Chapter One

The Clark Family Reunion at the Corcoran

Located just two blocks from the White House, the Corcoran Gallery of Art feels as if it is off the beaten path in Washington, drawing just a fraction of the city’s tourist throngs. The white marble 1897 Beaux Arts colossus usually closes promptly at 5 p.m. on Fridays. But on the rainy night of October 24, 2008, the lights were ablaze well into the evening. With a two-story atrium sporting forty Doric columns and a sweeping staircase to a grand balcony, the perennially cash-strapped private museum is often rented out for weddings and parties. However, tonight’s more than seventy-five guests, who had flown in from Paris, London, Florida, Texas, California, and New York, had a personal connection to the museum and its paintings by Corot, Gainsborough, and Delacroix.

In his invitation, Corcoran director Paul Greenhalgh had described the two days of events as “a gathering of the Clark Family.” Not just any family named Clark, but a reunion of the descendants and relatives of William Andrews Clark, who in 1907 was described as the second richest man in America, after John D. Rockefeller, with a personal fortune worth more than $3 billion in today’s dollars. The copper mogul and Montana senator had been born in 1839 and died in 1925. A Corcoran benefactor, Clark’s name is prominently featured in gold leaf on the museum’s interior wall and credited in small type beside the many sculptures and paintings that he donated to the permanent collection.

The idea for the Clark family get-together had been jointly hatched by Greenhalgh, a British decorative arts scholar with a mop of brown hair, and Katherine Hall Friedman, known professionally as Carla Hall, a great-great-granddaughter of William Andrews Clark, whose father and grandmother had served on the Corcoran board. Ever since he had joined the Corcoran two years earlier, Greenhalgh, the former head of research at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, had been wooing potential donors, and he was eager to establish a stronger relationship to the Clarks. As Greenhalgh recalls, “It was clear a lot of the family had never been to the museum before.”

The relatives of William Andrews Clark were a far-flung family and many had never met prior to the reunion. Some siblings were estranged and had not seen or spoken to one another in decades. In an e-mail that Carla Hall sent a month before the reunion, she seemed hopeful that the event would change the family dynamics: “We are all eager to get to know one another and learn more about the Clark family, with a specific focus on the life of WA Clark and his legacy that is reflected in the Corcoran’s exquisite collection.”

This night would prove to be a turning point in the tangled history of the Clarks, although not in a way that the organizers could have imagined. Four years later, the party guests would be quizzed by teams of lawyers about their memories of the evening and who said what to whom. In the whispered asides at the Corcoran party, one could hear the battle lines of a future family feud taking shape. The Clarks in attendance that night included descendants of three branches of the family tree and a representative from the fourth. The senator had sired seven children during his first marriage, and then as a widower married a much younger woman and produced two daughters. As a result, there was a thirty-six-year age gap between his oldest and youngest children: his grandchildren and young daughters were nearly the same age.

Three children from his first marriage—the scandal-prone Manhattan divorcée Mary (known as May), the booze- and racetrack-loving California bon vivant Charles, and the prim and proper Katherine—had produced seven children, and many of their descendants were in attendance this evening.

Strolling past the snarling bronze lions guarding the Corcoran’s entrance, Karine Albert McCall, a petite and slender sixty-eight-year-old blonde, arrived with her husband, Donald McCall, a retired cellist. The grandchild of Charles Clark and his banking heiress wife, Celia, Karine had grown up in luxury at her grandmother’s San Francisco Tudor castle, “House-on-Hill,” a 35,000-square-foot estate on six acres with a fifty-five-foot-long music room, twelve bedrooms, and lush gardens.

An artist who painted colorful abstracts, the mother of three children, Karine had spent most of the previous forty years living in Europe, but she and her husband had just moved from London to Washington, D.C. She had recently discovered worrisome information about an elderly Clark relative and had been obsessing about what, if anything, to do. She had confided in her first cousin Jacqueline Baeyens-Clerte, who had flown in from her home in Paris to attend the reunion and give Karine moral support. Tonight Karine had a mission: finding allies to discuss her concerns. Karine had never met many of her Clark relatives. As she and Donald and Jacqueline circulated through the cocktail hour at the Corcoran, introducing themselves and making small talk, there was a subtext to the conversations. As Karine recalls, “We were trying to figure out, who can we trust?”

Karine’s newfound worries centered on her great-aunt, a woman she had known all her life as “Tante Huguette.” The frail and monied Manhattan centenarian had a haunting hold on the imaginations of several generations of Clark relatives.

Huguette Marcelle Clark, the sole surviving child of William Andrews Clark, was now 102 years old and resided in Beth Israel Hospital in New York. No family member had seen her in forty years. Born in 1906 in Paris to Clark’s second wife, Anna, Huguette (pronounced you-GET) had been instantly famous for her wealth and constantly chased by photographers as a pretty child and desirable debutante, reluctantly starring in the society pages. Divorced in 1930 after a brief marriage, she never wed again or had children and cut herself off from the social whirl, deliberately cultivating an air of mystery. The gossip columnists of her era, Walter Winchell and Cholly Knickerbocker, had periodically run whatever-happened-to items about Huguette.

Several third-generation Clark relatives like Karine, now in their sixties and seventies, had met Huguette during their childhoods, but to the younger generation she was a cipher, an eccentric curiosity. The family members speculated about her life, and several had repeatedly asked to meet her to no avail, which only made them even more curious. She haunted the imaginations of three generations of Clark relatives, an elusive, reclusive figure. “Talking with the family, none of them knew her,” says Corcoran director Greenhalgh. “I’m sure they were desperate to get an audience but none of them did.” The professional photographer who had been hired to capture the reunion, Martha FitzSimon, had been briefed about Huguette in advance, recalling, “Carla told me that nobody had been able to talk to her for years.”

The last time any family member could remember actually seeing Huguette was at the funeral of Carla Hall’s grandmother in March 1968 at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan. “After the funeral, we all were together for a short while, greeting each other and expressing condolences,” recalls Erika Hall, Carla’s mother and the widow of Huguette’s great-nephew John Hall. “Huguette was there also and did the same thing, very sweet, and disappeared rather soon.”

Disappeared was an apt word to describe Huguette’s behavior. She maintained sporadic phone contact for many years with a few Clark relatives, speaking in a soft voice with a hint of a French accent. When Erika Hall and her husband sent flowers once or twice a year, Huguette would call to say a brief thank-you. But even these kinds of communications had tapered off in recent years. Huguette had repeatedly declined to give out her phone number and had always taken a standoffish don’t-call-me-I’ll-call-you approach to her relatives. Most did not know that she was in the hospital and assumed she still resided at her sprawling complex of three apartments at 907 Fifth Avenue, with forty-two rooms.

Her two gatekeepers were Irving Kamsler, an accountant who had worked for her since 1979, and attorney Wallace Bock, a real estate tax specialist who had inherited Huguette as a client when her veteran lawyer became ill in 1997. At age seventy-six, Bock still handled Huguette’s legal affairs and served as an intermediary between Huguette and her relatives. An Orthodox Jew, Bock had been invited to the Corcoran event as Huguette’s representative, but the Friday-Saturday schedule conflicted with the Sabbath. He sent his colleague Kamsler to attend in his stead.

Huguette was, in fact, closer to the deferential sixty-one-year-old Kamsler, who visited her frequently and coordinated her medical care with her private nurses and doctors at Beth Israel Hospital. Bock and Kamsler viewed themselves as Huguette’s protectors: they paid her bills, handled her taxes, supervised her staff, and even ran errands. “I found them very easy to deal with,” says Greenhalgh of Kamsler and Bock. “My impression is what Huguette did is get faithful people who would stand by her and she would stand by them.”

Paid generous monthly retainers (Bock received $15,000 per month; Kamsler got $5,000 per month plus a standard yearly $50,000 bonus), the men made themselves constantly available to their most important client. As Cynthia Garcia, a paralegal at Bock’s firm from 1999 to 2002, recalls, “If Mr. Bock was in the men’s room when she called, I had to put her on hold and run to the men’s room and knock on the door. If he was smoking his pipe by the air shaft, I’d get him. I knew where he ate lunch, a kosher luncheonette. If she called, I’d run out to get him. She would call ten times a day.” But Huguette Clark was older now and her hearing was fading; the calls had become much less frequent.

The Corcoran Gallery had been the recipient of William Andrews Clark’s vast art collection, including nearly two hundred paintings, Rodin marble nudes, Oriental rugs, Egyptian antiquities, and majolica. His collection featured Corot landscapes and Degas ballet paintings, a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington, and works by Chardin and Cazin. The Salon Doré, an ornate 1770s gilded room that Clark had imported from Paris to install in his turn-of-the-century robber-baron Fifth Avenue mansion, gleamed as the result of a recent restoration.

As William Andrews Clark’s distant relations peered admiringly at the art, one implicit thought floated through the air: if only these valuable works of art had stayed in the family. Imagine the cachet of a Corot in one’s very own living room. Or better yet, consider the millions of dollars that these artworks would fetch now at auction. A Sickle-Leaf Persian carpet that had once belonged to Clark was subsequently sold by the museum for $33.7 million.

William Andrews Clark, who made his fortune in mining and banking in Montana, expanded into building railroads. Clark showered his children with gifts, bragging in nouveau riche fashion about his generosity. On May 29, 1900, the New York Times recited the senator’s wedding presents to his daughter Katherine, including $100,000 worth of jewelry—a diamond-and-ruby bodice ornament and diamond-and-emerald tiara—plus $4 million in securities and real estate. Just in case that sum did not convey his enduring fatherly love, the story noted that Clark had previously given his daughter $10 million.

Upon his death, the senator bequeathed an estimated $15 million each (inflation-adjusted, the equivalent of $200 million today) to his surviving children: two adult sons and two adult daughters from his first marriage, and the teenage Huguette. But fortunes have a way of dwindling as the money passes through several generations, especially in a family like the Clarks, with multiple marriages and divorces. Some of tonight’s guests were trust funders, but others lived off their salaries. As the Corcoran’s Greenhalgh recalls, “My impression was that a significant portion of the people at the reunion were not wealthy people. I think there was a range.”

On the Corcoran’s second floor, the tables were decorated with red-and-gold tablecloths and set with gold-rimmed glasses and gold-rimmed dinnerware. With just a half hour left before the seated dinner was to begin, Carla Hall, wearing a fitted navy cocktail dress with short sleeves, could be seen rearranging place cards. And she did not look happy about it.

A five-foot-ten, imposing fifty-six-year-old blonde with a take-charge personality, Carla had embraced her Clark heritage with pride. She ran a corporate branding business out of her Upper West Side brownstone in Manhattan, creating annual reports and marketing materials for clients such as the Ford Foundation and Morgan Stanley. Carla’s great-grandmother, Katherine Clark Morris, had been the only one of William Andrews Clark’s children to make a socially fortuitous marriage, to a descendant of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Lewis Morris.

Carla had been working on the arrangements for the Corcoran party for months with Ian Devine, another fourth-generation Clark descendant. A preppy-looking fifty-five-year-old consultant, Devine advised financial firms on how to market their services to wealthy families. His great-grandmother, Mary Clark Culver Kling de Brabant, had been the bad girl of her generation. Married three times, Mary, the oldest child of William Andrews Clark, was a darling of the gossip columns of her era for her acrimonious divorces and exotic galas.

Carla and Ian had only discovered by serendipity that they were related. In 2001, a business associate arranged for the duo to meet at Carla’s home office to discuss a potential work project. Ian’s brother had recently given him a family tree and certain names sounded familiar: his great-grandmother Mary and Carla’s great-grandmother Katherine had been sisters. As Ian recalls, “At the end of our business meeting, I asked if her parents were John and Erika. She said yes, and we took it from there.” Both of their families owned portraits of William Andrews Clark by Polish painter Tadé Styka (pronounced TAH-day STEE-ka), an artist popular in Washington and Hollywood, who had been commissioned by the senator to create an excessive eleven paintings.

Carla Hall had never met or spoken to her “Tante Huguette,” but she had frequently been in touch by phone in recent years with Huguette’s lawyer, Wallace Bock. Acting in 2006 as a self-appointed family liaison to the Corcoran, Carla had asked Bock to pass along a request to Huguette to donate archival Clark family material (letters, photos, documents) to the museum. Huguette declined to do so. Curious about William Andrews Clark’s historic estate, Bellosguardo, in Santa Barbara, still owned by Huguette but vacant, Carla had requested and received permission, via Wallace Bock, to visit in 2007. She sent Huguette a thank-you note afterward but did not receive a reply.

As soon as Carla began planning the Corcoran party, she consulted Bock and then sent Huguette an invitation to the event with a request for a donation to underwrite expenses. It was cheeky to write to a distant relative and ask for money, but everyone in the family assumed, correctly, that Huguette could easily afford it. Huguette contributed $10,000 but, as expected, declined to attend. As her accountant, Irving Kamsler, recalls telling her, “If you want to go, we can absolutely arrange it, get you there in a luxury limousine.” He adds, “But she had no desire to meet her family.” Her absence was a disappointment. Beverly Bonner McCord, a descendant of one of the senator’s sisters, says, “We would have loved to have met Huguette, even for just a few minutes.”

The centenarian represented a living link to the most glittering era of family history. Huguette and her mother, Anna Clark, attended the opening of the Clark wing at the Corcoran in 1928—President Calvin Coolidge cut the silken cord—and she had an emotional attachment to the artworks. She had played with her older sister, Andrée, in the Salon Doré back when it was part of her father’s Fifth Avenue house. The paintings and sculptures at the Corcoran had been the backdrop to her daily life. She had accompanied her father to museums in Europe and Manhattan. Art was a way that this shy girl could connect with her formidable father. Inspired to become an artist herself, she had taken private lessons for many years with Tadé Styka. The Corcoran had even mounted a show of Huguette Clark’s artwork in 1929, which received favorable attention. With intricate brushwork, she created a striking self-portrait and romantic depictions of flowers.

Proud of her father’s legacy as an art collector, she had been a loyal supporter of the Corcoran for many decades. “I talked to Huguette a number of times, she was very sweet,” recalls David Levy, former Corcoran Gallery director. “She loved things that were French and she loved the Salon Doré. We were restoring that and she contributed.” But he also thought her behavior was strange, to say the least. “She had some huge aversion to anyone seeing her. She would send me group photos, historic stuff, a group of people standing in front of a building. She would take a black magic marker and cross out her face. It was pretty weird. She never explained it and I never asked.” Freed now from the diplomatic requirements of being a museum head, Levy adds, “She was a nutcase. If you have a nutcase giving you between $25,000 and $100,000 per year, you’ve got to let it ride.”

Huguette’s long-standing relationship with the Corcoran unraveled when Levy championed a new addition to the museum designed by Frank Gehry, which would have sliced into the Clark wing and destroyed the rotunda. She cut her contributions. When the board canceled the Gehry addition, Levy quit as director. Greenhalgh, his successor, had worked to smooth the waters, although he was never able to speak to Huguette Clark directly. “I went to see Wallace Bock, and he was extremely cold at first, because Huguette’s experience with the museum had been bad for many years,” Greenhalgh recalls. “We reassured Wallace Bock that the Clark wing and Clark collections were extremely important to the museum.”

The strategy worked. When Greenhalgh wrote to Huguette in 2007 to tell her about the museum’s precarious financial condition—it was running a $2 million yearly deficit—she responded by pledging $1 million, to be paid in four installments. The new director was understandably eager to keep her, and her advisers, feeling warmly toward the museum.

Carla Hall had been happily chatting with guests that evening and accepting congratulations when she was abruptly interrupted by the Corcoran director’s assistant with an urgent request to change the seating arrangements at the head table. The table needed new additions for the emissaries from Tante Huguette: her accountant, Irving Kamsler, and his wife, Judith.

Short and overweight, wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and striped navy tie, Kamsler and his red-headed wife, Judi, did seem like interlopers as they mingled with the Clark descendants. A graduate of Baruch College, Kamsler and his second wife lived in a modest condominium in Riverdale, and until recently he had been president of his Bronx temple. After working at several different accounting firms, he was now a sole practitioner and Huguette Clark was his most important client. As her representative, he enjoyed the reflected glory at the party, recalling that the family members were eager for news: “Everyone was interested, people were asking me questions, what was Mrs. Clark like? How is she? I didn’t say very much.”

Even in absentia, Huguette Clark was present at the party. A Clark family photo display included pictures of Huguette and her sister Andrée, pretty young girls with long hair, dressed up for an outing. But Kamsler had become perturbed upon seeing a Clark family tree that did not mention either Huguette or her mother, Anna. He did not realize that the tree had been created as a seating chart for those actually in attendance that night.

Upset by what he perceived as a lack of respect for Huguette, Kamsler tracked down Greenhalgh’s executive assistant and angrily complained. As Kamsler recalls, “I said I’m not going to make a scene, but they are asking her to come and underwrite the cost and they’re ignoring her in this thing.” His rant sparked the last-minute seating change: the Corcoran staffer had taken it upon herself to ask Carla Hall to move Kamsler and his wife from Siberia in the hope of appeasing them.

Carla was visibly upset by the request to upgrade the Kamslers. “I had to reorchestrate all the table arrangements and accommodate the elder members of the family that had traveled far and wide,” Carla recalled with irritation. “I was shaken by that, and I didn’t understand.”

Once the family members were seated, as the mistress of ceremonies, Carla stood up and took to the microphone to welcome her relatives, noting that this was the first time the extended family had come together in a century. She told the group that she hoped the reunion would “begin a new era of Clark cousin connections.” Toward the end of her prepared remarks, Carla expressed her gratitude to Tante Huguette for her “tremendous generosity toward making this weekend reunion possible.” Carla had placed note cards on each table, and suggested that people write to Huguette, with the promise that the comments would be sent along. But her remarks irked Irving Kamsler, or as he put it, “Carla did make a point to thank Mrs. Clark, and in my opinion, I thought it was an afterthought.”

At the end of the evening, as waiters cleared the tables and the crowd began to disperse, Carla went up to the accountant and his wife and asked, “How did you enjoy the evening?” She was startled by Kamsler’s response. “He grimaced, which I didn’t quite expect, and then I said, ‘How would you think my great-aunt would have liked and enjoyed the evening?’ He became very belligerent and used words that felt very harsh to me… He said, ‘She would have been disgusted at this event, that it was disrespectful of her.’ Then he huffed off. My next conversation was with Ian, because he and his wife, Kerri, were coming toward me and I was quite shaken up.”

Ian Devine overheard a commotion and raced over to Carla to see what was going on. After hearing her account, he was furious about what he perceived as “this out-of-place attack” and “verbal assault on Carla.”

Paul Greenhalgh witnessed the confrontation. “Definitely, Irving was put out,” he says. “My memory was that on the various boards and posters put around, Huguette was not thanked for supporting the evening, and he was upset.” Word quickly spread that Kamsler had criticized the festivities.

The contretemps ended the evening on a jarring note. The next morning, the guests gathered at the museum again, starting with a brunch. Irving and Judi Kamsler received a decidedly chilly reaction from the family. “They treated us like lepers,” he recalled.

After touring the Clark collection, the guests wound up at a luncheon, with featured speaker Stanley Pitts, an amateur historian. Pitts, an airline safety administrator based in Alaska, had written his master’s thesis on William Andrews Clark at the University of Northern Texas. Back in 1899, Clark had been charged with bribing Montana legislators to win his Senate seat; Pitts’s thesis was an attempt to clear the senator’s name. Clark’s descendants were well aware of the controversies swirling around their patriarch and sought Pitts out to tell him their tales. “They’d been told that he was a rascal and tight-fisted,” Pitts says, recalling that one Clark relative confessed, “ ‘My great-aunt would not let us speak his name in the house, they were so ashamed. We thought he was a criminal.’ ”

Even though Pitts had a dramatic story to tell, the senator’s great-granddaughter Karine McCall had trouble paying attention during his remarks. Karine, who had come to the family reunion on a mission, needed to make a quick decision. Who could she trust in this roomful of relatives? The hyperorganized Carla Hall appeared to be plugged into the family history. Karine passed her a note, inviting Carla over to her town house in Georgetown later that afternoon. She had urgent matters to discuss.