Empty Mansions

assert, controlled by her nurse and her money men? And who would, or should, inherit her fortune?
    Yet on another level, above such worldly considerations, the story of the Clarks is like a classic folk tale—except told in reverse, with the bags full of gold arriving at the beginning, the handsome prince fleeing, and the king’s daughter locking
herself
away in the tower. The fabulous Clarks may teach us something about the price of privacy, the costs and opportunities of great wealth, the aftermath of achieving the American dream. They can take us inside the mountain camps of the western gold rush, inside the halls of Congress, the salons of Paris, and the drawing rooms of New York’s Fifth Avenue amid the last surviving jewels of the Gilded Age.
    This book is drawn from interviews, private documents, and public records, as described in the authors’ note and line-by-line notes at the back. We have invented no characters, imagined no dialogue, put no thoughts into anyone’s head. The sources include more than twenty thousand pages of Huguette’s personal papers and the testimony of fifty witnesses in the legal contest for her fortune. Though no work of nonfiction can pretend to map anyone’s interior terrain, the Clarks have left enough bread crumbs to lead us back into their fairy-tale world.

AN APPARITION

 
    D R . H ENRY S INGMAN , an internist, was making an emergency house call on a new patient on New York’s old-money Upper East Side. It was a sunny early-spring afternoon, March 26, 1991. Dr. Singman had received a call from a retired colleague, whose former patient had sent out an SOS.
    At the luxury apartment building at 907 Fifth Avenue, the uniformed doorman greeted the doctor, leading the way up the marble steps and through the lobby with its elegantly coffered ceiling. The elevator, paneled in mahogany like a plutocrat’s library, carried them to the eighth floor. The doorman then did something he had never dared before. He unlocked Apartment 8W, admitting the doctor.
    Drawn shades blocked the sunlight from Central Park. A single candle lit the entryway—an art gallery nearly forty feet long. The parquet floor was an obstacle course of French dollhouses and miniature Japanese castles. Mannequins populated a side room, a gaggle of geishas wearing kimonos. The draperies were green silk damask and red velvet, the furniture Louis XV gilded oak, the paintings signed by Renoir, Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Monet.
    In the half-light, Dr. Singman came face-to-face with “an apparition,” a tiny woman, nearly eighty-five years old, with thin white hair and frightened eyes the color of blue steel. She wore a soiled bathrobe and had a towel wrapped around her face.
    His medical notes give the grim details. The patient was suffering from several cancers, basal cell carcinomas that had gone untreated for quite a while. She was missing the left part of her lower lip, unable to take food or drink without it gushing from her mouth. Her right cheek had deep cavities. Where her right lower eyelid should have been, there were large, deep ulcers exposing the orbital bone. She weighed all of seventy-five pounds, “looked like somebody out of a concentration camp,” and “appeared nearly at death’s door.”
    Dr. Singman urged her to go immediately to a hospital. The patientchose Doctors Hospital, which wasn’t Manhattan’s finest but was close to a friend’s apartment. The patient had no insurance, so her attorney sent over a $10,000 check to the hospital, and the ambulance came that night.
    The patient never saw this apartment again, except in photographs. Though she recovered to excellent health, she chose to spend the next twenty years and nearly two months, or exactly 7,364 nights, in the hospital.
    As she left her home that spring evening in 1991, Huguette Clark insisted on being carried through the lobby and down the marble steps on a gurney, held high above the shoulders of the ambulance men, like Cleopatra riding on a litter—not for ceremony but for privacy, so the doormen and her neighbors couldn’t see her face.

STILL LIFE

 
    B ELLOSGUARDO REMAINS TODAY as Bellosguardo was the last time Huguette saw it sixty years ago. The Clark summer estate in Santa Barbara, with its sweeping view of the shimmering Pacific, has been lovingly preserved since the early 1950s at the cost of only $40,000 per month.
    Inside the gray French mansion, in the back of the service wing in a room off the kitchen, on