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.
Praise for
Empty Mansions
“An
exhaustively researched, well-written account . . . a blood-boiling expose
[that] will make you angry and will make you sad.”—The Seattle Times
“An
evocative and rollicking read, part social history, part hothouse mystery, part
grand guignol.”—The Daily Beast
“A
childlike, self-exiled eccentric, [Huguette Clark] is the sort of of subject
susceptible to a biography of broad strokes, which makes Empty Mansions, the
first full-length account of her life, impressive for its delicacy and
depth.”—Town & Country
“A
spellbinding mystery.”—Booklist
Get more details @ http://www.ypcart.com/buy/empty-mansions-the-mysterious-life-of-huguette-clark-and-the-spending-of-a-great-american-fortune-0345534522/
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