Huguette Clark spent the last twenty years of her life in a hospital room she did not need, registered under a false name and paying more than eight hundred dollars a day out of her own pocket. She owned three mansions and a fortune estimated at three hundred million dollars, yet she never returned to any of the houses maintained for her arrival. The staff who cleaned those homes had never met her. The gardens were kept, the rooms were dusted, the silver was polished, and the owner stayed away for six decades.
At the age of one hundred and four, she died still holding the fortune her father had built, and because she had no children, that money passed not to heirs but to lawyers, a court, and a foundation that now opens the doors of a house she refused to enter for sixty years. The fortune began with William Andrews Clark, born in 1839 in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, the son of Scotch-Irish farmers. He headed west during the Civil War and discovered that selling supplies to gold miners paid far better than digging for gold. Eggs that cost twenty cents back east sold for three dollars at the mining camps.
A pound and a half of tobacco bought for a dollar and a half sold for six dollars on the frontier. Clark understood the equation immediately and stayed on the selling side of it. From merchant he became a banker, from banker a mine owner, and from mine owner one of the richest men in America. In the 1880s, Butte, Montana was the richest mining hill on Earth, and three men fought for control of it.
Marcus Daly controlled the Anaconda mine. F. Augustus Heinze pressed claims through the courts. Clark out-bought and out-spent them both.
Together they were called the Copper Kings, and their wars for control of the Butte mines rank among the most corrupt business battles in American history. Clark won. His United Verde mine in Jerome, Arizona became one of the largest copper producers in the world, yielding more than two billion pounds of copper over its lifetime. He supplied the raw material that wired America for electricity at the exact moment the country was electrifying itself.
Copper was not enough. In 1899, Clark bribed Montana state legislators to buy himself a seat in the United States Senate. A witness described payoffs of thirty thousand dollars. The scandal was so brazen that Mark Twain called Clark as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag, adding that his proper place was the penitentiary.
Clark resigned in May of 1900 rather than face expulsion, then ran again the following year, won, and served a single term. The revulsion produced by his corruption reached far enough to change the law. The Seventeenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, took the election of senators out of the hands of state legislators and gave it to the voters. One man’s corruption changed the Constitution.
When asked about the bribery, Clark reportedly said, I never bought a man who was not for sale. Clark poured the copper fortune into real estate, art, and spectacle. On Fifth Avenue in New York, he built a mansion at 962 that took fourteen years to complete and cost seven million dollars, a sum approaching two hundred and forty million in modern value. The house rose nine stories and contained 121 rooms, thirty-one bathrooms, a ninety-five-foot picture gallery two stories high, and an organ with seventy-four ranks.
Coal arrived on its own underground rail. Thirty-five rooms were set aside for servants. New Yorkers called it the folly. Clark also auctioned 1,200 lots in the Nevada desert for his San Pedro, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake Railroad.
The town became Las Vegas. Clark County, Nevada still bears his name. When Clark died in 1925 at the age of eighty-six, his fortune stood at close to two hundred and fifty million dollars, a figure that crosses three billion in modern terms. He left behind seven children from his first marriage.
Then, at the age of sixty-two, he had remarried. Anna Eugenia La Chapelle was twenty-three, thirty-nine years younger than her husband. She had been his ward. Two daughters followed: Andre, born in 1902, and Huguette Marcelle Clark, born in Paris on June 9, 1906, when her father was sixty-seven.
The second family begun late in the builder’s life had no structure beneath it to govern what came next. Huguette grew up in wealth most Americans could not picture. She attended the Spence School in Manhattan. At twenty-three, she exhibited seven works at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington.
Loss found her young. Andre, her older sister, died of meningitis in 1919 at the age of seventeen. The sisters had been inseparable, and people who studied Huguette’s life later pointed to that death as the wound that shaped everything after it. In 1928, she married William MacDonald Gower.
The marriage lasted two years and, by the family account published decades later, was never consummated. She divorced in 1930 at the age of twenty-four. She never married again, and no children followed. From that point forward, the last direct heir of the Clark copper fortune began, by degrees and then in full, to leave the world behind.
The society events stopped. Then the visits to Bellosguardo, the family’s twenty-three-acre estate above the Pacific in Santa Barbara, stopped. After her mother died in 1963, Huguette gave the estate staff a standing order: keep everything as it was, and verify the condition through photographs. The gardens were maintained.
Every room stayed furnished. Two cars, a 1933 Chrysler and a 1933 Cadillac, kept their 1949 license plates into the next century. She was never coming back, but the house was never allowed to change. While Huguette withdrew, the male line of the fortune vanished.
William Andrews Clark II died in a plane crash in 1932 at twenty-nine. Charles Walker Clark died the following year at sixty-one. W. A.
Clark Jr. , who had founded the Los Angeles Philharmonic, died in 1934 at fifty-seven. In three years, the male heirs were gone. By 1935, Clark’s surviving daughters had sold the United Verde mine holdings to Phelps Dodge for twenty-two million dollars.
The copper empire was in someone else’s hands. Huguette was the last Clark standing, and she was choosing, year by year, to stand nowhere at all. What she owned and maintained and refused to use became a monument to absence. Bellosguardo sat empty for about sixty years, maintained at a cost of forty thousand dollars a month.
Le Beau Château in New Canaan, Connecticut, a nine-bedroom estate on fifty-two acres, had been purchased around 1951 as a Cold War nuclear refuge. Huguette never spent a single night there in sixty-two years of ownership. Property tax alone ran a hundred and sixty-one thousand dollars a year. At 907 Fifth Avenue, her three apartments totaled forty-two rooms and fifteen thousand square feet.
Staff maintained doll collections in pristine order for an employer they had never met. Maintaining three properties for a woman who lived in none of them cost close to a million dollars a year. On March 26, 1991, Huguette checked into Doctors Hospital in Manhattan for treatment of a basal cell carcinoma on her face. She was eighty-four.
The surgery was successful. She recovered. And then she stayed. Her physician urged her to go home.
She told the staff she was happy and content to remain. She paid out of her own pocket $829 a day, a rate that rose over the years to nearly twelve hundred dollars. Painting filled her mornings. Dolls were ordered and tended.
Cartoons played on a small screen. When a private nurse told her to leave the hospital, Huguette fired her. She registered under the name Harriet Chase and had a fake room number taped to her door. For twenty years, that room was her home.
Hadassah Perry was assigned as the daytime private nurse in the spring of 1991. Over the next two decades, she received gifts from Huguette totaling nearly thirty-two million dollars: five houses, a Bentley, and a Stradivarius violin valued at 1. 2 million for her son. When Huguette sold a Cézanne for fifteen million dollars, the proceeds came in three checks of five million each.
Perry cashed two. Her lawyer, Wallace Bock, solicited 1. 5 million from his own client for a personal construction project overseas. Her accountant, Irving Kamsler, was convicted in 2008 of attempting to disseminate indecent material to minors and continued working as her certified public accountant anyway.
Between them, Bock and Kamsler had failed to file federal gift tax returns for gifts totaling nearly fifty-six million dollars. The Internal Revenue Service assessed a total liability exceeding eighty-two million. The popular image of Huguette Clark is a helpless old woman trapped and exploited by scheming caretakers. The record tells a different story.
She was sharp. She was autonomous. Manhattan prosecutors visited her three times beginning in August 2010 and found no signs of delirium or confusion. The investigation was closed without charges.
This was a woman of full mental capacity who chose twenty years in a hospital room over three maintained mansions worth more than a hundred million dollars combined. The people who moved into the vacuum did so while the woman who created it was watching, aware, and signing every check herself. On March 7, 2005, at the age of ninety-eight, Huguette signed a will in her hospital room. It left five million dollars to her nurse and the remainder of the estate to twenty-one relatives.
Six weeks later, on April 19, she signed a second will in the same room. This one cut her family out with language that left no room for interpretation: I intentionally make no provision in this, my last will and testament, for any members of my family, whether on my paternal or maternal side, having had minimal contact with them over the years. The second will sent close to seventy-five percent to the Bellosguardo Foundation and the Corcoran Gallery. About thirty million went to nurse Perry.
To the family, nothing. On May 24, 2011, Huguette Clark died at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan at the age of one hundred and four, still holding a fortune north of three hundred million dollars. She was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in a private entombment conducted before the gates opened. She had requested no funeral service.
Nineteen distant relatives, half grandnieces and grandnephews, descendants of the seven children William Andrews Clark had fathered with his first wife, challenged the second will in Manhattan Surrogate’s Court. Most had not seen Huguette since 1957. Many had never met her. The argument they brought was undue influence.
The case never reached a jury. A settlement was approved on September 24, 2013, five days after jury selection had begun. The nineteen relatives received 34. 5 million dollars tax-free.
Nurse Perry received nothing from the estate, though she retained close to twenty-six million of the lifetime gifts. Bock and Kamsler forfeited all bequests and executor roles. Total legal fees consumed close to twenty-five million dollars. The judge called the outcome a fair result.
The Clark copper dynasty ended not in bankruptcy but in extinction. Children there were none. Direct heirs, none. Clark County, Nevada and the Los Angeles Philharmonic are the public traces that survive.
The bloodline holds nothing. The fortune Huguette held for close to a century found its purpose only after her death. The Bellosguardo Foundation, established under the terms of her second will, took seven years to bring into existence because the will was contested. Public tours of the property began in 2023.
Visitors now walk through the rooms her staff preserved and Huguette refused to enter. The automobiles with their 1949 plates are stops on a guided tour. The gardens are a park above the ocean. A foundation performs on her behalf every function she refused to perform for her own fortune.
Her father had started with twenty-cent eggs sold for three dollars to Montana miners. His daughter ended with sardines from a can in a room that cost $829 a day. One built a fortune from nothing. The other held a fortune and chose nothing.
The isolation that filled her last years did not protect the fortune. It invited the people who would dismantle it, one gift and one signature at a time, while the woman signing believed she was choosing of her own accord. The mansions are no longer empty, and the Clark copper line is gone. There is no heir and no dynasty.
There is a building on a cliff, a foundation with a board of directors, and a question that three hundred million dollars and one hundred and four years of life could not answer. What is a fortune for, if the person who holds it refuses to live?