Empty Mansions

by Bill Dedman

  If not already a millionaire, W.A. was well on his way. The thirty-seven-year-old banker and industrialist had an opportunity to see the future in 1876, representing the Montana Territory as its orator at the world’s fair in Philadelphia. Despite another worldwide economic depression, nine million visitors celebrated the centennial of the Declaration of Independence by touring the latest wonders of the world: Bell’s telephone and Remington’s typewriter, Heinz ketchup and Hires root beer.

  Fairgoers could walk up stairs inside a lookout tower to see the entire grounds of the Centennial Exhibition. The tower was part of an unfinished statue brought from Paris. The artist planned the statue as a gift from the French Republic to the United States, and was seeking subscriptions to pay for a pedestal. The work was to be a colossal metallic structure of a woman, fifteen stories tall, but all that was on display was her gigantic right forearm holding a torch and flame. The artist was Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, the sculpture was Liberty Enlightening the World, and this was America’s first glimpse of its Statue of Liberty.

  With a fifty-cent ticket, W.A. could climb the stairs to the torch’s balcony, looking out on the industrial wonders of the world, touching Lady Liberty’s smooth French skin of copper.

  A PALACE AND A TEMPLE

  BUTTE WAS NO LONGER a muddy, isolated town. As copper was changing the wider world, it transformed Butte. The same railroad that began taking copper out also brought culture in. By the end of the century, Butte’s Grand Opera House would be visited by Mark Twain and Sarah Bernhardt. Its Broadway Theatre, one of many in town, claimed to be the largest west of Chicago. W.A. was Butte’s dynamo, building its first water supply system, organizing the electric light company and the street railway, and owning The Butte Miner newspaper.

  He needed the finest house in town, particularly as he began to seek political office. From 1884 to 1888, he supervised every detail of the construction of a thirty-four-room red-brick Victorian mansion with a steeply sloping French mansard roof and dormer windows. Begun in a time of depressed copper prices, the home was W.A.’s testament to confidence in the copper camp. When asked why he was building in Butte, he answered with loyalty, “Because I owe it to Butte. I have made money there.”

  This first Clark mansion was designed to confer social status, and it was easily the most expensive home in town, costing a quarter of a million dollars, or about $6 million today. The plaster on the walls was painted in swirls of gold in the entryway, bronze in the octagonal reception room, silver in the dining room, and copper in the billiard room. The woodwork was of fine oak, Cuban mahogany, sycamore, bird’s-eye maple, and rosewood. W.A.’s silhouette was sculpted above the mantel, and frescoes on the library ceiling represented the arts: literature, architecture, painting, and music. The Clark home didn’t have just a staircase; it had the “staircase of nations,” with each wood panel representing one nation of the world, leading up to jeweled-glass windows large enough for a church. On the third floor was a ballroom sixty-two feet long.

  The house had another special feature, one that was required for an industrialist in that era. On the second floor, hidden in the second bedroom, known as the family bedroom, was a closet that served as a panic room. This closet had a call box that could be used to alert the police, the fire department, or the hospital. This was no extravagance: Wealthy men received threats of all kinds. In 1889, for example, W.A. received a letter threatening his life if he did not pay the writer $400,000. He didn’t pay, but he was prepared for trouble if it arrived.

  This first Clark mansion, now known as the Copper King Mansion, was located in an area called Uptown, somewhat distant from the worst smoke and fumes from W.A.’s copper smelter, which was called the tallest concrete smokestack in the world. The Butte hill was an industrial moonscape, denuded of trees. Copper was removed from the ore by roasting it in open-air heaps. W. A. Clark’s smelter smokestack dispensed sulfurous smoke packed with arsenic, a toxin despite its use by Victorian women to lighten their complexions. Sometimes the smoke was so thick that two people passing on a Butte sidewalk could bump into each other, as in the London fog.

  “I must say that the ladies are very fond of this smoky city, as it is sometimes called,” W.A. joked at the 1889 state constitutional convention, when he was the presiding officer, “because there is just enough arsenic there to give them a beautiful complexion.… I believe there are times when there is smoke settling over the city, but I say it would be a great deal better for other cities in the territory if they had more smoke and less diphtheria and other diseases. It has been believed by all the physicians of Butte that the smoke that sometimes prevails there is a disinfectant, and destroys the microbes that constitute the germs of disease.”

  • • •

  Kate Clark, the lady of Butte’s finest home, was known as a charming hostess, but she was not often at home. There’s no indication of a lack of affection between Kate and W.A., but she and the children spent most of the years 1884–93 in Europe and New York, seeking better schools and cultural opportunities. W.A., occupied with his business and political career, joined them for vacations, during which he spent much of his time beginning to build his art collection. Well into his forties, W.A. began to learn French and a smattering of German. The westerner with the bushy red beard nearly always wore refined, well-tailored black suits, dressing elegantly in the tradition of the boulevardiers of Paris. During an extended stay in the German cultural capital, Dresden, W.A. and Kate had their portraits painted. They stand proudly in these paintings, dressed as members of the haute bourgeoisie, W.A. with a silk top hat and knee-length Prince Albert coat, and Kate with an enormous hat and a skirt shaped by a prominent Victorian bustle.

  In 1893, while Kate was in Chicago for the World’s Columbian Exhibition, she contracted typhoid fever. Amid widespread concern about the poor quality of the city’s water supply, officials had assured fairgoers that the water at the fair was filtered or sterilized. (Officials also promised that summers in Chicago were “invariably cool.”) Kate died in New York on October 19. She was fifty years old.

  W.A. demonstrated his love for Kate by building her a $150,000 mausoleum in the form of a Greek temple. He chose a prominent hillside site, not in Butte but in New York City’s Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, north of Manhattan. The stone exterior is of white granite, with intricate mosaics inside. The bronze doors were sculpted by an American living in Paris, Paul Wayland Bartlett, who also designed the pediment for the House wing of the U.S. Capitol. W.A. corresponded endlessly with the artist over every detail. From the massive bronze doors, a portrait of Kate’s face looks out mournfully.

  W.A. was a fifty-four-year-old widower with five children between the ages of thirteen and twenty-three, all old enough to be away at boarding school or beyond. Soon he was looking for a site for a grand new home in New York City. The only question was, who would be the mistress of the manse?

  ANNA

  THE WIDOWER W. A. Clark gained a reputation as one ever ready to help develop young artistic talent, particularly the female sort. Or, as one contemporary said, he was “an ardent admirer, if that’s what one wishes to call it, of the fair sex.”

  His first protégée from the boardinghouses of Butte became an early star of American silent films, but she would not become Mrs. W. A. Clark. Kathlyn Williams was sponsored by W.A. in her early theater career. A blond beauty and the daughter of a boardinghouse operator in Butte, she was born Kathleen Mabel Williams in 1879 but adopted Kathlyn as her stage name. Her father died when she was young, and her mother paid the bills by renting out rooms to miners. As a teenager in the 1890s, Kathlyn starred in Butte theater productions, where she met W.A., the richest man in town.

  He agreed to send Kathlyn to New York to study opera, on the condition that she first finish her studies at Montana Wesleyan University, seventy miles away in Helena. The year she graduated, 1901, she turned twenty-two. W.A. was sixty-two.

  Kathlyn soon switched from opera to acting, and
W.A. paid for her to begin training in New York. By 1903, with W.A. occupied in the U.S. Senate, Kathlyn was married and had moved on to other male sponsors, eventually starring in more than 170 films. In a fan magazine in 1912, Kathlyn thanked Senator Clark, who she said “took a great interest in my welfare.” She explained that the senator “has helped so many boys and girls to realize their ambitions.” The names of no boys survive.

  • • •

  At the same time, W.A. was supporting another girl from a Butte boardinghouse, Anna LaChapelle, who had her own plans to become a musician and singer. In 1893 or 1894, soon after Kate’s death, W.A.’s eye fell on Anna, who was fifteen or sixteen. After she was well into her twenties, she would become his second wife and the mother of two daughters, Andrée and Huguette.

  There are competing stories of how W.A. met Anna. The family version, the official version, has W.A. spotting her on the Fourth of July in a community pageant in which she played a chaste Statue of Liberty. Anna loved to sing and play music, but she was shy and reserved in public. The teenager stood a shapely five feet four with cascading brown hair, a prominent round chin, and an inviting, gap-toothed smile. W.A. recognized her talents immediately.

  The unofficial version, printed in anti-Clark newspapers, casts Anna as the forward one. According to this story, Anna called on a banker in Butte, asking him to sponsor her acting career. That man declined but suggested that she contact another banker who might receive her more generously, W. A. Clark.

  The family also put forward another story about Anna, one describing her as the daughter of an honored physician who had died before the wealthy W. A. Clark became her guardian and she his ward, as though she were an orphan in need of his legal and financial protection. The facts were quite different, however: Anna’s father wasn’t quite a doctor, and he was very much alive.

  Anna Eugenia LaChapelle was born in the Michigan copper mining town of Red Jacket, now known as Calumet, on March 10, 1878. Her parents were immigrants from Montreal, in French-speaking Quebec, who had arrived in the United States six years earlier as part of a great French Canadian wave of immigration. The family later moved to Butte, settling in one of the rougher neighborhoods on the Butte hill, right below the smoke-belching smelters. Anna was the oldest of three children, two girls and a boy.

  The LaChapelles rented out rooms to miners. Anna’s mother, Philomene, could speak English, but not read or write it. She worked as a housekeeper. Anna’s father, Pierre, had been a tailor and then began selling medical potions such as eye lotions. Later he dispensed eyeglasses. Though his tombstone in Butte’s Catholic cemetery identifies him as “Dr. Pierre J. LaChapelle,” his obituary says he was studying medicine at the time of his death.

  The father was still living when Anna fell under W.A.’s sponsorship. The father’s obituary from 1896 places eighteen-year-old Anna already in Paris, studying the concert harp and refining her French. To add some respectability to the arrangement, Anna was described as W.A.’s ward. Court records in Butte show no such guardianship.

  At W.A.’s Paris apartment on avenue Victor Hugo, Anna was chaperoned by one of W.A.’s sisters,* who was there with two daughters. These nieces of W.A.’s described Anna as lively and in love with music. She had a puckish sense of humor that kept them entertained. She also liked to joke about her unusual eyes: one blue and one brown. Back in Butte, people noticed that Anna’s mother, now a widow, had moved into a fine home one block west of the Clark mansion.

  By 1900, as W.A. was serving in the U.S. Senate, Anna visited him in Washington. Newspapers reported that she was “the most interesting lady in Washington,” which might have been a polite way of calling her the most gossiped-about woman. The Denver Post said she had “a typical French face and the great soulful eyes which are often associated with the artistic temperament.” The papers quoted W.A.’s friends as saying that the couple would soon wed and that W.A. planned an opera career for Anna under the stage name Montana. For good measure, the papers added the fiction that Anna’s father had been killed in one of W.A.’s mines, stirring the magnanimous industrialist to take pity on the family.

  • • •

  While Anna was in Paris, W.A. had other romantic entanglements as the new century began.

  First, there was Hattie Rose Laube of Huron, South Dakota, a temperance lecturer and political campaigner, who let it be known in 1901 that W.A. had written her a promise of marriage from Europe. All the newspapers covered her announcement, although the Clark family dismissed the claim as false.

  Then there was the paternity suit filed by a young newspaperwoman named Mary McNellis. W.A. had met Mary at the 1896 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where he was a delegate. In 1901, while W.A. was serving in the Senate, Mary brought a lawsuit against him in New York. She claimed that in October 1900, over a dinner of oysters and champagne at the old Waldorf Hotel, W.A. had promised to marry her. She sought $150,000 for breach of promise, claiming that she had been seduced, debauched, and impregnated.

  W.A. admitted in court papers to knowing Mary and to socializing three or four times with this “rather agreeable and very intelligent young woman.” But he vigorously denied “that I ever promised to marry Miss McNellis, or ever made love to her or induced her to believe that I was going to marry her.” Court records show that a referee found in W.A.’s favor, ordering Mary to pay the senator $1,125 in court costs.

  The court records were sealed, keeping the case out of the newspapers for two years, during which time W.A. was courting Anna. Then in 1903, it was revealed that Mary had wanted her attorney to push for a jury trial, but the attorney had persuaded her to accept the referee’s decision and give up the case. Mary was surprised to discover that her attorney had owned part of a mining company in British Columbia and that the mine had recently been purchased by W. A. Clark. She filed an appeal, and at that point all the newspapers covered the McNellis case.

  Word of the case may have reached Paris, where twenty-five-year-old Anna was still studying the harp. W.A. traveled there at least twice a year by steamship. The girl from the Butte boardinghouse had adopted chic Parisian styles, with hemlines at the ankle and a high waist defined by a luxurious sash. Her brown hair was cut short in bangs hanging nearly to her deep-set eyes. And she began sporting a few expensive gifts: a bracelet with 36 sapphires and 126 small diamonds, a pair of tortoiseshell combs each with 320 diamonds, and a Cartier two-strand pearl necklace with a seven-carat diamond clasp.

  UNITED VERDE

  W.A. MOVED from rich to superrich after representing Montana at the 1885 World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans. There he toured the display from Arizona Territory, seeing samples of ore from a particular mine, samples rich in copper, gold, and silver. He made note of it, and promptly forgot about it. But later, in checking the books of a bankrupt ore refinery that he had taken control of, he saw the name of the mine again: the United Verde.

  In early 1888, W.A. went to Arizona to visit this mine near the remote town of Jerome. This was high in Yavapai County, at 5,400 feet on the eastern slope of the Black Hills mountains, overlooking the Verde River. It had been operated since 1876, but when miners encountered a leaner ore in 1884, they were no longer able to operate profitably. United Verde’s prospects were limited by the lack of access to water or a railroad to transport the copper ore. For a while, the nearest railroad station was three states away, in Kansas. But even after the Santa Fe railroad pushed through Arizona in 1882, worldwide copper prices were depressed, falling to nine cents a pound, and the mine lay idle.

  When W.A. visited the mine in 1888, the copper market was ripe, with prices having been driven up to fifteen cents a pound by a French syndicate that was limiting production. He and his mine superintendent went crawling around the mine to take ore samples every twelve inches. Satisfied with what he found, he took an option on the mine and started buying up all the stock, which was scattered across the globe. Eventually, out of 300,000 shares, the Clarks
would own 299,000.

  Under his ownership, the United Verde would become the richest copper mine in the world. It again showed W. A. Clark’s ability to grasp an opportunity. He installed a massive industrial complex for extracting, crushing, and roasting the ore to bring out the vital copper. The mining shafts, lined with concrete, reached two-thirds of a mile deep. W.A. also connected Jerome to the Santa Fe railroad by a narrow-gauge line, cutting his transportation costs dramatically.

  For his workers, W.A. built a model town, complete with a library and schools. This planned community, called Clarkdale, was founded in 1912 a mile from the mine. Under the rigid segregation of the day, miners and their families lived in company cottages, with Upper Clarkdale for engineers and bosses. Lower Clarkdale was for working class whites. Mexican immigrants lived in crude buildings in Patio Town closer to the smelter. And out in the desert Native American workers lived in domed huts they built themselves. The company provided a baseball park and four swimming pools, disability insurance, and wages paid on a bonus system, with extra pay given for loading more ore or blacksmithing more pickaxes. Unlike its competitors, the United Verde enjoyed mostly harmonious relations with its unions.

  W.A. operated all his businesses under strict secrecy, but he did let out that the United Verde was capable of producing eight million pounds of fine copper per month. Newspapers speculated that its annual profits were $5 million to $10 million, or in today’s dollars roughly $140 million to $280 million. With great understatement, W.A. recalled in a speech some years later his impression of the ore samples from United Verde that he had seen in New Orleans: “This was one of the most attractive collections of mineral to be found at the exhibition.”