The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark by Meryl Gordon Page A
Authors: Meryl Gordon
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For Huguette, her hospital room was her sanctuary. She wantedadvance notice and control over who was allowed to cross the threshold. Dr. Henry Singman noted with a mixture of admiration and exasperation that she would refuse to meet hospital personnel—from medical specialists to interns—if she wasn’t in the mood. “She would chase them away, she wouldn’t see anybody,” he said. “She was very particular who she allowed to talk to [her] and who she wouldn’t.”
So the surprise visit to Huguette’s room by Ian Devine and Carla Hall was as welcome to her as a screeching car alarm. They had breached her fortress. Huguette was upset, and her protectors felt responsible for letting her down. She viewed the sudden interest in her by Carla and Ian as suspect. William Andrews Clark had bequeathed money to all of his children, but now Huguette was the only one left, and she believed these distant family members had an ulterior motive. Or as Huguette plaintively said to Chris Sattler, “They got their money. Why do they want mine?”
The money, it always came back to the money, that coppery patina that cast a shadow over William Andrews Clark’s family, their friends, and their associates. The millions amassed by this American buccaneer had a life of their own, spawning tentacles of greed and corruption, multiple lawsuits over a century, and so many dysfunctional relationships that the boughs of the family tree had splintered. It sometimes seemed as if anyone who had even come into proximity to the Clark millions experienced an adverse reaction.
Rather than be grateful for any largesse, recipients consistently wheedled for more. Huguette had experienced money grabs before. She had established a $750,000 trust in 1964 ($5.6 million in today’s inflation-adjusted terms) to support a California cousin on her mother’s side of the family—Anna La Chapelle, her mother’s namesake. The divorced cousin sent Huguette frequent letters asking for more cash and finally showed her appreciation in the late 1980s by hiring lawyers to try, albeit unsuccessfully, to break the trust. The heiress wrote frequent checks to Beth Israel’s development office, but staffers also constantly cajoled her for more.
“She was a soft touch,” says her lawyer, Wallace Bock. “Nobody ever asked her for money, but they would come with a hard-luck story and she would volunteer.” Sharing her wealth was a bittersweetexperience. Each year she gave large bonuses to her nurses for their loyalty but responded awkwardly when they expressed gratitude. As her night nurse, Geraldine Coffey, recalls, Huguette would always say the same thing: “Don’t thank me, thank my father. I never earned a cent.”
Chapter Four
The Copper King
T he fortune that would become twenty-first-century tabloid fodder came into being some 150 years earlier in Montana, nearly two thousand miles away from Huguette’s New York hospital bed. It tells you everything that you need to know about a played-out Western mining town when one of its major tourist attractions, complete with a $2 admission fee, is America’s largest toxic waste site. The Berkeley Pit, the grim environmental legacy of open-pit copper mining, sits less than a mile from Butte’s downtown city center. The vast mile-long man-made lake is filled with 40 billion poisonous gallons of metal residue and chemicals that continue to rise every year.
As seen from the viewing platform, the scene is ominously beautiful: the mysterious, murky depths that drop down a quarter of a mile, the striated rock outcroppings etched by explosives, the snow-tipped mountains in the distance. Muted clanking sounds can be heard from the operations of a copper mine nearby, still exploiting the earth’s bounty.
Mining camps sprouted up here in the 1860s, and the street names attest to the city’s metalcentric history: Gold Street, Copper Street, Quartz Street, Mercury Street, Silver
For Huguette, her hospital room was her sanctuary. She wantedadvance notice and control over who was allowed to cross the threshold. Dr. Henry Singman noted with a mixture of admiration and exasperation that she would refuse to meet hospital personnel—from medical specialists to interns—if she wasn’t in the mood. “She would chase them away, she wouldn’t see anybody,” he said. “She was very particular who she allowed to talk to [her] and who she wouldn’t.”
So the surprise visit to Huguette’s room by Ian Devine and Carla Hall was as welcome to her as a screeching car alarm. They had breached her fortress. Huguette was upset, and her protectors felt responsible for letting her down. She viewed the sudden interest in her by Carla and Ian as suspect. William Andrews Clark had bequeathed money to all of his children, but now Huguette was the only one left, and she believed these distant family members had an ulterior motive. Or as Huguette plaintively said to Chris Sattler, “They got their money. Why do they want mine?”
The money, it always came back to the money, that coppery patina that cast a shadow over William Andrews Clark’s family, their friends, and their associates. The millions amassed by this American buccaneer had a life of their own, spawning tentacles of greed and corruption, multiple lawsuits over a century, and so many dysfunctional relationships that the boughs of the family tree had splintered. It sometimes seemed as if anyone who had even come into proximity to the Clark millions experienced an adverse reaction.
Rather than be grateful for any largesse, recipients consistently wheedled for more. Huguette had experienced money grabs before. She had established a $750,000 trust in 1964 ($5.6 million in today’s inflation-adjusted terms) to support a California cousin on her mother’s side of the family—Anna La Chapelle, her mother’s namesake. The divorced cousin sent Huguette frequent letters asking for more cash and finally showed her appreciation in the late 1980s by hiring lawyers to try, albeit unsuccessfully, to break the trust. The heiress wrote frequent checks to Beth Israel’s development office, but staffers also constantly cajoled her for more.
“She was a soft touch,” says her lawyer, Wallace Bock. “Nobody ever asked her for money, but they would come with a hard-luck story and she would volunteer.” Sharing her wealth was a bittersweetexperience. Each year she gave large bonuses to her nurses for their loyalty but responded awkwardly when they expressed gratitude. As her night nurse, Geraldine Coffey, recalls, Huguette would always say the same thing: “Don’t thank me, thank my father. I never earned a cent.”
Chapter Four
The Copper King
T he fortune that would become twenty-first-century tabloid fodder came into being some 150 years earlier in Montana, nearly two thousand miles away from Huguette’s New York hospital bed. It tells you everything that you need to know about a played-out Western mining town when one of its major tourist attractions, complete with a $2 admission fee, is America’s largest toxic waste site. The Berkeley Pit, the grim environmental legacy of open-pit copper mining, sits less than a mile from Butte’s downtown city center. The vast mile-long man-made lake is filled with 40 billion poisonous gallons of metal residue and chemicals that continue to rise every year.
As seen from the viewing platform, the scene is ominously beautiful: the mysterious, murky depths that drop down a quarter of a mile, the striated rock outcroppings etched by explosives, the snow-tipped mountains in the distance. Muted clanking sounds can be heard from the operations of a copper mine nearby, still exploiting the earth’s bounty.
Mining camps sprouted up here in the 1860s, and the street names attest to the city’s metalcentric history: Gold Street, Copper Street, Quartz Street, Mercury Street, Silver
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