I want $ of my ‘Uncle Holden’
SHE’S NO PHONY.
A California mom claims to be the long-lost niece of a mysterious Manhattan writer who died two years ago with more than $15 million and was once said to be the inspiration for Holden Caulfield, J.D. Salinger’s most famous character in “The Catcher in the Rye.”
Barbara Sinclair Benson has quietly filed paperwork in Manhattan Surrogate’s Court that she says proves she is the sole heir to the fortune of her reclusive uncle, Lamont Buchanan, who lived in a rent-controlled apartment and died a widower at 96 without any children. He also didn’t have a will leaving instructions on what to do with his fortune.
“I just don’t want the State of New York to get the money,” Benson, 80, told the Daily News. “My children and grandkids can enjoy it a lot more and put it to better use.”
Benson said she found out last year that Buchanan died when she was contacted by three heirhunting firms that specialize in finding the unknown relatives of decedents and linking them to windfall inheritances for a fee.
She instead hired a lawyer to prove her kinship in court. If she successfully connects her family tree to Buchanan, she would inherit his $15.4 million, which a city administrator currently oversees.
Benson said she lives comfortably now, but the money would be a boon for her family.
“I don’t have to worry about going off food stamps or anything like that,” she said.
Buchanan was a mildly successful writer who worked as an editor and art director at the pulp magazine Weird Tales in the 1940s and authored 15 pictorial books about history and sports.
But perhaps his biggest claim to fame came to light in a 2012 interview in the news media website The Drum, in which journalist Noel Young spoke with Shirley Ardman, a resident of Swampscott, Mass.
Ardman, then 90, told Young that at age 18 she scored an interview with the intensely private Salinger just after he published his first short story.
Ardman said her friend Buchanan knew Salinger and arranged for her to speak to him at a Manhattan hotel bar so she could write about it for her journalism class. She later tried to sell her interview to a magazine when Salinger became a household name, but she didn’t find any takers.
Young wrote that during his interview with Ardman, she mentioned that Buchanan was partially the basis for Caulfield, the cynical anti-hero of “The Catcher in the Rye” who believed nearly everyone was a phony.
Ardman’s two sons, Blair and Charles, confirmed to The News that she had told them about her interview with Salinger. Kenneth Slawenski, a Salinger biographer and the creator of DeadCaulfields.com, a blog devoted to the author, said he was aware of the Ardman interview.
But he said the idea of Buchanan as a basis for Caulfield should be taken with a grain of salt.
“Salinger made similar assurances to any number of people over the years,” Slawenski said. “Of course, we would have to know more about Buchanan in order to gauge the possibility — and it may well be a worthwhile investigation — but my first reaction is one of skepticism.”
If Buchanan was indeed the inspiration for Caulfield, then the second half of his life might have made for an apt epilogue for the beloved but troubled character.
Buchanan married his high school sweetheart, Jean Milligan, and they lived nearly all of their adult lives in a rent-controlled apartment on Sutton Place.
Aficionados of Weird Tales have suggested that either Milligan or Buchanan wrote for the magazine under the pseudonym Allison V. Harding.
But by the late 1950s, both Buchanan and Milligan had virtually disappeared from any literary scene and the public in general. Buchanan stopped churning out books and he didn’t have any other job.
That’s why both Milligan’s niece and nephew were shocked when a reporter told them the amount of money Buchanan had when he died on April 23, 2015.
Beatrice Bland, Milligan’s niece who lives in Kentucky, said she had known her aunt and uncle to be extremely frugal and private. They lived like hoarders, she said.
When Bland visited Manhattan, she would meet Milligan for coffee. Buchanan never tagged along.
“We always brought her some nice clothes and got her a couple of nice sweaters,” Bland said.
Milligan’s nephew Chuck Lowrie, who lives in Pine Grove, Calif., said he occasionally visited his aunt and Buchanan.
He said one time in the 1970s Buchanan invited him into the apartment. He recalled that Buchanan seemed embarrassed by the apartment’s messy appearance but showed him a financial statement with a large figure.
“The fact that he showed it to me suggests that he was either proud of or pleased with his financial situation, even though his lifestyle didn’t reflect that,” Lowrie said.
However, the figure was nowhere near the eye-popping sum of $15 million, Lowrie said.
“I’m not aware that that $15 million was something he inherited,” Lowrie said. “It must have been amassed through frugal living and careful investment.”
Buchanan’s cloistered life ended in 2004 when FDNY responders found him and his wife on the floor of their apartment after a concerned neighbor heard him crying for help. The two were placed in the Kateri Residence, a nursing home on the Upper West Side.
Milligan died shortly after the move, leaving Buchanan devastated.
“Like a child who has lost all his candy or had his favorite toy taken away,” he told a medical evaluator when asked how he was doing after his wife’s death.
Because of Buchanan’s deteriorating mental state, a judge appointed a lawyer as his guardian. The lawyer, Kerry O’Shaughnessy Montaigne, helped track down all of Buchanan’s money and arranged for health aides to care for him at the nursing home.
She also contacted Lowrie and Bland about his condition. Neither was in a position to serve as a his guardian, but they kept in touch with Buchanan. Montaigne told The News that she was unaware that Buchanan had any living relatives on his side of the family.
When Buchanan died without a will, the Manhattan public administrator’s office took control of his estate. The office and its lawyers got his assets in order and are in charge of vetting possible heirs.
Under New York law, Bland and Lowrie are ineligible as a heirs because they are Buchanan’s niece and nephew by marriage.
So far, Benson is the only one who has said she is an eligible relative, according to court documents filed in August. Her mother, Jane Buchanan Sinclair, was Buchanan’s only sibling, she said.
The lawyers for the public administrator will eventually hold a kinship hearing, where Benson will provide her family history and genealogical records.
Benson, who lives in Santa Ana, Calif., said she tried to visit Buchanan a couple of times more than a decade ago. Both times, he didn’t want to see her but spoke to her by phone, she said.
She plans on leaving most of the money to her own heirs.
“The main thing, if I get any, depending how much is left, I want to leave it to my kids. And reinvest it, too,” she said.