Empty Mansions

said she had turned down $100 million some years back. The lush estate was called Bellosguardo, meaning “beautiful lookout.”According to the Internet chatter, Huguette had not been seen there in at least fifty years, but the 21,666-square-foot mansion was immaculately kept, with 1930s sedans still in the garage, and the table set just in case the owner should visit.
    Though I didn’t put much stock in the tale, my curiosity was piqued. Out in Santa Barbara for a business trip a while later, I tried to visit Bellosguardo. The property is hidden on a bluff, separated by a high wall from the Santa Barbara Cemetery, allowing even the dead barely a glimpse of the great house. The back gate to Bellosguardo was open, however, so I walked up the serpentine driveway. At the top of the hill, several gardeners were at work. The main house was out of sight behind a stand of trees. Suddenly, a golf cart barreled toward me, driven by a sturdy man in his fifties giving instructions on a walkie-talkie. He identified himself as the estate manager, C. John Douglas III, and pointed out the half dozen No Trespassing signs. As he sent me back down the driveway, mentioning something about the police, he divulged only two facts: He had worked for “Mrs. Clark” for more than twenty-five years, and he had never met her.
    Talking through the locked gate, Douglas was in no mood to help solve a mystery. “I’m just sorry,” he said dismissively, “that this is what you have to do to put food on the table for your children.”
    My family was indeed worrying a bit about curiosity getting the best of me. After all, my wife and I did meet during a prison riot, two journalists breaking
into
the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary to get a better view of the hostages. After I told my brother, a movie buff, about the empty mansions and the search for their mysterious owner, he sent an email with a whispered word: “Rosebud.”
    Sure, make fun. But where was Huguette Clark? Where did these vast sums of money come from, and why were they being wasted?
    • • •
    Public records led me to a third residence. Huguette Clark owned not one but three apartments in a classic limestone building in New York City, at 907 Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park at Seventy-Second Street. It’s a neighborhood of legend and fantasy, near the statue of Alice in Wonderland and the pond where the boy-mouse Stuart Little raced sailboats. Yes, sir, said No. 907’s uniformed doorman, in his Russian accent, this is “Madame Clark’s building.” But no, he hadn’t seen Madame or any other Clarks for about twenty years, although he had carried groceries for Martha Stewart, who had a pied-à-terre in the same building. He shrugged, as if to say that doormen see a lot of strange things.
    Neighbors and real estate agents filled in a few details. Huguette Clark’s apartments took up the entire eighth floor of the building and half the twelfth, or top floor, for a grand total of forty-two rooms and fifteen thousand square feet on Fifth Avenue, the most fashionable street in the most expensive city in America. Her bill from the co-op board for taxes and maintenance was $342,000 a year, or $28,500 a month. Although they’d never seen Huguette Clark, neighbors said they’d heard that her apartments were filled with an amazing collection of dolls and dollhouses. And paintings, too, even a Monet. One neighbor let me into the quiet elevator lobby of Huguette’s eighth floor, where rolls of surplus carpet were stored. I rang the buzzer, and no one answered. It didn’t seem like a place where anyone would keep a Monet.
    So this Huguette Clark owned homes altogether nearly the size of the White House. Where on earth did she reside? And why did she keep paying for this fabulous real estate if she wasn’t using it? If I couldn’t find out
where
Huguette was, then perhaps I could at least discover
who
she was.
    • • •
    It turned out that I had wandered through a portal into America’s past. Long past. Huguette Clark, then 103 years old, was the heiress to one ofAmerica’s greatest fortunes, dug out of the copper mines of Montana and Arizona, the copper that carried electricity to the world. Her father, William Andrews Clark, sounded like the embodiment of the American dream: a Pennsylvania farm boy born in a log cabin, a prospector for gold, a banker, and a U.S. senator from Montana. W. A. Clark was also a railroad baron, connecting the transcontinental lines to