The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (11 page)

Clark demanded every modern convenience: a swimming pool, dressing rooms fitted with Carrara glass, a Turkish bath, a wine cellar, safe deposit vaults for Anna’s impressive jewelry, an air filtration system, three boilers, and an eighty-ton coal storage room, all in the basement. An elevator large enough for twenty people had been installed, as well as a spectacular white marble staircase suitable for a grand entrance, with balustrades of gold and bronze. Clark built four large art galleries to showcase his paintings, sculpture, tapestries, Egyptian antiquities, and majolica. The banquet hall, paneled in English oak, was carved in the style of Henry IV. Now that every robber baron was installing an organ in his home—including John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, and Andrew Carnegie—Clark had trumped them all with a massive instrument that cost $120,000.

The copper mogul commissioned sculptors such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Paul Bartlett, and George Grey Barnard to create bronze decorations for the house. Raphaël Collin, a painter and professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris who had painted panels used in the Opéra-Comique and Hôtel de Ville, advised on the décor. An Oriental art expert honored by the Japanese government with the medal of the Order of the Rising Sun, Collin created an Oriental room with hand-painted panels. This room would fascinate the young Huguette, sparking her lifelong interest in all things Japanese, from geisha-clad women to kabuki theatre to the royal family.

The showstopper in the Clark mansion was the Salon Doré. The widowed Count d’Orsay, renovating his Parisian mansion in 1770 in honor of his second marriage to a princess, had commissioned a profusion of gold leaf panels for the walls depicting love, music, victory, and the arts. On the third floor, Clark imported a library from a Normandy château with carved woodwork dating from 1523. That floor included his-and-hers suites. Anna’s opulent living quarters overlooked Central Park: the parlor was paneled in yellowish white satinwood from Ceylon and carved with flowers, and the boudoir was made of bird’s-eye maple. Her bathroom featured onyx and alabaster set with precious stones, and tiny faucets to dispense perfume so she could scent her bath with roses or violets.

Frustrated with cost overruns, Clark decided to seize the means of production after a granite quarry owner tried to triple the contractual price to $650,000, claiming that design changes had pushed up the price. He bought the Bangor, Maine, quarry and five other industrial facilities for the sole purpose of completing his dream mansion: a stone finishing plant, the Henry-Bonnard bronze foundry in Manhattan, a New Jersey marble woodworking plant, a woodworking factory, and a Long Island decorative plaster plant.

Against this backdrop of conspicuous consumption, Clark practiced ludicrous frugality. He took the subway in New York and caused a scene one day when he lost a penny in a chewing gum machine at the Fourteenth Street station. One of the richest men in America, he was sufficiently annoyed that he complained to the station manager, missing two uptown trains until he got his money’s worth, much to the merriment of his fellow passengers.

Clark was consumed with the idea that people were trying to cheat him, which had some basis in reality. Art dealers frequently tried to sell him fakes and sometimes succeeded. Clark’s architects sued one another over charges involving misappropriation of funds. In his business dealings, Clark repeatedly sued other companies—and was sued by them—and hated to give in. “This man who is said to have one of the largest incomes in the world is a born fighter for the sake of winning, no matter what the cause,” wrote the
Washington Post
, in a story about Clark’s efforts to avoid being fleeced on home building costs.
“He would slash when driven into the last ditch to accomplish his goals.”

While waiting for the house to be completed, Clark loaned eighty paintings to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington and had the pleasure of taking President Roosevelt there on a private tour to see his treasures. As word spread about Clark’s prodigious spending on art, the Metropolitan Museum’s curatorial staff began to send him solicitous letters. Clark was not considered socially eminent enough to be invited to join the Metropolitan’s board, one of the most desired honors in the city, but presumably his Corots and Gainsboroughs might be welcome. He invited the Met’s curators to an exhibit of his artworks at the Lotos Club.

The construction of his colossal mansion at 927 Fifth Avenue dragged on in comic fashion. Clark kept announcing that it was almost done and he and his new family would be moving in soon. Then that deadline would pass. Anna saw no need to uproot herself and her daughters from Paris until the Fifth Avenue palace was finished.

The painting pulses with life. The brightly colored scene depicts children playing at a park in Paris, young girls in their pinafores playing with friends, well-dressed indulgent mothers watching nearby and knitting or gossiping to pass the time. There is energy and exuberance and carefree joy captured in the brushstrokes. Painted in 1906 by American Impressionist William Glackens, purchased courtesy of William Clark’s copper fortune, the painting
Luxembourg Gardens
hangs in the Corcoran Gallery, as if providing a window into the early life of Clark’s two youngest daughters.

Huguette and Andrée lived with their mother and the servants in a magnificent home on the Avenue Victor Hugo in the 16th arrondissement, close to the Bois de Boulogne. Sheltered in a cocoon of luxury, the girls had a pampered existence that was radically different from their parents’ hardscrabble childhoods. Even the girls’ miniature jewelry was exquisite, tiny gold trinkets crafted with care. Both of their parents had worked with their hands—William Clark doing chores on his father’s farm, Anna helping at her mother’s boardinghouse—but
the two girls would never have to set a table or make a bed, much less earn their keep.

Huguette was fey and otherworldly, a sunny child who in family photos often looks like she is skipping along by herself, content with her own company. Andrée was the adventurous one, more likely to rebel and get into trouble. Huguette would remember their mother exploding with anger when Andrée began to whine one day about being bored. “Look at all that you have compared to people who have so little,” Anna lectured her eldest daughter. “You have the nerve to complain when you live in a palace.” Huguette idolized her mother and never wanted that furious tone directed at her. That maternal outburst was so unforgettable for Huguette that even as a centenarian, she remembered her mother’s comments word for word, recounting them to her assistant, Christopher Sattler.

Andrée and Huguette spoke French as their primary language. “Huguette giggled when she talked about her father’s French accent,” says Huguette’s goddaughter Wanda Styka, the daughter of painter Tadé Styka. “Everyone around her was speaking Parisian French, but he spoke with an American accent.” The girls were tutored in English, Spanish, Italian, and German. Anna, consumed by the harp, was eager for her children to embrace music lessons. Huguette took up the violin and Andrée studied the piano. In the summer Anna took her daughters to a villa in Cabourg on the coast of Normandy—the favorite watering spot of Marcel Proust—or to the Château de Petit-Bourg. That majestic property had belonged to a Bourbon duchess before the French Revolution. Huguette would talk about these carefree days as among the happiest of her life.

William Clark spent long stretches in Butte and Manhattan, occasionally summoning his family back to the United States. When the White Star liner
Teutonic
landed in New York in July 1910, an enterprising photographer snapped the senator alighting with his daughters, and the photo was sent around the country as newsworthy: “Former Senator Clark and his daughters: First photograph taken in the United States of the little girls, both of whom were born abroad.” Huguette, four years old, is staring shyly at the ground and trying to
avoid the camera as the senator adjusts her straw hat; Andrée smiles, enjoying the attention.

From then on, these two young heiresses were treated as American royalty. The two pretty Clark girls were frequently photographed by the newspapers, and even the smallest revelation about their privileged lives was devoured by the public. Huguette hated being on display. When her mother took family photographs, Huguette would fetchingly pose and smile, but when photographed by strangers in public, she would usually look away from the camera.

They were well-traveled children, covering thousands of miles in any given year in a Paris-Manhattan-Butte circuit, traveling first-class on luxury liners across the Atlantic and in their father’s private railcar in America (extra-large car No. 2001, paneled in oak from Sherwood Forest, seating twelve at dinner, sleeping compartments finished in vermillion, buttons to summon servants). The Clark family stayed in Butte long enough on this visit that the girls were listed as residents in the 1910 local census. These trips allowed Huguette and Andrée to become close to their grandmother—Anna’s mother, Philomene La Chapelle—who lived in Butte. Clark’s children from his first family, however, had long since scattered to the coasts: his two daughters were in New York City, his son William Jr. had remarried and moved to Los Angeles, and son Charlie was in San Mateo.

Huguette enjoyed Butte and described those trips fondly in later years. “She mentioned that house many times, the steps where she used to line up her dolls, the pansies that they planted just below it, she really liked it,” recalls her assistant, Chris Sattler. Clark took his wife and two young daughters to William Jr.’s fishing camp near Missoula; Anna was so enamored of the natural beauty that Clark wrote to his lawyer inquiring about renting a similar spot for future vacations.

At the end of 1910, the Clarks returned to Paris for Christmas, and then began preparing for the moment that William Clark had been anticipating for a decade: taking up residence in his much-ridiculed Fifth Avenue mansion. “There may be uglier structures, but none come to mind,” harrumphed the
Boston Journal
, calling the Clark
house “towering and massive in its arrogant hideousness.” Shortly before William Clark and his family moved in, the
Chicago Daily News
joked that the copper mogul had actually shown restraint: “In the description of the residence, we find no hint that he has incorporated a game reserve, a section of Adirondack mountains, a slice of Mediterranean shore, a volcano for heating purposes, a glacier for refrigeration, or a geyser for hot water.”

The public be damned—William Clark was happy with his new home. He expressed his good cheer on January 29 in a letter to his Montana-based lawyer, Walter Bickford. “Mrs. Clark and the rest are all well and we are gradually getting settled down,” Clark wrote. “We have been on the fourth floor for some time but soon expect to be ‘promoted’ to the third. I am engaged in hanging pictures, and you may be sure I am somewhat busy.”

In public, Clark conveyed a dour and pompous persona, presenting himself as a world-weary, self-important captain of industry. Yet in his letters to Walter Bickford, the mogul comes across as a man with a sense of humor, engaged and curious about politics and business. He writes fondly of his late-blooming sons and their prowess in business, but he is truly effusive when it comes to Anna. He sings her praises in chatty postscripts like a man very much in love, and often adds affectionate words about his two youngest daughters. (Even jaded journalists had noted the success of the marriage. The
Chicago Tribune
, in a story headlined
WOULD YOU LET YOUR DAUGHTER MARRY A MAN OLD ENOUGH TO BE HER FATHER
, wrote that “the senator appears to be devoted to his one time ward and she to him.”)

For Huguette and Andrée, moving into the mansion on Fifth Avenue was an adventure—the vast house was great fun to explore. There were shrieks of childish laughter in this forbidding palace. William Clark urged them to be careful about colliding with the art, or as Huguette would later tell Christopher Sattler, “Her father didn’t like her to run around in the gallery, the Salon Doré.”

The girls shared a room in the vast quarters. Huguette would later describe Andrée to her nurse, Geraldine Coffey. “Her sister was a wonderful writer and reader and she would tell her stories at night. She would not finish them,” says Coffey. Inspired by Scheherazade of
the Arabian Nights, Andrée would keep Huguette in suspense and pick up the tale the following evening.

These happy scenes were marred by two scares during the family’s first few weeks in the Manhattan mansion. Anna was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital on a Sunday night in terrible pain. The doctors pronounced her condition critical. The senator spent most of the night by her side. The next morning she was successfully operated on for appendicitis. For her two young daughters, their mother’s near-death experience was terrifying. Then just a few days later, while Anna was still recuperating at the hospital, and Andrée and Huguette were at home with their father and the servants, thieves tried to break into their Fifth Avenue mansion via the roof.

It happened late at night. After hearing reports from neighbors about an attempted robbery nearby, Clark’s watchman went up to the fourth floor of the house and spotted a flashlight shining on the roof of one of the art galleries. He called the local precinct, and thirty policemen responded to the call, a massive show of force, but the would-be burglars escaped. Clark sat in his library calmly reading a book as the search took place.