Well-respected journalist Gordon delves deeply into the enigmatic life of Huguette Clark (1906-2011), daughter of the Gilded Age copper baron and U.S. senator William Andrews Clark. Using exclusive interviews with those closest to the heiress and unprecedented access to thousands of her personal papers, the author delivers a balanced account of the peculiar 104-year existence of the childless, well-heeled recluse. Gordon's extensive research provides an understanding of how a relatively healthy, elderly multimillionaire chose to live the last decades of her life in a hospital all the while gifting significant portions of her assets to hospital staff and mere acquaintances. Gordon discusses why Clark was so resistant to creating a will and only when well into her nineties acquiesced to signing one under pressure from her attorney and personal nurse. The author provides insights from members of several branches of the Clark family, many of whom challenged the heiress's estate for a piece of the fortune. Although Clark's strange life was extensively covered in Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell Jr.'s Empty Mansions (2013), Gordon provides a more involved examination of the personal relationships and eccentricities of the woman-especially in her final years. VERDICT An engrossing account for those interested in the lengths that family, professionals, and others will go to appropriate the wealth of a seemingly desolate heiress.-Mary Jennings, Camano Island Lib., WA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

AT the end, she loved watching SpongeBob and the Smurfs, bidding (by proxy) on antique French dolls and writing enormous checks to her nurse, sometimes two in one day. When she died in 2011 at 104, Huguette Clark was flush with property - apartments totaling 42 rooms on Fifth Avenue, a 23-acre estate in Santa Barbara and a 22-room mansion in New Canaan, Conn., that she had never bothered to furnish. (In 1961, her Santa Barbara caretaker quit because he was suffering from the isolation: Clark had reportedly not visited the place since 1953.) Yet despite such splendid real estate, Clark had chosen to spend the final two decades of her life in a series of modest hospital rooms attended by a small circle of extremely well-paid retainers, including her doctor, her nurse, her accountant and her lawyer. In case you missed it, the tale of this high society refugee and recluse went viral in 2010, a year after Bill Dedman, a contributor to NBC, discovered the real estate listing for Clark's New Canaan house. He was intrigued by town records that noted the house had been unoccupied since 1951, and drove over to investigate. The caretaker there said he wasn't even sure if Clark was still alive. And there were other vast and empty properties, albeit with full staffs, all meticulously maintained, though Huguette was living under a series of pseudonyms at Beth Israel Hospital. She may have lost much of her hearing, but she seemed in good physical shape. What was she doing there? Was she of sound mind? Were her keepers taking advantage of her? There were troubling accounts of outlandish gifts - the Israeli settlement where her lawyer's daughter lived received $1.85 million for a security system. Huguette had given her nurse property and cash worth over $30 million. Her accountant was a convicted sex offender. Was Beth Israel exploiting its wealthy tenant-patient too? It turned out she had been brought to Doctors Hospital on the Upper East Side in 1991, her face ravaged by untreated skin cancer. When the surgeries needed to repair her face were completed, Huguette, who had lived alone since her mother's death in 1963, refused to leave. Without health insurance, she was paying outright for her care, and she suggested to hospital executives that she would be generous if she was allowed to stay. In 2010, when Dedman produced a series of reports for NBCNews.com and the "Today" show about the reclusive heiress and her quirky ways, her carefully orchestrated private life began to unspool. Readers wrote to Dedman alleging elder abuse, and comparisons were made to the illtreatment of Brooke Astor. Clark's relatives began wondering in earnest about Tante Huguette. The Manhattan district attorney's office began an investigation. The tabloids spun out the tale. NY's HERMIT HEIRESS & HER SAD SECRETS, screamed a headline in The New York Post. But as Meryl Gordon reports, in scrupulous and sometimes confounding detail in "The Phantom of Fifth Avenue," Huguette wasn't a sad character. Odd, perhaps, stubborn, certainly, as she coyly ducked the blandishments of the executives at Beth Israel Hospital (which had acquired Doctors Hospital in the mid-'90s); they pressed her relentlessly for donations, even suggesting at one point that she buy the place. She certainly had the means to do so. Huguette was the heir to an immense copper fortune, the youngest child of William Andrews Clark, a self-made prospector, copper-mine owner, railroad magnate and Montana senator, whose wealth rivaled that of John D. Rockefeller and about whom Mark Twain once wrote, "He is as rotten a human being as can ever be found anywhere under the flag." (Clark left the Senate when it was discovered he'd bribed his way there - and then he got himself re-elected to the same seat.) Huguette was the child of his second wife, Anna, who was 39 years his junior and his teenage ward. He died in 1925, when he was 86 and Huguette just 18. Anna died in 1963. In fact, all of Huguette's closest relatives - her parents and her six siblings - had predeceased her, one in the 19th century. She had been married, but the relationship had barely lasted a year, and the couple had no children. Huguette's long, slow retreat may have begun with her divorce (gossip columnists of the time, including Cholly Knickerbocker, were fond of speculating, sometimes cruelly, about her aversion to the limelight). She nevertheless seemed to relish her cloistered, cultured life, surrounded by Impressionist paintings, French antiques and priceless musical instruments, including three Stradivarius violins (one of these, La Pucelle - "the Virgin" - was bought in 1955 and sold in 2001 for $6 million, to raise cash for her escalating gift-giving). She commissioned elaborate dollhouses and Japanese miniatures. She had a close circle of friends, though the nature of those relationships was largely epistolary or conducted on the phone. When later pressed, Huguette's pen and phone pals couldn't quite remember the last time they'd seen her. Nineteen fifty-three? Perhaps in the late 1960s? Huguette had a habit of declining lunch invitations, saying she had "a little cold." One niece recalled an annual ritual, begun in 1982, of standing on the street corner in front of 907 Fifth Avenue and waving up at the penthouse windows. It's not clear that Huguette waved back. She was also squeamish about making a will, a duty she avoided until 2005, when, as it happens, she made two. The first left most of her $300 million estate to her Clark relatives, and $5 million to her nurse. The second, executed six weeks later, divvied up her property, cash and possessions among those who had cared for her in the last decades of her life: her nurse, her doctor, her lawyer, her accountant, an assistant, a godchild and Beth Israel Hospital. Her Santa Barbara estate would become a foundation for the arts. "I intentionally make no provision in this my Last Will Testament for any members of my family, whether on my paternal or maternal side, having had minimal contacts with them over the years," Huguette wrote. "The persons and institution named herein as beneficiaries of my Estate are the true objects of my bounty." Unfortunately for Huguette, three of her beneficiaries - her lawyer, accountant and nurse - may have remained in the room during her signing, an ethical no-no. Nineteen Clark descendants filed a lawsuit against the final will, while a public administrator charged that Huguette's circle had abused her trust, demanding a clawback of millions of dollars' worth of gifts. GORDON'S BOOK FOLLOWS Dedman's own account by about eight months. Dedman's "Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune," published last September and co-written with Paul Clark Newell Jr., a cousin of Huguette's and one of her many phone correspondents, became an immediate best seller. Dedman's reporting concluded in July 2013, when the case against the two wills had been scheduled for a September trial. Gordon's later deadline allows her to note its settlement. Who won? The lawyers, mostly, who among themselves billed nearly $40 million. Is there room for more Huguetteabilia? Sure, though Gordon - a contributor to Vanity Fair and the author of "Mrs. Astor Regrets: The Hidden Betrayals of a Family Beyond Reproach" - is not as graceful an escort into Huguette's life as her predecessor. (It was Gordon's publisher who assigned her the Huguette beat.) Huguette was a hoarder, who over the course of her very long life saved everything, even the care labels of her cashmere sweaters; with so much source material and so many litigants and principals so seemingly eager to be interviewed, you can sympathize with a reporter's impulse to include it all. (In their postscripts, both Dedman and Gordon note personal interviews with more than a hundred people, and access to over 20,000 documents.) Gordon is certainly indefatigable, conscientious to a fault about acknowledging sources and printing quotes or attributions in occasionally numbing detail. She is prone to descriptive hyphenates like "Lucy-in-the-sky-with-diamonds-high" and "dazzling daughter-of-a-robber-baron spoils" and other linguistic mouthfuls. But like Dedman, she is a tender and cleareyed biographer; "The Phantom of Fifth Avenue" teases out the ways in which some human relationships, at their core, may always be transactional. PEN ELOPE GREEN is a reporter for the Home section of The Times.

Gordon (Mrs. Astor Regrets, 2008) attempts to unlock the secret life of heiress Huguette Clark. When the fabulously wealthy Clark, the daughter of copper magnate William Andrews Clark, died in 2011 at the age of 104, she had not been seen in public for years. Owning and staffing luxury homes and properties on both coasts, she chose to live out her final 20 years in hospitals, despite the fact that she was in relatively good health. Intrigued by what turned a former socialite into a publicity-shy recluse, Gordon digs through journals, correspondence, and memorabilia, peeling away the poor little rich girl persona that captured the collective imagination of the public. While it is difficult to fully understand Clark's unusual lifestyle choices, a well-rounded portrait of an eccentric and talented woman who chose to go her own way eventually emerges. A perfect choice for the Grey Gardens set.--Flanagan, Margaret Copyright 2014 Booklist

Bestselling author Gordon (Mrs. Astor Regrets) takes on another heiress, the notorious recluse Huguette Clark, as the subject of her latest investigation into the world of New York's wealthiest. Clark was the youngest daughter of Montana robber baron William Andrews Clark, who made his fortune in copper and drew decades of media frenzy for his cash-fueled Senatorial races, fondness for fine art, and gaudy Fifth Avenue mansion. Meticulously researched, Gordon's account catalogues every juicy detail and eccentricity amassed over a century: Clark's years at the elite Spence School, under the Miss Spence; her painting lessons and prolonged flirtation with the famed Dutch portrait painter Tade Styke; her refusal, in the wake of her mother's death, to step outside of her Fifth Avenue apartments for just shy of two decades. Most headline-worthy of all were Clark's final years, spent (despite her net worth and supposed good health), in shabby Beth Israel Hospital quarters, avoiding her descendants and bestowing millions on her nurses, doctors, lawyer and accountant. Unsurprisingly, a massive money-grab unfolded in the wake of her death. But did Clark have diagnosable neuroses? Did she sit in her lonely rooms daydreaming about sex, family, fresh air, and every other characteristic of the normal life she denied herself? Readers who salivated over headlines like "Poor Little Rich Girl's Sad Life" (Courier-Mail) and "America's Antisocial Socialite" (Scottish Express) will be left wanting more. Yet this very unwillingness to speculate-Gordon's strict adherence to primary documents and witness interviews-makes for a rigorous, authoritative account of a 20th century enigma. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.