The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (37 page)

In a written summary of his conversation with Huguette, Dr. Newman sounded irked that she wanted to discuss topics other than the financial needs of Beth Israel. The nation was riveted by the still unresolved George Bush–Al Gore presidential election as the Florida recount hung in the balance—and that was what Huguette wanted to talk about. Dr. Newman wrote: “She focused on the terribly confused political situation (she’s strongly for Gore) and also on the volatile and largely downward spiral of the stock market…”

For a ninety-four-year-old recluse, Huguettte was decidedly in touch with current events. And that extended to the international art market. The heiress, who had spent her entire life surrounded by art and creating it, had strong opinions about current tastes and prices. “She has contempt for the Picasso that went for $50 million—says it’s ugly,” wrote Newman, referring to a 1938 Cubist painting of Picasso’s mistress Dora Maar,
Femme Assise Dans un Jardin
.

Dr. Newman tried to steer the conversation back to what Huguette could do for the hospital, hinting that she ought to make up for the Manet price shortfall. Huguette urged patience, telling him “we should wait until the political situation is stabilized.” Dr. Newman grumbled in an e-mail to another colleague that “she didn’t take the bait and offer a half dozen more” paintings. The Manet eventually sold for the initial $3.5 million price.

Wallace Bock, keenly aware that Huguette was filling every tin cup in sight, decided that he might as well get in line. Rather than request cash for himself, the lawyer sought an expenditure for an unlikely cause that was dear to his heart. His daughter and grandchildren were living in strife-torn Israel, which was facing the uprising known as the second intifada. Huguette asked after the family’s well-being whenever another bomb attack made the news.

Bock wrote to Huguette and asked her to pay to improve security for the town of Efrat. He pointed out that “there had been shooting attacks on outlying sections of Town and on buses and cars traveling to and from Town on the main highway to Jerusalem.” In November 2000—the same month that the Manet went on sale—Huguette agreed to give $1.85 million to fund the construction of the Israeli emergency command rescue center in Efrat, a security alert system that included a barbed-wire fence, plus cameras and motion and sound detectors to screen vehicles.

The timing of Bock’s request may have been dictated by the deteriorating situation on the West Bank, but it made no financial sense. Bock knew that Huguette currently owed $12.5 million in gift taxes—and did not have the available cash to pay. In fact, just five days before he asked her to protect the town of Efrat, Bock wrote to Huguette to
remind her of the tax liability stemming from her gifts to Hadassah and Suzanne. On the same day, her accountant, Irving Kamsler, sent Huguette a letter stating that she would need to sell more assets to pay those gift taxes—and copied Bock on the letter. In fact, Huguette was so cash-strapped that Bock gave the $1.85 million to the town of Efrat on the installment plan, in four separate checks over four years. (Bock declined in an interview to discuss the timing of his request.)

Ever since Donald Wallace, her lawyer from 1976 to 1997, had stepped aside due to his failing health, Huguette’s financial affairs had become increasingly muddled. The systems to manage cash flow and taxes that he had put in place were no longer operating. In the past, each year Donald Wallace would ask Huguette for a list of her gifts so he could pass along the information to Irving Kamsler, who prepared a gift tax return. Since Huguette wrote her own checks to friends and retainers and her lawyer did not have access to that account, her cooperation was needed to pay gift taxes. But once Donald Wallace no longer managed Huguette’s legal affairs, everything came to a standstill.

From 1997 through 2003—at a time when Huguette gave away more than $24 million—no gift tax returns were filed on her behalf.

Part of the problem was that Huguette, even if her sympathies were with liberal presidential candidates like Gore, found it difficult to accept that the federal government should have any say on how she spent her inheritance. After all, her copper mogul father had assembled his fortune before the Sixteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution in 1913 allowing the government to levy taxes. Huguette stubbornly ignored repeated letters from her lawyer and accountant reminding her of the tax consequences of her generosity. But having created this paper trail, Bock and Kamsler did not force the issue.

Wallace Bock would later insist that taxes were not his responsibility, although his monthly bills listed income and gift tax preparation among his legal chores. Bock’s explanation: he had carelessly copied the billing language used by his predecessor Donald Wallace. “My position was that Irving was the accountant,” says Bock. “Anything to do with taxes, I turned over to him. I really did not know. I knew she
owed taxes, but I did not know he was not filing the returns.” In civil legal proceedings, Irving Kamsler later took the Fifth Amendment repeatedly in a deposition when asked about why he did not file gift tax returns.

To this day, the behavior of Kamsler as well as Bock—who as her lawyer should have been up-to-date on her obligations—remains baffling since they derived no personal benefit from Huguette’s failure to pay gift taxes. In fact, the failure left them open to charges that they had mismanaged her affairs. This was a massive and costly gaffe. The taxes plus penalties quietly multiplied each year.

With so much of Huguette’s wealth tied up in real estate and art—which she had not seen in decades—her balance sheet was turning into a bookkeeper’s nightmare. Even as her tax obligations ballooned, Huguette’s impetuous gift giving resulted in a cash crunch by 2001. Her conservative investments were bringing in only $2.2 million a year, not nearly enough to cover her life at Beth Israel, maintaining three properties, paying for her staff, and passing out large bonuses. Rather than dip into principal, Kamsler wrote a letter urging her to sell more possessions.

First to go was a Stradivarius violin, known as “La Pucelle” or “the Virgin,” which she had purchased in 1955 for $50,985. When she had the violin appraised by Sotheby’s, Huguette disagreed with the auction house’s lowball estimate. Impressed by Huguette’s business acumen, Chris Sattler recalled, “The Sotheby’s people said the most that has ever been gotten is $2.5 million, we’ll start it at that. She said, ‘No. Absolutely. Not. That’s La Pucelle, the finest violin in the world. I’m not taking less than $6 million.’ ” She used a private dealer to act on her behalf instead, and the violin sold for $6 million to a Silicon Valley collector.

Huguette also put up for sale two paintings by John Singer Sargent, both sun-dappled scenes featuring European women. At an auction at Sotheby’s on May 24, 2001, the Sargent painting
Rosina-Capri
, an 1878 scene of a girl joyfully dancing the tarantella on a rooftop, sold for $5.35 million. But Sargent’s haunting 1913
Girl Fishing at San Vigilio
, showing a young woman in a long white dress at the seaside,
did not meet the reserve price. Rather than lower the price or rehang the art at one of her homes, Huguette lent the painting to the Corcoran Gallery.

After refusing pleas by three generations of lawyers to make her final wishes known, Huguette finally expressed a willingness to at least discuss her thoughts about potential heirs with Irving Kamsler, who passed her suggestions along to Wallace Bock. Eager to seize the moment, Bock immediately drew up a draft of a will in 2001. That document gives a sense of her priorities at the age of ninety-five: Huguette’s most valuable asset, Bellosguardo, was to be turned into an arts foundation.

Her nurse Hadassah and goddaughter, Wanda, were treated as equals in Huguette’s heart, each receiving 30 percent of the residue of her estate. Her best friend, Suzanne Pierre, would receive 15 percent. Acknowledging her fond memories of the French marquis whom she almost married, Huguette left 15 percent to his adopted daughter, Marie-Christine DeMarchez. The two women still maintained an ongoing correspondence. Huguette was worth an estimated $300 million, but even after subtracting the value of Bellosguardo (an estimated $100 million) and the mounting tax liabilities, there would still be plenty of cash to spread around.

The missing names on the list were her Clark relatives. She had not seen any family members since 1968, although she had spoken to a few of them sporadically. This draft included a stark paragraph in which Huguette disowned the descendants of her half sisters, Mary and Katherine, and half brother Charles. “I intentionally make no provision in this my Last Will and Testament for any members of my family, whether on my paternal or maternal side, having had minimal contacts with them over the years.” Her feelings were unequivocal.

This draft named Wallace Bock and Irving Kamsler as executors, which would guarantee them millions of dollars in fees. The lawyer and accountant would also each receive bequests of $400,000.

Huguette did not sign this will or any of the three follow-up drafts that were sent to her during the next few years. Cynthia Garcia, who began working as a paralegal for Wallace Bock starting in the fall of
2000, prepared many of the drafts and spoke frequently to Huguette by phone. “Wally was obsessed with getting her to sign a will. He would flip out,” Garcia says. Every time Huguette received a new will, the heiress would make her feelings known with a quick, one-word reaction. “She’d call me, and say, ‘No.’ Then she’d hang up,” Garcia says. “Wally would say, ‘Bring me a Scotch.’ ”

The September 11 attacks did not affect Huguette directly, since she was living in the most protected part of Manhattan, the Upper East Side. Her view out the window across the East River was tranquil, without smoke or debris or obvious signs that anything was amiss. But as in New York and across America, Huguette felt the emotional reverberations from the toppling of the World Trade Center.

Huguette’s best friend, Suzanne Pierre, was stranded in Paris, unable to return to New York, so she asked her granddaughter, Kati, to bring food to the hospital for Huguette. Kati had spoken to Huguette by phone, but they had never met before. “My grandmother would bring Huguette asparagus and brioche every Friday, so I did that,” she says. “The first time I saw her, she was very tall, white as a ghost, beautiful porcelain skin, piercing blue eyes, lovely white sweater, and she was wearing a light blue cashmere cardigan. She was very happy to see me. She’d answer the door herself, never invited me in. She had a beautiful view of the river but had the shades drawn and the lights low.”

Several weeks later on September 30, Huguette called Wanda to talk about what had happened. “I’m so glad I didn’t see it,” Huguette told Wanda, “It would have been so upsetting. I’m so glad that I didn’t see it, live.” From the seeming safety of a hospital bed, she was just eight miles from the worst terrorist attack in American history.

For Huguette, the anthrax mailings, which paralyzed the nation in the weeks after September 11, were frightening in a way that transcended terrorism. In a symbolic way, it brought back the death of Andrée, the sanitize-the-door-handles germphobia of her mother and once again, her own intimations of death.