Empty Mansions

by Bill Dedman

  The problems for the public administrator were that most of these gifts were a long time ago, and Huguette had made the gifts herself, relentlessly writing the checks until her eyesight gave out. Defending Huguette’s will, Bock’s attorney, John D. Dadakis, said the legal challenge was an insult to Huguette. “To suggest that these gifts were not from Mrs. Clark’s generous heart is to denigrate the person who gave these gifts, as well as the recipients who cared for her with their love,” Dadakis wrote. “All of the records reflect that Mrs. Clark actively enjoyed her generosity and fully understood what she was giving.”

  JUST THROWING MONEY AWAY

  LIKE A CONFIDENT TEENAGER at a carnival throwing three baseballs to knock over a tower of milk bottles and win a stuffed panda, the Clark family had three chances to win Huguette’s fortune.

  First, if the family could prove that both wills had not been legally signed and executed, they would inherit everything. If the family knocked out the last will, they could then go to work on the earlier will, which no one seemed to be able to find an original copy of anyway. Photocopies of wills are not often admitted. Even if the family got the later will thrown out but failed to throw out the earlier one, it still left nearly everything to the family except the $5 million to Hadassah.

  The signing ceremony had certainly been faulty, especially considering that a challenge to the will by Huguette’s distant relatives could have been anticipated. The defects were many. The will had been drawn up by one of the beneficiaries, attorney Bock. Another beneficiary, accountant Kamsler, was the only person who had any discussion with Huguette about her wishes, and he was a felon. At least one of the beneficiaries, Hadassah, apparently was in the room and, by one witness’s account, was helping Huguette hold the pen. The ceremony was not videotaped or photographed. Though the patient was elderly with failing eyesight, the will was in regular-size type. The lawyer overseeing the signing, Bock’s colleague, said he hadn’t read the document and had no idea Bock was receiving a bequest. No independent doctor examined Huguette and swore to her competence. There was no discussion of the provisions of this will, or the existence of prior wills, or the fees that her executors would receive. The witnesses had no way of knowing whether Huguette knew what she was signing, or even whether this was Huguette, not an impostor.

  Despite this slipshod handling of the procedure, the standards are so low that even an incompetently handled document could meet the minimum standards to be legally executed.

  Second, the family could try to prove that Huguette was unduly influenced by her caregivers, that the will didn’t represent her true wishes. The family argued that Huguette was so scared of going back to her apartment, so dependent on her nurses and advisers, that she couldn’t resist their efforts to shape her decision.

  Not all influence, however, is undue influence. To prove undue influence under New York law, the family must show almost to a certainty a “moral coercion, a powerful moral force that cannot be resisted,” depriving the person of her own free will. If there are facts to show that the will was parallel with Huguette’s wishes—love of her nurse and goddaughter, a desire to preserve Bellosguardo, a history of great generosity—it would be hard to distinguish undue influence from extreme eccentricity.

  Even if the family could prove undue influence, that didn’t mean they would get any money. A jury could throw out the will entirely, which would benefit the relatives. As an alternative, though it rarely happens, a jury could just as well excise only those beneficiaries it decided were taking advantage of positions of trust—possibly the nurse, doctor, attorney, accountant, and hospital. It’s hard to see how any claim of undue influence could be leveled against the goddaughter, Wanda, who hadn’t seen Huguette since 1954, or the Bellosguardo Foundation, which didn’t even exist when Huguette signed the will. If other beneficiaries were knocked out, that would increase the shares going to Wanda and the foundation, not to the family.

  Third, the relatives could try to prove that Huguette was incompetent, that she lacked the mental capacity to sign a will. If Huguette were incompetent, the relatives would win everything. The nineteen told the court, though none of them had seen her in more than forty years, that they were sure Huguette “was not of sound mind or memory and was not mentally capable of making a will.”

  One of the relatives assigned to Huguette a specific diagnosis. This half-grandnephew, Jerry Gray, is a psychotherapist, a licensed clinical social worker, and the founder of nonprofit groups that work around the world to help survivors of political torture bring their torturers to justice. Jerry saw Huguette only one time, the glimpse at a family gathering during World War II, when he was about nine and Huguette about thirty-seven. He was the one who said Huguette stared at him, saying nothing. Now, based on what he read in the media and in court papers, Jerry reduced his great-aunt to a diagnosis, which other Clarks said they found persuasive.

  “Huguette was a schizoid personality disorder,” Jerry testified, naming a mental condition in which a person has a lifelong pattern of social isolation and indifference to others, “possibly complicated later by paranoid ideation,” he said, so she was “compelled by mental illness to isolate herself.” He ticked off criteria in the diagnostic manual, saying this diagnosis clearly fit because Huguette “chose the solitary activity of playing with dolls all her life, apparently didn’t have a sex partner, had no close friends as we measure friendships, and did not appear to want or need human relationships.” Jerry contended that Huguette had “very few interests, if any,” and clearly didn’t understand what she owned, as shown by “living a reclusive life in a hospital, while you have enormous wealth and five residences you could live in.” She displayed, Huguette’s nephew summed up, “an irrational pattern of just throwing money away.”

  Proving incompetence is a high hurdle. The presumption that the signer of a will is competent, as one court put it, “cannot be destroyed by showing a few isolated acts, foibles, idiosyncrasies, moral or mental irregularities or departures from the normal unless they directly bear upon and have influenced” the writing and signing of the will. Even if the family proved that Huguette had some mental illness, that wouldn’t bar her from signing a valid will. (An estimated one in six Americans would qualify for at least one personality disorder.) The mentally ill can sign a will during a period of lucidity. Under New York law, all that she would have had to understand when signing the will was what property she owned, her relationship to the beneficiaries, and that the will would hand over that property to them after she died. The law requires less evidence of competence to sign a will than it does to sign a contract.

  The relatives could point to dolls and dollhouses, to Smurfs and SpongeBob, to extravagant spending on empty mansions, to the millions given away to Hadassah, to her self-exile at Beth Israel. But would that be enough to show that she was incompetent?

  There was nothing in the medical record, nothing before Huguette signed either will, to indicate any mental confusion or dementia. The record does show decades of Huguette’s not bending to the pleas of her attorneys or the hospital or the Corcoran.

  The beneficiaries also had witnesses who knew Huguette, witnesses who did not benefit from the will, who could testify to her mental alertness and clear memory even years after the will was signed. They had, for example, the neurologist.

  CUTE AS PIE

  IT WAS OCTOBER 25, 2005, six months after Huguette signed her last will. On that Tuesday morning, notes in her medical chart showed her to be in an “acute confusional state”—delirious, agitated. She was hearing piano music. A stroke was possible. Her doctor called for a specialist.

  In her more than ten years at Beth Israel Medical Center, Dr. Louise Klebanoff had heard of the “little old lady who lived in the hospital.” Now she was finally meeting her.

  The neurologist nudged ninety-nine-year-old Huguette awake from her morning nap. The patient opened her blue-steel eyes, seeing an unfamiliar face. “Leave me alone,” Huguette said irritably in
her high French accent, and closed her eyes.

  The doctor studied the chart and looked closely at the white-haired woman. Weighing barely eighty-five pounds, she was dressed in a housecoat and three white cashmere sweaters, and she had surprisingly soft, girlish skin and rosy cheeks. Skilled at cajoling older patients, Dr. Klebanoff gently persuaded Huguette to wake up and to play along with her mental status exam. She tickled her to test her sensory reactions. She gave her simple commands: Close your eyes. Hold up your arms. Wiggle your fingers.

  Huguette complied, and the doctor moved up to more complex commands. Clap your hands three times and stick out your tongue.

  “Leave me alone!” Huguette shouted, pulling the covers over her head.

  This turtle wasn’t coming out of her shell. Dr. Klebanoff said she’d come back tomorrow.

  The next morning, Huguette brightened up immediately when she recognized the smiling doctor. She sat up in bed and stepped through the tests with ease. She knew who she was and where she was and when it was. Huguette was very hard of hearing, but she was attentive. Her speech was clear, her reflexes quick. Her lab results and chest X-ray were clean. She was normal in every way, neurologically.

  “She seemed cute as pie,” Dr. Klebanoff said later, “perfectly content.”

  Huguette just had a cold, the doctor wrote on the chart, and was dehydrated, causing a temporary electrolyte imbalance, which can bring on confusion or hallucinations. With her fluids back to normal, she was fine.

  The women talked for another twenty minutes. Huguette gave the doctor a tour of her tabletop model castles from Japan with their brocade fabric interiors. She took out her photo album: Here was her dear mother, smiling shyly in an elegant summer dress. Her dear father, the copper king, looking proud in his dandyish white suit. Her dear sister with her bicycle in front of the family’s summer castle outside Paris. Huguette showed the doctor her California house, a palace on a cliff by the Pacific, and her father’s house, the largest in New York City, with a tower and 121 rooms, including one adorned with gold.

  Taking all this in, the neurologist wasn’t exactly sure how much to credit this tale of gold and copper, kings and castles. What did it indicate about the patient’s neurological status?

  Dr. Klebanoff turned to the nurse, Hadassah, and asked in a stage whisper: Is any of this stuff true?

  Oh yes, Hadassah said. It’s all true.

  • • •

  Settlement negotiations in the battle over Huguette’s estate began in late 2012. A settlement could dispose of the estate without a jury trial and could also clear away all the side issues, including the effort to recover Huguette’s $40 million in gifts, as well as the malpractice claims against Bock and Kamsler. There were two opposing teams in the negotiations, at least on paper. On one side was the family. On the other was everyone else: Hadassah, Wanda, Chris, Beth Israel, the Corcoran, Bock, Kamsler, her property managers, and the largest beneficiary of all, an entity newly created, the Bellosguardo Foundation.

  At first everyone gave only a little ground. The family began negotiations by asking for 75 percent of the estate. Others at the table, even those ostensibly on the side of Hadassah, took the position that the nurse had gotten an unseemly amount already, more than $30 million. If she would give up the $15 million or so that she would receive from the will after taxes, that money would go some distance toward a settlement offer to the family. Hadassah said no. Her attorney said she would give up half of her bequest if she could keep everything she’d already received. Her resolve seemed to be stiffened by Hurricane Sandy, which struck the East Coast in November 2012, damaging at least one of her homes and flooding her Bentley.

  A new player at the table was the office of New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman. In theory, its role in the case was to protect the charities that might benefit from the will: the Corcoran Gallery, Beth Israel Medical Center, and the new Bellosguardo Foundation. That concern put the attorney general on the side of the will. But at the settlement negotiations, the attorney general’s staff seemed more focused on the huge sums of money that Hadassah had gotten. That concern left the attorney general’s office in a public relations bind: If it supported the will, Hadassah would get even more. In the summer of 2013, the attorney general began pushing for a settlement, supporting the will in general, supporting Huguette’s wishes, but removing gifts to the nurse and others in confidential positions. That solution could make available millions to give to the relatives.

  The Corcoran also complicated the scorekeeping by playing for the opposing team. Though Huguette’s will left the museum Monet’s Water Lilies painting, worth about $25 million, the Corcoran objected to the document, siding with the family’s claim that Huguette “was not mentally capable” and that she had signed only under the influence of Bock, Kamsler, and Hadassah Peri.

  This was most unusual. Why would the Corcoran, so desperate for cash that it had talked of moving out of Washington to the suburbs, oppose a will from a longtime donor who had left a Monet to the museum? One possible advantage for the Corcoran was that it was standing on the side of the living members of the Clark family, some of whom were already donors to the museum. The more money the Clark relatives won in a settlement or jury trial, the more they would be able to give to the Corcoran in the future. In testimony, family members swore that they had heard of no backdoor deal with the Corcoran, though Corcoran employees said that they had been assured that the Corcoran would not lose its Monet in a settlement.

  The Corcoran’s leaders explained that they had no choice but to oppose the will, because they couldn’t be certain that Huguette was competent to sign it in 2005. Perhaps any incompetence was temporary. The museum didn’t return the $500,000 it received from her after 2005, when she had paid out half of her $1 million pledge. Nor did they challenge her earlier $500,000 support for the renovation of the Salon Doré, her father’s golden room, which the Corcoran now rents out to corporate clients at a rate of $25,000 per soirée.

  In 1988, at age eighty-two, Huguette wrote to the mayor of Santa Barbara, Sheila Lodge. In her precise handwriting, she described how much she wanted to preserve Bellosguardo, the home her mother had built. “Dear Mayor Lodge, Your kind letter touched me deeply. It is most gratifying to me that you share my view on the beauty of Bellosguardo. My dear Mother put so much of herself into its charm and had the satisfaction of knowing that during the great depression, she was a bit helpful in giving much needed employment. I, in turn want to express to you, my grateful appreciation for the great help you are giving me in my endeavor to preserve Bellosguardo. With my sincere thanks to you. Huguette Clark.” (illustration credit13.1)

  • • •

  Both the family and the beneficiaries had reasons to settle. Rolling the dice at a trial can mean losing everything. Both sides had already spent a great deal on pretrial research and legal fees. And a trial would be an exhausting endeavor, expensive for everyone, lasting weeks or months.

  Another reason to settle was that most of the key witnesses wouldn’t be able to testify to much at the trial. Through the “Dead Man’s Statute,” a quirk in New York law, beneficiaries of the will were barred from testifying about communications with Huguette. This law began with the common-law idea that a person with a financial interest shouldn’t be encouraged to commit perjury by testifying about what a dead man said before death. So a trial wouldn’t include much relevant testimony from Hadassah Peri or Chris Sattler or Dr. Singman. One option for attorney Bock and accountant Kamsler was to renounce their bequests, allowing them to fully testify in support of the will, though they would no longer stand to profit as beneficiaries. There was some doubt that a jury would let them inherit a dime anyway.

  A final oddity in the negotiations was that the largest recipient in the will was not at the table. The family questioned whether the Bellosguardo Foundation was a genuine charity or just an excuse for Huguette’s attorney and accountant to rake in fees as trustees. As evidence of this claim, the relati
ves pointed to how little money the foundation would end up with—only about $4.7 million in cash, as the will was written, not nearly enough to maintain the great house. The counterclaim was simple: If it were a fraud, wouldn’t the attorney and accountant have put more money into it? The relatives also questioned how the foundation could be Huguette’s intent. “She didn’t have a charitable bone in her body,” several relatives said, ignoring or unaware of Huguette’s many years of donations to the Corcoran and to Beth Israel, her donation of Rancho Alegre to the Boy Scouts, her donation of the Andrée Clark Bird Refuge, and her quiet charity to friends and strangers.

  Hoping to bolster the plan for the nascent Bellosguardo Foundation, a group of arts foundations in California stood up to say they would welcome, and perhaps support financially, the new neighbor. However, when the Santa Barbara groups tried to send a lawyer to the settlement talks in New York, the Clark family’s attorney, John Morken, refused to negotiate with him, saying if you love Bellosguardo that much, we’ll let you buy it after we win.

  The family had a reason to insist that Bellosguardo be sold: That’s where most of the money was. As written, the will left 86 percent of the pot, after expenses and taxes, to charities, which don’t pay taxes. The Bellosguardo Foundation was a charity, as were the Corcoran and Beth Israel. For every $10 million that went to the relatives instead of the charities, about $4 million more in estate taxes would have to be paid. In other words, to get an inch, the relatives had to ask for a mile.

  • • •

  There was a strong reason for all sides to settle: It would ensure that the lawyers got paid.

  If one of the aims of Huguette’s relatives was to keep the money out of the hands of her lawyers, their victory would nevertheless leave a large chunk of the estate in the hands of their own lawyer. Working on a contingency, as is standard, the family attorney would receive 33 percent of the first $50 million, and 30 percent of the next $50 million. At least sixty-two attorneys were named in court papers in this case, with dozens of others working behind the scenes, many of them in Manhattan, where it is not uncommon for experienced lawyers to bill at $1,000 an hour. Court dates and settlement conferences were attended by ten to twelve lawyers at a time, together running the meter in excess of $10,000 an hour.