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. 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. 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.Įmpty Mansions reveals a complex portrait of the mysterious Huguette and her intimate circle. The book is available on Amazon and more information can be found on the 'Empty Mansions' website. She owned paintings by Degas and Renoir, a world-renowned Stradivarius violin, a vast collection of antique dolls. How Heiress Huguette Clark Wound Up Living In A 400,000-A-Year Hospital Room For 2 Decades. She grew up in the largest house in New York City, a remarkable dwelling with 121 rooms for a family of four. Clark, nearly as rich as Rockefeller in his day, a controversial senator, railroad builder, and founder of Las Vegas. Huguette Clark was the daughter of self-made copper industrialist W. 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? 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. Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of nineteenth-century America with a twenty-first-century battle over a $300 million inheritance. Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune Mentions in Our Blog.

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