The very rich have fascinated me since I was just a little thing. You could blame Gloria Vanderbilt, now best known for being news anchor Anderson Cooper’s mom, putting her famous name on jeans, perfume and whatnot. I was dragging home just as many books about the Vanderbilts, Astors and Rockfellers and their ilk as I was sex and shopping novels from Madames Krantz and Collins. (Blacklight: “So once again you’ve changed how?”). Now I have another person to add to my pantheon of tragic and creative socialites. If there is an afterlife for these talented ladies, I really hope Mary Millicent Abigail Rogers and Doris Duke are welcoming Huguette Marcelle Clark with open arms and a quiet sunny art studio.

So you might have heard of Doris Duke (her family put the Duke in Duke University) and Millicent Rogers (granddaughter of Standard Oil’s Henry Huttleston Rogers) but Huguette Clark? Who she?

Instead of shoving Mr Laptop open to Huguette Clark’s Wikipedia page, I can calmly hand the questioner (let’s say…Blacklight) Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell Jr’s excellent Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune. It’s not one of those doorstops about the Astor or Vanderbilt clan I would pour over as a teenager. But it’s not a cheap and quick tell all either with Gothic horrors detailed in inflammatory language. The very best way I can sum up Empty Mansions is (and I mean this as quite high praise) it’s like one of those amazing profiles Vanity Fair used to run back in the days before Tina Brown and when Dominick Dunne was at the top of his game. The kind of writing that had me saving my allowance so I could buy the multi-year Vanity Fair subscriptions and line them up issue by issue on my bookshelves.

In all my mooning over the lost Gilded Age mansions in New York City, I never heard of the Copper King William A. Clark.  I never realized the grand and insanely wondrous creation he built for himself, second wife and their two young daughters which was torn down just sixteen years after it was built. Or that the first Girl Scout camp was founded after their older daughter Andree died much too young. And that their surviving daughter Huguette would go into relative social seclusion for decades until the descendants of her half siblings from William A. Clark’s first marriage feared the worst had occurred and decided to find out what happened to her.

There are parts of Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune were you’ll shake your head in sheer disbelief. Or feel to make sure your eyes haven’t popped right out of your skull. Huguette Clark wasn’t a Hetty Green, taking extreme measures to save and grow her fortune. Remember the subtitle? Just how Huguette Clark spent her fortune isn’t stinted. Picture the scene, I’m curled up on my bed in Moderate Income Apartments, feeling like a used up SOS pad and reading about how Huguette Clark decided to buy herself a lovely retreat in New Canaan, CT. Which she never lived in or set for in for the whole sixty years she owned it. A retreat with a 5000 square foot bedroom. A retreat were the groundskeeper earned more than my yearly pittance from Company X. This account with lesser writers? Would have me closing the book, stomping into the living room like a baby Godzilla and ranting to Blacklight about the sheer unfairness of the world. But Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell Jr aren’t lesser writers, so I kept reading.

Now remember I mentioned how Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune reminded me of profiles in Vanity Fair? Those profiles always seemed to have a snake in paradise. A caretaker getting too big for their boots. Greedy extended family. Well, the story of Huguette Clark offers both. You have her day nurse/companion Hassadah Peri who ended up getting over $31 million in gifts from Huguette Clark. It makes me wish my mother was alive so I could call her and say “Mom, you were doing the housekeeper thing all wrong” because my mother thought it was amazing to get an extra $50 in her pay packet. She scrubbed toilets on her knees. Nurse Peri? Try walking around with a five million dollar personal check from Huguette Clark. Then you have extended (and yes we are talking about great-nieces and nephews and great-great-nieces and nephews) family who didn’t seem to know if their Auntie Huguette was even okay until they heard she was selling some of her treasures. Now add contested wills and courtroom battles and you have a juicy read better than anything my Company X workers say I have to read (please stop trying to get me to read Fifty Shades and Twilight people, really) .

As much shock and scandal Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune reveals, there is also a human side. Scattered among accounts of wild or unusual spending are remembrances of phone conversation author Paul Clark Newell Jr had with his great-aunt. Because from behind her wall of wealth and privilege Huguette Clark did care about her family and friends even remembering small details. You can feel the warmth and shots of joy she gave to people such as her beloved goddaughter even if she couldn’t let them get closer than the telephone. And at the end, you want to know more about that side of Huguette just as much as you want to know what happened to her estate.

*Note: at the time of publication for Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune, the lawsuits over Huguette Clark’s wills were ongoing. On September 24, 2013, a settlement had been reached with monies going to Huguette Clark’s extended family and her intended arts foundation.