The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (3 page)

Carla and Ian had only discovered by serendipity that they were related. In 2001, a business associate arranged for the duo to meet at Carla’s home office to discuss a potential work project. Ian’s brother had recently given him a family tree and certain names sounded familiar: his great-grandmother Mary and Carla’s great-grandmother Katherine had been sisters. As Ian recalls, “At the end of our business meeting, I asked if her parents were John and Erika. She said yes, and we took it from there.” Both of their families owned portraits of William Andrews Clark by Polish painter Tadé Styka (pronounced TAH-day STEE-ka), an artist popular in Washington and Hollywood, who had been commissioned by the senator to create an excessive eleven paintings.

Carla Hall had never met or spoken to her “Tante Huguette,” but she had frequently been in touch by phone in recent years with Huguette’s lawyer, Wallace Bock. Acting in 2006 as a self-appointed family liaison to the Corcoran, Carla had asked Bock to pass along a request to Huguette to donate archival Clark family material (letters, photos, documents) to the museum. Huguette declined to do so. Curious about William Andrews Clark’s historic estate, Bellosguardo, in Santa
Barbara, still owned by Huguette but vacant, Carla had requested and received permission, via Wallace Bock, to visit in 2007. She sent Huguette a thank-you note afterward but did not receive a reply.

As soon as Carla began planning the Corcoran party, she consulted Bock and then sent Huguette an invitation to the event with a request for a donation to underwrite expenses. It was cheeky to write to a distant relative and ask for money, but everyone in the family assumed, correctly, that Huguette could easily afford it. Huguette contributed $10,000 but, as expected, declined to attend. As her accountant, Irving Kamsler, recalls telling her, “If you want to go, we can absolutely arrange it, get you there in a luxury limousine.” He adds, “But she had no desire to meet her family.” Her absence was a disappointment. Beverly Bonner McCord, a descendant of one of the senator’s sisters, says, “We would have loved to have met Huguette, even for just a few minutes.”

The centenarian represented a living link to the most glittering era of family history. Huguette and her mother, Anna Clark, attended the opening of the Clark wing at the Corcoran in 1928—President Calvin Coolidge cut the silken cord—and she had an emotional attachment to the artworks. She had played with her older sister, Andrée, in the Salon Doré back when it was part of her father’s Fifth Avenue house. The paintings and sculptures at the Corcoran had been the backdrop to her daily life. She had accompanied her father to museums in Europe and Manhattan. Art was a way that this shy girl could connect with her formidable father. Inspired to become an artist herself, she had taken private lessons for many years with Tadé Styka. The Corcoran had even mounted a show of Huguette Clark’s artwork in 1929, which received favorable attention. With intricate brushwork, she created a striking self-portrait and romantic depictions of flowers.

Proud of her father’s legacy as an art collector, she had been a loyal supporter of the Corcoran for many decades. “I talked to Huguette a number of times, she was very sweet,” recalls David Levy, former Corcoran Gallery director. “She loved things that were French and she loved the Salon Doré. We were restoring that and she contributed.” But he also thought her behavior was strange, to say the least. “She had some huge aversion to anyone seeing her. She would send me
group photos, historic stuff, a group of people standing in front of a building. She would take a black magic marker and cross out her face. It was pretty weird. She never explained it and I never asked.” Freed now from the diplomatic requirements of being a museum head, Levy adds, “She was a nutcase. If you have a nutcase giving you between $25,000 and $100,000 per year, you’ve got to let it ride.”

Huguette’s long-standing relationship with the Corcoran unraveled when Levy championed a new addition to the museum designed by Frank Gehry, which would have sliced into the Clark wing and destroyed the rotunda. She cut her contributions. When the board canceled the Gehry addition, Levy quit as director. Greenhalgh, his successor, had worked to smooth the waters, although he was never able to speak to Huguette Clark directly. “I went to see Wallace Bock, and he was extremely cold at first, because Huguette’s experience with the museum had been bad for many years,” Greenhalgh recalls. “We reassured Wallace Bock that the Clark wing and Clark collections were extremely important to the museum.”

The strategy worked. When Greenhalgh wrote to Huguette in 2007 to tell her about the museum’s precarious financial condition—it was running a $2 million yearly deficit—she responded by pledging $1 million, to be paid in four installments. The new director was understandably eager to keep her, and her advisers, feeling warmly toward the museum.

Carla Hall had been happily chatting with guests that evening and accepting congratulations when she was abruptly interrupted by the Corcoran director’s assistant with an urgent request to change the seating arrangements at the head table. The table needed new additions for the emissaries from Tante Huguette: her accountant, Irving Kamsler, and his wife, Judith.

Short and overweight, wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and striped navy tie, Kamsler and his red-headed wife, Judi, did seem like interlopers as they mingled with the Clark descendants. A graduate of Baruch College, Kamsler and his second wife lived in a modest condominium in Riverdale, and until recently he had been president of his Bronx temple. After working at several different accounting firms,
he was now a sole practitioner and Huguette Clark was his most important client. As her representative, he enjoyed the reflected glory at the party, recalling that the family members were eager for news: “Everyone was interested, people were asking me questions, what was Mrs. Clark like? How is she? I didn’t say very much.”

Even in absentia, Huguette Clark was present at the party. A Clark family photo display included pictures of Huguette and her sister Andrée, pretty young girls with long hair, dressed up for an outing. But Kamsler had become perturbed upon seeing a Clark family tree that did not mention either Huguette or her mother, Anna. He did not realize that the tree had been created as a seating chart for those actually in attendance that night.

Upset by what he perceived as a lack of respect for Huguette, Kamsler tracked down Greenhalgh’s executive assistant and angrily complained. As Kamsler recalls, “I said I’m not going to make a scene, but they are asking her to come and underwrite the cost and they’re ignoring her in this thing.” His rant sparked the last-minute seating change: the Corcoran staffer had taken it upon herself to ask Carla Hall to move Kamsler and his wife from Siberia in the hope of appeasing them.

Carla was visibly upset by the request to upgrade the Kamslers. “I had to reorchestrate all the table arrangements and accommodate the elder members of the family that had traveled far and wide,” Carla recalled with irritation. “I was shaken by that, and I didn’t understand.”

Once the family members were seated, as the mistress of ceremonies, Carla stood up and took to the microphone to welcome her relatives, noting that this was the first time the extended family had come together in a century. She told the group that she hoped the reunion would “begin a new era of Clark cousin connections.” Toward the end of her prepared remarks, Carla expressed her gratitude to Tante Huguette for her “tremendous generosity toward making this weekend reunion possible.” Carla had placed note cards on each table, and suggested that people write to Huguette, with the promise that the comments would be sent along. But her remarks irked Irving Kamsler,
or as he put it, “Carla did make a point to thank Mrs. Clark, and in my opinion, I thought it was an afterthought.”

At the end of the evening, as waiters cleared the tables and the crowd began to disperse, Carla went up to the accountant and his wife and asked, “How did you enjoy the evening?” She was startled by Kamsler’s response. “He grimaced, which I didn’t quite expect, and then I said, ‘How would you think my great-aunt would have liked and enjoyed the evening?’ He became very belligerent and used words that felt very harsh to me… He said, ‘She would have been disgusted at this event, that it was disrespectful of her.’ Then he huffed off. My next conversation was with Ian, because he and his wife, Kerri, were coming toward me and I was quite shaken up.”

Ian Devine overheard a commotion and raced over to Carla to see what was going on. After hearing her account, he was furious about what he perceived as “this out-of-place attack” and “verbal assault on Carla.”

Paul Greenhalgh witnessed the confrontation. “Definitely, Irving was put out,” he says. “My memory was that on the various boards and posters put around, Huguette was not thanked for supporting the evening, and he was upset.” Word quickly spread that Kamsler had criticized the festivities.

The contretemps ended the evening on a jarring note. The next morning, the guests gathered at the museum again, starting with a brunch. Irving and Judi Kamsler received a decidedly chilly reaction from the family. “They treated us like lepers,” he recalled.

After touring the Clark collection, the guests wound up at a luncheon, with featured speaker Stanley Pitts, an amateur historian. Pitts, an airline safety administrator based in Alaska, had written his master’s thesis on William Andrews Clark at the University of Northern Texas. Back in 1899, Clark had been charged with bribing Montana legislators to win his Senate seat; Pitts’s thesis was an attempt to clear the senator’s name. Clark’s descendants were well aware of the controversies swirling around their patriarch and sought Pitts out to tell him their tales. “They’d been told that he was a rascal and tight-fisted,” Pitts says, recalling that one Clark relative confessed, “ ‘My
great-aunt would not let us speak his name in the house, they were so ashamed. We thought he was a criminal.’ ”

Even though Pitts had a dramatic story to tell, the senator’s great-granddaughter Karine McCall had trouble paying attention during his remarks. Karine, who had come to the family reunion on a mission, needed to make a quick decision. Who could she trust in this roomful of relatives? The hyperorganized Carla Hall appeared to be plugged into the family history. Karine passed her a note, inviting Carla over to her town house in Georgetown later that afternoon. She had urgent matters to discuss.

O
n this rainy Saturday afternoon, Carla Hall arrived at Karine’s Georgetown house with Ian Devine in tow. Karine’s houseguest and cousin, Jacqueline Baeyens-Clerte, a French baron’s daughter, joined them as well. The white 1820s four-story town house on P Street NW in Georgetown, located on a prime corner lot, had been meticulously restored, with marble fireplaces on each floor and a small, sunny backyard. Karine and Donald McCall had purchased the showplace just weeks before the family reunion at the Corcoran and were still unpacking the final boxes.

They had decorated in eclectic fashion with African masks, colorful Oriental rugs, Russian icons mixed with antique furniture, and paintings that Karine had inherited from her mother, Agnes Clark Albert. A San Francisco philanthropist and granddaughter of William Andrews Clark, Agnes had attended the Spence School in Manhattan with Huguette back in the early 1920s.

The events that had triggered Karine’s newfound curiosity about her great-aunt Huguette began with a rekindled romance. In 1967, Karine, a divorced single mother, had married Donald, a musician nine years her senior. The couple amicably divorced in 1987 and settled in separate countries (Karine in England, Donald in Italy) but had recently gotten back together and remarried. Earlier this year, as they tried to decide where to live together as a couple, a bit of information emerged that inadvertently related to Huguette.

After Karine ushered her relatives into her new living room, she explained that her trip down the rabbit hole began with the enactment of a new British tax on foreigners that she and Donald feared might be ruinous to their finances. As they considered their options, an adviser inquired: Would Karine inherit money in the future? “I don’t know,” she replied, but then began to wonder about the odds.

The first name that came to Karine’s mind was an aging and wealthy family member who just might be generous: Tante Huguette. It was plausible. Karine’s mother had been friendly with Huguette, and Karine recalled visits to her relatives’ Fifth Avenue apartments and Santa Barbara estate. “Huguette was always sitting next to her mother [Anna], but she never said anything,” Karine remembers. “Anna was so much fun, she was an original. She did what she wanted. She had married for money, and she spent it too.” Huguette and Karine’s mother, Agnes Albert, spoke regularly even though they lived on opposite sides of the country. As Karine recalls, “My mother used to phone Tante Huguette every month.”

But a few years before Agnes died in 2002, she told her daughter Karine that she was concerned about Huguette. “My mother was not well,” Karine recalled. “She called me into her room and said she wanted to speak to me about something important. She said, ‘I tried to call Huguette to say hello, and instead spoke to her lawyer. He told me not to phone any longer, if Huguette wanted to talk to me, she would call. But that’s not the way it’s always been.’ ”

After Agnes Albert died, Karine’s older brother, Paul Albert, sent Tante Huguette a note informing her of the death. Huguette replied with a heartfelt handwritten condolence note:

With no children of her own, it was possible that Huguette might leave a bequest to Agnes’s children. Karine asked her lawyer to get in touch with Wallace Bock to inquire about whether she was in Huguette’s will, for tax planning purposes. Word came back that Karine and her siblings were not among the future recipients of Huguette Clark’s generosity.

Recalling her mother’s request to look out for Huguette and seized with a nagging sense of guilt, Karine did a Google search on Huguette’s closest known associates, Bock and accountant Irving Kamsler. She was astonished to discover that Kamsler was a convicted felon: “What I found out was his arrest for pedophilia.”

On September 6, 2007, Kamsler had been arrested and charged with exchanging sexually explicit e-mails with a fifteen-year-old girl in an AOL chat room. As the
Riverdale Press
story noted, the “girl” was an undercover cop; this was a sex sting. Kamsler used an e-mail address that was not even remotely incognito for an accountant trolling for underage girls: [email protected].

Freed on $20,000 bond, Kamsler was forced to resign from the presidency of his temple, Congregation Shaarei Shalom. A law enforcement officer who investigated the case recalls, “He was really nasty and domineering, very explicit about what he would do to these girls.” Yet the official also noted that Kamsler “wanted a ‘girlfriend’ experience. He wanted a more refined girl who would dress up a little bit and meet him in a hotel.” Newspaper photos show Kamsler’s wife, Judi, at his side for the court hearings.

Just three weeks before the Corcoran party, Kamsler pled guilty on October 2 to attempting to disseminate indecent material to a minor. (Sentenced several months later, he received a $5,000 fine and five years probation, and was required to register as a sex offender. He received a dispensation from the judge to continue to practice as an accountant.) Karine had been horrified by the prospect of sitting near Kamsler at the Clark reunion. Now she asked Carla and Ian: did they think Tante Huguette’s finances should be handled by a convicted felon?

“Carla and I were pretty much speechless,” Ian recalls. “I’m a pretty jaded guy, but this was horrifying.”

But this was not the first time that he and Carla had wondered whether anything was amiss with Huguette’s financial affairs. Five years earlier, Ian had seen an article in the
New York Times
announcing that Sotheby’s was auctioning off a Renoir,
Dans Les Roses (Madame Leon Clapisson)
, a portrait of an aristocratic Parisian in a garden. The owner was listed as Mrs. Huguette M. Clark. Ian alerted Carla, and they went to Sotheby’s together for a closer look. It was a bonding experience, cementing their mutual Clark roots and trying to satisfy their mutual curiosity about their relative.

“It took us by surprise that this painting was up for sale,” Carla said. “Why is this huge painting, very valuable painting, being sold? What’s going on? A woman who is of a substantial asset base, the daughter of Senator Clark, why is it being sold now?” (The Renoir was purchased for $23.5 million by casino owner Steve Wynn.) Carla fired off a letter to Dare Hartwell, a Corcoran curator, writing, “We were as shocked as anyone by the sale and she must have been truly horrified to see her name in print.”

Carla had also had a disconcerting back-and-forth with David Levy, the Corcoran’s former director, who mentioned that Huguette’s contributions to the museum had dropped substantially. He had heard that she had given a large sum of money instead to an Israeli project to help out Wallace Bock’s daughter. (Carla would later learn that at Bock’s behest, Huguette, who was Catholic, had donated $1.85 million to build a security system in Efrat, Israel.) David Levy wrote Carla an e-mail: “In truth, I’ve had some disturbing thoughts about the whole matter and in particular, Mrs. Clark’s relationship to Wallace Bock, the current lawyer, who may have his own agenda (which would be a big legal no-no.)”

Carla reported this development to her mother and to her uncle Lewis Hall, but both urged caution. “I brought this to the family’s attention and the answer was… if Mrs. Clark wanted to give to Israel, it’s her free will to give to Israel and it’s none of our business,” Carla recalls. “They advised me not to speak to anybody and to respect Mrs. Clark’s privacy.”

But this new information—that Huguette’s accountant was a convicted sex offender—was impossible to ignore. Sitting in Karine’s
living room, the family members strategized over how to proceed. They had no proof of any wrongdoing, but their questions were multiplying by the second. Was she in good health and of sound mind, or was someone else making financial decisions on her behalf? Was she well cared for? As the meeting broke up, they agreed to do more research and make a plan.

Although Ian Devine’s great-grandmother Mary and Huguette had been half sisters, he had never met the oldest living Clark. He sent her two cards in the 1970s that went unanswered. Now Ian went home and searched online for information about Kamsler. What turned up was odd. A friend of the accountant had posted purported advice from Kamsler about the repercussions of an upcoming tax law change. As Ian recalls, the quotes “seemed to indicate that Irving Kamsler was in favor of getting clients to agree to be kept on life support, kept alive by any means possible, until 2010, when estate taxes dropped to zero because of a quirk in the law.” These kinds of comments were actually common in accounting circles at the time because of the oddities of the 2001 Bush tax cut. (The family of Yankees owner George Steinbrenner saved an estimated $600 million in federal taxes because he died in 2010, rather than a year earlier or later.) Karine had found the same online reference to Kamsler’s supposed thoughts about estate taxes. The trio worried that Huguette might be in physical danger.

Unaware that the Clark relatives were marshaling their forces against him, Irving Kamsler went to Beth Israel Hospital to tell Huguette about the reunion. At 102, she remained mentally sharp, although she suffered from severe hearing loss. She was capable of having a conversation if people stood near her good left ear; familiar voices were easier for her to understand. Kamsler portrayed himself as acting as her champion at the event, challenging her family members on her behalf. Brutally honest, he told Huguette that in his opinion, her relatives were ingrates: “I was upset on your behalf that the family diagram and tree didn’t have your name on it.” For Huguette, this brought back painful memories of being treated dismissively by her half siblings in the 1930s and ’40s. Kamsler did tell her that many relatives had expressed interest in her, but the accountant insisted that he
had been circumspect. As he recalls, “She was glad that I had gone to represent her but upset that I had gotten into a tiff with Carla.”

Carla Hall called Wallace Bock to complain that Kamsler had been rude at the reunion, saying that she was “upset and concerned.” Bock recalls, “I tried to gloss it over and smooth it out.” Carla asked Bock to arrange a call between Huguette and her mother, Erika—the women had not spoken in several years—and he turned her down. Carla then talked things over with her mother, who decided to make the case herself. On November 24, Erika Hall phoned Wallace Bock to reiterate her request to speak to Huguette and received an equally frosty response. “He was very noncommittal and closed the door,” says Erika Hall. “That was the feeling, you had the door shut in to your face.”

Bock insists that he was only following Huguette’s instructions. “Mrs. Clark wasn’t talking to anyone on the telephone. She wouldn’t talk to any strangers,” he said. “One of the problems was her hearing. People had to shout at her, and she didn’t enjoy the conversations anymore.”

Erika was so angry that she wrote to Corcoran director Paul Greenhalgh, complaining about Bock and describing Kamsler’s criminal conviction. “As you may have heard, several of us are very disturbed and worried about the condition and financial situation of Huguette Clark,” she wrote. “After meeting the Kamslers, this became very apparent… We are exploring what legal rights we have and if there could be ‘elder abuse.’ ”

But the museum officials already knew about the accountant’s legal troubles. “Irving came to us personally and confessed he had this conviction,” Greenhalgh says. His reaction was that Kamsler had used poor judgment in one part of his life, but there was no evidence that he had done anything wrong in a professional context. Greenhalgh decided this should be seen as an isolated incident, explaining in an interview with me, “As far as I was concerned, it had nothing to do with the family and it was done, over and finished.”

Feeling increasingly frustrated, Carla and Ian decided to take direct action and actually go visit Huguette Clark. One relative mentioned that Huguette had supposedly been at Doctors Hospital in the
1990s, which had been taken over by Beth Israel. A telephone operator at Beth Israel confirmed to Ian that they did have a patient with the right name. He insists that they wanted “to make sure that our aunt was not being kept alive by artificial means in some inhumane fashion.”

Before heading to the hospital, Carla asked for advice from one of the few family members who had been in touch with Huguette. California Realtor Paul Clark Newell Jr., a descendant of William Andrews Clark’s younger sister Ella, had been working for a decade on an unpublished biography of Senator Clark. He had interviewed Huguette, although they had last spoken four years earlier in 2004. The go-between who arranged his calls was Suzanne Pierre, the widow of Huguette’s physician and the heiress’s best friend.