Rarely seen in public since at least the s, Huguette Clark had elected to live since in a Manhattan hospital, rather than her grand homes in Manhattan, Santa Barbara, Calif. Her circumstances came under question in , when some descendants of her half-siblings unsuccessfully asked a court to bar her lawyer and accountant from involvement in her affairs. The two have denied wrongdoing. Then the two wills emerged.
The first left most of her money to her distant relations. The second cut them out, giving bequests to arts charities, the nurse, a goddaughter, the hospital and others.
The Clark relatives would get one seat on the board, and the Santa Barbara community would also get seats. Although the Santa Barbara property goes to charity, as Californians have urged, the settlement plan angered the former mayor of Santa Barbara, Sheila Lodge, who was expected to testify about letters she received from Huguette Clark expressing how she wanted Bellosguardo to be preserved.
Lodge is co-chair of a Santa Barbara group called the Friends of Bellosguardo. Speaking as an officer of the recently formed foundation whose attorneys were excluded from court, Lodge criticized the New York attorney general, saying he has not sided with the charities. The current mayor of Santa Barbara, Helene Schneider, offered a more optimistic statement. Clark kept Bellosguardo in immaculate condition for the last 50 years even without visiting.
To me that means she cared deeply about this community. I sincerely hope that Ms. Clark's genuine wishes are reflected in any final judgment. Clark's will stated emphatically that none of her money should go to her relatives, who are descended from the first marriage of her father. The relatives challenged the will, claiming it was the product of fraud, that Clark was incompetent, and that the signing ceremony was faulty. Read the will. Skip Navigation.
Huguette was shy, but not sad. Giacovas, an attorney for Clark's accountant and health care proxy, Irving "Irv" Kamsler, 67, said, "After decades of service to Mrs. Clark on a personal and professional level, Mr. Kamsler is gratified to hear that the criminal investigation is closed. William Andrews Clark , one of the copper kings of Montana, a railroad builder, founder of Las Vegas, and one of the richest men of the Gilded Age. His daughter, born in Paris in while her father was in the Senate battling Teddy Roosevelt's environmental reforms, died during the Obama administration in , two weeks short of her th birthday.
The investigation was launched in after a series of reports by NBC News about the heiress whose fabulous properties sat unoccupied in New York, Connecticut and California. Clark had signed two wills, one that by default left most of her property to her distant relatives, and then six weeks later a second will cutting out the family entirely.
No allegations of misconduct were made in that case. And the accountant was a registered sex offender, after pleading guilty to a felony charge of attempting to disseminate indecent material to minors.
But what had seemed suspicious from the outside — a woman who had made herself vulnerable to elder abuse by secluding herself from the world — turned out to be more nuanced. Documents and testimony in the estate contest revealed a shy but strong-willed woman of unusual generosity. Huguette Clark was an artist, a painter and doll collector. Skittish around strangers, she engaged regularly with a circle of friends through letters and phone calls.
A neurologist visited Clark in , six months after she signed her last will cutting off her distant relatives from her father's first marriage. The year-old heiress was alert and cheerful, neurologically normal in every way, according to Clark's medical records. Louise Klebanoff testified, "perfectly content. Klebanoff's testimony in a pre-trial deposition is described in the biography "Empty Mansions," written by this reporter and a Clark cousin, Paul Clark Newell Jr.
Newell's telephone conversations over nine years with Clark, including many that were tape-recorded, show her to be refined and cheerful, with a clear memory for events nearly a century earlier. She described the time in when she and her family had tickets on the return trip of the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic, a trip they weren't able to take. It was never able to get to New York, because it sank before it got here. So we took another boat.
0コメント