#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Janet Maslin The New
York Times • St. Louis Post-Dispatch When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed
in 2009 a grand home for sale unoccupied for nearly sixty years he stumbled through a
surprising portal into American history. Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss
connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the nineteenth century with a twenty-first-century battle
over a $300 million inheritance. At its heart is a reclusive heiress named Huguette Clark a
woman so secretive that at the time of her death at age 104 no new photograph of her had been
seen in decades. Though she owned palatial homes in California New York and Connecticut why
had she lived for twenty years in a simple hospital room despite being in excellent health?
Why were her valuables being sold off? Was she in control of her fortune or controlled by
those managing her money? Dedman has collaborated with Huguette Clark's cousin Paul Clark
Newell Jr. one of the few relatives to have frequent conversations with her. Dedman and
Newell tell a fairy tale in reverse: the bright talented daughter born into a family of
extreme wealth and privilege who secrets herself away from the outside world. Huguette was the
daughter of self-made copper industrialist W. A. Clark nearly as rich as Rockefeller in his
day a controversial senator railroad builder and founder of Las Vegas. She grew up in the
largest house in New York City a remarkable dwelling with 121 rooms for a family of four. She
owned paintings by Degas and Renoir a world-renowned Stradivarius violin a vast collection of
antique dolls. But wanting more than treasures she devoted her wealth to buying gifts for
friends and strangers alike to quietly pursuing her own work as an artist and to guarding the
privacy she valued above all else. The Clark family story spans nearly all of American history
in three generations from a log cabin in Pennsylvania to mining camps in the Montana gold rush
from backdoor politics in Washington to a distress call from an elegant Fifth Avenue apartment.
The same Huguette who was touched by the terror attacks of 9 11 held a ticket nine decades
earlier for a first-class stateroom on the second voyage of the Titanic. Empty Mansions reveals
a complex portrait of the mysterious Huguette and her intimate circle. We meet her extravagant
father her publicity-shy mother her star-crossed sister her French boyfriend her nurse who
received more than $30 million in gifts and the relatives fighting to inherit Huguette's
copper fortune. Richly illustrated with more than seventy photographs Empty Mansions is an
enthralling story of an eccentric of the highest order a last jewel of the Gilded Age who
lived life on her own terms. Praise for Empty Mansions An amazing story of profligate wealth .
. . an outsized tale of rags-to-riches prosperity.-The New York Times An evocative and
rollicking read part social history part hothouse mystery part grand guignol.-The Daily
Beast Fascinating . . . [a] haunting true-life tale.-People One of those incredible stories
that you didn't even know existed. It filled a void.-Jon Stewart The Daily Show Thrilling . .
. deliciously scandalous.-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
