Empty Mansions

INTRODUCTION

 
    W E CAME TO THIS STORY by separate paths, one of us by accident and one by birth.
Bill Dedman
    I STUMBLED INTO THE MYSTERIOUS WORLD of Huguette Clark because my family was looking for a house, and I got a little out of our price range.
    In 2009, my wife’s job had been transferred from Boston to New York City, but we wanted to keep in touch with the charms and idiosyncrasies of New England: old stone walls, Colonial houses on country corners, thrifty Yankees who save an
r
sound by keeping their wool socks in a “draw,” yet put the
r
to good use when they “draw’r” a picture. While renting we looked at small towns in Connecticut, about an hour northeast of the Empire State Building. Although property values had plunged in the Great Recession, houses came in only two flavors: those we didn’t like and those we couldn’t afford.
    One evening, frustration turned to distraction. I began to scan the online listings for houses we
really
couldn’t afford, an exercise in American aspiration. Although some names were familiar—professional talkers Don Imus and Phil Donahue were having trouble selling waterfront mansions on Long Island Sound—other names sent me to Google. One fellow had been able to purchase an $8 million house by selling boxers and briefs on the Internet. (“Buy underwear in your underwear.”) I was gobsmacked, however, by the property at the top of the charts.
    The most expensive house for sale in Connecticut, in the tony town of New Canaan, was priced at $24 million, marked down from $35 million. Billed as Le Beau Château, “the beautiful castle,” this charmer had 14,266 square feet of floor space tucked into fifty-two wooded acres with a river and a waterfall. Its twenty-two rooms included nine bedrooms,nine baths, eleven fireplaces, a wine cellar, elevator, trunk room, walk-in safe, and a room for drying the draperies. The property taxes alone were $161,000 a year, or about four years’ income for a typical American family. I didn’t recognize the name of the owner, Huguette Clark. Was that a he or a she?
    There was an odd note in the records on the town’s website: Le Beau Château had been unoccupied since this owner bought it. In 1951. That couldn’t be right. Who could afford to own such a house and to not live in it for nearly sixty years? And why would anyone do that?
    A beautiful castle wasn’t quite in the job description of an investigative reporter, but the next morning, I drove over to New Canaan.
    On a winding, narrow lane called Dan’s Highway was a tiny handmade marker for No. 104 and a warning sign, “PRIVATE PROPERTY NO TRESPASSING VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.” Behind a low red-brick wall with white peeling paint sat two tiny brick cottages. Between them a driveway ran under a rusty gate into the trees and curved out of sight. If there was a beautiful fairy-tale castle, it was deep in the wood. The property showed no sign of humans, only wild turkeys, deer, and birds. It seemed more like a nature preserve than a home. There was no mailbox, no name, no buzzer. Leaning over the wall, I rapped on the window of one of the cottages.
    Out shuffled an unshaven man in his white undershirt, a sleepy fellow who introduced himself as the caretaker, Tony Ruggiero. Eighty years old but muscled, he said he used to be a boxer and had sparred once with Rocky Marciano, but now he was watching over “Mrs. Clark’s house.” He wouldn’t open the gate, but he said the house though empty was well cared for. He’d never met the owner in his more than twenty years. All he knew was that his paycheck came from her lawyer in New York City.
    Ruggiero thought of something and ducked back inside. He brought out a newspaper clipping from the
New York Post
. An auction house had sold a painting for $23.5 million, Renoir’s
In the Roses
, of a woman seated on a bench in a garden, and the newspaper said the portrait came from “the estate of Huguette Clark.” Ruggiero kept pointing to those words “the estate of.”
    “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “Do you suppose she’s been dead all these years?”
    • • •
    Finding Huguette Clark’s name on an Internet discussion board from Southern California, I discovered that Le Beau Château wasn’t her only orphaned house. She had a second, grander home in Santa Barbara, a vacation estate on twenty-three cliff-top acres fronting the Pacific Ocean. But this home was definitely not for sale. A newspaper