by Meryl Gordon
Ever since she had entered the hospital, Kamsler had been taken aback by the size of the bonuses that Huguette was paying to Hadassah, night nurse Geraldine, and others. As early as 1993, he had expressed his concern in a letter to Donald Wallace, writing, “Mrs. Clark appears to be somewhat vulnerable to the influence of people around her. This is evidenced by her extraordinary gifts to her nurses and their families.” But this was not the kind of sentiment that Kamsler dared express directly to Huguette.
His new legal counterpart, Wallace Bock, had previously taken care of bits and pieces of Huguette’s legal work, but now he was in charge. Although Donald Wallace eventually returned to the office, he was able to work only sporadically until his death in 2002. “I was the guy at the end of the telephone line,” says Wallace Bock. “When she needed something, she called me. She was very, very private. I rarely asked questions.” Bock and Kamsler, both observant Jews, got along well although their personalities were different: the lawyer was brusque and businesslike, while the voluble accountant liked to schmooze.
Four months after Donald Wallace’s heart attack, Bock wrote to Huguette to point out that she was spending $30,000 per month to take care of former staff members (retired cooks, maids, the widow of a caretaker) and that she ought to consider setting up a trust or writing a new will. He cautioned that “should you for some reason be unable to provide the support that these people have to rely upon” they could become “destitute.”
Huguette ignored the suggestion, but she did ask for an estimate of her current net worth. Kamsler informed her that she had roughly $300 million in assets, much of them tied up in real estate, paintings, tapestries, jewelry, silver, and antique musical instruments. Reassured that she had plenty of money, she continued to casually spend it. Huguette maintained her own checking account—and frequently wrote checks for tens of thousands of dollars—but did not balance it. She never bounced a check, but that was solely because bank managers would alert her lawyer that she was overdrawn and Bock would transfer cash (as much as $200,000 at a time) into her account.
Huguette’s extreme aversion to publicity and confrontation made her a difficult client to represent aggressively. Even when she was wronged, she refused to sue. Citibank had informed the heiress several years earlier that more than five million dollars’ worth of jewelry, including her mother’s wedding ring and a magnificent bracelet adorned with sapphires and diamonds, had been pilfered from a custodial account at a bank branch. “Somebody walked out of the vault with the jewelry,” says Kamsler. “Everything wasn’t taken but the majority was taken.” Unwilling to file suit for the full amount, she accepted the bank’s offer of a $3.5 million settlement. Citibank put the remainder of the jewelry in a safe deposit box in her name, with the agreement not to charge her.
Several years later, Citibank managed to make yet another extraordinary mistake. Citibank listed the box as abandoned. “They opened it up, sold the jewelry at auction, and then realized what they had done,” Kamsler recalled. “She wanted them to recover the jewelry. They said, ‘Can you describe it?’ ” Huguette had not seen the gems in decades. Once again, rather than fight, she told Wallace and Kamsler that she would accept significantly less money than the jewelry was worth.
The transition from the gentlemanly and cultured Donald Wallace, an opera and art lover, to the blunt Wallace Bock was jarring for Huguette’s inner circle. Acknowledging their personality differences, Bock says, “He was a WASP, I was a Jewish boy from Brooklyn.” Agnes Albert, Huguette’s niece, was accustomed to relying on Donald Wallace to pass along messages asking Huguette to call her. But after Agnes spoke to Wallace Bock in 1998 requesting a call with Huguette, she got off the phone in tears, complaining to her daughter Karine, “He is a dreadful man.” Karine would file that incident away in her memory bank for a later date.
Bock does not recall his conversation with Agnes Albert but says that he was in an awkward position as the middleman. “I probably treated her as I treated everyone who wanted to talk to Mrs. Clark directly,” he says. “My usual practice was to call and ask Mrs. Clark if she wanted to speak to that person, and either call them directly or set up something. She did not want to give out her phone number.”
Suzanne Pierre tried to intervene to find Huguette another lawyer. “My grandmother never liked him,” said Kati Despretz Cruz of Wallace Bock. “She wanted Huguette to change lawyers. She found lawyers but Huguette said, ‘It’s too late, I’m going to stay with him.’ ” Huguette had always been passive about hiring retainers. Rather than switch to a white-shoe full-service firm like Sullivan & Cromwell or use a well-known accounting firm, she accepted without question whoever took over her legal and financial affairs.
However, one constituency was pleased with Huguette’s new representatives. Donald Wallace had shied away from overtures by Beth Israel’s executives, but Bock and Kamsler proved amenable, charming two members of the hospital development staff during lunch at the kosher restaurant Abigael’s on February 17, 1998. In a two-page memo, Patricia Balsamini and Michelle Gelber gushed about the “fascinating” things they had learned about Huguette, from descriptions of her valuables to the fact that she insisted on keeping $8 million in a non-interest-bearing checking account.
The two men blurted out tales of Huguette’s generosity: she supported a ninety-year-old bookkeeper at Bellosguardo and gave cash to a temporary secretary who had expressed interest in studying opera in Europe. And they told the hospital staffers that Huguette did not have a current will. “Wally and Irving have been creative in the ideas they have suggested to her, for example turning the Santa Barbara property into a private foundation for scholarly pursuits, such as musical studies,” the two women noted in a memo. “The mayor of New Canaan approached them about donating the Connecticut property as a museum. Miss Clark is averse to change and will not follow through on any of these ideas.”
It was indiscreet for two of Huguette’s lawyers—first Donald Wallace and then Wallace Bock—to tell outsiders that their client refused to update the will that she had signed nearly seventy years ago. Their legal strategy was apparently trying to find allies willing to convince Huguette to reconsider any rational form of estate planning. Part of it was their professional responsibility, but there was also obvious self-interest involved. If she named her lawyer and accountant as executors, they would reap millions in fees after her death.
The money shimmered, just out of reach for so many supplicants. By then Huguette had given Beth Israel $695,000, a paltry sum given her net worth. After the two development officers reported back on the lunch conversation, hospital CEO Robert Newman immediately called a staff brainstorming session, which was followed by a flurry of e-mails including such suggestions as “we should strategize on how to get Hadassah to help us…”
Development staffer Stefanie Steel sent a cheeky e-mail to Dr. Newman on May 20, 1998: “So, has your mom had a chance to talk to Ms. Clark about the joy of making a will? Please advise.” Dr. Newman replied: “Yes, she spent an hour with her. My mother told Mrs. C of the great joy and spiritual satisfaction of preparing her will to ‘ensure care of those who loved her.’ ”
Unwilling to discuss this topic with Dr. Newman’s mother, Huguette instead insisted that they watch a tape of Christmas with the Smurfs. “I kid you not!” Dr. Newman wrote. “My mom spent thirty minutes watching the Smurfs. She deserves a medal—the lack of outcome not withstanding.”
Chapter Fifteen
The Great Giveaway
Huguette had long been a night owl, playing solitaire until 3 or 4 a.m., soothed by the repetitive pleasures of dealing and shuffling. Now during those long hours at night, while the busy hospital was at a standstill, she wrestled with a question that had always been there in the background—what to do with her money. Writing a new will would force Huguette to deal with the troubling sense of her own mortality. She dreaded the legal complexities that would accompany writing a last will and testament to replace the 1929 document beq
ueathing her entire fortune to her mother.
Yet by 1999, Huguette at age ninety-three was also conscious of the noblesse oblige that comes with vast wealth. People were depending on her, or at least on her money. A shrewd if often ethereal woman, Huguette reveled in the gratitude for what she always referred to as her “little gifts.” How pleasurable to see the surprise and glow on the faces of the lucky few—her friends, her nurses, her doctors, and anyone else who wandered into the vicinity and was understanding of her needs.
Why wait for death to spread joy? Huguette decided to write larger checks right now. The beneficiaries would range from her nurses to her hospital, her retainers, and her longtime friends, and as the amounts escalated, the steps that she took to cover her largesse eventually piqued the interest of curious others outside her chosen circle.
At the top of Huguette’s beneficiary list was the one woman she could not live without, the person whom she saw every day of the year. Hadassah remained at the center of Huguette’s life. A cynic might reduce theirs to a relationship akin to a grifter and her mark, but the relationship was far more complex and tender than that. “They were so good for each other,” says Marie Pompei, who had been Huguette’s original hospital staff nurse but now visited as a friend. “They were like mother and daughter, daughter and mother.”
Suzanne Pierre, the physician’s widow who was chauffeured twice a week to the hospital by Christopher Sattler, remained Huguette’s closest friend. The two women, closer in age and spirit, spoke several times a day by phone, ending with good-night calls that reassured Huguette. “It was very sweet and precious,” recalls Suzanne’s granddaughter, Kati Despretz Cruz, who often overheard the conversations. “She’d call to see how my grandmother was doing—‘I’ve been thinking of you, all my affection, we’ll talk in the morning.’ ”
Throughout her life, Huguette had never had to think about having enough money to do whatever she wanted. But she had been running through cash at a rapid rate and did not have enough on hand to give significant sums to her two confidants. For perhaps the first time ever, Huguette would have to sell possessions—treasured objects rich with memories—that had been in her life for decades.
The copper heiress, who had maintained her Fifth Avenue apartment as if she might return tomorrow, was going to have to leave bare spots on the walls. Two Impressionist paintings were consigned to the auction block: Paul Cézanne’s Pichet Des Grès, a handsome still life of an earthenware jug and fruit, was sent to Sotheby’s. The other painting to be deacquisitioned had more personal meaning for Huguette. She had purchased Claude Monet’s Les Trois Peupliers, Temps Gris—one of a series of lush landscapes featuring poplar trees and a meandering river—at a moment that she needed the comfort of beauty. She had acquired the painting in New York from the Durand-Ruel Galleries in 1930, just as she was heading off to Reno for her divorce. The Sotheby’s catalogue for November 1999, detailing the Monet’s provenance prior to sale, discreetly listed the last owner as “Mrs. H. C. Gower.”
When Huguette learned that the two paintings had sold for $25 million in total, she celebrated by telling Hadassah that she would receive $15 million and informing Suzanne that $10 million was coming her way. The arithmetic appeared to work perfectly except for the awkward—but unavoidable—matter of taxes. Huguette, the daughter of a robber baron, did not arrogantly claim like Leona Helmsley that “taxes are for the little people.” But Huguette chose not to dwell on unpleasant details.
Her accountant Irving Kamsler informed her by letter that she would owe $10 million in capital gains and $14 million in gift taxes, plus a generation-skipping transfer tax for the gift to Hadassah of $8.25 million. (In a quirk of tax law, if the age gap between the giver and the recipient is more than 37.5 years—a generation—the IRS levies an additional 55 percent tax.) According to Bock’s calculations, if Huguette wanted to give $25 million from the sale of the paintings to her friends, she would need to come up with an additional $7.25 million out of her own pocket to deal with the tax consequences. Huguette’s lawyer Wallace Bock urged her to delay or reduce her gifts.
“She wants to give me everything,” recalled Hadassah. “But attorney Bock said installment… there is no cash, said you have to wait.” The nurse was referring to Huguette’s decision to stagger the payments. Ignoring the tax issues raised by the sale of the painting, Huguette gave $10 million each to Suzanne and Hadassah. But she was forced to tell Hadassah that the other promised $5 million would have to come later. To placate the nurse, Huguette wrote an undated check for $5 million. Hadassah’s husband called Wallace Bock to complain. As months and then years passed, Hadassah became frustrated that the $5 million check was nothing more than a worthless piece of paper as long as Huguette resisted filling in the date. Huguette’s lawyer was irked, too. “I was upset there was this $5 million check floating around,” Bock said. “I felt that this wasn’t the way to do it. But this is the way Mrs. Clark sought to mollify Hadassah, who felt she would never collect the money she was promised.”
The nurse was not alone in seeing dollar signs above Huguette’s hospital bed; the administrators and doctors running Beth Israel Hospital wanted their share, too. On Thanksgiving Day in 1999, just a few weeks after the Sotheby’s auction, Beth Israel CEO Dr. Robert Newman stopped by Huguette’s hospital room to chat. Visiting a shut-in is a laudable holiday tradition. But Dr. Newman’s goal was not to cheer her up on that occasion but rather to convince her to write a new will. Beth Israel hoped to be among the beneficiaries.
The soft-spoken Huguette listened politely to his warnings about the financial dangers that might flow from a failure to tackle prudent estate planning. Huguette ignored the hospital CEO’s advice. But eager to remain in the good graces of the hospital’s administrators, a few months later she gave $160,000 to Beth Israel.
By this time, Huguette was writing checks with the same avidity that replicated her father’s behavior when he bought out the auction houses of Europe. Huguette was already paying private school tuition for the children of her nurse Geraldine Coffey and had given her $180,000 in bonuses. Now Geraldine asked for financial help to purchase an apartment at the Gatsby, a prewar rental building being converted into a full-service condo near Beth Israel North. Geraldine expressed concern that the condo conversion might not occur because apartments were selling too slowly. Huguette’s solution: she gave nearly $100,000 to Geraldine but also spent $1.1 million for a Gatsby apartment to be co-owned by Suzanne Pierre and her granddaughter, Kati Despretz Cruz. Entranced by the convenience of the Gatsby to her hospital room, she also bought an $800,000 two-bedroom there for Hadassah.
Hadassah already owned a home in Brooklyn courtesy of Huguette, a twenty-mile trip home at night. “I work late and Madame is worried. She wants me to have a place to stay every time that I’m late from work,” Hadassah said later. That problem was solved by the Gatsby purchase, but Hadassah was disappointed once she settled into the new condo on East Ninety-Sixth Street, between Park Avenue and Madison Avenue.
Her complaint was a familiar one to New Yorkers: the view was dreary from the back of the building, featuring the sight of a city bus terminal. Huguette’s solution was to buy Hadassah another $1.4 million apartment in the front of the building, this time with Central Park sightlines. This was one of those rare moments when Huguette’s largesse troubled Hadassah’s husband, Daniel, who was concerned about paying the monthly maintenance for both apartments. He recalls telling his wife, “We have a view, why do we have to stretch?” But he had no cause to worry. Huguette picked up those costs, too.
Huguette was now writing checks as if there were no tomorrow. She had typically given Wanda checks in the $6,000 to $10,000 range but suddenly a check arrived made out for $60,000. For decades, Huguette had exchanged Christmas cards with Lucy Lyle Tower, the granddaughter of the Clark family’s beloved physician, Dr. Gordon Lyle. Lucy’s husband, Whitney Tower, a Vanderbilt heir and Saratoga racing enthusiast, died in February 1999; the New York Times
ran a lengthy obituary. Rather than send a condolence note, Huguette included a little extra something in her Christmas card later that year. While spending her first Christmas as a widow at Jupiter Island, Lucy was sitting on the beach opening holiday cards and was stunned to find a $40,000 check from Huguette. “That blew my mind,” says Lucy, who for the next few years received similarly large checks. When Huguette was informed in 1999 that her great-nephew John Hall had died and the Corcoran was putting together a fund in his honor, she sent a check for $50,000.
Huguette retained fond memories of her childhood Spanish tutor, Margarita Vidal, who had traveled to Maine and Hawaii with the Clark family. Each year at Christmas the heiress gave $3,000 to Vidal’s college-professor son, Roberto Socas. As he recalls, “I would send her, every Christmas, a box of Whitman chocolates, which she loved for some stupid reason. It was cheap, not Godiva, but that was what she loved. She’d send me back a nice thank-you, or she’d call me up and we’d have a conversation about my kids.” Without any explanation, Huguette decided to make his holiday especially memorable with a check for $40,000.
By March 2000, Huguette had completed her ninth year in the hospital. Bill Clinton had survived impeachment and seven melodramatic years in the White House. But other than one trip to see a dentist, Huguette had not left the hospital and had rarely left her room. There was no medical reason for this self-imposed isolation, and no hospital psychiatrist had ever probed her agoraphobia. She could have strolled down the hallway and out to the neighboring park by the East River to breathe the fresh air at any time. But she did not want to leave the safety of her modest quarters.