Empty Mansions (10 page)

His first protégée from the boardinghouses of Butte became an early star of American silent films, but she would not become Mrs. W. A. Clark. Kathlyn Williams was sponsored by W.A. in her early theater career. A blond beauty and the daughter of a boardinghouse operator in Butte, she was born Kathleen Mabel Williams in 1879 but adopted Kathlyn as her stage name. Her father died when she was young, and her mother paid the bills by renting out rooms to miners. As a teenager in the 1890s, Kathlyn starred in Butte theater productions, where she met W.A., the richest man in town.

He agreed to send Kathlyn to New York to study opera, on the condition that she first finish her studies at Montana Wesleyan University, seventy miles away in Helena. The year she graduated, 1901, she turned twenty-two. W.A. was sixty-two.

Kathlyn soon switched from opera to acting, and W.A. paid for her to begin training in New York. By 1903, with W.A. occupied in the U.S. Senate, Kathlyn was married and had moved on to other male sponsors, eventually
starring in more than 170 films. In a fan magazine in 1912, Kathlyn thanked Senator Clark, who she said “
took a great interest in my welfare.” She explained that the senator “has helped so many boys and girls to realize their ambitions.” The names of no boys survive.

• • •

At the same time, W.A. was supporting another girl from a Butte boardinghouse, Anna LaChapelle, who had her own plans to become a musician and singer.
In 1893 or 1894, soon after Kate’s death, W.A.’s eye fell on Anna, who was fifteen or sixteen. After she was well into her twenties,
she would become his second wife and the mother of two daughters, Andrée and Huguette.

There are competing stories of how W.A. met Anna. The family version, the official version, has W.A. spotting her on the Fourth of July in a community pageant in which she played a chaste Statue of Liberty. Anna loved to sing and play music, but she was shy and reserved in public. The teenager stood a shapely five feet four with cascading brown hair, a prominent round chin, and an inviting, gap-toothed smile. W.A. recognized her talents immediately.

The unofficial version, printed in anti-Clark newspapers, casts Anna as the forward one. According to this story, Anna called on a banker in Butte, asking him to sponsor her acting career. That man declined but suggested that she contact another banker who might receive her more generously, W. A. Clark.

The family also put forward another story about Anna, one describing her as the daughter of an honored physician who had died before the wealthy W. A. Clark became her guardian and she his ward, as though she were an orphan in need of his legal and financial protection. The facts were quite different, however: Anna’s father wasn’t quite a doctor, and he was very much alive.

Anna Eugenia LaChapelle was born in the Michigan copper mining town of Red Jacket, now known as Calumet, on March 10, 1878. Her parents were immigrants from Montreal, in French-speaking Quebec, who had arrived in the United States six years earlier as part of a great French Canadian wave of immigration. The family later moved to Butte, settling in one of the rougher neighborhoods on the Butte hill, right below the smoke-belching smelters.
Anna was the oldest of three children, two girls and a boy.

The LaChapelles rented out rooms to miners.
Anna’s mother, Philomene, could speak English, but not read or write it. She worked as a housekeeper. Anna’s father, Pierre, had been a tailor and then began selling medical potions such as eye lotions. Later he dispensed eyeglasses. Though his tombstone in Butte’s Catholic cemetery identifies him as “Dr. Pierre J. LaChapelle,” his obituary says he was studying medicine at the time of his death.

The father was still living when Anna fell under W.A.’s sponsorship. The father’s obituary from 1896 places eighteen-year-old Anna already in Paris,
studying the concert harp and refining her French. To add some respectability to the arrangement, Anna was described as W.A.’s ward.
Court records in Butte show no such guardianship.

At W.A.’s Paris apartment on avenue Victor Hugo, Anna was chaperoned by one of W.A.’s sisters,
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who was there with two daughters. These nieces of W.A.’s described Anna as lively and in love with music.
She had a puckish sense of humor that kept them entertained. She also liked to joke about
her unusual eyes: one blue and one brown. Back in Butte, people noticed that Anna’s mother, now a widow, had moved into a fine home one block west of the Clark mansion.

By 1900, as W.A. was serving in the U.S. Senate, Anna visited him in Washington. Newspapers reported that she was “the
most interesting lady in Washington,” which might have been a polite way of calling her the most gossiped-about woman.
The Denver Post
said she had “a typical French face and the great soulful eyes which are often associated with the artistic temperament.” The papers quoted W.A.’s friends as saying that the couple would soon wed and that W.A. planned an opera career for Anna under the stage name Montana. For good measure, the papers added the fiction that Anna’s father had been killed in one of W.A.’s mines, stirring the magnanimous industrialist to take pity on the family.

• • •

While Anna was in Paris, W.A. had other romantic entanglements as the new century began.

First, there was
Hattie Rose Laube of Huron, South Dakota, a temperance lecturer and political campaigner, who let it be known in 1901 that W.A. had written her a promise of marriage from Europe. All the newspapers covered her announcement, although the Clark family dismissed the claim as false.

Then there was
the paternity suit filed by a young newspaperwoman named Mary McNellis. W.A. had met Mary at the 1896 Democratic National
Convention in Chicago, where he was a delegate. In 1901, while W.A. was serving in the Senate, Mary brought a lawsuit against him in New York. She claimed that in October 1900, over a dinner of oysters and champagne at the old Waldorf Hotel, W.A. had promised to marry her. She sought $150,000 for breach of promise, claiming that she had been seduced, debauched, and impregnated.

W.A. admitted in court papers to knowing Mary and to socializing three or four times with this “rather agreeable and very intelligent young woman.” But he vigorously denied “that I ever promised to marry Miss McNellis, or ever made love to her or induced her to believe that I was going to marry her.” Court records show that a referee found in W.A.’s favor, ordering Mary to pay the senator $1,125 in court costs.

The court records were sealed, keeping the case out of the newspapers for two years, during which time W.A. was courting Anna. Then in 1903, it was revealed that Mary had wanted her attorney to push for a jury trial, but the attorney had persuaded her to accept the referee’s decision and give up the case. Mary was surprised to discover that her attorney had owned part of a mining company in British Columbia and that the mine had recently been purchased by W. A. Clark. She filed an appeal, and at that point all the newspapers covered the McNellis case.

Word of the case may have reached Paris, where twenty-five-year-old Anna was still studying the harp. W.A. traveled there at least twice a year by steamship. The girl from the Butte boardinghouse had adopted chic Parisian styles, with hemlines at the ankle and a high waist defined by a luxurious sash. Her brown hair was cut short in bangs hanging nearly to her deep-set eyes. And she began sporting a few expensive gifts: a
bracelet with 36 sapphires and 126 small diamonds, a pair of tortoiseshell combs each with 320 diamonds, and a Cartier two-strand pearl necklace with a seven-carat diamond clasp.

UNITED VERDE
 

W.A
. MOVED
from rich to superrich after representing Montana at the 1885 World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans.
There he toured the display from Arizona Territory, seeing samples of ore from a particular mine, samples rich in copper, gold, and silver. He made note of it, and promptly forgot about it. But later, in checking the books of a bankrupt ore refinery that he had taken control of, he saw the name of the mine again: the United Verde.

In early 1888, W.A. went to Arizona to visit this mine near the remote town of Jerome. This was high in Yavapai County, at 5,400 feet on the eastern slope of the Black Hills mountains, overlooking the Verde River. It had been operated since 1876, but when miners encountered a leaner ore in 1884, they were no longer able to operate profitably. United Verde’s prospects were limited by the lack of access to water or a railroad to transport the copper ore. For a while, the nearest railroad station was three states away, in Kansas. But even after the Santa Fe railroad pushed through Arizona in 1882, worldwide copper prices were depressed, falling to nine cents a pound, and the mine lay idle.

When W.A. visited the mine in 1888, the copper market was ripe, with prices having been driven up to fifteen cents a pound by a French syndicate that was limiting production. He and his mine superintendent went crawling around the mine to take ore samples every twelve inches. Satisfied with what he found, he took an option on the mine and started buying up all the stock, which was scattered across the globe. Eventually, out of 300,000 shares, the Clarks would own 299,000.

Under his ownership, the United Verde would become the richest copper mine in the world. It again showed W. A. Clark’s ability to grasp an opportunity. He installed a massive industrial complex for extracting, crushing, and roasting the ore to bring out the vital copper. The mining shafts, lined with concrete, reached two-thirds of a mile deep. W.A. also
connected Jerome to the Santa Fe railroad by a narrow-gauge line, cutting his transportation costs dramatically.

For his workers, W.A. built a model town, complete with a library and schools. This planned community, called Clarkdale, was founded in 1912 a mile from the mine. Under the rigid segregation of the day, miners and their families lived in company cottages, with Upper Clarkdale for engineers and bosses. Lower Clarkdale was for working class whites. Mexican immigrants lived in crude buildings in Patio Town closer to the smelter. And out in the desert Native American workers lived in domed huts they built themselves. The company provided a baseball park and four swimming pools, disability insurance, and wages paid on a bonus system, with extra pay given for loading more ore or blacksmithing more pickaxes. Unlike its competitors, the United Verde enjoyed mostly harmonious relations with its unions.

W.A. operated all his businesses under strict secrecy, but he did let out that the United Verde was capable of producing
eight million pounds of fine copper per month. Newspapers speculated that its annual profits were $5 million to $10 million, or in today’s dollars roughly $140 million to $280 million. With great understatement, W.A. recalled in a speech some years later his impression of the ore samples from United Verde that he had seen in New Orleans: “
This was one of the most attractive collections of mineral to be found at the exhibition.”

TWO TABLESPOONS OF WHISKEY
 

T
HE
1880
S BROUGHT
a flood of pioneers into Southern California. Some came to escape harsh winters elsewhere. Some sought the restoration of their health. And some were prescient entrepreneurs and land speculators. The Clark family contributed immigrants in all three categories, and through W.A.’s enterprise, they built a railroad to open up Los Angeles as the center of business on the Pacific coast, America’s gateway for trade with the Orient.

In 1880, Los Angeles was an unimpressive town of 11,000 on the Los Angeles River. In some years, the river flooded in the winter and ran almost dry in the summer. Until 1878, when the Southern Pacific Railroad completed its line from California’s biggest city, San Francisco, to its little sister Los Angeles, the only way to make the three-hundred-mile trip was by horse-drawn stagecoach through treacherous mountain passes.

Among the early train passengers was W.A.’s mother, Mary Andrews Clark, age sixty-six, who left Iowa with two of her grown daughters in 1880. W.A.’s father had died five years earlier. They were in the vanguard of a population boom that would push the population of Los Angeles to 50,000 by 1890 and then to 100,000 by the turn of the century.