Huguette Clark, Recluse Heiress, Dies at 104

[alp227]

Source: The New York Times

She was almost certainly the last link to New York’s Gilded Age, reared in Beaux-Arts splendor in a 121-room Fifth Avenue mansion awash in Rembrandt, Donatello, Rubens and Degas. Her father, a copper baron who once bought himself a United States Senate seat as casually as another man might buy a pair of shoes, had been born before the Mexican War. Her six siblings died long before her, one in the 19th century.

Though she herself lived into the 21st century, Huguette Clark managed through determination and great wealth to spin out her golden childhood to the end of her long, strange, solitary life. Mrs. Clark died on Tuesday, at 104, at Beth Israel Medical Center, the Manhattan hospital where she had chosen to live in recent years, said Michael McKeon, a spokesman for Mrs. Clark’s lawyer, Wallace Bock.

In retrospect, Mrs. Clark’s life opens a portal onto the city’s glory days of Astors, Guggenheims and Vanderbilts, for the Clarks once walked among them. More recently, however, thanks in large part to her singular efforts to avert the limelight, the family name has faded from view.

By all accounts of sound body and mind till nearly the end of her life, Mrs. Clark had lived, apparently by choice, cloistered in New York hospitals since the late 1980s. There, first in Doctors Hospital and later at Beth Israel, she was reported to have lived under a series of pseudonyms. (The most recent, MSNBC.com, said Tuesday, in reporting the news of

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/nyregion/huguette-clark-recluse-heiress-dies-at-104.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

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Her father was William Andrews Clark, a Democratic senator from Montana who served during the 1900s.

[LiberalLoner]

1. Oh, yes, of course! I have heard of her. The fortune of the family was made from

Butte, Montana, which I think was the world's richest deposit of copper.

[LiberalLoner]

2. I'm sure she has already arranged for her inherited wealth to be distributed according to her

last wishes, but I can't help but hope that maybe there is a philanthropic gift to the town that made her family wealthy - Butte, Montana. I hope that maybe a park is donated or a nice library or a home for the elderly living on fixed incomes, etc. It would be a really nice thing because the state of Montana and the people of Montana had a part in building the wealth of the family. In the old days the very wealthy would often give charitably to their home states or to areas they felt had a hand in contributing to their wealth.

[secondwind]

3. Sounds like her lawyer and accountant may have some 'splaining to do.

[elocs]

4. "Recluse", so she lived her life as she pleased and that makes her odd.

"She died as she wanted, with dignity and privacy." Well good for her. She had a good, long life and if it was her choice not to be around people then that was her business. She does seem to have been a generous person.

[Scairp]

5. Very strange

I read the story that MSNBC ran last year about this woman, and there was some weird stuff going on with her life and her money. Anytime you've got these leech-like people, accountants or whatever, in charge of a very wealthy and old person who really has no family to look after them, things like money being spent on their families, expensive gifts or whatever, are going to happen. Now, who cares, she's gone, you can't take it with you and I think her fortune should be donated to the Red Cross for disaster relief. But that's me. I understand there is distant family, nieces and nephews I think, and they surely will be fighting over their bit of a half BILLION dollar estate. There's plenty to go around so why they would fight over it I have no idea.

[Downwinder]

6. Clarkdale, AZ was named for her father

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarkdale,_Arizona

[JI7]

7. if she had grown up in these times she would have a reality show

[pfitz59]

8. Her mansion in Santa Barbara has sat empty

for 30+ years! http://santabarbarasavvy.blogspot.com/2010/08/where-is-bellosguardo-santa-barbara.html I first wondered about it over 30 years ago! No close heirs. Wonder if her estate is exempt from taxes?

[murielm99]

9. The article said that after her mother died, Huguette

preferred to remain alone with her dolls.