How Long Does It Take To Get Inheritance Money

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On May 24, in a secured wing of Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan, a woman known as Harriet Chase died at the age of 104. And when the will of Harriet Chase (who was really the heiress Huguette Clark) was filed the following month, it revealed that she had left much of her half-billion-dollar estate to charity and potentially tens of millions to her longtime caretaker, Hadassah Peri. It was a bequest that raised a question that had been asked of millionaires before her: Why leave money to the maid if you haven't pulled an Ahh-nold?

Clark joins a line of lonely figures who have replaced family with the proverbial Jeeves or Fido. Mark Rothko, Doris Duke, and Leona Helmsley were, like Clark, wealthy people who made one of their grandest statements posthumously. Rothko left most of his works to his foundation, not his children. Duke left much of her billion-dollar estate to her eponymous foundation. And Helmsley, of course, left $12 million to her Maltese, Trouble, who died in June.

Although Helmsley was widely ridiculed, four-legged beneficiaries are hardly uncommon. Singer Dusty Springfield arranged for her cat Nicholas to sleep on a mattress covered by her nightgown. Countess Karlotta Liebenstein left her German shepherd, Gunther III, $65 million. (The money then passed to his son, Gunther IV.) Actress Beryl Reid left her five cats her $1.8 million house. Such gifts, says famed lawyer Ed Hayes, usually mean one thing: "They're estranged from their children."

Oddly, leaving your money to your dog can actually be easier than leaving it to your staff. After all, no one can accuse your poodle of manipulation. In fact, any outside parties named in wills face a fair amount of scrutiny. When socialite Gail Posner died in 2010 and left $27 million to her staff, including $5 million to her puppysitter, her son protested. He may have heard stories like the one about Marlon Brando, whose former maid sued for $100 million, claiming that she and the actor had been lovers and had agreed to split his money when his time came.

But Richistan author Robert Frank sees another meaning behind this growing tide of people who don't leave their money to their offspring. It's not that they're estranged from their children — it's that they want to encourage them to make their own way. Recently Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Sandy Weill have all said that inheriting wealth takes away children's drive. "Money can become a vehicle for emotional punishment and reward within families," Frank says. "Today's wealthy are very aware of how wealth can damage their kids."

That may be so, but try telling that to Clark's two half-grandnieces and one half-grand-nephew, to whom she didn't leave a cent. How good a case do they have if they try to contest the will? Not great, says lawyer Francis Harvey Jr., who co-represented Andy Warhol's estate. "People rarely challenge a will's [content]," he says. Often, spurned family members' only recourse is to challenge the mental state of the deceased loved one at the time of signature. And that too will be difficult for Clark's heirs to establish. Although Clark's attorney Wallace Bock tried many times to get her to sign a will naming him as a beneficiary, he was blocked by her family after the media picked up on the $1.5 million gift Clark had given him to build a bomb shelter for his daughter, who lived in an Israeli settlement. Bock, along with Clark's accountant, sex offender Irving Kamsler, ended up with only $500,000 apiece and roles as co-directors of her foundation.

But in the end Clark may simply have been more particular than she appeared. For instance, she did single out one family intimate as a beneficiary: a goddaughter, to whom she left several million. And while popular opinion has painted her a victim of her lawyer — or her own decrepitude — she may have protected herself better than most people assumed. Clark lived in America for more than 80 years, but she was born in Paris and spoke mostly in French so interlopers couldn't understand her. Not a bad idea. In a world where dogs are richer than people, family squabbles might soon be solved in Swahili.

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