The Phantom of Fifth Avenue, Meryl Gordon
4 Rating(s)
List: $31.99 | Sale: $22.40
Club: $15.99

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

Author: Meryl Gordon

Narrator: Bernadette Dunne

Unabridged: 13 hr 40 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/27/2014


Synopsis

Born in 1906, Huguette Clark grew up in her family's 121-room Beaux Arts mansion in New York and was one of the leading celebrities of her day. Her father William Andrews Clark, was a copper magnate, the second richest man in America, and not above bribing his way into the Senate.

Huguette attended the coronation of King George V. And at twenty-two with a personal fortune of $50 million to her name, she married a Princeton man and childhood friend William MacDonald Gower. Two-years later the couple divorced. After a series of failed romances, Huguette began to withdraw from society--first living with her mother in a kind of Grey Gardens isolation then as a modern-day Miss Havisham, spending her days in a vast apartment overlooking Central Park, eating crackers and watching The Flintstones with only servants for company.

All her money and all her real estate could not protect her in her later life from being manipulated by shady hangers-on and hospitals that were only too happy to admit (and bill) a healthy woman. But what happened to Huguette that turned a vivacious, young socialite into a recluse? And what was her life like inside that gilded, copper cage?

Author Bio

Meryl Gordon is a full-time magazine journalist who has been a contract writer for New York magazine for the past fifteen years. She has profiled such influential figures as Kofi Annan, Mike Bloomberg, and John Kerry, and such stars as Nicole Kidman, Susan Sarandon, and Maggie Gyllenhaal. She has written major features for the New York Times Magazine, Gourmet, Elle,
Marie Claire, and More. A graduate of the University of Michigan, she lives in New York City with her husband.

Reviews