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

by Meryl Gordon

  The public administrator’s petition was a reputation-killing document. Huguette’s longtime retainers were publicly transformed into rapacious villains. Hadassah was seen as Imelda Marcos in a nursing uniform. Now the rewards for the twenty years and the eighty-four-hour weeks that she had invested in Huguette could prove fool’s gold. She faced the real possibility of having to give it all back: the Cartier jewelry, the Stradivarius, the six homes, and the $5 million check that had obsessed her for so long.

  Forcing Hadassah to return this money would have meant an income transfer to Huguette’s other heirs. Yet even though Wanda Styka stood to benefit if additional cash flowed back into the estate, she was troubled by the clawback effort. “My godmother would have been so upset,” she said. “Can you imagine? She had given people gifts and now, they’re supposed to give them back?”

  The legal attack also underscored the shifting undercurrents and alliances in this complicated probate case. Two government agencies were involved, and at times they seemed to be acting at cross-purposes. The public administrator’s office, pursuing its mandate to investigate and reconcile Huguette’s finances, was busily discrediting the key players in her life: Hadassah, Wally Bock, and Irving Kamsler.

  But the New York State Attorney General’s office, which sent representatives to the court hearings, was charged with protecting her charitable bequest: establishing an arts foundation at Bellosguardo. If Huguette’s second will was thrown out because Hadassah, Wally, and Irving were found to have used undue influence on her or behaved inappropriately, then all of Huguette’s assets—including Bellosguardo—would go to her family members.

  The summer of 2012 was when the case moved from legal posturing to flesh-and-blood witnesses. Closed-door depositions were scheduled for fifty-five witnesses, who would be grilled for as long as three days each about their relationship with Huguette Clark. That number had been whittled down from initial requests for 167 witnesses. For a recluse, Huguette had accumulated a lot of acquaintances.

  As is standard practice, Hadassah was prepared in advance for her deposition by her lawyers, but she still stumbled over her lines. Wearing a purple jacket over a crisp white blouse and black pants, the nurse kept protesting that she had never demanded anything: “Madame is very generous, and we don’t force her to give us—we don’t ask for it, she just know our life.” Periodically, she would wail, “I give my life for her.” Asked inconvenient questions—such as did she call Wallace Bock and ask for her $5 million when Huguette was deathly ill—Hadassah experienced memory failure. She was inadvertently comic when she complained about her husband’s disastrous purchase of a Bentley, using Huguette’s money. She advised the lawyers, “So expensive to repair… Any one of you guys to buy this, forget it. It is hell.”

  These were confrontational sessions as rival lawyers constantly interrupted and scolded one another. Irving Kamsler was nervous when he arrived for his deposition at the Lexington Avenue office of Morken’s firm, but his blood pressure jumped when he encountered Carla and Ian, who had come to watch him testify. “I’m trying to be as relaxed as I can under the circumstances and they’re staring me down,” he recalls. “Ian was sitting there with a smirk on his face.” The air-conditioning was not working on this hot day and Kamsler began to sweat, drops rolling down his face. It was Ian who felt compassion and ran out to buy a fan to cool the room down. That was a rare break in an acrimonious day as Kamsler repeatedly took the Fifth Amendment when asked why he had not filed gift taxes for Huguette.

  Wallace Bock had an even more extreme reaction to the stress. After his first grueling day of being deposed, he went to the hospital for a long-scheduled knee replacement. Right after that surgery, Bock had a major heart attack and ended up having triple bypass surgery, delaying his return to the witness chair for several months.

  During their depositions, the Beth Israel team went to great pains to defend their reputations. Dr. Robert Newman, the president of Beth Israel, insisted that he had been unaware that doctors and nurses at his hospital had accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from Huguette. But he admitted that gift giving happens: “I believe it probably is done. I think it would be an absurdity to claim that it is never done.”

  Following the philosophy that the best defense is a good offense, Dr. Jack Rudick used his time in the witness chair to attack the Clark family descendants, claiming that Huguette had felt abandoned by them. “She just said she had no contact with them,” he said. “She was very resentful of the fact that none of them had deigned to see her or to contact her… She was very upset by that.”

  For Huguette’s relatives, the underlying question during their depositions boiled down to one sentence: where had they been all these years?

  “I expected it to be adversarial but it was more so than I expected,” Ian Devine says. “It was mentally challenging, these two guys were trying to catch me in everything. ‘Did you invite your aunt to your high school graduation? You’re a horrible person. Did you invite her to your wedding?’ ‘No.’ ”

  But both Ian and his brother Rodney had written to Huguette in the 1970s and ’80s asking to meet her, and she had kept those notes. Huguette’s packrat tendencies served the relatives well, offering tangible proof that her family members had tried intermittently to stay in touch. Huguette had held on to everything: invitations to Carla’s 1977 wedding, a 1990s London book party for Karine, and the wedding of Karine’s daughter, Geraldine; Christmas cards from a half dozen family members; and numerous letters from Karine’s mother, Agnes Albert.

  Only a handful of the Clark relatives had ever met Huguette, and their memories were sepia toned. In his deposition, Huguette’s great-nephew Gerald Gray recalled spending time on the beach at Bellosguardo with Huguette when he was about nine years old in the mid-1940s. “We were sitting on the sand, maybe very low beach chairs,” testified Gray. “She sat behind her mother and didn’t participate in the conversation at all… Never said a word. Just stared at me.” He recalled that his mother said afterward, “It’s so sad that all she can do is play with dolls.”

  That sole recollection did not stop Gray from issuing a diagnosis of her mental health, based on what he had since read and heard. “Huguette has a schizoid paranoid disorder, possibly complicated later by paranoid ideation, so that she could not have chosen to be private,” he said with total confidence about a woman he had last seen as a child. “She was compelled by mental illness to isolate herself.” Gray acknowledged that he had never tried to contact Huguette during her lifetime.

  But the family depositions proved to be a sideshow to the main event. As multiple witnesses each relived that fateful day when Huguette signed her second will, the accounts resembled an extremely off-key version of “Yes, I Remember It Well” from Gigi. Bock, Kamsler, and Lewis Siegel offered their recollections about that day while the other key witnesses—Bock’s secretary, Danita Rudisill, and nurse Steven Pyram—gave conflicting testimony. A trial would center on deciphering the extremely hazy events that occurred on that spring afternoon in 2005. Who had actually been in Huguette’s room? Had undue influence occurred? Did the heiress read her will, and did she understand the provisions? All these facts were in dispute, which caused major headaches for the beneficiaries of Huguette’s will.

  “What should have been a basic ministerial act was a huge problem. It was botched,” says John Graziano, Wanda’s lawyer. “And that became my biggest concern. You don’t bring your secretary and grab a nurse off the floor to witness a will you suspect will be challenged.” Harvey Corn, Hadassah’s lawyer, worried out loud that the wealthy nurse was “a hostage” to the signing ceremony.

  If Huguette’s will was flawed, however, so were the claims of the Clark relatives. At least that seemed to be the opinion of Justice Glen. She was retiring at the end of 2012 and would not be trying the case, which left her even more free than usual to speak her mind. At a hearing on September 7, when a lawyer for Holland and Knight, the firm representing Bock, demand
ed to know what evidence the Clark relatives had to prove Huguette was incompetent, the justice interjected with a cynical answer. “I think the way it generally happens here is somebody says, ‘Oh my God, my relative died with a lot of money and I didn’t get any,’ ” Glen said. “Goes to see a lawyer and a lawyer says, ‘Do you think it’s possible that she didn’t have capacity or it was the subject of undue influence?’ ‘Well, it must have been, because I am her relative and why would she leave money to the nurse and not to me?’ ”

  Justice Glen also appeared unimpressed with the arguments painting Beth Israel as unscrupulous in soliciting gifts. “I think it’s pretty clear that Beth Israel was a minor player here in terms of how this will turned out,” she said, adding a few minutes later, “And, you know, all not-for-profit institutions have their hands out. They have to have their hands out.”

  Settlement talks occurred sporadically as the case dragged on, but all sides were so far apart that the conversations amounted to the equivalent of posturing on Capitol Hill. John Morken took an aggressive stance early on, insisting in a meeting on November 12, 2012, that the Clark relatives should receive 75 percent of Huguette’s estate. In a follow-up session a month later, he stated that he wanted Bellosguardo to be sold, with the expected $100 million in proceeds put into a charitable foundation that would include family members on the board.

  The protectors of Bellosguardo, Carl Distefano and Jason Lilien of the Attorney General’s office charity bureau, rejected that money grab out of hand. They did not offer an alternate proposal. So no settlement talks occurred for months on end, even as the legal bills mounted into the millions.

  The Attorney General’s office was used to dealing with high-profile cases: Lilien and Distefano had helped settle the complex Brooke Astor probate estate, but this time around the public-service veterans were in an odd position. They would either have to choose a side in a courtroom battle or find a way to broker a settlement. Picking a side meant coming to a conclusion about whether Huguette had the mental capacity to sign her second will, or backing the argument made by the Clark family and the Corcoran Gallery that she had been coerced.

  After spending a decade as a corporate lawyer at the New York firm Weil, Gotshal, and Manges, Lilien had joined the AG’s office in 2008. He had an understanding of Manhattan politics after working pro bono for five years on the creation of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. His colleague Distefano, who had worked in the AG’s office since 2000, was an NYU law school grad who had clerked at the Appellate Court and was familiar with the nuances of estate and trust law.

  For information on the heiress’s state of mind, they sought out Elizabeth Loewy, the assistant district attorney who had met with Huguette three times in the fall of 2010. Loewy informed the lawyers from the Attorney General’s office that the elderly heiress had been able to answer questions and insisted that no one had forced her to do anything. Loewy’s eyewitness account made a strong impression. Loewy had put aside the elder abuse investigation of Huguette Clark’s finances, since the findings had not merited a criminal indictment.

  The only thing all sides appeared to agree on: Wanda Styka had been genuinely close to her godmother and deserved a bequest. But how much? Huguette had not left Wanda a specific amount, but rather a percentage of the residue, difficult to calculate under the circumstances. Her lawyer, John Graziano, was offended when the paltry sum of $1 million was suggested at a settlement conference. As he recalls, “I got tired of everyone telling me how wonderful Wanda was, and then in the next sentence, offering far less than she deserved.”

  After a delay of several months following Justice Glen’s retirement, the Clark case was transferred to Justice Nora Anderson. She set a trial date for September 17, 2013. All the lawyers publicly claimed that they did not want a costly trial that could eat up Huguette’s assets, but no one wanted to give any ground. Summer vacations were canceled at law firms as the billable hours soared.

  In Santa Barbara, the voluble former mayor Sheila Lodge had organized a group, Friends of Bellosguardo, to protest the Clark family’s efforts to block Huguette’s will. Current mayor Helene Schneider had joined her in a press conference to send a message that the city would not quietly stand by. In 2011, Holland and Knight, the firm that Bock had hired to probate the estate, had filed papers creating the foundation. But now in August 2013, officers were named: Sheila Lodge and James Hurley, a Santa Barbara lawyer who had handled California legal matters for Huguette. They promptly demanded a seat at the table in New York in any settlement negotiations or trial.

  Just maintaining the twenty-three-acre estate had cost Huguette nearly $1 million per year. The aging plumbing and electrical systems had never been updated. Ample funds would be needed to keep it going as a foundation, much more than Huguette had provided for in her will. The local officials insisted that they could raise the money. Jason Lilien of the Attorney General’s office flew out to Santa Barbara in August to meet with the current and former mayors and tour Bellosguardo. “It had a Downton Abbey feel,” he recalls. “It was a home of remarkable taste and character which was exceptionally well-preserved.” After seeing the caretaker’s cottage and Huguette’s separate beach house and stretch of private beach at Bellosguardo, Lilien theorized that if necessary, these properties could be sold, with the cash used to underwrite the foundation. He came away with the strong sense that a settlement could be structured that would save Bellosguardo, pay off the IRS obligations, and still leave enough cash to divide up among the warring parties.

  But time was running out. On August 9, Justice Anderson declined a summary judgment motion that would have allowed Wallace Bock’s lawyers to admit Huguette’s will to probate and avoid a trial. She made it abundantly clear in her decision that she had real concerns about the validity of Huguette’s April 2005 will signing. The justice noted that there were “myriad disputed facts” and spent several pages citing all the conflicting testimony.

  Large probate cases almost always settle. Yet this legal behemoth seemed to be moving inexorably toward a jury trial. Finally forced to take a position, the Attorney General’s office filed a document on August 22 in support of Huguette’s will. Jason Lilien and Carl Distefano had decided that they believed that she had not been coerced, and that her will (creating Bellosguardo as a foundation and giving 60 percent of the residue to Hadassah) represented her true wishes. They sided against Huguette’s relatives.

  Meanwhile, both sides hired jury consultants in late August to conduct mock trials in front of focus groups. The pricy rehearsals would allow the lawyers to figure out the weak spots in their cases and how best to pounce on their adversaries. Would jurors find the hardworking Hadassah admirable, or greedy? Would Irving Kamsler’s felony conviction as an Internet sex predator destroy his credibility on issues involving Huguette? Did the Clark relatives come across as sympathetic or johnny-come-latelys, interested in Huguette only for her money?

  Even though Wallace Bock was no longer an executor of Huguette’s estate, the firm that he had hired, Holland and Knight, had continued to take on the role of defending her 2005 will. “We felt we had an obligation to make sure that her wishes to create the Bellosguardo Foundation were carried out,” said John Dadakis of Holland and Knight. The firm convened three sets of twelve-person focus groups. Participants were given detailed statements presenting both sides of the case. The lawyers needed to vehemently argue the facts both ways; otherwise, the exercise would be a waste of money.

  The reactions of these would-be jurors varied so wildly that it seemed impossible to predict a likely verdict. The first focus group upheld the will. The second group wanted to toss it out. The third group was informed that they could uphold Huguette’s will but pick and choose who would inherit—as a real jury could do. This group voted to back Huguette’s will, as long as Hadassah, Wallace Bock, and Irving Kamsler received absolutely nothing. If that happened, Wanda and Bellosguardo would be the chief beneficiaries.

  The
demographics and income levels of jurors are a factor in any trial, but the reactions to Hadassah were so intense that all expectations were reversed. The working assumption was that blue-collar workers would relate to the hardworking nurse, believing that she had been rightly rewarded for her devotion. Instead, the lower-income focus group members distrusted Hadassah based on the absurd quantities of cash and possessions that she had already received.

  “To me that was surprising,” says John Graziano, Wanda’s lawyer. “It runs contrary to conventional wisdom.” John Dadakis, of Holland and Knight, added, “We thought the jurors with her similar background would have an affinity for her. But it was the college-educated people who believed our case.” Indeed, the affluent could appreciate the pleasures of disinheriting relatives and rewarding loyal staffers.

  John Morken, representing the Clark relatives, had also conducted focus groups out on Long Island, and he claimed that the results were favorable to his cause. He had kept a tight leash on his clients, urging them not to return calls from reporters, but on September 6, 2013, he arranged for me to meet with Ian Devine, Carla Hall, and Karine McCall in his office along with public relations representative Chris Giglio. Our understanding was that the family’s remarks would be embargoed for use until after the case was resolved.

  For nearly three hours, Carla, Ian, and Karine poured out their tales of the past few years, finishing each other’s sentences at times as if prepped and interrupting at other moments to add details. Five years ago, they had suspected that something had gone wrong with Tante Huguette’s life, and now they felt vindicated after learning about the $90 million gift tax debacle and the public administrator’s claim that Hadassah, Bock, Kamsler, and the Beth Israel doctors had abused Huguette’s trust. “For me, this isn’t about money, it’s about values,” Ian insisted. “This is a family member, whatever her vulnerability and emotional state, she was taken advantage of big time.” Karine, who had initially launched the family’s investigation in 2008, added, “It made such a vivid impression, looking into those horrifying charges.”