The ailing, elderly mother of New York socialite Emily “Pemmy” du Pont Frick is being warehoused in a dreary nursing home in Pennsylvania where most residents are destitute, The Post has learned – despite having a megarich daughter whose home sold for nearly $60 million last year.
“What Pemmy did to her is an absolute disgrace,” said a relative of Frick’s mom, 91-year-old Anne Waterman Troth, who insisted on anonymity. “She should be ashamed of herself.”
But Frick appeared anything but ashamed over the weekend at her colossal summer rental home in Maine, where a reporter asked about her mother’s living situation.
“This is what happens when you get old and run out of money,” said Frick, 66, whose mother’s annual care costs less than the price of one of four fireplace mantels in Frick’s former mansion. She added that her mother’s situation was “a tragedy.”
When it was pointed out that Frick had plenty of money herself, the striking blond widow became upset and kicked a reporter off her porch.
“I don’t care what it looks like to other people. God bless them if they’ve been half as good as I’ve been,” Frick snapped before shutting her door. “It’s none of your goddamn business.”
Afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease and blindness, Frick’s mom, Troth, resides in a small, single-bed room lit by florescent bulbs in the Main Line Nursing Home and Rehabilitation Center in Malvern, Pa., the relative claimed.
The painfully thin, white-haired woman is surrounded by a few personal belongings, including a grandfather clock and some photos of her dead husband, the relative said.
“She’s on a little, uncomfortable mattress, the window in her room is half falling off,” the relative said.
Hanging on the wall of her room are two portraits of a young girl and a boy – Emily Frick and her brother, John Troth, as children, the kin said.
The relative said, “Main Line is rundown. You can’t imagine a facility so awful, horrible. It’s beyond description. There’s people shouting, people mad as hatters, spit flying out of their mouths. It’s horribly depressing.”
Troth has suffered in the nursing home, according to the relative, who said, “She shouts, she yells, she’s uncomfortable.”
“The smell is atrocious, overwhelming,” the relative said. “She’s not being showered regularly. The caretakers look apathetic . . . [Troth’s] skin looks translucent, like she hasn’t seen the light of day in years.”
The relative claimed that Troth, whose care at a previous residential facility originally was funded by a trust set up by her mother’s family, now has no money left of her own.
As a result, her accommodations at the 184-bed Main Line – which charges patients $6,540 per month – are paid for by the state of Pennsylvania, the relative claimed.
“This is a flagrant waste of taxpayers’ money by a person clearly not in need of a [state-subsidized] facility for their mother,” the relative said.
But John Troth claimed that the trust set up by Anne Troth’s grandmother still funds her care at the nursing home. He also claimed, as did his sister, that he and Frick pay $2,000 per month for a private nurse to visit their mother every day for up to six hours.
But John Troth said he does not know how much money is left in the trust and also did not know the name of the nursing agency that employs the private nurse. “My sister has done everything that any daughter could, as far as I know,” he said, also claiming that he and Frick see their mother “almost religiously.”
In comparison to Anne Troth’s dreary living arrangements, her daughter, Frick, continues to enjoy a grand life of luxury after marriages to scions of two of America’s wealthiest and most renowned industrial families. That life has frequently earned her mentions on Gotham’s society pages.
This month, Frick has been staying in an eight-bedroom home that rents for $5,500 a week in Northeast Harbor, an exclusive enclave on Maine’s Mount Desert Island.
Frick’s first husband was Richard du Pont Sr., whose ancestor, Eleuthére Irénée du Pont, founded the company now known as DuPont – the second largest chemical company in the world. Frick had two sons – David and Richard – by du Pont, an investor, before they split.
She later became the second wife of Henry Clay Frick II, a Manhattan gynecologist and Columbia University professor. The couple was married for two decades before Henry Frick died last February at the age of 86 after himself suffering from Alzheimer’s.
His grandfather, Henry Clay Frick, founded a company that was a predecessor of United States Steel and assembled one of the most renowned private collections of European art in the world.
Emily Frick is a trustee of the Frick Collection, the museum that houses that art in an Upper East mansion. Her husband served as the Frick Collection’s president for 35 years.
In January 2006, Emily Frick and her then-ailing husband sold their 63-acre estate in Alpine, N.J., for a staggering $58 million.
As part of the sale, the buyer agreed to allow Henry Frick to live there for the rest of his life.
The Alpine estate, which is now being subdivided, features a large pond, a 10,000-square-foot, English-style manor house and three large greenhouses, where Emily Frick raised orchids. The Fricks reportedly spent $400,000 on mantelpieces for four of their fireplaces – and had them removed after the sale, with the new owner’s consent.
Last fall, while her dying husband remained in Alpine, Emily Frick bought a three-bedroom co-op at the exclusive building 3 E. 77 St. in Manhattan for $3.9 million.
Like her previous digs on Fifth Avenue, Emily’s new residence is one of only a few apartment buildings in Manhattan that contain restaurants restricted to the buildings’ tenants.
“Mrs. Frick said that this was her kind of assisted living,” Wendy Sarasohn, the apartment’s listing agent, told the New York Observer after the sale.
“Get it? The restaurants assist you with everything.”
The apartment, which has a formal dining room and two wood-burning fireplaces, features a view of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Frick’s parents, Anne and John Shipley Troth, lived for several years in a Pennsylvania retirement community called Bellingham, paying for their accommodations out of a trust fund from Anne’s family.
After John Shipley Troth died in 1999 at the age of 87, his wife stayed at Bellingham until John and his sister moved their mother out of Bellingham to the Malvern home because they “felt that Mother was not getting the necessary care,” John said.
But the relative disagreed about the Main Line.
“They . . . found an awful place. Nobody there has a pot to piss in. [John] and Pemmy stuck her in there,” the relative said. “I’d imagine the staff don’t have a clue about the du Ponts and the Fricks.”