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

by Meryl Gordon

  When California began rounding up Japanese residents and shipping them to internment camps in February 1942, Huguette had firsthand knowledge of a few of those taken away. Her uncle Arthur La Chapelle’s Japanese cook, Taka Muto, and his wife, Saburo Muto, were forced to leave his Beverly Hills estate and sent to a barbed-wire enclave in barren Cody, Wyoming. Huguette knew the couple well and stayed in touch with them for many decades following their release.

  All of it—the specter of attack right after Pearl Harbor, the FBI interrogation, the demonization of Japan—sent Huguette into a tailspin. Already relatively slender, she began to lose weight. She even stopped turning up for her painting lessons. Tadé and Doris bought orchids for her birthday on June 9, sending them to her apartment. Ten days later, Tadé was so worried that he spoke to Adele Marié to see how Huguette was doing. As Doris wrote, “She said Miss Clark is so terribly worried over war conditions, Miss Marié worried her health will break.” Those fears proved true.

  Huguette spent the next few months under the care of doctors, suffering from a psychological breakdown. She cut off contact with the outside world. On September 24, she finally emerged to tentatively make her way to Tadé’s studio. Doris described in her notes what happened: “Miss Clark came today for the first time in over two months. TS had amazingly divined her reason for staying away… She called the other day to confirm the words that TS had told me weeks ago—that she had been taking a rest cure to gain weight. She was not even allowed to talk because this wasted energy.” Where Huguette spent these months recovering from her breakdown was not spelled out, but her inability to make phone calls suggests an institutional setting.

  Huguette remained in fragile shape for the remainder of the year. On December 3, Doris wrote, “Miss Clark has been staying home trying to gain weight.” To cheer her up, Tadé sent Huguette a dozen long-stemmed red roses and a new artist’s palette that he had spent months meticulously carving and sanding, with wood specially chosen from the Steinway factory to match the color of Huguette’s blonde hair. It was a Christmas gift, meant to remind Huguette of her identity as an artist and to entice her to pick up a brush again. Tadé had finally married Doris in August with a simple City Hall ceremony, but he remained attached to his favorite pupil.

  Anna worried about her daughter’s emotional health. “Lani would sometimes make little semicritical comments about Huguette,” recalls Gordon Lyle Jr. “That Huguette wanted to be sheltered from all the problems of the world. For which I don’t blame her.” From then on, Anna appeared to family and friends to be especially protective of Huguette, concerned about keeping her sensitive daughter on an even psychological keel. At the end of the year, the family suffered another loss when Amelia La Chapelle Turner’s husband, Bryce, died of a heart attack on December 26. The former mining engineer had been a constant presence at family events, and the three women had now lost their final male anchor.

  Once Huguette recovered enough to reengage with the world, she did her small part to aid in the war effort. She donated money to the YWCA for hospitality for the troops, loaned a painting to the Museum of Modern Art for a fund-raising exhibit for Navy relief, and appeared at a morale-boosting USO party to cheer up soldiers headed to war. She kept a photo from the event as a souvenir, which she showed to Chris Sattler. “She is sitting with three other society women, with a sailor, a Marine, and a couple Army guys, young roughhousing guys,” he says. “She looked incredibly uncomfortable.” Making small talk with homesick soldiers was not in her repertoire.

  She returned to painting Japanese scenes again, although she bought a zipped case to carry her paintings out of Tadé’s studio, to avoid arousing hostility from strangers on the street.

  Huguette’s disappearance from public life had the inadvertent and undesired effect of making her even more of a figure of public curiosity. In May 1943, Cholly Knickerbocker devoted an entire column to Huguette, noting that she was keen to keep her “activities out of the news.” As the columnist wrote:

  Although Huguette makes her home in a luxurious apartment on upper Fifth Avenue, you seldom encounter her about the haunts of “cafe society” and you NEVER see accounts of her comings and goings in the “sassiety” columns…

  Huguette inherited great wealth—but she never had any desire to go in for a big social splash and her simplicity and directness, going hand in hand with a certain shyness are in contrast to the chi-chi and splurge affected by other Mayfairites blessed with far less coin of the realm… Huguette has continued to devote her time to her art work…

  Her former husband now is married to the one-time Constance Baxter Tevis Toulmin, and, as an executive to the Red Cross, was appointed to a post with the Civilian Relief mission in London.

  Huguette goes her quiet way, occupied with her art and her music, attending concerts, the theatre, the opera, various art exhibits, etc.—wartime exigencies permitted. She will have none of “cafe society.”

  Huguette and Anna finally returned to California that August. Worried about possible food shortages, Anna bought a 218-acre ranch nearby with grazing cows and vegetable gardens. Anna and Huguette never lived at Rancho Alegre but relied on its produce. For Anna, the ranch was a psychological safety net, a place where she and Huguette and the staff could flee if the coast of California came under attack. Anna held on to it even after the war when the previous owner, publisher Thomas Storke, tried to buy it back.

  Infants were not a regular part of Huguette’s life. But when Tadé Styka’s wife, Doris, gave birth to a daughter, Wanda, on August 19, 1943, the Clark women were besotted. Huguette was on her own in California at the time, but her mother and aunt paid an immediate visit. Tadé wrote to Huguette: “Votre dear Mother and your Aunt came to see Wanda and true to her sex, she seems to have been born with the art of winning hearts.”

  Huguette accepted the mantle of godmother with joy, showering baby Wanda with affection and gifts including musical dolls, French illustrated children’s books, and $1,000 bonds. Encouraging Tadé and Doris to take home movies, she sent them an early projector. She wrote frequent notes to Doris in English conveying how much she reveled in watching Wanda grow up. Proud father Tadé painted numerous portraits of his enchanting daughter and crafted busts of her likeness, sending a bronze sculpture of Wanda to Huguette as a gift.

  In a handwritten note from Santa Barbara dated June 16, 1944, a week after her own thirty-eighth birthday, Huguette wrote,

  Dear Doris,

  It was sweet of you and “the maestre” to remember my birthday. I am still getting much enjoyment from the delicious candy and I want to thank you both many many times. The ivy poisoning is better which makes me glad as it will be so nice seeing you again and you can imagine how I can hardly wait to see my godchild. Mother and my aunt and Uncle Arthur just rave about her… with much love, Huguette.

  Six months later, Huguette sent another note gushing about Wanda. She uses a surprisingly formal address for her painting teacher, as if still trying to get used to their changed relationship.

  Dear Doris,

  Thank you and Mr. Styka so much for the delicious box of chocolates you so sweetly sent me for Christmas and for your thoughts of me. I so enjoyed seeing you and Wanda the other day. Wanda looked so well and has grown considerably since I last saw her. She is adorable and so intelligent. I thought it was so by the way she handed me my photograph. I just have her photographs and will have one of the larger ones framed. With much love and wishing you all three a most Happy New Year, Huguette.

  Huguette frequently requested visits. “I love my little godchild,” she wrote. “Wanda has to spend the afternoon with us when you and Mr. Styka go to the movies or are otherwise engaged. Will call up very soon as I should also like you both to come to dinner one of these days.”

  Once Wanda learned to talk, Huguette asked to be called “Marraine,” the French word for “godmother.” Huguette liked coming up with ways to amuse Wanda, such as demonstrating her new Polaroid camera. She wrote to
Doris Styka: “I have a new camera which in minutes develop its photos. You can play a joke on Wanda. Snap her and then show it to her a minute later.”

  When Huguette came to the Styka family’s duplex complex of apartments—living quarters and studio—at 222 Central Park South, Wanda would often be kept company by Anna and Huguette’s social secretary, Adele Marié. “I had to be very quiet,” Wanda recalls. “It seems to me that the lessons were two hours, but of course a child thinks that everything is very long.” Bizarre as it seems, even after Huguette reached her late thirties and was visiting a full household, she still brought along a companion.

  Looking back on her early years when she was a young observer in her father’s studio, Wanda recalls being struck by how her father and Huguette expressed their very different personalities in their art. “My father was a virtuoso—he painted fast, he had an unerring touch. He liked to let the viewer finish some of the lines, to leave something unsaid in the paintings. Marraine liked everything very precise, finely delineated. She was very careful. I don’t think she was a fast worker.” For Huguette, it was all about control. She labored to show every ripple in the fabric of a gown and every flower petal unfolding, creating lifelike images.

  As avidly as Huguette pursued painting, her mother remained devoted to music. Undaunted by her diminished hearing, Anna still played the harp and often invited chamber music groups to perform at her Fifth Avenue music room. In 1945, she played host to her visiting California relative, pianist Agnes Clark Albert, the daughter of Celia Tobin and Charles Clark. Agnes had proposed a musical afternoon and brought along Robert Maas, the former cellist of the Pro Arte Quartet, a Belgian group that had been stranded in America by the war. Maas had parted company with the quartet and told Anna that he was unsure of his musical future. As Agnes Clark Albert later told her daughter Karine, Anna responded with a wildly extravagant gesture. Pointing to a Cézanne painting of his wife, Anna announced, “My daughter Huguette won’t come into this room because she hates this painting so much.” Then she took the Cézanne portrait of his wife off the wall and left with it.

  When she returned a few hours later, Anna announced that she had just sold the painting at the Wildenstein Gallery and spent the proceeds at the finest music store in New York. She then produced four Stradivarius violins that had belonged to the nineteenth-century Italian violinist Niccolò Paganini. Anna offered to lend them to Robert Maas if he would launch a new string quartet. (The exact details of the story may have been exaggerated through frequent retellings but Anna Clark definitely purchased the instruments and inspired the formation of the Paganini Quartet.)

  After the debut performance of the chamber music group at Manhattan’s Town Hall in November 1946, the New York Times praised the Bartók and Schumann selections and expressed gratitude toward “Mrs. William A. Clark” for supplying the historic instruments. As the quartet performed across the country, Anna was credited time and again for making this heavenly music possible, an artistic legacy of her own.

  The quartet performed at Bellosguardo, where Anna and Huguette continued to hold court. “The Clarks sponsored the Paganini Quartet and held concerts in the music room with its back-to-back Steinway concert grand pianos and harps,” wrote Barbara Hoelscher Doran in an essay for the Santa Barbara Independent. Born in 1944, Doran grew up on the estate, where her father, Albert Hoelscher, was the caretaker. In her essay, she described “lawn parties at the tennis court, with a quartet playing in a tree-house platform, and plays in the outdoor setting.” The Clarks were democratic enough to socialize with favored retainers and their children. “When Huguette and Anna E. Clark came out to the estate, Huguette would phone our house and invite me over for afternoon tea,” Doran wrote. “I would walk over with our dogs and sit with Huguette and Anna E. on the terrace under big umbrellas overlooking the great lawns and ocean.”

  Huguette led a quieter life when she was in Manhattan, continuing to take her painting lessons. She had begun to correspond frequently with longtime family friends based in the South of France—not only man-about-town Etienne de Villermont but his younger brother, Henri. Their letters back and forth were always in French. Ever generous, she sent them checks, and they wrote back with family news. “I thank you endlessly and with eternal gratitude for all you have done and are still doing for us,” wrote Henri.

  In April 1951, Huguette became weak and ill, ending up at St. Luke’s Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for several weeks. The hospital, which had a specialty in respiratory diseases, had an upscale clientele, treating bankers, politicians, and actresses. Tadé made note of Huguette’s illness in his appointment calendar but did not specify the problem. Henri de Villermont wrote to her on June 5: “We were so sorry in learning that you had suffered and worried about it.” On November 23, Henri reiterated his concerns, saying, “I hope, dear Huguette, that your health is definitively back to normal and that you don’t feel anything anymore. You have suffered so much for several months.”

  That year, Huguette purchased a new country refuge close to Manhattan, a sprawling twelve-thousand-square-foot French-style château in New Canaan, Connecticut. Built in 1938 with parquet floors and marble fireplaces, the twenty-two-room mansion was located on a private twenty-three-acre wooded lot with a meandering stream and waterfall. But the bucolic setting was not the primary draw: amid the nuclear panic of the early years of the Cold War era, this estate offered a ready escape from New York. “They had a place in Connecticut because people were scared about the atomic bomb,” explains Gordon Lyle Jr.

  The terrified atmosphere of the era rings through in a 1951 letter that Doris Styka wrote but ultimately did not send to Huguette, in which the artist’s wife stresses “the fears that have become so much part of life in New York”:

  It seems that just as one starts to relax and forgets about any wars or bombing along comes other dread news over the television reviving again the thoughts of escape I have thought to smother… With an atom bomb, survival would be few. I am confiding these fears to you, Huguette, in hope you could help me to know what to do. It isn’t for myself that I fear, but the survival of our little Wanda… as well as her father whose loss to us and to the world would be irreplaceable. When I constantly hear these words of possible bombing and what to do in case of an attack, I feel I don’t want to risk the possibility of it. This fear is making me actually ill…

  Huguette had similar worries, which her new refuge helped alleviate. She began renovations on her Connecticut estate, importing marble fireplaces and adding a painting studio above the master bedroom with a staircase featuring fanciful balustrades shaped like paintbrushes. She would now have a place in the country to use for weekends or if anything frightening happened in Manhattan.

  On June 28, 1952, Tadé and his wife and daughter went to Long Beach on Long Island for the afternoon. On this extremely hot day, he suddenly felt quite ill and was taken by ambulance to the hospital. At sixty-three, he had experienced a stroke. Worried about her dearest friend, Huguette sent him joking get-well cards at New York Hospital, with such scenes as a patient trying to lasso a nurse and gift certificates to be claimed upon leaving the hospital for a Scotch’n Soda, six Easy Rhumba lessons, or a Ride in a Roller Coaster. She reverted to writing notes in French to him on cards imprinted with colorful flowers, rather than writing in English to his wife.

  Tadé spent months recuperating in warmer climes and at his country house in Ashley Falls, Massachusetts. On January 23, 1953, Huguette scribbled, “Am so glad you are getting better and better. I hope that in Cuba you will find some nice hot water that will quicken your full recovery.” A month later, she followed up with another note:

  Cher Maitre,

  I am rejoicing at the idea of seeing all three of you again soon. I found the photos of Wanda very good. She is gorgeous. I hope the water in Miami has decided to become hotter so that you can finally enjoy it. With all of my most affectionate thoughts to all three of you and see you soon, Huguette.


  P.S. I am laying down one of the dancer in a yellow kimono.

  Five months later, she wrote to him in Ashley Falls to say, “I was so glad to have had this little chat on the phone with you today.” Her notes are meant to cheer him up, but her own anxiety is what comes through. Whenever Tadé left Manhattan, Huguette dropped him a line—in July, October, November—stressing how much she missed him and his family and asking to send Wanda a “big kiss.”

  Tadé Styka died on September 11, 1954, at New York Hospital. The New York Times obituary of the sixty-four-year-old artist recalled his precocious exhibit at the Paris salon and a portrait that he had painted in 1948 of Harry Truman, presented to the president at a White House ceremony.

  Shortly after the funeral, Huguette paid a condolence call to Doris and Wanda at their Central Park South apartment, the scene of decades of memories. Aware of how much Huguette had loved her painting lessons, Doris mentioned that Tadé’s artist brother, Adam, might be available to work with her. But Huguette declined. Her precious hours with Tadé could not be replicated with anyone, even his brother. A second-best consolation could not heal the hole in her heart.

  When Huguette left Doris and Wanda Styka after the condolence call, they assumed that they would see her again. Huguette loved Wanda, savoring their time together and eagerly anticipating visits. Huguette remained a major part of their lives for the next half century. The heiress who blossomed as a painter under Tadé’s tutelage would engage in long, affectionate phone conversations with both Wanda and Doris. She paid for Wanda’s private-school education at the Convent of the Sacred Heart and sent frequent checks and gifts. But the visits mysteriously halted. “We were always in communication by telephone,” says Wanda. “That was her medium. We were never out of touch.” But after Tadé Styka died, Wanda would never lay eyes on Huguette again.