Empty Mansions by Bill Dedman & Paul Clark Newell, Jr.
subtitle: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune
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.
reading about people with a lot of money is kind of a mind trip. it's hard to understand having so much money that you can just let 2-3 houses/apartments sit empty for decades and not care. things like the 121 room mansion that took years to build in the early 1900s. huguette & her family (mother, father, & sister) having tickets for the titanic's second voyage (return trip from new york to england). her mother just running out one day and buying expensive, vintage violins & violas for a music class some music person (player? teacher?) was involved in.
the parts about how her father got the money from copper mining (clark county, NV is named for him) are kind of interesting. as is the "our company cares about it's workers" by doing the minimum & having a park for them to go to. all the while the copper mines pollute butte, MT. and her father's shady dealings as a senator.
huguette later in life, hiding from the word, obsessed with dolls and, in the case of the japanese ones, detailed doll houses to go with them. and living for years in a hospital, even though she was in good physical health.
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.
reading about people with a lot of money is kind of a mind trip. it's hard to understand having so much money that you can just let 2-3 houses/apartments sit empty for decades and not care. things like the 121 room mansion that took years to build in the early 1900s. huguette & her family (mother, father, & sister) having tickets for the titanic's second voyage (return trip from new york to england). her mother just running out one day and buying expensive, vintage violins & violas for a music class some music person (player? teacher?) was involved in.
the parts about how her father got the money from copper mining (clark county, NV is named for him) are kind of interesting. as is the "our company cares about it's workers" by doing the minimum & having a park for them to go to. all the while the copper mines pollute butte, MT. and her father's shady dealings as a senator.
huguette later in life, hiding from the word, obsessed with dolls and, in the case of the japanese ones, detailed doll houses to go with them. and living for years in a hospital, even though she was in good physical health.