It was just over a year ago that Gene Hackman died.
He had given us many great performances, including in “The French Connection,” “Hoosiers,” “Unforgiven.” In fact I’m going to stop because there were so many, that listing a few leaves out too many others. But most of the news stories focused on the mysterious circumstances of his death.
He was 95, and he and his wife lived in a house in New Mexico that was nice enough to have been featured in Architectural Digest. Sadly, he had developed Alzheimer’s and it was at a fairly advanced stage. But he had a beautiful home in which to live out his life, and his wife Betsy was there to take care of him.
Then tragedy stuck. His wife fell sick from what turned out to be a serious virus. She took to bed, probably thinking she had a bad case of the flu, and then died.
And poor Gene, probably confused and not understanding why he was not being taken care of, wandered around the house for several more days. He wasn’t taking his heart medications. He wasn’t feeding himself. And eventually his pacemaker stopped registering a heartbeat. He was gone.
It is sad to think about such a talented actor, who brought life to so many great movies, miserable and confused and hungry. So what went wrong here? Gene had his wife right there in the house to care for him. She was only 65 and had no known medical problems. Presumably the couple assumed that if something went wrong, Betsy would call for help. They never anticipated that it would be Betsy who would have the sudden medical crisis.
The first lesson we can learn from the Hackman tragedy is that an older couple should have someone checking on them regularly. I have a number of clients who have a friend or relative assigned to check in on them every day or two. Had that happened in this case, it is still likely Betsy would have died, but at least somebody might have gotten to Gene in time to take care of him.
There was something else that interested me, though, as an estate planner. Not long after the tragedy, there were news stories reporting breathlessly that “Gene Hackman’s will left out his children.” Since his kids were from a prior marriage, I expect many people assumed that, as so often happens, he had become estranged from his children during his later marriage.
But it turns out that was not the case. True, the will did not mention his children. There was no reason for it to. Gene Hackman had a living trust, and this was a “pour-over will” designed to deal with a few miscellaneous assets. Whether his children are actually provided for in his estate plan is a secret held within his trust.
People use living trusts for a variety of reasons, but the most common is to avoid probate. Probate is an expensive court process, but it does not apply to assets in a trust. The distribution of most of Gene Hackman’s estate would have been done privately through his trust. There is no reason to think he was disinheriting his children.
I note that wealthy people often use living trusts in a slightly different way than normal folks. Gene’s overall estate has been estimated at $80 million, and I suspect it is actually quite a bit higher. Successful entertainment figures usually receive royalties for many years. Just a few nights before I wrote this column, “Crimson Tide” was on TV, and I’m pretty sure the Hackman estate was getting paid for that. For the very wealthy, advantages of a living trust include keeping matters private, managing the estate over the long term as royalties or other income continue to be received, and making it difficult for disgruntled heirs to fight the plan in court.
But living trusts have a lot of advantages for normal folks as well. Rich people will often put a few of their assets through probate just to clear off creditors; the cost of probate is a relatively small expense for them. For most people, the cost of probate can eat up a lot of their estate. I have seen a number of cases where more than $100,000 was spent on attorney fees and other probate costs. And that’s in Alaska, not Hollywood.
And that, my friends, ought to make you think twice about picking your feet in Poughkeepsie.
Kenneth Kirk is an Anchorage estate planning attorney. Nothing in this article should be taken as legal advice for a specific situation; for specific advice you should consult a professional who can take all the facts into account. In other words, have “The Conversation.”
