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A man was paid $90 an hour to create and catalog rooms for 1,157 dolls. “She is the Boo Radley of all Boo Radleys—if Boo Radley’s parents had been millionaires,” says Dedman. “She was skittish. I don’t think any diagnosis fits her. When she got into her eighties, she was living alone in this 15,000-square-foot space. The staff was dwindling. She didn’t do too well with new people, so she didn’t replace them. She had a staff of 12 and that went down to three, then down to one. She outlasted her doctors, and she wasn’t going to go out and find a new doctor. Then she got some skin cancers and went through a period where it was drastically untreated.” Once she had been moved to Beth Israel, her hospital bed was her command center: She communicated regularly with lawyers and other staff, oversaw her properties, corresponded by letter with friends around the country and in Europe and played with her doll collection by proxy, using employees to dress and maintain them. Clark’s dolls and dollhouses were unlike any a child might collect. She avidly monitored Sotheby’s and other high-end auction houses for antique dolls, bidding tens of thousands by phone. Artists and workmen around the world designed domestic models to her exacting specifics, which she calculated based on readings of fairy tales and Japanese medieval literature. “These one-of-a-kind tabletop models were texts, story houses, theaters with scenes and characters painted on the walls,” Dedman wrote. “And, like her father with his art collection, Huguette spared no expense. She commissioned religious houses with Joan of Arc, forts with toy soldiers, cottages with scenes from old French fables and house after house telling her favorite fairy tales: Rapunzel, the maiden with the long hair trapped in the tower. Sleeping Beauty, the princess stuck in sleep until a handsome prince awakens her with a kiss. Rumpelstiltskin, with the girl forced to spin straw into gold.” Her collection grew so large it needed a full-time caretaker, and Clark eventually employed a middleaged Brooklyn father to work five days a week organizing and overseeing the houses. This “man Friday,” Chris Sattler (who, like most everyone involved except the lawyers, refuses to speak to the media), was paid $90 an hour to create and catalog roomfuls of her 1,157 dolls and doll furniture. His special duty, though, was creating dollhouse scenes exactly as requested by the woman whom he and the rest of the staff always called Madame. This was no mere child’s play, however. Sattler and others who worked for Clark came to regard the dolls as her form of art. When she was 58, Clark cabled a Bavarian artist who made and sold fairy-tale dolls: “Rumpelstiltskin house just arrived. It is beautifully painted but unfortunately is not same size of last porridge house received. Instead of front of house being 19 3/4 of an inch wide it is only 15 1/2 inch wide. Please
make sure religious house has front of house 19 3/4 of an inch wide. Would also like shutters on all the windows. Would like another Rumpelstiltskin house with same scenes with scene where hay is turned to gold added as well as scene before hay is turned but with wider front and also wooden shutters on every window. With many thanks for all your troubles and kindest regards.—Huguette Clark, 907 Fifth Ave NYC.” How seriously did the reclusive woman treat these fantastical creations? One of her former assistants told Dedman that Clark asked a craftsman to raise the ceiling on one of the dollhouses an inch or two, complaining, “The little people are banging their heads!” “Her assistants will tell you that, and they see the look on your face and say, ‘No, no, no! You think she’s crazy and she wasn’t at all!’ ” Dedman said. “My coauthor Paul talked to her on the phone for nine years, and he thought she was lucid as anyone else. She was not having any trouble telling fact from fiction. She recalled both that his granddaughter was taking ballet lessons and the tickets on the Titanic. She had a sense of humor. She kidded him about finding a girlfriend.” Clark was especially fascinated with 18th-century Japan. She collected tiny dolls in historically precise costumes and employed a Japanese artist for the express purpose of going to temples and castles to do scale drawings. “Just as Americans would k now a figure of Abraham Lincoln immediately from his top hat and beard, Huguette would know the figures from the Tokugawa shogunate, specifically those from the 1770s,” Dedman wrote. In a deposition, Sattler told of how, when Huguette was 97 and lying in her hospital bed, she described six books in her collection on Japanese theater history, calling each one by title, even though she hadn’t seen them for years. “She was deep into a two-month project on Kabuki, creating a mock-up of a theater to be sent to the elderly artist in Japan, who would make a tabletop theater to her specifications,” Dedman wrote. Everything had to be perfectly to scale and historically accurate. Her written instructions were exacting for Sattler, who had received an undergraduate degree in history and literature from Fairfield University in Connecticut and then found himself, as Dedman puts it, “enrolled in the Huguette Marcelle Clark Graduate School of Japanese History.” Sattler would follow her instructions—“Find all the ladies-in-waiting of medium size.... Find all the court ladies who are playing cards”—construct the scenes, take hundreds of snapshots of the figurines and scenery posed just so and deliver them to the hospital. Only after she approved the photographs would he assemble and bring the entire model to the hospital, for a few hours or a couple of days. “Then she would be in heaven there for a while,” Sattler said in a deposition.
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hile she was alive—and even after her death in 2011—Clark was a woman of unyielding benevolence. She gave her nurse, Hadassah Peri, a Filipina immigrant, $30 million in gifts, property and cash, and bequeathed her an additional $40 million of her assets in her will. She reportedly gave $1 million in gifts to the night nurse who brought her warm milk to her hospital bed and sent $30,000 to a home health-care nurse she’d never met because she heard the woman took care of Clark’s stockbroker in his final years. “This woman is home in Queens and Huguette’s lawyer shows up and says, here is a letter, but you must never tell anyone about it,” Dedman said. “She had this incredible generosity. She liked to give money to the people close to her.” It is that very generosity that will be examined in the legal battle scheduled for September 17. Clark specifically stated in her will that she had no connection to her family and didn’t want them to have any of her money. Instead she granted most of her fortune to a charitable foundation, which doesn’t yet exist, with other sizable bequests going to various caretakers involved in her life until the very end. The chief claimants in the lawsuit are grandchildren and great-grandchildren of her father from his first marriage, people she knew but who allegedly had not seen her in person for decades, and then only once at a funeral when some were still small children. “The last time any of them were in her presence and talked to her was 1951,” Dedman said. “But that doesn’t matter. If they can knock out the will, they win. They are claiming that she was incompetent.” For evidence, the claimants point to her obsession with dolls, her choice to live out her days in a hospital bed and the empty mansions themselves. What sane person would choose a darkened, small room instead of sumptuous estates with staff and landscaped grounds? But relatives will have to explain other aspects of Clark’s later years that allude to her sanity. She “had lots of pen pals,” says Dedman, and wrote 4,000 pages of letters in French from her hospital room, in addition to overseeing properties and the exacting manipulation of dollhouse scenes. She had a niece she spoke with on holidays and a goddaughter on whom she doted (and who is included in the will). And Clark never told people she was living in a hospital, perhaps out of embarrassment, or to protect her cherished privacy. New York lawyer John Dadakis, who represents Wallace Bock, Clark’s attorney and the lawyer who wrote her will, says he has ample evidence that Clark was of sound mind. “The record is replete with factual information as to Huguette Clark’s competency,” he told DuJour. “She continued to be up and about almost to the end of her life and those that saw her on a daily basis have indicated that she was fully competent.”