Clark Huguette

Huguette Marcelle Clark (June 9, 1906 – May 24, 2011) was an heiress and philanthropist. The youngest daughter of United States Senator and industrialist William A. Clark, she lived a reclusive life after 1930 and her activities were virtually unknown to the public. Upon her death in 2011, Clark left behind a vast fortune, most of which was donated to charity. Huguette Clark was born in Paris, France, the second daughter of William A. Clark, and his second wife, the former Anna Eugenia La Chapelle (1878–1963).

Clark was a former U.S. Senator from Montana and businessman involved in mining and railroads. In addition to her older sister, Louise Amelia Andrée Clark (1902–1919), she had five half siblings from her father's first marriage to Catherine Louise Stauffer : Mary Joaquina Clark (1870–1939; married Everett Mallory Culver, Charles Potter Kling, and Marius de Brabant) ; Charles Walker Clark (1871–1933; married Katharine Quin Roberts and Cecelia "Celia" Tobin) ; Katherine Louise Clark (1875–1974; married Dr. Lewis Rutherford Morris) ; William Andrews Clark, Jr. (1877–1934; married Mabel Foster and Alice McManus) ; Francis Paul Clark (1880–1896)

Following the death of her father in 1925, Clark and her mother moved from a mansion at 962 Fifth Avenue, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York, to a nearby twelfth-floor apartment at 907 Fifth Avenue. She later purchased the entire eighth floor in the building. In 1928, she agreed to donate $50,000 (equivalent to $680,000 in today's dollars) to excavate the salt pond and create an artificial freshwater lake across from Bellosguardo (34.418376°N 119.660664°W), her 23-acre (93,000 m2) estate on the Pacific Coast in Santa Barbara, California. She stipulated that the facility would be named the Andrée Clark Bird Refuge, after her sister, who had died of meningitis. The daughter of a former staff member described Clark and her mother as not "odd or strange" but rather "quiet, loving, giving ladies". Over the years, she developed a distrust of outsiders, including her family, because she thought they were after her money. She preferred to conduct all of her conversations in French so that others were unlikely to understand the discussion.

Clark was a musician and an artist who, in 1929, exhibited seven of her paintings at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, located in Washington, D.C. The last photograph of her to be published during her lifetime was taken in 1928, though later photos are published in the book "Empty Mansions." She reportedly had a very small group of friends.[6] Her closest friend and former employee, Suzanne Pierre, died of Alzheimer's disease in February 2011. On August 18, 1928, in Santa Barbara, Clark married law student William MacDonald Gower, a Princeton University graduate who was a son of one of her father's business associates, William Bleakly Gower. The couple separated in 1929 and divorced in Reno, Nevada, on August 12, 1930.

In February 2010, Clark became the subject of a series of reports by NBCNews.com investigative reporter Bill Dedman, who found that caretakers at her three residences had not seen her in decades, and that her palatial estates in Santa Barbara and New Canaan, Connecticut, had lain empty throughout that time, although the houses and their extensive grounds were meticulously maintained by their staff. Dedman has written a book on Huguette Clark and her family, called Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune (ISBN 0345534522), published in September 2013.

Dedman determined in 2010 that she was in the care of a New York City hospital, and that some of her personal possessions had been quietly sold. Some of the possessions sold include a rare 1709 violin called La Pucelle (or The Virgin) made by Antonio Stradivari, and an 1882 Pierre-Auguste Renoir painting entitled In the Roses.[6] Building staff reported that she was frail but not ill when Clark left her Fifth Avenue cooperative apartment in an ambulance in 1988. Initially she took up residence at the Upper East Side's Doctor's Hospital to be more comfortable, but was later transferred to Beth Israel Medical Center.

In August 2010, the office of the New York County District Attorney (Manhattan) initiated a probe into her affairs managed by her accountant, Irving Kamsler, and her attorney, Wallace Bock. Then a former paralegal for Bock's law firm, Cynthia Garcia, said that Bock received many lavish gifts from Clark, including a $1.5 million gift after the September 11 attacks in 2001, to build a bomb shelter in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank near the homes of his daughters. According to Garcia, Bock tried many times to get Clark to sign a will, including versions that included him as a beneficiary. Bock's spokesperson acknowledged that she had a will. In September 2010, in a one-paragraph ruling, Judge Laura Visitacion-Lewis turned down a request from a grand-half-nephew and two grand-half-nieces – Ian Devine, Carla Hall Friedman and Karine McCall – to appoint an independent guardian to manage Clark's affairs.

Clark's will was filed on June 22, 2011, in New York Surrogate's Court. The last will and testament was made in 2005 and left seventy-five percent of her estate, about $300 million, to charity. Her longtime nurse, Hadassah Peri, received about $30 million; her goddaughter, Wanda Styka, received about $12 million; and the newly created Bellosguardo Foundation, $8 million. Other employees who managed her residences received smaller sums. Her attorney and accountant each received $500,000. A Claude Monet painting, part of his series of 250 oil paintings known as the Water Lilies (Nymphéas), was bequeathed to the Corcoran Museum of Art;[15] she had purchased the 1907 painting from Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1930. On September 24, 2013, the will was finally settled with the majority of the distant relatives receiving $80 million, the nurse nothing but amicably returning $5 million of the earlier $30 million gift, and the bulk of the substantial remainder going to the arts including the gift of her estate in Santa Barbara which will become a museum. The 12th-floor apartments where she lived until her hospitalization were subsequently sold for over $55 million in 2012. She also owned a 52-acre estate in New Canaan, Connecticut, referred to as Le Beau Chateau.

In October 2011, NBCNews.com reported that an earlier will was signed six weeks before the second will. This earlier will left Clark's estate to her family. In yet another unusual twist, it was reported by NBCNews.com in March 2012 that shortly after Clark moved to a hospital a valuable pastel, Danseuse Faisant des Pointes (Dancer Making Pointes), by Edgar Degas was taken from her Fifth Avenue apartment. The painting was sold to Peter Findlay Gallery and later acquired in 1993 by H&R Block co-founder and art collector Henry W. Bloch. The Peter Findlay Gallery indicated that it acquired the piece from a "European gentleman, seemingly from a good family, who visited New York from time to time" who claimed to have inherited the work. It wasn't until 2005 that the FBI made Bloch aware that it was investigating the painting, and in 2007 it told Bloch that the painting had been reported stolen from Clark.

Under an October 2008 deed of gift, Clark agreed to donate the pastel, valued at $10 million, to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, of which Bloch was a major benefactor. After making the gift, Clark made a request that the pastel be lent three times in 25 years to the Corcoran Museum of Art, that it be listed as from an anonymous donor, and that Clark personally receive a full-sized color photograph of the work. The museum kept the matter confidential acknowledging ownership in a 2012 written exchange with NBCNews.com, which was doing an investigative report on Clark. Seventeen items of her personal jewel collection were auctioned off at Christie's on April 17, 2012. Buyers paid a total of over $20M for the items, including a rare 9 carat pink diamond by Dreicer & Company that was purchased for over $15.7M, which includes a buyer's premium of 12 percent.

Clark died at Beth Israel Medical Center, in New York City, two weeks short of her 105th birthday. She had been moved a month earlier to an intensive-care unit and later to a room with hospice care. She had been living at Beth Israel under pseudonyms; the latest was Harriet Chase. The room was guarded and she was cared for by part-time private nurses. Her room on the third floor had a card with the fake room number "1B" with the name "Chase" taped over the actual room number. A criminal investigation into the handling of her money was ongoing at the time of her death.

She was entombed on the morning of May 26, 2011, in the family mausoleum in section 85 of Woodlawn Cemetery, located in The Bronx borough of New York City, before the cemetery gates were open to the public. Her attorney said she had specific instructions that no funeral service or mass be held. In 2008, Clark's representatives had obtained consent from other Clark family members to alter the mausoleum originally commissioned by her father. It was not until early 2011 that the mausoleum was altered to accommodate her entombment.