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

by Meryl Gordon

  It is still very hot here but fortunately we do not have New York’s humidity.

  The small dogs are fine and Shan is getting so fat he looks like a ball.

  I hope your health leaves nothing to be desired.

  Maman would like me to extend her greetings, to which I add my own, Huguette

  When she did not hear back from him, Huguette was so upset that she sent him a needy telegram on July 26, 1930, which was uncharacteristically written in English.

  DEAR MR. STYKA,

  How are you standing the terrific heat. Did you receive my letter? Please wire.

  All Good Wishes from us, Huguette Clark Gower.

  She received her decree on August 11, which stated that she had been “granted an absolute divorce on the ground that the defendant has willfully deserted plaintiff for a period of more than one year, and the bonds of matrimony now and heretofore… dissolved.” Given legal permission to return to her maiden name, Huguette nonetheless held on to the honorific “Mrs.,” identifying herself for the rest of her life as Mrs. Clark.

  Within hours of receiving her decree, Huguette and her mother left for Santa Barbara. Five days later, they sailed from San Francisco to Hawaii. Some newspapers used an unflattering photo of Huguette that had been taken by the Associated Press while she was on her honeymoon. She is wearing a fur coat, cloche hat, pearls, and two diamond Cartier Art Deco bracelets. She looks much older than her age and her expression is unbearably sad. This was the last public photograph of Huguette.

  Chapter Ten

  Alone Again

  At the end of January 1931, Edward FitzGerald, the seventh Duke of Leinster, sailed for America on the ocean liner Europa. His fellow passengers included movie producer Samuel Goldwyn and heavyweight boxing champ Max Schmeling. The duke had a dinner date scheduled with Huguette’s mother, Anna, and her aunt Amelia for the day after he arrived in New York.

  Long on pedigree but short on funds, the duke was what wags of that era would call a “no-account count.” Dating back to the fourteenth century, the FitzGeralds had been among Ireland’s wealthiest dynasties, amassing multiple glossy titles—the Dukedom of Leinster, Marquess of Kildare, Earl of Kildare, Baron of Offaly, Viscount Leinster—and building massive castles and Georgian mansions. Edward’s older brother Maurice FitzGerald, the sixth Duke of Leinster, came into his title in 1893 as a six-year-old after both of his parents died. As the eldest of three sons, Maurice inherited a huge family fortune plus the 1,100-acre family estate, Carton.

  Edward FitzGerald grew up with all the affectations of great wealth, but as the third son in a country built on primogeniture, he was entitled to a mere fraction of his family’s riches. At age twenty-one, this ne’er-do-well fell in love with showgirl May Etheridge, known as the “sweet little pajama girl” for her preferred onstage attire (presumably, offstage she wore less). To break up the match, the FitzGerald family kidnapped Edward and spirited him out of London. Promising to end the romance, he was set free—and promptly returned to England and married the actress in 1913. The couple had a baby boy but separated in 1923 and finally divorced in 1930.

  During World War I, Edward’s middle brother, Desmond, a major in the Irish Guards, accidentally set off a bomb in his tent in France that killed him. Edward had a good war and came away physically unscathed. But unaccustomed to living within his means, he gambled and racked up huge debts, filing for bankruptcy in 1918. Described by the British newspapers as a “daredevil sportsman” who liked fast cars and fast yachts, Edward was in constant need of cash.

  Assuming that he would never inherit, Edward sold his life interest in the family’s $50 million estate to Harry Mallaby-Deeley, a financier and Conservative member of Parliament. Edward FitzGerald received approximately $365,000 and the guarantee of a $5,000 yearly payment for life. It was a decision that Edward would quickly regret.

  In 1922, his oldest brother Maurice FitzGerald died suddenly while locked up in what the newspapers called a “lunatic asylum.” Edward assumed the title of the Duke of Leinster, but Mallaby-Deeley continued to live in the family’s historic homes and receive the income from the duke’s estates. The profligate duke filed for bankruptcy again in 1922, with creditors claiming that he owed more than $1.5 million. The following year, the duke was briefly jailed in London for borrowing money without alerting gullible lenders that he was bankrupt.

  Even before his 1930 divorce, the Duke of Leinster had begun prospecting for an American heiress to save him from his creditors. It was a transatlantic tradition: riches in exchange for a title. A handsome man with a raffish charm, Edward began his search during trips to New York in the late 1920s. The duke would later admit that he lived “at an extravagant rate,” entertaining lavishly to give the right aristocratic impression as he attempted to “marry somebody rich.” Edward FitzGerald set his sights on two women who could afford to keep him in style: the name of the first heiress remains shrouded in mystery, but his second prospect was Huguette Clark. As he later described it in distinctly unromantic terms, he then began negotiations.

  While he was en route to New York on the Europa to close the deal, the duke’s plans became public in a series of front-page stories in America. “His Grace, the Duke of Leinster, first Duke of Ireland, whose arrival in New York City is said to portend wedding bells with himself and Mrs. Huguette Clark Gower, as principal figures,” reported the syndicated item. “Mrs. Gower is a daughter of the late Senator William A. Clark.” Huguette’s debutante photo and a picture of the duke looking dapper in his fedora ran side by side.

  Besieged by reporters when the Europa docked in New York, the panicked duke denied any talk of an engagement to Huguette. Edward insisted that he was “not going to be married to anyone” during his American holiday. DUKE DENIES PLANS TO WED was the New York Times headline, stressing that he was refuting rumors that he had marital intentions toward Huguette. The duke still attended the scheduled dinner with Huguette’s mother and aunt at the Fifth Avenue home of mutual friends Mr. and Mrs. Irving Hogue. It must have been an awkward evening.

  Was Huguette ever interested in this Irish bounder? Perhaps fleetingly. She was enough of a woman of her era to be flattered by the notion of a European title. And with his wild Irish hair and daredevil smile, the Duke of Leinster was undeniably handsome. But the European fortune hunter was not artistic, he did not share any of Huguette’s interests, and he was nakedly avaricious.

  For Huguette, still recovering from the humiliation of being forced to state that she had been deserted by William Gower, it was an unpleasant jolt to see her name dragged through the press with the implication that she had been rejected by a man yet again. Five years later, the duke would admit that Huguette and her mother had walked away from his marriage proposal. But that was not the impression that he fostered at the time. Later in life, Huguette acted as if this embarrassing chapter of her life had never occurred. She would often discuss the men who had mattered to her, but she never mentioned the Duke of Leinster.

  Nonetheless, the tale dogged her for years. In 1932, when the duke married an American, Agnes Raffaela Kennedy Van Neck, the ex-wife of a bandleader, articles stressed his near miss with Huguette. In 1936 when the duke filed for bankruptcy for the third time, he told a courtroom of creditors about his search for a rich American bride. Huguette was portrayed as a savvy woman who had broken off the ill-suited romance. As the Boston Globe put it, “Mrs. Gower, as wise as her father the late Senator Clark, scoffed as ridiculous all rumors and reports that she was to enter into any matrimonial alliance with the Premier Duke of Ireland. Indeed, the Clark millions were not to be exchanged for a title and a lot of debt-burdened castles.” Those Clark millions were an inescapable part of Huguette’s public identity. A woman who prided herself on being an artist, time and again she was portrayed as a walking dollar sign.

  As a newly minted divorcée, Huguette developed a distinct rhythm to her life: winters in her twelfth-floor New York apartment with her mother four floors below
, summers with Anna in Santa Barbara, with an occasional side trip to Hawaii. Huguette’s days in Manhattan revolved around her painting lessons four days a week with Tadé Styka. Even though she was a divorced woman, she still brought along her mother’s overbearing and protective social secretary, Adele Marié, known as Missy, who would sit in another room and wait for her twenty-five-year-old charge.

  Seventeen years older than Huguette, Styka was a courtly man, Old World in his ways, a man who painted while wearing a suit. As his daughter Wanda says, “My father was used to traveling in rarified circles and his family was of nobility. In Europe, he had many friends who were counts and baronesses. In his manner, he was very reserved with people he didn’t know well. If he knew someone well, he was vivacious and warm.”

  The art magazine Apollo, in a lengthy feature on the artist, wrote, “On personal contact with Tadé Styka, one was bound, sooner or later, to experience the feeling that he was the spiritual exile of another and a greater age. Beneath his large, warm kindness, which was of the heart, there was a melancholy of the spirit, a shade of impatient, unresigned indignation—never expressed—as of a banished monarch or a caged lion.”

  Each year, Huguette and her painting teacher, who spent his summers in Europe, were separated for several months either by a continent or by an ocean. For all her girlish warmth and enthusiasm, in Huguette’s many letters to Tadé there is a sense that the watchful Anna Clark or her social secretary was monitoring the correspondence. Her chatty letters have an undertone of unrequited passion, but she seems reluctant to express herself for fear of rejection. Huguette comes across as cheerful and independent, with bubbly descriptions of her activities. On July 18, 1931, she sent him a four-page missive, in French, on monogrammed stationery from Bellosguardo.

  Cher Maitre,

  I thank you very much for your nice letters. My intention was to respond immediately, but the lizard life that we are leading here at the beach makes one very lazy.

  I have begun to daub a canvas. You are going to tell yourself, “It was about time!” We have greatly regretted not being able to call you in accordance with our promise. Maman’s amplifier was not working well.

  Our trip to Honolulu is not quite yet decided upon. The weather here is superb and the small dogs are fine. Maman and Madame Bellet thank you for your kind greetings and send their fond regards, to which I add my own.

  Your pupil, Huguette

  Painting gave her a sense of purpose. An Associated Press story on September 6, 1931, updated readers on Huguette’s postdivorce life with a favorable mention of her talent. “Huguette Clark, who inherited millions from her father, William A. Clark, copper magnate and senator, has won considerable recognition as an artist. Her paintings received high praise at the Corcoran Galleries in Washington last year and now she’s planning an exhibition in Paris. She is an accomplished musician.” Huguette’s lush painting of a blue night-blooming flower was featured in the prestigious 1932 Winter Exhibit of the National Academy of Design in Manhattan. She was beginning to make a name for herself.

  Tadé was also making news. A syndicated item noted: “The talk of Paris being ‘gay’ is rot and drivel, so far as Tadé Styka, Polish portrait painter, has been able to observe. New York is more wicked than Paris and Harlem is much ‘hotter’ than anything gay Paree has to apologize for.” Tadé presumably had gone up to the Cotton Club in Harlem to see the uninhibited scene—jazz greats, gangsters, movie stars, ample alcohol despite Prohibition—but there is no evidence that he ever brought his devoted pupil along.

  As the nation plunged deeper into the Depression, Anna and Huguette felt the stirrings of philanthropy. They helped friends: Dr. William Gordon Lyle’s finances had taken a hit from the market crash; the Clarks underwrote tuition for his son Gordon at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire. Anna sent a $250 check to the Fund for Relief of the Unemployed in the fall of 1931. Huguette, who read the New York Times religiously, was touched by the heartrending stories featured in the Christmas fund-raising effort for New York’s Neediest Cases. For two years in a row—1930 and 1931—Huguette wrote the largest checks received by the newspaper charity, $2,500 each year, the equivalent of more than $34,000 in current dollars. Throughout her life, Huguette was moved by individual appeals rather than organized charity.

  The crime broke the nation’s heart: on March 1, 1932, Charles Lindbergh’s two-year-old son was snatched from the second-floor nursery of his parents’ New Jersey home. The police fielded thousands of tips as they hunted for the baby, and the aviator eventually paid a $50,000 ransom. Two months later, the baby’s body was found less than a mile from his home. After a marked bill from the ransom turned up in the possession of German immigrant Bruno Hauptmann, he was charged and convicted of the crime. Still protesting his innocence, he died in the electric chair in 1936.

  At the time of the kidnapping, Huguette Clark was an adult, but the crime obsessed her and panicked Anna. Beyond imagining the agony of the Lindbergh parents, mother and daughter worried that the extensive publicity about Huguette’s inheritance might make her a ransom target. If an innocent baby’s life could be bartered for a $50,000 ransom, what were the odds of threats to an heiress said by the newspapers to be worth $50 million?

  Mother and daughter knew that they were not immune to crime. Robbers had attempted to break into the Clarks’ Fifth Avenue mansion many years earlier. William Andrews Clark was so worried about his family’s safety that he kept a pistol under his pillow and traveled with bodyguards. Anna now employed a chauffeur who doubled as the protector for both women. After the Lindbergh kidnapping, Anna and Huguette continued to go out in New York but were more careful about their travels. “They never came to our house,” says Gordon Lyle Jr., although his family lived a few blocks away from the Clarks. “We always went there. I guess they felt safer there. They were on their own turf.”

  The Lindbergh tragedy was imprinted on Huguette’s consciousness, an event that increased her sense of vulnerability and reminded her yet again that her fortune singled her out for uncomfortable attention. Beyond the symbolism, the fear of kidnapping stayed with her. In 2000, when Huguette was ninety-four years old, she offered to buy a Manhattan apartment for the granddaughter of her friend Suzanne Pierre. Huguette became agitated when she learned that the young woman, Kati Despretz Cruz, had chosen a second-floor unit, insisting that she move to a higher floor. Cruz had a two-year-old son, Julian, the same age as the Lindbergh toddler. “I was only there a year because Mrs. Clark thought it was too dangerous,” Cruz recalls. “She thought that someone could get access to Julian through a window.”

  Even as the Lindbergh kidnapping was fading from the headlines, Huguette suddenly lost a family member only four years her senior, who had been constantly around during her childhood. William Andrews Clark III, known in the family as Tertius, had become an amateur pilot and hired as his full-time instructor Jack Lynch, the pilot who taught Charles Lindbergh how to fly. The twenty-nine-year-old Clark was in Arizona taking a flying lesson from Lynch on May 15, 1932, when their plane went into a spin and plunged two thousand feet into foothills near Clemenceau. Both men were killed. The senator had doted on his clever grandson and namesake; Tertius was a frequent visitor to the family’s Fifth Avenue home and a big-brother figure to Huguette.

  In the seven years since William Andrews Clark’s death, the copper mogul had vanished from public consciousness. The death of Tertius sparked the Boston Globe to publish an editorial noting how quickly the family patriarch had been forgotten. “Traditionally, the American cycle is from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. Though William Andrews Clark Third was not exactly in his shirt sleeves when he was killed in an aviation accident the other day, the Clark family fairly illustrates the proverb. Today, the name is hardly known and the once vast fortune of its founder has been divided up and diminished till it has almost disappeared.”

  The following year, Huguette’s half brother Charles Clark, the big spender known
for his love of horse racing, died at age sixty-one of pneumonia at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Charles Clark was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in his father’s mausoleum. He had disapproved of his father’s marriage to Anna and had minimal contact with his stepmother after the death of the senator. Charles had ended contact with his own four children after divorcing their mother, Celia, in 1925. He had skipped the 1929 Paris wedding of his daughter Mary to French baron James Baeyens, so her uncle gave her away. The newspaper obituaries conveyed that Charles had been more enthusiastic about the running times at the racetrack than running his father’s enterprises.

  The ties binding the Clark relatives were fraying. Mary de Brabant, William Clark’s oldest daughter, had separated from her third husband, Marius; he had returned to Riverside, California, and moved in with his older sister. Mary was nonetheless still giving parties at her Manhattan mansion and her Long Island estate, a twenty-five-room waterfront mansion with a farm building, greenhouses, and kennels, right next door to the residence of William K. Vanderbilt. But when her guest lists made the society columns, Anna and Huguette were no longer mentioned. Katherine Clark Morris, William Clark’s second daughter, spent time at her three properties—a Fifth Avenue apartment, a large estate near Oneonta, and a plantation in Savannah—but did not see much of Anna and Huguette, who lived only twelve blocks south on Fifth Avenue.

  During her marriage, Anna had worked to nurture her relationships with her stepchildren, and she resented being cast aside. Huguette would later say that her mother felt abandoned by her stepchildren. As Huguette’s assistant, Chris Sattler, recalls, “She told me that they did not treat her mother well. They ignored her. There was very little interaction between the first family and her mother.” Huguette confided in her nurse Hadassah Peri about the estrangement between Anna Clark and her stepchildren. Peri recalls hearing that William Clark’s first family “didn’t have much communication with her mom.”