Empty Mansions

Huguette married once, in 1928, to a man named William Gower, the son of her father's associate. The marriage lasted barely two years and was never, by most accounts, much of a marriage at all; they divorced in 1930, and she never married again. From there her life narrowed by choice. She kept the enormous Fifth Avenue apartment where she had settled with her mother, and she began, over the following decades, to acquire property with no apparent intention of using it.

There was Bellosguardo, the Santa Barbara estate she had inherited and rebuilt — a beautiful house on a bluff over the Pacific, staffed and maintained in perfect order for decades after she stopped visiting. She last set foot there in the early 1950s. Everything else was kept as if she might arrive tomorrow: the gardens tended, the rooms cleaned, the cars in the garage. The New Canaan house she bought in the late 1990s, sight unseen in the ordinary sense, seems to have been purchased as a possible refuge in case of some emergency that never came, and she never slept in it.

Around 1991, Huguette Clark checked into a New York hospital with some skin problems that had gone untreated — she had let a couple of facial cancers develop far longer than she should have, out of her horror of being examined and seen. The medical issue was real and got fixed. But once inside, she did not leave. She stayed in the hospital, in a plain room, for roughly the last twenty years of her life, well into her second century, though she was not meaningfully ill for most of that time.

She could have gone home to any of three homes at any moment. She chose the hospital. It gave her what she seems to have wanted above everything: walls, routine, distance from the world, and a small circle of people who came to her rather than the reverse. She watched cartoons, kept up her French, worked on her miniatures, and spoke on the phone with a handful of relatives and advisers. Almost no one saw her face. She refused photographs. When Dedman went looking, he could barely find an image of her from the previous fifty years.

Clark died leaving an estate worth roughly $300 million, and two wills signed within about six weeks of each other in 2005 that said very different things. The first left much of the fortune to her distant relatives — grandnieces and grandnephews she barely knew. The second, signed weeks later, cut them out almost entirely and steered the money toward her nurse, her goddaughter, the hospital, her lawyer, her accountant, and a planned arts foundation at Bellosguardo. The relatives challenged it, arguing she had been unduly influenced by the very people who stood to gain. The case settled in 2013: the second will was largely set aside, the relatives received a substantial share, the nurse kept less than she had been promised, and the estate paid out.

Step back from the courtroom and the story stops being about one eccentric woman and becomes something about how great fortunes behave. Clark's money was made by a hard, ambitious, morally flexible man in the 1880s and 1890s, and it kept working long after he and his world were gone. It funded a life of near-total withdrawal for a granddaughter who did almost nothing to earn or spend it in any ordinary sense. A fortune like that does not simply pass down; it accumulates a gravity of its own, pulling in caretakers, advisers, institutions, and hopeful heirs, all orienting themselves around a person who has stopped participating in the world.

The house in New Canaan that first caught Bill Dedman's eye eventually sold. So did the Fifth Avenue apartments and, in time, the plan for Bellosguardo took shape as the arts foundation Clark had wanted, opening the Santa Barbara estate to the public she had spent her life avoiding. The dollhouses and dolls were catalogued and dispersed. The relatives got their share; the nurse kept a fraction of what she'd been given; the paintings her father bought by the crateload went to auction. A century after William Andrews Clark dug his fortune out of Montana, it finally scattered.