SHUT-IN: Huguette Clark, here at age 24, had lived in this Upper East Side building in a room lit by one candle. (
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In a lavish apartment overlooking Central Park, she occupied only one room, lit by a single candle. She was elderly and emaciated, wore an old, soiled bathrobe, her face hidden behind a towel.
Meeting 85-year-old heiress Huguette Clark for the first time was like encountering “an apparition,” her private physician recalls in a detailed account of his “most strange” introduction to her in March 1991 in her 10-room, 5,000-square-foot apartment.
Notoriously reclusive, the daughter of industrialist and senator William Clark had been long forgotten by most of the world by the time a friend asked Dr. Henry Singman to check on her at 907 Fifth Ave., where she owned three apartments.
Except for a small, tight-knit circle, few knew of the existence of the copper-mining heiress.
Skin cancer had devastated her once-attractive face, leaving her “looking like an advanced leper patient,” Singman wrote in his medical notes.
Weighing a mere 75 pounds, Clark held the towel over her mouth, shielding others from the sight of her partially missing lower left lip.
Ulcers had corroded her right lower eyelid and cheek. She appeared to be “nearly at death’s door.”
The house call changed the course of Clark’s long life.
The physician got the wealthy shut-in to go to the hospital. Clark chose Beth Israel North, the former Doctor’s Hospital, on the Upper East Side for its proximity to Suzanne Pierre, the friend and former social secretary who had asked for Singman’s help.
Clark went through Beth Israel’s doors and never re-emerged. She died there last year at age 104.
After a few months at Beth Israel, Clark’s physical health improved. Within months, she gained weight. Surgeries helped her cancer and her appearance.
But Clark refused to leave, and she refused to say why.
The only hint came in an exchange with Singman over a French poem. The verses concerned a cricket and a butterfly. Clark read it to Singman in Spanish and French.
“The upshot of it was she wanted to remain a cricket rather than to be this beautiful butterfly that was flying around, because it was basically safer for her and she felt more secure,” Singman’s deposition says.
Her caregivers happily accepted the odd arrangement as Clark repeatedly lavished them with extravagant amounts of money and expensive gifts, including homes and cars.
Singman received monthly payments, which totaled $521,025 from 1997 to 2011. Clark, who was paying Singman’s malpractice-insurance premiums, left the doctor another $100,000 in her now-disputed will.
Singman taught the octogenarian solitaire “and she learned every game in the book, improvising and inventing new games. She has a ‘steel trap’ memory,” he wrote, “but remains shy and reticent.”
Additional reporting by Isabel Vincent