The $300 Million Hospital Patient

Hello! This is Deep Pockets #18.

On May 24, 2011, an extraordinarily unusual patient died at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City. The patient, whose paperwork listed her name as “Harriet Chase,” died two weeks shy of her 105th birthday. But age wasn’t what made “Harriet Chase” extraordinarily unusual.

First off, “Harriet” hadn’t been hospitalized for a few weeks or even months, as you may have assumed. She had been living in a hospital for the last TWENTY YEARS.

And despite the fact that she was paying $1,000 per day just for the room, it was not a fancy VIP suite. She lived in a tiny, drab room on a busy floor with no view. Not that the view mattered since blackout shades were drawn 24-7.

She also wasn’t sick when she first entered the hospital. She was generally healthy and apparently very happy throughout her two-decade hospitalization.

The only time “Harriet” left the hospital during her two-decade residency was in July 2004, when she spent 20 minutes in an ambulance being transferred to a different hospital.

Had the ambulance driven down Fifth Avenue during that transfer, “Harriet” might have spotted the site of her childhood home. At the time it was a luxury apartment building. A century ago, it was the most expensive mansion in the world. A minute later, she would have zoomed by another building where she owned an apartment. And when I say “owned,” I don’t mean past tense. On the day of that ambulance ride and right up to her death in 2011, “Harriet” owned a 15,000-square-foot apartment located not far from thw hospital where she was living in a tiny room. The walls of this apartment were covered with priceless artwork, and the windows looked directly out on Central Park.

The NYC apartment was not her only abandoned residence, all of which were meticulously maintained by armies of staff seven days a week.

Finally, as you may have surmised from my quotation marks, “Harriet Chase” was not the patient’s real name. It was a pseudonym to protect her privacy. Her real name was Huguette Clark. She was the last surviving child of copper magnate William A. Clark. She was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

DEEP DIVE: The $300 Million Hospital Patient

FYI, We don’t plan to do many two-part Deep Pockets stories, but today’s newsletter is connected to our previous story about William A. Clark. You don’t need to have read that story to enjoy today’s, but it is highly recommended. Here’s a link to part 1.

Also, if you want to learn more about William or Huguette, I highly recommend a book titled “Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune.”

When Copper King William A. Clark died on March 2, 1925, at the age of 89, he was the third richest person in America (and likely the world) behind only Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller. At the time of his death, William was worth at least $250 million. That’s the direct inflation-adjusted equivalent of $5 billion today. However, when you take into account his relative wealth to the Gross National Product at the time, William A. Clark’s fortune was worth more like $50 billion today. Enough to make him one of the 50 richest Americans of all time.

William left a relatively small amount of money to charity (roughly $600,000) in his will. The vast majority of his fortune and business empire went to his five children. Four of those children came from his first marriage to Katherine Stauffer (who died in 1893). Those four children were:

• Mary Joaquina Clark

• Charles Walker Clark

• Katherine Louise Clark

• William Andrews Clark, Jr.

William’s fifth surviving child was his second daughter born from his second marriage to Anna La Chapelle. That fifth surviving child was:

• Huguette Clark

William did not leave a succession plan for his business interests, so the empire was sold off over time, generating an even larger fortune for the heirs. At the time of his death, the children from his first marriage ranged in age from 48 to 55. Huguette was 19.

His widow Anna was 47. All of his children from his first marriage were older than his widow, including youngest son, William Jr., who was a year older than his step-mom.

As you can imagine, this second marriage to a MUCH MUCH MUCH younger woman was highly controversial within his family. To appease his older children, William agreed to exclude Anna from inheriting a significant portion of his wealth or business interests.

Mary Clark died in 1939. Charles Clark died in 1933 after a life of heavy drinking, womanizing, and gambling. Katerine Clark died in 1974 at the age of 99.

William Andrews Clark Jr. died in 1934 at the age of 57. He’s easily the second most interesting of the Clark children. He single-handedly founded and financed the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He was also a passionate collector of more than 10,000 very rare books. He built a massive private library in Los Angeles set on five acres. Upon his death, he donated the library and his collection to the school that eventually became UCLA.

William Jr. is buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Below is a satellite photo of Hollywood Forever Cemetery. As you can see, there are a couple dozen large mausoleums scattered around the property. But note that one mausoleum (circled in yellow) appears to be set on its own private island:

That’s William A. Clark Jr.’s private tomb. Here’s an absolutely incredible 4K video tour around his tomb:

Huguette Marcelle Clark

Huguette Marcelle Clark was born in Paris in 1906. On the day she was born, her mother was 28, her father 67. Her older sister, Louise Amelia Andrée Clark (who went by Andrée), was born in 1901, also in Paris. French was their first language, and Huguette would speak with a French accent for the rest of her life.

The sisters moved to America with their parents in 1910. Because their mansion in New York City was not quite ready, they spent their first year in America living in Butte, Montana, where their father’s empire was based. As you may recall from our previous story, when they did move to NYC, they moved into a 121-room mansion on Fifth Avenue that cost the modern equivalent of $245 million to build:

Tragically, Andrée died very suddenly from meningitis in 1919, just shy of her 17th birthday. Her death shook Huguette, who was 13 at the time, to the core.

Even before the deaths of her sister and father, Huguette was unusually introverted and isolated, perhaps to a paranoid degree.

Very soon after William died, the children from his first marriage politely asked Huguette and Anna to vacate the Clark mansion. It was sold off at a significant loss in 1926 and torn down in 1927.

Huguette and Anna bought a 5,000-square-foot penthouse apartment five blocks away at 907 Fifth Avenue. They eventually bought two more apartments on the building’s eighth floor for a total living space of 15,000 square feet. All of the windows looked directly out at Central Park. They owned a little more than half of the building’s 12th floor (the top floor) and the entire eighth floor.

This was not their only home. Though Anna was excluded from inheriting William’s NY mansion, she was allowed to keep their West Coast summer home, a 23-acre hilltop estate above the ocean in Santa Barbara, California. William and Anna bought the estate, which is called Bellosguardo, in 1923 for $300,000. In 1925, the same year William died, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake decimated the area. Anna razed the former home and, by 1933, had completed construction on a 22,000-square-foot French-style palace:

In the middle of construction, something surprising happened. Huguette actually got married! Maybe her reclusive nature was cracking.

The groom was the son of one of her father’s accountants. They actually married on the grounds of Bellosguardo in 1928.

A month before her wedding, Huguette donated $50,000 to the City of Santa Barbara to clean up a stinky swamp on the other side of Bellosguardo to create the Andrée Clark Bird Refuge. I visited the Refuge recently. In the second photo below, Bellosguardo is located on the hilltop on the other side of the lake:

Unfortunately, Huguette’s marriage did not last long. The exact length is not known. They officially separated after nine months, but they may not have lasted longer than the honeymoon. According to a 1941 biography written about the family, the husband claimed the marriage was never consummated because Huguette refused to… consummate… with him on the honeymoon. She would later claim he deserted her.

Whatever the reason, the marriage did provide one important artifact. Nevada was one of the few states where divorce was legal at the time, but there was a catch. You had to have been a resident of the state for three months uninterrupted before a divorce would be granted. While most wealthy divorce seekers rented modest apartments for three months while they served their time, Huguette, her mother, and a dozen servants took over an entire floor of a luxury hotel in Reno.

On the day her divorce was finalized, Huguette was spotted by a reporter. He snapped a photo. It would be the very last photograph the public would see of Huguette for the rest of her life. At the time, she was 22:

Anna and Huguette barely left their New York City apartment in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. When they did leave, it was typically to visit Southern California for around a month at a time. Between 1936 and 1953, Anna and Huguette visited Bellosguardo a total of 14 times.

On the evening of February 23, 1942, just three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese submarine attacked the coast of Santa Barbara, not far from Bellosguardo. Though the attack only caused around $500 worth of damage, Anna and Huguette were terrified. After all, what could be a better target for the Japanese than a massive hilltop oceanfront mansion? Fearing for their lives, Anna and Huguette purchased a 200-acre ranch 40 miles inland called Camp Rancho Alegra to serve as their summer retreat during the war years. Huguette did not visit the ranch a single time in her life, and upon Anna’s death, Huguette donated the property to the Boy Scouts, who still operate it today.

In 1952, Huguette bought a 52-acre estate in Connecticut. She also never spent a single night at this estate.

Meanwhile, the walls of their NYC apartment could have been mistaken for a wing at the Louvre. Anna and Huguette owned paintings by Degas, Monet, Manet, Picasso, Rubens, Renoir, and more.

They also loved music. Anna played the harp, and Huguette the violin. And not just any violin, a Stradivarius. One of two she owned.

In case you are not aware, Antonio Stradivari constructed around 1,100 instruments during his lifetime. There are only around 650 surviving today. They are considered the greatest string instruments ever crafted. When they pop up for sale, which is exceptionally rare, they sell for $20 million.

On somewhat of a whim in 1945, Anna paid $200,000 cash for FOUR - two violins, a viola, and a cello. She immediately handed all four over to a famous cellist so he could form a quartet. The “Paganini Quartet” performed together for the next two decades. After disbanding, following the terms of Anna’s will, the instruments were donated to a museum.

Reclusion Begins

Anna LaChapelle Clark, Huguette’s mother and essentially sole companion from the 1930s onward, died in 1963. After her mother’s death, Huguette’s reclusive behaviors were exacerbated. She developed deep distrust and discomfort with outsiders, including family members. She was borderline paranoid that everyone just wanted her money.

For the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, Huguette remained sequestered in her 15,000-square-foot apartment almost without interruption. She painted, continued playing music, and, most significantly, amassed thousands of dolls and dollhouses. She ate crackers and sardines for lunch every single day. She avidly watched cartoons, especially “The Flinstones” and “The Smurfs.”

So, did she sell Bellosguardo and her Connecticut estate? Nope. Did the properties rot and become overgrown with weeds? Nope.

Throughout this period, and this would remain true for the rest of her life, Huguette maintained both Bellosguardo and her Connecticut estate with teams of full-time staff who worked seven days a week. Bellosguarado alone cost $40,000 per month to maintain. At all times, the staff of Bellosguardo kept the property in a readiness state as if Huguette might pull up the driveway at any moment unannounced. That never happened. Her lawns were cut. The furniture was continuously dusted. A car from the 1930s was maintained and preserved.

Hospitalization

In March 1991, at the urging of a concerned friend, 85-year-old Huguette checked in to Doctors Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to receive treatment for some cancerous lesions on her face.

She never left.

Well, as you’ll recall from our opener, she did leave ONCE. In July 2004, 98-year-old Huguette was wheeled to a waiting ambulance and driven 15 minutes to Beth Israel Medical Center because Doctors Hospital was shutting down.

Huguette Clark lived in a drab hospital room from March 26, 1991, until her death on May 24, 2011, at the age of 104. She spent a little over 20 years living in a hospital. 7,364 nights.

And to be clear, she was not in a coma or incapacitated in any way. She was underweight and dehydrated when she first entered the hospital, but after some basic treatment, she was considered to be in perfectly good mental and physical shape. She had a daily routine. She bathed herself, fed herself, had doctor and nurse visits, watched the news and cartoons on a small TV, and kept in touch with various contacts through letters and occasional phone calls.

She also continued being very interested and involved in her doll and dollhouse collection. She would have multiple calls a day with her NYC house manager to deliver instructions on dolls that needed to be maintained and items she wished to purchase at auction. With unlimited funds and determination, she rarely lost an auction. But she would never actually see the items won at auction, except in photographs.

For all her fears of being used for money, Huguette was extremely generous to many, many, many people. People she hadn’t seen in decades would receive random checks for $30,000 or even $50,000. And not close friends. Someone as far-flung as the widow of a man she had been friends with decades earlier. She paid tuitions, medical bills, back taxes, and other random expenses for dozens of hospital staff members. Two of her doctors received a combined $3 million in gifts during her two decades as their patient. Over various transactions, including donating a painting by Edouard Manet, she gave her first hospital $4 million.

Huguette wrote so many checks for such huge amounts that she frequently overdrew her bank account balance. When this happened, her accountants would get a call from her banker, and more funds would be transferred.

Huguette gave so much money away that she got to a point where her accountants were running out of liquid funds. Not wanting to sell the stocks that comprised the bulk of her fortune and provided significant dividends, they finally convinced Huguette to sell her unused Connecticut estate to create additional liquidity.

In November 2008, a 14,000-square-foot mansion set on 52 acres in New Canaan hit the market for the first time in 60 years. The asking price was $24 million.

Unfortunately for Huguette, listing this estate is what exposed her privacy. Locals around New Canaan had wondered for decades about the owner of the abandoned mansion. Those who knew it once belonged to Huguette Clark assumed she was long deceased. A Connecticut-based investigative journalist named Bill Dedman was the first to pick up the string. In February 2010, he published a slideshow titled “The Clarks: An American story of wealth, scandal, mystery” on NBC’s website. Dedman would later co-author the book we referenced at the top of this story. Dedman’s reporting would also lead the world to learn the name Hadassah Peri, arguably the richest private nurse of all time.

Hadassah Peri

Huguette’s generosity had absolutely no limit when it came to her private nurse, a Philipino immigrant named Hadassah Peri. Hadassah was assigned to Huguette at random back in 1991. If ever there was a patient jackpot to hit, this was it.

Now, to her credit, Hadassah was Huguette’s private nurse for her entire twenty-year hospital stay. And, for most of those twenty years, she worked 12 hours a day, from 8 am to 8 pm, seven days a week, barely seeing her own family. She became Huguette’s closest confidant and her primary contact point to the outside world. When she got home in the evening, Huguette would call to make sure she arrived safely.

Huguette’s generosity with Hadassah started with a complaint about flood damage at her Brooklyn apartment. In short order, Huguette bought her a $450,000 house. The house was purchased in Hadassah’s name with Huguette’s money. Over time, Huguette bought six more properties for Hadassah and her family members, including a $1.5 million Upper East Side apartment and a $600,000 Jersey Shore vacation home. Private tuition from preschool through graduate school for three children was paid by Huguette. The Peri family used Hugette’s money to buy a 1998 Lincoln Navigator, a 1991 Hummer, and an extremely limited edition 2001 Bentley Arnage Le Mans, one of only 150 in the world, for $210,000. The family complained to Huguette that they didn’t like driving the Bentley because they were afraid it would get stolen or dinged.

During their twenty years together, Huguette Clark gave Hadassah Peri $31 MILLION in gifts. According to a lawsuit brought after Huguette’s death by her extended family members, the specific total was:

$31,906,074.81 

And actually, she was supposed to get more.

Estate Battle

Even after decades of extreme generosity, during which time she spent or gave away perhaps as much as $100 million, when she died in May 2011, Huguette Clark’s net worth was still a little more than $300 million.

In her last will and testament, signed in April 2005, Huguette stated that she did not want any of her extended family members to benefit from her estate. She did want Bellosguardo to be donated to the City of Santa Barbara as a charitable foundation to promote the arts. The Bellosguardo Foundation would also receive 75% of the value generated after assets were sold. Furthermore,

$12 million would go to a goddaughter.

And…

An ADDITIONAL $30 million would go to Hadassah Peri. To make it $61 million in total.

That’s not what ended up happening though.

Upon learning the terms, roughly 20 extended members of the Clark family filed a lawsuit to challenge the will. Of these family members, most had never met her, and the one who had seen Huguette most recently had last seen her in 1957.

The family members argued that her obsession with dolls and cartoons and the fact that she lived in a hospital for 20 years was evidence that she was mentally unsound. Of course, they also accused Hadassah and her other hospital associates of taking advantage of her. They had a point. Not only had the hospital staff received millions of dollars in gifts from their permanent patient, but why was she allowed to remain a patient for so long in the first place if she was perfectly healthy? It also looked very bad when it was revealed that the doctors at her first hospital continually pressed Huguette for donations, eventually even asking her for $125 MILLION to save the hospital from financial ruin. They presented the request almost like a mafia threat. “If you don’t give us $125 million, say goodbye to this room and all doctors and nurses you love so much…” She did not give the money, and that’s why she moved hospitals.

Oh, and when Huguette signed her will in 2004, all the people present stood to make millions off the estate, including Hadassah, who allegedly held the pen while the signature was made.

After tens of millions of dollars in legal fees (paid by Huguette’s estate), when the dust settled, Hadassah Peri agreed to give up her share of the estate and even agreed to give back $5 million of the $31 million she had previously received.

After paying $20 million in legal fees, nearly $90 million in taxes, and tens of millions of other costs, Huguette’s $300 million was reduced to $175 million. Of that amount, $35 million went to her roughly 20 distant relatives TAX-FREE because Huguette’s estate agreed to cover that bill as well. The majority of the remaining $140 million, of which $85 million was the estimated value of Bellosguardo, went to the Bellosguardo Foundation.

Estate Sales

In April 2012, Christie’s generated $16 million auctioning Huguette’s jewelry collection.

Her apartment at 907 Fifth Avenue was converted back into three units. In July 2012, a hedge fund manager bought the 12th-floor penthouse for $25.5 million. One of the eighth-floor apartments sold for $22.5 million, and the other sold for $6.8 million.

In April 2014 her 52-acre Connecticut estate - which sat empty for over six decades and was never visited by Huguette - sold for $14.3 million. The new owners performed $10 million worth of upgrades and renovations, including adding a 60-foot swimming pool. These owners listed the home for sale in October 2024 for $25.5 million.

Huguette’s impressive and bizarre life story is captivating and perplexing. Her life reminds us that even amidst unimaginable riches, the human need for connection and purpose remains paramount, leaving us to ponder the true value of wealth in the face of loneliness and isolation.

FINAL WORD

On the next edition of “Deep Pockets,” we will tell the story of a different billionaire heiress. An heiress who, in addition to fighting all the way up to the Supreme Court for her inheritance, posed in Playboy and starred in a “Naked Gun” movie.

Thanks for reading! Deep Pockets is brand new, and I appreciate you being part of it. I want it to be the best newsletter you’ve ever read.

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