Empty Mansions (4 page)

Huguette Marcelle Clark was
born in Paris on June 9, 1906. Her parents’ apartment was on avenue Victor Hugo, at No. 56, a short walk down the wide, tree-lined avenue from the Arc de Triomphe. The baby girl, like the avenue, was named for
France’s beloved novelist, poet, and dramatist, who had lived just down the block in his last days. The child’s name may also have been a nod to her father’s French Huguenot ancestry. As a young woman, Huguette sometimes signed her name Hugo, and some of her friends called her Hugs. Andrée was nearly four when Huguette was born. When she had been told that a baby sister was due, Andrée said to her mother, “
Let me think it over.” Even one hundred years later, Huguette loved to laugh at her sister’s cleverness. Huguette’s father was old enough to be her great-grandfather. When Huguette was born, W.A. was a vigorous sixty-seven with four grown children from his first marriage, while Huguette’s mother, Anna LaChapelle Clark, was only twenty-eight.

Although both parents had accompanied the girls on the ocean crossing, W.A. is the proud parent in the photographs on the pier. Anna
stayed off to the side out of the camera’s view. In the rare public photos of her, Anna appears standoffish, coolly looking out from under her tilted formal hats. But in the private photos in Huguette’s albums, we see another Anna. Wearing her fashionable Continental dresses with a sash around her waist, she smiles warmly, playfully.

When the family arrived in 1910, they had no house in New York to go to. The greatest mansion in the city wasn’t quite ready, even after ten years of construction. W.A. sent his wife and daughters west to the Rocky Mountains to Butte, Montana, where he had made his fortune in copper mining. He stayed behind in
his New York apartment, sometimes spending the night in the unfinished Clark mansion, changing the plans to make it grander.

• • •

“
When this modern palace is completed,” the New York
World
reported, “it will rival in beauty and richness the mythical palace of Aladdin.” W.A. had selected the site in 1895, paying $220,000 for the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Seventy-Seventh Street, prominently situated in the middle of New York’s Millionaires’ Row, up the avenue from Vanderbilt and Astor, down from Carnegie. By the time it was finished in 1911, observers called it the “biggest, bulliest and brassiest of all American castles,” “the most remarkable dwelling in the world,” and “without doubt the most costly and, perhaps, the most beautiful private residence in America.”

The 121-room mansion was also Huguette’s childhood home from age five to eighteen. This was a fairy-tale castle come to life, with secret entrances, mysterious sources of music, and treasures collected from all the world. When Andrée and Huguette would arrive home in their chauffeured automobile, accompanied by a private security guard, they passed through the open carriage gates—bronze gates twenty feet high, fit for a palace.

The bottom half of the six-story Beaux Arts mansion was not so unusual in its day, and might not have stood out if it were W.A.’s bank building. But on the top half, every inch was decorated with Parisian Beaux Arts ostentation, a profusion of lions, cherubs, and goddesses. Oh, but the architects weren’t done. Soaring above the mansion was an
ornate domed tower reaching nine stories, so pleased with itself that it continued to an open cupola. The overall effect was as if a lavish wedding cake had been designed in the daytime by a distinguished chef, and then overnight a French Dr. Seuss sneaked in to add a few extra layers.

Andrée and Huguette were outdoor girls. In the winter, dressed in matching red coats and red broad-brimmed hats,
they went coasting down hills on sleds in Central Park. In the summer, they romped in matching sailor shirts and bloomers gathered above the knee. From any corner of the park, they had a specific home base for navigation: the tower of the Clark mansion. And when they stood in the tower itself, one hundred feet above the sidewalk, Andrée and Huguette could see all of Manhattan spread out below them.

Reporters who toured the home counted twenty-six bedrooms, thirty-one bathrooms, and five art galleries. Below the basement’s Turkish baths, swimming pool, and storage room for furs, a railroad spur brought in coal for the furnace, which burned seven tons on a typical day, not only for heat but also to power dynamos for the two elevators, the cold-storage plant, the air-filtration plant, and the 4,200 lightbulbs.

As the girls pulled into the U-shaped driveway, they rode first into an open-air main courtyard and then under an archway into a vestibule decorated with a fountain of Tennessee marble. The fountain displayed a satyr’s head projecting from a great clamshell, while two marble mermaids played in the spray. Their carriage then passed into a rotunda, where the young ladies of the house could disembark.

Mass production of the automobile had not yet begun when the plans were drawn up in 1898 by a
little-known firm. By 1900, the foundation was being laid, but W.A. kept changing the plans, buying up five neighboring houses to make room for a more extravagant plan by a more famous architect, Henri Deglane, the designer of the Grand Palais in Paris.

W.A. supervised every detail of the house, every furnishing.
To hurry along the work, and to keep from being gouged on the prices, in 1905 he bought the Henry-Bonnard bronze foundry, which used copper from his mine in Arizona to make the radiator gratings and door locks. When the price of white granite was raised by a quarry in North Jay, Maine, W.A. bought the quarry next door to undercut the price. He also bought
the stone-dressing plant, the marble factory, the woodwork factory, and the decorative-plaster plant.

The plans were modified to include an automobile room after Ransom Olds began selling his Curved Dash Oldsmobile in 1901. After the home was occupied in 1911, photographs show carriages of both types—horse-drawn and horseless—lined up by the gate, with the automobile’s driver careful to park in front of the horse.

From the carriage rotunda, Andrée and Huguette could stop on the ground floor to see their father in his private office, situated at the street corner for maximum light. With Santo Domingo mahogany walls, the office was dominated by a Gilbert Stuart portrait above the mantel—the familiar face of George Washington now on the one-dollar bill.

Huguette’s girlhood home, the most expensive house in New York, afforded 121 rooms for a family of four. Note both types of carriages awaiting passengers at the Clark mansion on Seventy-Seventh Street at Fifth Avenue.
(
illustration credit 1.1
)

If Andrée and Huguette sneaked through their father’s waiting room and down the mirror-lined hallway past his office library, they could peek into the house’s male domain, a Gothic-style great hall for smoking and billiards. The room was twenty feet by ninety feet, decorated with a thirteenth-century stained-glass window from a cathedral at Soissons in France.

The billiard room had another oddity: six paintings depicting the heroism, trial, and cruel death of
Joan of Arc, France’s maiden heroine. Her story was a particular favorite of Andrée’s. The French artist of these paintings, Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel, had done a children’s history of the maiden Joan, and the girls met the artist in France. At first the artist intended these paintings for a chapel near Domrémy, Joan’s birthplace. But W.A. had to have them, so instead of being on view for the faithful who made pilgrimages to honor Joan, they were hanging in W.A.’s billiard room.

The cost of building the Clark house, not counting the furnishings, had been predicted to be $3 million, which would have made it as expensive as Rockefeller’s and Carnegie’s homes combined. As so often happens with home construction projects, the cost climbed—to $5 million, then $7 million, and some newspapers said $10 million, a bill that works out to a bit more than $250 million in today’s currency. For perspective, the fifty-seven-story Woolworth Building, a neo-Gothic cathedral of
commerce completed in 1913 in Lower Manhattan, cost $13.5 million, and the Woolworth would reign for nearly two decades as the tallest skyscraper in the world. Still, the Clark mansion cost no more than two years’ profits flowing from a single Clark copper mine, the United Verde in Arizona. Always watching his pennies, W.A. was able to persuade the courts to lower his property tax bill by valuing the home at only $3.5 million, on the legal theory that it was so expensive to operate that it was of no use to anyone else.

The girls could ride up to the main floor in the elevator, or climb the grand circular staircase. Made of ivory-tinted Maryland marble, the stairs wound their way through a ceiling of oak overlaid with gold leaf. At the top of the stairs, Andrée and Huguette passed two exquisite bronze statues on white marble pedestals, each showing classical Greek heroes in scenes of struggle: on the left a muscular Odysseus bending his bow to show his strength and prove his identity, and on the right a chained Prometheus enduring his endless torture, an eagle eating his liver.

From the top of the stairs, the girls could look down the hallway, of white marble with mottled Breche violette columns, to the marble sculpture hall, with its thirty-six-foot-high octagonal dome made of terra-cotta, in the center of which hung an antique Spanish silver lamp. Here the girls enjoyed playing a game of hide-and-seek. If Andrée, the braver one, climbed to the third floor and passed through an alcove to the top of the dome, she could look down to see Huguette three floors below.

The main dining room, twenty-five feet by forty-nine feet, was about the same size as a family apartment in New York City. Above its massive fireplace, carved figures of Neptune, god of the sea, and Diana, goddess of the hunt, presided over the stone mantel, attended by cherubs, guarded at their feet by carved lions six feet tall. The ceiling set mouths agape: gilded panels carved from a single English oak supposedly harvested from Sherwood Forest. Over the door was a panel for the new Clark crest. The Clarks had no hereditary coat of arms, so W.A. sketched one out himself with elements fit for a royal house: a lion, an anchor, and a Gothic
C
.