Within months of her arrival, the hospital,
Beth Israel Medical Center, went after her for an all-out fund-raising campaign. They researched her family history, had officials visit her often in her room and plied her with gifts. The effort, described in court documents, quickly extended to the hospital’s chief executive and
even his mother, who watched the Smurfs with Mrs. Clark and talked to her about making a will. After Mrs. Clark donated a Manet to Beth Israel, but it sold for less than expected, the chief executive wrote an e-mail joking that Mrs. Clark “didn’t take the bait and offer a half dozen more.”
That note from July 6, 2001, was among scores of hospital documents filed on Wednesday in Manhattan Surrogate’s Court as part of a battle over Mrs. Clark’s $300 million estate with her distant relatives. She died in 2011 at age 104.
The case is scheduled for trial in September, but until then, the documents provide a rare look at the inner workings of a nonprofit hospital’s fund-raising operation — one that, as the relatives see it, coerced a woman who did not need constant medical care to give it a piece of her large fortune. In one of the e-mails, which were turned over to the relatives’ lawyer under a judge’s direction, a hospital fund-raising employee wondered whether Beth Israel’s legal department would approve of Mrs. Clark’s residency there.
Admitted in 1991, Mrs. Clark ended up staying until her death, giving the hospital at least $4 million in donations, not counting millions more she paid just to live there and a $1 million bequest in her final, contested will, according to court papers.
“What this is about is not just a will contest, it’s about the accountability of professionals,” John Morken, the lawyer for the relatives, 20 grand and great-grand half-nieces and half-nephews, said.
In previous court filings, the Manhattan public administrator, who has been appointed as temporary administrator of the estate, also has criticized the hospital’s behavior — as well as that of Mrs. Clark’s accountant, lawyer, admitting doctor and a private nurse, all of whom appear in the disputed will as beneficiaries of her estate. In response to those filings, the hospital has defended its actions, saying Mrs. Clark was sharp as a whip — her dolls were “objets d’art” and a sophisticated hobby, she read the newspaper, and she gave every cent willingly.
“Having provided lifesaving and compassionate care to a person of Ms. Clark’s wealth, it would have been surprising if Beth Israel had not approached her for donations,” the hospital’s lawyer, Marvin Wexler, said in a January written response to the public administrator, who is seeking the return of various gifts, including those to Beth Israel.
His brief said Beth Israel had provided Mrs. Clark with “a well-attended home where she was able to live out her days in security, relative good health and comfort, and with the pleasures of human company.” Besides, he said, the amount of money she gave to Beth Israel was “not very large considering her vast wealth.”
Mr. Wexler declined to comment on Wednesday.
Mrs. Clark, then almost 85, arrived at Beth Israel’s north campus on the Upper East Side on March 26, 1991. She was emaciated and her face was disfigured by skin cancer. She was missing part of her lower lip, which made it hard to eat or drink, according to notes made by Dr. Henry Singman, the admitting doctor who later became her full-time personal physician.
“The circumstances of her admission were particularly strange: She was swathed in sheets and did not want anyone to see her,” Cynthia L. Cromer, a member of the Beth Israel development, or fund-raising, staff, wrote in a memorandum to “file” on June 7, 1991.
She was well enough by then to go home to her spacious apartment at Fifth Avenue and 72nd Street, overlooking Central Park, Ms. Cromer said, but “she asked if she might stay in the hospital longer: she feels comfortable and safe, and her apartment is being renovated.”
Dr. Singman had told the development office that Mrs. Clark was “quite wealthy and suggested that she might make a gift to the hospital,” Ms. Cromer wrote, adding that she was mulling over “an appropriate cultivation approach.”
The researcher reported back that Mrs. Clark was
the only surviving child of William Andrews Clark, a copper king and a senator from Montana, and his much-younger second wife. The relatives now fighting the hospital are descended from Mr. Clark’s first marriage.
The book described Huguette Clark, who was only briefly married and had no children, as being unusually close to her mother in a childlike way and being “hopelessly spoiled,” the development office reported.
Ms. Cromer soon became a regular visitor to Mrs. Clark’s room.
In one memo, she described Mrs. Clark as giving her a photographic tour of her dollhouses, built around the themes of Japanese culture.
“She places dolls in the house and moves them through activities (drinking tea, walking in the garden, in conversation), taking a photo of each activity so that they tell a story,” Ms. Cromer wrote, adding, “She is very happy here.”
A turning point was the discovery that, as one memo put it, Mrs. Clark was a “Japan-ophile.” Dr. Robert Newman, the chief executive, who was married to a Japanese woman, Seiko Newman, and had lived in Japan, made visits to Mrs. Clark, as did his mother, who had lived in France, where Mrs. Clark spent part of her youth. Dr. Newman did not respond to messages left at his homes on Wednesday, and several other Beth Israel officials named in the documents declined to comment.
Despite her childlike interests, the hospital reported that Mrs. Clark seemed to have an iron grip on her own money.
On Feb. 17, 1998, a development officer reported that Mrs. Clark “is very conservative financially,” maintaining a trust left by her mother that was invested in municipal bonds.
By now she was paying out of pocket roughly $1,200 a day for her room, according to a May 1998 hospital summary.
“Does Legal know about Miss Clark’s situation?” one internal e-mail asked, seven years after she was admitted. “My fear is that if we raise the issue with them, they might push the question of whether she should even be living at the hospital. If we were forced to ‘evict’ her, we’d certainly have no hope of any support.” (The e-mails do not say if the legal department ever weighed in.)
Dr. Newman and development officers planned to hold a “brainstorming” meeting in the office of the hospital chairman, Morton P. Hyman, on May 11, 1998, to talk about how to get a “big gift” from Mrs. Clark. On May 20, Stefanie Steel, a development officer, asked Dr. Newman whether his mother had broached “the joy of making a will” with Mrs. Clark.
“Yes,” Dr. Newman replied. But Mrs. Clark’s response, he said, was, “ ‘Let me show you a wonderful tape of Christmas with the Smurfs.’ ”
“I kid you not!” he wrote. “My mom spent 30 minutes watching the Smurfs celebrate Christmas; she deserves a medal — the lack of outcome notwithstanding.”
“Not even Hanukkah with the Smurfs — Ms. Clark really doesn’t get it,” Ms. Steel sympathized, apparently alluding to Dr. Newman’s mother’s faith.
Over the years, the hospital showered her with gifts like classical music CDs, an orchid, birthday balloons and an Easter basket.
Mrs. Clark sometimes replied in writing.
In a card dated Nov. 30, 1992, she thanked Dr. Newman “for the most delicious home made Thanksgiving desserts, which I enjoyed very much.” Dr. Newman annotated the file copy, crediting his wife: “5 different homemade pies (chez Seiko)!”
On Oct. 30, 2000, Mrs. Clark thanked Dr. Newman and his wife “for the delicious chocolates, and the very interesting playing cards from Paris.”
Earlier that year, Dr. Newman announced that he planned to retire, upsetting Mrs. Clark, according to the documents.
“She is crazy about him and is also afraid that her position at the hospital might be compromised with him gone,” a development officer wrote. (When Beth Israel’s north campus closed in 2004, Mrs. Clark was moved to the campus on East 16th Street.)
Soon she made her biggest donation ever — Manet’s 1864 painting “Peonies in a Bottle.”
“She said she wants to give BI the painting worth $6 million in honor of Dr. Newman and she’ll arrange to have it delivered to his apartment.!!!!!!!” trumpeted an Aug. 1, 2000, e-mail from the development office.
There were signs of friction over the circumstances of the donation. “Sotheby’s is insisting on a letter from Ms. Clark that authorizes them to accept and hold onto the painting,” Ms. Steel wrote. Dr. Newman wrote the next day that the painting would be picked up by Christie’s.
But the painting did not make its $4.2 million reserve price.
On Nov. 15, 2000, in a letter to Mr. Hyman, the chairman, Dr. Newman described a conversation with “our donor lady.” Mrs. Clark had complained that the stock market was volatile and suggested not making any financial decisions until after the Florida recount.
“I noted the danger in waiting — the market and everything else can go straight south,” Dr. Newman wrote.
In June 2001, the painting sold for $3.5 million; after commission, Beth Israel received $3.15 million. “I told her about the disappointing price of the painting, but she didn’t take the bait and offer a half-dozen more,” Dr. Newman wrote.
At his request, Mrs. Clark made one more cash donation, for $35,000 in 2002.
In 2005, she drafted two wills; the first, a sparse document signed March 7, included her relatives but not the hospital. In court documents, the relatives say that Dr. Newman visited Mrs. Clark on March 18, 25 and 27. The second and now-disputed will, on April 19, cut out her family but added a host of people and organizations as beneficiaries, including Beth Israel, which was to get $1 million.
Susan Beachy, Jack Begg and Jack Styczynski contributed research.
