Eleanor Close Barzin

Eleanor herself became famous for her choice of husbands. (She had a half-dozen.) At age 20, in 1930, she eloped with the playwright and future Oscar-winning screenwriter Preston Sturges, 11 years her senior, scandalizing her family and titillating the press. That union was annulled after two years. But her last marriage, to conductor Leon Barzin, lasted 45 years until his 1999 death. While remaining a U.S. citizen, she lived mostly in Paris from the 1930s on. Barzin’s later decades were spent largely out of the spotlight, and her death received scant media attention. She left a $74 million estate consisting mainly of art, European real estate and $32 million, long managed by a cousin, in a Baltimore brokerage account. Plus more than one last testament. An amended French will split the European estate–after payment of $9 million in bequests to 29 charities, employees, friends and relatives–between her only child, Antal (Tony) Post de Be-kessy, now 66 and living in Austria, and his only child, Laetitia Allen Vere, of London. But a U.S. trust Barzin created holding that $32 million said that after similar bequests, De Bekessy would get only 25%; the other 75% would go to his daughter. A U.S. will gave everything left over to De Bekessy. The trust and multiple wills apparently were intended to coexist without repealing one another and to simplify probate of the estate across different countries with different laws. Alas, the plan has had the opposite effect. The most intriguing ploy came after the U.S. estate in 2007 paid $17.5 million to the Internal Revenue Service toward the final U.S. estate tax bill and in February 2008 got the U.S. will admitted to probate in Washington, D.C. A few days later De Bekessy quietly filed his own U.S. estate tax return. Tendering no money, he requested a $10 million “refund.” Apparently without doing much checking, the IRS mailed the full refund to a Paris address for De Bekessy three weeks later. With no obvious quick end in sight to the litigation, lawyers, taxes and administration expenses are certain to eat up much of the estate.