“Recluse Heiress” Huguette Clark’s Fascinating Obituary

“Mrs. Clark was from her 30s onward an antisocial socialite, an enigmatic figure whose closest companions were her mother and her dolls.” The whole thing is incredible, but if you’re stingy with NYT pageviews, a few of the best parts are below. (Her $24 million Connecticut mansion is also for sale, on a website with an incongruously chipper auto-soundtrack.)

At Huguette’s birth, her mother was 28, her father 67. …

In 1928, at 22, she married William MacDonald Gower, the son of a business associate of her father’s. The union lasted nine months: she charged desertion; he maintained the marriage was unconsummated …

By the late 1930s, Mrs. Clark had disappeared from the society pages. Most if not all of her siblings had died; she lived with her mother at 907 Fifth Avenue, painting and playing the harp. Her mother died there in 1963.

For the quarter-century that followed, Mrs. Clark lived in the apartment in near solitude, amid a profusion of dollhouses and their occupants. She ate austere lunches of crackers and sardines and watched television, most avidly “The Flintstones.” A housekeeper kept the dolls’ dresses impeccably ironed. …

By all accounts of sound body and mind till nearly the end of her life, Mrs. Clark had lived, apparently by choice, cloistered in New York hospitals since the late 1980s. There, first in Doctors Hospital and later at Beth Israel, she was reported to have lived under a series of pseudonyms. …

In the hospitals, Mrs. Clark, whose given name is pronounced hyoo-GETT, was attended by round-the-clock private aides and surrounded by the fine French dolls she had collected since she was a girl.

And where will the dolls go now? Adam Martin at The Atlantic guesses they might be donated to the New York Toy Museum or the Princeton Doll and Toy Museum, although it’s also possible some will inexplicably be given to women who work on websites.