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What it argues
Empty Mansions is the biography of Huguette Clark, an extraordinarily wealthy woman who died in 2011 at the age of 104, having spent the last twenty years of her life in a hospital room she chose not to leave despite being in good health and owning a Santa Barbara estate, a Fifth Avenue apartment, and a Connecticut mansion — all maintained, staffed, and largely unvisited. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bill Dedman and Huguette's cousin Paul Clark Newell Jr. spent years reconstructing her life from court records, private letters, interviews, and the estates themselves.
The story has two threads. One is Huguette herself: born in 1906 to William Andrews Clark, one of the wealthiest men in America (copper magnate, Senator from Montana, art collector), she grew up in an era of Gilded Age extravagance before retreating progressively from public life following the death of her younger sister and, later, her mother. Huguette never had close friends as an adult, never married (her marriage in 1928 lasted nine months), and spent her later decades painting in her apartment, maintaining correspondence with a small number of people, and ordering dollhouses and French chateau models for a collection she rarely showed anyone.
What it gets right
- 1.
Huguette Clark was the daughter of one of Gilded Age America's wealthiest men and outlived him by eight decades, dying in 2011 at 104 while her three properties sat empty and staffed.
- 2.
She chose to spend her last twenty years in a hospital room despite being healthy enough to leave, preferring the contained, controlled world of her room to the larger one outside.
- 3.
William Andrews Clark, Huguette's father, built a copper fortune and became a senator through a combination of business genius and unabashed bribery — one of the Gilded Age's least flattering portraits.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Bill Dedman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent most of his career at major American newspapers including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Newsday. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in 1989 for a series on racial discrimination in home lending. He discovered Huguette Clark's story while working as an investigative reporter for msnbc.com and spent several years with co-author Paul Clark Newell Jr. reconstructing her life. Empty Mansions, published in 2013, was a New York Times bestseller and is Dedman's only book-length work.
