Empty Mansions

suddenly had the modern media machine at her doorstep. Huguette Clark was featured on the
Today
show and on page one of theNew York tabloids. Although she had been born in the silent film era, she became after her 104th birthday a trending topic of searches on Google and Yahoo, with a biography on Wikipedia, fan pages on Facebook, and a lavish story on thefront page of
The New York Times
.
    Huguette had been famous in her childhood and was famous again more than a century later, but in between she’d been a phantom. The last known photograph of her, a snapshot of an uncomfortable heiress in furs, jewels, and a cloche hat in the fashionable bell shape, had been taken in 1928. She had managed to escape the world’s gaze since then. How? And, more important, why?
    Urging further investigation, one of Huguette’s own bankers confided to me, “The whole story is utterly mysterious but equally frightening. It has all the markings of a massive fraud. Poor Miss Clark sounds like one in a long list of rich, isolated old ladies taken advantage of by supposedly trustworthy advisers.”
    If that’s what really happened.
    • • •
    During my research I was fortunate to meet one of Huguette’s relatives. Paul Clark Newell, Jr., is not in line for a claim to her estate, but he was interested in tracing the family history. And he’d gotten a lot closer to Huguette than I had. For one thing, he’d had the good sense to look for her number in the phone book.
Paul Newell
    H UGUETTE C LARK WAS MY FATHER ’ S FIRST COUSIN , although she preferred to identify herself to me as Tante Huguette, using the Frenchword for aunt. My father, Paul Clark Newell, remembered Senator W. A. Clark, who was his uncle and Huguette’s father. This famous uncle often visited the Newell family home in Los Angeles. In the last years of his life, my father took up a long-delayed mission, writing a biography of Senator Clark. Unfortunately, his health was failing, so only fragments of that work were completed.
    After my father’s death, I began to organize our family archives, to visit museums and historical societies, and to develop friendships with relatives who had known W.A. and his second wife, Anna. A few had even met the reclusive Huguette. From the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which held the senator’s art collection, I learned that Huguette was still alive. She was a generous patron to the Corcoran, sending handwritten checks while insisting that her gifts be attributed to “Anonymous.”
    Huguette had always been a mysterious presence in family lore. Though they were essentially the same age, my father had never met her, even when he was a guest in Senator Clark’s monumental mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York. When I was a youngster, on family trips on the Pacific Coast Highway through Santa Barbara, my father would point out a promontory by the sea and tell me of Bellosguardo, the great Clark vacation estate. I had heard him speak of Huguette’s shyness and reclusive tendencies, but I knew little more about her.
    Years later, while traveling through Santa Barbara in the 1990s, I checked under Clark in the phone directory, and to my great surprise I found not one but two listings for Huguette M. Clark, giving her phone numbers and street address on the oceanfront Cabrillo Boulevard. Remarkable openness, I thought, for someone whose life was enveloped in secrecy. I dialed one of the numbers and reached her estate manager, John Douglas. He told me a little about his work and said that Madame Clark was a wonderful person to work for, though he said he had never met her. I asked how I might make contact with Huguette, and he provided me with the name of her attorney in New York, Donald Wallace. In November 1994 I wrote to her, through Wallace, introducing myself and saying that I hoped she might cooperate in my family research.
    Within ten days I received a voice mail message, chipper and tantalizing. “Hello, Paul, this is your Aunt Huguette. I’m sorry I missed you,Paul, because I do want to speak with you. I’ll call you back soon, Paul, so we can talk. Bye-bye.”
    Her voice was high-pitched, with a hint of a foreign accent, perhaps reflecting her early years in France or revealing a minor speech impediment. Although she was then eighty-eight years old, her voice was steady. She left subsequent messages, but never a phone number to call her back.
Why not provide me with her phone number?
I pictured her at home