Empty Mansions (5 page)

Huguette recalled that her father forbade the girls to run around in the grand salon. W.A. had bought this room, alone the size of a typical house, and had it reassembled here overlooking Fifth Avenue and the woodlands of Central Park. Called the
Salon Doré, or “golden room,” it gleamed with exquisitely carved and gilded wood panels made in 1770 for a
vainglorious French nobleman. W.A. brought the extravagant wall panels intact from Paris, adding reproduction panels to make the square room fit into his larger rectangular space. He decorated the salon with a clock from the boudoir of Marie Antoinette. During the French Revolution, when the former queen was under house arrest at Paris’s Tuileries Palace, this gilded clock counted down the hours before her imprisonment and execution. A century later, this room was reserved for formal occasions. The Clark girls were allowed to play in the smaller room next to it, sitting on the Persian carpet of the petit salon.

The girls found more wonders in the tower. Huguette recalled playing hide-and-seek with Andrée there, one hundred feet above the street, discomforting their mother terribly. The tower held its own secret, a suite held in reserve for dark days. This was the quarantine suite, a valued space in these years before antibiotics, with bedrooms and its own kitchen, a refuge in case of a pandemic.

Coming down from the tower, the girls passed the servants’ quarters on the fifth and sixth floors. The nursery on the fifth floor was separated into night and day nurseries, each with its own kitchen. A gentleman from
The New York Times
who toured the new house explained, “
As the Senator and Mrs. Clark have but two small children, the facilities of
these spacious rooms will not be overtaxed.” On the fourth floor was the Oriental room, with the senator’s treasures from the East, and some of the twenty-five guest rooms. These higher floors were designed at first to hold apartments to accommodate W.A.’s grown children from his first marriage, but they already had their own homes, and the apartments were converted to other uses.

Brought over from Paris, the golden room, or Salon Doré, was a bit too formal for Andrée and Huguette to play hide-and-seek in
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There were many nooks for Andrée and Huguette to explore. The private area of the mansion, the part reserved for the immediate family, was located on the third floor. Here the most comfortable spot was the morning room, with a bearskin rug at one end and a tiger rug at the other. The mirror-paneled walls hid mysterious doors, which opened on a spring when the right spot was touched, revealing a fire hose, a storage closet with boxes of cigars, or an entire suite of rooms. Perhaps these doors were hidden out of whimsy, perhaps with an eye toward security.

The family of four had seventeen servants in residence, including a houseman, a waitress, two butlers, three cooks, and ten maids. For dish-ware, W.A. and Anna ordered from Chicago a nine-hundred-piece
set of china, costing $100,000, or about $3 million today. It was a simple pattern, aside from the gold trim and Clark crest.

The room that Huguette described with the most fondness, years later,
was the library, warmed by a fireplace from a sixteenth-century castle in Normandy, with armed knights standing guard as andirons. The mantel was carved with a scene of rural revelry, bringing to mind W.A.’s own origins, with a shepherdess, a bagpiper, and dancing men. The ceiling was of carved French mahogany from the 1500s, and the room contained three stained-glass windows freed from a thirteenth-century abbey in Belgium. Its thousands of volumes included
Dickens and Conan Doyle, Poe and Thoreau, Ibsen and Twain.

A morning room in the Clark mansion was decorated with a tiger rug at the near end and a bear rug at the far end. The public areas downstairs were cavernous galleries and salons, while the suites upstairs were more warmly decorated for family living, though still featuring European furnishings and the finest Persian rugs
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Oh, but from France—their France—the library also held copies of letters of Marie Antoinette, a history of French illustration, and the fables: seventy-five volumes wrapped in red Levant morocco leather and gilt lettering, the works of Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian and his more famous predecessor Jean de La Fontaine. These were French versions of
ancient stories still known the world over, such as “The Ant and the Grasshopper” and “The Miser Who Lost His Treasure,” along with lesser-known gems, “The Man with Two Mistresses” and “The Cricket.”

Huguette recalled nearly a century later how Andrée patiently read to her here, enjoying the fables and fairy tales of the France they had left behind. Of all the rooms in the mansion, the library was the one Huguette missed most of all.

• • •

Huguette once showed her nurses a photograph of “my father’s house” in
a book of the great houses of New York. With evident pride she reminisced about how much fun she and her sister had had there. The architectural criticism in that book didn’t pierce her memories.

Critics have long been mixed in their opinion of the Clark castle: Some didn’t like it, and others thought it awful. It was called an abomination, a monstrosity, and “Clark’s Folly.”
The Architectural Record
said it would have been a fine home for showman
P. T. Barnum. The horizontal grooves in the limestone suggested to some passersby that the building was wearing corduroy pants. Others were offended by the tower, so vulgar and bombastic.

It may be time for a reassessment of the Clark mansion. In his “Streetscapes” column in
The New York Times
in 2011, architectural historian Christopher Gray took the critics to task: “
These opinions have been parroted many times but, upon contemplation, this is a pretty neat house. If Carrere & Hastings [architects of the New York Public Library] had designed it for an establishment client, its profligacy would certainly have been forgiven, perhaps lionized.”

It’s not clear, however, whether the true objection of critics was to the building or to the man it represented. Whatever one thought of the house, it was a perfect embodiment of W. A. Clark’s lifelong striving for opulence and recognition, his defiance of criticism, and his self-indulgence.

AN AMERICAN CHARACTER
 

W
HEN THE SLIGHTLY BUILT MAN
in the black frock coat and silk top hat stepped briskly down New York’s Fifth Avenue in the Easter Sunday parade of 1914, the gawkers saw his face and recognized him instantly. His bristly beard and mustache may have turned from auburn to gray, but at seventy-five years of age, he was the picture of sartorial eminence. The proud little man was accompanied by three discreet touches of male vanity: a gold watch chain hanging from his dapper white waistcoat, a polka-dotted silk cravat held tightly to his high collar by a pearl stickpin, and his thirty-six-year-old wife. The publicity-shy Anna walked in the parade by his side, wearing a flowered hat and an uncomfortable expression, perhaps attributable to the tiny steps enforced by her fashionable but thoroughly impractical hobble skirt from Paris.

Uncomfortable in public, Huguette’s mother, Anna, does not appear to be enjoying the Easter Parade on New York’s Fifth Avenue, which offered a chance for the public to gawk at the tycoons living on Millionaires’ Row. On Easter in April 1914, eleven-year-old Andrée walks in the parade, studying her fingernails while her mother gives her hand a tug. Seven-year-old Huguette stayed home.
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There strode a man of unusual character, a symbol of two contradictory American archetypes.

W. A. Clark, businessman, was legendary, respected on Wall Street as a modern-day Midas. The epitome of frontier gumption, he was a triumphant mixture of civilizing education, self-reliance, and western pluck, living proof that in America the avenues to corporate wealth were open even to one born in a log cabin.

W. A. Clark, politician, was ridiculed on magazine covers as a payer of bribes, the epitome of backroom graft, and a crass mixture of ostentatious vanity, extravagance, and Washington plutocracy, living proof that in America the avenues to civic power were open only to those with the most greenbacks.

An indefatigable worker, W.A. carried on at a pace that today seems impossible, especially in an era when travel was by steamship and railroad, and communication by letter and telegram. During the first decade of the 1900s, for example, he maintained homes in Paris and Montana; built and furnished the most expensive house in New York City; constructed out of his own pocket a major railroad between Los Angeles harbor and Salt Lake City; subdivided and marketed lots for the city of Las Vegas; oversaw the operation of copper mines in several western states; ran streetcar and electric power companies in the West and a bronze foundry and copper wire factory in the East; grew sugar beets in California; published several newspapers; owned a bank with a good national reputation; was forced to resign from the U.S. Senate, then was reelected and served six more years; fought off a paternity suit filed by a young woman he had met at the Democratic National Convention; traveled through Europe collecting art; maintained good relations with his adult children; married a young wife and sired two daughters. All while in his sixties.