Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune

Author: Dedman, BillBrand: Ballantine BooksColor: MulticolorEdition: NO-VALUEBinding: PaperbackNumber Of Pages: 512Release Date: 22-04-2014Part Number: black & white illustrations, colour illuDetails: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Janet Maslin, The New York Times • St. Louis Post-Dispatch When Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed in 2009 a grand home for sale, unoccupied for nearly sixty years, he stumbled through a surprising portal into American history. Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the nineteenth century with a twenty-first-century battle over a $300 million inheritance. At its heart is a reclusive heiress named Huguette Clark, a woman so secretive that, at the time of her death at age 104, no new photograph of her had been seen in decades. Though she owned palatial homes in California, New York, and Connecticut, why had she lived for twenty years in a simpl