Empty Mansions

OUT

 
    T O RAISE CASH for the accelerating gifts, Huguette had to sell some of her collections and property. In 2001, she sold her best Stradivarius violin, La Pucelle, which she had bought in 1955 and carefully maintained.
    In April 2003, she sold Renoir’s
In the Roses
, which had been the very first portrait by Renoir to enter a collection in the United States. The portrait shows a stockbroker’s wife with a plunging neckline seated on a bench in a rose garden. The Las Vegas casino magnate Steve Wynn bought the painting for $23.5 million. This Renoir, while in the hands of the Clarks, had not been seen by the public since 1937.
    IN CONVERSATION WITH HUGUETTE

 
    In November 2003, Huguette made an unintended call to my number. She apparently called me by mistake while trying to reach someone else. The call was placed station-to-station collect. She was briefly confused, but after she realized whom she had reached, we talked for about five minutes. I’m not surprised by the mistaken call. I’ve done that myself. But to this day I am perplexed: Why would one of the richest women in the world be placing a collect call to anyone?
    In 2005, Huguette put her Connecticut refuge, Le Beau Château, on the market. Documents show that Huguette was well aware of each of these sales, authorizing them and even directing how La Pucelle should be sold.
    The London violin expert and dealer Charles Beare had written to Huguette many times since the 1980s asking about La Pucelle. Finally in 2001 Wally Bock told him that Huguette had consented to sell it. At first Bock planned to let Sotheby’s auction off the violin. The estimate was$2 million to $3 million. Huguette insisted instead that Bock go through a dealer, because such instruments bring higher values in private sales.
    There was one hitch: Huguette refused to let La Pucelle leave the apartment to be seen by potential buyers. She didn’t say why, but that wouldn’t make it easy to sell the violin.
    Beare, however, had a regular customer, and the dealer knew just what to tell him. He called David Fulton, a software millionaire in the Seattle area. A former concertmaster, Fulton had merged his Fox Software database company into Microsoft and was now using his fortune to collect the world’s finest violins.
    Beare remembers telling Fulton, “I have in hand the very best Strad that will ever be available to you, almost certainly the finest Stradivari that’s not in a museum and certainly the best preserved. This is the last chance you’ll ever have to get a fiddle this great. Are you interested?”
    Fulton couldn’t travel then to New York, but heagreed to buy La Pucelle at the asking price, sight unseen.
    There was another hitch. Beare said the confidentiality agreement proposed by Bock was so onerous that not only would it forbid him to disclose whom he had bought the violin from, or even the seller’s gender, but it would prevent him from revealing that he owned the violin at all. He could not play it in the presence of anyone, ever.
    Fulton responded that either the violin was for sale or it wasn’t. A less restrictive arrangement was negotiated: Fulton agreed to a ten-year ban on revealing the previous owner.
    Beare went to 907 Fifth Avenue to pick up the violin for Fulton. He was allowed in the side service entrance and up the freight elevator to Huguette’s kitchen. And there, on a stainless steel counter, in a leather case, was La Pucelle, with its famous frontpiece of Joan of Arc. Chris Sattler also showed Beare the well-worn Strad that Huguette called her Traveler, explaining that she had kept La Pucelle untouched.
    La Pucelle is indeedan extraordinary instrument, said the acclaimed violinist James Ehnes, who played a sad, sweet tune with a French name, “Salut d’Amour,” for the instrument’s first recording, in 2007. “It really has an amazing purity of tone,” Ehnes said. “But purity with incredible breadth as well. I think that it’s like a beam of light that is very strong and very wide.… I’ve never seen another violin like it.”
    Huguette was disappointed in the selling price. She’d said the violin might be worth $10 million. La Pucelle had cost her $49,500 in 1955, equivalent to about $327,000 in the inflated dollars of 2001. But she was entirely right about keeping it out of the auctions. She received $6 million, at that point a record price for a Strad, multiplying her investment eighteen times.

SHAKEDOWN

 
    H OW TANTALIZING