Interviews were conducted at our events in October, where 600 people came out to the Santa Barbara Historical Museum. Included are photos from Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune. Here’s a recent special from TV Santa Barbara on Huguette Clark and the future of her summer home, Bellosguardo. She knew what she wanted she knew what she didn't want, but she also had a sense of humor.'ĭedman and Gordon paint a very different portrait of the reclusive heiress in her final years - quite different from the one many people had imagined.TV Santa Barbara special on Huguette Clark and Empty Mansions ' really was all there until she went into a coma and died. 'And they were singing in the hospital they were telling jokes,' Gordon says. Pompei saw the heiress about a month before Clark died in 2011. She interviewed Marie Pompei, a nurse who became a friend of Clark's after she no longer worked for her. Astor Regrets, just wrote a book about Clark, The Phantom of Fifth Avenue. Meryl Gordon, who wrote about the Astor family scandal in Mrs. What she did want was to create an art institute in her mansion in Santa Barbara - and that will become a reality. In the end she gave the hospital only $1 million. (Photo from the book Empty Mansions)īefore Clark's death, the hospital where she had lived for so many years lobbied her for money for a building. The view from Clark's last regular hospital room at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City. 'The decorative arts that you see around the room here have come from the Fifth Avenue apartment where Huguette lived a fair part of her life,' says Andrew McVinish, head of Private and Iconic Collections at Christie's. One armchair from the 18th century is so perfectly preserved that the needlepoint colors are still brilliant. And now, three years after her death at age 104, Clark's artwork and antiques are heading from her abandoned apartments to Christie's auction block.Īt a preview for the auction, being held this month, the room is filled with extraordinary items collected over decades, all in perfect condition. Her lavish gifts to her nurse prompted a police investigation. For years, even friends and family thought she was living on Fifth Avenue. It's just one of many curiosities about Clark, the late heiress to the fortune of copper magnate Sen. (Photo from the book Empty Mansions)Ĭourtesy of the Estate of Huguette M. Huguette Clark poses for a photograph in her debutante days.

Empty Mansions by Bill Dedman