The story of a reclusive heiress—and what she saw outside her Fifth Avenue window

New York City has always had its share of recluses. Many remain anonymous after years of seclusion behind apartment walls, others become infamous later in life or after death.

Huguette Clark (above photo) falls into the latter category. More than a decade ago, headlines appeared revealing that this forgotten heiress—born in 1906 to rakish copper magnate and Montana senator William A. Clark (below) and his much younger second wife—had been living out the past 20 years in a Manhattan hospital suite, tended to by private nurses.

Following Huguette’s death at Beth Israel Medical Center in 2011, a few weeks shy of her 105th birthday (and with a $300 million fortune to be divvied up), more details of her unusual life came to light.

As a girl (above right), the “Baby Copper Queen” took the path of other rich Gilded Age daughters. She traveled abroad with her parents, studied the violin, graduated from Miss Spence’s School (now Spence), made her debut in society, and married a Princeton graduate described as a “promising young bond salesman” in 1927.

After a divorce in 1930 (Huguette claimed abandonment, her former husband said the marriage had been unconsummated, according to her New York Times obituary), she returned to the palatial twelfth-floor apartment at 907 Fifth Avenue (below) where she had been living with her mother, Anna, since her father’s passing in 1925 at age 86.

Previously, the family resided in a 121-room mansion fronting Fifth Avenue at 77th Street dubbed “Clark’s Folly” because it was so insanely ornate.

Her retreat over the next decades from society events and social outings went unnoticed by the press. Apparently she was content to lead a small life, collecting dolls, visiting the family’s Santa Barbara estate, and staying out of the public eye—a lifestyle her mother seemed to pursue.

“Mrs. Clark did not care for social distinction, nor the obligations that would entail upon my public life,” William Clark once wrote of his wife, according to Bill Dedman’s 2010 NBC News article and photo gallery exploring the family backstory and re-introducing Huguette to contemporary viewers.

When her mother passed away in 1963, Huguette isolated herself even more. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that a frail Huguette arrived at Doctors Hospital on the Upper East Side for treatment for skin cancer lesions that disfigured her face. Doctors removed them, but she opted to stay in the hospital.

She transferred to Beth Israel when it merged with Doctors Hospital…and never left.

Huguette’s reasons for leading much of her life in seclusion from the outside world remain a mystery. She left no diary or trail of clues. Maybe she was simply an introvert, or very much her publicity-shy mother’s daughter. Perhaps her reclusiveness was driven by grief after losing her mother, her father, and in 1919, her sister Andree (second photo on the left), who died at age 16 of meningitis.

What she did leave behind are her paintings. While her father was an avid art collector whose collection of 800 or so paintings, sculptures, and antiquities are now housed at the Corcoran Gallery, Huguette herself was an artist with a focus on portraits, landscapes, and still lifes.

The image above is a self-portrait of the heiress as a young woman. Holding her palette and standing before a canvas, she seems to see herself a serious artist. There’s a softness to her face and form that reveals a comfort in this space, most likely a studio in her Fifth Avenue apartment.

The second and third photos have self-evident titles. The first is “Scene From My Window, Night,” (above) which overlooks Fifth Avenue traffic, illumination from headlights and street lamps, and the modern skyscraper cityscape including the Empire State Building in the background.

“Scene From My Window—After the Snowstorm” (below) is a similar nocturne featuring soft lights, a snowy Central Park, and prewar apartment buildings like her own in the distance.

When she painted these and others isn’t known. Huguette did exhibit some of her work at the Corcoran Gallery in 1929, and I imagine these date to about that time. If she exhibited elsewhere, I couldn’t find any reference.

The last two paintings intrigue me. On one hand, they’re lovely landscapes showing what makes New York so enchanting: the lights, the snow, the skyline. They seem to have been painted by someone who took pleasure in this side of Manhattan and wanted to recreate it.

On the other hand, the window panes mimic jail bars. Was Huguette’s Fifth Avenue apartment a kind of prison for her? It’s impossible to know, but I prefer to think that this heiress, one of the last human links to the Gilded Age, put herself there by choice—and created a life behind these masonry and glass walls that gave her fulfillment.

[Top image: NBC News; second image: Wikipedia; fourth image: Indianapolis Star; fourth, fifth, and sixth images: Artnet.com]

Fifth Avenue’s most insane Gilded Age mansion

On the avenue dubbed the “Millionaire’s Colony” in the late 19th century thanks to its unbroken line of ornate mansions, one house stood out as the most insanely overdone: William A. Clark’s 7-story Beaux Arts monster at 77th Street.

Finished in 1907 after eight years in the making, “Clark’s Folly,” as it was called, broke all records. It cost $7 million to build, featured 121 rooms, and had its own rail line for the delivery of coal.

Amazingly, this monument to money was out of style by the time the final ornament was attached, and it only stood for 20 years.

William Clark (below, with his youngest two daughters) was a copper baron who made a fortune in mining and helped found Las Vegas.

He did a stint as senator from Montana in 1899. Forced to resign after a bribery scandal, the deep-pocketed titan who was highly disliked in Washington (even Mark Twain called him out for corruption, describing him as “the most disgusting creature that the republic has produced since Tweed’s time”) got himself elected again in 1901.

Meanwhile, he began building his mansion in New York. This captured the attention of city residents and the press, who estimated Clark’s worth at $150 million.

After Clark left Washington in 1907 with his new wife (a much younger woman who used to be his ward!) and two young daughters, he took up residence in his finally finished marble palace.

The amenities boggled the mind: repurposed pieces from a French chateau, oak panels from Sherwood Forest, Turkish baths, vaulted corridors lined with Gustavino tile, 11 elevators, a pipe organ, 20-plus servant rooms, and galleries for Clark’s extensive art collection.

By the time Clark and his family moved in, however, this Gilded Age “pile of granite,” as the New York Times called it, was out of fashion. Architectural critics loathed it.

How Clark felt about this is unclear, and in any case, in 1925, the 86-year-old died inside his citadel (at left, in 1927).

His art collection went to the Corcoran Gallery, and his wife and surviving daughter (her sister succumbed to meningitis in 1919) sold the mansion to an apartment house builder—then decamped for a full-floor apartment at 907 Fifth Avenue down the road.

There the two remained. Decades after his wife passed on in the 1960s, Clark’s daughter made headlines for an entirely different reason than her father did.

She is Huguette Clark (on the right side of the photo with her father and sister, about 1917), the reclusive heiress who died in 2011 at the age of 104 after many years of living in Beth Israel Hospital.

Huguette Clark left a $300 million fortune, and many mysteries.

Gilded Age excess may have gone out of style by 1910. But every financial titan or old money heir staked their claim to the Millionaire’s Colony in the late 19th century, intent on building a marble castle.

See the amazing photos of this palaces in Ephemeral New York’s upcoming book, The Gilded Age in New York, 1870-1910.

[Top image: Museum of the City of New York (MCNY), X2010.7.2.5452; second image: MCNY, X2010.7.2.21088; third image, via Shorpy; fourth image: MCNY/Phillip G. Bartlett, X2010.11.4911; Fifth image: Wikipedia]