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

by Meryl Gordon

  Anna’s sister, Amelia, who did not have children of her own, often joined the family in Europe for months at a time. Amelia’s first marriage in 1901 to Edward Hoyt, a Minneapolis securities dealer, had unraveled within a few years, and she had begun listing the Clark’s Fifth Avenue mansion as her home address on shipboard immigration forms. Amelia played the role of second mother to Andrée and Huguette, and Huguette would later talk about her with love. “She was very close to Aunt Amelia,” says Hadassah Peri, Huguette’s nurse for two decades. “Amelia was married to a guy and he walk out. The first husband is no good.”

  For Anna La Chapelle Clark, her musical skills were an asset in her New York life, perceived as an admirably genteel hobby. She won a favorable mention in Town & Country for her proficiency in playing the harp, a sign that she was starting to win acceptance among the members of the Social Register. “A pretty woman playing the harp makes a very delightful picture and stirs the memory with scenes from Jane Austen and suggests dainty little watercolors in gilt frame,” stated the magazine story about the newly fashionable artistic pursuit. “The society women who are taking the harp seriously include Mrs. William A. Clark, wife of the ex-senator, who makes the instrument a feature of her beautiful new music room.”

  The spring of 1914 found Anna once again headed for France and the Château de Petit-Bourg. But Clark was preoccupied over labor unrest at his Missoula operations, and concern about socialists running for office in Montana. He could not get away until mid-July, writing to a friend that he was eager to see his family and “get a little rest.”

  Clark crossed the Atlantic just as war was about to erupt in Europe. On June 28, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo. As Clark was arriving on the continent, on July 28 Austria declared war on Serbia, and within days Russia and Germany mobilized their troops. When Germany declared war on France on August 3, the Americans in Paris began scrambling to get out.

  American ambassador to France Myron Herrick was deluged with cries for help, as his assistant and biographer, T. Bentley Mott, later recounted. “It was the height of the tourist season, and upon the declaration of war, from every quarter of Europe whence they could escape, travelers poured into Paris on their way to the channel ports of France and England… They expected that their troubles would be over when they reached Paris, when in fact they had often only begun. Train service was everywhere disorganized by the requirements of mobilization, busses and private automobiles had been requisitioned, taxis became scarce, hotels began to close, the whole mechanism of modern life was topsy-turvy. And they had no money and could get none.”

  The French banks refused to cash checks from foreigners. Even William Clark, who was now with his family and Anna’s sister, Amelia, at the Château de Petit-Bourg outside Paris, was unable to secure the money to pay their way out of town. William Clark’s name was on a list released by the State Department of well-known Americans in Europe whose safety was at risk. The United States government announced it was sending a battleship, the USS Tennessee, to bring in a supply of gold to France and then transport Americans to England.

  Huguette vividly remembered what happened next, because she had been the little heroine. As her assistant Chris recalled, “They had to get to Le Havre, the port, but they had no cash. Millionaires don’t walk around with cash. The senator had given her a gold coin every week, and she never spent it.” The eight-year-old and her sister volunteered their savings; their parents used the contents of Huguette’s and Andrée’s piggy banks to pay for their escape. According to Sattler, “They took these gold coins, hired a carriage, and it took them to Le Havre.” Even the hardened William Clark was sobered by the journey, later telling reporters, “Every road from the city is choked with fleeing refugees. From what we heard in Paris, a great battle will soon be fought in the region of Marne.” Huguette cherished a photo taken on the deck of the USS Tennessee. Her father looks up from his newspaper at the camera; Anna and Andrée are smiling while Huguette gazes shyly at the ground.

  William Clark had asked the American embassy to keep an eye on his Paris home, but after a few weeks in England, he and Anna decided it was safe for them to cross the English Channel again. “Mrs. Clark and I have just returned from Paris where we went to get a lot of things that we left there when Paris was supposed to be almost within the grasp of the enemy and we had a pleasant time,” he wrote to his lawyer in Butte.

  When the Clarks arrived in New York in late October, they were photographed yet again disembarking from the boat, with Huguette clutching one of her constant companions, a doll. “When she traveled in the early years with her family, she always took her dolls,” says Geraldine Coffey, Huguette’s night nurse. “She knew everything about dolls.”

  Now that the family planned to live in Manhattan full-time, the two girls were enrolled in private school. Huguette did not last long at her first placement. Since she was the only blonde in her class, the teacher asked her to play a German girl in a skit. Since Huguette and her family had just fled the Germans, she refused to take the part. She was so proud of her protest that she still spoke about it years later. Her supportive parents moved Huguette to Miss Spence’s school instead. Their youngest daughter was showing some spunk.

  Chapter Seven

  The Fractured Fairy Tale

  The life of a typical eight-year-old does not involve hours spent practicing on a Stradivarius or posing patiently for a renowned artist. But now that Huguette Clark was living full-time on Fifth Avenue, her day-to-day existence required a full-scale immersion in the dual passions of her parents, art and music. They were force-feeding her culture. Not only was Huguette living in a vast art museum, walking past paintings by Titian and Turner, but strains of music were ever present, from her mother playing her harp to chamber music groups giving private concerts.

  Huguette strived to improve her musical skills—she had once cheerfully serenaded passersby from the balcony of their Paris apartment—although rarely has there been such a mismatch between the rudimentary skills of a struggling pupil and a concert-worthy instrument created by the world’s greatest violin maker. To give her every opportunity to excel, her parents arranged for Huguette to take lessons with Anna’s friend André Tourret, a celebrated Parisian violinist who was performing with the New York Chamber Music Society and shared concert billing with Enrico Caruso at a Biltmore Hotel musicale.

  The artist chosen in the fall of 1914 to capture the likenesses of Huguette and Andrée was another Parisian émigré. Pierre Tartoue charged up to $20,000 per portrait and would go on to paint King Gustav of Sweden and President Calvin Coolidge. In his portraits of the Clark girls, the artist highlighted their age difference. At twelve, Andrée looks like a worldly teenager, somberly holding a large basket of flowers, wearing a dancing school costume—a red blouse and white skirt—with her dark hair carefully coifed and legs demurely crossed. The eight-year-old Huguette is a sprite, her short blonde hair in a pixie cut, wearing a short-sleeved frilly white dress and perched on a table with her feet akimbo as if she’s ready to jump off, holding onto her favorite prop, a doll. Tartoue prided himself on capturing the personality of his subjects, and he conveyed Andrée’s bookish seriousness and Huguette’s I-won’t-grow-up charm.

  Clark allowed Tartoue to display the paintings at the Henry Reinhardt Gallery, a Fifth Avenue showplace that sold masterpieces by Corot, Rubens, and Van Dyck. The portraits of the Clark girls were favorably reviewed in the New York Herald: MR. TARTOUE LIMNS SOCIETY DELICATELY. But the copper mogul may have had second thoughts after the New York World used a mashed-up photo of the portraits with the misspelled caption: “Miss Andre and Miss Hugette Clark and their six million dollar home on Fifth Avenue.” Public interest in the Clark heiresses, two of the richest girls in America, remained intense even as gossip columnists feasted on morsels about the extended Clark family. Every birth, death, divorce, custody fight, and society antic was covered by newspapers coast-to-coast as entertainment f
or the masses, a vicarious glimpse at how the other half lived. The fascination was so strong that even a California con man who pretended to be a Clark scion—shades of twenty-first-century “Clark” Rockefeller—received ample ink.

  Three of the senator’s children from his first marriage were portrayed as caricatures: divorcée Mary Clark Culver Kling with her flamboyant Manhattan parties and busy love life; spendthrift Charlie’s splurges on his racing stable and battles against his creditors; and culture maven Will Jr., who collected rare books and manuscripts with a special interest in the works of Oscar Wilde, and launched the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. Clark’s fourth child, Katherine Clark Morris, married to a physician, was the lone respectable pillar of New York society, and unlike her siblings, she did not ostentatiously display her wealth. “She was frugal, she wore mended gloves to the Philharmonic,” says Erika Hall, who was married to John Hall, the grandson of Katherine Morris. “She had wonderful jewelry but she only wore it for the family, not to impress people. She was immensely private, she hated publicity.” Katherine Morris looked askance at her siblings’ antics, or as Hall says, “She was distant from her brothers. She laughed about her sister, but she loved her.”

  The age gap between William Clark’s two families was sufficiently large that Huguette and Andrée were virtually the same age as their nieces and nephews. Now that the girls were based in New York, they saw more of their similarly named Manhattan contemporaries, Katherine Clark Culver and Katherine Elizabeth Morris, developing childhood friendships. The young Katherine Morris attended Spence with the Clark girls. Huguette and Andrée occasionally spent weekends with their relatives at Morris Manor, a large farm estate near Oneonta.

  In Manhattan, rich arrivistes have long turned to philanthropy as a route to move up in society. William and Anna Clark put their much-vaunted residence on display to raise money for World War I relief in France. More than two hundred guests paid $5 each for a concert of French music featuring violinist Tourret at the Clarks’ home on February 24, 1915, with proceeds going to the Villa Molière, the French military hospital in Paris. As the New York Tribune quipped, “This is the first time that the would-be visitor to the art treasures collected by the millionaire Senator did not have to present a certificate of character before a pass to the house would be issued.” The Clarks’ next charitable event was a $3-per-person fund-raiser on April 7 for the American Artists Committee of 100, aiding destitute families of French artist-soldiers. The party featured an organ recital and lecture by James Barnes, who spoke about his recent time overseas, “Back of the German Lines in the First Weeks of the War.”

  The Clarks may have been motivated by their love for France, but they were rewarded with prominent mentions in the staid Sun (SOCIETY GOES CHARITY MAD AND FINDS ITS REWARD) and, most important, the New York Times (WILL SOCIETY KEEP LENT? MRS. JOHN JACOB ASTOR, MRS. ANDREW CARNEGIE AND MRS. WILLIAM A. CLARK TO OPEN THEIR HOUSES FOR LENTEN BENEFITS).

  That headline might just as well have read: “Anna La Chapelle Clark has arrived.” Now that she had been given equal status with the wives of other robber barons, her social standing was now secure. Anna had been listed in the Social Register as of 1904, when William Clark first announced their marriage. But now newspaper articles no longer dredged up questions about the couple’s peculiar backdated nuptials and instead simply stated that their marriage occurred in 1901. The past had been airbrushed.

  At the Spence School for girls, then located in a gray stone building at 30 West Fifty-Fifth Street, Huguette and Andrée took classes with other young heiresses such as Margaret Carnegie. After a Parisian upbringing with private tutors, Huguette, whose first language was French, initially had a hard time adjusting to an American school and all-English classes. Her studious and outgoing older sister, Andrée, had an easier time fitting in. A letter from William Andrews Clark to his wife indicates that Huguette was initially placed in a class with students a year younger, with the promise that once she caught up, she could jump a grade.

  The Spence School day started promptly at 8:55 a.m., and the dress code required the well-bred girls to wear skirts at least three inches below the knee. They took classes in literature and Latin, art history and geography, chemistry and physics, penmanship and elocution. Huguette developed exquisite handwriting resembling calligraphy and memorized poetry that she could still recite as a centenarian. Deportment and manners were emphasized at the school; Huguette always wrote gracious thank-you notes and never raised her voice in anger.

  Clara B. Spence, the progressive educator who founded the school in 1892, gave weekly dramatic readings from Shakespeare at Wednesday morning assemblies. “Miss Spence was very strict,” says an East Side woman in her eighties whose mother attended school with Huguette but requested anonymity. “My mother was a boarder, and she was homesick and crying one night. Miss Spence said to her, ‘How can you cry when you are lucky enough to be in my school?’ ” To expose her students to the interesting minds of the era, Miss Spence arranged for such speakers as Edith Wharton, Helen Keller, and George Washington Carver. Huguette later recalled taking a dance class with Isadora Duncan.

  Conservative in matters of decorum but liberal in championing the rights of women, Miss Spence tried to imprint her values on her students. In an undated commencement address probably given while Huguette was at the school, Miss Spence urged students to cultivate their imagination, saying, “Sympathy, that great bond between human beings, is largely dependent on imagination—that is, upon the power of realizing the feelings and the circumstances of others so as to enable us to feel with and for them.” Huguette Clark lived in her imagination, and she would grow up to be so sensitive to the plight of others that she would send anonymous checks to strangers after reading hard-luck stories in the newspapers.

  Her elitist classmates did not know what to make of the daughter of the showy copper mogul. “My mother remembered going to the house and the gold-plated faucets,” says the Upper East Side octogenarian. “It was really garish.” Huguette apparently felt that her early school problems could have been handled with more sensitivity. Later in life, she would often ask her night nurse, Geraldine Coffey, if her children were being mistreated by teachers. “She would reminisce about old times and the schools she went to and how they varied,” Coffey says. “How teachers were nice in one school and not so nice in the other and the fact that they didn’t do good psychology.” But Coffey recalls that Huguette always praised her headmistress. “She loved Miss Spence. Miss Spence was a kind and generous woman.”

  The workaholic William Clark and his upwardly mobile wife believed that their daughters’ education should be a twelve-month-a-year experience, hiring tutors to travel with the family as well as provide after-school lessons. Anna Clark’s sister, Amelia, recommended her Spanish teacher, Margarita Vidal, an Argentine artist who was supporting herself by giving language lessons. Margarita and her sister Jaquita Vidal, a violinist, became a regular part of the Clark family entourage, accompanying them on summer travels and amusing the adults while keeping Huguette and Andrée company.

  William Clark did not normally socialize with his staff, but he grew fond of these two attractive young women who could converse knowledgeably about art and music. Anna Clark took Spanish lessons with Margarita, sending a car to pick her up. Margarita Vidal’s son, Roberto Socas, a retired political science professor, says, “My mother and my aunt traveled with them. They were like tutors, elder sisters to Huguette. [My aunt] Jaqui was very social, a live wire. My mother was more introverted, very involved with her art.” Margarita encouraged Huguette’s interest in painting and later told her son that the young heiress was “energetic and social.”

  Even in his late seventies, William Clark put in long hours at his Wall Street office and traveled frequently to Chicago, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and, of course, Butte. Clark kept up-to-date on even his smallest operations, writing to his lawyer, Walter Bickford, that his Butte streetcars had become unprofitable d
ue to the popularity of the automobile, and it was time to shut down the trolleys. Although Clark had voluntarily left the Senate, he wanted to be perceived as politically relevant. On a 1916 trip to Washington, D.C., Clark was miffed that President Woodrow Wilson did not invite him to the White House, writing to Bickford: “The President did not call around to see me. It is too bad!”

  While he relied primarily on family members to run his operations, Clark had a few trusted managers such as his controller, William B. Gower, a British accountant who worked for him for thirty-five years, keeping the books at twenty of Clark’s companies. Gower was the resident problem solver, called upon to deal with Clark family issues. One of Charles Clark’s creditors sued the senator for $37,000, but the case was dropped after Gower gave an affidavit saying that there was nothing in the company books indicating that the father owed any money to his son. The copper titan perceived the controller as indispensable. “Mr. Gower left for a little visit to Montana, but I expect him back here within a few days,” Clark wrote to his lawyer. The Clarks and the Gowers, who lived in Westchester with a son and daughter close in age to Huguette and Andrée, occasionally socialized together.

  Vain about his appearance and proud of his good health, Clark practiced a physically abstemious and athletic lifestyle that he imparted to his children. In 1917, when the Anaconda Standard asked him about the secret of his longevity, Clark replied, “I find what is termed ‘the simple life’ very conducive to the maintenance of good health—that is, temperance in eating, observance of full quota of sleep particularly up to eight hours, plenty of exercise in the open air and freedom of mind from disturbances and annoyances. This can often be secured by exercise of the volition and mental control.”

  But it was Anna—thirty-nine years younger than her husband—whose life was marked by a disability. She began losing her hearing in her twenties. By the time Anna reached her thirties, she relied on a hearing aid, an unwieldy box with an earpiece. For a woman who loved performing and listening to music, this was demoralizing, although she seldom complained. “Her hearing was a great impediment to her,” recalls Gordon Lyle Jr., whose father was the Clark family physician. “She carried this little box around. An electronic box about the size of a purse. When you wanted to talk, she held it up to you.” Anna’s condition took a toll on her children, since crying out for “Maman” did not always produce the desired response. Huguette suffered from frequent ear infections as a child and, aware of her mother’s struggles, feared that she would go deaf, too.