Empty Mansions (51 page)

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
 

I
T WAS
O
CTOBER
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 relatives 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.