Empty Mansions

enterprising, but the investigators found that the paper trail backed up their story. Huguette had authorized, in writing, the sale of the Renoir, the sale of the Stradivarius violin, the marketing of the Connecticut home, even the gift of the security system for the community in Israel where Bock’s family lived. Nearly all of the hundreds of gift checks were written in Huguette’s clear handwriting, right up until her eyesight gave out.
    ----
    * The nineteen included four descendants of W.A.’s daughter Mary Joaquina “May” Clark Culver—Edith MacGuire, Rodney Devine, Mallory Devine Goewey, and Ian Devine; nine descendants of his son Charlie Clark—André Baeyens, Patrick Baeyens, Jacqueline Baeyens-Clerté, Jerry Gray, Celia Gray Cummings, Alice Gray Coelho, Paul Francis Albert, Karine Albert McCall, and Christopher Clark; and six descendants of his daughter Katherine Clark Morris—Lewis Hall, Jack Hall, Carla Hall Friedman, Kip Berry, William Berry, and Lisa Berry Lewis. See the family tree on pp. x–xi.
    † Including $84.5 million in real property; $34.5 million in art, books, and instruments; and $4.7 million in cash.
    ‡ Including an estimated $1.7 million in dolls.
    § This effort created a mind-bending paradox. Unwinding, say, $10 million in gifts given to Hadassah could save the estate $20 million in taxes, interest, and penalties. And who would get that $30 million? Under the will, it would be part of the “residuary,” the part distributed after specific bequests. That meant 60 percent of the money would go back to Hadassah.

A LIFE OF INTEGRITY

 
    H UGUETTE C LARK LIVED a surprisingly rich life of love and loss, of creativity and quiet charity, of art and imagination. Though the platitude—money can’t buy happiness—may be comforting to those who are less than well heeled, great wealth doesn’t ensure sadness either.
    Huguette suffered sorrows, yes, as happens when one lives more than a century—long enough to narrowly escape both the
Titanic
’s sinking and the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. She suffered the death of her dear sister, Andrée, and then of her father, W.A., and her mother, Anna. She persevered through divorce, cancer, mendacity. She lost her Degas ballerina, her mother’s jewelry, her privacy.
    Yet she did not have a sad life. Huguette focused on happy memories of good times with her close family, of playing hide-and-seek and listening to her sister’s bedtime stories in the fairy-tale Clark mansion, of cleverly offering their banker father gold coins to escape from the German armies, of riding surfboards with Duke Kahanamoku at Waikiki Beach.
    Huguette was not as she appeared to those who barely knew her. The story told by her relatives, the Clark relatives seeking her fortune, was that she was mentally ill, even intellectually disabled. In Paul Newell’s years of conversations with her, however, right up to a year before the wills were signed, he found Huguette to be impressively lucid and cheerful, possessed of a keen memory. She remembered events from nearly a century earlier, and she remembered that he’d recently mentioned that his granddaughter was taking ballet lessons. In spite of her years in seclusion, her social skills appeared quite normal. If she was troubled or unhappy, she did a fine job of disguising it through years of conversation and correspondence. Eccentricity is not a psychiatric disorder.
    Huguette was relentless and sophisticated in pursuing the arts—trained as a painter, self-taught as a photographer, a shrewd collector of Renoirs and Stradivaris. She explored Japan’s culture and history—language,hairstyles, fabrics—to lend authenticity to her castles and paintings. She kept alive, through her patronage and correspondence, an entire generation of the greatest illustrators in France, the ones she remembered from children’s books and magazines. Before her eyesight failed, she read the classics, played the violin, learned chess in her eighties on one of her carved Japanese sets, conversed in French.
    The family’s story is that Huguette was controlled, was kept in a cocoon, that she must be a victim of fraud. And who didn’t make the same assumption upon hearing about the wealthy woman who shut herself away in a hospital, giving millions to her nurse while her affairs were handled by an attorney and a felon accountant?
    “Mrs. Clark,” wrote attorney Peter S. Schram for the public administrator’s