by Meryl Gordon
Huguette’s engagement had been announced in December, but she and her mother were coy about setting a wedding date. Anna arranged to rent and decorate an eighth-floor apartment in the same building, 907 Fifth Avenue, for herself, so that her daughter and Bill Gower could begin married life on the twelfth floor. Huguette had been a bridesmaid and a guest at the weddings of many friends, and it was expected that Huguette would reciprocate with a large wedding at her family’s usual religious locale, St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue.
So New York society was taken aback when Huguette opted for a small wedding at Bellosguardo on August 17, 1928. “The wedding will be extremely quiet, with only members of the family present and there will be no attendants,” according to an item in the local Santa Barbara newspaper. A wedding photo shows the bride and groom with Anna Clark; William and Helen Gower; Anna’s sister, Amelia, and her husband, retired mining engineer Bryce Turner; Anna’s brother, Arthur La Chapelle, and his wife, Hanna; and Dr. and Mrs. William Gordon Lyle and their impish, blonde, four-year-old daughter, Tina.
Despite the understated ambience, Huguette wore an elaborate white wedding gown with a veil and a train that stretched out six feet, and she carried an enormous bouquet of flowers. Just a week earlier, she and Bill had happily joined in the annual Santa Barbara fiesta celebration, featuring polo matches and garden parties. But now in the group wedding portrait, Huguette seemed nervous and downcast. In a formal photograph given to the newspapers, the newlyweds look more serious than joyous.
For Bill Gower, marrying Huguette elevated his social status by several notches. In the discussions leading up to the wedding, Anna and Huguette had agreed to give the groom a large dowry estimated at around $1 million. William Andrews Clark had settled money on Anna La Chapelle when they married. Perhaps Anna saw this as a way to try to start off her daughter’s marriage on a more equitable footing. But to put it bluntly, William Gower was being paid to marry Huguette. “They were so mismatched,” says Gordon Lyle Jr. “I don’t know why she married him, whether she got pushed into it or lured into it.”
From the groom’s perspective, the substantial sum quieted any qualms he might have felt about embarking on matrimony with his sheltered and unworldly bride. He could not lose: he would either be rich and happy with Huguette, or he could move on with his finances assured for life.
The couple honeymooned in San Francisco: their wedding night was a disaster. Huguette could never bring herself to reveal the full details. But later in life, when her friend Suzanne Pierre and her nurses asked why her marriage did not last, Huguette always referred to how unprepared she had been for the shock of sex. She used phrases like, “It hurt, I didn’t like it.” As Kati Despretz Cruz says, “Huguette told my grandmother [Suzanne Pierre] that the marriage was never consummated.”
Many years later, Huguette’s assistant, Chris Sattler, was organizing the thousands of books in her apartment when he came across a poignant find: a dozen how-to sex manuals. “They were all from the 1930s, after her marriage,” says Chris. “They were very clinical, unhelpful, written by doctors. But she was interested in knowing about it.”
Despite their apparent sexual incompatibility, the newlyweds did not immediately separate. A month after their marriage, a syndicated article analyzed the financial inequities in the marriage and concluded that the couple would not last together. A $30-A-WEEK HUSBAND FOR THE $50,000,000 HEIRESS: THE NEWEST MONEY ROMANCE-DOMESTIC PROBLEMS OF THE POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL CLARK AND HER DAILY $333 was the headline of the article in the Salt Lake Tribune. “The average young man refuses to live on his wife’s money,” wrote society writer Eleanor Town. “He thinks it is a disgrace. And of course, that is the manly and proper way for him to feel.” The author added that for the couple to try to live on Gower’s meager income would be equally disastrous: “Who pays the club dues? Is Mr. Gower’s income sufficient to enable him to travel with her friends? If not, what happens?”
In keeping with the national obsession with Huguette, on October 28, 1928, an item appeared in the Salt Lake Tribune reporting that she and her husband would be passing through Salt Lake on the Union Pacific at 9:30 p.m. “The young couple are returning from a honeymoon spent in Los Angeles,” the newspaper said. “Gower is to enter Columbia upon his return and begin the study of law.”
William Gower moved into Huguette’s apartment at 907 Fifth Avenue. The overly blushing bride marked her return to Manhattan by treating herself to jewelry. On October 31, 1928, the new Mrs. William MacDonald Gower went to Cartier and splurged on $15,500 earrings combining emeralds, pearls, and diamonds, a $2,640 diamond wristwatch, and a $3,125 diamond bracelet. In January, she returned to the store to purchase a $320 gold cigarette case. The Gowers continued to appear in public as a couple with their whereabouts charted in the society columns, such as attending a wedding anniversary party for friends at the ever popular Sherry’s. On April 8, Mrs. Gower bought herself a Steinway piano, but as always she remained more passionate about painting than music.
That dedication was rewarded in a way not normally available to fledgling artists—with a show in a major museum. The Corcoran Gallery freed up wall space from April 28 to May 19 for a showing of seven paintings by Huguette Clark, who used her maiden name for the exhibit. The museum’s gratitude to the Clarks shone through the catalogue, yet the curator went beyond boilerplate politeness, announcing that the twenty-two-year-old heiress was creating impressive work:
“From the day of her birth Huguette Clark has lived in an artistic atmosphere. She has been surrounded by many treasures of various Schools and Periods, contained in the notable art collection bequeathed to this gallery by her father, the late William Andrews Clark. She has had the benefit of extensive European travel; and added to these advantages, she is endowed with unusual natural talent.”
Huguette included two scenes of Central Park as viewed from her Fifth Avenue home, one of the sparkling oasis at night and the other a pristine wintry scene after a snowstorm. The show also included two intricate portraits of her dolls, a party scene, a study of hydrangeas, and a work entitled “Portrait of Myself.”
A self-portrait by Huguette, included many years later in a Christie’s catalogue, might have been the one shown at the Corcoran. In the painting, the artist is standing in front of a canvas holding a brightly-hued palette of paint, and turning to look over her shoulder. She wears a flowing rose-colored painting jacket, her wavy, blonde hair shines, and her mouth is a lipsticked red bow. She looks serene, an artist deeply involved with her work, taking a momentary break. The painting is striking and well-executed.
The Corcoran exhibit was a triumph for Huguette. Her painting teacher, Tadé Styka, was in Paris but returned to the United States to see the show. A few weeks later, Huguette, her husband, and her mother attended a dinner and concert on May 9 at the home of Huguette’s half sister Mary de Brabant. The guests that night included Huguette’s other half sister, Katherine Morris, and her husband, Lewis Morris, plus Dr. William Gordon Lyle and his wife, Leontine. The grand de Brabant stone mansion at 7 East Fifty-First Street, on a block then known as Millionaire’s Row, would later be occupied by the jewelry store Harry Winston. This was a festive family evening, with no apparent sign that trouble was bubbling just below the surface.
The bombshell dropped five days later in the Cholly Knickerbocker column in the New York American. “The distressing task of reporting, exclusively, that Huguette after nine short months of married life is about to divorce ‘Bill’ Gower comes to my lot,” Knickerbocker wrote. “The possession of untold wealth, all the luxuries vast wealth will provide and enviable social position failed to make the union a success and about a week hence, Mrs. Clark and Huguette will start westward to spend the summer at their palatial estate in Santa Barbara, formerly the home of Mrs. William Miller Graham. From Santa Barbara, Huguette will go to Reno to establish residence and seek a divorce. The above is certain to cause a sensation in society for the Gowers were supposed to be happy and th
ere have been no rumors of an estrangement.”
Even though her marriage was over, Huguette did not actually go to Reno for another year. But she did immediately sign a new will, leaving everything to her mother. As Christie Merrill, a San Franciscan whose mother, Aileen Tobin, attended Spence with Huguette, recalls, “My mother told me that the family paid him a million to marry Huguette, and after he got the money, he ran off.” Cholly Knickerbocker would later write in a follow-up column about Huguette that at the time of her marriage, she had given “her none-too-well dowered bridesgroom a cool million dollars so he would ‘feel free.’ He felt so ‘free’ Huguette had to divorce him and resume use of her maiden name.”
That was an inside reference to Gower’s romantic life. Within months of separating from Huguette, William Gower began squiring around a new woman who would never have wedding-night jitters: Constance Baxter Tevis McKee Toulmin.
Gower’s new love collected wealthy husbands the way some women add charms to their bracelets. The daughter of rancher George Baxter, who served as the territorial governor of Wyoming, and his Southern belle wife, Constance (sometimes known as Cornelia) had been shipped to convent school in Paris. It didn’t take. At age eighteen, she jilted her wealthy Denver fiancé to wed forty-year-old San Francisco widower Hugh Tevis. On their honeymoon to Japan in 1901, Hugh Tevis died suddenly in Yokohoma. Constance returned a pregnant widow and claimed her husband’s million-dollar fortune.
But a million dollars only goes so far. Four years later, she befriended Pittsburgh playboy Hart McKee Jr., whose deceased father had made $20 million as a glass manufacturer. McKee was in the middle of divorcing his wife for a married woman. But as soon as his divorce came through, he dumped his paramour and married Constance in a quickie ceremony in 1905. The couple moved to Paris and she gave birth to a second son, but the marriage dissolved in spectacular fashion. The couple’s 1908 divorce was a publicly covered brawl. She claimed that he stole her jewels and beat her, and that thirty-five maids quit one after another, fleeing McKee’s sexual advances. McKee charged that Constance had conducted a flagrant affair with an Italian marquis. The scorching testimony produced such headlines as BEAUTY WILL TELL STORY OF GROSS CRUELTY followed by NOT SO INNOCENT AS SHE PRETENDS. She won custody of her son with McKee, but the French judge issued an order excoriating both parties for bad behavior.
Constance’s saucy past would have been well-known to Huguette’s mother, since they moved in the same social circles in Paris, prior to 1914. Constance was more than twenty years older than Bill Gower, and in fact, two of her three children were older than Gower. Newly divorced from her third husband, Evelyn Toulmin, Constance split her time between Paris and America.
Had Gower been a junior bank clerk, she would not have seen him as a serious suitor. But thanks to Huguette’s dowry, he was a wealthy man. While some of Constance’s luster had dimmed with age, she more than compensated by offering social entrée. Her well-connected parents entertained in style at their Southampton estate, and the family boasted new publishing connections, since her twenty-year-old niece, Leslie, had just become the second wife of fifty-five-year-old Condé Nast.
Huguette appeared to be sad and subdued after her marriage ended, pained by feelings of rejection. Gordon Lyle Jr. says, “I’m guessing it had a very negative effect on Huguette.” The carefree, naïve young woman had learned a sobering lesson about the ways of the world.
Since Anna believed in the healing balm of a change of scenery, mother and daughter headed west for several months, spending time in Santa Barbara followed by Hawaii (where Huguette was listed on the Malolo’s ship manifest as Huguette Gower) and then back to Santa Barbara for the remainder of the summer. The vacation seems to have lifted Huguette’s spirits, and she found solace in painting, judging by her letter to Tadé Styka, written in French on August 8 from Bellosguardo.
Cher Maitre,
I found your letter upon our return from Honolulu. What to tell you about my work? You will certainly be disappointed in your pupil. The heat was so strong that it stripped me of a little of my energy.
I only did five paintings, having only stayed five weeks and I have two in progress that I can finish here.
Really, you would create wonders if you spent a few months on this enchanting island. The color of the water is jade, sapphire, mauve and varies every day. The streets were lined with trees garnished with fiery red flowers, other flowers formed pink, yellow or mauve clusters.
The prettiest are the rainbow trees. I painted a branch, also a marvel of a white flower that lives but one night and dies with the sunrise.
One night we saw a moonlit rain shower followed by a magnificent rainbow, very visible. I so would have liked to paint this beautiful scene.
The departure is very moving, the Hawaiian music plays Aloha and they cover you with flower garlands and wish you a good trip.
The hotel is so trendy, they even clean the change. For my personal taste I would have liked it better at a more primitive time.
Maman joins me in sending you our kindest regards, Huguette
In October, Tadé Styka moved from Paris to live in Manhattan full-time, renting an apartment with a studio on Central Park South. Huguette wrote a note to him from Santa Barbara, expressing her enthusiasm.
Cher Maitre,
I would like to welcome you to New York and am sending you five brushes so that you will quickly get to work.
I hope that they will please you.
We send you our best regards; your studious pupil, Huguette.
In December 1929, Walter Winchell mentioned the artist in his newspaper column, writing, “Tadé Styka, who charges them 10 G’s for their portraits, is here from Paree looking for chumps.” That was a plug since the chumps, of course, were the rich and famous regularly featured in Winchell’s column. Tadé had shown his work at a Chicago gallery in January and the Clarks sent him a telegram from California: “With all of our best wishes for a huge success in Chicago, Anna and Huguette Clark.”
The Chicago art critics ran out of adjectives in enthusing about his work at the branch of the Knoedler Gallery. “It is a very rare exhibit that leaves you wordless,” wrote Eleanor Jewett of the Chicago Daily Tribune. “It is astonishingly and astoundingly fine. The sweep of it rushes you from your feet… if there is genius in the world today, Styka is possessed of it.”
But with the onset of the Great Depression, fewer wealthy patrons could afford to splurge on a portrait, even by a “genius.” So Tadé had the free time and financial motive to resume his two-hour, four-times-per-week painting lessons with Huguette once she returned to Manhattan. (The market crash did not daunt Huguette, who dropped $2,700 in January 1930 at Cartier on a diamond, onyx, and emerald brooch, and also bought Monet’s painting Nympheas from the Durand-Ruel Galleries.)
Bill Gower had been fond of his mother-in-law, and a year after he and Huguette separated, he wrote an apologetic note to Anna on March 19, 1930.
Dear Mrs. Clark,
I have wanted for some time to write to you, but have hesitated because it seems quite impossible to convey with words what I want to say.
I am very sorry that there had to be parting. I am sorry that the end came as it did in anger. I wish that there could have been the success we hoped for but were unable to attain.
Your friendship and esteem always meant more to me than I can ever express. Your tireless efforts in every possible way to make things turn out for the best I shall always remember. There has been a loss greater than I have ever had. Sincerely, Bill.
A month later, Huguette and her mother made the trip to Reno for the required three-month residency to get a divorce. In 1930, divorce was still a novelty: census records show that 196,000 divorced that year. New York State’s unforgiving laws required proof of infidelity and a yearlong wait, but in wide-open Nevada, a spouse could list such grounds as desertion, neglect, or habitual drunkenness. Reno had become the nation’s divorce capital, with dude ranches opening up to a
ccommodate the flow of soon-to-be single women, a world chronicled in Clare Boothe Luce’s 1936 catfight of a play, The Women. In petitioning for divorce, Huguette claimed that Gower had deserted her. The New York Times tried unsuccessfully to reach William Gower for comment, stating “he is understood to be in New York.”
Huguette’s arrival in Reno created a stir. She had brought along a large entourage including her dogs, a cook, a butler, several maids, a chauffeur, and a social secretary. Her uncle Arthur La Chapelle had arranged for Huguette to lease an entire floor at the Riverside Hotel, a redbrick luxury property, at the cost of $2,000 per month. In a syndicated feature that ran on June 28, 1930—WHY AMERICA’S $50,000,000 HEIRESS CAST OFF HER $30-A-WEEK PRINCE CHARMING—Huguette was criticized for violating the social mores of divorce land. “Extravagance and exclusiveness may be all right for Park Avenue, but they’re out of place in Reno,” the article huffed. “The majority of even the wealthiest divorce hunters have been satisfied with a suite at the most. It was recalled that Cornelius Vanderbilt was content with a single room… while even Mary Pickford selected an unostentatious home.”
Avoiding other would-be divorcées, Huguette remained cloistered with her mother and the servants. Her vulnerability is palpable in a poignant letter that she wrote in French on hotel stationery on July 4, 1930, to Tadé, in which she expresses the desperate hope that she can count on him:
Cher Maitre,
I intend to return to New York by October 1rst and I hope to be able to get to my work on the fifteenth by the latest. Would you write to me as soon as possible, if I can count on you, as I would like to seriously work with you this winter?