The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (45 page)

Chris Sattler lingered on a few extra minutes at the end of a hospital visit that winter of 2011 to express his enduring gratitude to his employer. Huguette had given him a satisfying job for twenty years, she had paid his daughters’ private school tuition, and when he had health problems, she called him every day to wish him well. He did not know how much longer the 104-year-old would be alive. He leaned over by her good ear to express his thoughts. “Thank you, Mrs. Clark, for all you’ve done,” he told her. She turned her head so she could see him clearly and replied, “No, Chris, I thank you.”

That was their last conversation. Huguette suddenly came down with an acute case of pneumonia. “I had a bad feeling about it because she was so frail,” recalls Mildred Velazquez, her hospital case manager. “But she told me, ‘I’m going to fight this.’ I said, ‘You never quit, you always a fighter.’ She smiled. Then the next time I went to see her she was already in the ICU, intubated… unable to respond.”

Huguette lingered on in a comalike state for almost two months. Hadassah sat at her bedside, held her hands, and talked to her. Chris, Marie, and Irving made frequent visits. They hoped their familiar voices would be comforting even if Huguette could not communicate. She had refused to sign a DNR order, and now she was on a respirator with a feeding tube. Kamsler, who had been entrusted as her medical proxy, found himself arguing with hospital officials as the weeks stretched on. “They wanted to pull the plug,” he says. The accountant had already been vilified in the press for his felony conviction, and he could imagine the headlines if he signed the equivalent of her death warrant. He says that he insisted Huguette’s wishes be respected, even though she was unlikely to regain consciousness.

On May 24 at 3 a.m., Chris got a call from Kamsler, summoning him to the hospital. Huguette was dying. It took Chris an hour to get in from Long Island, and by then Hadassah and Dr. Singman
were there, as well as other nurses who had cared for Huguette. Chris found it painful to bear witness, saying, “It’s awful to watch someone die.” For hours, the small group prayed and reminisced. As Kamsler recalls, “We went in and out of the room. Everyone was talking about their little memories of her and how kind she was to them.” At Hadassah’s insistence, a priest was called to give Huguette last rites. At 7:35 a.m., she took her last breath.

Wanda Styka received the news in an early-morning call from Irving Kamsler. She was grateful for his courtesy and his acknowledgment of her relationship with her godmother. Wallace Bock e-mailed Karine McCall, saying that he had sad news, and asked her to inform the rest of the family. She inquired about funeral services, and was told that Huguette had expressly asked for a private burial and no funeral.

The gates at Woodlawn Cemetery opened briefly at dawn on May 26 to admit the hearse with Huguette’s casket, transported by pallbearers from the Frank E. Campbell funeral home, the discreet Upper East Side firm favored by the well-to-do. Susan Olsen, the cemetery’s historian, was waiting along with the president of the cemetery and the contractor who had rebuilt the Clark mausoleum. No one else was permitted inside: not Hadassah, Chris Sattler, or any of Huguette’s intimates. “High-profile funerals have to be orchestrated out of respect for family and the people you are entombing,” Olsen says. “It wasn’t about keeping anyone away. She led a very private life and deserved a very private funeral.”

The mausoleum’s bronze door, with its vision of a mysterious woman, was created more than a century earlier, but now that decorative touch seemed especially apt. In an 1897 article about the much-admired door entitled “The Vision,” the
New York Times
wrote, “The face of the figure expresses the sadness of parting from family and friends, while the abundant draperies and the right hand raised to the breast furnish at once a suggestion of modesty and offer a gesture that calls attention to the person represented; in other words, it is an appeal to be remembered by the living.”

For a private woman, Huguette received a very public send-off. On her death certificate, her occupation was listed as “artist.” The form
was filled out by Wallace Bock, who knew she cherished that identity. But this central fact of her life was not what fascinated the journalists and headline writers, who focused instead on her copper fortune and her secretive life.

The
New York Times
played Huguette’s obituary on page one (
HEIRESS TO THE HIGH LIFE, THEN DETERMINED RECLUSE
), and the
Wall Street Journal
weighed in as well (
SOCIETY GIRL WHO SPENT 8 DECADES IN SECLUSION
). This curious tale was an international sensation, covered by publications from Australia’s
Courier-Mail
(
POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL’S SAD LIFE
) to the
Scottish Express
(
AMERICA’S ANTISOCIAL SOCIALITE
) and Asian News International (
REAL “MISS HAVISHAM”
).

The Clark family drama would continue to unfold, but without Huguette. The
New York Post
cut directly to the chase:
MYSTERY HEIRESS DIES—$500 MILLION FORTUNE AT STAKE
. It was the obvious question: what would become of Huguette’s money?

S
o many famous New Yorkers are buried at Woodlawn Cemetery, from Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to newspaper baron Joseph Pulitzer to Broadway legends Irving Berlin and George M. Cohan, that caretakers offer visitors a “Hall of Fame” map. William Andrews Clark’s mausoleum is not on that list, because the robber baron faded long ago to obscurity, but his daughter’s death in the spring of 2011 turned the spot into a tourist destination.

In the weeks after Huguette’s death, many people came to gawk, but one woman came regularly to mourn: Hadassah Peri. The nurse who had been by Huguette’s side for two decades was now at loose ends without her job, and she missed her confidant. So the nurse made frequent visits to the cemetery, sometimes joined by Huguette’s other nurse-turned-friend, Marie Pompei. Hadassah tucked tokens of affection such as plastic flowers and cartoon toys into the side of the grand bronze doors. She knew and remembered Huguette’s interests.

But her mourning rituals were at odds with the high WASP way of death. After several Clark family members complained to cemetery officials that these gifts were tacky, Hadassah was asked to discontinue her offerings. Reprimanded, she cut back her visits to the white mausoleum.

For the cast of characters who had populated Huguette’s well-compensated but invisible world, their new reality was jarring once her will was filed for probate on June 22. Suddenly, they were in the press. Hadassah became a tabloid favorite when it was revealed that she was the chief beneficiary at the expense of Huguette’s relatives.
FAMILY STIFFED OUT OF $400 MILLION FORTUNE
, announced the
Daily News
.
HEIRESS HAD ILL WILL: NURSE $34M, KIN
0, trumpeted the
New York Post
. No one knew, at that time, that Hadassah had already received $31 million from Huguette during her lifetime.

The players in this high-stakes drama chose their attorneys with care, aware that they needed to depend on—and would be judged by—the company they kept. Hadassah hired veterans from the Brooke Astor case. Prominent trusts and estate lawyer Harvey Corn had successfully handled an early legal battle for Astor’s son Anthony Marshall; Corn brought in public relations man Fraser Seitel, who had been the spokesman in that case for David Rockefeller and Annette de la Renta.

With her shaky command of English, Hadassah was judged too inarticulate for prime time, although her demure demeanor might have played well before the cameras. The public relations spinning began immediately as Seitel issued a statement on Hadassah’s behalf about her now deceased employer: “I am profoundly sad at her passing, awed by the generosity she has shown me and my family, and eternally grateful.” This did not sound remotely like the nurse’s awkward cadences and inverted sentence structure. In Seitel’s release, Hadassah went on to piously vow to devote some of Huguette’s money “to making the world a better place.”

For Wanda Styka, the publicity surrounding being named as a beneficiary of Huguette’s will was an intrusion on her rural idyll in the Berkshires. When her home phone began ringing off the hook from reporters requesting comment, she switched to an unlisted number. Instead of hiring New York legal heavyweights, she chose John Graziano, a small-town Lee, Massachusetts, lawyer who had handled her mother’s estate.

As the executors of Huguette’s estate, Wallace Bock and Irving Kamsler needed to hire their own legal gladiators to protect their
interests, probate the will, and insure that Huguette’s wishes prevailed if her will was challenged. Kamsler had previously had professional dealings with John Dadakis, of Holland and Knight, a Manhattan attorney who specialized in high-end estate planning. His firm had just won national acclaim for representing the actor Mickey Rooney in an elder abuse case. By signing on as clients, Bock and Kamsler could hope that some of that legal glow would rub off on them.

All wills filed for probate in New York State are assigned to a judge. Case 1995/1375 landed on the docket of Surrogate’s Court Justice Kristin Glen, who had been the dean of City University of New York law school before being elected to the bench in 2008. With a sarcastic sense of humor and forceful persona, the judge was intimidating; lawyers tended to sit up straight in her presence. Early in her career, Glen had worked with crusading liberal lawyer Leonard Boudin on such prominent cases as the Pentagon Papers and viewed herself as an advocate for social justice. In her two and a half years on the bench so far, she had not presided over a trial. Every single case—even the most viciously litigated ones—had settled.

The Huguette M. Clark case had the potential to be the will fight of the decade: hundreds of millions up for grabs, angry disinherited relatives, a scandal-tinged accountant, a nurse whose unemployed husband drove a Bentley, a criminal investigation by the district attorney’s office, and a press corps avidly following the action. An army of trained professionals would be hired to deconstruct Huguette’s life, including private detectives, psychiatrists, forensic accountants, jury consultants, and PR firms hired to influence public opinion. Holland and Knight alone would employ eighty-five people to work on the case.

Justice Glen made a pivotal decision early on that shaped the battle over Huguette Clark’s fortune. After ascertaining that the district attorney’s office was still investigating Huguette’s affairs for evidence of elder abuse, the judge decided to take protective action. Rather than allow Bock and Kamsler’s chosen firm, Holland and Knight, to solely manage the estate, Glen announced that she was appointing the public administrator to jointly handle the job. The public administrator
typically presides over estates when a person dies without a will. This development did not bode well for Bock and Kamsler, since it meant that Huguette’s tangled finances would be scrutinized in painstaking detail by an independent agency.

On the sunny morning of August 17, 2011, when Justice Glen called the first hearing in Case 1995/1375, a dozen principal lawyers marched up to the front of the room. The penny-pinching William Andrews Clark had traveled by mules through snowstorms in the 1860s to deliver goods to mining camps; now the remnants of his fortune would pay the billable hours of these pin-striped pleaders. In the majestic high-ceilinged courtroom, with marble fireplaces, ornate carved wooden moldings, and red drapes, the lineup included lawyers representing the Corcoran Gallery, Beth Israel Hospital, and the New York State Attorney General’s charity bureau, on hand to protect the designation of Bellosguardo as an arts foundation.

Nineteen Clark descendants had filed an objection to Huguette’s will. Although Carla, Ian, and Karine had initially been drawn into Tante Huguette’s orbit out of altruism, concerned that she was being mistreated, this family quest had morphed into a battle over her money. Clark relatives from three branches of the family, located in multiple time zones from Paris to California, were now involved.

Underscoring long-simmering frictions, two relatives, both grandchildren of the racetrack-loving Charles Clark, had not joined the legal fracas: Timothy Gray, who had been adopted into the Clark family, was so estranged from his three siblings that they did not have an address or a phone number for him. (Holland and Knight hired a private detective to find him, since Gray needed to be informed of his legal rights.) Other Clark siblings also had rocky relations with one another: Karine McCall and her sister Victoria Clare Sujata, seven years younger, had not spoken for two decades. The author of a book about a Tibetan yogi, Sujata declined to be drawn into what promised to be a bruising public probate fight.

To start unraveling Huguette’s finances, Justice Glen commanded Wallace Bock and Irving Kamsler to produce Huguette’s financial records dating back to 1996, including her canceled checks. After
spending decades protecting Huguette’s privacy, the lawyer and accountant were troubled that this information would become public. But when their lawyers asked that the files be sealed, Glen denied the request. After the 275-page volume was filed at the Surrogate’s Court clerk’s office at 31 Chambers Street, reporters were riveted by Huguette’s outlandish spending, such as toy and doll purchases ($2.5 million to the Parisian store Au Nain Bleu, $729,000 on Theriault’s doll auctions) and the $440,000 she distributed in staff bonuses on November 16, 2009. The
New York Post
was so enraptured by the high-spending Huguette that the newspaper ran two stories on November 20, 2011:
ALL DOLLED UP: ECCENTRIC’S OWN TOYLAND
and
THE HEIRESS AND THE NURSE: HEALTH WORKER BECAME SCION’S BE$T PAL
.

A team of lawyers and paralegals descended on Huguette’s apartments to examine her files. They were stunned by the sheer accumulation of documents and photographs. If Huguette had not been able to store her things in forty-two rooms, she would have been in danger of rivaling the hoarding Collyer brothers. She had kept everything: 1925 receipts for a Louis XV sofa and Jacobean table, a 1928 Cartier invoice for a $320 gold cigarette case, her 1930 divorce decree, a 1942 order for French chinoiserie satin curtains, Bonwit Teller summer storage bills from 1964 for fur coats (sable, ermine, mink, fox), contractor’s estimates for a 1964 kitchen renovation, a January 1968 grocery order of raspberries from Winter Market, sketches for couture clothing from Jean Patou in Paris.

There were hundreds of personal letters and telegrams, including her parents’ tender 1923 love letters as well as affectionate letters and telegrams to Huguette from the important men in her life—Tadé, Bill, and Etienne. She kept notes jotted on scrap paper about TV shows she planned to tape (such as the groundbreaking PBS show about the dysfunctional Loud clan,
An American Family
) and yearly reminders of “Daddy’s birthday” on January 8. She held on to ancient Christmas apartment tip lists and care labels for her Pringle of Scotland cashmere sweaters. Lawyers’ letters dating back to the 1930s included accounts of an argument with her downstairs Fifth Avenue neighbor over a leak and an unsuccessful effort to buy and preserve
her childhood home in Butte. It was overwhelming. Paralegals began scanning the vast detritus, the residue of a 104-year life. Eventually, more than seventy-five boxes of documents and photographs were carted out.

The Clark relatives hired a new lawyer that fall, John Morken of the Long Island firm Farrell Fritz. Born in China, the son of an evangelist Christian minister, he had an unconventional background. After dropping out of Swarthmore, he cut broccoli as a farmworker and worked in a steel mill before returning to a white-collar path, finishing at Swarthmore, attending NYU law school, and clerking for an Appellate Court judge. The Clark relatives had contributed money toward his initial retainer, but Morken had taken the case on contingency, gambling that he could win big.

Morken used colorful, outraged prose in legal papers filed on November 28 challenging Huguette’s will, charging that Wallace Bock and Irving Kamsler had used “deceit, undue influence and exploitation” and “took control of her life, isolated her from her family, and ultimately stripped her of her free will, as well as millions of dollars.” Much more important than the angry rhetoric was the biggest revelation so far in this case. As part of discovery, Kamsler’s firm had alerted the other law firms that Huguette had signed the earlier March 7, 2005, will, under which the Clark relatives would have inherited. Morken made this information public. The Associated Press sent out a bulletin:
COPPER HEIRESS SIGNED 2 WILLS IN 2 MONTHS
.

A ticking time bomb had been buried in Huguette’s finances for nearly two decades, and the inevitable detonation occurred six months after her death. Two IRS agents contacted Peter Schram, the public administrator’s counsel, in November 2011 to say that they had been unable to find gift tax returns filed on Huguette’s behalf. Where was the missing paperwork?

So the search began for documents that the lawyers assumed had been misfiled. John Dadakis assigned Holland and Knight staffers to examine records provided by Bock and Kamsler, but the forms did not turn up. A puzzled Dadakis called Bock, who insisted that it
was Kamsler’s job to prepare gift taxes. After hemming and hawing, Kamsler finally confessed that he had never filed the returns. “We were blindsided,” said Dadakis. He had to alert the judge and the other lawyers that there was a huge problem with the Internal Revenue Service. The public administrator’s office filed a scorching petition charging that Bock and Kamsler’s tax fraud and negligence had led to a stunning $90 million tax bill, including penalties, potentially knocking Huguette’s estate down to $210 million.

Justice Glen gave Bock and Kamsler a courtroom tongue-lashing on December 23, calling the two men “unfit to serve by reason of dishonesty… violation of their fiduciary obligations, waste of the estate, dishonesty with respect to authorities, violation of the rules of professional conduct, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera…” Prior to the hearing, Kamsler bowed to the inevitable and withdrew as an executor. Justice Glen made it official, suspending Kamsler as an executor as well as Bock, who continued to proclaim his innocence, even though his itemized legal bills to Huguette listed gift taxes as a responsibility.