A Legacy of Litigation : Can sperm be bequeathed? Deborah Hecht--pictured above with lover William Kane shortly before his suicide--is in the midst of a court battle with his children. Rarely has such a personal and private possession caused such a tenacious and public crusade.

She calls it her child. She even has a name for it. Boy or girl, it will be called Wyatt. But she’s way ahead of herself. Deborah Hecht isn’t even pregnant. At this point, her child is no more than 15 vials of sperm chilling for the past three years at a Westwood sperm bank.

She’ll be lucky to get any of them.

Certainly, they were intended for her. She even went along with her longtime lover, William Kane, on his several trips in 1991 to deposit sperm for her future insemination.

But beyond that, nothing about what they did was as simple as it looked.

For Kane, a brilliant businessman, the trips to the sperm bank were just some of the personal missions he needed to complete before he killed himself. For Hecht, distraught over her lover’s suicidal intentions, the trips were a way to soothe a man beleaguered by his demons.

When Bill Kane finally did commit suicide in October, 1991, at age 48, the only thing his death laid to rest was his body.

Almost immediately, Hecht, the major beneficiary of the estate, found herself pitted against Kane’s grown son and daughter and embroiled in a legal battle that continues to this day. They’ve fought over money, furniture, and whether or not Deborah Hecht could have saved Kane from his death.

But mostly they’ve fought over sperm--the most coveted and least monetarily valuable item of the estate.

For Hecht, 39, the sperm is the legacy of the man she once loved--and her only chance to have his baby. For the Kane children, the sperm is a grotesquerie--a reminder of their father’s strangely orchestrated death and the woman who didn’t stop him. They want the sperm destroyed.

While there’s some unexplored legal territory here--can a person bequeath sperm the way you will someone a bracelet?--the rougher terrain is the landscape of emotions. Rarely has such a personal and deeply private possession caused such a tenacious and public crusade.

Upping the psychological ante is the children’s choice of attorney: their mother, Pasadena attorney Sandra Irwin.

Even a Superior Court judge’s Solomonic decision last March to give Hecht three vials of sperm has gone unenforced as the children appeal the ruling.

Both sides have girded themselves in hurt, anger and a certain amount of self-righteousness.

“If he had just dropped dead one day and there was sperm lying around, I would not have said a thing,” says Kane’s 23-year-old son, Everett, who believes that Hecht used the sperm as a lever to get as much of the estate as possible from his father.

But in the end--once his many creditors are paid--Kane’s estate of nearly $1 million may be worth virtually nothing.

“The sperm has created an impassable issue,” says Gary M. Ruttenberg, the attorney for the administrator of the estate. “I don’t think either side is fighting over money.”

So why would Hecht continue to fight two people (who show no signs of capitulating) for sperm (which is no guarantee of pregnancy)?

Because she believes this is her future. This is her baby.

“The child has become more than just Bill Kane’s child,” she says. “The child has its own identity. It’s not about Bill so much, do you understand?”

*

Indeed, many people do not understand. Those who don’t know Hecht are mystified, even scornful. The people who do know her bring gifts for the baby-to-be.

Embattled or not, married or not, Deborah Hecht is 39 and wants to have a baby. The way she sees it, the traditional choices are unsatisfactory: “I can have the child of a man whom I don’t know with sperm from a sperm bank--and then face dealing with that later. The second choice is I can find a man I know and say, ‘Can I have your child?’ . . . Or if I were to push a man into marrying me for a child then that child will probably end up being the child of a divorce.”

Or there’s the option she’s chosen: “To have a child by a man I know I love, who loved me, and then be a single mother by choice. That seems to be the most sensible choice.”

The fact that Kane killed himself is not an issue for Hecht.

“I met a man and loved a man and watched a man who made a conscious decision that it was time for him to go,” she says. “And just because it doesn’t fit your image or picture of the way you think it’s supposed to be doesn’t mean it can’t be that way.”

When she met Bill Kane in 1985, he was president of a Los Angeles bank subsidiary that invested in real estate. She had moved around--growing up in New York, going to college in San Francisco, teaching elementary school in the Bay Area, then moving to Hawaii and running jewelry stores with a business partner/boyfriend. She first encountered Kane while working for a real estate executive head hunter. Kane and Hecht met to do business together. But a relationship quickly brewed. They courted on the phone.

She was going through the phase of her life where she kept lists of the pros and cons of the men she dated. Kane defied the list. He was everything that she didn’t want--he smoked, he didn’t exercise, he ate poorly. And he was everything that she did want--dashing, smart, funny, unconventional, intense, wealthy.

Kane was also the archetypal eccentric. At the time of his death, he hadn’t worked for income in four years yet he kept a full-time secretary in an office in his Malibu house--which he rarely left. Living off his previous financial successes, he preferred to stay up half the night and sleep during the mornings, a schedule Hecht struggled to match. By all accounts talented, he was an author, a businessman, a Yale-educated lawyer with an undergraduate degree from Princeton.

For years he regaled friends and family with dubious stories about flying military planes and parachuting into foreign lands on secret missions. But his most well-known story was that he was a military strategist during the Gulf War.

His son, who grew up idolizing his father and chose his alma mater to attend, later became obsessed with debunking the many stories his father told him. They spent a year in therapy together working on their relationship, but it didn’t prevent an eruption of anger when Everett confronted his father with evidence of some of his falsehoods.

“I think he was a garden-variety pathological liar with a psychotic edge,” says Everett Kane, now an art student in Pasadena.

Hecht never saw Kane that way. Her story of their life together has the glow of adventure about it.

Once she moved to Los Angeles in 1987 to be with him, her life revolved around his, whether it was redecorating his house or going out to buy him books on topics that intrigued him. “Living with Bill Kane was like being in school 24 hours a day because he never slept and I was constantly up with him,” she says. “He always wanted company. . . . It was an awesome, awesome experience.”

But by the summer of 1991, Kane had become quiet and brooding. He was locked in a bruising legal battle with a former business partner and his financial resources were dwindling. An extravagant man, he was paying more than $8,000 a month to rent a rambling Malibu home at the end of a treacherous road in Las Flores Canyon.

Hecht was soaking in the adobe tub of their bathroom when Kane told her that he planned to kill himself.

“I don’t think I want to be here anymore,” he said as he stood in the doorway, cradling a glass of wine in one hand.

For the next two months, Hecht says that she cajoled and counseled Kane on all the reasons he should stay alive. She accompanied him to therapy sessions with Westwood clinical psychologist Carl Faber. She held him at night. She cried as he slept. But she also helped him finalize his plans: She bought him a kit so he could change his will, she suggested that he leave a letter for his children.

He broached marriage--then nixed the idea, saying she would be burdened with his financial problems. When he offered to get her pregnant, she feared the stress would make her miscarry. “I couldn’t fathom the chance of being pregnant when he was talking about dying,” she says.

When he suggested a sperm bank, he dispatched her to research the topic. She accompanied him on his five trips to the California Cryobank, where he deposited sperm and left the vials in her name.

He made her promise not to tell his children of his plans. “I had no commitment to them,” she says. “My commitment was to him.”

And when he finally told her he was going to Las Vegas on a one-way ticket, she drove him to the airport, knowing full well she might never see him alive again.

She remembers saying to their psychotherapist: “‘I can’t glue myself to his hip and make sure every moment he doesn’t. . . .’ ” Her voice quivers at the memory. “I wasn’t God. So if I went with him to Vegas, then the next trip he’d do it.”

On Oct. 30, 1991, ensconced at the Mirage Hotel, Kane swallowed a handful of sleeping pills and some Dramamine and put a plastic bag over his head. He left a note for the management reassuring them he had no complaints with the hotel.

“So why am I checking out?” he wrote in a rambling suicide missive. “All I have to look forward to is a life of mediocre survival; and that has not been my chosen way of living.”

Hecht does not see Kane’s “checking out” as an affront to her.

“I loved him so deeply that when he turned to me and said, ‘It’s time for me to go now,’ ultimately I could step back and say, ‘I love you so much that if you are in that much pain, that tired, it’s time for you to go and I know it’s not because of me.’ He made sure I didn’t feel personally. . . .” She stops herself, then continues, “It wasn’t my fault.”

*

A week before Kane’s death, Hecht was counseling Kane’s daughter, Katie, then 18, on her love life. Two weeks later they were headed for a court battle. Kane’s children contested the will, claiming that Hecht--the major beneficiary of the estate and its executor--had exerted undue influence over their father, whom they argued was too depressed to be of sound mind. They also sued her unsuccessfully for wrongful death.

The children portrayed Hecht as a conniving opportunist who kept Kane isolated from family and friends in the last few weeks before his death as she went about securing his assets for herself. In the days after his death, they say, she tried to sell Kane’s furniture, forged checks on Kane’s account and lied to Las Vegas officials about her identity--she called herself “Mrs. Kane”--to get Kane’s body and personal property released to her.

“This is a woman who will do anything to get what she wants,” says lawyer Irwin, who was married to Kane for 10 years. They were divorced 18 years ago.

Hecht says she did sign Kane’s name on checks--”to pay for his funeral.” She did misrepresent herself as Mrs. Kane to Las Vegas authorities. She did try to sell furniture. “It seemed logical,” she insists. “Sell some of it, pay bills. . . .”

And she wasn’t without a certain theatricality.

Much to the dismay of the Kane children, Hecht showed up at one deposition wearing Bill Kane’s clothes--as a kind of comforting armor, she explained later. When the estate attorney insisted she return the clothes to the estate, she angrily ripped the shirt open to her bra and sat there defiantly until her attorney suggested she put her clothes back on--and defended her action as an attempt to comply.

The family claims that in the days after Kane’s death, Hecht frantically searched for a nonexistent $1 million life insurance policy--a charge Hecht denies.

In 1991 when Hecht agreed to a settlement that essentially gave 80% of Kane’s estate to the children, she believed the sperm was not an issue. Who would want it but her? She was wrong. Kane had left the sperm to the care of the executor of the estate, and although he had designated Hecht as his executor, the court transferred that role to a neutral administrator, a common practice. Suddenly, Hecht had no right to the sperm. And the battle for control began.

At first, a Superior Court judge ordered it destroyed. But last year a state appeals court reversed that finding, noting that sperm could be treated similar to property in court. That moved the case back to Superior Court, where Judge Arnold Gold ruled that Hecht was entitled to 20% of the sperm. The family has temporarily blocked that ruling by appealing it.

Irwin’s arsenal of arguments includes the claim that Hecht has no right to the sperm because it was an anatomical gift, like eyes or organs or limbs. “She is not a valid donee because she has no medical need for therapy or transplantation,” Irwin says.

Lost in all this is what Bill Kane himself seemed to want.

In his suicide letter, he acknowledged that he had been generating sperm for Hecht and even addressed these unborn children.

“I have loved you in my dreams,” he wrote, “even though I never got to see you born.”

*

Before his death, Kane and Hecht decided together that the child would be named Wyatt if it was a girl and Joshua if it was a boy. She has already transgressed against his wishes.

“Bill,” she says, pausing over dessert in a restaurant, glancing skyward, “you’ll forgive me, but I don’t want it named Joshua any longer. I want it named Wyatt and Wyatt only, and I know you’ll live with that.”

Kane’s suicide doesn’t hang over her would-be pregnancy like a cloud. She only sees his desire that she bear his children.

“It makes such a statement of his love for me,” she says. “He couldn’t be with me but he left me the capability to be with his child.”

Lawyer Irwin has accused Hecht of only wanting the child for its dramatic value.

Hecht admits she’s thought about that.

“I have to look at the fact that I’m sitting here with a reporter,” she says. “Am I here with this reporter to get the sperm to make a scene to have a movie? I have to constantly be on check about that with myself because I don’t want that to be the case. If I decide to have this child you can know that I decided to do it because I want to do it. And not because they don’t want me to.”

Not even the mention of Katie and Everett Kane’s dread of a half-sibling can dampen her enthusiasm.

Not that her life is as lavish as it once was.

She owes her attorney, Marvin Rudnick, $110,000. She’s gone on talk shows for money, tinkered with a book, discussed selling film and television rights. Once an aspiring actress, she’s now put theatrical ambitions aside to pursue a more stable job. She’s now a gemologist and sells gemological equipment at a Santa Monica store.

Gone is the expansive Malibu house she once roamed. (It burned to the ground in the Malibu fires.) Now she lives in a tiny Santa Monica studio that she rents for $650 a month. She pays $200 a year in storage fees on the sperm she can’t have yet. Hats decorate one wall and a collection of snapshots of friends crowd another.

Even though she speaks of Bill Kane with devotion, she sees other men. “I date,” she says tersely. “Let’s just leave it at that.”

But always there is Bill Kane.

On a shelf sits a Chinese jade urn that contains a few spoonfuls of his ashes. Although she dutifully had his ashes scattered at sea, she saved a few for herself, an ever-present reminder of his life and his suicide.

“He did a lot of thinking and communicating before he decided to do it,” says Hecht, sitting in her apartment, the urn nearby. “I don’t want to say I forgave him, because it wasn’t about forgiving him. It was about understanding him.”