by Meryl Gordon
There was one exception: Anna remained close to Celia Tobin Clark, Charles Clark’s ex-wife. Banking heiress Celia had become a patron of the arts, hiring George Bellows to paint a portrait of her son, Paul, and supporting San Francisco music groups. Celia and her children—Mary, Patricia, Agnes, and Paul—visited Anna and Huguette at Bellosguardo and eventually brought the next generation along, too. Anna had a special fondness for Agnes Clark, who trained as a pianist and debuted with the San Francisco Orchestra in 1932. In 1933, Agnes married Alexander Albert, the son of a German industrialist and an American socialite, and began to split her time between Europe and California. When Agnes came through New York, she often stopped by 907 Fifth Avenue to visit Anna and Huguette.
For a divorcée, there is one piece of information that is inevitably jarring: learning that your spouse has remarried. On the morning of June 4, 1932, if Huguette had picked up the Sun at the breakfast table, she could have read all about it: her ex-husband, William Gower, was getting married that very day to Constance Baxter Tevis McKee Toulmin. A follow-up New York Times article a day later mentioned that “Mr. Gower’s marriage to Huguette Clark, youngest daughter of the late ex-Senator William A. Clark, ended in divorce in August 1930.”
Constance had been living in a château in the French countryside but spent the winter at the Waldorf Astoria, the site of the couple’s wedding. The newspapers tracked her comings and goings: the newlyweds honeymooned in Italy at her summer home, the Palazzo Brandolini on the Grand Canal in Venice, then moved into an apartment at 1 Sutton Place on the East River, a luxurious 1926 co-op designed by Rosario Candela.
Huguette harbored complicated feelings toward her ex-husband. Her initial bitterness was wearing off, and in the years ahead, she allowed herself to remember what she had liked about him in the first place. She did not sound angry when she talked about Bill, simply telling friends that it was not meant to be.
The heiress was now developing her own alternate life, taking pleasure in Tadé Styka’s companionship. Tadé appreciated and encouraged her creativity. No one knew better the extent of her artistic talent. After arriving in Santa Barbara for her annual vacation, Huguette was giddy with joy when she received an artist’s palette that Tadé had crafted for her. Not only did she send him a grateful telegram but she followed up immediately with a letter in French, on July 20, 1932.
Cher Maitre,
What an enjoyable surprise you have given me. I am delighted by my palette. It’s amazing! So light and so balanced. Thank you very much for the great pleasure I felt in receiving this beautiful gift!
I am still on vacation, which means that I have yet to pick up a paintbrush since we have been here, as all of my mornings are busy with Italian lessons and swimming in the afternoon, golf.
But this palette is so tempting that I will be starting another painting. I hope that you are spending an enjoyable summer and that you are still in good health.
Maman’s eye is still the same but she looks healthy and plays three to four hours of golf a day. We both send you our best regards, hoping to hear from you soon.
Huguette.
Huguette cherished this gift so much that when she managed to break it, she was distraught. Anna sent an urgent telegram to Tadé: “An accident has befallen the superb palette that you gave to Huguette. A painting fell on it, split and flattened it. Would it be possible for you to send her a new one? Huguette is disconsolate and heartbroken by this accident. Kind regards, Anna Clark.”
Of course, the artist complied.
That summer in Santa Barbara, Huguette stopped into the G. T. Marsh shop, a branch of the San Francisco emporium of Japanese antiques, and became enthralled by the items on display. The original store was founded in California in 1876 by Australian George Marsh, who ran away from home as a boy, jumped ship, and landed in Japan, where he began collecting jade and porcelain. Renowned for his expertise in all things Japanese, Marsh designed the Japanese garden at Golden Gate Park. When he died in 1932, the business was taken over by his son Lucien.
During her childhood, Huguette had been fascinated by the Oriental room in her father’s Fifth Avenue mansion, and she owned several Japanese dolls, depicting them in a painting for her Corcoran show. Now the Marsh shop, with its antique screens, kimonos, and intricate fans, reawakened her interest in the Land of the Rising Sun.
Huguette began purchasing Japanese artifacts in 1932—the Marsh family still has the invoices—but then had an idea far more artistic. She began to commission miniature castles based on Edo-era Japanese structures, as well as tiny furniture, painted screens, doll-sized Japanese food, doll-sized kabuki theatres, and the costumed characters to go with them. These were her own versions of Queen Mary’s dollhouse but with an Oriental flair. The Marsh family tracked down Japanese artisans to do the work. Huguette was so pleased with the first miniatures that this enthusiasm became a lifelong passion.
She turned herself into a scholar on Japanese architecture and culture: her collection of books about Japan would eventually fill three large bookcases in her Fifth Avenue apartment. “She was a great teacher for me,” says Caterina Marsh, an Italian who married into the Marsh family and became Huguette’s contact at the firm. “She was very knowledgeable.” Huguette would look at blueprints before agreeing to the work and ask for extensive revisions, fixated on getting the tiny details right. As Marsh puts it, “The pleasure for her was in creating something.”
In her own way, Huguette was mimicking her father’s passion when he built his fantasy Fifth Avenue mansion and looted Europe to stock it with art and antiques. The understated Huguette was re-creating history on a smaller but no less artistic scale. William Andrews Clark had been a perfectionist, focusing on such details as the color of the marble, while his daughter fretted over the precise proportions of doll-sized rooms. With fond memories of her girlhood in France, Huguette commissioned a Parisian toy store, Au Nain Bleu, to arrange for the construction of miniature French châteaus.
After growing up in a haunted hotel-sized home—with a mother who could not always hear her, a preoccupied elderly father, and a beloved sister who died young—here was a kingdom that Huguette could control. This artistic enterprise was time-consuming and intellectually challenging, requiring historic research and imagination.
Even as Huguette was embarking on her new artistic venture, Anna had a much larger project in mind: improving her California real estate. Huguette had previously donated $50,000 to turn a wetland across the street from her property into the Andrée Clark Bird Refuge. Now Anna decided to tear down Bellosguardo and put up an entirely new and grander mansion on this cliffside property with unobstructed ocean and mountain views. She told her daughter and friends that she felt inspired to offer employment to the struggling local workmen ravaged by the Depression. Anna hired Pasadena architect Reginald Davis Johnson, whose Mediterranean and Spanish Revivalism helped define the look of that community just as Addison Mizner’s designs did for Palm Beach. Johnson, who had designed the Santa Barbara Country Club and the Santa Barbara Biltmore Hotel, created the new house with a budget of $1 million, the equivalent of more than $17 million today.
The original Bellosguardo, an Italianate country villa, was replaced with a twenty-three-thousand-square-foot eighteenth-century French-style formal gray reinforced concrete mansion. Unlike the over-the-top excess of Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach mansion built a few years earlier by heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, Bellosguardo has an austere elegance. The airy house, with six large bedrooms plus servants’ quarters, features parquet floors, richly colored marble fireplaces (gold, green, rose), antique chandeliers sporting crystal and amethyst glass, as well as fanciful gold-plated bathroom fixtures in the shapes of dolphins’ and swans’ heads. The building is U shaped, with a reflecting pool and orange trees tucked into the outdoor middle space between the two wings. The formal driveway features a mosaic made of black and white stones.
Upon entering the building at the center of the U, a sma
ll reception area leads to a long central hallway. Down the hallway to the left is the magnificent dining room with antique Sherwood Forest woodwork from the senator’s Fifth Avenue mansion, 167 distinctive panels, each carved with images including dragons, peacocks, oak leaves, fish, and horns of plenty. At the other end of the grand hallway—past the powder room and an Oriental-style carved-wood-paneled reception room with Chinese-themed paintings on the ceiling—is the right wing of the house and the large corner music room, with two Steinway pianos and Anna’s harp. An avid bridge player, Anna chose chairs and a table that could be used for a game, as well as plush couches and armchairs to accommodate guests listening to musicales. Portraits by Tadé Styka of a girlish Huguette in a pink dress and pearls, and a thoughtful-looking Andrée, grace the walls, as does a charcoal sketch by Italian artist Edmondo Pizzella of the serene Anna in an evening gown.
Next to the music room is the library, featuring ornate wood paneling from the senator’s home and stocked with leather-bound volumes by Voltaire, Molière, and Goethe. Anna commissioned what she called the “bureau room” next door, another wood-paneled room with Fragonard-style cherubs painted on the ceiling. She used this study to conduct correspondence and handle the estate’s business.
Huguette had the equivalent of a private duplex wing situated at the very end of that hall, the right-hand top of the U, with a small ground-floor kitchenette, a bathroom with a silver leaf ceiling, and a large closet to store her easels and canvases. Her large painting studio featured sixteen-foot-high ceilings and views of the ocean and the gardens. The room was austere compared to the rest of the house, without elaborate molding and with an oak-pegged floor rather than parquet. A staircase tucked into the studio led to the second floor and her bedroom, directly above the studio.
Her single bed, with an upholstered wood frame, was angled so that her first sight in the morning was the lawn and the rose garden, although if she looked out the window to the right she could see the Pacific. Huguette ordered a dozen half-size Empire-style chairs to display her antique doll collection; she could line the chairs up against the walls of her bedroom, or put them in her adjoining dressing area. She rotated her selection; when the dolls were not in use they were stored in numbered boxes. Her bathroom included a gold-colored marble tub and a scale built into the floor, with the dial at eye level on the wall.
Anna had spared no expense for her own second-floor master bedroom, an enormous sea-green room with unusual curved molding, furnished with a bed with a carved wooden headboard, a velvet daybed, an antique desk and bureau, and a large standing mirror. A large balcony overlooked the ocean. Her bathroom included a marble bathtub large enough for two people. The suite included a dressing area as well as a second music room. In the built-in bookcases tucked into two closets, Anna stored her bridge books and medical literature, including volumes on surgery and eye diseases.
In the family quarters, one large bedroom was dedicated for the use of a family retainer (likely Anna’s social secretary Adele Marié). The three ample-sized guest rooms included a gold-painted luxurious haven with a spectacular chandelier made of porcelain flowers, as well as a masculine wood-paneled suite. Anna decorated the upstairs hallway with riotously colorful Hawaiian paintings with an Impressionist-style flair by Anna Woodward, a Pittsburgh painter who studied in Paris in the 1860s and then made her home in Hawaii.
The property boasted a tennis court, a thatched-roof play cottage named after Andrée, and a plant nursery. An Italian fountain with a marble nymph was installed, and Anna hired landscapers to create the largest rose garden in Santa Barbara, featuring every possible shade of pink. Concerned about privacy, Anna decided to sacrifice part of the view, planting one thousand trees directly in front of the house to block beachgoers below from peering up. A private beach below included wooden cabanas.
Huguette admired her mother’s vision. More than fifty years later, she would reminisce about the construction of the new Bellosguardo in a June 10, 1988, handwritten letter to Santa Barbara mayor Sheila Lodge. “My dear Mother put so much of herself into its charm and had the satisfaction of knowing that during the great depression she was a bit helpful in giving much needed employment.” Once the rebuilt Bellosguardo was complete, the Clarks employed a large year-round staff: twenty-five gardeners, two full-time painters, a plumber, an English butler, a chauffeur, and a complement of housekeepers, maids, and chefs.
Anna began a practice that her daughter would emulate: loyal employees were taken care of for life. Most of the Clark staff continued to receive salaries after they retired, and even after they died, checks kept going to their spouses and children. Huguette was so grateful to a childhood nanny that she supported the woman’s daughter, Ninta Sandre, for decades, buying her a New York apartment, paying for nursing home bills and, finally, burial expenses. Although Anna was a long way from her impoverished adolescence in Butte, she still remembered what it was like to worry about money. Treating employees like extended family, she and her daughter were strong believers in rewarding devotion.
When Huguette returned to New York and her painting lessons in 1933, Tadé Styka began work on a haunting portrait that shows her seated in front of the easel, intent on her artwork. He was painting her to amuse himself; this was not a commission. Wearing lace-up leather shoes, a skirt well below the knee, and a blouse and jacket, she is totally focused on her work, with her brush on the canvas as she tries to capture an image. The back of the canvas faces the viewer so that one cannot see what she is painting. But off to the right is a well-proportioned, naked male model, posing with his back to Huguette.
Explaining his efforts to psychoanalyze his subjects, Tadé once told a journalist, “I do not paint the mask, I paint the character beneath.” This painting is simultaneously serious and humorous as Tadé reveals Huguette’s earnest schoolgirl determination to appear blase against the backdrop of the glorious sexuality of the male model. Tadé understood Huguette’s quirky mixture of shyness and adventurousness in a way that no one else ever had or would.
The artist was a quick study, giving his undivided attention to his subjects. As Apollo later wrote in its obituary, “It was a memorable experience to watch Tadé Styka at work during these short seances that left him exhausted, as after a fencing match, so rapid and violent were his lunges and strokes—while the sitter was hardly aware that the tediousness of posing was over almost before it had begun…”
Those hours at Tadé’s studio on Central Park South were what Huguette lived for—the fulfillment of her own creativity plus the chance to bask in the teasing and supportive friendship of her teacher. They had an ongoing game: making silly bets for a dime. Tadé saved a drawerful of Huguette’s dimes as an amusing symbol of how often he won. Tadé was still resolutely single, and Huguette fantasized that one day the relationship could turn to requited love. For her, it already was love.
One day in 1933, a visitor arrived at Tadé’s studio during Huguette’s lesson, a young woman who had heard about the famous Polish artist and wanted to see his work. A twenty-one-year-old model with high cheekbones, porcelain skin, and long wavy brunette hair, Doris Ford had posed for magazine fashion spreads and illustrations. A New Jersey native, her father was a naval architect and her mother was a pianist and painter. An art student herself, Doris had called Tadé in advance to ask permission to visit, and he invited her to come by at 1 p.m. Huguette took morning lessons and was usually gone by then, but today she was caught up in her work and her art teacher and lingered on.
When the elevator door opened and Doris walked into the room, she and Tadé took one look at each other—and it was a coup de foudre. Huguette saw the way they reacted to each other, and she knew at that moment that the spinning globe of her life had just tilted off its axis. She put down her brush, politely excused herself, and left for the day. Tadé then invited Doris to show her painting technique by taking a brush to his current work-in-progress, his portrait of Huguette at her easel. Doris was nervous but began to
touch up his version of the heiress. It was a symbolic moment that Doris never forgot. “She was so astounded that he would do that,” says Wanda Styka, the couple’s daughter, who heard the courtship tale from her parents. “She was so beautiful and he enjoyed it.” When Huguette decided to buy the completed painting several years later, Doris was dismayed to lose the artwork that held so much meaning for her, too. She propped it on a chair and snapped a final photograph, right before Huguette took possession.
Now Huguette had a rival for the painter’s affections. She and Doris would circle around each other in the coming years, the blonde heiress and the younger brunette fashion model, waiting for this sophisticated older European artist to make up his mind.
Chapter Eleven
Facts, Fiction, and Betrayal
The screwball comedies of the 1930s buoyed the spirits of Americans during the Depression by featuring the foibles of the fortunate and the harebrained schemes of heirs and heiresses. A social butterfly escapes from a gold digger (It Happened One Night) only to fall for an out-of-work reporter, or a wealthy Boston Brahmin moonlights as a butler (My Man Godfrey). This escapist fare was a tonic against breadlines and the daily struggle of surviving.
The Clark family’s riches and romances continued to provide newspapers with similar grist for entertaining the masses. Everyone wanted William Andrews Clark’s money, accumulated over sixty years, and some were willing to go to court to pry away a piece of the copper fortune. The public had the fun of watching the financial hijinks play out as modern-day morality plays.