Huguette Clark was born on June 9, 1906, in Paris, the second daughter of William A. Clark, a man who had built one of the great American fortunes of the Gilded Age. Her father had made his money in mining during the western expansion into Montana in the 1860s, then multiplied it through railway construction during the railroad boom, and finally entered politics as a senator from Montana in the 1890s. By the time of Huguette’s birth he was approaching seventy, and she was born into a world of immense wealth and European high society.
In 1911, at the age of five, she attended the coronation of King George V of Britain with her family. She was soon sent to New York to be educated at the Spence School, an all-girls private school in Manhattan. During those years she lived with family members in a six-story, 121-room house on Fifth Avenue, believed to be the largest single-ownership home in New York City at the time. Her family situation was unusual.
Her father had seven children from his first marriage, five of whom survived to adulthood, making them roughly thirty to forty years older than Huguette. She also had one full sibling, a sister named Andrée, four years her senior, who died of meningitis in 1919. The enormous family fortune continued to grow. In the 1900s and 1910s William Clark expanded into additional mining operations and became involved in the early development of Las Vegas as a stopping point for travelers heading to Los Angeles.
When he died in New York City on March 2, 1925, his wealth was estimated at roughly three hundred million dollars, which would equate to over five billion today. He divided his estate approximately equally among his wife and five living children, leaving Huguette an inheritance believed to be around fifty million dollars. She showed no interest in following her father into business or politics. Instead, she devoted herself to philanthropy, art, and fashion.
In the late 1920s she spent about fifty thousand dollars to drain a saltwater pond at her villa in Santa Barbara, California, turning it into a bird refuge named in honor of her late sister Andrée. She had moved to Santa Barbara after marrying William McDonald Glover, a law student she met while both were studying in New York. They wed in August 1928, but the marriage lasted less than a year, and they divorced a week before their first anniversary. She returned to New York and took an apartment on Fifth Avenue, converting it and the adjoining apartments into a vast open space overlooking Central Park, complete with a library and other amenities.
Through the 1930s she engaged somewhat with East Coast society, displaying paintings at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and attending fashion shows in New York. But her circle of close friends remained small, and to those who knew her she appeared elusive and taciturn. As the years passed, her reclusiveness deepened. She continued to spend money freely, often on projects she never visited or donations made anonymously.
During the 1930s a mansion was built at the Santa Barbara bird refuge, and she continued to pay tens of thousands of dollars each month to maintain everything there, though she rarely appeared. Her isolation intensified after her mother’s death in 1963. She had lived with her mother for most of her adult life, and with her gone, Huguette became an increasingly distant figure in New York. Much of this withdrawal stemmed from a growing distrust of strangers.
She had never remarried and had no children, and in her later years she came to view everyone around her as a potential schemer trying to get into her good graces for the sake of her will. Her methods bordered on the paranoid. She increasingly chose to speak in French to hide her conversations from those nearby. By the late 1980s she had become almost mythical in New York, so rarely seen that many people believed she was dead, a plausible assumption given that she turned eighty in 1986.
She was, in fact, alive, but in poor condition. She had become frail and was suffering from multiple ailments, the most serious being cancerous lesions on her face that had left her disfigured. She had refused treatment for years, unwilling to leave her apartment for a prolonged hospital stay. By 1991 there were no other options, and she was admitted to Doctors Hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Her physicians gave a sobering account. Her face had to be operated on and reconstructed because of the damage caused by her refusal to treat the lesions. She had not seen a doctor in two decades and showed every sign of rarely eating. Her mental state was poor, and she often seemed unaware of her surroundings.
After her surgery and recovery, her doctors advised that she could return home. Instead, she took to the hospital. She began paying nearly one thousand dollars per day to remain in her room. When she was moved to Beth Israel Medical Center, she took an eleventh-floor room overlooking Central Park and hired private nursing staff to care for her.
She would spend the final twenty years of her life living in hospital, effectively in her own semi-private wing with a view over the park her apartment had towered above for half a century. Curiously, the change seemed to do her good. Over the years her health and mental state improved considerably, according to intermittent reports from her physicians, though she remained highly eccentric. During all this time, she never checked in with the large number of staff who maintained her properties.
Workers at the Fifth Avenue apartment, the Santa Barbara estate, and a mansion she had bought in Connecticut in the 1950s but never lived in continued to receive their pay and maintain the buildings, but none of them knew where their employer was or what had happened to her. Meanwhile, Huguette was spending her vast fortune. She gave lavish sums to individuals. A close lifelong friend received ten million dollars.
More troubling was the fact that one of her private nurses at Beth Israel, Hadassah Perry, received over thirty million dollars in cash bequests and gifts, suggesting some element of exploitation. Huguette was, in any case, not a difficult woman to receive gifts from. On one occasion she gave twenty-five thousand dollars to the repairman who fixed her television in her hospital room. She died on May 24, 2011, at the age of 104.
Immediately there was controversy. It came to light that she had owned several valuable paintings by famous French Impressionists such as Edgar Degas and Claude Monet, and some of these had disappeared from her mansions during the years she was confined to hospital. But the greatest dispute concerned the dispersal of her fortune, which still amounted to roughly three hundred million dollars at the time of her death. A will was presented in court showing that Huguette had intended to give about three quarters of her fortune to charities.
Thirty million dollars was reserved for Hadassah Perry, on top of the similar sum in gifts she had already received while Huguette was alive. Other stipulations provided for a bequest to her goddaughter and cash payments to longtime servants. But it was soon revealed that just weeks before this will was finalized, Huguette had signed another one that was enormously different. That earlier will left most of her fortune to her extended family, by 2011 mostly grand-nephews, grand-nieces, and more distant relatives, many of whom she had never met and most of the older members of which she had not seen since the 1950s.
She had at least temporarily entertained the idea of granting them the vast majority of her estate, then changed her mind and disinherited them. Her relatives appealed to the courts. Their argument was obvious: Huguette had been an extremely old woman in questionable psychological condition, and they believed her private nurse and others had coerced her in her final weeks into rewriting the will to benefit themselves. It was a plausible claim, though it was equally possible that Huguette had simply decided to reward the people closest to her in the last twenty years of her life.
The judge sided with the family, and her first will was effectively implemented. The family received upwards of seventy-five percent of the estate. Hadassah Perry was forced to return the thirty million dollars she had received in the will settlement, though on the condition that her receipt of similar sums in gifts during Huguette’s lifetime would not be challenged. The Clark family thus ended up as the major beneficiaries.
It will never be known for certain who the mysterious Huguette Clark actually intended to inherit her wealth. She was entombed in the family mausoleum in the Bronx, while several of the artworks she collected during her life now hang in major museums and galleries.