On June 9, 1906, in a fashionable Paris apartment on Avenue Victor Hugo, Anna Eugenia Clark, twenty-eight, gave birth to a daughter. The attending physician announced the birth of a girl. Standing by the window in his morning coat was William Andrews Clark, sixty-seven, one of the wealthiest men in America. The child was named Huguette Marcelle Clark.

The telegrams went out within the hour. The New York Times noted the birth of a daughter to Senator W. A. Clark, traveling abroad with his wife.

The Butte Miner, Clark’s own newspaper, welcomed the new daughter of the Copper King. Gifts arrived within days: a christening gown from the House of Worth, a diamond bracelet from the widow of Marcus Daly, Clark’s greatest rival, gold serving pieces from Mrs. J. P.

Morgan, roses from the Vanderbilts, a music box from the Rockefellers, and a check for ten thousand dollars from Andrew Carnegie for the child’s education fund. The total value of gifts in the first month reached forty-five thousand dollars. This child was born into a fortune estimated at two hundred million dollars, a sum equivalent to the entire gross domestic product of Belgium. The fortune had been built over four decades from copper mining in Butte, Montana, and Jerome, Arizona, from railroads, newspapers, banks, and real estate speculation that created the town of Las Vegas.

William Clark had started with nothing, born in a log cabin in Pennsylvania, traveling west during the gold rush, and discovering that the real money was not in mining but in supplying miners. He drove mule trains to boomtowns, opened a bank, repossessed mining claims when borrowers defaulted, and found copper at precisely the moment the Second Industrial Revolution demanded it for electrical wiring. By the time Huguette was born, he was one of the three Copper Kings of Butte. Huguette spent her first five years in Paris, learning French before English, hearing her mother practice the harp, playing with her sister Andrée, four years older and devoted to her.

Then the family moved permanently to New York. William Clark had completed his masterpiece: 962 Fifth Avenue, the largest private residence ever built in Manhattan. Commissioned in 1897 and fourteen years in construction, it contained 121 rooms, 31 bathrooms, and nine stories. It cost seven million dollars.

Clark purchased an entire quarry in New Hampshire just to source the granite for the facade, then built a temporary railroad to transport it. The house rose from a Turkish bath below ground to laundry rooms above, with four art galleries, a swimming pool, a concealed garage, and an underground railroad siding for coal delivery. The household employed forty-seven staff members, and the annual operating budget was three hundred thousand dollars. Huguette attended the Spence School, where her classmates were daughters of Vanderbilts, Astors, and Whitneys.

She was a good student, quiet and shy, artistic. She drew constantly, studied the violin, and took harp lessons at home. By age ten she owned over a hundred dolls, each named, each with stories she created. She painted watercolors, and her mother framed them.

She was being groomed to be a proper society lady, to marry well, to ornament a wealthy household. But she was also being isolated, sheltered from ordinary life in ways that would damage her ability to function in the world. She never rode a streetcar, never handled money, never made an independent decision. In August 1919, at the family’s summer home in Rangeley Lake, Maine, Andrée, age sixteen, fell suddenly ill with cerebrospinal meningitis.

William Clark was in Montana on business; he raced back by private railcar but did not arrive in time. Andrée died one week before her seventeenth birthday, with her mother at her bedside and Huguette, age thirteen, in the next room. The loss devastated the family. Anna Clark collapsed and wore black for a year.

William Clark withdrew from public life. Huguette lost her only sibling, the only person who truly understood what it meant to be a Clark daughter. After Andrée’s death, she became more withdrawn, more isolated, more attached to her dolls and her art. William Clark died of pneumonia on March 2, 1925, at age eighty-six.

His estate was valued at three hundred million dollars. Eighteen-year-old Huguette inherited approximately fifty million dollars plus partial ownership of the twenty-three-acre Santa Barbara estate called Bellosguardo. She was one of the wealthiest young women in America and one of the most unprepared for independence. The mansion at 962 Fifth Avenue became impossible to maintain, and the property was sold in 1927 for three million dollars.

The new owner demolished it immediately. The greatest mansion in Manhattan had survived less than twenty years. Huguette and her mother moved into 907 Fifth Avenue, renting an entire floor of the most expensive apartment building in New York. At her mother’s insistence, Huguette entered society reluctantly.

She was described as petite, dark-haired, soft-spoken, accomplished, and wealthy beyond imagination. Eligible bachelors circled, and Anna Clark screened them carefully. In December 1927, Huguette announced her engagement to William McDonald Gower, a law student from a respectable family. The wedding took place in August 1928 at Bellosguardo, with about one hundred guests and no press allowed.

In the wedding photographs, she looked terrified, not joyful. The marriage lasted one year. They separated in 1929, and the divorce was finalized in Reno on August 11, 1930. The official grounds were abandonment; court records documented she refused physical intimacy and showed no interest in being a wife.

The truth was simpler: Huguette had never wanted to marry. After the divorce, she withdrew completely. She declined all invitations, stopped attending social functions, and expanded her apartments at 907 Fifth Avenue until she occupied forty-two rooms. She filled them with her collection: hundreds of dolls, elaborate dollhouses, art supplies, musical instruments.

She painted constantly and practiced daily. She saw almost no one. Her mother visited daily. A few old friends came occasionally.

That was all. She never married again, never had children, never traveled, never ventured far from her apartments. The decades passed. The Depression devastated millions; Huguette remained insulated and continued buying dolls.

Her half-brothers and half-sisters died one by one. In the 1940s she suffered a nervous breakdown, emerging even more withdrawn than before. She maintained her Santa Barbara estate with full-time staff but never stayed overnight. She purchased Le Beau Chateau, a twenty-two-room mansion in Connecticut with forty-two acres, and never spent a single night there in sixty years.

When Anna Clark died, Huguette’s seclusion became total. She communicated only with staff by telephone, speaking weekly to her accountant and monthly to her attorney, never seeing either face to face. In March 1991, at age eighty-four, she developed basal cell carcinomas on her face. The lesions were removed successfully at Doctors Hospital, and she recovered fully.

The doctors expected to discharge her. She refused to leave. The hospital room felt safer than her apartment. She offered to pay, and she could afford it indefinitely.

She had over three hundred million dollars. She stayed at Doctors Hospital for several years, then transferred when the hospital merged with Beth Israel Medical Center. She remained in the hospital for twenty years, seven thousand three hundred sixty-four nights, paying approximately five hundred thousand dollars per year for a room she chose to occupy. She hired private duty nurses for round-the-clock coverage.

The nurses became her companions, her contacts with the world. She gave them lavish gifts. One nurse, Hadassah Peri, received gifts totaling over thirty million dollars, including a Park Avenue apartment, cars, cash, jewelry, a Stradivarius violin, and a Cézanne painting. Her doctor received nearly nine hundred thousand dollars in gifts; another doctor received over a million.

Her attorney received a million and a half, including money to build a bomb shelter in an Israeli settlement. Everyone with access to Huguette received gifts, large and inappropriate gifts that raised serious questions about exploitation of an isolated elderly woman. But Huguette seemed content. She watched television, spoke to her nurses, ordered dolls from Japan by phone, and maintained her properties from her hospital bed.

She never allowed photographs and used fake names to guard her privacy. At age ninety-nine, her attorney urged her to update her will. She signed the final version in May 2005. It was extraordinary.

She left seventy-five percent of her three-hundred-million-dollar estate to charity. Her nurse, Hadassah Peri, received thirty million dollars, the largest individual bequest. Her goddaughter received twelve million. Her nineteen distant relatives from her father’s first marriage received nothing, a complete disinheritance of people she had never met.

Huguette Clark died on May 24, 2011, two weeks short of her one hundred fifth birthday, in her hospital room with a fake number taped to the door. Hadassah Peri was at her bedside, the only person present. The relatives immediately contested the will, arguing she had lacked mental capacity and been unduly influenced. The district attorney’s office launched a criminal investigation.

After two years, the evidence showed Huguette had been lucid and had made her own decisions. She understood what she was doing. She had chosen to isolate herself, chosen to live in the hospital, chosen to give lavish gifts, chosen to disinherit relatives she never knew. In September 2013, the parties reached a settlement.

The relatives received thirty-four and a half million dollars. The nurse returned five million but kept about twenty-five million total. The bulk of the estate went to charity as Huguette had intended. She was born into everything and died with nothing that mattered.

No husband, no children, no life lived fully. Just money, and dolls, and empty mansions, and a hospital room with a fake name on the door.