Empty Mansions (44 page)

H
UGUETTE SEEMED TO FEAR
one thing most of all: publicity. In this she favored her mother more than her father.

The jewelry that W. A. Clark gave to Anna when he was courting her, when he married her, while they raised a family, all that jewelry was entrusted by their daughter Huguette to First National City Bank, where the family banked for more than fifty years.

In the 1980s, a blue diamond and other pieces of
Anna’s jewelry disappeared from the securities department at Citibank, as it was now called, either lost or stolen. Citibank made just the right threat: The bank insisted that it couldn’t pay any more than $3 million without involving the insurer, Lloyd’s of London, where such a large loss might bring publicity. Huguette accepted in 1991 a $3 million settlement, much less than the jewelry’s appraised value.

Then, in 1994, when Huguette was in the hospital, Citibank did it again. The rest of Anna’s jewelry was in a safe-deposit box, No. 883. The trust department at Citibank was paying the bill for the box, but an interoffice address changed, and the bill fell delinquent. Bank officers cut open the box and sold the contents as abandoned property to a liquidator at rock-bottom prices.

Anna’s gold wedding band, gone. Her 2 gold lockets. Her tortoiseshell combs with 320 diamonds. Her Cartier 2-strand pearl necklace with the 7-carat diamond clasp. Her 3-strand cultured pearl and jade bead necklace with two 4-carat diamonds by Cartier. Her bracelet with 36 sapphires and 126 small diamonds. Her 5 small gold bracelets. Her Cartier diamond and rock crystal hairpin with 64 diamonds. Her 3-stone diamond ring. Her pearl ring. Her 18-carat-gold-mesh purse with 5 inset emeralds and the matching gold-mesh change purse. Her Cartier gold watch with 30 carats of diamonds. Her Cartier bracelet with 22 carats of diamonds. Her Cartier necklace with 60 carats of diamonds and 40 carats of emeralds. Her 20 gold safety pins. And 30 other pieces. All gone.

The loss “
has been devastating,” attorney Don Wallace wrote to Citibank, relating her “anxiety and pain.” This time Huguette didn’t know what to do. At first she wanted all her mother’s jewelry back. Citibank traced some pieces to a dealer in Europe, but they had been resold. The bank trotted out its successful threat again: Further efforts to hunt down the jewelry could bring public attention.

So Huguette wouldn’t sue, wouldn’t risk having her name in the newspapers. Valuing her privacy more than money, she had no leverage. She relented, demanding $6 million while protesting that the jewelry was worth $10 million.

The bank chairman, John S. Reed,
wrote her a note of apology but agreed to pay no more than $3.5 million. She took it. Before making the payment, Citibank insisted that she produce a statement from
an independent physician attesting to her mental competence so she couldn’t revoke the deal. After a few months, the bank accepted such a statement from her own physician, Dr. Singman.

Similarly, Huguette and her attorneys took no action, and did not call the police, when
someone stole nearly a quarter of a million dollars from her in November 1991, after she went into the hospital. Her bank reported that someone cashed a check from an old unused account, getting away with $230,000. Another check for $650,000 was refused. Her attorney, Wallace, didn’t call the police, but quietly closed the account.

• • •

Huguette’s gentle ballerina by Edgar Degas,
Dancer Making Points
, which she had bought with her mother in 1929, was stolen from her apartment wall in 1992 or 1993. Not wanting any publicity, she urged her attorney not to report the loss. She didn’t file an insurance claim or call the police, but the building manager reported the theft anyway, and an FBI agent marched right into Huguette’s hospital room for an amiable conversation. Wallace was shocked: The FBI had spent a full hour more with his client than he ever had.

Twelve years later, in 2005, the FBI discovered that Huguette’s Degas pastel was hanging in Mission Hills, Kansas, at the home of the noted collector Henry Bloch, the “H” in the H&R Block tax preparation firm. He and his wife, Marion, had purchased the Degas ballerina unwittingly
from an art dealer in Manhattan. Soon after the painting had disappeared, a well-dressed man with a European accent had walked into a small gallery, saying the Degas ballerina had been in his family for many years. The gallery owner bought it, no questions asked. Then the Blochs were told of the painting and had it shipped to Kansas, after having a museum director friend look over the painting’s provenance.

Huguette wanted the painting back, of course. Instead of demanding their money back from the dealer and returning the painting, the Blochs claimed that, even if the painting had been stolen, it was abandoned property, because Huguette had not tried to find it. Besides, the Blochs had promised to give their entire collection of Impressionists, after their deaths, to Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, where Henry Bloch had been chairman of the board. The museum was adding a Bloch Building to honor its longtime benefactors. Huguette did not want to sue. Any publicity about a stolen Degas could bring her life into the open.

To avoid any embarrassing public attention for either party, after years of discussions the attorneys agreed on an unusual solution. Huguette signed a deed giving the painting to the Kansas City museum. She, not America’s tax expert, would receive the charitable deduction for the $10 million painting. To assure the museum that Huguette, who was now 102, was able to make such a decision, Dr. Singman signed a second statement attesting to her competence.

To make things tidy for the lawyers, the painting actually had to change hands. Outside the Bloch home on an October day in 2008, the Degas ballerina was the object of the following game of hot potato. The ballerina was taken down from the wall and handed to Huguette’s attorney, Wally Bock. Bock was escorted by a former FBI agent to the driveway, where the director of the museum, Marc Wilson, was waiting in a limousine.

Bock handed the painting to the director of the museum, which was receiving it as a gift from Huguette.

And the museum director walked the ballerina back into the Bloch home, where it went in the same spot, above the sofa, between a Seurat and a Toulouse-Lautrec. The museum’s executive committee had agreed to lend the painting to the Blochs. Although a stolen painting had been
found on their wall, they got it back, for as long as they lived. The deal was so hush-hush that the museum’s curators, and most of the museum’s directors, didn’t know they now owned the Degas. The museum did agree that it would consider lending the painting, up to twice within the next twenty-five years, to Huguette’s favorite museum, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington.

The effect for Huguette, of course, was that she no longer owned her ballerina. She asked the Kansas City museum to take a photograph, at full size, so she would have a print to remember her by.

TWO WILLS
 

C
HRIS
S
ATTLER CALLED
attorney Bock with disturbing news: “
Mrs. Clark’s condition seems to be deteriorating.” It was February 15, 2005, and Huguette’s cold had turned into pneumonia.

The same day, Hadassah followed up with her own call to Bock, asking about the $5 million “owed on her gift.” She was referring to the $5 million she had not yet gotten from the sale of the Cézanne, the $5 million she was carrying around in an undated check. Huguette told Bock she wanted to give Hadassah the $5 million right away.

Huguette, at age ninety-eight and with pneumonia, still hadn’t signed a will. This was the opening that her attorneys had been waiting forty years for.

• • •

When Huguette was young, she signed two wills, leaving everything to her mother. The last one had been signed in 1929, when she was Mrs. Gower.

After Anna died, Huguette’s lawyers at Clark, Carr & Ellis, the old railroad firm, made a renewed push. In 1964,
they sent over a draft will, leaving Bellosguardo to the Santa Barbara Foundation to support the arts, and $1 million to her friend Etienne de Villermont, among other bequests.

Every time the lawyers brought this up, she’d say, “Let’s wait until after the holidays.” Her objection seemed to be to the idea of having a will at all, or at least to having one
now
. Perhaps she found the subject too dark, or was suspicious of signing away her authority, as she refused repeatedly to sign any power of attorney.

Lawyer after lawyer tried every argument. They explained that she was in such good financial condition because her parents had made sound plans. They explained that her many friends were relying on her generosity and could be left with nothing.

Her attorneys’ letters show that they assumed they were writing to an
educated, intelligent person who knew what she wanted. Huguette was her father’s daughter. The letters are businesslike, detailed, and respectful, leaving decisions to her.

Don Wallace reminded her that without a will, her money would go to her relatives from her father’s first marriage. “
You have never expressed any interest,” he wrote, “in any of them having any part of your inheritance.” She didn’t sign, and she didn’t say why.

• • •

By 1985, Don Wallace was fed up with his client. For more than a decade, Wallace had handled her purchases of dolls at auction, had delivered her anonymous gifts, had done all the little things that one didn’t learn in law school. A fellow attorney recalled a meeting with Wallace in the 1980s. Huguette interrupted four times with telephone calls, and each time Wallace’s end of the conversation went something like this: “Yes, Mrs. Clark. Yes, Madame. Yes, I will take care of it, Madame.”

Wallace had learned to talk her through her quirks. What Wallace couldn’t do was get her to sign a will.

Wallace summed up his exasperation in a “personal and confidential” letter to Huguette in March 1985. He summoned the names of her previous lawyers who had given her the same advice.

His wish was not granted that year. Nor for the next seventeen years, as he continued to send pleading letters. Nor in his lifetime. When Don Wallace died in 2002 without persuading Huguette to sign a will,
he had never met his client of twenty-six years. He had talked with her only on the phone or through a closed door. Wallace’s successor, Wally Bock, had written her with the same wish. “
Once again,” he begged in 2000, “I urge you to stop
thinking
about a Will and do something about it.”

From time to time, the attorneys did get Huguette to revise her list of beneficiaries, reflecting the pecking order of her current friendships.
A 2001 list would have left 30 percent of her estate, after specific bequests to employees and friends, to nurse Hadassah, 30 percent to goddaughter Wanda, 15 percent to Etienne’s daughter Marie-Christine, 15 percent to establish the Bellosguardo Foundation for the arts in Santa Barbara, and 10 percent to Madame Pierre. But she signed nothing.

Often on afternoons in the early 2000s, Bock and Kamsler would gather at Bock’s office. Bock would pour a vodka for Irv and a double Scotch for himself, and they would work on another draft.

Huguette said she’d be glad to talk about it after the holidays.

• • •

Now she had pneumonia. With her health in question, and with Hadassah nagging for the promised $5 million, Huguette finally said she’d sign.

Bock and Kamsler took a draft to her hospital room on February 28, 2005, two weeks after she first fell ill. But Huguette didn’t want to wait until she died to pay Hadassah the $5 million, so that day she approved putting the Connecticut home on the market. She was ambivalent, however, about selling even a home she had never spent one night in. She changed her mind several times in the following weeks. Huguette even proposed letting Hadassah act as the real estate agent, so she could also pocket the commission, but her advisers said that wasn’t feasible. Then
Huguette proposed just giving the Connecticut house to Hadassah, but Kamsler told her that would be “a financial disaster” because of the gift taxes she would have to pay.