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The Heiress Who Vanished: Bill Dedman on Huguette Clark’s Hidden World
The Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and New York Times #1 bestselling author of Empty Mansions shares the extraordinary story of a reclusive copper heiress, the battle over her fortune, and the HBO series adaptation now in development.
As an investigative journalist, Bill Dedman has built his career on writing stories that change the way we see the world. It was that reporter’s instinct—paired with relentless curiosity—that led him to one of the most extraordinary tales of American wealth: the mysterious life of Huguette Clark and the spending of a great American fortune.
Had Bill not stumbled onto her story—and brought it to light in Empty Mansions—her final wishes might well have been lost in the legal battle over her $300 million estate.
Huguette was the daughter of copper magnate and U.S. senator W.A. Clark, one of the richest men in America. She grew up in dazzling extravagance: the largest home in New York City, with 121 rooms, four art galleries displaying rare art, and a $100,000 pipe organ that filled the halls with music. There was also Bellosguardo, the family’s 23-acre estate in Santa Barbara with sweeping views of the Pacific. She traveled to Europe, attended champagne soirées and black-tie balls—it was, by any measure, a life lived in grandeur.
And yet, in stark contrast, Huguette later chose seclusion.
For decades, Huguette lived reclusively in her Fifth Avenue apartments, surrounded by paintings by Renoir, Degas, and Corot, and by her vast collection of antique dolls—thousands of them, some dressed in custom Dior. She painted portraits, read voraciously, and built elaborate miniature temples by hand, each costing up to $100,000 to make. In her eighties, though still in excellent health, she chose to move into a modest hospital room, where she remained for the next twenty years—her whereabouts unknown even to longtime friends. Meanwhile, her staff kept her mansions in New York, California, and Connecticut just as she left them—waiting, it seemed, for her return.
What makes Huguette’s story even more remarkable is her quiet generosity to friends, strangers, and staff: $30 million to her nurse, a Stradivarius violin for the nurse’s son, a Rolls- Royce for the chauffeur, a Renoir, fine jewels, Christmas cards with $30,000 checks enclosed—among many other gestures that changed the lives of those around her.
Her choices were so unusual that distant relatives, left out of her will, seized on Huguette’s eccentricities as grounds to question her capacity, sparking a legal battle over her fortune. Was she being manipulated? Was she unwell? Crazy? “Did you hear about the dolls?” Had they been Birkins, she’d be on the pages of Vogue…
Bill uncovers a more nuanced truth: a woman of elegance and discretion, a loyal friend and deeply caring person, a trained artist dedicated to her craft.
It takes a while to get close enough to someone’s choices so that they start to make sense.
Bill says, “It takes a while to get close enough to someone’s choices so that they start to make sense.” That insight runs through Empty Mansions, the New York Times #1 bestseller that continues to captivate readers. A brilliant reporter and storyteller, no one but Bill Dedman could have written this story with such depth and intrigue.
This episode explores the fascinating life of Huguette Clark, as well as surprising new details that deepen our understanding of her. It also raises larger questions about privacy, legacy, and what it means to live on one’s own terms. For Huguette, the answer lay in a French fable she once recited to her doctor: “To live happily, live hidden.”
See Huguette’s extraordinary homes, jewelry, treasures, artwork, and more on Bill’s website, www.emptymansionsbook.com. Watch the testimonies of her nurse, accountant, attorney, and assistant on his YouTube channel @billdedman1. And pick up a copy of Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great Fortune, available wherever books are sold.
You can visit Bellosguardo, the Santa Barbara estate frozen in time—and the backdrop for Vanity Fair’s feature on Gwyneth Paltrow.