The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark by Meryl Gordon
Authors: Meryl Gordon
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recalled, when she met her patient, “I put two and two together, that the person I was consulting on was, in fact, the little old lady who lives in the hospital.” Her impression of the patient? “She seemed, you know, cute as pie, little old lady, perfectly content…”
Life in a hospital room could have been dreary and claustrophobic. But Huguette had created a self-contained and busy life within these four walls. Ever since her parents had given her Jumeau and Bru dolls from France as a child, she had been a passionate doll and toy collector. She owned more than six hundred antique French porcelain dolls, and her interests had expanded to include wind-up antique automatons, Japanese Hina dolls, toy soldiers, Smurfs, and even Barbie dolls, plus all available accessories. Her collection encompassed nearly 1,200 dolls. She relished the thrill of the chase, the acquisitive urge. When catalogues arrived from Theriault’s, the premier American doll auction house, she would page through them with anticipation, and then instruct her lawyer, Wallace Bock, to bid, spending up to $120,000 for a single doll. Auction days were exciting, and her staff got caught up in the drama, too. “She would wait by the phone for the outcome,” says Chris Sattler. “She really enjoyed the outcome.”
Bock found the bidding to be an unusual experience, since his client refused to specify a price limit. “Whatever it was, that was what we were going to pay for it,” says Bock. He recalls Huguette’s reaction when he put in an offer to Sotheby’s for three times the asking price for a Japanese screen and was nonetheless outbid. “She was very upset. I had to go buy it from the person who bought it at the auction.” Yet once her craving for possession had been satisfied, she usually did not feel the need to see what she had bought. “The screen was sentright to her apartment,” Bock says. “All she saw was the picture in the catalogue. But she knew what she wanted.”
Huguette had become the patron of an unusual art form: commissioning miniature historical French châteaus and Japanese castles. These complex projects could take years to finish, since Huguette had an idealized idea of perfection. “We were taking a real castle in Japan, which is a fortified building, and making it to scale down to one-sixteenth of an inch and everything had to be accurate,” says Caterina Marsh, who runs the California import firm that Huguette used to hire artisans in Japan for this specialized work. Huguette scrutinized photos of works-in-progress and requested changes. “There were some interior panels in a Japanese home which are called fusuma,” Marsh explained. “So we hired an artist to paint the fusuma, and Mrs. Clark didn’t like the particular design on these doors, so we had to send drawings and find out which particular pattern she would like.”
As part of her historical research for these projects, Huguette would ask Chris Sattler to bring her books from her vast home library or purchase new ones. She was perfectly happy spending hours reading her books or perusing the
New York Times
,
Newsweek
, and French magazines like
Paris Match
to stay au courant. Her interests were eclectic: she followed the Olympics but also had an ongoing interest in Japanese and European royalty, especially Princess Grace. As Chris Sattler marvels, “She never appeared bored.”
With twenty-four-hour shifts of private nurses, Huguette was never alone and had turned her caretakers into a surrogate family. She would pepper the nurses and doctors with questions about their children. “She is the one always asking about our family,” recalls Hadassah Peri. Huguette initially kept to herself when she first entered the hospital in 1991 but had become more outgoing as the years passed, taking an interest in anyone in the vicinity. As Peri added, “Not only us, everybody who is involved with Madame, even the housekeeper, even the person who come just to
Life in a hospital room could have been dreary and claustrophobic. But Huguette had created a self-contained and busy life within these four walls. Ever since her parents had given her Jumeau and Bru dolls from France as a child, she had been a passionate doll and toy collector. She owned more than six hundred antique French porcelain dolls, and her interests had expanded to include wind-up antique automatons, Japanese Hina dolls, toy soldiers, Smurfs, and even Barbie dolls, plus all available accessories. Her collection encompassed nearly 1,200 dolls. She relished the thrill of the chase, the acquisitive urge. When catalogues arrived from Theriault’s, the premier American doll auction house, she would page through them with anticipation, and then instruct her lawyer, Wallace Bock, to bid, spending up to $120,000 for a single doll. Auction days were exciting, and her staff got caught up in the drama, too. “She would wait by the phone for the outcome,” says Chris Sattler. “She really enjoyed the outcome.”
Bock found the bidding to be an unusual experience, since his client refused to specify a price limit. “Whatever it was, that was what we were going to pay for it,” says Bock. He recalls Huguette’s reaction when he put in an offer to Sotheby’s for three times the asking price for a Japanese screen and was nonetheless outbid. “She was very upset. I had to go buy it from the person who bought it at the auction.” Yet once her craving for possession had been satisfied, she usually did not feel the need to see what she had bought. “The screen was sentright to her apartment,” Bock says. “All she saw was the picture in the catalogue. But she knew what she wanted.”
Huguette had become the patron of an unusual art form: commissioning miniature historical French châteaus and Japanese castles. These complex projects could take years to finish, since Huguette had an idealized idea of perfection. “We were taking a real castle in Japan, which is a fortified building, and making it to scale down to one-sixteenth of an inch and everything had to be accurate,” says Caterina Marsh, who runs the California import firm that Huguette used to hire artisans in Japan for this specialized work. Huguette scrutinized photos of works-in-progress and requested changes. “There were some interior panels in a Japanese home which are called fusuma,” Marsh explained. “So we hired an artist to paint the fusuma, and Mrs. Clark didn’t like the particular design on these doors, so we had to send drawings and find out which particular pattern she would like.”
As part of her historical research for these projects, Huguette would ask Chris Sattler to bring her books from her vast home library or purchase new ones. She was perfectly happy spending hours reading her books or perusing the
New York Times
,
Newsweek
, and French magazines like
Paris Match
to stay au courant. Her interests were eclectic: she followed the Olympics but also had an ongoing interest in Japanese and European royalty, especially Princess Grace. As Chris Sattler marvels, “She never appeared bored.”
With twenty-four-hour shifts of private nurses, Huguette was never alone and had turned her caretakers into a surrogate family. She would pepper the nurses and doctors with questions about their children. “She is the one always asking about our family,” recalls Hadassah Peri. Huguette initially kept to herself when she first entered the hospital in 1991 but had become more outgoing as the years passed, taking an interest in anyone in the vicinity. As Peri added, “Not only us, everybody who is involved with Madame, even the housekeeper, even the person who come just to
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