Empty Mansions

Samuels never talked face-to-face with her.
    In 1970, Huguette had a staff of eight. By 1990, she hadonly one part-time maid and a handyman to maintain her forty-two rooms at 907 Fifth Avenue.
    Then there was a frightening incident at the apartment. Huguette described a day in the late 1980s when a water delivery boy, or someone pretending to be a delivery boy, came to 8W. Huguette was up in 12W, getting something for one of her art projects. When she came back downstairs, she found the maid locked in the bathroom, with no sign of the delivery boy.
    As Huguette described it much later, “It was spooky.”

MADAME PIERRE

 
    H UGUETTE C LARK had been outliving her doctors.
    When the cancers on her face ate away at her lip, nearly causing her to starve in March 1991, it was her friend Suzanne Pierre whom she finally called with an SOS. Suzanne was the wife of Huguette’s longtime doctor, Jules Pierre, but he was quite elderly and no longer seeing patients. After he retired, Huguette had seen Dr. Myron Wright, but he died in 1990. Huguette didn’t find a new doctor, so her skin cancers had gone untreated.
    Madame Pierre called Dr. Henry Singman, who was seeing some of her husband’s former patients. The internist that evening discovered Huguette, an “apparition” in her own apartment, and persuaded her to go to the hospital immediately. And that’s how she began her long seclusion, choosing Doctors Hospital because it was near Suzanne’s Upper East Side apartment.
    Though everyone said Suzanne Pierre was Huguette’s best friend, Suzanne knew her place in the pecking order. “Her dolls,” Madame Pierre said, “are her closest companions.”
    Suzanne and Huguette loved to converse in French. Suzanne was fifteen years younger than Huguette, born in France in 1921. Her first marriage ended quickly in divorce. She left her nine-month-old son with his grandparents in Brittany and went to work. She rarely saw her son until he was a young man.
    Suzanne came to the United States in 1948 and eventually married Dr. Jules Pierre, a Frenchman, an officer in the Legion of Honor, and president of the Federation of French War Veterans. Dr. Pierre was the physician for Anna and Huguette.
    Madame Pierre and Huguette became friends. She visited 907 Fifth Avenue regularly. Over time, she began to act as sort of a social secretary and assistant for Huguette, a buffer against the world.
    • • •
    On a stormy afternoon in March 2010, serving hot tea and cookies for a visitor in her tasteful apartment at 1075 Park Avenue, eighty-eight-year-old Suzanne Pierre was dressed in a sharp blouse and jacket with a pearl stickpin. She said she couldn’t explain why Huguette was a recluse. In the years after Huguette’s mother had died, Suzanne said, she tried to get Huguette to join her for afternoons out.
    “I would ask her to go out to lunch, but she preferred to stay in. She would say she has a little cold.”
    Huguette did not want to see outsiders, even relatives, Madame Pierre said. “She thought they were just after her money. She didn’t trust people.”
HADASSAH

 
    F ROM DAY ONE at Doctors Hospital, Huguette had private nurses twenty-four hours a day. The nurse on the day shift, assigned randomly to Huguette in the spring of 1991, was Hadassah Peri. She would work for her “Madame” for twenty years, becoming, it seems probable, the wealthiest registered nurse in the world.
    Doctors Hospital was not the place that a New Yorker with a life-threatening illness normally would select. It was better known as a fashionable treatment center for the well-to-do, a society hospital, a great place for a face-lift or for drying out. Michael Jackson had been a patient, as had Marilyn Monroe, James Thurber, Clare Boothe Luce, and Eugene O’Neill. The fourteen-story brick structure on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, between Eighty-Seventh and Eighty-Eighth streets by a bend in the East River, gave the impression of being an apartment building or hotel, with a hair salon offering private appointments in patient rooms and a comfortable dining room where patients could order from the wine list if the doctor allowed. When it opened in 1929, it had no wards and no interns, allowed no charity care, and included hotel accommodations for family members of patients. In its early days, it was often used as a long-term residential hotel or spa, and finally in the 1970s it added modern coronary units and intensive care.
    Huguette checked