The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark

by Meryl Gordon

  Justice Glen made a pivotal decision early on that shaped the battle over Huguette Clark’s fortune. After ascertaining that the district attorney’s office was still investigating Huguette’s affairs for evidence of elder abuse, the judge decided to take protective action. Rather than allow Bock and Kamsler’s chosen firm, Holland and Knight, to solely manage the estate, Glen announced that she was appointing the public administrator to jointly handle the job. The public administrator typically presides over estates when a person dies without a will. This development did not bode well for Bock and Kamsler, since it meant that Huguette’s tangled finances would be scrutinized in painstaking detail by an independent agency.

  On the sunny morning of August 17, 2011, when Justice Glen called the first hearing in Case 1995/1375, a dozen principal lawyers marched up to the front of the room. The penny-pinching William Andrews Clark had traveled by mules through snowstorms in the 1860s to deliver goods to mining camps; now the remnants of his fortune would pay the billable hours of these pin-striped pleaders. In the majestic high-ceilinged courtroom, with marble fireplaces, ornate carved wooden moldings, and red drapes, the lineup included lawyers representing the Corcoran Gallery, Beth Israel Hospital, and the New York State Attorney General’s charity bureau, on hand to protect the designation of Bellosguardo as an arts foundation.

  Nineteen Clark descendants had filed an objection to Huguette’s will. Although Carla, Ian, and Karine had initially been drawn into Tante Huguette’s orbit out of altruism, concerned that she was being mistreated, this family quest had morphed into a battle over her money. Clark relatives from three branches of the family, located in multiple time zones from Paris to California, were now involved.

  Underscoring long-simmering frictions, two relatives, both grandchildren of the racetrack-loving Charles Clark, had not joined the legal fracas: Timothy Gray, who had been adopted into the Clark family, was so estranged from his three siblings that they did not have an address or a phone number for him. (Holland and Knight hired a private detective to find him, since Gray needed to be informed of his legal rights.) Other Clark siblings also had rocky relations with one another: Karine McCall and her sister Victoria Clare Sujata, seven years younger, had not spoken for two decades. The author of a book about a Tibetan yogi, Sujata declined to be drawn into what promised to be a bruising public probate fight.

  To start unraveling Huguette’s finances, Justice Glen commanded Wallace Bock and Irving Kamsler to produce Huguette’s financial records dating back to 1996, including her canceled checks. After spending decades protecting Huguette’s privacy, the lawyer and accountant were troubled that this information would become public. But when their lawyers asked that the files be sealed, Glen denied the request. After the 275-page volume was filed at the Surrogate’s Court clerk’s office at 31 Chambers Street, reporters were riveted by Huguette’s outlandish spending, such as toy and doll purchases ($2.5 million to the Parisian store Au Nain Bleu, $729,000 on Theriault’s doll auctions) and the $440,000 she distributed in staff bonuses on November 16, 2009. The New York Post was so enraptured by the high-spending Huguette that the newspaper ran two stories on November 20, 2011: ALL DOLLED UP: ECCENTRIC’S OWN TOYLAND and THE HEIRESS AND THE NURSE: HEALTH WORKER BECAME SCION’S BE$T PAL.

  A team of lawyers and paralegals descended on Huguette’s apartments to examine her files. They were stunned by the sheer accumulation of documents and photographs. If Huguette had not been able to store her things in forty-two rooms, she would have been in danger of rivaling the hoarding Collyer brothers. She had kept everything: 1925 receipts for a Louis XV sofa and Jacobean table, a 1928 Cartier invoice for a $320 gold cigarette case, her 1930 divorce decree, a 1942 order for French chinoiserie satin curtains, Bonwit Teller summer storage bills from 1964 for fur coats (sable, ermine, mink, fox), contractor’s estimates for a 1964 kitchen renovation, a January 1968 grocery order of raspberries from Winter Market, sketches for couture clothing from Jean Patou in Paris.

  There were hundreds of personal letters and telegrams, including her parents’ tender 1923 love letters as well as affectionate letters and telegrams to Huguette from the important men in her life—Tadé, Bill, and Etienne. She kept notes jotted on scrap paper about TV shows she planned to tape (such as the groundbreaking PBS show about the dysfunctional Loud clan, An American Family) and yearly reminders of “Daddy’s birthday” on January 8. She held on to ancient Christmas apartment tip lists and care labels for her Pringle of Scotland cashmere sweaters. Lawyers’ letters dating back to the 1930s included accounts of an argument with her downstairs Fifth Avenue neighbor over a leak and an unsuccessful effort to buy and preserve her childhood home in Butte. It was overwhelming. Paralegals began scanning the vast detritus, the residue of a 104-year life. Eventually, more than seventy-five boxes of documents and photographs were carted out.

  The Clark relatives hired a new lawyer that fall, John Morken of the Long Island firm Farrell Fritz. Born in China, the son of an evangelist Christian minister, he had an unconventional background. After dropping out of Swarthmore, he cut broccoli as a farmworker and worked in a steel mill before returning to a white-collar path, finishing at Swarthmore, attending NYU law school, and clerking for an Appellate Court judge. The Clark relatives had contributed money toward his initial retainer, but Morken had taken the case on contingency, gambling that he could win big.

  Morken used colorful, outraged prose in legal papers filed on November 28 challenging Huguette’s will, charging that Wallace Bock and Irving Kamsler had used “deceit, undue influence and exploitation” and “took control of her life, isolated her from her family, and ultimately stripped her of her free will, as well as millions of dollars.” Much more important than the angry rhetoric was the biggest revelation so far in this case. As part of discovery, Kamsler’s firm had alerted the other law firms that Huguette had signed the earlier March 7, 2005, will, under which the Clark relatives would have inherited. Morken made this information public. The Associated Press sent out a bulletin: COPPER HEIRESS SIGNED 2 WILLS IN 2 MONTHS.

  A ticking time bomb had been buried in Huguette’s finances for nearly two decades, and the inevitable detonation occurred six months after her death. Two IRS agents contacted Peter Schram, the public administrator’s counsel, in November 2011 to say that they had been unable to find gift tax returns filed on Huguette’s behalf. Where was the missing paperwork?

  So the search began for documents that the lawyers assumed had been misfiled. John Dadakis assigned Holland and Knight staffers to examine records provided by Bock and Kamsler, but the forms did not turn up. A puzzled Dadakis called Bock, who insisted that it was Kamsler’s job to prepare gift taxes. After hemming and hawing, Kamsler finally confessed that he had never filed the returns. “We were blindsided,” said Dadakis. He had to alert the judge and the other lawyers that there was a huge problem with the Internal Revenue Service. The public administrator’s office filed a scorching petition charging that Bock and Kamsler’s tax fraud and negligence had led to a stunning $90 million tax bill, including penalties, potentially knocking Huguette’s estate down to $210 million.

  Justice Glen gave Bock and Kamsler a courtroom tongue-lashing on December 23, calling the two men “unfit to serve by reason of dishonesty… violation of their fiduciary obligations, waste of the estate, dishonesty with respect to authorities, violation of the rules of professional conduct, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera…” Prior to the hearing, Kamsler bowed to the inevitable and withdrew as an executor. Justice Glen made it official, suspending Kamsler as an executor as well as Bock, who continued to proclaim his innocence, even though his itemized legal bills to Huguette listed gift taxes as a responsibility.

  That same day, the public administrator’s counsel made another surprising announcement: he was planning to demand that Hadassah return the $5 million that she had received in 2009, since he could not find any documents showing that Huguette had authorized the cash transfer. “I can guarantee you,” Schram sai
d, “I’m not giving away any secrets, that that gift is going to be the subject of clawback proceedings.” Hadassah had now been warned that instead of receiving more of Huguette’s money from the will, she was in danger of losing what she already had.

  For Bock and Kamsler, who had served Huguette side by side for years, the court hearing resulted in a public rift. Holland and Knight dropped Kamsler as a client while continuing to represent Bock. Bock, who had recently turned eighty, seemed stunned to find himself in the center of a legal firestorm over his work for Huguette. “I figured she would go eventually, and I’d be able to relax. Be the executor of the estate, slowly dispose of the property she had, and collect my commissions,” said Bock. Did he ever imagine that this day would come, with his reputation and judgment under attack? “Not in my wildest dreams.”

  The battle for Huguette’s estate was becoming a referendum on her character: Who was she, really? Huguette’s state of mind was at the center of the case. Her psyche was being dissected at Surrogate’s Court as each side argued for the point of view that would make their clients rich.

  Attorneys for Hadassah Peri and Beth Israel Hospital insisted that Huguette was smart, well-informed, and independent, while the lawyer for her relatives, who had not seen her in decades, portrayed her as a defenseless centenarian who had been exploited by greedy caretakers. In February 2012, Clark family lawyer John Morken filed legal papers claiming that Huguette had been coerced by Hadassah, Wallace Bock, and Irving Kamsler to sign both of her 2005 wills and was “not of sound mind or memory.”

  This would be difficult to prove, since there was nothing in Huguette’s medical records that indicated she suffered from any form of dementia or senility.

  It is a time-honored tactic in a probate fight to charge that an elderly person was incompetent, but this portrayal in legal papers and the tabloids felt disrespectful to those people who had actually known Huguette well. Marie Pompei, who had nothing financially to gain, fondly remembered her final few conversations with Huguette in 2011. She vehemently insisted, “You can’t tell me she was out of it.”

  Even as the legal battle lines were being drawn, Huguette’s possessions—her New York real estate and her jewelry—were being liquidated. Rarely in high-end Manhattan real estate do apartments come up for sale that have been off the market for eighty-six years, so it was not surprising that Huguette’s sprawling Fifth Avenue properties drew tremendous interest. IT’LL BE HUGUETTE! BROKERS LICK THEIR CHOPS OVER CITY’S BIGGEST LISTING, wrote the New York Observer. Mary Rutherfurd of Brown Harris Stevens, who sold Laurance Rockefeller’s triplex apartment to Rupert Murdoch for $44 million in 2004, landed the listing. She began ushering potential buyers through Huguette’s long-unoccupied homes in early March. The furniture had been emptied out, but the vintage wallpaper and fixtures spoke of bygone days, a home trapped in amber. “It was like going back in time one hundred years,” one would-be buyer told the New York Times.

  The Clark family descendants were given a private tour. As Carla Hall recalls, “The most fascinating thing for me was Huguette’s paintings, the stained-glass windows, and the view. I thought she was a good painter.” Adds Celia Gray, a Clark descendant who had flown in from California, “I was very impressed with her talent.” Karine McCall was the only relative present who had been there before and remembered visiting Huguette and her lively mother, Anna, back in the 1950s, a lifetime ago. Karine recalled that every time she saw mother and daughter, the dynamics were the same. “Anna did all the talking, Huguette would sit quietly by. She was very sweet, very shy, didn’t say much.”

  The trophy real estate listing brought in an initial $31.5 million bid for two of Huguette’s apartments by the prime minister of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani. But the exclusive co-op board turned him down. Two Wall Street masters of the universe ultimately won the right to live in Huguette’s treasured lairs. She had purchased her twelfth-floor aerie for $31,500 in 1955; hedge fund manager Boaz Weinstein paid $25 million for the space. Frederick Iseman, the founder of a private equity firm, bought most of her two eighth-floor apartments for $22.5 million. Now her heirs—whoever they turned out to be—would reap the rewards.

  Huguette’s diamonds, emeralds, and pearls, the dazzling daughter-of-a-robber-baron spoils, had been locked away in a safe deposit box at a Chase branch on the Upper East Side for more than fifty years until the estate’s lawyers turned the key. To generate interest in an auction of the jewelry, Christie’s devoted an entire room to the reclusive Huguette in its ground-floor Rockefeller Center headquarters. Her colorful self-portrait, wearing an artist’s smock and carrying a palette, dominated the space. Photographs revealed glimpses of her long-gone public life: Parisian baby pictures, girlish photos with her sister and father, high-spirited deb years, and a vamping, laughing 1930s formal portrait in a floral gown. During the week before the auction, crowds gathered in the small space, speculating out loud about Huguette. This private woman would have been mortified that images of her life were being used to boost sale prices.

  Visitors were permitted to try on her jewelry; staffers unlocked the glass cases while security guards warily stood by. Prices went Lucy-in-the-sky-with-diamonds-high during the April 17, 2012, auction. Huguette’s rare pink diamond sold for $15.7 million, more than double the estimate; her twenty-carat diamond ring was bid up to $2.7 million; Huguette’s pearls brought in $362,000; a ruby, emerald, and sapphire Tiffany bracelet sold for $220,000, more than four times the auction house’s estimate. The entire take was $21 million. Karine McCall’s daughter, Geraldine, bought a gold child’s bracelet for $3,500, explaining, “I wanted a connection to her.”

  The Corcoran Gallery had been overjoyed to receive William Andrews Clark’s staggering art collection upon his death in 1925, and it stood to reason that the museum would be equally delighted by Huguette’s gift of a Monet Water Lilies. It is unheard of for an institution to turn down a painting worth an estimated $25 million.

  But executives at the beleaguered Corcoran Gallery had become concerned about landing on the wrong side of history. The museum was in such financial trouble that the board was exploring a sale of its historic building in downtown Washington, including the William Andrews Clark wing. The Corcoran had been cozying up to Clark’s descendants for decades. Now the accusations by family members that Huguette’s will was tainted left the museum in a very uncomfortable position.

  The Corcoran quietly filed a two-page document in April that was the equivalent of tossing Huguette’s Monet out the fifth-floor window of Judge Glen’s courtroom. So much for Irving Kamsler’s prediction to Huguette that the museum would be “ecstatic” over the gift. The Corcoran’s lawyers announced that they did not believe Huguette was “mentally capable” of signing the second will and accused Hadassah, Bock, and Kamsler of “moral coercion.” By siding with the Clark descendants, the museum was committing financial hara-kiri. If Huguette’s will was tossed out, the museum had no claim to the painting.

  Hadassah’s lawyer, Harvey Corn, later railed that the museum’s lawyers were not prudently watching out for their own interests. “They’ve got a $20 million painting that they are not protecting,” Corn said. “This is an institution that’s going broke.” He accused the Corcoran’s attorneys of “doing the bidding of family members.” Museum officials insisted to David Montgomery of the Washington Post that there was no side arrangement with the family and that the gallery had taken the step out of an obligation to respect the “true intentions” of donors. The Corcoran’s legal tactic—giving up the Monet without a fight—was seen as inexplicable by other attorneys involved in the case.

  Clawbacks entered the common vocabulary following the Bernie Madoff case, as lawyers tried to get back money from one group of people in order to give it to other victims of the Ponzi scheme. Now public administrator’s counsel Peter Schram wanted to apply the same approach to Huguette’s estate. After examining her financial records and the enormous sums that she had handed
over to her nurses, doctors, the hospital, and her lawyer and accountant, Schram had concluded that her trusted retainers had abused her trust.

  On May 22, Schram filed a phone-book-sized petition demanding the return of $44 million, with exhibits including Bock’s and Kamsler’s correspondence with Huguette. More than two-thirds of that sum (nearly $31 million) came from Hadassah and her family, representing every gift that Huguette had given them in the previous twenty years. Schram also asked for $2.1 million from Dr. Jack Rudick and his wife, nearly $1 million from Dr. Singman and his family, $1.1 million from night nurse Geraldine Coffey, and even $500,000 that Huguette had donated to the Corcoran. The public administrator wanted to dun Wallace Bock for the entire $1.85 million that Huguette had donated at his behest to the Israeli security system in the West Bank and force Irving Kamsler to give back $435,000.

  Schram did not spare Beth Israel Hospital, heaping special scorn upon the medical facility for its avarice. “At no time did Beth Israel, its staff, or any other physician or expert conduct a neurological examination or psychiatric examination of Mrs. Clark or otherwise ensure that she possessed the capacity required to make a gift to Beth Israel.” He demanded that the hospital return the $3.5 million from the sale of the Manet and $135,000 in cash donations.

  Beth Israel would later respond in logic-defying fashion. Attorney Marvin Wexler, representing the hospital, pointed out that from 2002 to 2007, Huguette had “repeatedly declined” requests by Beth Israel for donations, “proving that during that time Ms. Clark knew her own mind and acted on her own will… Ms. Clark was a strong-willed individual who did nothing that she did not want to do…” In other words, the hospital now purported to be glad that she had cut them off when she did.