Empty Mansions (55 page)

Just as her mother bought a California ranch as a refuge during World War II, Huguette during the Cold War bought this Connecticut retreat, Le Beau Château, on fifty-two acres in New Canaan.
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It sat empty for more than sixty years, with vines eventually growing through the shutters outside the kitchen windows. When she finally offered it for sale, it led to the disclosure of her reclusive life.
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Huguette Clark’s dear Frenchman and childhood friend, Etienne de Villermont, shown here in France, brought his daughter, Marie-Christine, to visit Huguette in New York. The girl’s toy donkey, Cadichon, was one of many gifts she received from Huguette. Etienne and Huguette corresponded for decades, and he visited her many times, even with his wife. He wrote to her in 1966: “In spite of our separate lives, my heart always beats with you. The years will always live …”
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On a single day in 1993, when Huguette was eighty-six, she bought these two French dolls from the late 1800s (a Jumeau, top, and a Thuillier). She paid nearly $30,000 for the pair, but had authorized her attorney to bid up to $135,000. She was nearly always the highest bidder.
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Huguette designed and commissioned many tabletop reproductions of Japanese buildings: castles, tearooms, houses, temples. “She was just a delightful person,” said Caterina Marsh, her go-between with the artists in Japan. “She developed an incredible knowledge about the art and culture of Japan. It was astonishing what she knew, all the legends and folklore. To me, she was the last of an era.”
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Trying to count all of Huguette’s dolls in her three apartments, her personal assistant came up with 1,157, including more than 600 antique Japanese dolls. She loved the tiny hina dolls, which in Japan are displayed during a festival every March. “They are hard to get,” she said. “They are very lovely dolls, you know.”
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A dedicated amateur photographer with a collection of high-end cameras, Huguette in her middle years posed regularly for simple self-portraits taken with her Polaroid instant cameras. Regularly on Easter and Christmas, she would pose for such snapshots in her apartment on Fifth Avenue
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After moving into a hospital in 1991, Huguette spent $445,893 for a French company to make these reproductions of the antique furniture that was upstairs in her late mother’s former bedroom. If you walked into Huguette’s bedroom in Apartment 8W, or her mother’s in 12W, you would have had a hard time telling the difference. She never returned to this room or saw any of this furniture, except in photos.
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One of three $5 million checks that Huguette wrote to her private-duty nurse,
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Hadassah Peri, who received more than $31 million from her, not counting millions more in her will. Hadassah worked for Huguette for twenty years, including every day for nearly a decade. She said, “I give my life to Madame.”
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