by Bill Dedman
Maas was a forceful cellist, his immense bald head leaning forward as he drove his bow “deep into the strings to produce a tone of unique vibrancy and breadth,” as one fellow player described him. “Yet, for all his dramatic power and fervor, his playing was characterized by classic reserve and impeccable taste.”
On that afternoon in 1945, with the Germans and Japanese defeated, Maas was in New York, in Anna’s living room, playing Bach sonatas. He was a frequent guest, as Anna had grown quite fond of him. Maas was accompanied on the 1940 Steinway grand piano by Agnes, Huguette’s niece.
“Robert,” Anna said to Maas, “you must form another string quartet.” If he did, she promised to fund it. But what instruments would the new quartet play, instruments befitting the quality of the players and the reputation of their patron?
Maas told Anna that he had seen four remarkable instruments at the New York studio of Emil Herrmann, a dealer in rare instruments. All were made by Antonio Stradivari in Cremona, Italy, between 1680 and 1736, and all had been owned by the Italian violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini in the 1800s. The four had been split up, sold off by Paganini’s heir and illegitimate son. Herrmann had reassembled the group and would sell them only if they stayed together. But who could afford to buy four Stradivarius instruments at once?
Anna immediately took Madame Cézanne down from the wall and called for the chauffeur. A couple of hours later, she returned home to find Robert Maas and Agnes Albert still playing sonatas. She told them she had gone to Fifty-Seventh Street and Madison Avenue, to Knoedler & Co., one of the favored galleries of the Clarks and their peers. There she had sold Madame Cézanne. We’re not sure what she got for the portrait, but it was enough to continue on to her second errand, on West Fifty-Seventh Street near Carnegie Hall, where she spent $200,000 at Emil Herrmann’s penthouse studio.
Anna and the chauffeur were carrying four instruments in their cases—each three hundred years old, with finely carved maple backs and thick orange varnish: two violins, an exceptionally rare Stradivarius viola, and, for Maas, a cello, inscribed inside in Latin in the hand of Antonio Stradivari himself: “Made in my ninety-third year.” These were among the finest musical instruments in the world, and Anna had bought them on a whim with the money from the Cézanne.
“Now, Robert,” she said, “you have a wonderful quartet of Strads to use. Go and form a string quartet.”
At that moment was born the Paganini Quartet, which recorded for RCA Victor, performed the full Beethoven quartet cycle in six concerts at the Library of Congress, and presented public concerts in halls around the world.
In addition to founding a world-class quartet, Anna had removed an impediment to her daughter coming downstairs to visit.
Besides, the Clarks had another Cézanne.
Sometimes even Huguette’s closest niece couldn’t get in to see her. One day in the mid-1950s, Agnes brought her children by to visit, but Huguette said she had a little cold. Not one to take no for an answer, Agnes sent word through the doorman that she would go out by the street and wave to Huguette. So there they stood on the sidewalk along Fifth Avenue, waving up at the twelfth-floor windows, unable to see whether Huguette was waving back.
SIXTEEN FIRST DATES
AFTER HER DIVORCE, Huguette reclaimed her maiden name, but she kept the “Mrs.,” perhaps indicating that she was no longer in the market for a husband. For the rest of her life, her staff called her Mrs. Clark or Madame Clark, in the French style of extending that title of marriage to older, unmarried women.
There were newspaper accounts in 1931, apparently false, that Huguette was ready to wed an Irish nobleman named Edward FitzGerald, the Seventh Duke of Leinster. The duke, a compulsive gambler and ne’er-do-well, later admitted in court that he was bankrupt when he came to America “with the idea of marrying someone rich.” He died by suicide, penniless.
Not that a marriage for Huguette was out of the question. Anna made further attempts to find her daughter a husband, even into Huguette’s forties, but only within a carefully circumscribed group of friends, even relatives. She was scheduled to go on dates with one young man in particular, appointments that became a comical series of sixteen attempted first dates.
Anna’s dear sister, Amelia, was married to T. Darrington Semple, the treasurer of suburban Westchester County, New York. It was Amelia’s third marriage and his second. He had a son, T. Darrington, Jr., known as Darry, who served in the Army Air Corps during World War II, graduated from Harvard, and studied law in Alabama. Darry was family, but not a blood relative, and he was twenty years younger than Huguette.
Speaking sixty years later from a nursing home in Montgomery, Alabama, Darry described how Anna and Amelia conspired to set him up on dates with Huguette. He said the Clarks were kind and generous, observing that “they gave money away like it was water.” As for Huguette, he said, “from all the family stories, she was just shy, introverted, didn’t like crowds. But very smart.” Huguette was not unattractive, with her Japanese-print, floor-length summer dresses. He was willing to go out with her, but there were complications.
“I had sixteen dates to meet her, a proper social date,” Darry said. “Every time, her hair wasn’t right, or she had to do something else, or there was some other excuse. Every time, she couldn’t go. Sixteen times it got called off at the last minute.”
He soon found another woman to marry, and they had children and grandchildren. In 2010, when Huguette Clark was in the hospital at age 104 and Darry Semple was suffering from Parkinson’s disease, both of them in the last year of their lives, he still had his sense of humor. “If I saw her now,” he said, “I’d say, ‘Let me know if you got your hair one.’ ”
He never knew that Huguette already had a boyfriend.
LOVE OF HALF A LIFE
THE CLOSEST ROMANTIC CONNECTION of Huguette’s life began on the beaches of Normandy. On their summer jaunts to Trouville before World War I, the Clarks made friends with a family by the name of Villermont. The grandfather was a painter, as were the mother and father, and they must have had much to discuss with the art-collecting Americans. The Villermonts were a proud old Roman Catholic family, with roots in the French nobility but not much money to show for it since the Revolution. One of their sons was just two years older than Huguette.
Etienne Allard de Villermont was called Etienne (pronounced AY-tyin), the French name for Stephen. Although Etienne and Huguette played together as school-age children, they didn’t cement their friendship until he came to America in the 1930s. The Marquis de Villermont was a well-known name in the society columns of New York and Los Angeles from 1935 to 1944. He attended parties with Hollywood royals Errol Flynn and Pola Negri, and also with actual royalty: Russian princes, British countesses, and Indian maharajahs. And he was a frequent guest of Anna and Huguette Clark at society dinners, musical afternoons at 907 Fifth Avenue, and during their summer vacations at Bellosguardo in Santa Barbara.
Etienne was tall, with brown hair, a kind face, and a debonair manner. He looked dapper in his black bow tie, with a sharp jaw and high forehead. A French book about high-society parties in Trouville in the late 1930s described the marquis as a handsome man with a flair for playing the piano at parties.
Marquis Etienne de Villermont in 1936. (illustration credit7.1)
In 1936, an announcement was made of the engagement of the French nobleman to an American heiress, not from a copper fortune but from coffee. Before there was Starbucks, there was Arbuckles’, the first national coffee brand, known as “the cowboy’s favorite.” Etienne snagged an Arbuckles’ heiress. Newspaper front pages across the country showed Etienne with tall redhead Claire Smith, who was known for wearing $1.5 million in jewels just for an average evening.
It was not unusual for Europeans of noble birth to come to America shopping for heiresses to refill their coffers, as the Irish duke had done in 1931 when his name was linked to Huguette’s. The newspapers in 1936 said the coffee heiress had chosen the marquis o
ver his best friend, a Russian prince. But a month later, Walter Winchell, the nation’s best-known gossip columnist, said mysteriously that it had been called off.
In May 1939, Etienne was back in Winchell’s “On Broadway” column in more than two thousand newspapers, with a new heiress: “The Marquis de Villermont and Huguett [sic] Clark probably will wed this summer.” It had been three years since Etienne’s engagement broke up, and nine years since Huguette was divorced. Both were now approaching their middle thirties.
Etienne’s source of income was a bit vague. While Winchell said the marquis was “due for a post with the French Diplomatic Service,” one newspaper said he was an importer of French perfumes. Another said he was representing France at the New York World’s Fair in 1939–40, as the French fell under the thumb of the Nazis.
In fact, the family’s greatest source of support was Anna Clark. W.A. and Anna had sent money to the Villermonts for decades. In 1942, during World War II, the Clarks apparently helped Etienne find a position with the new Vermont Copper Company, formed to take advantage of the wartime demand for the metal. Etienne became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1943. The president of the copper company was a Clark attorney, the father of Anna’s goddaughter Ann Ellis—who also visited the family in France in 1949, a visit arranged by Anna. She recalled Etienne as “a quite handsome Frenchman,” and the family farm quite simple. Etienne’s extended family kept mentioning how grateful they were to him for helping support them, Ann Ellis recalled, though she said it seemed clear that in fact the money was coming from Anna Clark.
Though Huguette never became the Marquise de Villermont, she remained deeply interested in royalty the rest of her life, a theme infusing her artwork and her reading. For one of her Japanese projects in the 1950s, she was ordering a silk costume for a marquise, the wife of a marquis, when her intermediary sent the bad news that noble titles had been abolished in Japan. Still, into old age, she was an avid reader of the magazines that follow the goings-on of the nobility.
Curiously, Etienne continued to be a frequent social guest of the Clarks. In 1941, he took a long train ride to the West Coast to visit Bellosguardo, and was their guest at a party for Santa Barbara’s big fiesta, the Old Spanish Days. Gloria Vanderbilt was there, along with the dukes and duchesses of the Montecito summer colony.
It’s hard to imagine that Anna broke up the marriage—tying her family to French nobility must have appealed to her, especially when she knew the Villermont family so well; and if she opposed the marriage, why would she still play host to Etienne at Bellosguardo? It’s hard to imagine that Etienne ended it—why would he pass up a chance at a wealthy American bride? So it must have been Huguette who opposed the marriage—perhaps any marriage. After all, she never did marry again. There is one secondhand account that Huguette and Anna had a spat on that 1941 stay at Bellosguardo, and that Huguette’s reclusivity became more pronounced when they returned to New York. “It was roughly right around there that she started, well, stopped coming out of the house.” That’s the story Huguette’s personal assistant, Chris Sattler, said he heard decades later. But we can’t be sure. Sattler knew no details, referring to the Marquis de Villermont as “the duke of something from France.”
One could suppose that this connection between Etienne and Huguette was simply another nobleman’s play for a fortune, if not for the fact that these two remained friends and pen pals for life. If Huguette Clark ever had a soul mate, he was the Marquis Etienne Allard de Villermont.
• • •
From the 1940s to the early 1980s, Huguette and Etienne exchanged hundreds of postcards, letters, and telegrams. Dozens of his notes to her survive, and a few of hers to him as well—mostly telegrams, nearly always in French. And their relationship was not only long-distance. Etienne crossed the Atlantic to New York a couple of times a year, staying in an apartment that it seems Huguette paid for.
They stayed in touch even after Etienne married in 1953 at age forty-nine. His wife, Elisabeth, got on with Huguette, and they corresponded as well. Elisabeth was sickly, and she and Etienne had separate bedrooms. Even though Etienne described himself to Huguette as “split emotionally,” there is no hint in their correspondence that his relationship with her was a threat to his marriage.
On March 21, 1965, Etienne wrote to Huguette:
I join you through my thoughts, and neither distance nor time alters the bond of love of half a life, which will never disappear.… My encouragement comes from knowing that we will see each other again this year in New York.
In February 1968, he sent Huguette a postcard with a picture of two young lovers about to kiss, protected from a shower of hearts by the broad white brim of the young woman’s hat. The woman hides a gift behind her back in a white-gloved hand, and he offers a bouquet of roses. Etienne wrote, in French:
From Etienne de Villermont, writing in French to Huguette in 1965 from France: “I join you through my thoughts, and neither distance nor time alters the bond of love of half a life, which will never disappear.…” (illustration credit7.2)
It’s Valentine’s Day and I am thinking of you with great affection.
I send you this bouquet but the mimosas are under the snow. We will take the boat in the middle of March, the United States. It will be a joy to see you, I can’t wait. I hope you are well, will try to call you.
He added in English, “Much love, always, Etienne.”
Like her mother, Huguette sent money to the Villermont family, $10,000 and $20,000 at a time, and even helped Etienne and Elisabeth adopt an orphaned girl born in 1962, Marie-Christine. Huguette began to shower the child with gifts: a bicycle, a stuffed toy donkey. Etienne sent back photos of himself with Marie-Christine. In one snapshot taken on a street corner in France, handsome Etienne is standing beside his little girl, buttoned up in her gray coat, and the toy donkey, both about the same size. They had named the donkey Cadichon after the mischievous character in a children’s book.
“Dear Etienne, I hope you have not suffered too much from the great heat and that all is well and that my letter has reached you. I would be happy to hear from you. I am thinking seriously of taking a short stay in France. What do you think of that? Affectionately, Huguette.” (illustration credit7.3)
It doesn’t appear that Huguette visited Etienne in France, or ever returned to her native country after a trip there with her mother in 1928, although she did consider making the journey. On July 17, 1959, she sent Etienne a telegram saying that she was planning a visit, one she apparently couldn’t quite accomplish.
“A FLOWER IN MY LIFE”
THE LAST PHOTOGRAPH taken of Huguette was not the uncomfortable one from the time of her marriage in 1928. She continued to have photos taken, but kept them inside the family. In her late thirties, she presented to Anna a portrait of herself standing elegantly in a Japanese-print floor-length gown, with the note, “To my darling Mother, With all my love, Huguette.”
A devoted amateur photographer, Huguette bought for herself and friends the latest cameras—from the highest-end models of the 1930s to the newfangled instant Land Cameras introduced by Polaroid in 1948. She kept many snapshots of the gardens and rooms at the Clark summer home, Bellosguardo, and of the view across Central Park from No. 907. She studied the light, painstakingly recording on the backs of her prints the light and camera settings: “September 30, 1956, one floodlight, opening 4, counted four seconds.”
On Easter and Christmas through her forties and fifties, she sat for photographs at home, perhaps self-portraits that she composed. Time after time, she placed a chair in a corner under a Cézanne still life, or sat by the 1940 Steinway piano topped with Easter flowers or a simple white Christmas tree. From year to year, the photos are nearly identical, although the costumes change and she ages. In one she is wearing high-heeled shoes and a smart, slimming dress with polka dots, in another a similar dress with sheer sleeves. Always her hair is in a wave, always a strand of pearls at her neck. Often a Japanese doll is stand
ing on the bureau behind her.
Only one year did her mother participate in this photo session, late in Anna’s life, perhaps in the early 1960s. In the photo, Anna stands alone in front of the still life. In place of the Japanese doll is a vase of flowers. Next to Anna is one of her magnificent golden French harps, much taller than she, even in her high heels and black Mamie Eisenhower dress with its sheer back. Her back is all we see, for Anna is facing away from the camera.
• • •
Anna Eugenia LaChapelle Clark died at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital on October 11, 1963, at age eighty-five, after several years of decline. The Catholic funeral Mass was private. In the newspapers, brief obituaries of Mrs. William Andrews Clark listed her only survivors: her sister, Amelia, and daughter, Huguette. Anna’s last will and testament, carefully drawn up in 1960 and sealed with a purple ribbon and red wax, named four executors: Huguette along with Anna’s brother-in-law, attorney, and banker. The will shows a devotion to her family, to her employees, and to charity. Most of the bequests were simple to carry out. Anna left sums of $12,000 to $20,000 each to her sister, her sister-in-law, and her nieces, all on the LaChapelle side. She provided for several friends and relatives by establishing trusts. She directed $50,000 to be set aside for each of her goddaughters, Leontine and Ann. Her former aide Adele Marie (“Missie”) received $100,000, and other employees were remembered with smaller sums.