Empty Mansions

a sleepy California port called Los Angeles. And along the way, he auctioned off the lots that became downtown Las Vegas.
    The newspapers of the early 1900s couldn’t decide who was the wealthiest man in America in that age before the personal income tax.
The New York Times
calculated in 1907 that if you counted only the money already in the banks, oilman John D. Rockefeller was tops. However, if you also included the wealth still to be brought up from underground, the
Times
decided that copper king W. A. Clark might prove to be richer than Rockefeller.
    W. A. Clark also had one of the more controversial political careers in American history. He was forced to resign from the U.S. Senate for paying bribes to get the seat in the first place. Undeterred, he was reelected. While serving in the Senate in 1904, the widower with grown children shocked the political world by revealing a secret marriage to a woman thirty-nine years his junior. At the time of the announcement, the senator andAnna LaChapelle Clark already had a two-year-old daughter, Andrée. The woman I was looking for in 2009, Huguette Clark, was the second child of that marriage, born in 1906 in Paris.
    So the name was French: Huguette. The pronunciation took some getting used to, and my Southern accent still has trouble with it. I’m told that the French “u” sound doesn’t exist in English. It’s not “hue-GET” with an initial “H” sound, nor “you-GET” with a “Y,” but somewhere close to “oo-GET.” When W. A. Clark died in 1925, he left an estate estimated at $100 million to $250 million, worth up to $3.4 billion today.One-fifth of the estate went to eighteen-year-old Huguette, who was depicted in cartoons as a spoiled poor little rich girl. In the histories and magazine cover stories of his time, the word most often associated with W. A. Clark was “incredible.” But after his death, his businesses were sold, and the Clark name faded. He may be the most famous Americanwhom most Americans today have never heard of. Now Huguette, who inherited one-fifth of the copper-mining fortune, also was missing.
    The length of history spanned by father and daughter is hard to comprehend. W. A. Clark was born in 1839, during the administration of the eighth president of the United States, Martin Van Buren. W.A. was twenty-two when the Civil War began. When Huguette was born in 1906, Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth president, was in the White House. Yet 170 years after W.A.’s birth, his youngest child was still alive at age 103 during the time of the forty-fourth president, Barack Obama.
    Well, still alive, as far as I knew.
    In researching stories about Huguette for the NBC News website, I gradually pieced together that she was indeed alive and had been living for twenty years in self-imposed exile in hospital rooms in Manhattan, although she was said to be in good health. For her own reasons, she had separated herself from the world. She was so reclusive that one of her attorneys, who had handled her business for more than twenty years, had never spoken to her face-to-face, talking to her only on the phone and through closed doors.
    And that was, for me, the end of the hunt. I wrote about the mansion mystery, but I wasn’t going to barge into a shy old woman’s hospital room.
    • • •
    Then readers started emailing with hints of something nefarious, and the mansion mystery morphed into a criminal investigation. One of Huguette’s possessions—one of the rarest violins in the world, a Stradivarius—had been sold for $6 million, and the buyer had been made to promise that he wouldn’t tell anyone for a decade where he got it. Meanwhile, a nurse had somehow received millions of dollars in gifts from Huguette’s accounts. Huguette’s accountant was a felon and a registered sex offender, caught trolling to meet teenage girls over the Internet. And that accountant, along with Huguette’s attorney, had already inherited the property of another elderly client.
    After my updates about these developments, the Manhattan district attorney had the same questions our readers did: Why would Huguette be selling precious possessions unless she was down to her last copper? Wasthis eccentric centenarian, who had lived in a hospital for twenty years, competent to manage her affairs? Were her attorney and accountant in line to inherit her fortune, said to be worth more than $300 million?
    The reclusive heiress who had withdrawn from the world