A Montana Mystery: Huguette Clark and 7,364 Hospital Days

Born to the second wealthiest man in the United States, Huguette Clark disappeared for decades into her vast estates, strange obsessions, and, finally, years in the hospital. Michael Gross on a new book that details her family history—and the story of her 7,364 hospital days before she died.

Huguette Clark was 103 years old in February 2010, when a photo essay published on MSNBC.com by a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, Bill Dedman, made her famous for the second time in an otherwise mostly unremarkable life. Searching to buy a home for his family, Dedman stumbled upon a mystery: Clark, who’d been much publicized in the 1920s as the debutante daughter of America’s second-richest man, owned sprawling estates in California and Connecticut and several huge Fifth Avenue apartments, spent small fortunes to maintain them, but didn’t occupy any of them. Though presumed to be living, her whereabouts were unknown—she’d been a recluse since her mother died in 1963. Another mystery was the fate of the nine-figure fortune they’d inherited from Huguette’s father, William A. Clark, a dimly remembered copper baron and, briefly, a United States senator from Montana.

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