House Call #15

Plus Empty Big Houses

As Always, What Do They Do With the Money?

We really need a book where people get rich and then spend the money on something worth reading about…

Still in my Bulking Phase, I read King Leopold’s Ghost in which the monarch of Belgium enslaves half the African continent in harvesting rubber. Leopold profits enormously, and the book describes in vague terms how he spends the money building extra palaces and monuments. In this week’s book, Empty Mansions, I read how William Andrews Clark, born a Pennsylvania farm boy, goes on to develop copper and silver mines in Montana and New Mexico. W.A. Clark founds the city of Las Vegas — thus Clark County in Nevada is named for him. He’s elected to a short career as a Senator and dies in 1925. He builds a lot of houses…

…Just as King Leopold built palaces and Hearst built San Simeon and Sarah Winchester built her “mystery” house in San Jose. The impulse to translate wealth into art and architecture makes sense on a couple levels: It keeps the rich person in conversation with creative minds. In a way this impulse seems like that of men who earn a fortune and start a podcast so they can stay in dialog with a wide selection of creatives. It’s like founding a salon: exciting and social and exhausting.

Also, Nora Ephron wrote that her marriage thrived as long as she and her husband were building or renovating something. This “nesting” pitted them against contractors and problems, and kept them united… at least until the house was finished. Cheating and divorce followed. Think of the archetype: The Overlook Hotel is only finished for a couple years before the builder’s son dies and the project falls to ruin. In The Haunting of Hill House the house is barely glimpsed by its new mistress before she dies in a carriage accident.

In short, the building part is fun: Building the fortune, building the monument.¹ What follows is death. Which brings us to Empty Mansions. The Fifth Avenue mansion on the book’s cover stood for only sixteen years, less time than it took to plan and build its 121 rooms. Most of the fortune piled up by W.A. Clark ends up with his youngest child, Huguette, who… spends that money as a recluse — wait for it — building and furnishing doll houses. Like her father, she corresponds endlessly with artists and craftsmen, designing and revising the houses for her collection of hundreds of antique dolls.² Yes, a bit like Hugh Crain’s daughter, Abigail, who grows old sleeping in her own childhood nursery and eventually dies.

Huguette Clark, however, lives building and discarding her dollhouses until the age of 104. Making this — a New York Times #1 bestseller — the sort of book that should come equipped with a cyanide capsule around page 250. So, please, somebody write a book, please, where getting the money is interesting, please, and where what the money is spent on is even MORE interesting.³

The creative process, the discourse, the back-and-forth reasoning, is the joyous process. The community part. The active part. The Building Part. The result is death, unless it can drive readers into community, as the Tolkien books do. This was the favorite proof cited by Shirley Brice Heath, the anthropologist who explains that books become lasting classics only when they do bring together communities of readers.

Which Brings Us to Hayden Thorner

This past week has been a treat. Hayden’s story, All Growed Up, has been a joy to read and discuss. Hayden demonstrates the perfect spirit of creative exploration, the truly fun part of putting together a book or story. If you’ve not already read the Mark Richard story This is Us, Excellent doing so will give you a leg up on what Hayden is doing here. Please give All Growed Up a read and let’s see your feedback.

As always, please link to your own writing samples Here. My thanks to Hayden, and I’ll be in contact with the next House Call writer soon.

1. Dare I say “building the book”?

2. Yes, like silent movie star Colleen Moore who spent much of her fortune on one vast dollhouse.

3. 'Pillars of the Earth’ sort-of did this. Who’d guess that the invention of the flying buttress would be this interesting?