Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

At 400+ pages, Empty Mansions is a rather long book, so I thought I would skim through the first half, which chronicles the life of W.A. Clark, a Gilded Age millionaire who shrewdly invested in copper mines out west. He is the father of the main focus of the book -- his daughter, Hugette Clark, who lived to be 104 years old but was not seen in public for the last 70 or so years of her life. That's not a typo. Hugette Clark was an eccentric heiress whose concerns about privacy were obsessive. She is the female version of Howard Hughes. Another way to think of her is as a real life derivative of Miss Havisham, although Ms. Clark was not left at the altar, nor did she seem at all distraught over remaining single following a very brief marriage whose end she initiated. So, as mentioned earlier, I thought I would just skim the first part of the book, since it takes place at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries and is more about Hugette's father than it is about her. However, the first few pages were so interesting that I just kept reading until I had finished every bit, including the notes and bib. The book is exceptionally well researched and thus presents an absorbing picture of America's social, economic and political landscape during the Gilded Age and on through the 20th century and the first several years of the 21st. I came to like Hugette Clark, who was strangely childlike while also being quite astute about art, style, family loyalty and friendship. In today's dollars, her father's fortune was in the billions and as the only surviving child of his second, May-December marriage, Hugette inherited it all. Born in Paris in 1906, Ms. Clark spoke French fluently and considered herself as much French as American, perhaps more so. She became a good painter and developed a refined taste in art, investing in works by Monet, Manet and many other well known masters. She collected dolls and spent massive amounts of money having doll houses and their furnishings built from designs of her own. She was also incredibly generous, often to people she had never met but who were the children of old friends or who had been kind to people she loved. In one case, she sent an anonymous check for $25,000 (a very large amount for the 1960s) to a woman who had served as caregiver to one of Ms. Clark's property managers. Her long life, which ended in 2011 at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan, gave her ample opportunities to witness most of the life-changing breakthroughs and events of the 20th century, such as female suffrage, the civil rights movement, the moon landing and the advent of digital technology. Through it all, she remained unchanged, going about her days focused on her artistic pursuits, giving away personal gifts of money and jewelry, and writing checks for the private school tuition of the children of her maids and other retainers. She was seldom seen, even by those who conducted business for her, usually communicating with people by phone, letter or even through a closed door. Sometime in her 80s, she developed skin cancer, which went untreated until one of her maids saw it and insisted she see a doctor. One was called in and he persuaded Ms. Clark to go to Doctor's Hospital for treatment. A small, boutique facility on the Upper Eastside of Manhattan, Doctor's protected Hugette Clark's privacy and because of this she ended up living there for many years, until it was purchased by Beth Israel Medical Center and then sold to a real estate developer. Ms.Clark then moved downtown to the main Beth Israel campus, although less by her own choice than through what can only be called blackmail by the head of Beth Israel, Dr. Robert Newman, who was the CEO of Beth Israel's parent company, Continuum Health Partners. Dr. Newman and Beth Israel come off very poorly in the book and there is solid evidence to back up the author's claim that hospital fund raisers and Dr. Newman attempted to manipulate Ms. Clark into making a mega donation to their nonprofit corporation. Although she gave Beth Israel about $2 million, the hospital felt cheated when Ms. Clark finally gave in to pressure to make a will and then did not leave Beth Israel the funds it was seeking. Instead, she left the bulk of her still-substantial estate to her caregivers and to fund an arts foundation she had created to maintain her magnificent estate, Bellosguardo, in Santa Barbara, California. Shortly after she signed her will, Beth Israel -- apparently in retaliation -- moved Ms. Clark into a vastly inferior hospital room that had little light, no view and was located in the oldest wing of the facility. And there were plenty of other institutions that tried to take advantage of Ms. Clark, such as the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which joined a group of Ms. Clark's half-nieces and nephews -- descendents of her father's first wife -- to challenge her will in court immediately following her death. The Corcoran had already received major gifts from the Clark family, first in the form of W.A. Clark's impressive art collection and later in checks that Hugette Clark wrote over the years in response to annual funding appeals. Plus the Corcoran was to receive an important Monet as part of Ms. Clark's will. But that was not enough for the museum, which thought it would get more if the relatives were successful in challenging the will. (They weren't.) One of the most egregious and greedy exploiters of the elderly Ms. Clark was Citibank, where she and her mother before her (when the bank was still called First National City) kept their collection of precious jewelry. Not once but twice did Citibank contact Ms. Clark to tell her that jewelry of significant value had been either lost or stolen. The bank claimed to have no idea what happened to the jewelry and then refused to pay Ms. Clark for its true value, which was around $6 million. Instead, Citibank offered $3.5 million and when Ms. Clark resisted Citibank officials told her that if they had to pay the full cost a news story would result, and that would place her in the public spotlight. They did this knowing full well that Ms. Clark would protect her privacy at all costs and settle, which she did. Citibank's assertion that valuable jewels simply disappeared on two separate occasions strains credibility. Authors Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr., a cousin of Ms. Clark's, do a great job of presenting Hugette Clark not as a caricature, but as a real human being -- a sympathetic and kind person, albeit eccentric. They offer a nuanced portrait of an intriguing woman who valued money not for itself but for what it could do to help people she cared about. As a reader, I came to feel not merely compassion for this woman, but admiration. She resisted the social pressures, expectations and changing values of many people through several eras. She had her own moral compass and she stuck with it. Hers was a life that was lived differently, but lived well, and it was a life that is worth reading about in this deeply interesting book.