descendants of her father, Sen. William Andrews Clark (1839-1925). Instead, most of the lucre will go to establish a charitable foundation and museum, headquartered in her seaside Santa Barbara mansion, Bellosguardo. Bellosguardo’s walls will be adorned with most of her collection of paintings, including works of John Singer Sargent and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. To help underwrite Bellosguardo, Mme. Clark’s trifecta of Manhattan apartments, all at 907 Fifth Avenue, have been placed on the market. So has a 52-acre estate in Connecticut, complete with mansion. The largest and most expensive of the New York apartments offers the palatial splendor of “intricately carved plaster ceilings, dark wood paneling and ancient wood-framed windows, flecked with bits of stained glass, that look out onto the entire expanse of Central Park,” according to the New York Times. Rotary-dial telephones still identify the exchange number as “Butterfield 8.” A b attle of wills Clark’s funeral, attended only by mortuary employees and from which relatives were barred by the elderly heiress’ lawyer, Wallace Bock, was a harbinger of the will’s revelations. Childless and having outlived everyone on her mother’s side of the Clark family, Huguette Clark’s only blood relations were 21 descendants from William Clark’s first marriage, half-great-nephews and such. If they thought being kept out of the funeral was a shock, it was nothing compared to the subsequent opening of the will. Clark’s goddaughter, Wanda Styka, received $12 million. Private nurse Hadassah Peri stood to inherit more than $30 million, along with Clark’s legendary collection of French dolls, which Clark treated as family members, often holding conversations with them. Another $1 million legacy went to Bock and his co-executor, accountant Irving Kamsler, two superannuated vassals whom family members have painted as shady characters. (It’s not difficult in the case of Kamsler, once known in AOL chatrooms as “IRV1040” and now a registered sex offender.) For that reason alone, a nasty fight in probate court is a certainty — as will the fact that Bock and Kamsler constitute two-thirds of the newly formed Bellosguardo Foundation, placing them in control of its endowment, thereby generating “unending fees and salaries,” according to reports by MSNBC investigative reporter Bill Dedman. The will was signed in April 2005 — a year after Clark, under the alias “Harriet Chase,”
entered Beth Israel Medical Center, never to leave again — at least alive. Prior to that, Clark had taken refuge in Manhattan’s Doctors Hospital, possibly as early as 1988 (news accounts vary), where Peri was assigned to her in 1991. As Clark chronicler Dedman once said, “She made Howard Hughes seem outgoing.” The causes for her long confinements were “many mysterious and imagined ailments,” wrote New York Observer reporter Kim Velsey.
During discovery proceedings, it was learned that Clark had filed another will, six weeks earlier, one that bequeathed all her wealth to family members, save for a $5 million legacy to Peri. Bock and Kamsler, as executors, stood to collect an $8 million commission each — but no cash outright. (If both wills are tossed, family members get everything.) Even if the later will is upheld, things are not looking good for the contro-
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