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Manhattan heiress to copper fortune 'made Howard Hughes seem outgoing'
For 80 years her life was set in aspic, preserved as if in a time warp in an ever-shrinking social world that ended with her death this week aged 104 in a hospital room accompanied only by the nurses caring for her and her beloved French dolls.
But Huguette Clark leaves behind her a fortune estimated as at least $500m (£307m) and a story of eccentricity and loss anchored in another age.
For the past 22 years or more, she has lived under a false name in a hospital room, most recently in the Beth Israel Medical Centre, New York, where she died on Tuesday, with no one other than her lawyer allowed to visit her. The last known photograph of her shows her standing on a steamship swaddled in furs; it was taken in 1930.
As MSNBC's investigative reporter Bill Dedman, who has written the definitive work on Clark and last year tracked her down to a bustling corridor in the hospital, has put it: "She wasn't sick. She was reclusive. She made Howard Hughes seem outgoing."
By choosing to closet herself away at Beth Israel, Clark deprived herself of fabulous riches. Her inheritance included Bellosguardo, a mansion worth $100m overlooking the Pacific in Santa Barbara, California, which she last visited 50 years ago, as well as the $24m Le Beau Chateau, tucked among 21 hectares (52 acres) of land in Connecticut, which she bought in 1952 and expanded with an artist's loft but never occupied.
Above all, there was the Fifth Avenue apartment, distinguished by being the largest at that illustrious Manhattan address, with 42 rooms over one and a half floors of an entire block. She was last spotted there at least 22 years ago.
If Clark sounds a little irregular, then consider the source of her wondrous wealth – her father, William Clark. He was a copper tycoon from Montana, second in riches only to the oil magnate John Rockefeller.
Notorious for his curmudgeonly ways and temper, Clark is still remembered in Montana as the man who stripped the state of its natural wealth. He was seminal in the founding of Las Vegas, which he established as a maintenance base for one of his railway lines. He also has the dubious distinction of having inspired the 17th amendment to the American constitution which provides for direct elections for US senators – it was introduced after he tried to buy a seat.
Clark built a house on Fifth Avenue a few blocks from where Huguette eventually moved. It had 121 rooms and four art galleries, with electricity powered by a daily load of seven tons of coal brought to the house via his own subway line.
Huguette was brought up in that house and in Paris, where she had been born on 9 June 1906. She is said to have spoken English with a French accent to the day she died. She spent much of her time, both as a child and adult, with her prized collection of dolls, playing music – she owned four Stradivari including The Virgin, one of the most sought-after violins, made in 1709, given by her mother for her 50th birthday and later sold for $6m – and watching the Flintstones and other TV cartoons.
Why she became a recluse is not known. It could have been the bereavement of losing her elder sister, Andrée, who died in 1919 of meningitis, or of her mother in 1963, or it could have been related to divorcing her husband, William Gower, after just two years' marriage in 1930. Perhaps it was a reaction to her huge wealth. She once called money "a menace to happiness".
It is unclear what will happen to her fortune; it is being investigated by the Manhattan district attorney.
She had no children and had not seen any relatives for decades. Her only visitors were her lawyer, Wallace Bock, and accountant, Irving Kamsler, each the subject of the attorney's attention after Clark's relatives complained a couple of years ago that her affairs were being mismanaged. Both men deny any wrongdoing.