The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark

• History

When Huguette Clark died in the spring of 2011, the 104-year-old heiress left behind a 42-room apartment on New York’s Fifth Avenue, a 23-acre estate overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Santa Barbara, a 22-room mansion in the woods of Connecticut, a fortune estimated at $300 million and countless unanswered questions including why did she spend the last twenty years of her life in hospitals when she was perfectly healthy, and what had turned a Jazz Age socialite whose first entry in the Social Register was at age 12, into a recluse for the last half-century of her life?

Award-winning journalist and bestselling author Meryl Gordon reveals a full portrait of the complex woman behind the mystery and controversy.