I first started reading about Huguette Clark, the subject of this book, back in college, maybe 2009 or 2010, as a news story on, I think, NBCNews.

At the time, she was 100+ years old, living in a hospital, and the reason she was in the news at all was because the New York district attorney was investigating wrong doing/abuse/mismanagement of her fortune by her shady lawyer and accountant.

She died in 2011, at 104 years old, having spent the last 20 or so years of her life living in a New York hospital.

Which brings us to Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell Jr.

The aforementioned news story was (I believe) written by Dedman, who became aware of Clark when he encountered her property in Connecticut. The property was meticulously maintained and he spoke to the caretaker, who was well paid, but the owner hadn’t been there in years. Dedman, a reporter, started poking around, and found that Ms. Clark had three enormous, well maintained properties – one in New York City (a 5th Ave apartment), a property on the California Coast, and the property he’d seen in Connecticut.

He couldn’t figure out why she didn’t appear to live in any of them. He ended up contacting some of her family. Paul Clark Newell Jr. is a relative of hers – a great great nephew or something like that. Her family may not have been so great either, but Paul Clark Newell had reached out to his aunt some years earlier in an effort to get to know her because she was an elderly recluse with no immediate family of her own. He co-authored the book with Dedman based on what he knew about his family history and conversations with his aunt.

The book goes into detail about the life of Huguette’s father, Senator William Clark, and how he made a vast fortune, beginning as a mail carrier for the US postal service (a much more difficult job than it sounds like when you consider he was crossing the Rockies in the 1800s and through hostile Native American territory in Wyoming, Montana, etc…) and by eventually owning and running successful copper mines in the West. It should be noted that for the time, Clark’s employees were paid well and even had days off.

Senator Clark didn’t marry Huguette’s mother until he was much older. Huguette’s mother was originally sponsored by Senator Clark as a music student. Senator Clark had a first wife and other children long before Huguette came along, which explains how when William Clark was born Martin Van Buren was President of the United States, and when Huguette Clark passed away, Barack Obama was President of the United States.

The book then goes into Huguette’s life growing up, her adult life, and how she eventually came to be living in a hospital. For some reason – maybe it was the scandal that plagued her father’s time in office or because she was such a recluse who only ever quietly spent her money – but the current world doesn’t well remember William Clark, whose fortune was one of the largest in the United States during his lifetime and who was a senator from Montana from 1899 – 1907, and the world didn’t much notice or remember Huguette until Dedman wrote the news articles in 2009/10.

I found the whole book fascinating. I’m a history nerd anyway, so I loved all the history involved in telling Huguette’s story. The story is one of mystery and intrigue, that runs from before the Civil War, to the Guilded Age, to the 21st century battle for a huge inheritance.

But I think my favorite thing about the book was learning about Huguette, who I’d never have known otherwise, and who was so admirable in so many ways. She was so shy and so secretive that no photographs exist of her for decades, and she spent the last years of her life with doctors and nurses, buying gifts for others (people she knew and people she didn’t). Drawing on her papers, conversations with her and with her few friends and relatives, Empty Mansions reveals the portrait of an eccentric but kind and generous woman, and learning about her life made Empty Mansions one of my favorite books in 2015.

Tagged: authors: bill dedman, authors: paul clark newell jr, books: empty mansions, genre: biography, genre: history