by Bill Dedman
With or without a marriage certificate, Anna was now writing letters with her eighteen-carat-gold Cartier fountain pen, opening replies with her fourteen-carat-gold Tiffany letter opener, checking the time on her Cartier gold and diamond watch, applying a bit of dark red with her eighteen-carat-gold and diamond lipstick holder, fixing her hair with her Cartier diamond and rock crystal hairpin, mending clothes with her fourteen-carat-gold safety pins, trimming her nails with her fourteen-carat-gold manicure set, carrying coins in her eighteen-carat-gold-mesh purse with five inset emeralds, and praying with fourteen-carat-gold and jade rosary beads. Her Tiffany toiletry case was engraved AEC, for Anna Eugenia Clark.
* * *
* The chaperone was Elizabeth Clark Abascal, who accompanied Anna to Paris with Elizabeth’s daughters, Anita and Mary.
SATURDAY AFTERNOONS FROM THREE TO SIX
WHEN SENATOR W. A. CLARK brought his newly revealed young bride to New York from Paris for a visit in 1905, he began a public campaign for acceptance into fashionable society. With an absence of subtlety, W.A. announced in the newspapers his plan to join the Social 400, New York’s informal list of old merchant and landowning families, a list guarded by Caroline Astor. The 400 may have been a dying concept by this time, but the Clarks and other nouveau riche newcomers still chafed under Mrs. Astor’s impenetrable defenses.
Along with another “westerner” from Pennsylvania, Charles M. Schwab, who gave the world the steel beam and thus the skyscraper, W.A. threatened to set up their own social set if not added to the 400. After all, if the Vanderbilts had been admitted to the list, albeit with some reluctance, why not a couple of newer millionaires?
A spouse with an outgoing personality might have helped W.A.’s social standing. But Anna, uninterested in the celebrity and gossip that their secret marriage had engendered, preferred to stay at home. W.A.’s wealth was enough to gain his admission to the proliferating social clubs of the era: the New York Yacht Club (with J. P. Morgan), the Lotos Club (called “the Ace of Clubs” by member Samuel Clemens), the National Arts Club (with Theodore Roosevelt), and, outside the city, the Sleepy Hollow Country Club (with the Astors and the Vanderbilts). His wife, however, rarely accompanied him, except to the opera and chamber concerts. Now in possession of wealth and power, Anna exhibited no ambition for social glory.
So W.A. brought society to his home. After he settled his young family into the Clark mansion in early 1912, W.A. printed up cards, distributing them whenever he met a friendly face of the right social caste.
This Card Will Admit _______ to the galleries at my residence, 962 Fifth Avenue, on _______, from 3 to 6 o’clock.
Bearing a facsimile of his signature, the cards allowed New Yorkers to visit the Clark home, usually on Saturday afternoons, and to tour his five art galleries. If W.A.’s lineage could not impress the members of the 400, he could demonstrate his good taste through one of the best art collections in America. The art, said his eldest daughter Katherine, was “my father’s great joy in life.”
Starting in 1878, W.A. was one of the best customers of the art dealers of Europe. At home in Butte, he was derided as “the Paris millionaire,” but he was more swayed by the opinion of a French ambassador, who praised Clark’s “finest collection of French art in the United States.”
The mansion’s five art galleries were enormous windowless rooms under large skylights, with dark red woolen baize lining the walls of Istrian limestone. The art filled the walls, in rows stacked two or three high, as was common then in the galleries of Paris and the homes of New York.
W.A.’s collection was an eclectic mix of the best of Europe: Rembrandt’s Man with a Sheet of Music, The Judgment of Midas by Rubens, the ephemeral ballet dancers of Degas, Van Goyen’s panoramic Dutch landscapes and seascapes, a sunny field in France by Rousseau, Gainsborough’s flattering portraits of the landed gentry, and drawings by Titian, Leonardo, and Raphael.
The main picture gallery, a full ninety-five feet by twenty feet, doubled as a ballroom. Beyond was the small picture gallery, then two more galleries framing the music room, which contained Anna’s gilded concert pedal harps and a few of the seven pianos in the house. W.A. fancied more than paintings, with his galleries fringed by easels holding delicate lace from Venice and France. Guests walked on the finest great silk carpets from Persia and India and Turkey, fit for a royal tent or a throne.
After W.A. had all these treasures installed in the house, he added few more, explaining that if he acquired more paintings, he would have to remove something, and he was happy with things as they were.
• • •
W.A. personally led visitors down the back stairs of the Clark mansion, giving tours of a hidden art gallery close to his heart and his social ambitions. It was a long room alongside the driveway court, a room lined with tapestries and two dozen glass cases. Huguette remembered this room well. A few of the shelves were devoted to antique sculptures from Greece and Egypt. Inside the rest of the cases were, well, dishes.
But such dishes. These earthenware plates and three-dimensional forms—vases, inkwells, figurines—conveyed the refinement, status, and classical education of their owner. Under the names majolica in Italy and Spain, faïence in France and Germany, and delft in the Netherlands, this decorated pottery from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries passed through the most honored families of Europe.
Though paintings dominate art auctions today, in the Italian Renaissance great value was also placed on tapestries, furniture, fine lace, and these earthenware pots. They were glazed white with tin oxide, then brightly painted with colors from the earth: copper produced green hues; cobalt, blue; manganese, purple; antimony, yellow; and iron, ocher, orange, and red. The artists used brushes made from the whiskers of mice.
Clark’s pieces showed a great variety of themes—whimsical, religious, grotesque. Christ as a man of sorrows. The tragic lovers Pyramus and Thisbe. Saint George slaying the dragon. Icarus flying too close to the sun. Saint Catherine of Alexandria appearing as a vision to Joan of Arc. Satyrs and nymphs and drunken Bacchus.
To understand the collection, one needed a grounding in literature, mythology, and music. For a man such as W.A. with a classical, though interrupted, education, leading a tour of his faïence gallery conveyed a clear message. These art pieces had been owned by the Borgias and the Medicis and were now right where they belonged, with the Clarks.
• • •
In the rotunda of the sculpture hall on the main floor, where Huguette and Andrée enjoyed their games, was a small marble statue of Eve that W.A. had bought directly from Rodin, who had created it for his masterwork, The Gates of Hell. Rodin’s Eve is a powerful portrait of shame, her head bent, her eyes open, barely hiding her nakedness.
Dominating the rotunda, however, was a life-size marble sculpture of another female nude, the delicate Hope Venus, commissioned by the English collector Thomas Hope from the eighteenth-century Italian sculptor Antonio Canova, who was renowned for making marble look like human skin. Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty, stands as though surprised in her dressing room, inadequately covering herself with her garment, her hand touching her right breast.
The Hope Venus found its way into the rotunda because the seller knew enough to raise the price. Most of Clark’s contemporaries in the mining world had hardly any education and even less interest in foreign travel and culture. However, those who achieved great wealth felt it incumbent on them to decorate their mansions with expensive art. They bought capriciously, often through order-taking dealers who exploited their naïveté. As a result, many ended up with hodgepodge collections of mediocre, repainted, or counterfeit work. One critic reported that of the eight hundred landscapes executed by the French artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, American millionaires owned more than eleven hundred.
Clark approached the collection process with considerable advantages. He had, at a minimum, a dilettante’s knowledge of fine art. In addition, he found intrinsic value in art for hi
s own enjoyment. He tended to be conservative in his acquisitions, choosing the established work of old masters and the prevailing Barbizon school. And by willingly paying the highest prices, usually buying paintings with a clear provenance, he was less susceptible to buying fakes. He held twenty-three scenes by Corot (most of them legitimate), twenty-two landscapes and scenes of everyday life by Cazin, and a better collection of Monticellis than held by the Musée du Louvre. W.A. did buy those daring but vulgar new Impressionists, but he was a bit late in betting on them. He bought a Pissarro in 1897 and then at the turn of the century two Degas studies of ballet dancers, but he could have snatched up the entire studios of Monet and Van Gogh for pocket change.
W.A. made a splashy entrance into New York society as an art buyer in 1898, paying an extravagant price for a Fortuny painting, The Choice of a Model. The subject of this kitschy work is a nude woman posing before an assemblage of male artists. W.A.’s purse strings could be loosened by female pulchritude. He paid $42,000, a record price for a painting, which commanded New York’s attention: Who was this westerner?
To advise him on his collection, W.A. had been induced to hire Joseph Duveen, a shrewd British purveyor of fine art to American millionaires. To get the commission, Duveen somehow learned details of Clark’s house plans and spent $20,000 on a model of the manse—a dollhouse based on the Clark home. This plaster model was accurate down to the carpets, tapestries, and light fixtures—all to be purchased from Duveen.
Duveen’s taste was impeccable and his contacts superb, but his ethics questionable. Among the pieces he located was the Hope Venus, which was available for $25,000. A Parisian dealer persuaded Duveen that this was not a sufficiently important price to interest Clark, who had spread the word that he wanted the best in the market. Duveen raised the price to $110,000, and Clark bought it.
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As guests toured the Clark collection on Saturday afternoons, the main attraction was not any particular piece of art, but the music one heard throughout the galleries. The music came from an enormous pipe organ set into the wall above the entrance to a picture gallery. It was the finest organ anyone ever thought of putting in a private home. It was the size of organs at metropolitan churches, with 4,496 pipes encased in a grill-work of oak. Hidden ducts carried the sound to the art galleries, enveloping visitors with music.
One of the five art galleries in the Clark mansion was dominated by a wall of pipes belonging to the $120,000 organ, which filled all the galleries with music. (illustration credit 4.1)
The original price of the organ was $50,000, but W.A. demanded the most wonderful chamber organ in the world, driving the cost up to $120,000, or roughly $3 million today. Critics declared its sound “the most perfect ever heard,” and on one occasion two hundred members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir stood in W.A.’s gallery to sing. He and Anna hired their own church organist, and he stayed on staff, well salaried, for the next fourteen years.
A DAMNABLE CONSPIRACY
W.A.’S QUEST FOR SOCIAL ACCEPTANCE could have overcome the obstacles of a shy wife with no social ambitions, even the lack of a marriage certificate. His campaign was thwarted, however, by the stain from his messy political career.
One political cartoon of the early 1900s showed W. A. Clark firing a cannon in battle—with bags of money used as ammunition at the rate of a thousand dollars a second. Another showed W.A. working in a barn as “the new chore boy,” feeding not corn but millions of dollars to a raggedy mule named Democracy. A third depicted W.A. as a stray cat with dollar signs for eyes—a cat that keeps returning to the door of the U.S. Senate.
W.A.’s public profile was summed up, or solidified, by Mark Twain, coiner of the derisive term “the Gilded Age” and the principal American voice of the era. In an essay penned in 1907, Twain excoriated W. A. Clark of Montana. “He is said to have bought legislatures and judges as other men buy food and raiment. By his example he has so excused and so sweetened corruption that in Montana it no longer has an offensive smell.”
Twain was just getting started. “His history is known to everybody; he is as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag; he is a shame to the American nation, and no one has helped to send him to the Senate who did not know that his proper place was the penitentiary, with a chain and ball on his legs.”
There was a personal connection between Mark Twain and W. A. Clark, which the author did not disclose.
• • •
W. A. Clark’s desire in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century was a title, and his quest made him nearly a permanent political candidate in the first days of the state of Montana, which denied him the honor time after time. He presided over two conventions that wrote constitutions for the new state, supporting the vote for women and immigrants while leading the opposition to taxation of mines. But that wasn’t enough for W.A. The title he wanted was senator, and the quest for it left his reputation forever stained.
He had a few handicaps as a candidate. He was not the friendliest campaigner. He was a Protestant in a state with a heavily Irish Catholic workforce that could be motivated by its employers to vote as it was told. And many of those workers were employed by Marcus Daly, W.A.’s main rival in the copper mining business in Montana, who seemed determined to keep W.A. out of office.
Both men were Democrats, and both owned mines, but they had little else in common. Daly, a burly extrovert born in Ireland, never ran for office and lived on a Montana ranch, where in the 1890s he bred some of the fastest racehorses in America. Clark, a reed-thin introvert born in Pennsylvania, spent time in Europe, where he collected works by Rodin and Renoir.
But they did have one other thing in common: They were family. Marcus Daly’s wife’s sister, Miriam Evans, married W. A. Clark’s brother Ross. Huguette said she was fond of her Aunt Miriam. And after both men were dead, their widows lived in the same exclusive apartment building in New York City.
W.A. was nominated to be the Montana Territory’s delegate to Congress in 1888 but was defeated when Daly, though a Democrat, told his miners to support the Republican candidate. Clark’s campaign was afflicted with what today would be called gaffes: criticizing an Irish newspaperman as a traitor, putting on a huge feast for Daly’s mostly Catholic miners on a Friday but serving them steak instead of fish. He lost handily.
“The conspiracy was a gigantic one,” W.A. wrote to an ally, “well planned, and well carried out, even though it did involve the violation of some of the most sacred confidences.… The day of retribution may come when treason may be considered odious.… For the time being, I retire politically.”
Two years later, in 1890, he was elected to be the first U.S. senator from Montana—or so it seemed. As the Founding Fathers prescribed, senators were chosen not by the people but by their elected state legislators. Unfortunately for W.A., he was not elected by Montana’s only legislature. Democrats and Republicans both claimed the majority that year and caucused in separate halls, electing two different men to fill the open Senate seat. In Washington, the Senate seated the Republican, and W.A. was still without his title.
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The first political battle W.A. won was not for office. Montana had become a U.S. territory on May 26, 1864, and the forty-first state on November 8, 1889. The question was where to put its capital. In 1894, Clark’s political forces won a raucous battle over Daly’s supporters when Helena, rather than the Daly-backed Anaconda, was selected as the capital. That night, the Clark partisans celebrated by taking on the role of horses, pulling W.A. in his carriage through the streets of Helena. W.A. repaid the honor by buying drinks for the whole town.
In Montana in the 1890s, as in the United States in the 2010s, the laws were loose enough to allow men of means to spend unlimited sums of money, either personally or through their companies, to put candidates into office. Bribery was forbidden, but virtually any “campaign expense” was allowed.
According to W.A., although he may have put $250,
000 into the capital fight, his opponent Daly had spent $1 million. And although Daly never held public office, he wielded enormous power in Montana through his Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Clark claimed that he saw men in a voting line getting paid $5 apiece for their votes, and in some Anaconda precincts twice as many people voted as were registered.
The Montana legislature attempted to rein in both men. After the fight over the capital, an anti-bribery law forbade any candidate to spend more than $1,000 on his own campaign or anyone to give more than $1,000 to a political committee in any county. The law was little regarded and poorly enforced.
In public, W.A. spoke often about integrity. He attributed his career in business to it. “The most essential elements of success in life are a purpose, increasing industry, temperate habits, scrupulous regard for one’s word … courteous manners, a generous regard for the rights of others, and, above all, integrity which admits of no qualification or variation.”
Another quotation often ascribed to him is more direct: “I never bought a man who wasn’t for sale.” Although there seems to be no proof in the record that W.A. ever said anything of the sort, the comment is attributed to him in dozens of books.
Clark was determined to try again for the Senate, with or without the backing of Daly or the state Democratic committee. In the summer of 1898, his twenty-seven-year-old son, Charlie, a Yale graduate, helped organize his campaign committee. W.A. later admitted giving Charlie and others nearly $140,000 (about $4 million today) to run the campaign, without making any report of how it was spent.
W.A. said that the money was used only for “legitimate” expenses, such as paying hotel bills for about three hundred friends and political operatives, paying men to accompany legislators so the Daly faction could not get to them, and compensating newspapers for their endorsements. Indeed, it was not unusual at the time for a candidate to buy a newspaper before an election, use the paper’s editorials to endorse himself, and then sell the newspaper back to the previous owner after the election was over.