Bellosguardo — Marjorie May

Based on a true story, Bellosguardo: The Lives of Anna & Huguette Clark is an historical novel of the Gilded Age Clark family. With impeccable research into this family that American history elided, this novel presents the lives of the mother-daughter duo beginning in the nineteenth century and extending through the twenty-first century. Enter an opulently ordered and fiercely protected world of wealth and prestige that no longer exists. Experience the teenage Anna La Chappelle as she transforms in Belle Epoque Paris to capture the elusive and powerful Senator W.A. Clark's heart. After giving birth to an illegitimate daughter in Africa, she finally becomes Clark's second wife in a scandalous marriage during the Astor reign. Anna pays the price in America with not only society but also with Clark's adult children, the true heirs to his billions. To escape, in France she creates a private world of music, learning, religious devotion, and haute couture in Paris and at Château de Petit-Bourg while raising her two daughters, Andrée and Huguette.Huguette's perfect, protected world with her beloved family—attending King George V's coronation, tickets for first class travel on the Titanic's second voyage, private rail cars, nannies and private tutors, and a 121-room Fifth Avenue mansion—is torn open wide when the Great War begins. The Clarks must escape France to begin a new life in America, where soon tragic events occur, and pressures bear down that irrevocably alter Huguette. Follow her idyllic, early life with Andrée as their father—the second richest man in America—whisks his American princesses from Europe to North America to the Hawaiian Islands. Experience what it was like to be a celebrated debutante with unlimited resources and a cliff-top estate on the California Riviera. Then, after an unsuccessful early marriage, in 1930's Manhattan a divorced Huguette spends days painting and glittering nights out on the town with the man she truly loves, before the terrifying 1940's, with a personally devastating second world war. Discover the reasons why, as one of the richest heiresses of the twentieth century with multiple beaus, estates, and artistic talent, in her middle years Huguette Clark shunned society to become a recluse in three apartments on Fifth Avenue in New York City before moving on to a hospital room for the remainder of her very long, remarkable life.