Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Hugette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell Jr.

from goodreads

3 stars

Have you ever looked at houses or buildings and wondered what it's like inside? I have been doing that for as long as I can remember. Growing up I had a few houses that I would pass that I always tried to envision what it would be like inside or what it would be like living there. My neighbour's house went up for sale recently and I waited with bated breath for the listing to be put up on realtor.ca so I could look at the inside. (I thought going to the open house might be a bit too creepy.)

I know I am not the only person with this curiosity of what goes on behind closed doors. Many cities now have an open door day where different businesses or unique houses open their doors for the public to go in and view the inside. This really has been going on for centuries as even the great heroine Elizabeth Bennett went voyeuring around Pemberley. Who knows what our fascination with houses is. I guess it is the whole seeing how the others live thing. It could be our whole comparing nature. All I know it is a societal quirk that will most likely not go away anytime soon.

Synopsis

Hugette Clark is the heiress to a large fortune yet was most mysterious. Many of her employees had never met her. This book looks at her life, her properties and what she did with her wealth.

My Thoughts

I went into this book with no preconceived notions. I had no idea who she was or who her father even was. For being one of the wealthiest men in the U.S.A. and having a county in Nevada named after him, I had no idea he even exsisted. The name Rockerfeller I have heard of but Clark, nope.

Hugette came across as being very generous and kind hearted but very eccentric. She was one who seemed to live with her heart and not so much with her head. She was someone who seemed to like being able to help others out and was one who lived with money just always being available (which in her case it was). It was crazy to hear some of the amounts of money she put towards her dolls. And how exacting all her miniatures had to be. She was definitely some one with a great eye for detail.

Hugette was very reclusive. It would have been interesting to know if this was because of phobias or if she was just content with her own company or if her father instilled a fear of other people and how they would only like her for her money and not her.

I loved the pictures in the book. Hugette's art work was beautiful.

If you are reading this book you will definitely get some helpful advice from it. The first is watch out for taxes, they are going to get you. The amounts she had to pay on property taxes each year alone was insane. But in the U.S.A. there is also a gift tax, so anytime she gave large sums of money to friends or employees as a gift she had to pay tax on that amount and man... that came to a hefty bill too. The second is make sure you have a will, don't wait until you are old and feeble. That will give your crazy family an in to being able to contest it. Her family was a bit nuts. Those people didn't even have a relationship with her yet all of the sudden showed care and concern as she went into her centennial year.

Near the end of the book a lot of focus goes onto her care in the hospital where she lived out the rest of her life (for like 10 years of it). She had a nurse that was there every day for over 12 hrs a day. Yes, that woman should have been well compensated and there was probably genuine love and trust between them. But okey smokes. The amount of money Hugette gave her nurse and the nurse's family. It seems sort of suspicious. Perhaps nothing nefarious was going on but, perception needs to be taken into account and to me, well the jury is still out on it.

All in all this was an interesting book about an eccentric recluse. There were parts that were thoroughly riveting. There were parts that were down right dull. But this was a great view into someone's life. Though she lived differently than most would choose to, especially given her financial status, she was not portrayed as a weirdo or as someone who was not all there. The author portrayed her as simply a woman, who had an interesting upbringing, an interesting time in her adulthood and has someone who lived as she wanted to live. And for that lack of judgement I thank the author.