Empty Mansions

put Dr. Singman’s name on it in appreciation for helping raise the money from his patient. She gave $80,000 to the hospital as a tribute to both Dr. Singman and her surgeon, Dr. Jack Rudick. In her first decade in the hospital, she gave $940,000.
    Hospital leaders sought advice from Dr. Rudick, who urged them to make larger, specific requests, because“she has no ‘concept’ of money.”
    Dr. Rudick followed his own advice, borrowing $1 million from his patient. Though he signed promissory notes agreeing to pay the money back with interest,he made no payments. When Rudick asked for another $500,000, he told Huguette he wouldn’t be able to continue as her doctor otherwise. Her attorney, Bock, called this “almost blackmail,” warning Huguette that Dr. Rudick was misleading her by claiming that he needed the money to open an office in the city, when in fact he was retiring. She was not resentful, signing documents forgiving his loans entirely.Dr. Rudick denied this account, saying he never misled Huguette or even asked her for the money. He said that he and Huguette agreed from the beginning that the $1 million was actually a gift, though it was described as a loan in the documents.
    Her nurse, Hadassah Peri, encouraged Huguette to make gifts to the hospital. The hospital waived some ofHadassah’s fees when she had back surgery.
    Hospital officials said they had no idea that Huguette was giving gifts to her doctors or nurses. Internal emails show that gifts to Hadassah, who was not a hospital employee, were discussed at a 1998 meeting in the office of the board chairman, shipbuilding tycoon Morton Hyman.
    Hospital correspondence shows that officials were disappointed with their own results. “I think her gifts,” Dr. Newman said, “considering what she could have given, considering what other people had given, … had been relatively, relatively modest.” He lamented in an email to fund-raising staff, “Without knocking her past gifts, the potential has been overwhelmingly unrealized.”
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    Hospital officials knew from Huguette’s advisers that she had not signed a will. Dr. Newman urged her to sign one, then sent his mother to share with her “the great joy and spiritual satisfaction of preparing her will.”
    Hospital officials considered having their legal department scope out what would happen to Huguette’s money at her death if she died without a will. There was a problem, however. One official raised in a memo the fear that if the hospital leaders asked for advice from their own lawyers, “they might push the question of whether she should even be living in the hospital.”
    Indeed,Huguette was hidden away from hospital inspectors, according to two former employees at Doctors Hospital, a nurse and a social worker.The Joint Commission, which accredits hospitals, made regular visits to Beth Israel to ensure it met standards. One of its standard investigative techniques was to choose a “tracer” patient, going through all of a patient’s file, evaluating each department that had worked on that patient’s case. Patients with long stays might attract particular attention, as Huguette did on at least one occasion. With more than twenty thousand pages of medical records, Huguette would have been the ultimate tracer. The nurse and social worker said that her name was left off the daily patient census and they were told to hide her file when inspectors came. In later years, every new page in her hospital chart was stamped with an admission date of January 1, 2003, which was nearly twelve years after her actual date of admission. As one fund-raising official noted in the file, “If we were forced to ‘evict’ her, we’d certainly have no hope of any support.”
    The hospitalencountered financial difficulties, spurred on by a couple of high-profile malpractice cases in obstetrics. By 1995, Moody’s Investors Service had lowered the hospital company’s bond rating, and in 2000 dropped the rating again as its liquidity reached “an extremely low level,” with only six days’ worth of cash on hand. Beth Israel in 1997 became part of a hospital super-company, Continuum Health Partners,with Dr. Newman the CEO over Beth Israel, as well as St. Luke’s-Roosevelt and the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary.
    Huguette came to the hospital’s rescue. In 2000, when Hyman asked her for a donation, she decided togive a painting by Edouard Manet,
Peonies in a Bottle
. Sotheby’s appraised it