Empty Mansions (52 page)

• • •

There was a strong reason for all sides to settle: It would ensure that the lawyers got paid.

If one of the aims of Huguette’s relatives was to keep the money out of the hands of her lawyers, their victory would nevertheless leave a large chunk of the estate in the hands of their own lawyer. Working on a contingency, as is standard, the family attorney would receive 33 percent of the first $50 million, and 30 percent of the next $50 million. At least sixty-two attorneys were named in court papers in this case, with dozens of others working behind the scenes, many of them in Manhattan, where it is not uncommon for experienced lawyers to bill at $1,000 an hour. Court dates and settlement conferences were attended by ten to twelve lawyers at a time, together running the meter in excess of $10,000 an hour.

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
 

T
O 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.

A LIFE OF INTEGRITY
 

H
UGUETTE
C
LARK 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 wealthy 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.