Empty Mansions (12 page)

The wedding wasn’t Senator Clark’s only secret: The couple had a daughter, Andrée, already nearly two years old. “
THEY’RE MARRIED AND HAVE A BABY,” thundered a front-page headline in the opposition Montana newspaper,
The Anaconda Standard
.

Louise Amelia Andrée Clark had been born on the southern coast of Spain on August 13, 1902, a date more than a year after the supposed marriage. The announcement was so haphazard that her name was misspelled in the newspapers as Audree.

W.A.’s
Miner
took pains to stress the next day that the situation had been a chaste one, with his ward, Anna, chaperoned in Paris by the senator’s sister and nieces as she studied the harp. Over time, however, “
he learned that his early affection for this beautiful girl had ripened into love.” And Anna was certainly now of legal age, twenty-three at the time of the supposed marriage. Her sixty-two-year-old bridegroom was still vigorous enough that year to defend himself during a street robbery in Paris, slugging one of the thieves in the mouth.

W.A.’s announcement attempted to explain the delay in making the marriage public, pointing to Anna’s shy manner:

• • •

The marriage—and the baby—were a surprise to W.A.’s grown children from his first marriage. They suddenly had a new half-sister, not to mention a new stepmother who was younger than they were. His children were, as one headline put it, in for “A Very Rude Shock.” Their inheritance was now in peril. Their father was a widower, free to do as he pleased, but this match, to a nobody from Butte, certainly didn’t enhance the social standing of the Clark scions.

After sending his announcement from Paris, W.A. visited his daughter Katherine in New York. After talking with her sister, May, she wrote to their brother Will:

If W.A. indeed realized the wedding was a mistake, there’s no indication that he treated Anna rudely. He spent far more time with her than he had with his first wife during their marriage, when he was primarily engaged in the acquisition of wealth and political power. He showered Anna with jewels and presents, and there is no indication that W.A. continued his tomcatting around. Well into his sixties, W.A. finally matured.

The week after the announcement, W.A. wrote to son Will from the 1904 Democratic National Convention in St. Louis, assuring him that his “alliance” with Anna would not dim his affections for his adult children, that Anna did not have designs on his fortune, and that she would receive only a small sum after his death.

In his public statement, W.A. had acknowledged that “
it has been stated that my family objected to this union.” But he said that any initial apprehension of his children had been overcome and “their approval of these relations were so essential to my happiness.”

There was speculation in the family that the birth of Andrée had been followed by a second pregnancy, a boy, Paul, who died within hours of his birth, and that this second event sparked Anna to pressure W.A. to announce a backdated marriage. The birth of a son, if it happened, is undocumented.

Not everyone believed that W.A. and Anna were legally married, certainly not married in May 1901 in Marseille. Clark’s political opponents quickly pointed out that his own newspaper in Butte had interviewed him that month about his European travels, which by his account hadn’t taken him anywhere near Marseille. The supposed marriage also caused a legal complication. Montana law required a married man to obtain his wife’s signature if he signed a deed, and during recent years W.A. had signed several deeds, indicating on each one that he was an unmarried man. Either he was lying on the deeds or he was lying now.

Aside from such political sniping, there was
the Clark family Bible, where family marriages and births are listed. W.A.’s 1869 marriage to Kate L. Stauffer is recorded in his handwriting, but no marriage to Anna is mentioned there, though later deaths are listed. Perhaps that’s merely a sign of his first family’s reluctance to accept the younger second wife. The Bible had been in the home of W.A.’s mother in Los Angeles.

When Anna was required to show proof of their marriage, in a Montana court after W.A.’s death, all she could offer was a postnuptial declaration that the couple signed in 1909 at the American embassy in Paris. In this document, W.A. and Anna swore under oath that “
no record of said marriage is known to exist.”

With or without a marriage certificate,
Anna was now writing letters with her eighteen-carat-gold Cartier fountain pen, opening replies with her fourteen-carat-gold Tiffany letter opener, checking the time on her Cartier gold and diamond watch, applying a bit of dark red with her eighteen-carat-gold and diamond lipstick holder, fixing her hair with her Cartier diamond and rock crystal hairpin, mending clothes with her fourteen-carat-gold safety pins, trimming her nails with her fourteen-carat-gold manicure set, carrying coins in her eighteen-carat-gold-mesh purse with five inset emeralds, and praying with fourteen-carat-gold and jade rosary beads. Her Tiffany toiletry case was engraved AEC, for Anna Eugenia Clark.

SATURDAY AFTERNOONS FROM THREE TO SIX
 

W
HEN
S
ENATOR
W. A. C
LARK
brought his newly revealed young bride to New York from Paris for a visit in 1905,
he began a public campaign for acceptance into fashionable society. With an absence of subtlety, W.A. announced in the newspapers his plan to join the Social 400, New York’s informal list of old merchant and landowning families, a list guarded by Caroline Astor. The 400 may have been a dying concept by this time, but the Clarks and other nouveau riche newcomers still chafed under Mrs. Astor’s impenetrable defenses.

Along with another “westerner” from Pennsylvania, Charles M. Schwab, who gave the world the steel beam and thus the skyscraper, W.A. threatened to set up their own social set if not added to the 400. After all, if the Vanderbilts had been admitted to the list, albeit with some reluctance, why not a couple of newer millionaires?

A spouse with an outgoing personality might have helped W.A.’s social standing. But Anna, uninterested in the celebrity and gossip that their secret marriage had engendered, preferred to stay at home. W.A.’s wealth was enough to gain his admission to the proliferating social clubs of the era: the New York Yacht Club (with J. P. Morgan), the Lotos Club (called “the Ace of Clubs” by member Samuel Clemens), the National Arts Club (with Theodore Roosevelt), and, outside the city, the Sleepy Hollow Country Club (with the Astors and the Vanderbilts). His wife, however, rarely accompanied him, except to the opera and chamber concerts. Now in possession of wealth and power, Anna exhibited no ambition for social glory.

So W.A. brought society to his home. After he settled his young family into the Clark mansion in early 1912, W.A. printed up cards, distributing them whenever he met a friendly face of the right social caste.

Bearing a facsimile of his signature, the cards allowed New Yorkers to visit the Clark home, usually on Saturday afternoons, and to tour his five art galleries. If W.A.’s lineage could not impress the members of the 400, he could demonstrate his good taste through one of the best art collections in America. The art, said his eldest daughter Katherine, was “
my father’s great joy in life.”

Starting in 1878, W.A. was one of the best customers of the art dealers of Europe. At home in Butte, he was derided as “the Paris millionaire,” but he was more swayed by the opinion of a French ambassador, who praised Clark’s “finest collection of French art in the United States.”

The mansion’s five art galleries were enormous windowless rooms under large skylights, with dark red woolen baize lining the walls of Istrian limestone. The art filled the walls, in rows stacked two or three high, as was common then in the galleries of Paris and the homes of New York.

W.A.’s collection was an eclectic mix of the best of Europe: Rembrandt’s
Man with a Sheet of Music, The Judgment of Midas
by Rubens, the ephemeral ballet dancers of Degas, Van Goyen’s panoramic Dutch landscapes and seascapes, a sunny field in France by Rousseau, Gainsborough’s flattering portraits of the landed gentry, and drawings by Titian, Leonardo, and Raphael.

The main picture gallery, a full ninety-five feet by twenty feet, doubled as a ballroom. Beyond was the small picture gallery, then two more galleries framing the music room, which contained Anna’s gilded concert pedal harps and a few of the seven pianos in the house. W.A. fancied more than paintings, with his galleries fringed by easels holding delicate lace from Venice and France. Guests walked on the finest great silk carpets from Persia and India and Turkey, fit for a royal tent or a throne.

After W.A. had all these treasures installed in the house, he added few more, explaining that if he acquired more paintings, he would have to remove something, and he was happy with things as they were.

• • •

W.A. personally led visitors down the back stairs of the Clark mansion, giving tours of a hidden art gallery close to his heart and his social ambitions.
It was a long room alongside the driveway court, a room lined with tapestries and two dozen glass cases. Huguette remembered this room well. A few of the shelves were devoted to antique sculptures from Greece and Egypt. Inside the rest of the cases were, well, dishes.

But such dishes. These earthenware plates and three-dimensional forms—vases, inkwells, figurines—conveyed the refinement, status, and classical education of their owner. Under the names majolica in Italy and Spain, faïence in France and Germany, and delft in the Netherlands, this decorated pottery from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries passed through the most honored families of Europe.

Though paintings dominate art auctions today, in the Italian Renaissance great value was also placed on tapestries, furniture, fine lace, and these earthenware pots. They were glazed white with tin oxide, then brightly painted with colors from the earth: copper produced green hues; cobalt, blue; manganese, purple; antimony, yellow; and iron, ocher, orange, and red. The artists used brushes made from the whiskers of mice.

Clark’s pieces showed a great variety of themes—whimsical, religious, grotesque. Christ as a man of sorrows. The tragic lovers Pyramus and Thisbe. Saint George slaying the dragon. Icarus flying too close to the sun. Saint Catherine of Alexandria appearing as a vision to Joan of Arc. Satyrs and nymphs and drunken Bacchus.

To understand the collection, one needed a grounding in literature, mythology, and music. For a man such as W.A. with a classical, though interrupted, education, leading a tour of his faïence gallery conveyed a clear message. These art pieces had been owned by the Borgias and the Medicis and were now right where they belonged, with the Clarks.