She even preferred speaking French to her few friends and associates, hoping to hide her personal life as much as possible. Huguette’s distrust of outsiders grew, and she became even more reclusive, worried that people were only after her money. Even her 1933 Chrysler Royal Eight convertible and sleek black 1933 Cadillac limousine, both sporting 1949 license plates, were covered in cloth they would sit parked in the garage for decades. Eventually, they covered the furniture and artwork in sheets linens were wrapped in paper. The caretakers who lived on the estate followed Huguette’s request, though she never visited again. When her mother died in 1963, Huguette gave her staff a standing order: Bellosguardo should remain exactly as it was, frozen in time. “Huguette had a fairy-tale checkbook, one that was refilled whenever it ran out of magic beans,” explained Bill Dedman, who profiled Clark in his best-selling book, Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune.īut despite her incredible wealth-when she died, her fortune was over $300 million-Huguette had few friends and was “skittish around strangers.” She spent much of her time at Bellosguardo painting alone in her artist’s studio. Huguette moved back in with her mother, and though the pair spent most of their time at their primary residence on Fifth Avenue in New York City, Bellosguardo was their getaway of choice. After just one year, she divorced her husband, William MacDonald Gower, in 1930. Huguette married, but the romance was short-lived. Featuring 27 rooms, including a music room reverberating with Huguette’s two grand pianos and harp and a library packed with leather-bound books, the lavish interior dazzles with intricately carved wood accents, ornately painted ceilings, and sparkling crystal chandeliers. (Johnson is the same architect who designed another contested area property, the Santa Barbara Biltmore). Pasadena-based architect Reginald Johnson designed Bellosguardo with the 18th-century French Riviera in mind. Huguette, his youngest child, later received a bonus inheritance: Bellosguardo, “beautiful lookout,” a gem of a mansion built by her mother, Anna Clark, in 1936. When he died in March 1925, his millions were divided equally among his five surviving children. Known as the “Copper King,” he owned copper mines, electric power companies, newspapers, and railroad lines. Clark (1839–1925), had already amassed his incredible fortune. When Huguette Marcelle Clark was born on June 9, 1906, in Paris, France, her father, William A. In 2023, however, the mansion reopened its grand doors to visitors looking to learn more about Huguette, a woman who embodied the sad little rich girl stereotype when she gave up on public life and became a storied recluse. But despite her seemingly endless fortune, she spent the last 20 years of her life as a hermit, choosing to live in a private hospital instead of in her magnificent mansions.Ĭlark’s opulent, 21,000-square-foot summer mansion, which sits atop one a prime slice of California real estate–a bluff overlooking East Beach in Santa Barbara–sat untouched, frozen in time, since the day Clark last visited in 1953. To live happily, live hidden.The daughter of one of the wealthiest magnates of the Gilded Age, she was born into unimaginable wealth. Heiress, painter, and philanthropist Huguette Clark lived the popular French saying: Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés.
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