The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark

by Meryl Gordon

  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.

  Chapter Six

  A Parisian Girlhood

  When 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.

  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.