Monday, November 21, 2011

Monday Morning Link: Huguette Clark

Buckle up butter beans because Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bill Dedman filed his latest installment on MSNBC.com regarding the saga of wickedly rich and recently deceased copper heiress, doll collector and hardcore recluse Huguette Clark. And, children, it is a doozy.

Mister Dedman combs through, chronicles and details court documents filed in relation to the legal battle brewing over the dispensation of Miz Clark's approximately $400,000,000 fortune. The documents (and Mister Dedman's report) shed a bit of light on just how Miz Clark's closest advisers spent her money in the last years of her isolated life.

With no children or close relatives, the aged heiress communicated with almost no one the last 20 or 25 years of  besides a small coterie of assistants, doctors, nurses, an attorney (Wallace "Wally" Bock) and an accountant (Irving Kamsler), all of whom benefited financially from Miz Clark's largess and the latter two under criminal investigation for possible misuse and misappropriation of Miz Clark's fortune.

Despite owning a massive ocean front estate in Santa Barbara, CA with a 23,000 square foot stone mansion (Bellosguardo, pictured above), a sprawling 52-acre spread in New Canaan, CT (in which she reportedly never slept even a single night), and two vast apartments on two different floors in the same Fifth Avenue building where Martha Stewart has long maintained a pied-a-terre, Miz Clark lived the last 22 years of her life in an unmarked hospital rooms. She died in May 2011 at Beth Israel Medical Center in Lower Manhattan. She was 104 years old.

photo: Bing



11 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is sad and appaling to think that this woman wasted for decades in a hospital while that amount of real estate sat empty and had to be maintained! Who knows what good that money could have done in the hands of charity?. And obviously her handlers were not looking out for her estate, or all of these assets would have been sold at or near the height of the market.

Anonymous said...

Her life probably teaches a lesson, but exactly what lesson is it? So bizarre, I am bewildered.

Anonymous said...

One lesson, I think, remembering Brooke Astor too, is that you can live too long for your own and other people's good. Vast wealth and dementia add up to trouble.

Anonymous said...

Anon 12:36: Clark was clearly a troubled woman, who needed help looking after herself. But to do what you suggest- sell of all her properties and assets- she would have to be declared insane, which she wasn't.
In short, they had no right to do any of what you suggested.

Yes, the properties were maintained- at her own expense, and presumably at her will, batty as it seems to us.

As for charity: well, who would administer this charity? Huguette? People seem not to realize it's a difficult thing to give away enormous sums and make sure the money is used in the proper way. It's a fulltime job. Also, you don't know whether she regularly gave sums to charity over her life, or left in her will. And it should be said, she didn't always have $400 million sitting around for fifty years. This is what her estate is worth now, after things like appreciation of assets like houses and artwork and investments.
I get the feeling she didn't think about money very much. Didn't know what it was like to not have it, not be rich. But what you're advocating is that someone should have stepped in and taken it from her, for "charity". No, she had the right to do with it- or not do- as she saw fit.

Anonymous said...

So true. Remember the waste caused by sending money, though with good intentions, to Haiti? The money still hasn't fully been accounted for AND the people of Haiti are still in close to the same shape they were in right after the earthquake. "Charity" is another word for 'give us all your money (for a worthy cause) and trust that we'll do right by you'. It doesn't always happen the right way. Ms Clark's story is still sad, no matter what the amount of money.

Anonymous said...

5:52 I disagree..your description of "charity" is the description of our current GOVERNMENT.

Anonymous said...

I just hope her real estate can now move on to good owners who will take care of it.

What a tragic way to live and die.

Anonymous said...

Im betting martha grabs the full floor apartment in nyc before it even hits the market, and bellosguardo will be scooped up by either larry ellison or ty warner. Anyone else care to guess?

Anonymous said...

She left Bellosguardo to a foundation which will run it as a museum style open house - much like many of the Newport mansions.

Anonymous said...

Wonder who sits on the board of the Bellosguardo Foundation. Please no more of these avaricious bounders...the likes of Ellison, Warner, Stewart and the remaining self appointed and self involved who only drape themselves in the philanthropic banner to hide their insidious behavior.

Steve Mawson said...

bravo the old bag...she did what she wanted, had what she wanted and probably died when she wanted, leaving all these pernicious nitpickers to now crawl out of their smelly pits to criticize...dream on kids...that's as close as you'll get