The Phantom of Fifth Avenue ─ The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark

Born in 1906, Huguette Clark grew up in her family's 121-room Beaux Arts mansion in New York and was one of the leading celebrities of her day. Her father William Andrews Clark, was a copper magnate, the second richest man in American, and not above bribing his way into the Senate.
Huguette attended the coronation of King George V. And at twenty-two with a personal fortune of $50 million to her name, she married a Princeton man and childhood friend William MacDonald Gower. Two-years later the couple divorced. After a series of failed romances, Huguette began to withdraw from society--first living with her mother in a kind of Grey Gardens isolation then as a modern-day Miss Havisham, spending her days in a vast apartment overlooking Central Park, eating crackers and watching The Flintstones with only servants for company.
All her money and all her real estate could not protect her in her later life from being manipulated by shady hangers-on and hospitals that were only too happy to admit (and bill) a healthy woman. But what happened to Huguette that turned a vivacious, young socialite into a recluse? And what was her life like inside that gilded, copper cage?

Meryl Gordon is the author of Mrs. Astor Regrets: The Hidden Betrayals of a Family Beyond Reproach. She is an award-winning journalist whose articles have appeared inVanity Fair, the New York Times, and New York Magazine, and the director of Magazine Writing at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. A native of Rochester, New York, she lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side with her husband, Walter Shapiro.