The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (41 page)

Despite the more than $20 million that she had already showered on Hadassah, Huguette wanted to bequeath the nurse the bulk of her estate. But after looking at the numbers and her list of other potential beneficiaries, she agreed to follow the advice of her lawyer and accountant to slightly reduce that amount. Hadassah would receive Huguette’s doll collection plus 60 percent of the residue of her estate, after specific bequests had been paid (such as $500,000 for Chris Sattler, $100,000 to Dr. Singman, $1 million to Beth Israel, $500,000 each to Bock and Kamsler). “She wanted to leave substantially more to Hadassah,” recalls Kamsler. “We told her that if you do that, nothing will be left to leave for Wanda or to provide for continued upkeep and maintenance of Bellosguardo.”

Wanda and Hadassah had been treated as equals in Huguette’s 2001 draft, but now the heiress had downgraded her goddaughter, who would receive only 25 percent of the residue of the estate.

One odd thing stood out: Huguette had expressly signed her previous will in March for only one reason, and that was to insure that Hadassah would receive $5 million in case Huguette inconveniently died before her Connecticut estate was sold. But this new document eliminated that clause, making absolutely no mention of that sum or any special obligation to Hadassah. Bock would later admit that this was a mistake, saying, “I had failed to put it in.” Pressed on how he could have forgotten such a significant sum and whether he subconsciously intended to thwart the nurse, Bock mused out loud, “It might have very well been subconscious. It’s a complete blank to me whether I forgot it or made an assumption that it should be left out because Hadassah was getting so much in the will. I was a little embarrassed, to say the least.”

There were other losers: Suzanne Pierre and Marie-Christine DeMarchez, who had both stood to inherit under the 2001 draft of Huguette’s will, had been cut from the list. Suzanne had already received $10 million from Huguette. The heiress still exchanged letters with Marie-Christine, the daughter of Etienne de Villermont, but Huguette’s emotional tie to that family had lessened.

Huguette never explicitly mentioned her family members by name
in any draft of her will. This new will included the primal-scream paragraph disowning her relatives that had initially appeared in the 2001 draft. Just a few weeks earlier, Huguette had signed a new will that gave her distant family members virtually all of her money, by default. But she had apparently had a change of heart.

In memory of the tension between Huguette’s mother, Anna, and her stepchildren, Huguette was prepared to punish their descendants. She did not want them to receive any of her inheritance. Huguette had repeated this refrain so often to the members of her circle including Suzanne, Hadassah, and Chris that it was treated as gospel. Irving Kamsler insists that she pointed out to him yet again that she and her half siblings had all received equal shares from William Andrews Clark’s estate. “She clearly said that she doesn’t want anything to do with her family, hasn’t for years. They had been taken care of,” he recalls. “Whatever happened or has not happened over the years, they got their money. She felt that certain family members had not treated her or her mother very nicely when she was younger.”

On March 30, Dr. Singman suggested to Huguette that she sign a Do Not Resuscitate order. Her recent health woes made this a timely consideration. But Huguette was not receptive. Hadassah, who was present for the conversation, remembers, “She really don’t want to hear about this, you know… She wants to be resuscitated.” Huguette had a tremendous will to live. She had books to read, dolls to buy, and art projects to work on. She was eager to take another look at her collection of French children’s illustrations, to read up on Queen Elizabeth I’s coronation, and arrange for a new project using her antique Japanese Hina dolls. She kept Chris running to and from her apartment and the hospital to fulfill her wishes. If she stayed busy enough, she could avoid brooding about the terrifying inevitable. To sign a DNR order would be to give in.

Six weeks after Huguette signed her first new will, Wally Bock, Irving Kamsler, and Lewis Siegel again made their way to Huguette’s room on the third floor, document in hand. Siegel was along to supervise the signing ceremony. He would later admit that he had not read the document beforehand and assumed that Huguette already knew what was in it. A copy had been sent to her a few days earlier.

Under estate law, beneficiaries are not supposed to be in the room when someone signs a will, to insure that no arm-twisting or pressure is applied. It is not illegal to stick around, but if the will is later contested, such behavior gives opponents a potent weapon—the ability to charge that undue influence occurred.

Bock’s secretary, Danita Rudisill, accompanied him to Beth Israel to serve as a witness, but he would have to recruit a second person from the hospital staff. For a signing ceremony that Kamsler and Bock had been anticipating for years, there was a slapdash quality to the April 19 event.

Hadassah and Chris were chatting with Huguette when the others arrived. Huguette had been up until 4 a.m. the night before, as usual, but appeared alert. “We exchanged pleasantries,” Bock says. “I introduced Danita to Mrs. Clark. She had spoken to her many times over the phone, but she had never met her personally.”

Since Hadassah, Chris, Wally, and Irving were all slated to receive money from Huguette, they were supposed to make themselves scarce. Hadassah went out into the hallway and recruited nurse Steven Pyram to serve as the second witness. Pyram was preoccupied with other patient responsibilities, but agreed to take a few minutes for the task.

Memories would later differ on what occurred next in Huguette’s room. In Wallace Bock’s version: “I then asked Mr. Kamsler, Chris, and Hadassah to leave the room, and I left the room and we closed the door and we were out in the corridor.”

However, his secretary, Danita Rudisill, who subsequently had a falling out with Bock and left his law firm, would later insist that things played out quite differently. Speaking in a deposition probing the details of the signing ceremony, she stated that Hadassah not only remained in the room but helped guide Huguette’s hand when she initialed the pages and signed the will. Rudisill also claimed that Irving Kamsler and Wallace Bock had remained by Huguette’s side. Steven Pyram, who was there for less than five minutes, recalled seeing “an Asian” woman and also thought that another man had been present. Hadassah testified that she could not remember whether or not she was in the room, but was certain of one thing: she had not helped Huguette sign the will.

Lewis Siegel later acknowledged in a deposition that if he had read the will and had known that Hadassah was going to inherit, “I might have asked her to leave.” He also said that he did not confirm with Huguette that she was aware of all the provisions in the document. She did not study it line by line in front of him and the other witnesses.

Nobody videotaped the signing ceremony, which would have made it easier later on to determine what actually happened. Had a large, established law firm handled the paperwork for a woman leaving a multimillion-dollar estate—especially one who was cutting out her relatives—no doubt this would have been a far more prolonged process. But Wallace Bock was a member of a small firm, and he thought what he had done was sufficient.

“Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” Bock said in December 2013. “I should have taken more precautions. I’ve been writing wills for umpteen years and I have a set procedure. I have the person initial the pages, I ask if they’ve read it before they initial it. Lewis has observed me doing it.” But Bock claims that this situation was unusual for him: he says it was the first time that he prepared a will in which a client left him money, requiring him to leave the room rather than preside over the signing ceremony. If he could have a do-over, Bock says, “I might have made a videotape of it. The witnesses were the male nurse and my secretary. If I had called in a couple of doctors, I would have been better off. I had two independent witnesses who could not remember what happened. In hindsight, I could have done other things.”

In Hadassah’s official nursing notes that day, she described Huguette as “alert and oriented x 3”—which in nursing shorthand means that she knew who she was, where she was, and what time it was. In other words, Huguette was mentally competent to sign a will enriching Hadassah.

Three days later, Huguette felt the urge to revisit her past; the nursing notes state that she spent a few hours paging through a photo album depicting her childhood in Montana with her parents and Andrée. She gazed at a picture of her sister, her father, and herself putting on hard hats to descend into the mines. Those mines
had produced the copper fortune that she had just arranged to give away. Irish and Chinese immigrants working in brutal conditions had wrested the copper from the earth. None of that money would be returning to Montana to benefit the regions ravaged by William Andrews Clark.

In the yin and yang of Huguette’s relationship with Hadassah, their shifting emotional balance often played out in tangible fashion, as witnessed by the entries in the heiress’s check registry. The nurse had become accustomed to receiving large gift checks as often as twice a day, but Huguette had slowed down the pace and now was reaching for her checkbook only twice a month. Hadassah still didn’t have her $5 million in hand. Huguette appeared to be holding the money tantalizingly out of reach, shrewdly dangling it in front of the nurse to make sure that she did not quit.

Yet for Huguette, the reverberations lingered from those ten frightening days in January when the nurse had gone AWOL. Huguette was eager to avoid a recurrence. One day that spring, Hadassah came to work wearing a pair of inexpensive but attractive earrings. And that gave Huguette an idea.

She called Chris and asked him to open up her home safe and bring the contents to the hospital. The Cartier and Van Cleef and Arpels boxes were vintage, filled with treasures dating back to Huguette’s debutante days—necklaces, rings, bracelets, and earrings that she had either bought for herself or been given as gifts. Huguette opened up the boxes and dumped the contents onto her hospital bed. It was a dazzling display—diamonds, emeralds, rubies, gold, platinum—a shimmering array of colors lighting up the hospital room. This was not even Huguette’s “important” jewelry, which remained locked away in a bank vault.

A half century had passed since Huguette had fastened the clasps of the necklaces and bracelets and adorned herself to go out to the opera or a fashion show. The sight of her possessions evoked old times. “She was having so much fun, she loved it,” Chris recalls. Huguette not only wanted to show off her jewelry—she wanted to give it away.
Rather than ask Hadassah to pick out a few pieces, Huguette decided to hand it all over to the nurse. But with Chris standing by, Huguette thought that he and his wife and two daughters might like a handful of mementoes, too. Huguette picked up a gold cross with red rubies and said to him, “Hadassah is Jewish now, would you like this? Your girls might like it.” Unaware of Huguette’s intentions when he brought the jewelry to the hospital, Chris later realized that he had better tell Wallace Bock, recalling, “He always got exasperated when these things happened.”

As for Hadassah, she could now be the envy of almost any best-dressed room in Manhattan, dripping in diamonds after receiving eighty-seven pieces of antique jewelry valued at $667,300. The nurse called her husband and urged him to drive over to the hospital immediately to pick up the baubles. “I was afraid to carry it,” recalls Daniel Peri. He worried that even just en route back to his car, somebody could “hit me on the head, take it.” Back in their Brooklyn home, he waited for his wife to return; they opened up all the boxes together and gazed at the sparkling loot. Daniel Peri then hid the jewelry around the house.

Huguette loved watching Hadassah light up with a smile, overcome with gratitude. Happy days were here again in her hospital room. Why not keep the good mood going? After all, Huguette had two homes full of expensive possessions that she had not seen in years. She called Bock in June and told him that she wanted to give a Renoir to Hadassah. The lawyer recorded his blunt reaction in his monthly bill: “Told her she couldn’t.” Huguette still owed taxes on her previous gifts to Hadassah; this would just further pile up her indebtedness to the IRS.

Huguette nonetheless was determined to make another grand gesture. She asked Chris to bring a Stradivarius violin from her apartment to the hospital. Crafted in 1686 and known as “the Cremona,” the violin was insured at $1.2 million. Fourteen years earlier, Hadassah’s six-year-old son David had played a few tunes on an inexpensive violin for Huguette at the hospital. At that time, the heiress had promised him that one day she would give him a gift. But David, now twenty years old, had long since given up the instrument.

Yet Huguette decided to make good on her long-ago promise. Hadassah later insisted that she warned Huguette the instrument would not get much use: “I told Madame that he doesn’t play anymore, but she insist maybe he will go back to learn again.”