This Is So Sad ...
Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2012 10:35 am
..yet so intriguing that I just have to find out more!
Reclusive American heiress Huguette Clark died last year, just a few days shy of her 105th birthday. She was born in Edwardian Paris, the daughter of Senator William A. Clark, a copper mining tycoon once the second-richest man in the United States (after Rockefeller, of course).
A socialite party girl in her younger days, she became a recluse after a brief marriage to the son of one of her father’s business associates. This photograph, taken on August 11th, 1930, the day her divorce became final, is the last known taken of her.
She refused to be photographed and, according to The New York Times, spent nearly quarter of a century at a Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan, alone except for her growing doll collection, playing the harp, eating sardines, and watching Flintstones cartoons. (AFP)
Madame Clark, as she liked to be called, left behind three magnificent multi-million-dollar estates - one in Santa Barbara on a bluff overlooking the Pacific, a castle in the Connecticut countryside, and a 42-room apartment on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan where her epic collection of antique French dolls, her only companions, were kept.
The houses have all been well maintained over the years, even though their owner hadn’t set foot in them for decades. The last 22 years of her life were spent living in a hospital room in New York under an assumed name, “Harriet Chase.” She was buried at the family mausoleum in the Bronx, with only the funeral home employees to say goodbye.
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Reclusive American heiress Huguette Clark died last year, just a few days shy of her 105th birthday. She was born in Edwardian Paris, the daughter of Senator William A. Clark, a copper mining tycoon once the second-richest man in the United States (after Rockefeller, of course).
A socialite party girl in her younger days, she became a recluse after a brief marriage to the son of one of her father’s business associates. This photograph, taken on August 11th, 1930, the day her divorce became final, is the last known taken of her.
She refused to be photographed and, according to The New York Times, spent nearly quarter of a century at a Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan, alone except for her growing doll collection, playing the harp, eating sardines, and watching Flintstones cartoons. (AFP)
Madame Clark, as she liked to be called, left behind three magnificent multi-million-dollar estates - one in Santa Barbara on a bluff overlooking the Pacific, a castle in the Connecticut countryside, and a 42-room apartment on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan where her epic collection of antique French dolls, her only companions, were kept.
The houses have all been well maintained over the years, even though their owner hadn’t set foot in them for decades. The last 22 years of her life were spent living in a hospital room in New York under an assumed name, “Harriet Chase.” She was buried at the family mausoleum in the Bronx, with only the funeral home employees to say goodbye.
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