The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark Read Free

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 roomthat 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