The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (46 page)

That same day, the public administrator’s counsel made another surprising announcement: he was planning to demand that Hadassah return the $5 million that she had received in 2009, since he could not find any documents showing that Huguette had authorized the cash transfer. “I can guarantee you,” Schram said, “I’m not giving away any secrets, that that gift is going to be the subject of clawback proceedings.” Hadassah had now been warned that instead of receiving more of Huguette’s money from the will, she was in danger of losing what she already had.

For Bock and Kamsler, who had served Huguette side by side for years, the court hearing resulted in a public rift. Holland and Knight dropped Kamsler as a client while continuing to represent Bock. Bock, who had recently turned eighty, seemed stunned to find himself in the center of a legal firestorm over his work for Huguette. “I figured she would go eventually, and I’d be able to relax. Be the executor of the estate, slowly dispose of the property she had, and collect my commissions,” said Bock. Did he ever imagine that this day would come, with his reputation and judgment under attack? “Not in my wildest dreams.”

The battle for Huguette’s estate was becoming a referendum on her character: Who was she, really? Huguette’s state of mind was at the center of the case. Her psyche was being dissected at Surrogate’s Court as each side argued for the point of view that would make their clients rich.

Attorneys for Hadassah Peri and Beth Israel Hospital insisted that Huguette was smart, well-informed, and independent, while the lawyer for her relatives, who had not seen her in decades, portrayed her as a defenseless centenarian who had been exploited by greedy caretakers. In February 2012, Clark family lawyer John Morken filed legal papers claiming that Huguette had been coerced by Hadassah, Wallace Bock, and Irving Kamsler to sign both of her 2005 wills and was “not of sound mind or memory.”

This would be difficult to prove, since there was nothing in Huguette’s medical records that indicated she suffered from any form of dementia or senility.

It is a time-honored tactic in a probate fight to charge that an elderly person was incompetent, but this portrayal in legal papers and the tabloids felt disrespectful to those people who had actually known Huguette well. Marie Pompei, who had nothing financially to gain, fondly remembered her final few conversations with Huguette in 2011. She vehemently insisted, “You can’t tell me she was out of it.”

Even as the legal battle lines were being drawn, Huguette’s possessions—her New York real estate and her jewelry—were being liquidated. Rarely in high-end Manhattan real estate do apartments come up for sale that have been off the market for eighty-six years, so it was not surprising that Huguette’s sprawling Fifth Avenue properties drew tremendous interest.
IT’LL BE HUGUETTE! BROKERS LICK THEIR CHOPS OVER CITY’S BIGGEST LISTING
, wrote the
New York Observer
. Mary Rutherfurd of Brown Harris Stevens, who sold Laurance Rockefeller’s triplex apartment to Rupert Murdoch for $44 million in 2004, landed the listing. She began ushering potential buyers
through Huguette’s long-unoccupied homes in early March. The furniture had been emptied out, but the vintage wallpaper and fixtures spoke of bygone days, a home trapped in amber. “It was like going back in time one hundred years,” one would-be buyer told the
New York Times
.

The Clark family descendants were given a private tour. As Carla Hall recalls, “The most fascinating thing for me was Huguette’s paintings, the stained-glass windows, and the view. I thought she was a good painter.” Adds Celia Gray, a Clark descendant who had flown in from California, “I was very impressed with her talent.” Karine McCall was the only relative present who had been there before and remembered visiting Huguette and her lively mother, Anna, back in the 1950s, a lifetime ago. Karine recalled that every time she saw mother and daughter, the dynamics were the same. “Anna did all the talking, Huguette would sit quietly by. She was very sweet, very shy, didn’t say much.”

The trophy real estate listing brought in an initial $31.5 million bid for two of Huguette’s apartments by the prime minister of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani. But the exclusive co-op board turned him down. Two Wall Street masters of the universe ultimately won the right to live in Huguette’s treasured lairs. She had purchased her twelfth-floor aerie for $31,500 in 1955; hedge fund manager Boaz Weinstein paid $25 million for the space. Frederick Iseman, the founder of a private equity firm, bought most of her two eighth-floor apartments for $22.5 million. Now her heirs—whoever they turned out to be—would reap the rewards.

Huguette’s diamonds, emeralds, and pearls, the dazzling daughter-of-a-robber-baron spoils, had been locked away in a safe deposit box at a Chase branch on the Upper East Side for more than fifty years until the estate’s lawyers turned the key. To generate interest in an auction of the jewelry, Christie’s devoted an entire room to the reclusive Huguette in its ground-floor Rockefeller Center headquarters. Her colorful self-portrait, wearing an artist’s smock and carrying a palette, dominated the space. Photographs revealed glimpses of her long-gone public life: Parisian baby pictures, girlish photos with her sister and
father, high-spirited deb years, and a vamping, laughing 1930s formal portrait in a floral gown. During the week before the auction, crowds gathered in the small space, speculating out loud about Huguette. This private woman would have been mortified that images of her life were being used to boost sale prices.

Visitors were permitted to try on her jewelry; staffers unlocked the glass cases while security guards warily stood by. Prices went Lucy-in-the-sky-with-diamonds-high during the April 17, 2012, auction. Huguette’s rare pink diamond sold for $15.7 million, more than double the estimate; her twenty-carat diamond ring was bid up to $2.7 million; Huguette’s pearls brought in $362,000; a ruby, emerald, and sapphire Tiffany bracelet sold for $220,000, more than four times the auction house’s estimate. The entire take was $21 million. Karine McCall’s daughter, Geraldine, bought a gold child’s bracelet for $3,500, explaining, “I wanted a connection to her.”

The Corcoran Gallery had been overjoyed to receive William Andrews Clark’s staggering art collection upon his death in 1925, and it stood to reason that the museum would be equally delighted by Huguette’s gift of a Monet
Water Lilies
. It is unheard of for an institution to turn down a painting worth an estimated $25 million.

But executives at the beleaguered Corcoran Gallery had become concerned about landing on the wrong side of history. The museum was in such financial trouble that the board was exploring a sale of its historic building in downtown Washington, including the William Andrews Clark wing. The Corcoran had been cozying up to Clark’s descendants for decades. Now the accusations by family members that Huguette’s will was tainted left the museum in a very uncomfortable position.

The Corcoran quietly filed a two-page document in April that was the equivalent of tossing Huguette’s Monet out the fifth-floor window of Judge Glen’s courtroom. So much for Irving Kamsler’s prediction to Huguette that the museum would be “ecstatic” over the gift. The Corcoran’s lawyers announced that they did not believe Huguette was “mentally capable” of signing the second will and accused Hadassah, Bock,
and Kamsler of “moral coercion.” By siding with the Clark descendants, the museum was committing financial hara-kiri. If Huguette’s will was tossed out, the museum had no claim to the painting.

Hadassah’s lawyer, Harvey Corn, later railed that the museum’s lawyers were not prudently watching out for their own interests. “They’ve got a $20 million painting that they are not protecting,” Corn said. “This is an institution that’s going broke.” He accused the Corcoran’s attorneys of “doing the bidding of family members.” Museum officials insisted to David Montgomery of the
Washington Post
that there was no side arrangement with the family and that the gallery had taken the step out of an obligation to respect the “true intentions” of donors. The Corcoran’s legal tactic—giving up the Monet without a fight—was seen as inexplicable by other attorneys involved in the case.

Clawbacks entered the common vocabulary following the Bernie Madoff case, as lawyers tried to get back money from one group of people in order to give it to other victims of the Ponzi scheme. Now public administrator’s counsel Peter Schram wanted to apply the same approach to Huguette’s estate. After examining her financial records and the enormous sums that she had handed over to her nurses, doctors, the hospital, and her lawyer and accountant, Schram had concluded that her trusted retainers had abused her trust.

On May 22, Schram filed a phone-book-sized petition demanding the return of $44 million, with exhibits including Bock’s and Kamsler’s correspondence with Huguette. More than two-thirds of that sum (nearly $31 million) came from Hadassah and her family, representing every gift that Huguette had given them in the previous twenty years. Schram also asked for $2.1 million from Dr. Jack Rudick and his wife, nearly $1 million from Dr. Singman and his family, $1.1 million from night nurse Geraldine Coffey, and even $500,000 that Huguette had donated to the Corcoran. The public administrator wanted to dun Wallace Bock for the entire $1.85 million that Huguette had donated at his behest to the Israeli security system in the West Bank and force Irving Kamsler to give back $435,000.

Schram did not spare Beth Israel Hospital, heaping special scorn upon the medical facility for its avarice. “At no time did Beth Israel, its staff, or any other physician or expert conduct a neurological examination or psychiatric examination of Mrs. Clark or otherwise ensure that she possessed the capacity required to make a gift to Beth Israel.” He demanded that the hospital return the $3.5 million from the sale of the Manet and $135,000 in cash donations.

Beth Israel would later respond in logic-defying fashion. Attorney Marvin Wexler, representing the hospital, pointed out that from 2002 to 2007, Huguette had “repeatedly declined” requests by Beth Israel for donations, “proving that during that time Ms. Clark knew her own mind and acted on her own will… Ms. Clark was a strong-willed individual who did nothing that she did not want to do…” In other words, the hospital now purported to be glad that she had cut them off when she did.