by Meryl Gordon
As far as Huguette was concerned, this was a social outing that she had no desire to repeat. From then on, she turned down invitations from these New York Clark relatives. As Katherine Morris’s great-granddaughter Carla Hall, born in 1952, recalls, “I sat every Sunday with my grandmother and great-grandmother at their table for lunch. My perception as a child growing up about my aunt Huguette is that she was invited to lunch very often for holidays and for a couple of these Sunday lunches. She would call up prior to the lunch and say that she had a little cold, and that she would be indisposed, and she sends the family greetings.”
Alone now at 907 Fifth Avenue, rambling around the spacious apartments, Huguette had to deal with the business of death—handling her mother’s estate—and find a way to fill the hours that she had previously spent tending to Anna. Huguette gave Rancho Alegre, the Santa Barbara ranch that Anna had purchased during World War II, to the Boy Scouts. She commissioned music in her mother’s honor from her mother’s harp teacher, Marcel Grandjany. As a way to move forward in life, Huguette decided to renovate Anna’s eighth-floor apartment, using the decorating firm French and Company, which her mother had employed for various jobs since 1926. The family firm was now run by Robert Samuels Jr.
But Huguette insisted on one provision that reflected her reclusive state of mind: she refused to meet with him. Samuels orchestrated work on her apartment periodically for the next thirty years, but Huguette would never see him face-to-face. “He’d tell us stories at the dinner table, how she’d hide behind a door and slip him notes,” says Ann Fabrizio, the decorator’s oldest daughter. Her younger sister, Margaret Hoag, recalls, “My father talked to her through the door. She would never open the door. After her mother died, she started to stay hidden.”
Huguette never explained her behavior.
She spent more than $78,000 in 1964 fixing up her mother’s co-op, replacing the floor with reproduction parquet de Versailles and renovating the new kitchen with a black Garland gas stove and a Kelvinator refrigerator. “Everything is proceeding nicely although the apartment is in shambles at the moment,” Robert Samuels wrote to Huguette on September 4, 1964. The eighth floor had two apartments, and her mother had lived in 8W, facing Central Park. When the unit next door, 8E, became available, Huguette bought it to insure her privacy, although she never furnished it. Now she had forty-two rooms at 907 Fifth Avenue. But she was a voracious reader who constantly ordered new books, her doll collection kept increasing, and she never threw out any piece of paper that entered the house. Consequently, some rooms became cluttered with stuff. Radiator leaks in the aging building were a constant problem. Huguette primarily lived on the twelfth floor for at least fifteen more years before switching to sleeping downstairs in 8W.
For Huguette, her daily mail deliveries provided an infusion of life from the outside world. One of her frequent correspondents during the 1960s was a man who had once been dear to her: her ex-husband, William Gower. He had retired from his Paris-based job as the European head of the American publishing firm Cowles Media and was now splitting his time between a villa in Antibes and vacation lodging on the island of Antigua. His second wife, Constance, had died in 1951. He had been very discreet about his first marriage. Gower’s niece Jan Perry, now eighty-three, was unaware that he had previously been married to Huguette Clark, saying, “He never talked about her.”
But the former spouses were now frequently in touch, sending each other telegraphs and letters. Huguette mailed him checks as well as her photographs with witty captions, and he replied with amused sentiments.
Dear Huguette,
I can’t honestly say that I detect much quality between your 800 and 1000 lenses because they are both excellent… Your picture stories were cute and the Japanese house and doll were charming. It won’t be long before you have enough confidence to tackle the rooftop blonde sunbather. When you do, use the 1000 lens, follow her around and be careful not to make the pictures blurry! Love, Bill
The former magazine publisher followed up with another letter commending her pictures.
Dear Huguette,
I have difficulty keeping track of all of your photographic exploits! Your sequence pictures have the same effect as movies and I enjoy your amusing titles. I still like the larger close-ups better but they are all excellent. Why don’t you try some shots up or down Fifth Avenue?… Affectionately, Bill
The old flames made plans to meet when Bill Gower came to Manhattan in 1964. Huguette sent him a telegram on February 15, asking: “When are you thinking of coming to the states STOP Be sure to let me know in advance so I will be in New York. STOP. With affection, Huguette.” After she received his reply, she wrote again on February 21 to confirm their plans: “Will call Union Club on 3rd or 4th of March STOP Bon Voyage, Affectionately, Huguette.” Her ex-husband sent her a telegram on Feb. 28: “Will telephone you on arrival scheduled Sunday afternoon. Affectionately, Bill.”
Judging by the available correspondence, that may have been the only time the two former spouses saw each other during this period. Whatever had gone wrong in their brief marriage, they had nonetheless become friends again. But friends separated by an ocean, content in their separate worlds. Huguette sent Bill a telegraph in April, conveying her sympathies over the death of his dog, Snoopy. “Having had dogs I know what the heartbreak is. STOP. All my best wishes for a good Easter under the circumstances.”
In August, Huguette wrote a wistful telegram to her ex-husband.
Cher Bill,
Wondering what you are doing today. STOP we are having marvelous weather STOP how is it over there did you ever replace snoopy not in your heart but in your household. Bien Affectueusement, Huguette
She often wrote chatty notes to him about current events and her extended family including her aunt Amelia, and Amelia’s third husband, lawyer Thomas Darrington Semple. On September 26, 1968, Huguette wrote a draft of a letter that she planned to send to Bill, talking about the political unrest in France and the bitter New York City school strike. “From what I hear, France is back to normal again and there is no more talk of strikes for which I am thankful. Here there seems to be no hint of a settlement for the teacher’s strike. During my school days such happenings were unheard of (no such luck). Although I am a very poor correspondent you are very often in my thoughts dearest Bill. Do write me soon and in the meantime, all my love.”
In the first few years after her mother’s death, Huguette still cared about her appearance, sending her maids out to buy false eyelashes, nail polish, and copies of Vogue. She had yet another gentleman caller who split his time between New York and California: novelist and screenwriter Polan Banks. Born in 1906, the same year as Huguette, the well-born Virginia native published his first historical novel at the age of twenty and parlayed that into a successful career as a novelist and Hollywood writer. (One of his novels became the 1941 hit The Great Lie starring Bette Davis and Mary Astor; another was turned into My Forbidden Past in 1951, starring Ava Gardner and Robert Mitchum.) His first wife, Amalie, was the niece of financier Bernard Baruch.
The novelist and Huguette had friends in common, which was likely how they met. Polan Banks and Etienne de Villermont were both close to Russian prince Alexis Droutzkoy, serving as usher and best man at the prince’s 1944 New York wedding party and joining him at other society watering spots such as Saratoga Springs.
Polan Banks sent Huguette a jaunty note in March 1966 from his Wilshire Boulevard office in Los Angeles, written as if in the voice of his dog.
Chere Mademoiselle,
Your gracious telegram so delighted me that I ran around barking until mon oncle Polan cuffed my ear (he is really a brute!) but I didn’t mind as it was the first telegram I have ever received.
In any event, I am looking forward to sharing a fine bone and some dog biscuits dipped in Pouilly fuisse with us, very soon. It is only too bad that we have to have him along, non?
But as much as Huguette wanted to trust people, she inevitably wo
rried about being used. Her friendship with Banks unraveled years later when the writer mentioned that he might want to base a character on Huguette in one of his novels. She was so upset that she responded by having her lawyer warn him off. Remembering her mother, whose life had been fictionalized in The Sisters, Huguette did not want to be an unwitting star on best-seller lists. Banks wrote back to apologize. His letter indicates that Huguette may have helped him out financially.
I just received your attorney’s letter. As I told you during our recent conversation, I would not dream of ignoring your wishes about including your name in any way in the current book in work. Please rest assured that you can rely on my word. You do know however that I am and always have been deeply grateful to you for what you have done for me in the past. I shall never forget it. You are a very unique lady.
With so much time on her hands, Huguette became addicted to watching television. She had eclectic viewing habits: she favored The Dick Cavett Show and The Forsyte Saga but also had a deep fondness for cartoon shows such as The Flintstones and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Once early television recorders were developed, she taped shows for her ex-husband, shipping thirty-seven boxes of tapes to Bill in the South of France; he sent a grateful but startled note requesting a valuation for customs.
Throughout this period, the calls and letters kept coming from Huguette’s married Frenchman, Etienne de Villermont. The tone of his letters varied markedly. Sometimes he wrote deeply romantic letters: “I join you through my thoughts and neither distance nor time alters the bond of love of half a life, which will never disappear.” He often thanked her for innumerable gifts. But he frequently devoted page after page to complaining about his wife Elisabeth’s ailments—a lump in her breast, lumbago, eczema—and the difficulties of caring for her and their adopted daughter, Marie-Christine. Etienne’s notes often exude a world-weary companionship, rather than sensuality. “I do more food shopping, I change Elisabeth’s bandages, empty Marie-Christine’s pot, she is still having accidents often,” he wrote in one long letter. “If I enumerate all this, it is to show you that I’m not ‘twiddling my thumbs’ and that genuinely, dear Huguette, the sincere desire to write to you is, alas, often interrupted. I am often tired.” Etienne sent Huguette photos of his house and mentioned the sleeping arrangements—“Elisabeth has her room on the side, for I don’t sleep well in the same room”—but this was done in matter-of-fact rather than suggestive fashion.
But Etienne did make a point of remembering important dates, writing to Huguette in February 1968: “It’s Valentine’s Day and my thoughts are on you today, especially and affectionately. I would like to write to you everyday [sic] but with this bad weather, we all caught colds and I go out as little as possible.” He added that he and his wife and daughter would see her soon in New York.
If Etienne did not hear from Huguette for a few weeks, he wrote her letters with an undertone of panic: “I am very very worried about not having heard from you. I wouldn’t be if you tell me you are doing well.” Undoubtedly, Etienne cared about Huguette, but losing her as the family’s financial patroness would have made his life much less comfortable.
For Huguette, her inheritance was forever an undercurrent in her relationships. She was insecure, worrying about how others perceived her. She often wrote drafts of letters in pencil, tinkering with minor word choices before taking the bold step of putting pen to paper. She fretted: should she thank Bill “many times” or “a million times,” wish him a “joyous” birthday or a “very happy one.” Writing to a vendor to complain about a bill, Huguette initially planned to say that she was “very much surprised” but then upped the ante to “amazed.” This was a woman afraid of spontaneity.
Once Huguette passed her sixtieth birthday, her losses began to mount up. Her half sister Katherine Morris, now eighty-nine, remained a living link to her past, but Katherine’s daughter, Katherine Morris Hall, who had been Huguette’s childhood playmate and a Spence classmate, died in March 1968. Huguette made a rare appearance at the funeral, held at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. She chatted pleasantly with her relatives and then left. They would never see her again.
Huguette was now preoccupied with the lingering illness of her aunt Amelia, confined to her home at 575 Park Avenue, just a dozen blocks from Huguette’s Fifth Avenue home. The childless Amelia had been the equivalent of a second mother to Huguette, a calming and loving presence. Huguette worried constantly about her aunt, and both Etienne and Bill Gower sent supportive notes trying to buck up her spirits. On September 24, 1969, Etienne wrote to say that he would be coming to Manhattan in November. “I apologize for not having written earlier,” he said in his letter. “It’s not that I am not thinking of you, as you suspect, but like you, I have family members with health problems and it has shaken me… I will soon be in New York and I am eager to see you again, and knowing you are worried bothers me very much.”
Amelia La Chapelle Hoyt Turner Semple died on October 18, 1969. As Huguette poignantly wrote in an affidavit filed with Amelia’s will, “I knew her all of my life.” Amelia bequeathed the bulk of her $757,000 estate to her third husband, lawyer Thomas Darrington Semple. He soon moved to Alabama to join relatives.
Huguette was so devastated by Amelia’s illness that she once again virtually stopped eating. Just as in 1942 when she began to waste away from stress, her weight plummeted. She kept track of her weight, weighing herself every three weeks and writing down the number. In 1967, the five-foot-six heiress weighed 131 pounds, but she had dropped to a too-slender 114 pounds by April 1969. (She made a note to herself: “120 pounds is good weight.”) Huguette often jotted thoughts on scratch paper. One day she made a note to herself: “My get up and go got up and went.”
Wanda and Doris Styka had been the first people to feel the cool breeze of Huguette’s physical absence in their daily lives, but now Huguette’s retreat turned into full-scale isolation. In her grief over the deaths, six years apart, of her mother and now her aunt, Huguette turned visitors away, an emotional reaction that became an entrenched habit. She limited her contact to the telephone.
Leontine Lyle, the wife of physician William Gordon Lyle, had been a family friend for forty years, yet Huguette declined repeated invitations to get together. As Leontine Lyle’s granddaughter Lucy Tower recalls, “My grandmother tried to see Huguette, but she wouldn’t see her. And they were close—they talked by phone two or three times a day. My grandmother would say, ‘It’s such a pretty day, I think I’ll take a walk downtown, why don’t I drop in and see you and we could chat over tea?’ Huguette would say something like, ‘No, I have to take a nap this afternoon.’ ” As Tower puts it, “There was always an excuse.”
Huguette had been friendly with her aunt Amelia’s husband. His son, T. Darrington Semple Jr., a lawyer who lived in Manhattan, made numerous efforts to visit Huguette. She had sent the younger Semple numerous gifts—her antique Pierce-Arrow automobile, an apartment’s worth of air conditioners—as a tribute to his devotion to Amelia. (Semple Jr. even chose “La Chapelle” as the middle name for his daughter Sarah.) “My father said he felt obligated to try to meet Huguette, as a family member, and he tried,” recalls Sarah La Chapelle Thompson. “But after the sixteenth time she had to wash her hair, he gave up. But he talked to her on the phone. He stopped saying ‘Let me come visit,’ because that made her upset.”
Since Huguette was chatty and engaging on the telephone, friends and acquaintances tried artful wiles to see her. Jane Bannerman, whose husband, Charles, was Huguette’s lawyer, recalls. “At my husband’s firm, they sort of passed her along down the line. None of them ever met her, but they talked to her on the telephone. I talked to her many times on the telephone.” Huguette enjoyed reminiscing about her childhood ocean crossings and sent vintage ship menus with unusual artwork to Jane. “When we went out to Bellosguardo with the partners,” Jane Bannerman says, “I said to Mrs. Clark, ‘Why don’t you show us the place yourself, that would be really nice.
’ She said, ‘Oh, no, I couldn’t do that because it would make me sad.’ ”
There may have been a final event that pushed her into solitude—a traumatic incident with her chauffeur. Many years later, her accountant, Irving Kamsler, recalls being told that “she had been in the car with her chauffeur and he had a heart attack. She got scared of people coming around the car.” Several other people referred to their own versions of this story. Huguette had often dispatched her chauffeur on errands or to take her staff home, but by 1975 she had an account with Carey Car Service to handle those chores.
During the formative years of her life, Huguette and her family had been subjected to relentless scrutiny by the newspapers. She could not put up a moat around her castle, but in a white-glove Fifth Avenue doorman building she could now do the next best thing: keep the world out. Huguette refused to see virtually anyone face-to-face other than a housekeeper; her mother’s former social secretary, Adele Marié; and a few maids.
It was as if every frightening moment, every heartbreaking event, that had happened in her life had now come back to haunt her—Andrée’s sudden death, the illness that caused her mother to go deaf, her parents’ phobia about germs. There was nothing wrong with Huguette’s own appearance, no ugly scars to make her ashamed of showing herself to others. She had never been particularly vain, so a few wrinkles and other signs of aging would not have been enough to matter. But Huguette did not want to look people in the eye or allow them to get physically close to her. She acted as if most human contact was dangerous.