We are not letting social distancing get in the way of a good book, good friends, and good a time!
The Chapel Café Book Club is hosting a special winter event! A virtual Fireside Chat event with George Hill, our President. He will lead the interactive discussion. We are excited to announce our book choice, The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark, by Meryl Gordon. To register for this FREE event, please email loisbrown@oakhillcemeterydc.org.
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?
Read or listen to the book and be prepared for an exciting virtual interactive Fireside Chat
