Editor's note: This review of "Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune" appeared in the September issue of The Real Deal. This is an excerpt; you can read the full review here.
To some who knew the late copper heiress Huguette Clark, she was an oddball recluse who wasted her last decades in a hospital room, while her spread at 907 Fifth Avenue — a trio of co-ops spanning 42 rooms — sat as an empty, haunted museum of antique dolls.
Distant family members, meanwhile, saw her as an incapacitated dupe at the mercy of bloodsucking money managers and caregivers.
Those caregivers, however, considered her the quick-witted benefactress who willingly cut them checks for tens of thousands of dollars.
Not surprisingly, her 2011 death at age 104 sparked a court battle over her $308 million estate.
But who was Huguette, really? That’s the question Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr., one of Huguette’s cousins, seek to answer in “Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune,” which will be published this month.
An ambitious and clearly written account of Huguette’s life, “Empty Mansions” offers meticulous details on her finances, appraisals of her personality from her closest confidantes, laughably specific descriptions of her opulent homes and even — courtesy of phone calls she exchanged with Clark Newell — scraps of conversation in her own voice.
And yet, “Empty Mansions” fails to solve the puzzle of Huguette Clark. Disappointingly, the motivations of the cloistered scion remain as elusive as ever.
To Dedman and Clark Newell’s credit, they avoid the trap of other historical writers who reconstruct the thoughts of their long-dead subjects. When they have people to interview — a bevy of living Clark descendants or Huguette’s nurse, Hadassah Peri, who received almost $32 million from her elderly charge — the pages jump with life. Unfortunately, the first half of the book, which focuses on the early years of Huguette’s father, W.A. Clark — a frontiersman who made his fortune in banking and copper — is dry.
Indeed, “Empty Mansions” is at its best when investigating the nooks and crannies of Huguette’s personality, and weighing whether she was a victim or not. (The authors seem to come down in favor of her aides, noting that almost none of her extended family members visited her.)
In many ways, “Empty Mansions” portrays Clark as a normal person, despite frequent speculation that she must have been mentally ill. For one, she was extremely generous — possessed of “a fairy tale checkbook, one that was refilled whenever it ran out of magic beans,” the authors note. “The woman was an eccentric of the first order,” her doctor, Henry Singman, told the authors. “[But] I didn’t think her behavior was that of one suffering from a psychiatric illness.”