by Meryl Gordon
Sen. William Andrews Clark with his second wife and Huguette’s mother, Anna La Chapelle Clark. The senator met the former Miss La Chapelle when she was just fifteen and he was a widower thirty-nine years her senior. Anna, prematurely deaf, used a boxy hearing aid, seen here. (Courtesy of Roberto E. Socas)
Huguette playing with her dolls on the porch of her family’s home in Butte, Montana. (Courtesy of Christopher Sattler)
Huguette with her father and her elder sister, Andrée (left), at Columbia Gardens, an amusement park that her father built in Butte. (Courtesy of Montana Historical Society)
Huguette in a grass skirt in Hawaii with a friend circa 1920. The Clark family made numerous visits to the island, where Huguette befriended and learned to surf from Olympic champion Duke Kahanamoku. (Courtesy of Roberto E. Socas)
Huguette, in the background, frolicking on the beach with her violin teacher, Jaquita Vidal. The Clarks hired Vidal and her sister Margarita as tutors and traveling companions for their daughters. (Courtesy of Roberto E. Socas)
Huguette on the day of her wedding to William MacDonald Gower, a Princeton man and the son of her father’s longtime accountant. It was a very small wedding at her family’s Santa Barbara estate. (Courtesy of Tina Harrower, the flower girl)
The marriage was brief and the press chronicled the details. (A $30-A-WEEK HUSBAND FOR THE $50,000,000 HEIRESS was a 1928 headline in the Salt Lake Tribune.) From the time she was a child Huguette’s life was tabloid fodder. (Courtesy of newspaperarchive.com and the Salt Lake Tribune)
Tadé Styka, who was one of the most sought-after painters of his day—his works included a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt that hangs in the White House. He was also Huguette’s painting teacher and confidant. She called him “Cher Maitre,” and for twenty-four years after her divorce Huguette came for weekly painting lessons at his Central Park South studio. She eventually became godmother to his daughter, Wanda. (Courtesy of Wanda Styka)
A photograph of a Styka portrait of Huguette painting a male nude. She showed her work at both Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery and New York’s National Academy of Design. (Courtesy of Wanda Styka)
Bellosguardo, the twenty-three-acre Clark family compound in Santa Barbara overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Huguette spent several months a year there for three decades but ceased visiting the estate in the early fifties, even though she continued to pay for its upkeep until her death in 2011. Bellosguardo became a key asset in the battle over her estate. (Photograph by @JohnWiley/flickr.com/jw4pix)
Irving Kamsler (above) was Huguette’s accountant (seen here with his wife, Judi), and Wallace Bock (right) was her attorney. In her later years the two men acted as gatekeepers. (Kamsler photograph by Martha FitzSimon; Bock photograph by Christopher Sadowski)
Hadassah Peri became Huguette’s private duty nurse in 1991 and was eventually given $31 million in gifts, which included real estate, cash, a Bentley, and antique Cartier jewelry. (Photograph by J. C. Rice)
Chris Sattler, a high-end Manhattan contractor originally hired by Huguette to renovate her Fifth Avenue apartment, became one of her lifelines to the outside world during her twenty years in the hospital.
(Left to right) Karine McCall, Ian Devine, and Carla Hall—three of the Clark relatives who grew concerned about Tante Huguette’s whereabouts. (Photograph by Angela Jimenez)
Huguette’s painting of the view from her Fifth Avenue apartment, where she lived until 1991. The last time she was seen by her relatives was in 1968. (Reproduced with the permission of the Estate of Huguette Clark)
Acknowledgments
When Huguette Clark’s obituary appeared on page one of the New York Times on May 25, 2011, the executives at Grand Central Publishing—publisher Jamie Raab, editor in chief Deb Futter, and executive editor John Brodie—were so intrigued by Huguette’s life that they wanted to know more. Since my first book, Mrs. Astor Regrets, centered on the final years of another memorable Social Register centenarian, Brooke Astor, they thought of me for this book project. I am very grateful to the three of them for sending me off on an absorbing three-year quest to understand the reclusive, talented, and much-misunderstood Huguette Clark.
As he shepherded this idea into a manuscript, John Brodie has been the dream editor, very supportive and a pleasure to work with. His astute suggestions and advice have made the book so much better. I am grateful to unflappable production editor Carolyn Kurek and savvy senior publicist Caitlin Mulrooney-Lysky for their efforts on my behalf. Also, the efforts of copy editor Mark Steven Long, vetting attorney John Pelosi, and Karen Andrews, Grand Central’s senior VP for legal and business affairs, were much appreciated.
I want to thank my agent, Gail Hochman, for her friendship, encouragement, and rapid-fire skill as a negotiator. This was a whirlwind experience from phone call to contract: within weeks I was on a plane to Butte to learn about Huguette’s copper-baron father, Sen. William Andrews Clark.
I appreciate everyone who took the time to speak with me. But two people—both close to Huguette Clark—made all the difference in the world, granting me exclusive interviews. Wanda Styka, Huguette’s goddaughter, not only discussed in multiple conversations her half-century relationship with Huguette, but spent weeks searching through file cabinets of archival materials from her father, Tadé Styka, who was Huguette’s painting teacher and confidant. Wanda found letters, journal entries, and appointment calendars chock-full of information about Huguette, and even translated her father’s Polish notes into English on my behalf.
Christopher Sattler, who was Huguette’s assistant for twenty years, proved an invaluable source of anecdotes and observations. He spoke to Huguette five days a week; she told him stories about her past. Like Wanda, Chris cared deeply about Huguette, and his memories convey her intelligence, her unwavering passion for perfection, and her thoughtful personality.
Several other people believed in this book early on and were enormously helpful but requested anonymity. I send along my heartfelt thanks for your guidance and friendship.
My book is both a biography of Huguette Clark and the story of the high-stakes fight over her $300 million fortune. I was able to talk to virtually all the key players in this legal battle, and I have tried to explain how Huguette’s unusual life choices and complicated relationships led to this public drama. Huguette’s embattled accountant, Irving Kamsler, who worked for her for thirty-two years, gave me six hours of exclusive interviews, and Huguette’s lawyer, Wallace Bock, who spent twenty-four years on retainer, also spoke to me at length on the record. On the other side of this fight, six of the Clark family members who sued to remove Wallace Bock and Irving Kamsler as executors of Huguette’s will granted me interviews. I am especially grateful to the three Clark relatives—Ian Devine, Carla Hall, and Karine McCall—who discussed their lawsuit and family history in several on-the-record sessions.
The lawyers involved in the probate court fight were exceptionally patient with my endless questions. Thanks in alphabetical order to Harvey Corn, John Dadakis, Carl Distefano, John Graziano, Thomas LeViness, Jason Lilien, John Morken, and Peter Schram. I am also grateful to Irving Kamsler’s lawyers Marci Goldstein and Robert Giacovas.
Kati Despretz Cruz, the granddaughter of Huguette’s closest friend, Suzanne Pierre, offered a wealth of information. The Lyle family—Gordon Lyle Jr.; his sister, Tina Harrower; and his daughter, Lucy Tower—summoned up decades of recollections of Huguette and her mother, Anna. Roberto Socas, whose mother was Huguette’s tutor, shared memories and a trove of photographs of the Clark family.
Special thanks to: Ellen Crain and Lee Whitney of the Silver-Bow Historical Society in Butte, Bellosguardo caretaker Mario Da Cunha, Ilde Smilen of Milbank Tweed, art appraiser Beverly Jacoby, psychiatrists Dr. Anna Fels and Dr. Chandler Rainey.
I am grateful to the journalists who graciously provided guidance. Lael Morgan, the author of Wanton West, and Montana journalist Steve Shirley both made the ultimate gesture and sent me their notes. Ben O’Connel
l of C-SPAN gave me a crash course in Montana history; Washington Post reporter David Montgomery wrote a terrific piece about the Corcoran and helped with details; Andrew Alpern, the author of Apartments for the Affluent, provided information about 907 Fifth Avenue; New York Post reporter Julia Marsh kept me on top of breaking news.
My dear friend Jere Couture, copyright lawyer extraordinaire, provided legal advice and endless encouragement. Jere died this past August, a tremendous loss.
Alyson Krueger, a 2011 graduate of NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, has been the ideal meticulous fact-checker. Malika Toure, a 2013 Arthur L. Carter graduate, and Margaret Yang, a graduate of NYU’s MA Literary Translation program, translated nearly one hundred letters from French to English. Andre Tartar translated Le Sénateur Qui Aimait La France by André Baeyens. NYU MA scholars Kate Beaudoin and Georgette Yacoub provided research assistance. I am very grateful to all of the above for their help, but any mistakes are mine.
I have been blessed with wonderful friends: Jane Hartley, Ralph Schlosstein, Susan Birkenhead, Tom Curley, Michelle and Stephen Stoneburn, Mary Macy, Mandy Grunwald, Benjamin Cooper, Louise Grunwald, Liz Loewy, Paul Giddens, Suzanna Andrews, Tamar Lewin, Gail Gregg, Christine Doudna, Rick Grand-Jean, Susan Chira, Michael Shapiro, Caroline Miller, Eric Himmel, James Wetzler, Rita Jacobs, Judy Miller, Jason Epstein, Elaine and Tino Kamarck, Joe Klein, Victoria Kaunitz, Swoosie Kurtz, Jenny Allen, Diane Yu, Michael Delaney, Lisa New, Larry Summers, Nancy Leonard, Urban Lehner, Jeff and Christine Rosen, Thea Lurie, Joel Kaye, Josh Gotbaum, Joyce Thornhill, Dotty Lynch, Morgan Downey, Joanne Hubschman, Margo Lion, Kate Feiffer, Chris Alley, Patricia Bauer, Ed Muller, Alexis Gelber, Mark Whitaker, Jeff Greenfield, Dena Sklar, Jill Lawrence, John Martin, Richard M. Cohen, David Weisbrod, Peggy Simon, Hillary Ballon, Orin Kramer, Larry Rockefeller, Wendy Gordon, Nancy and Charlie Kantor, Peggy Noonan. Some friends are gone but remain in my heart: Ron Silver, Henry Hubschman, Wendy Wasserstein, Susannah McCorkle.
For the past five years, Graydon Carter and Aimee Bell of Vanity Fair have kept me busy with enjoyable assignments, and I am very grateful. Thanks to my NYU colleagues for their support: Robert Boynton, Perri Klass, Brooke Kroeger, Pamela Newkirk, Adam Penenberg, Mary Quigley, Charles Seife, and Carol Sternhell.
My husband, Walter Shapiro, makes me laugh, critiques my topic sentences, and created an entire imaginary sleep clinic to deal with my middle-of-the-night insomnia. When you’re lucky in love, everything else is manageable. I spied Walter in 1972 at the Michigan Daily newsroom—what an adventure it has been.
My father, David Gordon, now ninety-one, and my mother, Adelle Gordon, now eighty-eight, are a constant inspiration—engaged with the world, loving, and supportive. The other lights of my life: my nephew Jesse Gordon, his wife, Meghan Wolf, their delightful toddler, Ozzy, my nephew Nate Gordon, and Jenny Rakochy. Special thanks to Nate, a photo editor at Sports Illustrated, who organized the photographs for this book. My sisters-in-law, Sarah Cooper-Ellis and Amy Shapiro, remain my close friends. I cherish my uncle Melvin Silverman and aunt Beverly. I miss my brother, Bart Gordon, even more as the years go by.
About the Author
MERYL GORDON is the author of Mrs. Astor Regrets: The Hidden Betrayals of a Family Beyond Reproach. She is an award-winning journalist whose articles have appeared in Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and New York Magazine, and is the director of magazine writing at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. A native of Rochester, New York, and a graduate of the University of Michigan, she lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with her husband, Walter Shapiro.
Sources
My main sources of information for this book consisted of personal interviews with more than one hundred people and a vast array of documents.
I am tremendously grateful to the administrators of Huguette Clark’s estate for allowing me to read and quote from material in seventy-six boxes—more than twenty-five thousand documents—that belonged to Huguette Clark and were removed from her Fifth Avenue apartment after her death. This trove included Huguette’s 1920 diary; her sister Andrée’s 1919 diary; family letters written by Huguette, Andrée, and their parents, Sen. William Andrews Clark and his wife, Anna; hundreds of personal letters and telegrams; and thousands of photographs, receipts, and business letters dating back to 1926; plus items of historic interest, including the 1925 contents of William Andrews Clark’s wallet and his Senate briefcase.
At press time, I was the only reporter allowed to see the entire archive: seventy-one boxes stored at the Manhattan offices of the law firm Milbank Tweed plus an additional five boxes at Christie’s storage facility in Brooklyn. I was also the first journalist allowed, on January 21, 2014, to tour Huguette’s Santa Barbara estate, Bellosguardo. Special thanks to the lawyers who made both possible: Peter Schram, for the public administrator; Carl Distefano of the New York Attorney General’s office; and Thomas LeViness, the co-administrator for the estate and trustee for Huguette Clark’s intellectual property. The Clark family archival material will eventually go to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA in Los Angeles.
Huguette Clark took painting lessons for thirty years from artist Tadé Styka, who was also her frequent evening escort, taking her to the Ziegfeld Follies, to the 1939 World’s Fair, and dancing at the Rainbow Room. His daughter, Wanda Styka—Huguette Clark’s goddaughter—generously made exclusively available to me the appointment calendars, journal entries, and letters of her parents, Tadé and Doris Styka, dating from 1935 through 1980. These documents enabled me to reconstruct much of Huguette’s life during that period.
Other vital material: William Andrews Clark’s letters to his lawyer, W. S. Bickford, and other archival documents at the Montana Historical Society in Helena; William Andrews Clark’s letters to Butte Miner editor J. S. Dobell, plus bound volumes of Montana newspapers and other archival materials at the Silver-Bow Historical Society in Butte.
I relied on databases for newspaper stories from 1869 through 2013: ProQuest Historical, LexisNexis, Old Fulton NY Post Cards, the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America, NewspaperArchive.com, America’s Historical Newspapers, Ancestry.com, Genealogy.com. Books are also listed separately in a bibliography.
From August 2011 through September 2013, I attended court hearings for the Huguette Clark probate case and read the voluminous depositions and legal documents, File 1995/1375, Manhattan Surrogate’s Court, 31 Chambers Street.
CHAPTER ONE: The Clark Family Reunion at the Corcoran
Interviews: former Corcoran Gallery directors Paul Greenhalgh and David Levy, Ian Devine, Carla Hall, Karine McCall, Wallace Bock, Irving and Judi Kamsler, Cynthia Garcia, Beverly Bonner McCord, Martha FitzSimon, Stanley Pitts.
Depositions: Ian Devine, Carla Hall, Erika Hall, Karine McCall, Paul Clark Newell Jr.
Articles cited: “Mr. Clark of Montana,” Washington Post, December 3, 1899; “Morris-Clark Wedding,” New York Times, May 29, 1900; “Fortunes Which Exceed a Hundred Million,” New York Times, February 24, 1907; “Coolidge Cuts Silken Cord Opening Art Gallery Annex,” Washington Post, March 11, 1928; “Mrs. John H. Hall,” New York Times, March 22, 1968; Bob Thompson, “Corcoran Director Quits; Trustees Shelve Gehry Plans,” Washington Post, May 24, 2005; Katherine Boyle, “Corcoran’s Clark Sickle-Leaf Carpet Breaks World Record at Sotheby’s Auction,” Washington Post, June 5, 2013.
Documents: Information on monthly fees of Wallace Bock and Irving Kamsler; Huguette M. Clark probate case; File 1995/1375. Carla Hall speech at the Clark reunion, courtesy of Carla Hall.
Books:
Laura Coyle and Dare Myers Hartwell, Antiquities to Impressionism: The William A. Clark Collection, Corcoran Gallery of Art, 2001.
Lewis Hall, The William A. Clark Collection, Treasures of a Copper King, Corcoran Catalog, 1978.
Writer’s Note: Anna La Chapelle’s name is sometimes spelled as LaChapelle, but Anna signed both Huguette’s birth certificate and a Montana marriage registe
r using La Chapelle.
CHAPTER TWO: The Quest for “Tante Huguette”
Interviews: Wallace Bock, Ian Devine, Carla Hall, Karine McCall, Irving Kamsler.
Depositions: Hadassah Peri, Dr. Jack Rudick, Christie Ysit.
Articles cited: Tommy Hallissey, “Porno Sting Nabs Temple President,” Riverdale Press, September 20, 2007; Megan James, “Kamsler Admits Guilt in Child Pornography Case,” Riverdale Press, October 2, 2008; Carol Vogel, “Art Auctions Buffeted by Events,” New York Times, April 30, 2003; “A Splendid Hospital on the East Side Has Been Built Largely with Contributions from Poor People,” New York Daily Tribune, December 28, 1902; Joshua Kosman, “Agnes Albert—Pianist, S.F. Symphony Supporter,” Los Angeles Times, June 20, 2002; “Alumni Spotlight: Ian Devine, Class of 1968,” Bridge, Palm Beach Day Academy; Jacqueline Trescott, “A Museum’s Fortunes on the Decline,” Washington Post, January 5, 2011.
CHAPTER THREE: Huguette’s Walk in Central Park
Interviews: Wallace Bock, Kati Despretz Cruz, Tina Lyle Harrower, Gordon Lyle Jr., Caterina Marsh, Christopher Sattler, Wanda Styka, Lucy (Lyle) Tower.