The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (2 page)

L
ocated just two blocks from the White House, the Corcoran Gallery of Art feels as if it is off the beaten path in Washington, drawing just a fraction of the city’s tourist throngs. The white marble 1897 Beaux Arts colossus usually closes promptly at 5 p.m. on Fridays. But on the rainy night of October 24, 2008, the lights were ablaze well into the evening. With a two-story atrium sporting forty Doric columns and a sweeping staircase to a grand balcony, the perennially cash-strapped private museum is often rented out for weddings and parties. However, tonight’s more than seventy-five guests, who had flown in from Paris, London, Florida, Texas, California, and New York, had a personal connection to the museum and its paintings by Corot, Gainsborough, and Delacroix.

In his invitation, Corcoran director Paul Greenhalgh had described the two days of events as “a gathering of the Clark Family.” Not just any family named Clark, but a reunion of the descendants and relatives of William Andrews Clark, who in 1907 was described as the second richest man in America, after John D. Rockefeller, with a personal fortune worth more than $3 billion in today’s dollars. The copper mogul and Montana senator had been born in 1839 and died in 1925. A Corcoran benefactor, Clark’s name is prominently featured in gold leaf on the museum’s interior wall and credited in small type
beside the many sculptures and paintings that he donated to the permanent collection.

The idea for the Clark family get-together had been jointly hatched by Greenhalgh, a British decorative arts scholar with a mop of brown hair, and Katherine Hall Friedman, known professionally as Carla Hall, a great-great-granddaughter of William Andrews Clark, whose father and grandmother had served on the Corcoran board. Ever since he had joined the Corcoran two years earlier, Greenhalgh, the former head of research at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, had been wooing potential donors, and he was eager to establish a stronger relationship to the Clarks. As Greenhalgh recalls, “It was clear a lot of the family had never been to the museum before.”

The relatives of William Andrews Clark were a far-flung family and many had never met prior to the reunion. Some siblings were estranged and had not seen or spoken to one another in decades. In an e-mail that Carla Hall sent a month before the reunion, she seemed hopeful that the event would change the family dynamics: “We are all eager to get to know one another and learn more about the Clark family, with a specific focus on the life of WA Clark and his legacy that is reflected in the Corcoran’s exquisite collection.”

This night would prove to be a turning point in the tangled history of the Clarks, although not in a way that the organizers could have imagined. Four years later, the party guests would be quizzed by teams of lawyers about their memories of the evening and who said what to whom. In the whispered asides at the Corcoran party, one could hear the battle lines of a future family feud taking shape. The Clarks in attendance that night included descendants of three branches of the family tree and a representative from the fourth. The senator had sired seven children during his first marriage, and then as a widower married a much younger woman and produced two daughters. As a result, there was a thirty-six-year age gap between his oldest and youngest children: his grandchildren and young daughters were nearly the same age.

Three children from his first marriage—the scandal-prone Manhattan divorcée Mary (known as May), the booze- and racetrack-loving California bon vivant Charles, and the prim and proper
Katherine—had produced seven children, and many of their descendants were in attendance this evening.

Strolling past the snarling bronze lions guarding the Corcoran’s entrance, Karine Albert McCall, a petite and slender sixty-eight-year-old blonde, arrived with her husband, Donald McCall, a retired cellist. The grandchild of Charles Clark and his banking heiress wife, Celia, Karine had grown up in luxury at her grandmother’s San Francisco Tudor castle, “House-on-Hill,” a 35,000-square-foot estate on six acres with a fifty-five-foot-long music room, twelve bedrooms, and lush gardens.

An artist who painted colorful abstracts, the mother of three children, Karine had spent most of the previous forty years living in Europe, but she and her husband had just moved from London to Washington, D.C. She had recently discovered worrisome information about an elderly Clark relative and had been obsessing about what, if anything, to do. She had confided in her first cousin Jacqueline Baeyens-Clerte, who had flown in from her home in Paris to attend the reunion and give Karine moral support. Tonight Karine had a mission: finding allies to discuss her concerns. Karine had never met many of her Clark relatives. As she and Donald and Jacqueline circulated through the cocktail hour at the Corcoran, introducing themselves and making small talk, there was a subtext to the conversations. As Karine recalls, “We were trying to figure out, who can we trust?”

Karine’s newfound worries centered on her great-aunt, a woman she had known all her life as “Tante Huguette.” The frail and monied Manhattan centenarian had a haunting hold on the imaginations of several generations of Clark relatives.

Huguette Marcelle Clark, the sole surviving child of William Andrews Clark, was now 102 years old and resided in Beth Israel Hospital in New York. No family member had seen her in forty years. Born in 1906 in Paris to Clark’s second wife, Anna, Huguette (pronounced you-GET) had been instantly famous for her wealth and constantly chased by photographers as a pretty child and desirable debutante, reluctantly starring in the society pages. Divorced in 1930 after a brief marriage, she never wed again or had children and cut
herself off from the social whirl, deliberately cultivating an air of mystery. The gossip columnists of her era, Walter Winchell and Cholly Knickerbocker, had periodically run whatever-happened-to items about Huguette.

Several third-generation Clark relatives like Karine, now in their sixties and seventies, had met Huguette during their childhoods, but to the younger generation she was a cipher, an eccentric curiosity. The family members speculated about her life, and several had repeatedly asked to meet her to no avail, which only made them even more curious. She haunted the imaginations of three generations of Clark relatives, an elusive, reclusive figure. “Talking with the family, none of them knew her,” says Corcoran director Greenhalgh. “I’m sure they were desperate to get an audience but none of them did.” The professional photographer who had been hired to capture the reunion, Martha FitzSimon, had been briefed about Huguette in advance, recalling, “Carla told me that nobody had been able to talk to her for years.”

The last time any family member could remember actually seeing Huguette was at the funeral of Carla Hall’s grandmother in March 1968 at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan. “After the funeral, we all were together for a short while, greeting each other and expressing condolences,” recalls Erika Hall, Carla’s mother and the widow of Huguette’s great-nephew John Hall. “Huguette was there also and did the same thing, very sweet, and disappeared rather soon.”

Disappeared
was an apt word to describe Huguette’s behavior. She maintained sporadic phone contact for many years with a few Clark relatives, speaking in a soft voice with a hint of a French accent. When Erika Hall and her husband sent flowers once or twice a year, Huguette would call to say a brief thank-you. But even these kinds of communications had tapered off in recent years. Huguette had repeatedly declined to give out her phone number and had always taken a standoffish don’t-call-me-I’ll-call-you approach to her relatives. Most did not know that she was in the hospital and assumed she still resided at her sprawling complex of three apartments at 907 Fifth Avenue, with forty-two rooms.

Her two gatekeepers were Irving Kamsler, an accountant who had worked for her since 1979, and attorney Wallace Bock, a real estate tax specialist who had inherited Huguette as a client when her veteran lawyer became ill in 1997. At age seventy-six, Bock still handled Huguette’s legal affairs and served as an intermediary between Huguette and her relatives. An Orthodox Jew, Bock had been invited to the Corcoran event as Huguette’s representative, but the Friday-Saturday schedule conflicted with the Sabbath. He sent his colleague Kamsler to attend in his stead.

Huguette was, in fact, closer to the deferential sixty-one-year-old Kamsler, who visited her frequently and coordinated her medical care with her private nurses and doctors at Beth Israel Hospital. Bock and Kamsler viewed themselves as Huguette’s protectors: they paid her bills, handled her taxes, supervised her staff, and even ran errands. “I found them very easy to deal with,” says Greenhalgh of Kamsler and Bock. “My impression is what Huguette did is get faithful people who would stand by her and she would stand by them.”

Paid generous monthly retainers (Bock received $15,000 per month; Kamsler got $5,000 per month plus a standard yearly $50,000 bonus), the men made themselves constantly available to their most important client. As Cynthia Garcia, a paralegal at Bock’s firm from 1999 to 2002, recalls, “If Mr. Bock was in the men’s room when she called, I had to put her on hold and run to the men’s room and knock on the door. If he was smoking his pipe by the air shaft, I’d get him. I knew where he ate lunch, a kosher luncheonette. If she called, I’d run out to get him. She would call ten times a day.” But Huguette Clark was older now and her hearing was fading; the calls had become much less frequent.

The Corcoran Gallery had been the recipient of William Andrews Clark’s vast art collection, including nearly two hundred paintings, Rodin marble nudes, Oriental rugs, Egyptian antiquities, and majolica. His collection featured Corot landscapes and Degas ballet paintings, a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington, and works by Chardin and Cazin. The Salon Doré, an ornate 1770s gilded room
that Clark had imported from Paris to install in his turn-of-the-century robber-baron Fifth Avenue mansion, gleamed as the result of a recent restoration.

As William Andrews Clark’s distant relations peered admiringly at the art, one implicit thought floated through the air: if only these valuable works of art had stayed in the family. Imagine the cachet of a Corot in one’s very own living room. Or better yet, consider the millions of dollars that these artworks would fetch now at auction. A Sickle-Leaf Persian carpet that had once belonged to Clark was subsequently sold by the museum for $33.7 million.

William Andrews Clark, who made his fortune in mining and banking in Montana, expanded into building railroads. Clark showered his children with gifts, bragging in nouveau riche fashion about his generosity. On May 29, 1900, the
New York Times
recited the senator’s wedding presents to his daughter Katherine, including $100,000 worth of jewelry—a diamond-and-ruby bodice ornament and diamond-and-emerald tiara—plus $4 million in securities and real estate. Just in case that sum did not convey his enduring fatherly love, the story noted that Clark had previously given his daughter $10 million.

Upon his death, the senator bequeathed an estimated $15 million each (inflation-adjusted, the equivalent of $200 million today) to his surviving children: two adult sons and two adult daughters from his first marriage, and the teenage Huguette. But fortunes have a way of dwindling as the money passes through several generations, especially in a family like the Clarks, with multiple marriages and divorces. Some of tonight’s guests were trust funders, but others lived off their salaries. As the Corcoran’s Greenhalgh recalls, “My impression was that a significant portion of the people at the reunion were not wealthy people. I think there was a range.”

On the Corcoran’s second floor, the tables were decorated with red-and-gold tablecloths and set with gold-rimmed glasses and gold-rimmed dinnerware. With just a half hour left before the seated dinner was to begin, Carla Hall, wearing a fitted navy cocktail dress with short sleeves, could be seen rearranging place cards. And she did not look happy about it.

A five-foot-ten, imposing fifty-six-year-old blonde with a take-charge personality, Carla had embraced her Clark heritage with pride. She ran a corporate branding business out of her Upper West Side brownstone in Manhattan, creating annual reports and marketing materials for clients such as the Ford Foundation and Morgan Stanley. Carla’s great-grandmother, Katherine Clark Morris, had been the only one of William Andrews Clark’s children to make a socially fortuitous marriage, to a descendant of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Lewis Morris.

Carla had been working on the arrangements for the Corcoran party for months with Ian Devine, another fourth-generation Clark descendant. A preppy-looking fifty-five-year-old consultant, Devine advised financial firms on how to market their services to wealthy families. His great-grandmother, Mary Clark Culver Kling de Brabant, had been the bad girl of her generation. Married three times, Mary, the oldest child of William Andrews Clark, was a darling of the gossip columns of her era for her acrimonious divorces and exotic galas.