Empty Mansions

by Bill Dedman

  The estate manager’s daughter, living at Bellosguardo year-round, had far more time to explore these wonders than Huguette did. Amid all this luxury, she remembers the Clarks most of all for their generosity. “Huguette wanted my mother to have the very best piano for our home on the property, and spent days trying out pianos until she found one that had the quality she wanted,” Barbara Hoelscher Doran recalled. “She loved the latest technology and innovations, and would buy the newest camera or sixteen-millimeter projectors, one for her and one for our family.

  “They were very quiet, lovely, giving ladies.”

  A FRIEND ATTACKS

  ON DECEMBER 3, 1941, Huguette wrote a jaunty note in French to Tadé Styka from Santa Barbara. She was still in touch with her former painting instructor, who had sent her chocolates and a corsage for her journey west. She wrote that she was tanning in the beautiful sun, “turning the color of chocolate.”

  Four days later, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor drew the United States into World War II. Huguette, who had studied Japanese culture and art, told her friends she was crushed by the sneak attack.

  Bellosguardo changed during the war, as fear of invasion dominated the Pacific coast. An infantry regiment brought up to Santa Barbara had a post in the Clark beach house. The estate manager, Albert Hoelscher, became a civil defense warden, his home the district headquarters. Along the cliff, there were posts in the ground with time clocks to make sure the armed sentries made their rounds. The young sentries were a little goosey and shot at anything, recalled Barry Hoelscher, Barbara’s older brother. The children were issued 1917-style steel helmets and gas masks. Anna was generous to the staff and showed concern for their safety. Each year during the war, she gave the Hoelscher family a $1,000 war bond and each of the children a $75 bond. She also outfitted the Hoelschers with a rifle, a .45-caliber pistol, and $10,000 in case they had to evacuate.

  On February 23, 1942, a Japanese submarine surfaced off Santa Barbara and began to fire shells at the Ellwood Oil Field and its fuel storage tanks, about ten miles west of Bellosguardo. Though little damage was done, fear of a Japanese attack bordered on hysteria. A week later, President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the removal and internment of Japanese Americans living on the Pacific coast. A government pass was needed to get through the barbed wire checkpoint on Cabrillo Boulevard near the Clark estate. Curtains had to be closed at sundown because of the blackout. Streetlights were painted over, and cars had to drive with only their parking lights on, so as not to help the unseen enemy spot the silhouette of an American ship near the shore. Anna grew suspicious of outsiders and at one point mistook a kelp cutter boat for a Japanese submarine.

  Because of the ever-present danger of invasion, Anna sought a refuge away from the coast for herself and Huguette, and, more important, for the staff. She bought a 215-acre ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley, twenty-two miles northwest of Santa Barbara. Called Rancho Alegre (“cheerful ranch”), it included a ranch house, a sloping meadow for horses and deer, a swimming pool fed by a mountain stream, and open views of Figueroa Mountain. Guests at the Clark ranch could ride horses, including a recalcitrant brown stallion named Don Antonio and the pure white Lady, who had been known in town as a flag bearer in parades.

  Although the Japanese surrendered after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the closed-off feeling never left Bellosguardo. Anna was rattled when one night the electricity failed, leaving the entire estate in the dark. After that episode, whenever Anna and Huguette planned a visit of only a week or two, they would sleep at the Biltmore, saying they didn’t want to trouble the staff to open up the house.

  Anna was getting older, and may have wearied of the long train rides. Anna and Huguette made their last trip west sometime around 1953.

  While the Chrysler convertible and the Cadillac limousine stayed in the garage, Anna gave the Rolls-Royce to the chauffeur, Armstrong, who hadn’t used it in quite a while, except to have fun by putting on his white gloves for picking up an embarrassed Barry Hoelscher, the estate manager’s son, after classes at Santa Barbara High School.

  FIRST-CLASS CONDITION

  AFTER ANNA DIED in 1963, leaving Bellosguardo and Rancho Alegre to Huguette, the daughter issued new instructions to the staff. No longer was the house to be kept in readiness for the arrival of the Clarks under a forty-eight-hour rule.

  When John Douglas came on as estate manager in 1983 after Albert Hoelscher died, he was given only two instructions: Keep everything in “first-class condition” and in “as original condition as possible.”

  When El Niño storms uprooted a half dozen hundred-foot trees at Bellosguardo in the 1980s, the gardeners planted replacements and sent photos to New York. Huguette sent word that one of the new trees wouldn’t do; it was too small. The tree was taken out, and a mature tree was planted. She declared that tree also too small. Finally, on the third try, she said it would have to do.

  When painters finished work on the back of the service wing, Douglas sent photos of the work to New York. He received a quick reply, through Huguette’s attorney. The painting was fine, but “Mrs. Clark would like to know what happened to the doghouse that the Pekingese used.” The Pekingese had died many years earlier. Douglas asked if Mrs. Clark wanted the doghouse in place even if there was no dog. Her attorney responded that Mrs. Clark was well aware that the dog was no longer there but wanted to be sure its house was still on the property. It was.

  Huguette insisted that an archway leading through a dense hedge of Monterey cypress be kept just as she remembered it. She sent word after seeing a photo that she “would like to know if the small oak tree that was outside her bedroom window could be replanted.”

  One Clark relative recalled being shocked, on a rare visit to the main house, when a housekeeper barked, “Who moved that chair?” The housekeeper moved it about four feet back to its spot.

  Her mother was gone, and Huguette would have to live with that, but her mother’s house could be preserved indefinitely.

  • • •

  Not even for kings would Huguette allow Bellosguardo to be disturbed.

  She turned down the entreaties of an agent for Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran, when he wanted to buy the property in January 1979, in the last days before he fled the Islamic Revolution. Even after his death, the shah, the last king of Iran, couldn’t meet the admission standards for the Montecito neighborhood. His sister wrote to the Santa Barbara Cemetery asking to buy space for a family mausoleum but was refused.

  Huguette wouldn’t give permission for the Hollywood billionaire Marvin Davis to land his helicopter for a tour of Bellosguardo in 1989, when he was offering $30 million to $40 million for the estate.

  Newspapers offered reports that the Beanie Babies tycoon, Ty Warner, had raised the possibility of paying $100 million for Bellosguardo, but Huguette wasn’t interested.

  The Santa Barbara Museum of Art asked her in 1991 and 2004 to donate the home but got nowhere. Her attorney Don Wallace said she did seriously discuss leaving the home to the nearby Music Academy of the West. She said it would be nice to have chamber concerts at Bellosguardo again, but she was concerned about cars spoiling the grounds.

  When the mayor of Santa Barbara asked Huguette twice to consider giving Bellosguardo to a foundation, she said that she would consider it. In a handwritten note to Mayor Sheila Lodge in 1997, Huguette wrote, “My answer to you about Bellosguardo, is the same as it was in the year 1993 but if some day I should have a change of mind I shall let you know.”

  Historians and journalists sent letter after letter, usually trying to get interviews by promising to avoid too much mention of her father’s electoral scandal. In a typical letter, a graduate student in history, Jeanette Rodda, wrote to Huguette in 1988, “The scandal, of course, cannot be ignored but I believe I effectively reinterpret and underplay several unfortunate incidents.” Huguette’s attorneys forwarded these letters to her, but the supplicants got nowhe
re.

  • • •

  Anna had visited her mountain refuge outside Santa Barbara, Rancho Alegre, only occasionally and Huguette perhaps not at all. After Anna died, Huguette soon donated Rancho Alegre to the Boy Scouts in her mother’s memory. She attached one condition: The kindly ranch manager, Niels “Slim” Larsen, and his wife, Oda, would be allowed to move into the ranch house, staying as long as they wished. Today many community groups use Rancho Alegre for retreats, and the Outdoor School of Santa Barbara, run by the Scouts, serves four thousand children a year through Huguette’s generosity.

  Before Oda Larsen died in 2001, she said she recalled talking only once to Huguette, on the phone. Huguette asked her two questions:

  “What color is the swimming pool?”

  “Are there any gazelles on the property?”

  • • •

  In the sixty quiet years at Bellosguardo after Anna and Huguette’s last visit, the furniture has been covered. Anna’s harps were laid on their sides to protect them from damage in case of an earthquake. The floral Aubusson rugs of raspberry and pink were wrapped in paper and labeled with photographs of the contents, each bundle dated and signed by a member of the staff.

  The furniture at Bellosguardo remained covered during the nearly sixty years when Huguette no longer visited. Her instructions to her staff were to change nothing and to keep everything in “first-class condition.” (illustration credit8.2)

  Not everything on the Clark estate has stayed in first-class condition, however. The passage of time has been enough to bring about changes. The bathrooms throughout the house haven’t been updated since the 1930s, and warning signs in some read “DO NOT FLUSH.” Although seamstresses were brought from Holland in the 1950s to repair the Louis XV upholstery on the sofa and chairs in the sitting room, in recent years some of the cushions have rotted.

  The extensive landscaping once required between twelve and twenty gardeners and two full-time plumbers to keep the grounds irrigated. In recognition of the water shortages that plague Santa Barbara, the twelve hundred rose plants were carefully removed and their location mapped so the garden could be re-created if Huguette desired. Now there are only four gardeners, and the rest of the staff consists of a houseman, two part-timers for bookkeeping and filing, and the estate manager.

  IN CONVERSATION WITH HUGUETTE

  We discussed several times Huguette’s memories of Bellosguardo. I asked why she didn’t visit. Didn’t she want to see the house and gardens again, to enjoy the view of the Pacific?

  “Well,” she said, “when I think of Santa Barbara, I always think of times there with my mother, and it makes me very sad.”

  • • •

  Huguette kept in touch with Santa Barbara from New York. Until her death, the staff sent monthly dues to the Valley Club, though she hadn’t been there for sixty years, and annual checks to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, along with contributions to music institutions and police and fire charities.

  She received clippings of news from Lorraine Hoelscher, second wife of the longtime estate manager, who kept the books at the estate, and from the chauffeur’s widow, Alma Armstrong, both of whom received pensions until they died. When maid Sylvia Morales retired in 1993 after thirty years of cleaning the estate manager’s house, Huguette approved a pension at 92 percent of her regular pay.

  Still in the garage at Bellosguardo, under an ornate light fixture, are two of Anna and Huguette’s automobiles, including a 1933 Cadillac seven-passenger limousine with a gilded hood ornament and a 1933 Chrysler Royal Eight convertible. Both have license plates from 1949. (illustration credit8.3) (illustration credit8.4)

  Beginning in 1987, Huguette spent nearly a million dollars on an eight-hundred-foot rock seawall to protect the cliff and, as a consequence, the main driveway, which is the only way for fire trucks to reach the house. This project destroyed a beautiful cliff face and removed a line of Monterey cypress trees along the cliff top. In exchange for permission to build the wall, Huguette allowed the city to designate most of the estate as a landmark, limiting its future development and perhaps its resale value.

  John Douglas, who never met her in the twenty-eight years he managed her most valuable property, talked with her on the phone only twice. During those conversations, as he described any improvements on the estate, Huguette replied politely, “Yes, Mr. Douglas.” But when she heard of work to keep the property just as it had always been, as it was in her mother’s time, she exclaimed, “Isn’t that wonderful!”

  “WE DON’T WANT ANY!”

  JUST AS ANNA HAD her emergency retreat in California at Rancho Alegre, Huguette added her own country refuge in the leafy Connecticut suburbs. It was called Le Beau Château. The castle takes its name from an old French children’s song, the music for a circle game in which two concentric circles of children alternate singing verses. Here’s one translation of the refrain:

  Oh! My beautiful castle!

  My auntie turns, turns, turns.

  Oh! My beautiful castle!

  My auntie turns, turns beautifully.

  The verses follow, with a new beginning line modifying each round:

  Ours is more beautiful!

  We will destroy it!

  How will you do that?

  We will take your girls!

  Which one will you take?

  We will take this one!

  What will you give her?

  Beautiful jewels!

  We don’t want any!

  In 1951, the Clarks’ chauffeur drove Huguette and Anna out to New Canaan, a Connecticut suburb an hour north of New York City. Huguette later explained to her man Friday, Chris Sattler, that it had been her mother’s idea to have a refuge for family and friends in case of a Russian attack on New York. (This was, after all, during the Cold War, which had heated up with North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in 1950.)

  In appearance, Le Beau Château is an echo of the château de Petit-Bourg from the Clarks’ happy summers in France. Huguette bought the property, expanded the house, and bought more land for a buffer, eventually owning fifty-two acres, twenty-two rooms, and more than fourteen thousand square feet of emptiness. She never moved a stick of furniture into the house during the six decades she owned it.

  The senator’s daughter was buying the house of a senator. The château was built in 1938 by David Aiken Reed, former Republican senator from Pennsylvania. Reed was best known for the Immigration Act of 1924, which tried to keep Jews and Asians out of the United States, with the goal of “keeping American stock up to the highest standard.”

  New Canaan is one of the most affluent communities in the nation, with little notice taken of quiet wealth. Nearby neighbors now include musician and actor Harry Connick, Jr., and others not far away during Huguette’s ownership were architect Philip Johnson in his Glass House, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, and singer-songwriter Paul Simon.

  Huguette bought the Connecticut estate, Le Beau Château, in 1951, the year she turned forty-five. Her annual property tax bill reached $161,000, but she never moved in. It was maintained but unfurnished for more than sixty years. She was nearly one hundred before she agreed to put it on the market. (illustration credit9.1)

  As the years passed and the mysterious property remained unoccupied, neighbor children sneaked through the woods to peek at the house, and townspeople passed around legends about the missing owner. Her fiancé had built the house for her, one story went, and after he died at sea on the honeymoon, she couldn’t bear to move in. Another story had Huguette’s father paying the fiancé a million dollars to go away.

  • • •

  Le Beau Château would have been a pleasant hideaway for enjoying her Impressionists, for listening to violin sonatas and partitas, and for painting portraits quietly into old age. As one enters on the long driveway, deer bound out of the woods. The balcony of the magnificent bedroom with its double-height window is only twenty steps from the woods near a waterfall on a trout brook. But Huguette
had her own private castles and dollhouses to attend to in New York.

  The spiral staircase was grand, but for sixty years no wedding photos were taken there. The water heater in the basement, the length of a Rolls-Royce limousine, never heated water for a bath. An old green Jaguar belonging to the caretaker was parked in the garage. The combination to the walk-in safe was lost long ago.

  Huguette’s enormous bedroom at Le Beau Château is quiet, except for the sound of a waterfall on a trout brook running through the nearby woods. (illustration credit9.2)

  This Connecticut home was never maintained with the care lavished on her Bellosguardo. There were no memories to preserve. In California, the annual salary of estate manager John Douglas reached $110,000 plus use of the beach house. But at Le Beau Château, caretaker Tony Ruggiero got the use of a guard cottage and only $16,800. Huguette did keep paying the property taxes—they eventually reached $161,000 a year—and in 1997 she spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on repairs and painting.

  Today the white paint is peeling off the red brick on the back of the house. The New England stone walls are collapsing. The tennis court is so overgrown that it’s easy to miss. And creeping vines have the kitchen shutters firmly in their grasp.

  Le Beau Château has served for years now as an informal wildlife refuge for turkeys; deer; screech owls, barred owls, and great horned owls; goshawks, sharp-shinned hawks, and Cooper’s hawks; an occasional bald eagle; yellow-spotted salamanders; rare box turtles; and red and gray foxes. Chimney swifts nest in the stacks. The caretaker’s son rehabbed injured and orphaned animals: raccoons, cottontail rabbits, deer. When Huguette’s attorney Don Wallace once came out for a tour, a goose named Curly untied his shoes.