The Phantom of Fifth Avenue

by Meryl Gordon.

Another about Huguette Clark, and immensely wealthy women who spent the last twenty years of her extremely long life (she died two weeks before her 105th birthday) in a hospital, despite the fact that she was not ill until the very end. She married once, had no children, was very reclusive almost her entire life, and gave away millions of dollars to the people who took care of her those last years. After her death, relatives on her father's side (there were none at all on her mother's) sued to overturn her will.

I am not going to finish this particular book because I've come across to many seemingly small factual errors that make me wonder about the author and the editor. The first was when talking about Huguette in her late 90's liking to read magazines about various royalty and that she was especially interested in Princess Grace. That made me go hmmm, as Grace Kelly died in 1982.

Slightly later the author talks about 15 year old Anna La Chapelle (who would a decade later become William Andrews Clark's second wife and the mother of Huguette) at that age being a pretty teenager who performed in high school plays. "Her practical sister Amelia [three years younger] enrolled in secretarial school and her brother, Arthur [five years younger] worked as an elevator operator in an office building." There seems to be something seriously wrong with the time line here, given the ages of those younger children A twelve year old in secretarial school? I acknowledge that children in the late 19th century often held jobs that kids today would never hold, but I suspect that job was several years later, and it's quite careless of the author not to add the word or two that would make it clear.

Okay. But a few pages later it gives the address of the the mansion William Clark built in NYC as 927 Fifth Avenue. No, it was at 952 Fifth Avenue.

In many ways those are trivial details, but getting the details wrong -- and who knows what else I might have missed -- makes me wonder if the author hasn't gotten other things wrong. So I'm not going to bother to finish this book.

Several months ago I read Empty Mansions by Bill Dedman, also about Huguette Clark, and I don't recall noticing any egregious errors in that book. So I'm going to assume I won't learn anything new from this book, and since I apparently have to be on guard against small factual oddities, I'll return this book to the library and pick up something else to read.