The First Lines and Last Lines of the book EMPTY MANSIONS, THE MYSTERIOUS LIFE OF HUGUETTE CLARK.
“Huguette and Andree, daughters of the multimillionaire former senator W.A. Clark, arrived in New York Harbor in July 1910, immigrants to their own country.” So begins this fascinating book, which reveals a complex portrait of a secretive lady who inherited $300 million from her father’s copper mines, was booked to sail on the Titanic, had a French boyfriend, and owned mansions worldwide.
However, she spent the last years of her life sequestered away in two hospital rooms jam-packed with her antique dolls and doll houses, her paintings, and her memories. I highly recommend this book for those who love reading about wealth, loss, and Gilded Age opulence. “Huguette was a quiet woman in a noisy time. She had all the possessions anyone could want. But she set them aside—all except her brioche and cashmere sweaters.”
(Originally published August 25, 2021)
Huguette’s father began building the magnificent 5th Avenue mansion in 1897. It took 14 years to build and included 121 rooms, 31 baths, four art galleries, a swimming pool, a concealed garage, and an underground rail line used to bring in heating coal. Just 14 years after its completion, in 1925, Senator Clark died. The house was demolished two years later.A 1920s snap of Huguette. She was born in 1906 and passed away in 2011 at age 104.The Salon Dore, known as the Golden Room, gleamed with exquisitely carved and gilded wood panels created in 1770 in Paris. When the house was demolished, this room was saved and installed in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.The Golden Room today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.When Senator Clark died in 1925, his widow and daughter, Huguette Clark, moved to 907 Fifth Avenue and sold the mansion, which cost $7 million, to Anthony Campagna for $3 million (equivalent to $52,121,000 in 2023) in 1927. Campagana had the mansion torn down just 19 years after it was built in 1911.Some of Huguette’s hundreds of antique dolls, which were sold at auction after her passing.
