Empty Mansions

by Bill Dedman

  Kamsler’s full statement to the court, when his time came to show remorse, was simply this: “I just want to apologize to the Court, to my wife, to my family for what I have done, and the aggravation, and thank the court very much for their consideration and assistance in this.”

  A month after his plea, as the Clark relatives kept pressing Bock, Kamsler met with Huguette and gave her a letter:

  Dear Mrs. Clark: I recently visited with you and explained my legal situation concerning my pleading guilty to a single felony charge involving the use of my computer to attempt to communicate with minors, who in fact were not minors but were undercover agents. Although I do not believe that I had committed any crime, I accepted this plea in order to put this incident behind me and enable me to not have to put my family through the risks and agonies of a trial, as well as the high financial costs involved. The judge believed that this in no way should affect my ability to serve my clients and continue as a professional. He therefore granted me a Certificate of Relief from Civil Disabilities. You have indicated that you want me to continue to serve as your accountant and representative and as one of your Executors and Trustees and in any other capacity that you decide. Please indicate your agreement by signing below.

  Kamsler, in line for more than $3 million in fees when this elderly client died, had waited a year and five months to tell her about his arrest on sex charges, and even then his letter didn’t disclose that he had explicit sex talk with people who had told him they were underage girls, or that he’d talked with them about meeting him, or that he was charged with multiple offenses over several years, or that he was undergoing sex therapy, or that he would remain a registered sex offender.

  To pacify the relatives, Bock sent them a copy of the letter, signed by Huguette. He vigorously defended Kamsler, his co-executor of Huguette’s estate, saying the accountant “had been changed” by the therapy and was the “victim” of a sting operation, as though he had been entrapped by police into doing something he didn’t want to do.

  The relatives were less than pacified. Kamsler the victim! They discussed whether Huguette could possibly have understood what had happened, but they were stymied. They feared that Bock was failing to protect Huguette from Kamsler, but they also considered that Bock could be protecting her from change, which they thought she feared, based on their knowledge of how she dealt with Bellosguardo.

  One relative who is an attorney, half-grandnephew Paul Albert, urged the family to be cautious:

  Huguette has not asked for our intervention in her financial affairs. She has chosen to be a recluse her entire life and to cut herself off from her family. One of the foreseeable consequences was that she put herself in danger of being taken advantage of. But this was her choice and as long as she is competent I feel uncomfortable in interfering with it. She has a right to privacy.… It’s possible that Bock is actually doing a good job on her behalf. We just don’t know.

  • • •

  By early 2009, Huguette’s eyesight was quite dim, and she stopped using her magic bottomless checkbook. She implored Bock to complete her promise to Hadassah from the sale of the Cézanne. That February, Bock wrote a third $5 million check to Hadassah. To cover the check, Huguette had to borrow. Although Huguette was nowhere near broke, in terms of total assets, she didn’t have enough cash. Bock and Kamsler arranged for her to get a line of credit at JPMorgan Chase.

  In exchange for the “good” $5 million check, Hadassah handed over to Bock her marker, the undated $5 million check that Huguette had written.

  With the “fussy” Gehry plan for the Corcoran now dead and buried, and the new director pledging a “new approach” of respecting the W. A. Clark Collection, Huguette pledged in 2009 to give the museum $1 million in four installments. Her accountant, Irving Kamsler, delivered the first installment personally at the Annual Corcoran Ball, just after his sentencing.

  THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY

  THE ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY held Huguette’s hand and said hello, offering a greeting in French.

  It was late summer 2010 at Beth Israel, after stories by NBC News raised questions about Huguette’s orphaned houses, the men managing Huguette’s money, the Stradivarius violin and the gifts to Hadassah. Huguette’s photo from 1928 was in the tabloids and on the Today show. To protect her from prying eyes, attorney Bock arranged for her hospital room to be disguised with a fake room number and her medical records were stamped with the pseudonym “Harriet Chase.”

  The assistant district attorney was Elizabeth Loewy, chief of the Elder Abuse Unit of the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Loewy had successfully prosecuted the son and attorney of heiress Brooke Astor in 2009 on charges of forgery and grand larceny from the heiress’s accounts. Now Loewy was looking into the affairs of Huguette Clark, who had nearly three times as much money as Mrs. Astor.

  At 104, Huguette was still able to walk and to feed herself, and she was still lucid nearly all the time, her medical records show. But since early 2007, she had had occasional hallucinations, a couple of times a year. Once, when she was one hundred, Huguette awakened with a night terror, reliving the torturous death of Joan of Arc. When she was 101, one night Huguette insisted that a tissue box was flying around the room, and she wouldn’t get out of bed because it might fly into her. She talked again about the terrible way Joan was killed, burned at the stake.

  The next day after these episodes, Huguette would be as conversant as ever. The doctors would say she had just been dehydrated, not at all unusual for an older patient, but now she was back to her cheerful self, commenting on events in the news. At age 101, she said she felt so sorry for the wife of New York governor Eliot Spitzer, who resigned after being caught paying a call girl.

  About the same time as the assistant DA’s visit, in September 2010 as the publicity about Huguette was reaching its height, the hospital arranged for a psychiatrist to see her for the first time in her nearly twenty years in hospital care. The doctor, evaluating Huguette’s capacity to make medical decisions, wrote on her chart that she was in frail health with “periods of delirium,” a confusion that comes and goes suddenly.

  The assistant district attorney visited Huguette three times, seeing no evidence of dementia. She did see her frailty. Huguette didn’t seem frightened at all and was responsive and friendly. Though nearly blind, she could hear well enough, could understand what Loewy was saying, and could speak clearly enough to communicate her answers. But the documents would have to tell whether Huguette’s finances had been handled according to her wishes.

  • • •

  Two police detectives and a forensic accountant began to go over Huguette’s checking accounts, the sale of the Renoir, the sale of the Stradivarius La Pucelle. The element in the news stories that most caught Loewy’s eye was the curious case in which attorney Bock and accountant Kamsler ended up with the property of another former client. The elderly client was someone Huguette knew well: Don Wallace, her attorney for many years before his death in 2002 at age seventy-six.

  Wallace’s law partner and attorney was Wally Bock, who inherited Huguette as a client. And Wallace’s accountant was Kamsler, Huguette’s longtime accountant.

  Wallace’s goddaughter, Judith Sloan, said he had severe dementia in his later years, since his heart attack in 1997. He had no children, and she said earlier versions of his will had left the bulk of his estate to her and her brother, who was Wallace’s godson. This included two properties: a $1.5 million weekend house with fourteen acres in the horse country of Dutchess County, New York, where he stored the dolls that Huguette gave him, and an upscale apartment in the Dorchester, on East Fifty-Seventh Street in Manhattan.

  In a new will that Wallace signed in March 1997, a month after he returned home from a stay in the hospital, two new beneficiaries were added, to receive $50,000 each: Bock and Kamsler. In a 1999 revised will, the amounts doubled to $100,000 each, and Kamsler was also to receive Wallace’s 1995 Mercedes-Benz E300D sedan. Under law, as exec
utors, the men were entitled to a total of $368,000 in fees for being executors of his $4 million estate. The godchildren said they were called in to a meeting in 1997, where Kamsler and Bock told them brusquely that only the country house would go to them, while the city apartment would go to Bock and Kamsler.

  If a lawyer who draws up a will receives a bequest in that will, New York law says this circumstance automatically raises a suspicion of undue influence. The probate court had the option to inquire into all of this, but no one challenged Wallace’s will. After Wallace died in May 2002, Bock submitted a sworn statement to the court explaining that he and Wallace were not only law partners but also good friends. Wallace treated Kamsler, his accountant for twenty-five years, “as the son he never had.” Kamsler said he had visited Wallace in the hospital and arranged home care, just as a child would do for a parent.

  Bock explained, “I said to him that he was being overly generous, that he had done enough for me with various gifts given over the years. He insisted however, stating that the people he named as beneficiaries in his Will were ‘his family’ and that is what he wanted to do.” As for the possibility that Wallace suffered from dementia, Bock wrote that although Wallace had been unable to work after January 1997, when pneumonia had led to coronary failure, “at all times, while there were limitations on his physical capabilities, his mental acumen never diminished.”

  Now, in 2010, eight years after Wallace’s death, publicity about Huguette’s empty mansions and sale of her property had put Bock and Kamsler on the radar of the district attorney. If these men had inherited money from one client, were they in line to inherit from another? What was the story behind the sale of Huguette’s paintings and violin? Bock informed Huguette of the investigation into their handling of her affairs, and she signed another statement, agreeing to pay their legal fees for criminal defense attorneys.

  Emboldened by news of the investigation, three of Huguette’s relatives went to court in September 2010, seeking to have a guardian appointed to oversee Huguette’s financial affairs. The three were Carla Hall Friedman, Ian Devine, and Karine McCall, representing three branches of W. A. Clark’s children. They were convinced, Karine said, that Bock and Kamsler were taking advantage of Huguette. But they had no solid evidence of financial impropriety. The judge turned down the relatives without a hearing. Their hopes for a clear view of Huguette’s situation would depend on the district attorney’s office.

  “THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING”

  ALTHOUGH HUGUETTE HAD ARRANGED for fresh flowers to be placed by the bronze doors of the mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery every week for forty-three years to honor her mother and father and sister, the last crypt had been filled in 1963 with her mother’s casket. Huguette, who in life had more houses than she could use, who had spent so many hours building dollhouses, was in death going to be without a home.

  Her attorney learned of this problem at about the time of Huguette’s hundredth birthday, in 2006, when her Clark relatives were renovating the decaying mausoleum. Other descendants of W.A. were paying to restore the mausoleum and needed Huguette’s consent. There was an additional need to add to the small endowment her father had left for the cemetery, and she agreed to put up the full $147,000. When the renovation was finished, the family held a picnic at the cemetery, on the grass beside the granite memorial to the senator. Of course, Huguette did not attend.

  This effort brought to Bock’s attention the fact that Huguette had no place to be buried. He’d never checked on this before. The cemetery staff suggested that her body could be cremated, but Huguette was upset by this idea, insisting that she be with her mother and father and sister. The cemetery proposed that she be buried in the ground near the mausoleum. No, she said, inside!

  Any changes at the mausoleum required by law the approval of every living descendant of W. A. Clark. With urgency now, Bock rounded up their signatures from around the world, learning for the first time the names and whereabouts of all her living relatives. With approvals in hand, engineers found a solution in 2010: A new crypt could be built inside the mausoleum.

  At age 103, Huguette finally had a place to be buried.

  • • •

  Huguette was laid to rest in the Clark mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, along with her father, mother, sister, and relatives from her father’s first marriage. Though every spot was filled by 1963, Huguette waited until she was nearly one hundred to have a place carved out for her under her mother’s tomb. (illustration credit12.1)

  Huguette had for decades, at least since 1989, refused to sign a living will or a do-not-resuscitate order, anything that would limit lifesaving efforts in an emergency. “She wanted to live as long as she possibly could,” explained Geraldine, the night nurse. Huguette had named a medical proxy to speak for her with the hospital: her accountant, Irving Kamsler, who visited her every two to three weeks.

  In late 2010, Huguette became more frail. When doctors found that she could no longer make her own decisions, Kamsler told them to follow her previously expressed wishes, to continue all lifesaving treatment.

  In the spring of 2011, Kamsler got the call. Huguette had suffered heart failure, and was moved to intensive care.

  So Huguette spent her last weeks as so many do, being fed through a tube, enduring IVs and scans and scopes.

  Chris Sattler said she was able to speak the last time he saw her. “I said, ‘I thank you for everything.’ She says, ‘No, Chris, I thank you.’ ”

  She died early on the morning of May 24, 2011, two weeks short of her 105th birthday. Hadassah was by her side at the end. Huguette had long said she wanted no funeral, no priests, but in her final hours in the middle of the night, Hadassah, a Roman Catholic convert to Orthodox Judaism, called for a priest, who gave Huguette the last rites.

  After a life lived in the shadows, the news stories had shoved Huguette back into the limelight. Her obituary appeared on the front page of The New York Times, just like her father’s.

  Her occupation, as listed on her death certificate, was “artist.”

  • • •

  The Clark relatives pressed Bock to let them know about a funeral Mass or when she would be buried, but the attorney said her wishes were to have no ceremony.

  Huguette’s casket was carried up the steps of the Clark mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery and through the open bronze doors, joining her dear father, mother, and sister. The casket was placed on a shelf built under her mother’s crypt. The two share a single tomb marker. The entombment was arranged before the cemetery’s gates were opened for the day, to keep out relatives and cameras. The only attendants worked for the funeral home and the cemetery. This time no one read “Thanatopsis,” including the passage “What if thou withdraw in silence from the living, and no friend take note of thy departure?”

  A few weeks later, in California, at a Roman Catholic church near Bellosguardo, old friends and relatives gathered for a simple memorial service. Inside the gates at Bellosguardo, the work went on, gardeners and housemen preparing the Clark estate for another summer.

  JUSTICE

  NINETEEN OF HUGUETTE’S CLOSEST RELATIVES, her Clark relatives, went to court in 2012 to throw out her last will and testament. If the will were overturned, they would inherit her entire fortune, more than $300 million.

  The nineteen relatives were W.A.’s great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. To Huguette, eleven were her half-grandnieces and grandnephews, and eight were a generation further removed, her half-great-grandnieces and grandnephews.*

  You could say that they had already gotten their share of the copper mining fortune of W. A. Clark. The millions had been divided equally among his five surviving children: Huguette and her four half-siblings from his first marriage. Each of W.A.’s five children who lived to adulthood had received one-fifth of his estate after his death in 1925: equal shares for May, Katherine, Charlie, Will, and Huguette. Huguette got her allowance for a couple of years, and eventually got something extra, in
heriting Bellosguardo and the jewels and cash that her mother had received from her prenup. But W.A.’s plan, it seemed, was to treat each of his children equally.

  None of that mattered, under the law. If the nineteen relatives could persuade a judge or jury in Surrogate’s Court to overturn the will, they would be allowed to sell Bellosguardo, to sell the paintings, her castles, her dolls. Nothing would go to her nurse Hadassah Peri, her assistant Chris Sattler, her goddaughter Wanda Styka, nothing to the Corcoran museum or Beth Israel hospital—nothing to the people and institutions she had supported while she lived. Not only would attorney Wally Bock and accountant Irving Kamsler not get their $500,000 bequests, but they would lose their $3 million commissions as executors, and the chance to reap fees as trustees of a new Bellosguardo Foundation.

  The nineteen accused the attorney and accountant and nurse of fraud, and described Beth Israel as Huguette’s jailer, keeping a scared, vulnerable old woman closeted as part of a plot to take her money. The doctors and hospital had treated Huguette’s cancer, the family alleged, but hadn’t treated an underlying psychiatric disorder that had caused Huguette to remain in her home with untreated cancer in the first place. The attorney for the nineteen, John R. Morken, wrote to his clients that their aim was not financial, but to ensure “that Huguette’s true wishes are honored and that justice is done.”