Empty Mansions

by Bill Dedman

  Copyright © 2013 by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are

  registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  All credits for reproduction of photographs can be found on this page.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Dedman, Bill.

  Empty mansions : the mysterious life of Huguette Clark and the spending of a great American fortune / Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr.

  p. cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-54556-5

  1. Clark, Huguette, 1906–2011. 2. Heiresses—United States—Biography. 3. Eccentrics—United States—Biography. 4. Recluses—United States—Biography. 5. Collectors and collecting—United States—Biography. 6. Clark, William Andrews, 1839–1925—Family. 7. Clark, Huguette, 1906–2011—Family. 8. Clark, Huguette, 1906–2011—Homes and haunts—United States. 9. Mansions—United States—History. I. Newell, Paul Clark, Jr. II. Title.

  CT275.C6273D33 2013

  328.73′092—dc23 2013023933 [B]

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Cover design: Anna Bauer

  Front-cover photograph: the Clark mansion in New York City, Fifth Avenue at Seventy-Seventh Street, Huguette Clark’s childhood home (Collection of the New York-Historical Society, George P. Hall & Son Photograph Collection/colorization by Marc Yankus)

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  W. A. Clark Family Tree

  Introduction

  An Apparition

  Still Life

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE CLARK MANSION, Part One

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE LOG CABIN

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE COPPER KING MANSION

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE U.S. CAPITOL

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE CLARK MANSION, Part Two

  CHAPTER SIX

  907 FIFTH AVENUE, Part One

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  907 FIFTH AVENUE, Part Two

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BELLOSGUARDO

  CHAPTER NINE

  LE BEAU CHATEAU

  CHAPTER TEN

  DOCTORS HOSPITAL

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  BETH ISRAEL MEDICAL CENTER

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  WOODLAWN CEMETERY

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  SURROGATE’S COURTHOUSE

  EPILOGUE

  THE CRICKET

  Authors’ Note

  Illustration Insert

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  List of Illustrations

  Appendix: Siblings of W. A. Clark

  Appendix: Inflation Adjustment

  About the Authors

  To view a full-size version of this image, click HERE.

  INTRODUCTION

  WE CAME TO THIS STORY by separate paths, one of us by accident and one by birth.

  Bill Dedman

  I STUMBLED INTO THE MYSTERIOUS WORLD of Huguette Clark because my family was looking for a house, and I got a little out of our price range.

  In 2009, my wife’s job had been transferred from Boston to New York City, but we wanted to keep in touch with the charms and idiosyncrasies of New England: old stone walls, Colonial houses on country corners, thrifty Yankees who save an r sound by keeping their wool socks in a “draw,” yet put the r to good use when they “draw’r” a picture. While renting we looked at small towns in Connecticut, about an hour northeast of the Empire State Building. Although property values had plunged in the Great Recession, houses came in only two flavors: those we didn’t like and those we couldn’t afford.

  One evening, frustration turned to distraction. I began to scan the online listings for houses we really couldn’t afford, an exercise in American aspiration. Although some names were familiar—professional talkers Don Imus and Phil Donahue were having trouble selling waterfront mansions on Long Island Sound—other names sent me to Google. One fellow had been able to purchase an $8 million house by selling boxers and briefs on the Internet. (“Buy underwear in your underwear.”) I was gobsmacked, however, by the property at the top of the charts.

  The most expensive house for sale in Connecticut, in the tony town of New Canaan, was priced at $24 million, marked down from $35 million. Billed as Le Beau Château, “the beautiful castle,” this charmer had 14,266 square feet of floor space tucked into fifty-two wooded acres with a river and a waterfall. Its twenty-two rooms included nine bedrooms, nine baths, eleven fireplaces, a wine cellar, elevator, trunk room, walk-in safe, and a room for drying the draperies. The property taxes alone were $161,000 a year, or about four years’ income for a typical American family. I didn’t recognize the name of the owner, Huguette Clark. Was that a he or a she?

  There was an odd note in the records on the town’s website: Le Beau Château had been unoccupied since this owner bought it. In 1951. That couldn’t be right. Who could afford to own such a house and to not live in it for nearly sixty years? And why would anyone do that?

  A beautiful castle wasn’t quite in the job description of an investigative reporter, but the next morning, I drove over to New Canaan.

  On a winding, narrow lane called Dan’s Highway was a tiny handmade marker for No. 104 and a warning sign, “PRIVATE PROPERTY NO TRESPASSING VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.” Behind a low red-brick wall with white peeling paint sat two tiny brick cottages. Between them a driveway ran under a rusty gate into the trees and curved out of sight. If there was a beautiful fairy-tale castle, it was deep in the wood. The property showed no sign of humans, only wild turkeys, deer, and birds. It seemed more like a nature preserve than a home. There was no mailbox, no name, no buzzer. Leaning over the wall, I rapped on the window of one of the cottages.

  Out shuffled an unshaven man in his white undershirt, a sleepy fellow who introduced himself as the caretaker, Tony Ruggiero. Eighty years old but muscled, he said he used to be a boxer and had sparred once with Rocky Marciano, but now he was watching over “Mrs. Clark’s house.” He wouldn’t open the gate, but he said the house though empty was well cared for. He’d never met the owner in his more than twenty years. All he knew was that his paycheck came from her lawyer in New York City.

  Ruggiero thought of something and ducked back inside. He brought out a newspaper clipping from the New York Post. An auction house had sold a painting for $23.5 million, Renoir’s In the Roses, of a woman seated on a bench in a garden, and the newspaper said the portrait came from “the estate of Huguette Clark.” Ruggiero kept pointing to those words “the estate of.”

  “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “Do you suppose she’s been dead all these years?”

  • • •

  Finding Huguette Clark’s name on an Internet discussion board from Southern California, I discovered that Le Beau Château wasn’t her only orphaned house. She had a second, grander home in Santa Barbara, a vacation estate on twenty-three cliff-top acres fronting the Pacific Ocean. But this home was definitely not for sale. A newspaper said she had turned down $100 million some years back. The lush estate was called Bellosguardo, meaning “beautiful lookout.” According to the Internet chatter, Huguette had not been seen there in at least fifty years, but the 21,666-square-foot mansion was immaculately kept, with 1930s sedans still in the garage, and the table set just in case the owner should visit.

  Though I
didn’t put much stock in the tale, my curiosity was piqued. Out in Santa Barbara for a business trip a while later, I tried to visit Bellosguardo. The property is hidden on a bluff, separated by a high wall from the Santa Barbara Cemetery, allowing even the dead barely a glimpse of the great house. The back gate to Bellosguardo was open, however, so I walked up the serpentine driveway. At the top of the hill, several gardeners were at work. The main house was out of sight behind a stand of trees. Suddenly, a golf cart barreled toward me, driven by a sturdy man in his fifties giving instructions on a walkie-talkie. He identified himself as the estate manager, C. John Douglas III, and pointed out the half dozen No Trespassing signs. As he sent me back down the driveway, mentioning something about the police, he divulged only two facts: He had worked for “Mrs. Clark” for more than twenty-five years, and he had never met her.

  Talking through the locked gate, Douglas was in no mood to help solve a mystery. “I’m just sorry,” he said dismissively, “that this is what you have to do to put food on the table for your children.”

  My family was indeed worrying a bit about curiosity getting the best of me. After all, my wife and I did meet during a prison riot, two journalists breaking into the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary to get a better view of the hostages. After I told my brother, a movie buff, about the empty mansions and the search for their mysterious owner, he sent an email with a whispered word: “Rosebud.”

  Sure, make fun. But where was Huguette Clark? Where did these vast sums of money come from, and why were they being wasted?

  • • •

  Public records led me to a third residence. Huguette Clark owned not one but three apartments in a classic limestone building in New York City, at 907 Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park at Seventy-Second Street. It’s a neighborhood of legend and fantasy, near the statue of Alice in Wonderland and the pond where the boy-mouse Stuart Little raced sailboats. Yes, sir, said No. 907’s uniformed doorman, in his Russian accent, this is “Madame Clark’s building.” But no, he hadn’t seen Madame or any other Clarks for about twenty years, although he had carried groceries for Martha Stewart, who had a pied-à-terre in the same building. He shrugged, as if to say that doormen see a lot of strange things.

  Neighbors and real estate agents filled in a few details. Huguette Clark’s apartments took up the entire eighth floor of the building and half the twelfth, or top floor, for a grand total of forty-two rooms and fifteen thousand square feet on Fifth Avenue, the most fashionable street in the most expensive city in America. Her bill from the co-op board for taxes and maintenance was $342,000 a year, or $28,500 a month. Although they’d never seen Huguette Clark, neighbors said they’d heard that her apartments were filled with an amazing collection of dolls and dollhouses. And paintings, too, even a Monet. One neighbor let me into the quiet elevator lobby of Huguette’s eighth floor, where rolls of surplus carpet were stored. I rang the buzzer, and no one answered. It didn’t seem like a place where anyone would keep a Monet.

  So this Huguette Clark owned homes altogether nearly the size of the White House. Where on earth did she reside? And why did she keep paying for this fabulous real estate if she wasn’t using it? If I couldn’t find out where Huguette was, then perhaps I could at least discover who she was.

  • • •

  It turned out that I had wandered through a portal into America’s past. Long past. Huguette Clark, then 103 years old, was the heiress to one of America’s greatest fortunes, dug out of the copper mines of Montana and Arizona, the copper that carried electricity to the world. Her father, William Andrews Clark, sounded like the embodiment of the American dream: a Pennsylvania farm boy born in a log cabin, a prospector for gold, a banker, and a U.S. senator from Montana. W. A. Clark was also a railroad baron, connecting the transcontinental lines to a sleepy California port called Los Angeles. And along the way, he auctioned off the lots that became downtown Las Vegas.

  The newspapers of the early 1900s couldn’t decide who was the wealthiest man in America in that age before the personal income tax. The New York Times calculated in 1907 that if you counted only the money already in the banks, oilman John D. Rockefeller was tops. However, if you also included the wealth still to be brought up from underground, the Times decided that copper king W. A. Clark might prove to be richer than Rockefeller.

  W. A. Clark also had one of the more controversial political careers in American history. He was forced to resign from the U.S. Senate for paying bribes to get the seat in the first place. Undeterred, he was reelected. While serving in the Senate in 1904, the widower with grown children shocked the political world by revealing a secret marriage to a woman thirty-nine years his junior. At the time of the announcement, the senator and Anna LaChapelle Clark already had a two-year-old daughter, Andrée. The woman I was looking for in 2009, Huguette Clark, was the second child of that marriage, born in 1906 in Paris.

  So the name was French: Huguette. The pronunciation took some getting used to, and my Southern accent still has trouble with it. I’m told that the French “u” sound doesn’t exist in English. It’s not “hue-GET” with an initial “H” sound, nor “you-GET” with a “Y,” but somewhere close to “oo-GET.” When W. A. Clark died in 1925, he left an estate estimated at $100 million to $250 million, worth up to $3.4 billion today. One-fifth of the estate went to eighteen-year-old Huguette, who was depicted in cartoons as a spoiled poor little rich girl. In the histories and magazine cover stories of his time, the word most often associated with W. A. Clark was “incredible.” But after his death, his businesses were sold, and the Clark name faded. He may be the most famous American whom most Americans today have never heard of. Now Huguette, who inherited one-fifth of the copper-mining fortune, also was missing.

  The length of history spanned by father and daughter is hard to comprehend. W. A. Clark was born in 1839, during the administration of the eighth president of the United States, Martin Van Buren. W.A. was twenty-two when the Civil War began. When Huguette was born in 1906, Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth president, was in the White House. Yet 170 years after W.A.’s birth, his youngest child was still alive at age 103 during the time of the forty-fourth president, Barack Obama.

  Well, still alive, as far as I knew.

  In researching stories about Huguette for the NBC News website, I gradually pieced together that she was indeed alive and had been living for twenty years in self-imposed exile in hospital rooms in Manhattan, although she was said to be in good health. For her own reasons, she had separated herself from the world. She was so reclusive that one of her attorneys, who had handled her business for more than twenty years, had never spoken to her face-to-face, talking to her only on the phone and through closed doors.

  And that was, for me, the end of the hunt. I wrote about the mansion mystery, but I wasn’t going to barge into a shy old woman’s hospital room.

  • • •

  Then readers started emailing with hints of something nefarious, and the mansion mystery morphed into a criminal investigation. One of Huguette’s possessions—one of the rarest violins in the world, a Stradivarius—had been sold for $6 million, and the buyer had been made to promise that he wouldn’t tell anyone for a decade where he got it. Meanwhile, a nurse had somehow received millions of dollars in gifts from Huguette’s accounts. Huguette’s accountant was a felon and a registered sex offender, caught trolling to meet teenage girls over the Internet. And that accountant, along with Huguette’s attorney, had already inherited the property of another elderly client.

  After my updates about these developments, the Manhattan district attorney had the same questions our readers did: Why would Huguette be selling precious possessions unless she was down to her last copper? Was this eccentric centenarian, who had lived in a hospital for twenty years, competent to manage her affairs? Were her attorney and accountant in line to inherit her fortune, said to be worth more than $300 million?

  The reclusive heiress who had withdrawn from the world suddenly had the modern
media machine at her doorstep. Huguette Clark was featured on the Today show and on page one of the New York tabloids. Although she had been born in the silent film era, she became after her 104th birthday a trending topic of searches on Google and Yahoo, with a biography on Wikipedia, fan pages on Facebook, and a lavish story on the front page of The New York Times.

  Huguette had been famous in her childhood and was famous again more than a century later, but in between she’d been a phantom. The last known photograph of her, a snapshot of an uncomfortable heiress in furs, jewels, and a cloche hat in the fashionable bell shape, had been taken in 1928. She had managed to escape the world’s gaze since then. How? And, more important, why?

  Urging further investigation, one of Huguette’s own bankers confided to me, “The whole story is utterly mysterious but equally frightening. It has all the markings of a massive fraud. Poor Miss Clark sounds like one in a long list of rich, isolated old ladies taken advantage of by supposedly trustworthy advisers.”

  If that’s what really happened.

  • • •

  During my research I was fortunate to meet one of Huguette’s relatives. Paul Clark Newell, Jr., is not in line for a claim to her estate, but he was interested in tracing the family history. And he’d gotten a lot closer to Huguette than I had. For one thing, he’d had the good sense to look for her number in the phone book.

  Paul Newell

  HUGUETTE CLARK WAS MY FATHER’S FIRST COUSIN, although she preferred to identify herself to me as Tante Huguette, using the French word for aunt. My father, Paul Clark Newell, remembered Senator W. A. Clark, who was his uncle and Huguette’s father. This famous uncle often visited the Newell family home in Los Angeles. In the last years of his life, my father took up a long-delayed mission, writing a biography of Senator Clark. Unfortunately, his health was failing, so only fragments of that work were completed.

  After my father’s death, I began to organize our family archives, to visit museums and historical societies, and to develop friendships with relatives who had known W.A. and his second wife, Anna. A few had even met the reclusive Huguette. From the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which held the senator’s art collection, I learned that Huguette was still alive. She was a generous patron to the Corcoran, sending handwritten checks while insisting that her gifts be attributed to “Anonymous.”