REVEALED: A new book details heiress Huguette Clark’s eccentricities, like doll collecting and building model castles — even well into old age. (
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The painting wasn’t pretty.
A grumpy looking woman in a red dress stared out from the canvas, and ever since Anna E. Clark hung it in her sumptuous Manhattan apartments, her daughter Huguette rarely came downstairs.
Clark, by then 20 years a widow, dealt with the problem one night in 1945, when renowned cellist Robert Maas visited.
Maas was in between gigs. Clark offered to sponsor a new string quartet — but he needed instruments. Maas told her of four Stradivari once owned by the famed violinist Niccolo Paganini.
They were for sale. And they were in Manhattan at a shop near Carnegie Hall.
Just one catch: They were being sold only as a group.
Clark wasted no time. She swept the oil painting — Paul Cezanne’s 1890 work “Madame Cezanne in Red Dress” — off the wall, and called her driver.
A few hours later, she walked back into 907 Fifth Ave. with the 300-year-old instruments and handed them to Maas, according to the new book “Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune,” due out on Sept. 10.
Anna Clark sold the Cezanne, which Huguette never liked, to an art gallery, and plunked down $200,000 ($2.6 million in today’s dollars) for the Stradivari, thus launching the acclaimed Paganini Quartet, which toured the world for decades.
For Anna Clark and her daughter Huguette, the money was barely a drop in the bucket.
Unimaginable wealth, fear and indulgence shaped the Clark women — and warped the world of Huguette.
The heiress lived her last 20 years, childlike and mostly alone, in a hospital room at Beth Israel Medical Center, until her death in 2011 at the age of 104.
During those years, her 42-room apartment on Fifth Avenue, a California estate and a Connecticut manse gathered dust.
A native of France and the youngest daughter of William A. Clark, a US senator, copper-mine owner and railroad baron with riches rivaled only by the Rockefellers, the final decades of Huguette’s life have been subjected to the public spotlight she dreaded, as a legal battle over her will winds its way through court.
The fight pitches 19 distant relatives, who mostly never met or spoke to Huguette, against the childless woman’s caretakers, including her lawyer, accountant and nurse. They are accused of duping their charge into giving them gobs of cash before her death and stand to inherit millions more.
The family cites Huguette’s obsession with high end, lifelike French and Japanese dolls, model castles, the Smurfs, her reclusiveness and tendency to give her money freely as evidence of mental illness.
Her adult years were just as peculiar as her golden ones, according to co-authors Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell Jr., a Huguette relation.
Though a Francophile and lover of Japanese art and culture, she never traveled. Huguette once confessed in a letter that she was afraid to visit her beloved France as an adult in the 1960s because “she might be kidnapped or killed if there was another revolution.”
A rare visitor recalls walking into Huguette’s Manhattan home in the late 1950s and seeing that “the long gallery in her apartment was completely lined with armchairs, each providing a seat for a doll.” Even then considered a hermit, she always attended the Christian Dior fashion shows “to see the dresses to dress her dolls,” according to the book.
In her 80s and 90s, she spent tens of thousands on rare dolls at auction, often directing a surrogate from her hospital bed in bidding. She later bequeathed the vast doll collection to her nurse, Hadassah Peri.
Dedman and Newell create a contradictory picture of their subject, with descriptions ranging from a “slow” “germaphobe” who was “never able to grow up,” to a woman capable of purchasing one of the most famed violins ever made, the Stradivarius called “La Pucelle,” and negotiated single-handedly a 10 percent discount.
Huguette considered herself an artist, painting the scenes from her window overlooking Central Park or portraits of Geishas in colorful costumes.
She wrapped herself up in “projects,” specifically, the meticulous building of model castles.
Striving for authenticity, she spared no expense, according to the book. Once, she petitioned the Japanese government to buy a rare type of cedar regulated by law, for a “castle” that cost $80,000 to create. She hired an artist to travel to Japan to take measurements and photos of the structures she wanted to miniaturize.
As staffers, doctors, lawyers and others died off, Huguette simply didn’t hire replacements. Her circle shrank as high society forgot her and her once-legendary family. Yet her privacy remained crucial — even in the face of tremendous financial loss.
A collection of stunning jewelry was auctioned off when a paperwork snafu led to an unpaid bill on a safety-deposit box.
“Gone” were her mother’s gold wedding band; tortoise-shell combs with 320 diamonds; a Cartier two-strand pearl necklace with a seven-carat diamond clasp; a bracelet with 36 sapphires and 126 small diamonds, and many others.
Devastated, Huguette would not sue for fear of publicity, accepting instead a $3.5 million settlement for jewels she believed were worth $10 million.
She didn’t call the police, according to the book, when someone cashed a check from an unused account, stealing $230,000 in the early 1990s.
And she didn’t report the theft of one of her most prized paintings: Degas’ “Dancer Making Points,” which turned up 12 years later on the Kansas wall of Henry Bloch, co-founder of the tax firm H&R Block, who bought it from a Manhattan art dealer.
It’s unclear who reported the theft, but when the FBI found the Degas, Huguette wanted it back. Bloch stood firm. Fearing public attention, she relented; the $10 million painting was “donated” to a museum where Bloch was a trustee and Huguette took a tax deduction.
Nurse’s $45M windfall
Hurricane Sandy helped scuttle a settlement in the battle over copper heiress Huguette Clark’s $300 million estate.
Private-duty nurse Hadassah Peri, 63, hit a $30 million jackpot when she was randomly assigned to care for Clark in 1991 and stands to gain roughly $15 million more if the wealthy woman’s contested will is upheld in Manhattan Surrogate’s Court.
As the legal battle dragged on, most players wanted Peri to give ground, according to the book “Empty Mansions” by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell Jr.
“Even those ostensibly on the side of Hadassah took the position that the nurse had gotten an unseemly amount already,” they wrote.
Peri refused to budge, the authors claim. “Her resolve seemed to be stiffened” by the October 2012 storm, which damaged at least one of Peri’s five homes and the family Bentley, all paid for by Clark.
Clark’s relatives have challenged the will, which leaves them nothing.
The New York public administrator claims Peri and others, including Clark’s lawyer and accountant, got gifts because of “undue influence” and wants the money returned“
I gave my life for her,” said Peri, who worked 12-hour shifts seven days a week, the authors said.
Peri’s spokesman, Fraser Seitel, denied the claim.
“There is no truth to that at all,” he said.