‘Though no work of non-fiction can pretend to map anyone’s interior terrain,’ they write in their introduction, ‘the Clarks have left enough bread crumbs to lead us back into their fairy-tale world. From the early 1950s to 1991, she lived in isolation in her apartment. Together they embarked on Clark and her family’s extraordinary and almost unknown story. Dedman believes Huguette Clark bought the New Canaan home in 1951, in part, as a bomb shelter in case of a Cold War attack. Dedman has collaborated with Huguettes cousin, Paul Clark Newell, Jr., one of the few relatives to have had frequent conversations with her, to tell a fairy tale in reverse: the bright, talented daughter who is born into an almost royal family of amazing wealth and. Dedman’s researches brought him into contact with Paul Newell, a younger cousin of Clark (but not in line to inherit anything from her) with an interest in family history who had never met Clark but who’d been speaking to her on the telephone since 1994. Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune is a non-fiction book by the American authors Bill Dedman. At its heart is a reclusive 104-year-old heiress named Huguette Clark. A year later she would die, a fortnight short of her 105th birthday another year after that, nineteen of her relatives, with whom she had had barely any contact during her lifetime, went to court to claim their share of her $300 million fortune. In 'The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune,' by NBC News investigative reporter Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell Jr., a distant relative, the life of.

Bill Dedman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, came across the story of reclusive heiress Huguette Clark in 2010. It might seem unusual for an exhaustively researched and scrupulously objective biographical work to be dedicated to its subject, but Empty Mansions is an extremely unusual book.

The mysterious life of huguette clark