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

by Meryl Gordon

  During that summer in Santa Barbara, she wrote to Tadé as always. Even after so many mornings in Tadé’s painting studio and evenings by his side, her letters to him are chaste, as if the thirty-two-year-old’s emotions are so repressed that she cannot express deeper feelings. She plays it light and girlish, the younger pupil to older mentor. On August 14, 1938, she wrote to Tadé on stationery monogrammed with an elaborate “H.” By then it was likely that she knew Tadé was involved with Doris Ford.

  Cher Maitre,

  What a good and enjoyable surprise you gave me by calling from New York. I who had believed you to be in South America. Imagine my astonishment! Thank you for offering to have me resume my lessons on September 15th. This will not be possible for me, but I am delighted at the thought of picking my paintbrush up again on the 25th of next month.

  I can’t wait to resume my lessons. It is such a privilege to work with you.

  There was recently a horse show here which was very interesting for me, as my niece Patsy took part in it.

  We are spending a lot of time at the beach. The ocean air is so good and invigorating but I find the water quite cold.

  Included here are a few photos of the house… and of your little rose bush which has grown nicely and faces my studio, as well as some newspaper clippings about the earthquake in New York that I think must be very exaggerated.

  Write me a note, dear Maitre. I will be happy to hear from you. I hope these few lines will have found you in good health. Maman joins me in sending our best regards, Huguette.

  (New York City did indeed experience a minor earthquake at 3 a.m. on July 29, 1938. Huguette’s horse-mad niece was Patsy Clark, the daughter of Charles Clark and Celia Tobin.)

  In this letter to Tadé, Huguette sent along photos of the newly rebuilt Bellosguardo and a fetching photo of herself, standing by the trees on the cliff overlooking the ocean. She is wearing a white skirted suit with a cheerful polka dot blouse and matching belt. Plumper than her previous slender self, more curvaceous and womanly, Huguette looks at the camera with a wistful expression.

  Huguette’s artistic love affair with Japan had intensified. Concerned about the verisimilitude of her Japanese-themed paintings, she had begun an ongoing correspondence with a Japanese woman based in California, Mrs. Sajiri. Huguette inquired about everything from the appropriate names for female figures to what kinds of insects she should portray. Mrs. Sajiri wrote to Huguette in January 1939 that there were more than one hundred known species of cicadas in Japan but “for your parasol study, however, I think that a dragonfly or a butterfly would be more appropriate.” That April, Mrs. Sajiri gave Huguette detailed instructions on where a geisha might place a coral pin on her kimono and obi.

  Huguette’s and Tadé’s paths diverged that spring, although they remained close. On May 11, 1939, Tadé Styka presented a large diamond solitaire surrounded by twenty pigeon red blood rubies to Doris, whose modeling career had blossomed with magazine covers. But he did not propose. Only months later, when a friend asked Doris whether this was an engagement ring—and she repeated the conversation to Tadé—did he admit that was what he had in mind. But the perennial bachelor was in no rush to set a wedding date.

  Just a few days after giving Doris the ring, Tadé took Huguette to an art exhibit; then on May 21, he and the heiress attended a concert by harpist Marcel Grandjany, Anna Clark’s harp teacher. Huguette and Tadé ventured out to Queens—likely courtesy of her chauffeur—to see the wonders of the 1939 World’s Fair. Tadé and Huguette marveled at Broadway showman Billy Rose’s spectacular Aquacade, a ten-thousand-seat amphitheater featuring an enormous pool and cascades of water. Ornately costumed glamour girls performed dance routines and then stripped down to bathing suits to show off synchronized swimming feats. Olympic champion and actor Johnny Weissmuller was featured in the act. After the show, Tadé and Huguette dined at the Italian Pavilion’s second-floor restaurant, where imported chefs concocted dishes dotted with white truffles.

  Huguette, however, had romantic news of her own. She had warmed up to the idea of the Marquis de Villermont as a suitor. Her mother’s social secretary, Adele Marié, told family friends that she had helped broker the match. The society columns heralded another upcoming walk down the aisle. Walter Winchell declared on May 31, 1939, that “The Marquis de Villermont and Huguette Clark will probably wed this summer. He’s due for a post with the French diplomatic Service.”

  Winchell prided himself on getting his facts right, and was saved in this case by the word probably. There was no wedding that summer, much less a formal engagement. The relationship between Huguette and Etienne never did progress to marriage. But they would continue to see each other periodically over the next few decades.

  On Christmas Day 1939, Tadé Styka spent the holiday at dinner with Anna and Huguette at 907 Fifth Avenue, but he did not bring along his fiancée. However, he did repeat to Doris a conversation that he had that evening with Huguette. The heiress teased Tadé about his engagement. As Doris wrote in her notes, “She was joshing him about me—saying for him not to fool her as she could find out a lot but did not want to.” Huguette was trying to graciously accept the news that he was now committed to someone else, but this transition troubled her.

  Ever since the newspapers had feasted on the tale of her 1930 divorce, Huguette had loathed publicity. But she could not avoid it. As one of the wealthiest women in Manhattan, she remained a figure of interest. Less than a year after her purported engagement to the Marquis de Villermont was mentioned in the newspapers, syndicated columnist Cholly Knickerbocker wrote an item on March 16, 1940, stating that Huguette had given up on romance.

  “When lists of American heiresses are compiled, ink-slingers usually overlook popular Huguette Clark, whose father the late bewhiskered Senator William A. Clark amassed a fortune in Montana’s copper and Alaska’s gold.” After mentioning her failed marriage to William Gower, the columnist continued, “She’s been disillusioned ever since, most of her time is given over to art work, and on Fifth Avenue in the winter and at Santa Barbara in the summer. She prevues [sic] oils and watercolors that win high praise from art critics. If she didn’t have $15,000,000, she could amass a fortune as an artist.”

  Gossip columnists could not resist pointing out that her ex-husband, William Gower, and his second wife were tripping through Europe, highballs in hand. Gower’s niece Jan Perry recalls, “He led a fast life. We all adored him. He was a name-dropper who knew everyone.” When Perry visited her uncle in London and he honored her with a cocktail party, Lady Astor was among the guests. Gower was nominally affiliated with a law firm but, as Perry adds, “He sure acted as if he didn’t have to work.” His wife remained a social climber par excellence. As the New York Sun wrote, “Mrs. Gower is one of the most popular hostesses in the American colony in London.”

  Anna and Huguette employed a large retinue of servants at 907 Fifth Avenue: cooks, maids, housekeepers, and a chauffeur. One day, a staffer delivered an unexpected, and unwanted, package to the two women—an eye-opening tell-all manuscript about William Andrews Clark and his family, written by a former family employee from Butte, William Daniel Mangam. The loose-leaf pages were in dark green three-punch binders, with copies of photos and excerpts of personal letters.

  Every family has its secrets: the cruelties and shameful moments, the sibling rivalries, the forbidden romantic entanglements and hidden financial finagling. But only rarely is the dirty linen hung on the clothesline for public ridicule. Nothing ever written about the Clarks—even The Sisters—exuded vitriol like this little book entitled The Clarks of Montana.

  Mangam had been the confidant of William Andrews Clark Jr. and had spent decades on the Clark payroll. In 1902, Mangam got into such a bloody bare-knuckles brawl in Butte defending Senator Clark’s reputation that the fight made the national newspapers, in which he was described as “the protege of Senator Clark.” Mangam worked his way up to become the secretary-treasurer of the Clarks’ Timber Butte Mi
ning Company. Mangam read and kept copies of letters between family members and collected damaging internal financial documents. Even after the Clark estate sold the senator’s Montana enterprises in 1928 to the Anaconda Mining Company, he remained close to William Clark Jr. But once Junior died in the company of a teenage boy, Mangam decided to cash in.

  Mangam’s lacerating book portrayed the senator as a reprobate who fathered illegitimate children with Indian women and favored “aberrant” (albeit unspecified) sexual practices. The author went after the entire Clark family, including Anna and Huguette, with vicious portraits exposing embarrassing moments. Mangam filed for a copyright in 1939, but the book got wider circulation when it was issued in 1941 by a New York publisher, Silver Bow Press, with an introduction by University of Wisconsin sociology professor Edward Alsworth Ross, who pronounced it a “priceless social document.” Ross added, “The author makes charges which would undoubtedly lay him open to ruin by many successful libel suits were he not in a position to substantiate them.” Mangam wrote an expose of Will Clark Jr.’s activities as a sexual predator, attacked Charles as an alcoholic and a philanderer, and portrayed Mary Clark de Brabant, who had died in December 1939, as a snob with terrible taste in men. Katherine Clark Morris, the only surviving child from Clark’s first marriage, is described as a stingy social climber.

  Anna La Chapelle is depicted as an ambitious teenage fortune hunter who became pregnant out of wedlock and manipulatively reeled in her man, negotiating a large prenuptial settlement. Mangam quotes letters that convey the distress of Clark’s older children over the relationship. The senator’s oldest daughter, Mary, thought that her father should have married someone elevated in society, and Mangam says that she “resented it deeply” that he chose Anna La Chapelle.

  The portrait of Huguette was even more cruel. Mangam flatly stated, without a shred of evidence, that she might not be Clark’s daughter but instead the product of an affair by Anna. He says that William Andrews Clark did not love Huguette. The expose described Huguette as a spoiled child with a “mother complex.” Mangam wrote with clotted syntax: “Huguette Marcelle never occupied the place in the affections of the Senator that the winsome Andrée did. His feelings toward Huguette at times seemed almost to approach indifference. It is not believed that the Senator’s attitude was dictated or influenced by the tale that Huguette was not his offspring but that of a New York doctor, a story, incidentally, in the truth of which his sons and one grandson expressed their belief.”

  Those sons and grandson—Charles Clark, William Clark Jr., and William Clark III—were all dead now. But the possibility that they had not only believed but spread this sleazy story hardened Huguette and Anna against their relatives. Twisting the knife, Mangam announced the reason for the short-lived nuptials of Clark’s youngest daughter: “Huguette refused to consummate the marriage.”

  Many of Mangam’s stories were probably embellished or even invented. But his description of Huguette and Anna’s bond rings true: “They seem now to live largely for each other.” The author sent the unpublished manuscript to Anna and Huguette to purportedly protect himself from a lawsuit. In his foreword, Mangam writes: “To guard against the possibility of error in the presentation of factual statements, the chapters of this narrative were submitted to all the characters who are still alive and to their legal representatives.”

  Unlike The Sisters, the Mangam book was not a best seller. Rumor had it that family members tried to buy up all the copies and pulp them, although the slim volume was periodically reprinted and made its way into libraries. If anyone wanted to learn about the history of William Andrews Clark, his wife, Anna, and daughter Huguette, this was the standard volume to consult from now on. And it was merciless to Clark’s youngest daughter.

  For Huguette, the seacliff estate in Santa Barbara remained her refuge, a place to escape from New York and societal expectations. She could paint, play golf with friends, swim in the ocean, and relax away from prying eyes. In 1941, she spent more time than usual in Santa Barbara. Early that year, she began writing to Tadé to ask him to save dates for painting lessons, but postponed her return to New York four times, finally returning on June 11.

  In her notes to her teacher, she mentioned how tan she was becoming, so he decided to play a practical joke: a tan-a-thon. In the weeks before her scheduled arrival, he began sunning himself on the roof at lunch. Huguette swanned into his studio on June 12 and discovered that Tadé was darker than she was. He wrote a letter to his brother later that day about the prank: “She stayed in California because she wanted to astound me, astonish me with her own tan. In the meantime, I stupified her when she saw me. She did nothing else but tan.”

  Huguette had always come for morning lessons, but she abruptly announced that she wanted to switch to afternoons, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. This upset Tadé’s own painting schedule. But much to the annoyance of his fiancée, Doris, he accepted Huguette’s demand without complaint. As his daughter, Wanda, says, “My mother mentioned that this made it difficult for my father, since he’d have to schedule a sitting in the morning or after 3 p.m., and if it was the winter the light would be going. My father was very delicate, he would never have said, ‘Gosh, this is a problem in life.’ He thought, noblesse oblige, I have to be chivalrous.”

  Huguette had temporarily put aside Japanese themes to work on a new series about envelopes, some with white flaps fetchingly open, a hint of the mysteries of the letters inside. “She has been so fanatical about the little envelopes she has been painting for months, if not for all of last year,” wrote Doris in her notes. “Studying abstract perspectives to finish them.”

  The heiress did not spend much time in New York that year, heading back to Bellosguardo for the month of August. Etienne de Villermont was a houseguest at Bellosguardo during the annual fiesta, which included a pageant, a parade, street dancing, and parties at the Montecito Country Club and the Biltmore’s waterfront Coral Casino. Huguette met Etienne at the train station, and a photograph caught the happy moment as she gave him a hug.

  Huguette’s and the Frenchman’s social circles overlapped: when he returned to New York that fall, Etienne was a guest at a dinner given by the ubiquitous Amanda Storrs, the widow of the theatre producer. The marquis benefited financially from his friendship with the Clarks. He was named to the board of a newly formed Vermont copper company chaired by George Ellis, a lawyer who had worked for William Andrews Clark. His Manhattan firm handled legal affairs for Anna and Huguette.

  Huguette returned briefly to New York that fall, but then turned around and headed back to California to spend December 1941 and the Christmas holidays with her mother at Bellosguardo. The weather was balmy, perfect for tennis or golf, a pleasant seventy-eight degrees on December 7, 1941, the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

  Ever since the Clarks had fled France at the outbreak of World War I, Anna and Huguette had a tendency to panic. But trapped on the West Coast in the harrowing days after Pearl Harbor, they had genuine reason to be fearful. Air sirens went off in major cities, anti-aircraft guns were fired into the sky over Los Angeles, and fear was rampant that Japanese troops were about to invade by air or by sea. Beaches were laced with barbed wire.

  Huguette and her mother desperately wanted to flee California after the Japanese attack, but they were competing with thousands of terrified residents. She sent a telegram to Tadé Styka, explaining that they were having difficulty obtaining tickets and would be arriving in New York later than she had hoped.

  The location of the Santa Barbara Cemetery—high above on the ocean with a sweeping view of the horizon, right next to Bellosguardo—offered an ideal observation post. The Army established a presence in the cemetery, stationing troops with artillery and searchlights there as sentries patrolled the beaches below. Bellosguardo was now part of a war zone.

  Huguette and Anna had left Santa Barbara by the time the city was traumatized on February 22, 1942, when a Japanese submarine surfaced a half mile
from the coast and fired at the Ellwood Oil Field. Just twelve miles from Santa Barbara, the oil facility sustained minimal damage and no one was injured, but the attack ratcheted up concerns about the region’s vulnerability.

  Back in New York, Huguette and Anna began to ludicrously worry about money despite their ample means. Huguette announced that she needed to economize and cut back her painting lessons from four times a week to two visits, although it hardly dented her budget. “Her manager of financial affairs said she must cut down on expenses since the government is taking too much from her,” wrote Doris in her notes.

  For Huguette, the outbreak of war was emotionally shattering. She loved Japanese culture and had been collecting Japanese artifacts for a decade, but now Japan was the enemy. She had befriended Japanese Americans and immersed herself in learning about the country. Lucien Marsh, the proprietor of the Japanese importer Marsh and Company, wrote to Huguette on January 29, 1942, to convey the obvious: “When we succeed in abolishing the war lords of Japan I believe we will be able to accomplish your unfilled orders.” He added, hopefully, “And any future orders…”

  But now any American with close ties to Japan was considered a potential subversive. Until Pearl Harbor, Huguette had been receiving regular shipments from Japan of dolls, castles, and antiques. At her Fifth Avenue apartment, she received a series of unsettling visits from the FBI. She talked about the experience many years later with her assistant, Chris Sattler. As he recounts, “There was so much correspondence between Japan and Mrs. Clark, she was actually interviewed on a number of occasions by the FBI.”

  The government paranoia was not as far-fetched as it seems. Velvalee Dickinson, the proprietor of a New York doll store, was later convicted of spying for Japan and sentenced to ten years in prison. She sent coded letters about American ship movements that were disguised as routine correspondence about doll shipments and repairs.