The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (17 page)

So when Huguette later expressed interest in taking painting lessons, there was an obvious candidate. Tadé had not taken on private pupils before, but he could hardly refuse the blandishments of his well-heeled patron. Huguette was ferried by chauffeur to his Central Park South studio, along with a chaperone who remained in the next room. Tadé became fond of the shy and sheltered but artistically inclined teenager. They chatted away happily in French, and he liked to play practical jokes to make her laugh. He would occasionally dash off an impromptu portrait of Huguette while she was working. In one of these paintings, he depicts Huguette standing at her easel with a paintbrush and a palette in hand, a slender young girl with a thoughtful and engaged expression, alive with the pleasure of creating—an artist at work.

Anna Clark had discovered that she liked California during her visits to her brother, Arthur, in Los Angeles and her vacations at Long Beach. Now that the family needed to shut down their New York residence for five months a year to avoid taxes, they needed another home. In 1923, Anna and her husband rented a house in Santa Barbara for the summer. The sun-drenched city with its palm trees, ocean vistas, and hilly canyons had become the West Coast version of Newport, dotted with grand estates built by Goulds and Peabodys.

The Clarks took a handsome white oceanfront villa, Bellosguardo, perched on a cliff with views of the mountains and water. Bellosguardo had been built in 1903 by Tulsa oil magnate William Miller Graham and his wife, Lee, whose houseguests included the Duke and Duchess de Richelieu, Pittsburgh banker William Mellon, actress Elinor Glyn, and members of the Vanderbilt family. But the owners had recently divorced, so the sprawling property was available, with its wraparound porch, verdant gardens, football-field-sized lawn, and private white sand beach.

While Anna and Huguette played golf—the athletic Huguette also went horseback riding and tried out her surfing technique—William
Clark continued to crisscross the country on business. He was now eighty-four years old, lonely for his wife during his frequent absences, but he refused to retire.

The teenage girl whom he had taken as his protégée in 1893 had become his great love, and he missed Anna so much that he wrote to her constantly. On July 23, he wrote to his wife from Butte, “I can also see you all in my minds eye around the yard in various games and on the beach and in due course of time I shall be glad to get back again.” The family man urged Anna a few weeks later to encourage Huguette to write to him, saying, “My love to Huguette and tell her I have had only two letters from her since I came away. How easy it is to forget. I am so glad that you remember me so often.”

He wrote affectionate letters to Huguette, encouraging her to keep up her golf game. “I know you will like golf when you get to playing well. This requires a great deal of practice… I am glad that you are getting along well with your studies.” The former Democratic senator lamented to his daughter the sudden death of Republican president Warren Harding on August 2: “It was such a pity as he was one of the greatest and best Presidents we have had for many years.”

With Anna, he discussed his business problems in his letters: “The Socialists are trying to induce me to sell the water system to the city at a low price so they can get cheap water. They would not care what I would lose as they would like to have the city buy it at half price the cost.” The elderly robber baron felt beleaguered and bitter about his legacy. “I sometimes feel that all that I have done for the betterment of mankind is not worthwhile as there is very little appreciation but one should not encourage that feeling…”

Andrée was always on his mind, and he wrote to his spouse on the fourth anniversary of their daughter’s death:

That August, the headmistress and founder of the Spence School, Clara Spence, died at the age of sixty-one while on vacation at a cottage in Greenwich, Connecticut. William Clark wrote to his wife on August 16 that he was sorry to hear the news, adding, “It is such a pity as she took such an interest personally in my girls. I hope that it will not interfere with the plans she professed to me to advance Huguette this year…” In the same letter, he mentioned he was going to the “Old Timer meeting” of the Montana Pioneers, but joked in a postscript, “Don’t worry about me at all. I am not going to do anything indiscreet. W.A.C.”

His older children were concerned about Clark’s health. His son Will Jr. alerted his sister Katherine Morris that the aging senator did not look well. Katherine sent a telegram to her stepmother, Anna, urging her to get the senator to take it easy: “Letter from Will says father doing altogether too much is losing weight and does not get proper rest and food. Cannot you get him back to Santa Barbara as we are all much worried about him.” Will Jr. followed up himself, alerting Anna in a telegram on August 29 that he would be accompanying his father from Butte to California by train and “think it would please him if you would meet us at Los Angeles.”

Once William Andrews Clark arrived in Bellosguardo, he was delighted to join in the easygoing resort life. “We are all very well and all enjoying this splendid climate,” Clark wrote to his lawyer, Walter Bickford. “Today we had the eclipse to attract our attention… the effect of it was wonderful.” In a photograph of the senator and his wife, he is sitting in a wooden chair and Anna is perched on the armrest with her arms around him, a picture of domestic tranquility. A wire dangles from her ear, attached to her hearing aid on a table
nearby. She was not vain about her disability and was willing to be photographed with the box so that she did not miss a word of conversation. Anna had brought along Huguette’s tutors, the Vidal sisters, and the senator also posed with the flirtatious beauty Jaquita Vidal, looking pleased by her attention. The two young women doted on Huguette, and she beamed in their presence.

William Andrews Clark was so taken with the twenty-three-acre Bellosguardo that he bought the estate that fall for a reduced price of $300,000. The Italian-style two-story mansion featured white marble floors, oak ceiling beams, and ample porches, and the private beach included cabanas. The building was secluded on three sides by its location on a bluff at the edge of the ocean; the only neighbor was the adjoining cemetery. He and Anna decided to stay there for the fall, sending Huguette back to New York with chaperones to stay at the Ambassador Hotel. The seventeen-year-old Huguette did not seem to mind, writing a series of upbeat letters to her father as she continued to try to impress him with her dedication to classwork.

A week later, Huguette wrote to him again. She wanted to send word that she was spending time with her Clark relatives at Spence as well as John Hall Jr., the husband-to-be of her older niece, Katherine Elizabeth Morris. Huguette had been chosen as a bridesmaid for the couple’s upcoming January wedding, with the party to be held at her father’s Fifth Avenue mansion.

Her father arrived back in Manhattan in time to celebrate his eighty-fifth birthday on January 9. He was still considered such a formidable figure in the business world that the
Wall Street Journal
wrote a tongue-in-cheek article about this momentous birthday, joking that Clark continued to be “a driving personality so prejudiced as to be against the right of such words as ‘leisure’ and ‘vacation’ to repose in the dictionary.” The article quoted an unnamed business colleague who said Clark’s idea of fun is “to drop down to Wall Street and put in the night working.” The article closed by saying, “He’s months and months older than Mr. Rockefeller; but try to tell him—you try!” John D. Rockefeller was six months younger than his fellow robber baron, born on July 8, 1839.

That year, a new, imported fad swept the country that had a profound impact on Huguette. In London, the renowned architect Sir Edwin Lutyens built an elaborate four-story Palladian dollhouse for
Queen Mary at the behest of her cousin Princess Marie. It included a tiny Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost in the garage, miniature furniture, 750 tiny paintings, and even miniature bottles of Château Lafite. James Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle wrote new stories that were included in miniature books, prompting a
New York Times
feature,
QUEEN’S DOLLS HAVE PRICELESS LIBRARY
. Prohibitionists in America complained about the display of liquor:
WINE CELLAR IN DOLL HOUSE FOR QUEEN IS QUESTIONED
was the headline of a
Washington Post
article. The dollhouse was put on public display to raise money for charity.

This much-publicized Lilliputian 1924 dwelling launched a craze among upper-class American women for dollhouses. Mrs. James Ward Thorne of Chicago, who had married into Montgomery Ward’s family, was inspired to commission craftsmen to create sixty-eight miniature rooms, with replicas of antique American furniture and European interiors, which would later go on permanent display at the Art Institute of Chicago. “This was a very female hobby,” explains Lindsay Mican Morgan, a curator at the Art Institute, explaining that wealthy women seized on the novelty constructions as a form of self-expression. “These women often didn’t have full control over their own world and their own lives. Here they were reaching out to create their own little worlds that they completely controlled themselves.”

For the already doll-obsessed Huguette, these idealized miniature worlds were a source of wonder. She already owned dollhouses, but this upscale enthusiasm made her passion a respectable hobby. Huguette would go on to commission and collect many dollhouses, paying meticulous attention to getting the period details and proportions just right.

Although her father still bragged about having the energy of a robust middle-aged man, William Andrews Clark had begun to look and feel his age. In the summer of 1924, the senator and his wife and daughter decamped for Santa Barbara again, joined by three of his grandchildren: Charles Clark’s daughters Mary, Patricia, and Agnes. Local man-about-town Marshall Bond Jr. lovingly described a party
that the senator and Anna gave for the young women in his 1974 memoir,
Adventures with Peons, Princes, and Tycoons.
A Los Angeles band played jazz—this was, after all, the Roaring Twenties—and couples danced until twelve, after which they ate a midnight meal that included Lobster Newberg and Chicken à la King. “I later learned that the Clarks had one of the most celebrated French chefs in the world,” Bond wrote. But the senator sat out the event. “Mrs. Clark took me into the study to meet the senator, who was slumped in an easy chair, scowling like an ancient bird of prey… We had one of the shortest conversations in history, consisting of the word, ‘Hello.’ ”