The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (49 page)

Huguette’s specific requests—to Chris Sattler, the caretakers at Bellosguardo and her New Canaan estate, Dr. Singman ($100,000), and Beth Israel ($1 million)—were honored under the settlement. But there was a twist: the clawback petition remained in place against Beth Israel, Dr. Singman, Dr. Rudick, and Huguette’s night nurse, Geraldine Coffey. Just because the hospital and Singman were slated to receive money from the estate under the settlement, they were not off the hook.

The Clark family’s lawyer, John Morken, remained angry that Beth Israel had never tried to address Huguette’s psychological issues. “If they had treated her properly, she would have been able to go home and enjoy the last twenty years of her life,” he fumed. “This was a reputable hospital that should have been taking care of people rather than exploiting someone who was dependent.”

In a coordinated legal maneuver, the public administrator subsequently withdrew the clawback petititon and, on behalf of Huguette’s estate, Morken sued Beth Israel, Dr. Singman, Dr. Rudick, and Geraldine Coffey for $105 million in damages. Geraldine Coffey countersued, claiming that she had been promised a bequest by Huguette and should receive money from the heiress’s estate, not give it back. A trial date was set for the end of 2014. If any financial settlement comes out of that lawsuit, the proceeds will be divided up three ways: the family members will receive 50 percent, and Bellosguardo and the Corcoran Gallery will each receive 25 percent.

Make no mistake, the attorneys’ fees in the Huguette M. Clark probate battle were obscene: the lawyers who lucked into this case were awarded nearly $40 million of her money. But a trial would have sent the meters for billable hours racing into overdrive. “It was a victory for charity,” Jason Lilien insisted. “Bellosguardo was created as an arts foundation, and the family received much less than they were seeking.”

There was one last dramatic turn left in the case. The negotiations orchestrated by the Attorney General’s office had not been wrapped up by the time that jury selection was scheduled to start on Thursday morning, September 19, The largest remaining problem: the Santa Barbara members of the self-named Bellosguardo Foundation were still demanding to be involved. So at 10 a.m., the full squadron of lawyers gathered at a large courthouse room at 60 Centre Street to interview potential jurors. Hadassah arrived wearing an expensive-looking quilted black hunting jacket, skirt, and jaunty scarf, looking as if she’d had a makeover. With a flattering haircut framing her face, she smiled shyly at everyone in the vicinity. Paul Albert, Karine’s older brother, had flown in from California for the occasion to see the action firsthand.

For an hour, the lawyers questioned potential jurors about what they knew about Huguette Clark, and whether they would be willing to spend two months or longer at a trial. But the larger message was how damaging the
New York Times
story had been to the Clark family’s position. As a middle-class professional Asian man freely admitted, he thought they didn’t deserve any money. “She had relatives she hadn’t seen who showed up,” he said. “Her second will gave a lot to the people around her and her caretakers. I have a bias toward the second will.” If the case had gone to trial, perhaps the family would not have made out so well after all.

Suddenly, there was a flurry of activity in the courtroom. The lawyers had received an e-mail from Justice Anderson’s clerk, saying that she was about to rule on whether the newly formed Bellosguardo group had legal standing. After turning that group down, the judge agreed to suspend jury selection to allow a few more days for negotiations. Around midnight on Friday, September 20, the
Times
broke the story that a tentative settlement had been reached. The following Tuesday, the lawyers marched before Justice Anderson to present the done deal. The battle over Huguette’s fortune was over.

The Clark relatives were jubilant. “Someone tried to take advantage of someone in our family and we stood up to it,” Karine said. “I’m so glad we did that.” Added Carla, “We came together, this choreography brought us together to become a cohesive family that we never
knew we had.” They were eager to frame the settlement as a victory for a larger cause rather than financial gain. “We achieved everything we wanted to achieve, we got those guys removed,” said Ian, referring to Wallace Bock and Irving Kamsler. Ian, who had been chosen as the family representative to the Bellosguardo Foundation, added, “Hopefully, this whole matter will draw more attention to the issue of elder abuse, which is a serious problem in our country.”

In truth, elder abuse had almost nothing to do with the resolution of the last will and testament of Huguette Marcelle Clark. There was no legal finding that anyone had preyed on Tante Huguette. Although even the Attorney General’s office believed that Huguette’s second will reflected her wishes, nonetheless it might not have stood up during a protracted court fight due to the problematic signing ceremony. In that sense, Wallace Bock won the family’s victory for them.

When I interviewed him after the settlement, Bock was relieved that he did not have to make restitution to the estate. “I thank God it’s over,” says Bock. “To me the most important thing is that I’ve gotten out clean. I don’t have to worry about money I’m losing, money I’m gaining. It’s over.” Aware of the Clark relatives’ enmity, he was equally vitriolic toward them. “I think they’re pretty low,” Bock said. “They jumped on the bandwagon. They didn’t give a damn about her for all these years, then it’s all about how much they loved her and want her fortune.”

How would Huguette have reacted to the way her millions were parceled out by these lawyers, total strangers who did not know her?

Unlike her money-mad father, who was obsessed with building and preserving his fortune down to quibbling over a lost penny in a gumball machine, Huguette had never cared about her inheritance. She enjoyed living well and was adept at using her money to get what she wanted. But the woman who refused to acknowledge her own mortality never appeared to be concerned about what would happen to her fortune once she was gone. Viewing her inheritance as a mixed blessing, she was forever haunted by the fear implanted by her father that people cared about her only for her fortune. Money, love, and insecurity were forever intertwined.

For forty-two years, dating from her mother’s death in 1963 until 2005, she had been told repeatedly by lawyers that if she did nothing, the money would go to her distant Clark relatives. Huguette was a healthy fifty-seven years old when the question was first raised and declined to write a new will. Maybe she felt a connection to these blood relatives, maybe she resented them for ancient grudges, but either way, she knew they stood to inherit and did nothing to stop it.

Only when she was nearly ninety-nine years old, frail and recovering from pneumonia, pressured by virtually everyone in her life, did Huguette finally sign two new wills. And even in the first version of her last testament, her relatives would still have inherited. So it’s hard to believe that Huguette would have been terribly bothered by the final outcome in a Manhattan courtroom in 2013, as lawyers divided up the fortune amassed by her father, who was born in 1839.

Huguette loved Hadassah but she had already elevated the nurse to the upper 1 percent of the wealthy. Their relationship over the decades had been a study in mutual manipulation and codependency that has the making of a Tony Award–winning two-hander. Exposed to the light of public scrutiny, their transactional cash-for-affection bond was unappealing to the outside world, but the two women had unequivocally each gotten what they wanted. They mirrored each other and saw what they needed to see.

Born into a moneyed and cosseted existence, Huguette had never felt comfortable with that stultifying world and rebelled against some of the rituals. Rejecting the splendors of Fifth Avenue for a stark hospital room was in keeping with many of her other idiosyncratic life decisions. Belonging to society was important to her parvenu parents, and she honored their spirit each year by retaining her membership in the
Social Register
, but she never wanted to spend her time with Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and Astors. Rather than lunch at the Colony Club and the Knickerbocker, vacation in Palm Beach, and grace the side of an equally moneyed spouse, she chose solitude and art for most of her adult life.

Bellosguardo mattered to her. For thirty years, she spent her happiest times there. Even when she stopped going west, she could imagine
sitting in her studio and painting while gazing out the window at the rosebush that Tadé Styka had bought for her. She could picture her father dozing on a lawn chair overlooking the Pacific, recall the sound of her mother’s harp echoing down the halls and the bracing tang of salt water while skinny-dipping in the ocean on a hot afternoon.

She didn’t want the place to change, ever. And now she had passed that gift on to others. Artists could be inspired in the future by this serene spot that had given her such joy. Bellosguardo would not fall into the hands of a Russian oligarch or a Chinese billionaire. Huguette had now become William Wordsworth’s “phantom of delight”—“a dancing shape, an image gay, to haunt, to startle, and waylay”—and her spirit would forever grace the premises.

Chris Sattler had not yet heard about the probate settlement when I called for his reaction, so I had the pleasure of telling him that he would receive $500,000. “Oh, dear God, I’m stunned,” he said. “I didn’t think it would happen. That’s such good news. I have to go tell my wife.” A few days later, we spoke again. He had been thinking back to his last few days in Huguette’s apartment, before he had been let go in the summer of 2011. He had walked through the cavernous rooms, recalling two decades of listening to Huguette’s tales. “I was thinking about how lucky I had been, how fortuitous that we had been put together. I got to meet a very special person from a different epoch.”

Huguette had given him photographs to go along with her stories: escaping with her family from France in 1914 on the USS
Tennessee
, surfing with Duke Kahanamoku in Hawaii, picnicking with her mother at the Grand Canyon. Chris had hung the framed pictures in the upstairs family room at his Long Beach home, a tribute to her unique twentieth-century history.

He ended his tour of 907 Fifth Avenue in the twelfth-floor wood-paneled Japanese room, gazing at a picture that Huguette had painted of a geisha smoking an opium pipe, with an inscrutable look on her face. It haunted him. Every detail was perfect, even the ashes on the geisha’s hands. It made him wonder what the ethereal Huguette had been thinking and feeling when she painted it. For a woman who
seemed so sheltered, Huguette’s fascination with the floating world of prewar Tokyo illustrated the complexities lurking within. “She was supposed to be unworldly,” he concluded. “But she had so much more knowledge of the real world than people gave her credit for.”

As Sattler exited the apartment, he locked the door as he had countless times before, but this time it was different. Madame would never be coming home, and as the deadbolt clicked shut, it bid farewell to a woman who had lived through an era and a lifestyle that no one would ever experience again.

Sixteen-year-old Huguette Marcelle Clark in 1922—the same year New York society was scandalized by her half sister Mary’s second divorce. Huguette’s eighty-three-year-old father worried he wouldn’t be around to protect his daughter when suitors came to call, so he told her, “No one will love you for who you are. They will love you for your money.”
(Reproduced with the permission of the Estate of Huguette Clark)

Sen. William Andrews Clark with his second wife and Huguette’s mother, Anna La Chapelle Clark. The senator met the former Miss La Chapelle when she was just fifteen and he was a widower thirty-nine years her senior. Anna, prematurely deaf, used a boxy hearing aid, seen here.
(Courtesy of Roberto E. Socas)