Monday, November 21, 2011

Monday Morning Link: Huguette Clark

Buckle up butter beans because Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bill Dedman filed his latest installment on MSNBC.com regarding the saga of wickedly rich and recently deceased copper heiress, doll collector and hardcore recluse Huguette Clark. And, children, it is a doozy.

Mister Dedman combs through, chronicles and details court documents filed in relation to the legal battle brewing over the dispensation of Miz Clark's approximately $400,000,000 fortune. The documents (and Mister Dedman's report) shed a bit of light on just how Miz Clark's closest advisers spent her money in the last years of her isolated life.

With no children or close relatives, the aged heiress communicated with almost no one the last 20 or 25 years of  besides a small coterie of assistants, doctors, nurses, an attorney (Wallace "Wally" Bock) and an accountant (Irving Kamsler), all of whom benefited financially from Miz Clark's largess and the latter two under criminal investigation for possible misuse and misappropriation of Miz Clark's fortune.

Despite owning a massive ocean front estate in Santa Barbara, CA with a 23,000 square foot stone mansion (Bellosguardo, pictured above), a sprawling 52-acre spread in New Canaan, CT (in which she reportedly never slept even a single night), and two vast apartments on two different floors in the same Fifth Avenue building where Martha Stewart has long maintained a pied-a-terre, Miz Clark lived the last 22 years of her life in an unmarked hospital rooms. She died in May 2011 at Beth Israel Medical Center in Lower Manhattan. She was 104 years old.

photo: Bing



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