Empty Mansions (13 page)

• • •

In the rotunda of the sculpture hall on the main floor, where Huguette and Andrée enjoyed their games, was a small marble statue of Eve that W.A. had bought directly from Rodin, who had created it for his masterwork,
The Gates of Hell
. Rodin’s
Eve
is a powerful portrait of shame, her head bent, her eyes open, barely hiding her nakedness.

Dominating the rotunda, however, was a life-size marble sculpture of another female nude, the delicate
Hope Venus
, commissioned by the
English collector Thomas Hope from the eighteenth-century Italian sculptor Antonio Canova, who was renowned for making marble look like human skin. Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty, stands as though surprised in her dressing room, inadequately covering herself with her garment, her hand touching her right breast.

The
Hope Venus
found its way into the rotunda because the seller knew enough to raise the price. Most of Clark’s contemporaries in the mining world had hardly any education and even less interest in foreign travel and culture. However, those who achieved great wealth felt it incumbent on them to decorate their mansions with expensive art. They bought capriciously, often through order-taking dealers who exploited their naïveté. As a result, many ended up with hodgepodge collections of mediocre, repainted, or counterfeit work. One critic reported that of the eight hundred landscapes executed by the French artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, American millionaires owned more than eleven hundred.

Clark approached the collection process with considerable advantages. He had, at a minimum, a dilettante’s knowledge of fine art. In addition, he found intrinsic value in art for his own enjoyment. He tended to be conservative in his acquisitions, choosing the established work of old masters and the prevailing Barbizon school. And by willingly paying the highest prices, usually buying paintings with a clear provenance, he was less susceptible to buying fakes. He held twenty-three scenes by Corot (most of them legitimate), twenty-two landscapes and scenes of everyday life by Cazin, and a better collection of Monticellis than held by the Musée du Louvre. W.A. did buy those daring but vulgar new Impressionists, but he was a bit late in betting on them. He bought a Pissarro in 1897 and then at the turn of the century two Degas studies of ballet dancers, but he could have snatched up the entire studios of Monet and Van Gogh for pocket change.

W.A. made a splashy entrance into New York society as an art buyer in 1898, paying an extravagant price for a Fortuny painting,
The Choice of a Model
. The subject of this kitschy work is a nude woman posing before an assemblage of male artists. W.A.’s purse strings could be loosened by female pulchritude. He paid $42,000, a record price for a painting, which commanded New York’s attention: Who
was
this westerner?

To advise him on his collection,
W.A. had been induced to hire Joseph Duveen, a shrewd British purveyor of fine art to American millionaires. To get the commission, Duveen somehow learned details of Clark’s house plans and spent $20,000 on a model of the manse—a dollhouse based on the Clark home. This plaster model was accurate down to the carpets, tapestries, and light fixtures—all to be purchased from Duveen.

Duveen’s taste was impeccable and his contacts superb, but his ethics questionable. Among the pieces he located was the
Hope Venus
, which was available for $25,000. A Parisian dealer persuaded Duveen that this was not a sufficiently important price to interest Clark, who had spread the word that he wanted the best in the market. Duveen raised the price to $110,000, and Clark bought it.

• • •

As guests toured the Clark collection on Saturday afternoons, the main attraction was not any particular piece of art, but the music one heard throughout the galleries. The music came from an enormous pipe organ
set into the wall above the entrance to a picture gallery. It was
the finest organ anyone ever thought of putting in a private home. It was the size of organs at metropolitan churches, with 4,496 pipes encased in a grill-work of oak. Hidden ducts carried the sound to the art galleries, enveloping visitors with music.

One of the five art galleries in the Clark mansion was dominated by a wall of pipes belonging to the $120,000 organ, which filled all the galleries with music.
(
illustration credit 4.1
)

The original price of the organ was $50,000, but W.A. demanded the most wonderful chamber organ in the world, driving the cost up to $120,000, or roughly $3 million today. Critics declared its sound “the most perfect ever heard,” and on one occasion two hundred members of the
Mormon Tabernacle Choir stood in W.A.’s gallery to sing. He and Anna hired
their own church organist, and he stayed on staff, well salaried, for the next fourteen years.

A DAMNABLE CONSPIRACY
 

W.A.’
S QUEST FOR SOCIAL ACCEPTANCE
could have overcome the obstacles of a shy wife with no social ambitions, even the lack of a marriage certificate. His campaign was thwarted, however, by the stain from his messy political career.

One political cartoon of the early 1900s showed W. A. Clark firing a cannon in battle—with bags of money used as ammunition at the rate of a thousand dollars a second. Another showed W.A. working in a barn as “the new chore boy,” feeding not corn but millions of dollars to a raggedy mule named Democracy. A third depicted W.A. as a stray cat with dollar signs for eyes—a cat that keeps returning to the door of the U.S. Senate.

W.A.’s public profile was summed up, or solidified, by Mark Twain, coiner of the derisive term “the Gilded Age” and the principal American voice of the era. In an essay penned in 1907, Twain excoriated W. A. Clark of Montana. “
He is said to have bought legislatures and judges as other men buy food and raiment. By his example he has so excused and so sweetened corruption that in Montana it no longer has an offensive smell.”

Twain was just getting started. “His history is known to everybody; he is as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag; he is a shame to the American nation, and no one has helped to send him to the Senate who did not know that his proper place was the penitentiary, with a chain and ball on his legs.”

There was a personal connection between Mark Twain and W. A. Clark, which the author did not disclose.

• • •

W. A. Clark’s desire in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century was a title, and his quest made him nearly a permanent political candidate in the first days of the state of Montana, which denied him the honor
time after time. He presided over two conventions that wrote constitutions for the new state, supporting the vote for women and immigrants while leading the opposition to taxation of mines. But that wasn’t enough for W.A. The title he wanted was senator, and the quest for it left his reputation forever stained.

He had a few handicaps as a candidate. He was not the friendliest campaigner. He was a Protestant in a state with a heavily Irish Catholic workforce that could be motivated by its employers to vote as it was told. And many of those workers were employed by
Marcus Daly, W.A.’s main rival in the copper mining business in Montana, who seemed determined to keep W.A. out of office.

Both men were Democrats, and both owned mines, but they had little else in common. Daly, a burly extrovert born in Ireland, never ran for office and lived on a Montana ranch, where in the 1890s he bred some of the fastest racehorses in America. Clark, a reed-thin introvert born in Pennsylvania, spent time in Europe, where he collected works by Rodin and Renoir.

But they did have one other thing in common: They were family. Marcus Daly’s wife’s sister, Miriam Evans, married W. A. Clark’s brother Ross. Huguette said she was fond of her Aunt Miriam. And after both men were dead, their widows lived in the same exclusive apartment building in New York City.

W.A. was nominated to be the Montana Territory’s delegate to Congress in 1888 but was defeated when Daly, though a Democrat, told his miners to support the Republican candidate. Clark’s campaign was afflicted with what today would be called gaffes: criticizing an Irish newspaperman as a traitor, putting on a huge feast for Daly’s mostly Catholic miners on a Friday but serving them steak instead of fish. He lost handily.

“
The conspiracy was a gigantic one,” W.A. wrote to an ally, “well planned, and well carried out, even though it did involve the violation of some of the most sacred confidences.… The day of retribution may come when treason may be considered odious.… For the time being, I retire politically.”

Two years later, in 1890, he was elected to be the first U.S. senator from Montana—or so it seemed. As the Founding Fathers prescribed,
senators were chosen not by the people but by their elected state legislators. Unfortunately for W.A., he was not elected by Montana’s only legislature. Democrats and Republicans both claimed the majority that year and caucused in separate halls, electing two different men to fill the open Senate seat. In Washington, the Senate seated the Republican, and W.A. was still without his title.

• • •

The first political battle W.A. won was not for office. Montana had become a U.S. territory on May 26, 1864, and the forty-first state on November 8, 1889. The question was where to put its capital. In 1894, Clark’s political forces won a raucous battle over Daly’s supporters when Helena, rather than the Daly-backed Anaconda, was selected as the capital. That night, the Clark partisans celebrated by taking on the role of horses, pulling W.A. in his carriage through the streets of Helena. W.A. repaid the honor by buying drinks for the whole town.

In Montana in the 1890s, as in the United States in the 2010s, the laws were loose enough to allow men of means to spend unlimited sums of money, either personally or through their companies, to put candidates into office. Bribery was forbidden, but virtually any “campaign expense” was allowed.

According to W.A., although he may have put $250,000 into the capital fight, his opponent Daly had spent $1 million. And although Daly never held public office, he wielded enormous power in Montana through his Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Clark claimed that he saw men in a voting line getting paid $5 apiece for their votes, and in some Anaconda precincts twice as many people voted as were registered.

The Montana legislature attempted to rein in both men. After the fight over the capital, an anti-bribery law forbade any candidate to spend more than $1,000 on his own campaign or anyone to give more than $1,000 to a political committee in any county. The law was little regarded and poorly enforced.

In public, W.A. spoke often about integrity. He attributed his career in business to it. “
The most essential elements of success in life are a purpose, increasing industry, temperate habits, scrupulous regard for
one’s word … courteous manners, a generous regard for the rights of others, and, above all, integrity which admits of no qualification or variation.”

Another quotation often ascribed to him is more direct: “I never bought a man who wasn’t for sale.” Although there seems to be no proof in the record that W.A. ever said anything of the sort, the comment is attributed to him in dozens of books.

Clark was determined to try again for the Senate, with or without the backing of Daly or the state Democratic committee. In the summer of 1898, his twenty-seven-year-old son, Charlie, a Yale graduate, helped organize his campaign committee. W.A. later admitted giving Charlie and others nearly $140,000 (about $4 million today) to run the campaign, without making any report of how it was spent.

W.A. said that the money was used only for “legitimate” expenses, such as paying hotel bills for about three hundred friends and political operatives, paying men to accompany legislators so the Daly faction could not get to them, and compensating newspapers for their endorsements. Indeed, it was not unusual at the time for a candidate to buy a newspaper before an election, use the paper’s editorials to endorse himself, and then sell the newspaper back to the previous owner after the election was over.