Huguette Clark

Fun Facts

Clark was a musician and painter, and in 1929 exhibited seven of her own paintings at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, located in Washington, D.C. She possessed an enthusiasm for the arts and was an avid collector of visual art, as well as antique toys and dolls. She reportedly had a very small group of friends and was “skittish around strangers,” spending much of her time in private, rarely leaving her residence. She occasionally attended Christian Dior fashion shows in New York City, but only to find inspiration for clothing to dress her dolls.

She had a ticket on the Titanic for its return trip to Europe, which never happened.

In December 1927, Clark announced her engagement to law student William MacDonald Gower, a Princeton University graduate who was a son of one of her father’s business associates, William B. Gower. The two married on August 18, 1928, at Bellosguardo, her family’s 23-acre estate on the Pacific Coast in Santa Barbara, California. The same year, Clark agreed to donate $50,000 (equivalent to $916,000 in today’s dollars) to excavate a salt pond and create an artificial freshwater lake across from Bellosguardo. She stipulated that the facility would be named the Andrée Clark Bird Refuge, after her sister, who had died of meningitis. Clark and Gower separated in 1929, one year after their marriage, and divorced in Reno, Nevada, on August 11, 1930.

In 1952, she purchased a 52-acre estate in New Canaan, Connecticut, referred to as Le Beau Chateau. After the death of her mother in 1963, she became even more reclusive. Her mother’s death left Clark the sole owner of Bellosguardo, which she had not visited since the 1950s. Despite her lack of visitation, Bellosguardo continued to be maintained throughout Clark’s life for a total cost of $40,000 per month.

As she aged, Clark began to develop a distrust of outsiders, including her family, because she worried they were after her money. She preferred to conduct all of her conversations in French so that others were unlikely to understand the discussion. By 1991, Clark had grown frail and had numerous cancerous lesions that disfigured her face, making it difficult for her to see or eat. On March 26 that year, she was admitted to the Upper East Side’s Doctors Hospital for treatment.

Following her successful treatment, Clark remained a resident of the hospital for the rest of her life. Though initially a resident of Doctors Hospital, she later transferred to Beth Israel Medical Center following the merger of the two hospitals. Her doctor, Henry Singman, “had strongly urged that she go home,” but Clark was “perfectly happy, content, to remain in the situation she was in.” She had regular visitation from private nurses and medical staff throughout the day and was provided meals in the hospital, where her 11th-floor room overlooked Central Park. Clark paid a daily sum of $829 to stay in the hospital. There, hospital officials recalled her eccentric interests, noting that she would often change conversational topics to cartoons such as The Smurfs and The Flintstones.