When Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed
in 2009 a grand home for sale, unoccupied for nearly sixty
years, he stumbled through a surprising portal into American
history. Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and
loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the nineteenth
century with a twenty-first-century battle over a $300
million inheritance. At its heart is a reclusive heiress
named Huguette Clark, a woman so secretive that, at the time
of her death at age 104, no new photograph of her had been
seen in decades. Though she owned palatial homes in
California, New York, and Connecticut, why had she lived for
twenty years in a simple hospital room, despite being in
excellent health? Why were her valuables being sold off? Was
she in control of her fortune, or controlled by those
managing her money?
Dedman has collaborated with Huguette Clark’s cousin, Paul
Clark Newell, Jr., one of the few relatives to have frequent
conversations with her. Dedman and Newell tell a fairy tale
in reverse: the bright, talented daughter, born into a
family of extreme wealth and privilege, who secrets herself
away from the outside world.
Huguette was the daughter of self-made copper industrialist
W. A. Clark, nearly as rich as Rockefeller in his day, a
controversial senator, railroad builder, and founder of Las
Vegas. She grew up in the largest house in New York City, a
remarkable dwelling with 121 rooms for a family of four. She
owned paintings by Degas and Renoir, a world-renowned
Stradivarius violin, a vast collection of antique dolls. But
wanting more than treasures, she devoted her wealth to
buying gifts for friends and strangers alike, to quietly
pursuing her own work as an artist, and to guarding the
privacy she valued above all else.
The Clark family story spans nearly all of American history
in three generations, from a log cabin in Pennsylvania to
mining camps in the Montana gold rush, from backdoor
politics in Washington to a distress call from an elegant
Fifth Avenue apartment. The same Huguette who was touched by
the terror attacks of 9/11 held a ticket nine decades
earlier for a first-class stateroom on the second voyage of
the Titanic.
Empty Mansions reveals a complex portrait of the mysterious
Huguette and her intimate circle. We meet her extravagant
father, her publicity-shy mother, her star-crossed sister,
her French boyfriend, her nurse who received more than $30
million in gifts, and the relatives fighting to inherit
Huguette’s copper fortune. Richly illustrated with more than
seventy photographs, Empty Mansions is an enthralling story
of an eccentric of the highest order, a last jewel of the
Gilded Age who lived life on her own terms.
© 2003-2025 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy