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

“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 megroup 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.