Empty Mansions

of being taken advantage of. But this was her choice and as long as she is competent I feel uncomfortable in interfering with it. She has a right to privacy.… It’s possible that Bock is actually doing a good job on her behalf. We just don’t know.
    • • •
    By early 2009, Huguette’s eyesight was quite dim, and she stopped using her magic bottomless checkbook. She implored Bock to complete her promise to Hadassah from the sale of the Cézanne. That February, Bock wrote a third $5 million check to Hadassah. To cover the check, Huguette had to borrow. Although Huguette was nowhere near broke, in terms of total assets, she didn’t have enough cash. Bock and Kamsler arranged for her to get a line of credit at JPMorgan Chase.
    In exchange for the “good” $5 million check, Hadassah handed over to Bock her marker, the undated $5 million check that Huguette had written.
    With the “fussy” Gehry plan for the Corcoran now dead and buried, and the new director pledging a “new approach” of respecting the W. A. Clark Collection, Huguette pledged in 2009 to give the museum $1 million in four installments. Her accountant, Irving Kamsler, delivered the first installment personally at the Annual Corcoran Ball, just after his sentencing.
THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY

 
    T HE ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY held Huguette’s hand and said hello, offering a greeting in French.
    It was late summer 2010 at Beth Israel, after stories by NBC News raised questions about Huguette’s orphaned houses, the men managing Huguette’s money, the Stradivarius violin and the gifts to Hadassah. Huguette’s photo from 1928 was in the tabloids and on the
Today
show. To protect her from prying eyes, attorney Bock arranged for her hospital room to be disguised with a fake room number and her medical records were stamped with the pseudonym “Harriet Chase.”
    The assistant district attorney was Elizabeth Loewy, chief of the Elder Abuse Unit of the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Loewy had successfully prosecuted the son and attorney of heiress Brooke Astor in 2009 on charges of forgery and grand larceny from the heiress’s accounts. Now Loewy was looking into the affairs of Huguette Clark, who had nearly three times as much money as Mrs. Astor.
    At 104, Huguette was still able to walk and to feed herself, and she was still lucid nearly all the time, her medical records show. But since early 2007, she had had occasional hallucinations, a couple of times a year. Once, when she was one hundred, Huguette awakened with a night terror, reliving the torturous death of Joan of Arc. When she was 101, one night Huguette insisted that a tissue box was flying around the room, and she wouldn’t get out of bed because it might fly into her. She talked again about the terrible way Joan was killed, burned at the stake.
    The next day after these episodes, Huguette would be as conversant as ever. The doctors would say she had just been dehydrated, not at all unusual for an older patient, but now she was back to her cheerful self, commenting on events in the news. At age 101, she said she felt so sorry for the wife of New York governor Eliot Spitzer, who resigned after being caught paying a call girl.
    About the same time as the assistant DA’s visit, in September 2010 as the publicity about Huguette was reaching its height, the hospital arrangedfor a psychiatrist to see her for the first time in her nearly twenty years in hospital care. The doctor, evaluating Huguette’s capacity to make medical decisions, wrote on her chart that she was in frail health with “periods of delirium,” a confusion that comes and goes suddenly.
    The assistant district attorney visited Huguette three times, seeing no evidence of dementia. She did see her frailty. Huguette didn’t seem frightened at all and was responsive and friendly. Though nearly blind, she could hear well enough, could understand what Loewy was saying, and could speak clearly enough to communicate her answers. But the documents would have to tell whether Huguette’s finances had been handled according to her wishes.
    • • •
    Two police detectives and a forensic accountant began to go over Huguette’s checking accounts, the sale of the Renoir, the sale of the Stradivarius La Pucelle.The element in the news stories that most caught Loewy’s eye was the curious case in which attorney Bock and accountant Kamsler ended up with the property of another former client. The elderly client was