Empty Mansions (41 page)

• • •

Huguette offered the second painting, Cézanne’s
Earthenware Jug
, to Hadassah. The nurse said she didn’t have any use for an old painting, so Huguette included it in the 1999 sale at Sotheby’s. It sold for $15 million, and Huguette said she wanted to give it all to Hadassah.

Huguette’s lawyer and accountant were aghast. The tax implications were astounding. Giving away $25 million to Hadassah and Madame Pierre would cost Huguette another $28 million in taxes. Bock and Kamsler told Huguette she would have to sell other assets just to pay the taxes, so she improvised.

She immediately gave Hadassah two checks for $5 million each—along with an IOU, in the form of a third check, also for $5 million, undated.

“
She told me to hold it,” Hadassah said, until the Connecticut property was sold. Bock and Kamsler weren’t told about this check, but Hadassah made an unusual note of it in Huguette’s medical chart, citing the $5 million that “she promised.”

Huguette also may have profited from this transaction. She did not
like hiring new people. An employee carrying a well-worn, undated check for $5 million would be unlikely to seek other employment.

• • •

Huguette’s man Friday, Chris Sattler, also started receiving gifts. He said Huguette instructed him to open the large safe in the walk-in closet in Apartment 12W. He had to get a locksmith to drill the lock. There he found her stash of everyday jewelry. He brought the boxes from Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels to the hospital in a shopping bag. Huguette enjoyed looking it all over and gave him a piece. Then she gave Hadassah a piece, “and
it just snowballed,” Chris said.

Chris, who is Catholic, received from Huguette a crucifix, a $7,000 Cartier antique diamond and ruby cross pendant on an Art Deco diamond and platinum chain, and other pieces, in all worth $27,000. He said he didn’t think to refuse the gifts, which were documented through Huguette’s attorney after an appraisal.

To Hadassah she gave eighty-four pieces of jewelry, appraised at $667,300, as well as two antique harpsichords, a clavichord, and fifteen antique dolls.

And to Hadassah’s younger son, David, Huguette gave an even larger gift. When he had been a schoolboy, David played the violin for Huguette in her room.
“And Madame said, ‘Someday I have something for you, but you are too young,’ ” Hadassah said. “ ‘When you are responsible to have, I have something for you.’ ” Now she gave him her third-best violin by Stradivari, worth about $1.2 million.

“I told Madame, he doesn’t play anymore,” Hadassah said, “but she insist he will go back to learn again.… I think one time she told me she played the violin for twenty-one years, but she never really like it, but she just did it for her mother.”

Counting all the gifts, Hadassah and her family received
at least $31,906,074.81 in cash and property from Huguette while she was alive.

Of course, one must keep that amount in perspective. If Huguette were willing to keep selling property, she could have afforded ten Hadassahs.

Hadassah was asked whether she questioned the ethics of accepting large gifts from her patient. Hadassah showed no hint of embarrassment
or doubt, only entitlement, saying she didn’t know of any rules, and besides, she was an independent contractor, not a hospital employee. “
I cannot recall any paper that I am not allowed to receive any such gift.”

What about the ethics of the nursing profession?

“
Never come to my mind.”

KEEP THE BAD PEOPLE OUT
 

I
T WAS TIME
to dig in their heels. On October 26, 2001, Huguette’s advisers wrote separate letters to her, a coordinated warning about her excessive generosity. Her significant gifts in the past year had depleted her cash, and her income was no longer sufficient to pay her expenses.

“
You will have to seriously consider,” attorney Bock wrote, “the sale of additional assets in order to raise the cash necessary to meet all of these obligations.”

Five days later, Bock sent his client a solicitation for a gift.

Wallace “Wally” Bock, born in 1932, is a quiet Orthodox Jewish American with ties to Israel that reach back long before there was a State of Israel. His parents, before World War I, were among the founders of the Mizrachi religious movement in the United States to build a Jewish state. His mother was personal secretary to the world leader of that movement. His brother was imprisoned by the British for helping transport Jewish immigrants to Palestine.

Now Bock’s daughter and her husband were making a return to Israel (in Hebrew,
aliyah
, or “ascent”). They were living with Wally’s grandchildren and a great-grandchild in an Israeli settlement town called Efrat, in the Judaean Mountains of the disputed West Bank, just south of Jerusalem. The town was raising money for a sophisticated, state-of-the-art security system, including technology to monitor suspicious vehicles and alert military forces.

Though Bock had never met his client, Huguette called often to issue orders, and whenever she saw Mideast turmoil on CNN or in
The New York Times
, she would call to check on his family.

Bock sent Huguette the town’s fund-raising brochure for the security system. He explained that there had been several shooting attacks on the town and that one of its synagogues had been desecrated. “
As you well know,” Bock wrote to his client, “I have never sought help from you for myself personally or for any cause that I may have been involved in. However, in view of your expressed interest in what is happening in
Israel and your concern for my family there, I am taking the liberty of asking your financial assistance in this project. I will of course leave it to your discretion as to the amount, if any, that you may wish to contribute.”

Huguette had made gifts to her previous attorneys.
She gave Don Wallace $130,000 in French mechanical dolls, so many that he had to build extra shelves in his house. When
Wallace’s secretary wrote to Huguette, saying she was moving to Europe to launch a singing career, Huguette sent her a check for $10,000. But Bock had never received a gift, other than a dollhouse for a granddaughter. Bock later said that he had expected Huguette might donate $5,000 or $10,000.

Huguette filled in an amount on the second page of the solicitation, signed it, and sent it back. She had written in the entire amount the town was trying to raise, $1.85 million.

Bock paid out the money slowly over the next three years, writing checks to the town’s sponsors, the Central Fund of Israel and the American Friends of New Communities in Israel. He said he had to fend off efforts by some in the town to use the money for other than its intended purpose.

Bock went to Efrat in 2008, speaking at the dedication of the Efrat Emergency Command and Rescue Center. “
So there I was,” he told the gathering, “an Orthodox Jew, seeking a contribution from a non-Jewish millionairess, for a project to provide a security system for this place called Efrat, which she had never heard of, in a country called Israel, which she read about in the papers but was not too familiar with. Fortunately, she knew that I had a daughter living in Israel, and every time there was a terrorist incident she would call me to make sure that my family had not been affected.”

A plaque reads: “
The security system for Efrat has been made possible by the generosity of Madame Huguette M. Clark. May the Almighty bless her with good health and long life.” Bock said that at first Huguette had insisted on anonymity, as she always did, but that she had relented as the dedication neared.

Chris Sattler said Huguette expressed pride in the donation to Efrat. “
She said she bought the fence to keep the bad people out.”

• • •

Huguette was just two miles from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, when Islamist terrorists killed nearly three thousand people in the United States. She had a personal connection to one who died: The son-in-law of her California attorney was killed on hijacked American Airlines Flight 77, which struck the Pentagon. Although she had never talked with her attorney, James H. “Jim” Hurley, Jr., in the thirty-five years he had handled her business in Santa Barbara, Huguette wrote a note of condolence.

After September 11, as the news was filled with instances of
deadly anthrax and other powdered substances being sent to prominent people, Huguette was insistent that she not receive anything else through the mail. From then on, she received no mail or packages directly from the few people who knew she was at the hospital. All mail had to be sent to 907 Fifth Avenue, where Chris Sattler would open it and deliver it, or be delivered by courier from Bock’s office. Bock said Huguette often seemed to draw her fears from the day’s news.

Despite her fears, just two days after the September 11 attacks, ninety-five-year-old Huguette was thinking of others.
She called her goddaughter, Wanda, in Massachusetts to assure her that she was fine in New York City. They discussed the horrible events, and Huguette remarked to Wanda how glad she was that her shades were drawn most of the time.

CASHING OUT
 

T
O RAISE CASH
for the accelerating gifts, Huguette had to sell some of her collections and property. In 2001, she sold her best Stradivarius violin, La Pucelle, which she had bought in 1955 and carefully maintained.

In April 2003, she sold Renoir’s
In the Roses
, which had been the very first portrait by Renoir to enter a collection in the United States. The portrait shows a stockbroker’s wife with a plunging neckline seated on a bench in a rose garden. The Las Vegas casino magnate Steve Wynn bought the painting for $23.5 million. This Renoir, while in the hands of the Clarks, had not been seen by the public since 1937.

In 2005, Huguette put her Connecticut refuge, Le Beau Château, on the market. Documents show that Huguette was well aware of each of these sales, authorizing them and even directing how La Pucelle should be sold.

The London violin expert and dealer Charles Beare had written to Huguette many times since the 1980s asking about La Pucelle. Finally in 2001 Wally Bock told him that Huguette had consented to sell it. At first Bock planned to let Sotheby’s auction off the violin. The estimate was
$2 million to $3 million. Huguette insisted instead that Bock go through a dealer, because such instruments bring higher values in private sales.

There was one hitch: Huguette refused to let La Pucelle leave the apartment to be seen by potential buyers. She didn’t say why, but that wouldn’t make it easy to sell the violin.

Beare, however, had a regular customer, and the dealer knew just what to tell him. He called David Fulton, a software millionaire in the Seattle area. A former concertmaster, Fulton had merged his Fox Software database company into Microsoft and was now using his fortune to collect the world’s finest violins.