Empty Mansions

by Bill Dedman

  Additional costs came from travel to take testimony from fifty witnesses, including an all-expenses-paid trip in 2012 for three attorneys to see half-grandnephew André Baeyens in Vienna. At age eighty-two, the elegant former diplomat was afflicted with aphasia, a brain disease akin to dementia. Despite the family’s objection, André was subjected to two days of questioning in which he was unable to give even his home address. At least the attorneys were able to see the fountains of the Schönbrunn Palace at night.

  THE PINK DIAMOND

  TO RAISE CASH for the estate, the public administrator began selling some of Huguette’s property, even before the legal battle was concluded. He was able to sell only the items that were not specifically bequeathed to anyone.

  Her mother’s jewelry was already long gone, sold off by Citibank, and the pieces in her safe at home had been given to Hadassah and Chris, but she had another stash of jewelry, still in their original 1920s boxes from Cartier and Tiffany—in a safe-deposit box. They had apparently not been worn since the 1930s.

  After Huguette’s jewels were displayed for a public viewing, the auctioneer at Christie’s sold her nine-carat pink diamond ring for $14 million, as well as her twenty-carat rectangular diamond ring for $2.7 million; her Art Deco diamond and emerald bracelets that she wore on her honeymoon, for $90,000 and $480,000; her ruby, sapphire, and emerald gold bracelet for $220,000; and her charm bracelet, depicting themes of love—a girl watering a heart in a garden, a blindfolded lover choosing between two hearts—for $75,000. In all, the pieces brought $18 million, or so it first appeared. The purchaser of the pink diamond ring put out a press release announcing his purchase, then failed to come up with the money, so it was sold quietly for less.

  • • •

  The apartments at 907 Fifth Avenue also went on the market for a total of $55 million.

  Apartment 12W sold for $25.5 million to hedge fund manager Boaz Weinstein. The apartment had proved to be a good investment for Huguette. Even accounting for inflation, her investment of $63,000 in 1955 had increased forty-seven-fold.

  An oil sheik, the prime minister of the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar, bid $31.5 million for Apartments 8W and 8E, but the co-op board turned down his application. Too much traffic and security, the members said. Eventually, 8W and a sliver of 8E were sold for $22.5 million to a quieter owner, private equity manager Frederick Iseman. The rest of 8E was still on the market in mid-2013.

  In Connecticut, Le Beau Château had fetched an offer of $25 million while Huguette lived, but she wouldn’t take it, because the appraisal had been a bit higher at $26 million. An accepted offer at $21 million required getting town approval to divide the fifty-two acres into ten lots, but then the market crashed anyway. The price fell from its height of $35 million to $24 million, fell after her death again to $17 million, then to $15.9 million. In the summer of 2013, it remained on the market, with neighbor Harry Connick, Jr., among the lookers.

  The rest of Huguette’s possessions—her paintings and books, her dolls and dollhouses and miniature castles—were in storage, awaiting a trial or settlement.

  • • •

  The case was assigned in 2013 to a judge, Surrogate Nora S. Anderson, who the previous year had been censured for failing to report $250,000 in campaign contributions. She was acquitted by a criminal jury of two felony charges of filing false campaign reports, then was censured by the state judicial conduct commission. So the trial of the estate of Huguette Clark, whose father quit the U.S. Senate because of campaign finance irregularities, was being heard by a judge with campaign finance issues.

  As of this writing in July 2013, the parties had not agreed to a settlement. Absent a deal, a jury trial was scheduled for September 2013 to divide the Clark copper fortune.

  Two blocks away at the district attorney’s office, the criminal investigation officially was “inactive.” In nearly three years of digging, the district attorney didn’t find justification to bring a criminal charge against anyone. Bock and Kamsler may have been enterprising, but the investigators found that the paper trail backed up their story. Huguette had authorized, in writing, the sale of the Renoir, the sale of the Stradivarius violin, the marketing of the Connecticut home, even the gift of the security system for the community in Israel where Bock’s family lived. Nearly all of the hundreds of gift checks were written in Huguette’s clear handwriting, right up until her eyesight gave out.

  * * *

  * The nineteen included four descendants of W.A.’s daughter Mary Joaquina “May” Clark Culver—Edith MacGuire, Rodney Devine, Mallory Devine Goewey, and Ian Devine; nine descendants of his son Charlie Clark—André Baeyens, Patrick Baeyens, Jacqueline Baeyens-Clerté, Jerry Gray, Celia Gray Cummings, Alice Gray Coelho, Paul Francis Albert, Karine Albert McCall, and Christopher Clark; and six descendants of his daughter Katherine Clark Morris—Lewis Hall, Jack Hall, Carla Hall Friedman, Kip Berry, William Berry, and Lisa Berry Lewis. See the family tree on pp. x–xi.

  † Including $84.5 million in real property; $34.5 million in art, books, and instruments; and $4.7 million in cash.

  ‡ Including an estimated $1.7 million in dolls.

  § This effort created a mind-bending paradox. Unwinding, say, $10 million in gifts given to Hadassah could save the estate $20 million in taxes, interest, and penalties. And who would get that $30 million? Under the will, it would be part of the “residuary,” the part distributed after specific bequests. That meant 60 percent of the money would go back to Hadassah.

  A LIFE OF INTEGRITY

  HUGUETTE CLARK LIVED a surprisingly rich life of love and loss, of creativity and quiet charity, of art and imagination. Though the platitude—money can’t buy happiness—may be comforting to those who are less than well heeled, great wealth doesn’t ensure sadness either.

  Huguette suffered sorrows, yes, as happens when one lives more than a century—long enough to narrowly escape both the Titanic’s sinking and the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. She suffered the death of her dear sister, Andrée, and then of her father, W.A., and her mother, Anna. She persevered through divorce, cancer, mendacity. She lost her Degas ballerina, her mother’s jewelry, her privacy.

  Yet she did not have a sad life. Huguette focused on happy memories of good times with her close family, of playing hide-and-seek and listening to her sister’s bedtime stories in the fairy-tale Clark mansion, of cleverly offering their banker father gold coins to escape from the German armies, of riding surfboards with Duke Kahanamoku at Waikiki Beach.

  Huguette was not as she appeared to those who barely knew her. The story told by her relatives, the Clark relatives seeking her fortune, was that she was mentally ill, even intellectually disabled. In Paul Newell’s years of conversations with her, however, right up to a year before the wills were signed, he found Huguette to be impressively lucid and cheerful, possessed of a keen memory. She remembered events from nearly a century earlier, and she remembered that he’d recently mentioned that his granddaughter was taking ballet lessons. In spite of her years in seclusion, her social skills appeared quite normal. If she was troubled or unhappy, she did a fine job of disguising it through years of conversation and correspondence. Eccentricity is not a psychiatric disorder.

  Huguette was relentless and sophisticated in pursuing the arts—trained as a painter, self-taught as a photographer, a shrewd collector of Renoirs and Stradivaris. She explored Japan’s culture and history—language, hairstyles, fabrics—to lend authenticity to her castles and paintings. She kept alive, through her patronage and correspondence, an entire generation of the greatest illustrators in France, the ones she remembered from children’s books and magazines. Before her eyesight failed, she read the classics, played the violin, learned chess in her eighties on one of her carved Japanese sets, conversed in French.

  The family’s story is that Huguette was controlled, was kept in a cocoon, that she must be a victim of fraud. And who didn’t make the same assumption upon hearing about the wea
lthy woman who shut herself away in a hospital, giving millions to her nurse while her affairs were handled by an attorney and a felon accountant?

  “Mrs. Clark,” wrote attorney Peter S. Schram for the public administrator’s office, “was completely dependent for her physical and emotional needs on a small group of individuals, who were her only contacts with the world outside of her hospital room.”

  Her only contacts? Though she lived alone, Huguette was not isolated. First, she had her nurses twenty-four hours a day, starting with Hadassah Peri. She also had her regular visitors: her friend Madame Suzanne Pierre, with her artichokes with hollandaise; her doctor Henry Singman, with his photos of his grandchildren; and her man Friday, Chris Sattler, with his French baked goods and their buttery smell from her childhood. And she had the children and grandchildren of her friends and doctors and nurses, who also visited on occasion.

  Huguette had hundreds of other affectionate visitors, arriving in the mail. In exchange for the gifts she showered on the children and grandchildren of friends and employees, she asked only that the parents send photos of the children with their toys. These photos poured in by the hundreds: children with new bedroom furniture, children dressed as knights in suits of armor, children with guitars and electric pianos, train sets, castles, puppets, roller skates, and bicycles, all from their Tante Huguette.

  For a recluse, Huguette had a lot of pen pals, her lifelong friends, most of them unknown to one another. She was a recluse in that she locked herself away from travel and sunsets and cafés, but a woman who leaves twenty thousand pages of affectionate correspondence is also a world traveler. And she was a faithful friend, maintaining warm, mostly long-distance, relationships for decades.

  She had her Frenchman, Etienne de Villermont, with “the bond of love of half a life, which will never disappear.” She had his wife, Elisabeth, their daughter, Marie-Christine, and many others in their extended family, all grateful for Huguette’s sustained support, down to treats from their corner grocer in France.

  And her gregarious ex-husband, Bill Gower, to whom she sent money and family news.

  She had a loving, artistic goddaughter, Wanda Styka, who remained a faithful correspondent for sixty years.

  And her artist friends in France: The whimsical Félix Lorioux with his comical gift-giving insects. The fantastic and erotic Chéri Hérouard, her magazine hunter. And Jean Mercier, Manon Iessel, and J. P. Pinchon, for whom she was “a good fairy” in their old age.

  She had her telephone friends, including her cousin Paul Newell and her half-grandnephew André Baeyens. And her art helpers: Caterina Marsh, who was the go-between with her artist friend Saburo Kawakami in Japan. Her dollhouse repairman, Rudolph Jaklitsch, and his wife, Anna, who made the curtains. The staff at Au Nain Bleu and Christian Dior.

  She had her longtime friends from her childhood, the ones she supported so generously into their old age: Ninta Sandré, the daughter of her governess, and many others who received her help. Even a stranger, Gwendolyn Jenkins, whose only connection to Huguette was that she took care of Huguette’s stockbroker when he was ill.

  She had her pen pals in Santa Barbara, keeping tabs on her mother’s Bellosguardo and her sister’s bird refuge: Alma Armstrong, the chauffeur’s widow, who sent newspaper clippings. And the mayor, Sheila Lodge, whose long campaign to persuade Huguette to leave the Clark estate to the arts bore fruit in Huguette’s will and the Bellosguardo Foundation.

  Though many of those close to Huguette received large gifts, so much that one would naturally question their independence as witnesses to her competence, many doctors and nurses received nothing. Yet they tell the same story of a remarkable woman who knew her own mind. The audiologists tested her hearing and found her quite alert even at nearly ninety-nine. Dr. John Wolff visited frequently to bring Huguette flowers and to hear her stories. And the neurologist, Dr. Louise Klebanoff, found the little old lady in the hospital to be as “cute as pie.”

  An assistant district attorney, Elizabeth Loewy, met her obligation to check on Huguette’s well-being. An FBI agent, investigating the theft of a Degas pastel, walked right into her hospital room.

  • • •

  Huguette’s hobbies were not what most people would choose if they had unlimited wealth. She was unashamed about collecting dolls, building castles, and watching the Smurfs, just as other people like to collect stamps or can name the shortstop for the Boston Red Sox in 1967. Huguette took seriously Miss Clara Spence’s admonition to “cultivate imagination”—even to the point of being concerned that “the little people are banging their heads!”

  We will never know why Huguette was, as she might say, “peculiar.” The people in her inner circle say they have no idea. Outsiders speculate. It was being the daughter of an older father! It was her sister’s death! Or her mother’s! The wealth! It was autism or Asperger’s or a childhood trauma! Easy answers fail because the question assumes that personalities have a single determinant. Whatever caused her shyness, her limitations of sociability or coping, her fears—of strangers, of kidnapping, of needles, of another French Revolution—Huguette found a situation that worked for her, a modern-day “Boo” Radley, shut up inside by choice, safe from a world that can hurt.

  Like her attention-grabbing father and her music-loving mother, both strong-willed and private in their own ways, Huguette was a formidable personality who lived life as she wanted, always on her own terms. Far from being controlled by her money men, she drove them to frustration. Though she was firm, she was always kind. It would have been easy for anyone born into her cosseted circumstances to have abused her power. Yet in all the testimony by fifty witnesses in the battle for her fortune, in all her correspondence, there is not a single indication that Huguette ever used her wealth to hurt anyone. That just wasn’t her way.

  Huguette had experienced the finest belongings and most luxurious travel. She had seen heart-stopping panoramas, owned great art, heard inspiring music. Yet in the end, she preferred to live in a hospital room, with her hollandaise and brioche and cashmere sweaters. Huguette had the courage—or Clark stubbornness—to be an artist at a time when that wasn’t an approved path for a woman, to break away from a marriage she didn’t want, to resist the manipulations of her hospital and her museum to get more of her money, to leave most of her estate to her friends and to a charity that honored her mother’s memory. According to common belief, “just throwing money away” may be a sign of mental illness, but Huguette enjoyed giving gifts to the people she knew.

  These were not acts of incompetence, but of self-expression and resilience. In her own way, she found what life may be, a life of integrity.

  Huguette was a quiet woman in a noisy time. She had all the possessions that anyone could want, but she set them aside—all except her brioche and cashmere sweaters.

  TO LIVE HAPPILY

  ON MARCH 2, 2005, just a month before she signed her last will and testament, Huguette was sitting up in her hospital bed when Dr. Singman stopped by for a visit. She had a treat for him.

  Huguette recited a poem. “Le Grillon” (The Cricket) was one of the old French fables from the book of morocco leather in her father’s library at the Clark mansion on Fifth Avenue, where ninety years earlier Andrée had read to Huguette. This fable was written in the late 1700s by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian. It is also sometimes called “True Happiness.” Huguette knew it by heart.

  THE CRICKET

  A poor little cricket

  Hidden in the flowery grass,

  Observes a butterfly

  Fluttering in the meadow.

  The winged insect shines with the liveliest colors:

  Azure, purple, and gold glitter on his wings;

  Young, handsome, foppish, he hastens from flower to flower,

  Taking from the best ones.

  Ah! says the cricket, how his lot and mine

  Are dissimilar! Lady Nature

  For him did everything, and for me nothing.

  I h
ave no talent, even less beauty;

  No one takes notice of me, they know me not here below;

  Might as well not exist.

  As he was speaking, in the meadow

  Arrives a troop of children.

  Immediately they are running

  After this butterfly, for which they all have a longing.

  Hats, handkerchiefs, caps serve to catch him.

  The insect in vain tries to escape.

  He becomes soon their conquest.

  One seizes him by the wing, another by the body;

  A third arrives, and takes him by the head.

  It should not be so much effort

  To tear to pieces the poor creature.

  Oh! Oh! says the cricket, I am no more sorry;

  It costs too dear to shine in this world.

  How much I am going to love my deep retreat!

  To live happily, live hidden.

  Huguette, at ninety-eight years old, recited the childhood fable, from memory, three times.

  In English.

  In Spanish.

  And, of course, in French.

  Pour vivre heureux, vivons caché. To live happily, live hidden.

  AUTHORS’ NOTE

  THE LIVES OF HUGUETTE CLARK and her mysterious family, hidden in the shadows for so long, are illuminated now by an array of human sources, private documents, and public records.