Empty Mansions
Empty Mansions: The mysterious life of Hugette Clark and the spending of a great American fortune by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr.
Hugette Clark, heiress to a significant chunk of the Senator W.A. Clark fortune (Butte and Jerome copper mines, railroads, etc.), died on May 21, 2011, at the age of 104, in New York City. As of July, 2014 her estimated $300MM estate has yet to be settled. In spite of her wealth, her generally excellent (given her age) physical and mental health; her ownership of luxurious apartments in New York and mansions in Connecticut and California, she spent the last 20 years of her life in mediocre hospital rooms in NYC.
The basic questions Dedman and Newell address are: Firstly, was Hugette competent to make the decisions she did over the last 20 years of her life, or was she a mentally feeble invalid taken advantage of by her attorney, her accountant (the latter a convicted sex offender who, together with the lawyer, stood to make $6MM based on the wills they drafted for her), and by her nurse, who received gifts valued at $31MM over the course of her employment and stood to inherit more, based on the wills? Secondly, did growing up with extreme wealth and privilege somehow handicap Hugette and doom her to a reclusive later life (she essentially stopped interacting face-to face with all but her closest advisors, employees and care givers after her mother died in 1963), which she devoted to collecting dolls, ordering intricate custom houses for them and giving wads of money away to friends, new and old? Thirdly, and perhaps most interesting for a mining history aficionado such as this reviewer, the authors give some insights into Senator Clark’s life and times, going some way toward tempering the black image of him left by Mark Twain, who said: “His history is known to everybody; he is as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag; he is a shame to the American nation, and no one has helped him to the senate who did not know that his proper place was the penitentiary with a ball and chain on his legs.”
Attributed without proof to Clark, and equally damning, is this famous quote: “I never bought a man who wasn’t for sale.”
W.A. made his fortune in the rough-and-tumble west of the late 19th C as a prospector, mail contractor, retailer, mine owner and railroad builder. His epic battle with Marcus Daily (the infamous “War of the Copper Kings) for primacy in the Butte district and in Montana politics included numerous failed campaigns for political office in and from Montana. His quest for a title, for that was what it really amounted to, culminated with his “winning” (buying), losing and finally winning again a coveted seat in the US Senate, much to the detriment of his reputation. Interestingly, the author’s present evidence that Twain may have had ulterior motives for attacking Clark, being in thrall financially to Clark’s arch-rivals at the Standard Oil-controlled Amalgamated Copper Company.
Though personally generous, Clark never endowed charitable foundations like his rival “Gilded Age” plutocrats, the Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Mellons. He bequeathed his art collection to the New York’s Met, but with such onerous conditions that they refused to accept it and it ended up at his second choice the Cochoran Gallery in Washington. None of this helped posthumously polish his tarnished reputation.
Empty Mansions is an interesting piece of investigative reporting on a creative and generous woman who, based on her own words and the accounts of those closest to her, actually had a full and happy, though very idiosyncratic, life. It should be of interest both to students of human nature and American history.
