The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (10 page)

At the end of 1903, William Andrews Clark was in a reflective
mood. Anna La Chapelle had become pregnant again earlier that year but this time the baby—a boy—died within an hour of his birth in France. Anna’s place in the senator’s life remained a secret, so his children and colleagues were unaware of the loss of the child.

Sitting in his Wall Street office, the senator gave an unusually candid interview to the
Dallas Morning News
(
SENATOR W. A. CLARK, CROESUS, TELLS ABOUT HIMSELF
). Clark came across as a lonely and self-important man consumed by work yet eager to be admired for his good taste as a patron of the arts. “His shoulders are spare, his frame is lean, his features are sharply cast. He has the eyes of an eagle,” the writer noted. “It was his quiet demeanor, his soberness, his seriousness which can, if necessary, give way to dramatic and forceful denunciation, which impressed me.”

Clark described himself as an early riser, up for an energetic stroll around his Central Park neighborhood at dawn and finished with breakfast by 8 a.m. He often walked from his Fifty-Eighth Street apartment down to Wall Street for the exercise and at night avoided rich meals, limiting himself to one cigar and poring over business until late at night. “So what if I do work twelve, fourteen and sixteen hours a day?” the sixty-four-year-old Clark said, emphasizing that he still felt like a young man. “I can do good by working. Thousands of men and women are depending upon my energies for their bread and butter.”

He cited two great passions: fine European wines that he took with him by the case when traveling, and splurging on art. “I was born with the innate love of the beautiful in nature and in the arts,” he said, bragging that he had sixty-four masterpieces in storage in Vienna awaiting the completion of his Fifth Avenue mansion. He stressed that he had rarely relied on art advisers and instead relied on his own taste and judgment. (Which may explain why the Corcoran Gallery later identified numerous fakes in his collection.) Reciting the countries where he had toured galleries and museums—England, France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Italy, and Holland—Clark said, “I acquired a distinctive perception and correct notions and taste in painting, sculpture, architecture and other beautiful arts.”

With a nod to his children, he mentioned that in his rare time off,
he took pleasure in the Sunday afternoon musicales given by his two Manhattan-based daughters, Katherine and Mary, as well as attending the opera.

Asked about his philanthropic plans, Clark gave a surprisingly honest answer, noting that he especially liked to help young women. “I find that a direct application of aid to young people—especially girls without means—to prepare themselves for the unequal struggle in life is fruitful in gratifying results,” Clark said. Gratifying indeed, judging by the devotion expressed toward him by Anna La Chapelle.

The journalist ended the interview by asking Clark whether he would follow in the footsteps of three other senators who, “in the autumn of their lives,” had recently wed. Clark laughed at the question, replying, “I can not tell you how happy I was with my beautiful wife, who died in 1893. I believe in marriage when one can afford that luxury, but I am not seriously considering it.” Then he added, with another chuckle, “I am quite too young to think of it yet.”

A few weeks later, Clark was reminded of his own mortality when he developed mastoiditis, an acute ear infection that spread into his skull. With a high fever and intense pain, Clark underwent two operations and was confined to bed for several weeks at his New York apartment. Even as he was recovering, tragedy struck the family yet again. The wife of his son Charles, who was visiting friends and staying at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, became ill and died suddenly in January 1904. Both of Clark’s sons had now become widowers, within just two years of each other.

In April, word spread that Clark was on his deathbed.
MODERN CROESUS A VERY SICK MAN. CLARK MAY NOT LIVE TO RETURN TO BUTTE. HIS WEALTH, ESTIMATED FROM $50,000,000 TO $200,000,000, LIKELY TO GO TO HIS SONS AND DAUGHTERS AND HIS GRANDSON, W.A. CLARK III
was the headline of the April 22, 1904, story in the
Minneapolis Journal
. The article noted that the senator had recently had a falling-out with his namesake lawyer son. “It has been reported in Butte for a year or more that W. A. Clark Junior has become estranged from his father and the rest of the family and certain things have happened to lend color to this report.” (The reason for the estrangement
never became public, but years later a Clark family retainer went public with a vivid description of Junior’s energetic sexual pursuit of attractive young men.)

The deathbed reports were exaggerated, but Clark’s health remained poor. Clark sailed to Europe on the American liner
Princess
with plans to cruise the Mediterranean, announcing that he was taking a trip that might last seven weeks to “put the finishing touch” on his convalescence. Anna joined him.

By now, William Andrews Clark had painted himself into a corner in terms of his relationship with Anna La Chapelle. He had repeatedly insisted publicly that the relationship was platonic. He had lied to his four older children, neglecting to mention his bouncing new baby, Andrée. He told the Dallas newspaper that he had no plans to remarry.

But Clark had decided that he was ready to officially acknowledge Anna in his life as his wife. He was sixty-five years old, and there was never going to be a good time to explain their tangled past. But before he went public, he needed to break the news to his children. Clark’s dilemma: finding a palatable way to explain the existence of his and Anna’s nearly two-year-old daughter. There was only one quasi-respectable solution: backdate the year of a supposed wedding and claim it occurred prior to Andrée’s birth.

On June 30, the senator returned from Europe and met with his two daughters, Katherine and May, to apologetically break the news of their new stepmother and half sister. Katherine described her reaction to this painful revelation in a letter to her younger brother Will Jr., writing: “A line only, dearest Will, as of course you know by now of our father’s marriage—while May and I are greatly grieved and disappointed we must all stand by our dear father and try to make it as easy for him as possible because he realizes his mistake—your heart would have ached could you have seen him the night he left us for St. Louis, and I can’t get over the way he looked so badly. Don’t let anyone know that I have written you…”

While attending the St. Louis Democratic Convention, the senator remained discreet about his personal life as his party nominated New York justice Alton Parker for president. (Parker would be trounced by
incumbent Teddy Roosevelt in the fall.) Then on July 12, 1904, Clark issued a terse announcement, stating that he had married Anna La Chapelle three years earlier, on May 25, 1901, in Marseille and that they had a two-year-old daughter.

The secret to getting away with a big lie is making sure that all the minor facts are straight. The senator should have checked his calendar before choosing a date and place for the alleged ceremony. It turned out that his own newspaper, the
Butte Miner
, had interviewed Clark on June 1, 1901, and published a detailed account of his recent European trip in which Marseille was not on the itinerary or even close to the cities named.

Newspapers went wild over the news of Clark’s marriage to his former ward. The
New York Times
reported that Anna’s mother, Philomene La Chapelle, was “dumbfounded” to hear of the secret wedding. In a story with a Washington, D.C., dateline, the
Minneapolis Journal
noted that the tale of Clark’s not-so-new bride had created “feverish interest” in the capital: “Official society is particularly concerned. Indeed, it is viewing the situation with anxiety, not to say alarm. It is wondering, for instance, whether or not the senator will attempt to secure social recognition for the wife. The consensus of opinion seems to be that if he is a wise man he will not.”

Behind the scenes, Clark’s friends tried to sanitize the tale, insisting that the couple had indeed wed back in 1901 but that it was a religious ceremony, explaining the lack of an official license. These statements, from anonymous sources, were treated with skepticism.

This was such a delicious melodrama that no angle went unexplored, most notably the concerns of William Clark’s four older children that their inheritance would shrink due to his new marriage and child. “The whole family of Senator Clark resent his last matrimonial alliance and it is doubted if they will ever become reconciled to receiving Audree [
sic
], the little interloper, into the bosom of their confidence,” wrote the
Seattle Star
, in words that proved prophetic. To ameliorate his children’s concerns, Clark had quietly transferred assets to them; Will Jr., for example, received title to Clark’s Butte home plus an interest in several mines. Meanwhile, Charles Clark was
embarking on a new chapter of his life and had just become engaged to the polo-playing California banking heiress Celia Tobin.

William Andrews Clark was forced to defend the virtue of his bride. He issued a carefully worded statement that appeared in the one newspaper that would not challenge his account: the
Butte Miner
. He explained the supposed two years of secrecy by saying, “Mrs. Clark did not care for social distinction nor the obligations that would entail upon my public life. She was anxious to remain in Europe for a time to continue her studies and felt she could do with more freedom.” Then he added the busy-man excuse, saying, “Personally, I would have preferred to have her with me at all times, but my extensive interests compelled me to spend a great deal of time traveling through the United States…”

He attempted to address the reports that his children were mortified by his marriage. “It has been stated that my family objected to this union. Whatever apprehension, if any, may have existed in this respect on my part was entirely dissipated when the facts were disclosed by the cordial reception of the information and their approval of these relations which were so essential to my happiness. Then again, I wanted my child to be educated in America and brought up as a resolute and patriotic American.”

His older children found it impossible to remain simultaneously honest and diplomatic. His eldest daughter, Mary Clark Culver, made grudgingly supportive comments to reporters, making it clear that she and her siblings had been caught off-guard. “My father’s happiness is the first consideration of his children,” Mary said. “All talk of opposition to my father’s marriage is ridiculous. He literally gave us no time for opposition. It came as a complete surprise.” She admitted that the family was not entirely clueless about her father’s romance. “Oh, yes, we had heard rumors of it before but never considered them seriously at all… we gave them no credence whatever. When we learned the fact here from my father’s lips, it was completely unexpected.” Mary acknowledged that she had been startled to learn that she now had a new half sister. Mary and her siblings were wary of Clark’s new wife due to her youth, her undistinguished background,
and her religion—Anna was a practicing Catholic, while they had been brought up Presbyterian.

Anna La Chapelle Clark remained in Paris with Andrée during her trial by press. After spending so many years in a country tolerant toward affairs of the heart, Anna felt the judgmental reaction of post-Victorian America as a brisk slap. She was in no rush to join her newly announced husband at his homes in New York, Washington, or Butte. Anna delayed her return to the United States for nearly six months, which gave her plenty of time to plan her revenge on the naysayers.

W
hen the German ocean liner
Kronprinz Wilhelm
docked in New York City on January 11, 1905, reporters jostled on the pier, awaiting the arrival of Senator Clark and his newly unveiled bride. Anna had stayed in her stateroom for much of the crossing complaining of seasickness, although nerves may have accentuated her desire for privacy. But now she appeared by her husband’s side, dressed from head to toe in furs and carrying a bunch of purple violets, smiling shyly as she clutched his arm. The usually somber senator was in a jovial mood. “How are we?” Clark said. “Why as happy as sunflowers.”

The reporters inquired about the whereabouts of the newest sunflower, the couple’s toddler, Andrée, and were told that she had remained in Paris with a governess. “Oh, we hated to leave her,” Anna quickly explained. “But we are going back in the spring as soon as the Senator attends to some business here and in Montana.” Clark added this update on his youngest daughter: “She has grown so fast that we felt no anxiety over leaving her on the other side. She is in excellent hands.”

Six months had passed since the Clarks’ wedding announcement, but press curiosity about the unusual circumstances lingered. “Our marriage was not a secret one,” Clark insisted to the reporters. “It was known to our friends. I did not take the public into my confidence because I did not have to.”

The senator and his bride had returned home just as the New York subway system had opened and the Wright brothers were fine-tuning their flying machine. Later that year Edith Wharton would publish her first best seller about the fault lines in New York City’s upper classes and an ambitious young woman’s efforts to land a socially acceptable rich husband,
The House of Mirth
.

For the senator and his wife, this trip had been carefully orchestrated to introduce Anna to society at events such as President Teddy Roosevelt’s 1905 inauguration in Washington and the intimate second wedding of Senator Clark’s divorced daughter Mary, followed by a Butte homecoming. But three weeks after arriving in New York, Anna was rushed into surgery for an unspecified ailment. Since Clark’s four children had scarcely welcomed their new stepmother into the family, Anna was probably relieved to miss the wedding at the Navarro Flats, where her husband gave away his daughter, Mary Clark Culver, to lawyer Charles Potter Kling, a Harvard graduate and native of Maine.

After a few weeks in the hospital, Anna telegraphed to her brother, Arthur La Chapelle, announcing that reports of her illness had been exaggerated: “Don’t pay attention to the papers, I am perfectly well.” When the senator and his wife arrived in Butte on April 16, a large crowd greeted them at the Northern Pacific depot. In the years since Anna had first met William Clark, she had been in and out of Butte, quietly visiting her mother and siblings, aware of the gossip that swirled around her. Now, she was back in triumph as Clark’s wife, and Butte society was eager to witness her transformation into the spouse of the richest and most powerful man in Montana.

This was the moment that Anna had been waiting for, her chance to step out of the shadows onto center stage. Her cue came with a knock on the front door. Three of the most prominent women in Butte showed up together at the redbrick mansion on West Granite Street to call on the new Mrs. Clark. A butler ushered them into the grand entry hall and took their cards. They waited. The women could hear the servant, in an adjourning room, announcing their arrival, and arranged their faces in friendly anticipation. But instead of coming out to greet them, Anna told the butler, in a voice meant
to be overheard, to inform the visitors that Mrs. Clark was not at home.

Not home? This was a social slap heard from coast to coast. Everyone gasped over the cleverness of the new Mrs. Clark, especially since she was welcoming old friends who knew her when she lived near the red-light district. Newspapers lapped up the story.
SENATOR CLARK’S WIFE GETS EVEN,
blared the headline in a Rhode Island newspaper.
SOCIAL WAR IN BUTTE
, announced the
Philadelphia Inquirer
. The
Boston Herald
urged readers to learn from her etiquette lesson: “Treat kindly every poor and good-looking girl, shop girl, telephone girl, stenographer, for at any moment she may become the wife of a multimillionaire and society queen.”

Anna gave an interview elaborating on her feelings, which was quoted in the
Chicago Daily Tribune
. “As far as society is concerned, I know nothing about it and care nothing about it,” she said. “It has absolutely no charms for me. I am domestic in my habits. I love family life. I like to read, study and above all, to look after the interests of my little girl. I have been told that society people rarely mean what they say or say what they mean. As for me, I always wish to say what I think and I believe I do so.” Anna, always an independent woman, would mellow over time in deference to her husband’s desire to entertain. But this was a coming-out party that Butte would never forget.

The senator’s twenty-eight-year-old wife headed to Paris to join her daughter Andrée, but her aging husband then had a health scare that sent Anna racing back to Manhattan. In mid-July, an abscess began pressing down on the senator’s brain, which if untreated might have left him paralyzed. A radical two-hour operation was performed in which part of his skull was removed. Once he was able to travel, the couple sailed for Paris on August 23 and then went on to Italy, bringing three-year-old Andrée. Clark lingered in Paris, since in those slow-moving times the Senate was not in session until December.

This was one of the longest stretches of uninterrupted time the couple had spent together. Celebrating Clark’s return to health, they did the most life-affirming thing possible: conceive a new child. Their daughter Huguette would be born June 9, 1906. Rumors later spread that Huguette was the product of an affair between Anna and her
doctor. While nothing is certain without a DNA test, all accounts indicate that the Clarks were together during the relevant time.

As he approached fatherhood at age sixty-seven, following two frightening health crises, William Andrews Clark was ready to change his life. The month before the birth of his new child, he sent a telegram to the
Butte Miner
to announce that he was retiring from the Senate at the end of his six-year term in early 1907 and would not run again. His departure was not treated as a major loss for the Senate, where he had served on eight committees, including foreign affairs, Indians, and mining, but had not been influential on any of them. With a Republican majority in Congress, as a Democrat, Clark was in the minority during his entire Senate career. Political observers suggested that the aging Clark had fallen under the sway of his young spouse, or as one headline put it,
WIFE RULES THE SENATOR: MRS. W. A. CLARK’S LIKING FOR PARIS AT THE BOTTOM OF HIS RETIREMENT
. He flatly denied it, insisting that Montana would always be his true home.

Anna had retreated into the background in Paris, keeping her pregnancy secret while caring for her ailing former chaperone. She probably either heard about or saw the sensation in the art world that spring: two new paintings by prodigy Tadé Styka were exhibited at the prestigious Salon of the Société des Artistes Français. Born in 1889 to the aristocratic Polish painter Jan Styka, Tadé had been the youngest artist ever chosen to show his work at the 1904 salon. Now he was back with two sophisticated offerings: a scene of Tolstoy on his deathbed, surrounded by sad-eyed peasants and greedy family members, and a portrait of prominent American lawyer Donald Harper and his hunting dog. His father was known for florid religious works and creating what was then the largest painting in the world,
Golgotha
, while Tadé specialized in refined lifelike portraits. His striking painting of Donald Harper brought in many new commissions from Americans in Paris.

As Anna’s pregnancy bloomed, she explained to Andrée that she was going to have a sibling. The precocious four-year-old Andrée’s reply: “Let me think that over.” It became a family joke. Once
Huguette was old enough to understand it, she thought the comment was funny and adopted that phrase for herself. “She thought it was a clever remark and she had a great relationship with her sister,” recalls Huguette’s night nurse, Geraldine Coffey, who recalls that whenever she’d ask her patient to do anything, “She would raise her finger and say, ‘Let me think it over.’ ”

Once again, William Clark was not in the vicinity brandishing cigars when Anna gave birth in Paris to Huguette Marcelle. Instead, the senator had chosen this moment to visit his son Charles in San Mateo, California, and see his newest grandchild, a six-month-old girl. William Clark waited six weeks before turning up in Paris to admire his new daughter.

The occasion was commemorated by a formally posed family photograph. Anna is seated, looking elegant in a floor-length dark skirt, matching jacket, and lacy white blouse, with her hair carefully put up and crowned with an enormous hat with a feather. On her lap, she is holding the baby. Tiny Huguette, with her wispy blonde hair, looks doll-like in a white lace christening dress that trails several feet to the floor. Andrée, now nearly four, has been posed by the photographer on a chair, her expression sulky, her brunette hair flowing to her shoulders, clad in a short white dress, white knee socks, and a straw hat. The senator, with a full head of hair, bushy mustache, and beard, is dressed like a dandy in a summer white suit, white shirt, and tie. Looking directly into the camera with a formal but proud expression, he has one arm protectively around his wife and another encircling Andrée.

The photo previewed the family’s dynamics: Andrée’s closeness to her father, Huguette’s tie to her mother. William Clark affectionately described Andrée as “a little charmer,” and he was so indulgent with her that his wife was forced to play the disciplinarian. Huguette would develop into a shy child, eager to please, quietly hungry for the affection dispensed so freely by her father toward her sister, seeking warmth instead in the arms of her doting mother.

Two months later, in September 1906, the parents left their children at home with the servants, taking a jaunt together in their new Mercedes touring car. The chauffeur was speeding up a hill on a country road outside Marseille when a tire blew. The car flipped over, and
the Clarks were thrown out. “I had quite a knackering on account of [a] busted tire and the chauffeur I think lost his head,” wrote Clark, in a handwritten letter to his Montana lawyer, Walter Bickford, on September 17. “I had a rib broken… Mrs. Clark is with me. Fortunately she was not hurt, only bruised a little.”

In the spring of 1907, they brought Andrée with them to America while Huguette was left behind in Paris with nannies. The Clarks gave Andrée a party at their Butte home in June, complete with performances by trained dogs and singing and dancing in the ballroom. In honor of the absent Huguette’s first birthday, they put her picture on the table next to a small cake. This was an era when wealthy parents considered long absences to be acceptable, and before the existence of such phrases as “attachment disorder.” But for a baby to be without her mother and the rest of her family for several months—unable to see and hear familiar faces and voices—is frightening, creating inchoate fears of being abandoned that can linger beyond a reunion.

Even though he had retired from the Senate, Clark remained in the headlines because of the grandiosity of his nine-story Fifth Avenue mansion, which had been under construction for six years with no end in sight. The Beaux Arts structure, complete with an enormous tower topped with a cupola, had been nicknamed the “Fifth Avenue Horror” and “Clark’s Folly.” The senator had hired a French architect, Henri Deglane, to design the house and the New York architectural firm of Lord, Hewlett and Hull to build the hotel-sized 121-room dwelling. The supervising New York architect, Washington Hull, had taken to pointing to his gray head of hair and joking, “They were brown when we broke ground for the Clark mansion.” The mansion was known as the most expensive private home in America: the original cost had been estimated at $3 million, but as the years passed that number grew to more than $7 million. Fifth Avenue was known as Millionaire’s Row, dotted with the Vanderbilt Petit Chateau, the Carnegie Mansion, and the Astor palace, but Clark sought to outdo them all.

Clark’s oldest daughter, Mary, had originally been involved in planning the Fifth Avenue palace, since she had expected to live there with her family and serve as her father’s hostess. Mary liked amateur
theatricals and had customized the design to include a large theatre with a hydraulic lift for scenery and changing rooms for the actors. But Mary had lost her hoped-for social position now that her father had remarried; Anna would now be hosting parties at the senator’s side. The theatre plans were scrapped, and the mansion was reconfigured to accommodate the Clarks’ two young children and eliminate living quarters for Mary and her family.

Clark instructed workmen to create a magical nursery for his young daughters including hand-painted tiles illustrating nursery rhymes and fairy tales. (
LUXURY FOR THAT CLARK BABY
, announced the
Syracuse Journal
.) Concerned about pandemics and the health of his children, Clark had even created a secure room in a turret if they needed to be quarantined.