkbook and marking a balance after each check. The overdrafts had started around 1985, when she was nearly eighty. She wasn’t out of money; she just didn’t bother to tell her attorney or accountant that she had written checks.

  For the next twenty-five years: Huguette would write the checks. The bank would call the attorney to say the account was overdrawn. And the attorney would transfer in money from another account, $50,000 or $100,000 at a time, guessing blindly at how much she might spend in the next few weeks. Irving Kamsler, the certified public accountant that Wallace had brought on in 1979 to handle Huguette’s finances, said Huguette knew the value of money but thought the checks would be covered without her involvement. And they were. Although this arrangement troubled her bankers, who had never met Huguette, they never charged her an overdraft free.

  Huguette was not poor. She was never poor. But what worried Wallace was that she was starting to eat into her savings.

  Most of her income came from dividends paid by blue chips, stocks in the solid cornerstones of American industry: AT&T, American Airlines, Conoco, Exxon, General Electric, General Motors, Gulf Oil, RCA, Texaco. Her smallest were shares in two of her father’s old companies, Tonopah Banking Corporation and Clark Holding Company, which were no longer paying dividends. She engaged in no tax shelters or other schemes, paying more than 40 percent of her income in federal taxes through most of the Carter and Reagan years. (Ronald Reagan’s Tax Reform Act of 1986, which cut income tax rates on the highest earners, saved Huguette about $1 million a year.) Her income had its ups and downs with the stock market, but it was generally increasing, as shown on her tax returns: $725,734 in 1975, $1,000,010 in 1979, $3,092,147 in 1981, $5,827,446 in 1987.

  Her spending, however, was increasing even faster, even from a hospital bed. During the 1970s, she had given away only about $35,000 a year, much of that to Etienne’s family, but her generosity increased when Ninta Sandré went into the nursing home in 1987 and accelerated again when Huguette herself went into the hospital in 1991. By the mid-1990s, she was giving away nearly a million dollars a year.

  Each spring, her money men chased after her, seeking the information needed to report her gifts to the IRS. As the giver, Huguette owed the gift tax. It was a puzzle. Her attorney and accountant knew every penny spent on her properties and medical care, because they paid those bills. But for her personal account, which she used for most of her gifts, they had only the check numbers and amounts as listed on her bank statements. Well into the 2000s, her money men didn’t know the names of the recipients, because only she received the canceled checks, and she refused to give them up.

  • • •

  For a banker’s daughter, Huguette was not much interested in investing her capital either. Summit Bank of New Jersey held millions for her in an uninvested account. For example, on February 4, 1997, Huguette’s balance in that account was $5,899,133, earning nothing. The bankers, fearing they’d be sued for acting irresponsibly, wrote to her repeatedly, pleading with her to put the money in an interest-bearing account. Her attorneys and accountant urged the same, time after time. She told them she’d think about it, but she did nothing. Perhaps she preferred to keep the money where she could get at it quickly.

  If she had put that $5,899,133 balance into a one-year certificate of deposit, then earning 5 percent, she would have earned $294,957 in interest, nearly enough to pay for a Louis XV rolltop desk.

  BLOND HAIR AND A DIMPLE

  HUGUETTE RECEIVED a plea for help in 1988 with a familiar postmark—Butte, Montana—and bearing the name Clark. Though the letter was too polite to say so, it was raising a philosophical question: Do children owe an obligation to the place where their parents got their start?

  W.A.’s youngest son, Francis Paul Clark, known as Paul, was just sixteen when he died in March 1896. He was a student at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, preparing to attend Yale University. Paul was a shy boy, whose hobby was writing to famous artists to ask for their autographs. He died from a bacterial infection, erysipelas, which causes a painful rash known as Saint Anthony’s fire. W.A. was in Paris and came back to New York for the funeral. Paul was entombed at Woodlawn Cemetery alongside his mother.

  As a memorial, W.A. donated $50,000 for the Paul Clark Home, which opened in Butte in 1900. The Associated Charities of Butte took care of children in the handsome three-story brick home on Excelsior Street, less than a mile from the Clark mansion where Paul had grown up. W.A. also left the home an endowment of $350,000 in his will.

  Anna visited the home with young Andrée and Huguette and gave money for a grand piano for the children to play. She left the home $5,000 in her will, one of her smallest bequests.

  The Paul Clark Home wasn’t strictly an orphanage; it also took in children whose parents were still living but couldn’t care for them anymore. In addition, the home provided free medical care for any child from Butte and day care for children of working mothers. It was not in a bad part of town; directly across the street were three identical homes for managers of Clark’s mines.

  In 1988, the Paul Clark Home reached a crossroads, and the board of directors reached out to W.A.’s surviving daughter, Huguette, who was born ten years after Paul died. During the 1960s, it had been converted into a home for developmentally disabled young adults, whom the state was moving out of institutions. Now this Clark legacy needed a new mission, and it had bills to pay. The trust set up by W.A. in his will was providing only $29,000 of the $60,000 budget each year, and the home’s board hoped to raise $200,000 for a renovation. W.A.’s will had set up the home to exist for as long as his children and grandchildren should live. Well, his grandchildren were nearly all dead, but his daughter lived on. Was it Huguette’s wish, the home’s attorney asked, that it continue?

  Huguette sent back, through her attorney, questions about the home’s finances, but she didn’t send any money.

  In December 1988, the Paul Clark Home was converted into a Ronald McDonald House, providing a temporary home for families who have a child or family member in the hospital. So it continues today.

  The home is still a comfortable spot, with a reading room and a sun parlor. And one can still see, in the upstairs dormitory, the charming bathrooms with little sinks all in a row at a child’s height, twenty for boys and twenty for girls, with numbered cubbies for their toiletries and beautiful rows of lockers made of oak.

  Huguette received similar letters over the next few years from the YWCA of Los Angeles, where the $25,000 left by W.A. for a women’s home was not enough for its upkeep. This home was a memorial to her grandmother, Mary Andrews Clark. Huguette again asked questions but sent nothing.

  • • •

  On May 18, 1993, Huguette was a bidder at a Sotheby’s auction for two antique French dolls. The first, in Lot 219, was a Jumeau triste pressed bisque doll, circa 1875, with a dimple in the chin, fixed brown glass paperweight eyes, pierced ears, blond mohair wig, in cream lacy overdress with Eau-de-
Nil silk below and cream lacy and silk bonnet. The estimate was $12,000 to $15,000. She authorized her attorney to bid up to $45,000, but got it for $14,933.

  The second, in Lot 244, was a Thuillier pressed bisque doll, circa 1885, with fixed blue glass paperweight eyes, pierced ears, blond mohair wig, in pink silk dress with cream lacy overdress and matching straw bonnet. The estimate was higher, $18,000 to $27,000, and she craved this one even more, authorizing a bid up to $90,000. She won it at $14,054.

  On that day, not so different from many other days, Huguette spent $29,000 on two dolls, but she had been a lucky bidder. She had authorized her attorney to bid up to $135,000, twice the annual budget of the Paul Clark Home.

  WANDA

  AFTER HUGUETTE was no longer taking painting lessons from Tadé Styka and he had moved on to his own marriage during World War II, she kept up a lively correspondence with Tadé and his new wife, Doris. When the Stykas had their only child, a daughter born in 1943, Huguette became godmother to the girl, Wanda Magdaleine Styka. Like her mother, Huguette kept the thread of relationships alive from generation to generation.

  Wanda always called Huguette by the French word for godmother, Marraine. “She really is adorable,” Huguette wrote to Doris. “I find her more so each time I see her.”

  Sometimes Huguette offered to babysit when Wanda’s parents went to the movies, and the families exchanged gifts and talked on the phone. But even with these dear friends, her visits were few. “Mrs. Clark,” Doris wrote in July 1948, “it has been so very long since we have seen you. We do hope to be given the pleasure of a visit from you soon. But if you find it difficult to venture out in this steaming weather—may Wanda and I now or soon accept the invitation you so sweetly offered, so long ago, to visit you one afternoon—for just a little while?”

  Huguette sent Wanda a baby carriage, her first bicycle, and a cashmere cardigan in ecru. She paid for air-conditioning so the Stykas wouldn’t have to suffer from the heat. And later she sent checks, $50,000 and $60,000 at a time. Huguette and Anna sent Doris and Wanda a new television in August 1948, just in time to watch Milton Berle take over as the regular host of the Texaco Star Theater on Monday nights. That same month, Huguette did arrange a visit, giving Wanda a new doll and a proper wardrobe for it. “As we think of what you have done and are doing for Wanda,” Doris wrote, “with no thought of glory for your dear self, the overwhelming sense of gratitude we feel is really too deep for words.”

  After Tadé died in 1954, Huguette’s generosity filled the breach, supporting Doris and Wanda and paying for Wanda’s continued education at an elite Catholic high school for girls. The Stykas became an oddly reclusive pair themselves, living in a hideaway 1837 farmhouse in a river valley between the Berkshire Hills and the Taconic Range in southwestern Massachusetts. Wanda had no siblings and never married. It was just mother and daughter alone together in the mountains, just like Anna and Huguette alone together on Fifth Avenue.

  Like Huguette, Wanda lost her father when she was young. She lived with her mother until Doris’s death. She lived alone thereafter. She had very little contact with any of her relatives.

  Wanda, too, showed an artist’s sensibility, combined with a meticulous nature. Working as an art curator and archivist, she wrote regularly to Huguette, describing her work in a striking and imaginative handwriting that Huguette showed off to her doctors at the hospital. It was an artist’s handwriting, carrying earnest messages of her love for Huguette, along with news of the holidays and the passing seasons. Wanda often included photos of herself, at Huguette’s insistence. These photos show a short woman with her hair pulled back and parted in the middle, a bundle of positive energy posing dramatically among the peonies or the yellow roses flanking the stone steps to the Styka home. Wanda was living the quiet life, like her godmother, but in a beautiful place.

  Mother and I send streams and streams of fondest good wishes for a deeply happy Thanksgiving Day.…

  Mother and I love June for its warmth and blossoms but most of all because it is your month.…

  Snow lies all about us, as the chance of having an Indian Summer fades.…

  We greet you most affectionately, and our wishes are with you for all that is happy and beautiful. Mother sends her fondest love, and you always have, dearest Marraine, All my most Devoted love, Wanda.

  Huguette told her staff that she loved Wanda, a word she didn’t use with many people.

  Chris Sattler suggested that Huguette invite Wanda to the hospital, but she said she didn’t want Wanda to see her that way or that she couldn’t entertain properly there.

  In fact, though they talked often on the phone, Wanda said she never knew Huguette was in a hospital. She had figured out, however, that Huguette was no longer at 907 Fifth Avenue. After her mother died in September 2003, Wanda tried to call Huguette at the BUtterfield 8 numbers at the apartments. When she didn’t get an answer, she called Madame Pierre, asking her to tell Huguette of her mother’s death. Huguette returned the call to offer her condolences.

  Then Huguette called again, with urgent advice for Wanda. Huguette insisted that Wanda not live alone. With her mother gone, Huguette told Wanda that she wasn’t safe by herself in her retreat in the woods. She insisted that Wanda send her a map of the property showing the proximity of neighbors.

  Wanda never found out where Huguette was living. Madame Pierre told Wanda that she could reveal Huguette’s location, but at the same time she said she was afraid to tell, because Huguette might not like it. Wanda later said that she had replied, “Well, then don’t.” She said she didn’t need to know. “My godmother was very private, and I always respected that.”

  Wanda traveled to Manhattan from time to time and would tell Huguette all about her trips, but she didn’t press for an invitation to visit. She said she just didn’t want to impose on Huguette.

  Wanda said she must have seen Huguette for the last time at her father’s studio just after he died in 1954. Huguette was forty-eight, and Wanda was eleven. Wanda still kept in touch with her godmother for more than half a century. “If there ever was anybody in the world who ever loved Mrs. Clark just for her love,” Chris Sattler said, “it was that lady.”

  IT JUST SNOWBALLED

  HUGUETTE’S GIFTS to her nurse Hadassah began almost immediately after she moved into Doctors Hospital.

  The first large one came in September 1993, after there was a flood in the basement of the Peris’ building. Hadassah mentioned to Huguette that all three of her children had asthma. The next day, Hadassah recalled, Huguette suggested they move. The Peris found a house nearby, on Shore Boulevard, and bought it, with Huguette giving Hadassah $450,000. They kept the previous apartment, too.

  That year, her accountant, Irving Kamsler, expressed concern to her attorney Don Wallace that Huguette was “vulnerable to the influence of people around her evidenced by her extraordinary gifts to her nurses and their families.” Any sob story would have her reaching for her checkbook.

  Huguette started giving the Peris gifts at Christmas, $40,000 for Hadassah and $40,000 for her husband. Hadassah said she would say, “Madame, you have given us so much.” Huguette was generous to other employees as well, but the gifts to Hadassah accelerated. She paid for twenty years of schooling for the three Peri children, from preschool through high school at the Yeshivah of Flatbush, then through college and graduate school. She paid for their medical bills, piano lessons, violin lessons, and Hebrew lessons, their basketball and summer camps in upstate New York. When the Peris had some trouble with back taxes, she paid for that.

  Huguette wrote more than three hundred checks to Hadassah over the twenty years she was in the hospital. Some of these checks, Hadassah said, were not for her but for other staff members. Huguette would make the gifts through Hadassah to protect her privacy. For instance, Huguette gave $25,000 to Ruth Gray, the hospital kitchen worker who brought her meals. Sometimes she’d give Hadassah two checks a day—$45,000 in the morning, $10,000 in the afternoon. />
  “Sometimes I would say, you gave me a check already today. She would say, ‘You have a lot of expense, you can use it.’ I accepted the check because we have a lot of bills. Madame is very generous, and we don’t force her to give us—we don’t ask for it. That’s how she is, very generous, not only me, thousands of people, a lot of people.”

  HUGUETTE’S CHARITY

  Following are Huguette’s gifts for the year 1991, as listed on her federal gift tax return.

  EXPENSE TOTAL

  Ninta Sandré, nursing home care $223,510

  Dr. Jules Pierre and Madame Suzanne Pierre $114,000

  Mr. and Mrs. Sautereau (friends in France) $60,000

  Elisabeth de Villermont (Etiennes widow) $29,000

  Marie-Christine (Etiennes daughter) $10,000

  Hadassah Peri (day nurse) $32,000

  Geraldine Lehane Coffey (night nurse) $18,000

  Doris and Wanda Styka (friend, goddaughter) $22,000

  Anna E. LaChapelle (cousin) $10,000

  Mrs. Walter Armstrong (chauffeurs widow) $16,000

  Other former employees and their children $68,000

  Total $602,510

  • • •

  Huguette also kept buying homes for the Peris.

  In August 1999: $149,589 for a second apartment in their old building in Brooklyn, the one with the flood. The Peris’ older son, Abraham (or Avi), moved in there.

  In 2000: $775,000 for a house in Brooklyn, so Hadassah’s brother and his family would have a place to stay when they visited. It’s worth about $1.7 million today. But the brother moved to California, and the house has remained vacant ever since she bought it.

  Yes, Huguette’s nurse has her own empty mansion.

  The generosity continued.