by Meryl Gordon
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 t
heir 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.
The family headed for England in late May on the Adriatic to attend the coronation of King George V. Once again photographers snapped shots of Huguette and Andrée, accompanied by William Clark’s young grandchild, Katherine Morris. The family spent a leisurely summer at the French seaside. In late August, William Clark wrote to Walter Bickford, “Mrs. Clark and the children are still at Trouville where we have a beautiful villa. We have had a six weeks period of unceasing heat in Paris but out there it has been very pleasant.” At Trouville, the Clarks befriended a French couple, Andre and Noemie de Villermont, artists with two sons, Etienne—two years older than Huguette—and Henri, two years younger. The childhood playmates would remain close for decades.
William Clark had been listed in Who’s Who in New York as a member of numerous well-known private clubs (Manhattan, New York Yacht, Downtown, City Ardsley, National Arts), but he had never been fully included in the life of New York’s 400, the top echelon of society. He and his wife frequently stated that they had no interest in clubs that would not have them. When Clark was in Los Angeles in late October that year on a business trip (Anna and the girls were still in France), reporters asked whether he planned to entertain society in his new Fifth Avenue palace. “That depends on what you call society,” replied Clark, giving a windy and defensive answer. “If you mean giving big parties, these will be very few; if you mean meeting our friends and the people of the artistic and professional world, I hope these occasions will be many.”
In this interview, the senator was eager to boost the artistic credentials of his wife. “Mrs. Clark is a woman who enjoys the beautiful side of life, which means that side which includes artistic expression and effort,” Clark said. “She is a brilliant harpist herself and is intensely fond of music and the kindred arts, as I am, and we both like the sort of people of similar tastes and inclinations. Formal society, that which devotes itself to formal society affairs, has little attraction for either of us.”
Noble sentiments to be sure, but in truth, Clark was hungry to be recognized as a sophisticated art collector. He had scoured Europe and the auction houses of New York for treasures, outbidding his fellow robber barons to amass a cornucopia of art. He told the reporters that he felt a civic obligation to allow others to see his masterpieces, saying that he did not think he had “a right to be selfish with the objects of art that I have collected.” So he and Anna, who returned to New York with the girls in mid-December, decided they would give a grand party to showcase their collections.
The evening was a disaster. Anna was mortified by what occurred. Huguette was quite young, but she undoubtedly heard about the night. As one newspaper account put it, “When the new house was completed, Senator Clark gave a huge party. Hundreds of invitations were sent out to all the best people in New York but all the best people did not come for these were many in high society who always spurned the advances of the aspiring senator and to whom he was always just an ‘upstart’ from the wild west.”
Many years later, when Anna was a widow living several blocks away, she would confide her memories of that humiliating experience to Robert Samuels, an elite decorator. The story became part of the mythology surrounding Anna and Huguette, and their two-against-the-world, mother-daughter relationship. Samuels passed the story on to Neal Sattler, Chris Sattler’s older brother and the contractor who renovated Huguette’s apartment. “Bob told us about the debacle when the father had the big party and they were shunned by society,” Neal Sattler recalled. “The senator did not have a great reputation and none of the important people showed up. They were very hurt by this.” The Clarks would entertain again, but not for a while and not on this kind of scale.
Anna remained close to her mother, who had been able to relocate to a much larger home in Butte thanks to the generosity of her son-in-law. Philomene La Chapelle was sixty years old, nearly thirteen years younger than William Clark, and had always been the picture of good health. In January 1912, Philomene was on the phone with her son Arthur’s wife and complained of feeling ill. Eight hours later, she was dead from pneumonia. “The death of Mrs. La Chapelle was a very sad affair and it was so sudden and unexpected, and Mrs. Clark was all worked up about it,” wrote William Clark to Walter Bickford. “However, she is very brave about it and started yesterday for Butte.” Rather than accompany his wife to the funeral, Clark left instead on a business trip to Chicago, Arizona, and Los Angeles. Once again, their daughters were on their own on Fifth Avenue with the servants.
The death of their grandmother was a shock to Huguette and Andrée. But another untimely death, just a few months later, would haunt Huguette for the rest of her life. She would obsess about what happened, read about it, talk about it, and conflate the events in her mind until she imagined that she could have been among the dead, too. The unlucky family member who passed away: her first cousin Walter Miller Clark, the twenty-eight-year-old son of William Clark’s younger brother and business partner James Ross Clark. Walter Clark had spent his early years in Butte, then moved with his parents to Los Angeles. A graduate of the University of California, he had joined the Clark family sugar beet operation and become the supervisor of the Los Alamitos Sugar Factory. He had married a Butte woman, Virginia McDowell, in January 1909, and the couple had a baby boy, James Ross II. The couple decided in 1912 to take a belated honeymoon to Europe, leaving their two-year-old son with his maternal grandmother. When it was time to return home, Walter Clark and his wife boarded a luxury ship in Southampton destined for New York: the Titanic.
“All the way over, we had such beautiful calm weather, in fact up to the accident, the sea had been like glass,” Virginia Clark later told reporters. She had retired to their first-class stateroom when she felt a jolt at 11:30 p.m. She got dressed and went to find her husband, who was in the smoking room playing cards with friends. Alerted that the ship had struck an iceberg, the couple went to their room to change their clothes. “We took with us our heavy overcoats, I my furs, two life preservers, and what valuables we could pick up. My husband also saw that I was provided with money in case we should be separated.” On deck with John Jacob Astor and his pregnant wife, Madeleine, Virginia and the other women were helped by officers into lifeboats, but the men were not allowed to board. “I know from the way he bade me good-bye that he felt no apprehension and fully expected to join me later. There was room for fifteen others in our boat and three men could have been taken as well.” Walter Clark perished at sea.
William Andrews Clark, who had been fond of his nephew, wrote to Walter Bickford, “We have been shocked by the disaster to the Titanic and filled with the deepest regret at the drowning of Walter Clark. We had hoped for a day or two that he had been saved but now it seems as if all the saved have been accounted for.”
Huguette was only five years old, but as a veteran of several ocean crossings, the news left her terrified. Later in life, she would frequently inform people that her father had purchased tickets on what was meant to be the next voyage of the Titanic, from New York back to Europe. The story became convoluted in the telling, as if Huguette imagined that she had nearly been in danger herself. Her physician, Dr. Henry Singman, recalled, “She told me about somebody who died on the Titanic, who went down, and that she was supposed to be going back to the States but her father had changed the time of the departure from Europe.” She told the same story to her best friend, Suzanne Pierre, who passed it to her granddaughter, Kati Despretz Cruz. “Huguette and her mother were supposed to be on the Titanic but changed their plans at the last minute,” Cruz say
s. Huguette fixated on her cousin’s death and the near miss for herself for decades, going obsessively over all the might-have-beens. Her night nurse, Geraldine Coffey, recalled that she often talked about this disaster that befell “a young person, newly married man, a relative.”
Judging by William Clark’s letters, his family was never in danger. They spent the winter of 1912 in the United States: he noted that Anna was in Chicago in February, and mentioned her plans to return to Europe in May. Clark wrote to Walter Bickford on May 25 that he was en route to Jerome, Arizona: “Before I left my wife and the children sailed on the good ship George Washington, which I hope will not get Titaniced before its arrival at the French port.”
Children are often resilient on the surface—frightening moments can be held at bay, reemerging later in life—and Huguette did not seem unduly troubled to her parents. On July 15, 1912, Clark reported, “I have just heard from Mrs. Clark and they are all very well. She has taken a place at Fontainebleau for the summer.” Five weeks later, Clark was in France himself, noting approvingly that son William and his second wife, Alice, had come to visit, and adding, “Mrs. Clark never looked better in her life than now, and the children are growing fast and are having the time of their lives.”
For the next two years, the Clark family continued their transatlantic commute. Huguette would later mention her father’s frequent absences. The mining mogul had founded a new town—Clarksville, Arizona—for the employees of his booming United Verde Copper company in nearby Jerome. This was one of the first planned communities in the United States, and Clark had built six hundred homes, a school, a library, a church, and the entire infrastructure of water, sewage, and power lines.