Huguette Clark

1906–1926: Early life and family , after his daughter Andrée. Huguette Marcelle Clark was born on June 9, 1906, in Paris, France. She was the second daughter of William A. Clark (1839–1925), from his second wife, Anna E. Clark (née LaChapelle; 1878–1963). Her father was a former U.S. Senator from Montana and businessman involved in mining and railroads, who had largely amassed a fortune in copper mining operations in Butte, Montana, and Jerome, Arizona. He was also a railroad magnate and one of the founders of Las Vegas. Clark was raised Roman Catholic, the faith of her mother, while her father was a Protestant. In addition to her older sister, Louise Amelia Andrée Clark (1902–1919), she had five half-siblings from her father's first marriage to Katherine Louise Stauffer: Mary Joaquina Clark (1870–1939), Charles Walker Clark (1871–1933), Katherine Louise Clark (1875–1974), William Andrews Clark, Jr. (1877–1934), and Francis Paul Clark (1880–1896). Clark spent her early life in France, living with her family at their apartment on Avenue Victor-Hugo in the 16th arrondissement. When she was five years old, she moved to New York City, where she was educated at the Spence School in Manhattan. The family lived in a six-story, 121-room mansion at 962 Fifth Avenue, the largest house in New York City at the time. After her father died in 1925, Clark and her mother moved from the mansion to a twelfth-floor apartment at 907 Fifth Avenue. 1927–1987: Real estate and artistic endeavors estate in Santa Barbara, California In December 1927, Clark announced her engagement to law student William MacDonald Gower, a Princeton University graduate who was a son of one of her father's business associates, William B. Gower. The two married on August 18, 1928, at Bellosguardo, her family's estate on the Pacific Coast in Santa Barbara, California. The same year, Clark agreed to donate $50,000 (equivalent to $ in today's dollars) to excavate a salt pond and create an artificial freshwater lake across from Bellosguardo. She stipulated that the facility would be named the Andrée Clark Bird Refuge, after her sister, who had died of meningitis. Clark and Gower separated in 1929, one year after their marriage, and divorced in Reno, Nevada, on August 11, 1930. The residence grew to a total of 42 rooms, including a library, drawing room, and living room. According to architectural historian Andrew Alpern: "If you stood with your back to the fireplace in the library, you could see out to Central Park through the living room window that is almost away!" as well as antique toys and dolls. She reportedly had a very small group of friends and was "skittish around strangers," In 1952, she purchased a estate in New Canaan, Connecticut, referred to as Le Beau Chateau. After the death of her mother in 1963, she became even more reclusive. 1988–2009: Hospitalization and later life As she aged, Clark began to develop a distrust of outsiders, including her family, because she worried they were after her money. She preferred to conduct all of her conversations in French so that others were unlikely to understand the discussion. By 1991, Clark had grown frail and had numerous cancerous lesions that disfigured her face, making it difficult for her to see or eat. On March 26 that year, she was admitted to the Upper East Side's Doctors Hospital for treatment. Her doctor, Henry Singman, "had strongly urged that she go home," but Clark was "perfectly happy, content, to remain in the situation she was in." While Clark had a net worth of over $300 million, she was cash-poor in her later life, selling properties in order to give large gifts to both friends and strangers$10 million to her best friend, and $25,000 to hospital workers who once fixed the television in her room. made by Antonio Stradivari, and an 1882 Pierre-Auguste Renoir painting entitled In the Roses. A former paralegal for Bock's law firm, Cynthia Garcia, said that Bock received many lavish gifts from Clark, including a $1.5-million gift after the September 11 attacks in 2001, to build a bomb shelter in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank near the homes of his daughters. According to Garcia, Bock tried many times to get Clark to sign a will, including versions that included him as a beneficiary. Bock's spokesperson acknowledged that she had a will. In September 2010, in a one-paragraph ruling, Judge Laura Visitacion-Lewis turned down a request from a grand-half-nephew and two grand-half-niecesIan Devine, Carla Hall Friedman and Karine McCallto appoint an independent guardian to manage Clark's affairs. ==Death==

Clark died on May 24, 2011, at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, two weeks short of her 105th birthday. She had been moved a month earlier to an intensive-care unit and later to a room with hospice care; at the time of her death, Peri was by her side. Though Clark had long said she did not want a funeral or priests, a Catholic priest was summoned to give her last rites. During this time, Clark had been living at Beth Israel under pseudonyms; the latest was Harriet Chase. Her room was guarded and she was cared for by part-time private nurses. Her room on the third floor had a card with the fake room number "1B" with the name "Chase" taped over the actual room number. A criminal investigation into the handling of her money was ongoing at the time of her death. She was entombed on the morning of May 26, 2011, in the family mausoleum in section 85 of Woodlawn Cemetery, in The Bronx, New York City, before the cemetery gates were open to the public. Her attorney said she had specific instructions that no funeral service or Mass be held. In 2008, Clark's representatives obtained consent from other Clark family members to alter the mausoleum originally commissioned by her father. It was not until early 2011 that the mausoleum was altered to accommodate her entombment. ==Posthumous events==

Estate settlement Clark's last will and testament was filed on June 22, 2011, in New York Surrogate's Court. This will was made in 2005 and left seventy-five percent of her estate, about $300 million, to charity. The will provided that her longtime nurse, Hadassah Peri, would receive about $30 million; her goddaughter, Wanda Styka, would receive about $12 million; and the newly created Bellosguardo Foundation would get $8 million. Other employees who managed her residences and affairs would receive smaller sums totaling $2 million, while Beth Israel Hospital, where she resided for many years and where she died, received $1 million. she had purchased the 1907 painting from Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1930. The will described Clark as a "reluctant heiress" who "possessed a large heart as well as a deep devotion to the arts." They also accused Peri, as well as her attorney and accountant, of defrauding her. While no one was charged with a crime, the accusations resulted in an investigation by the district attorney's office, who mandated that the will be settled before a jury trial. Peri received nothing and agreed to return $5 million of the earlier $31 million in gifts made to her and her family. The bulk of the substantial remainder went to the arts, including the gift of her estate in Santa Barbara to a new foundation, called the Bellosguardo Foundation. Reported theft of artwork , was stolen from Clark's Fifth Avenue apartment In March 2012, it was reported that shortly after Clark moved to a hospital in the early 1990s, a valuable pastel, Danseuse Faisant des Pointes (Dancer Making Pointes), by Edgar Degas, was stolen from her Fifth Avenue apartment. The painting was sold to Peter Findlay Gallery and later acquired in 1993 by H&R Block co-founder and art collector Henry W. Bloch. The Peter Findlay Gallery indicated that it acquired the piece from a "European gentleman, seemingly from a good family, who visited New York from time to time" and who claimed to have inherited the work. It was not until 2005 that the Federal Bureau of Investigation made Bloch aware that it was investigating the painting, and in 2007, they told Bloch that the painting had in fact been reported stolen from Clark. Under an October 2008 deed of gift, Clark agreed to donate the pastel, valued at $10 million, to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, of which Bloch was a major benefactor. The bulk of Clark's collection of art and antiquities were consigned to go on the auction block at Christie's in June 2014, over three years after her death. In July 2012, one of Clark's three 907 Fifth Avenue apartments, the penthouse #12W, sold for a pre-emptive $25.5 million, $1.5 million above the listing price, to Boaz Weinstein, the hedge fund manager and founder of Saba Capital Management, which was the biggest sale of the week according to city records. The Prime Minister of Qatar attempted to purchase both of Clark's apartments on the eighth floor, which comprised the entire eighth floor, and combine the two into one huge apartment. However, the building's board did not allow it. In November 2012, apartment #8W was sold for $22.5 million to financier Frederick Iseman. The unit was listed for $19 million, but the sale includes a piece of unit #8E, which was later sold in October 2013 for $6.8 million to David Luski, president and chief executive officer at DRA Advisors LLC, after originally being listed for $12 million. In total, the three apartments sold for a combined $54.8 million. In April 2014, after sitting empty for more than 60 years, Clark's French-style chateau known as "Le Beau Chateau", which sits on 52 wooded acres in New Canaan, Connecticut, was sold to the fashion designer Reed Krakoff and his wife. They purchased the home for the reduced price of $14.3 million. ==See also==