Empty Mansions (3 page)

“Hello, Paul, this is your Aunt Huguette.”

At last, nearly a full year after my initial letter, we were in conversation.
We remained in conversation for nine years. We talked about six times a year. Sometimes the calls were brief, just a few minutes of light chatter, but on other occasions we talked for a half hour or longer. Selections from our chats are included throughout this book as pieces entitled “In Conversation with Huguette.”

She shared with me her favorite books and some of her memories. We discussed current events and family history. And she extended to me the rare treat of visiting her Santa Barbara home, Bellosguardo. I would call her attorney to arrange a time, and Huguette would call as requested, sometimes a few minutes early. What she never shared was her phone number.

I
N
M
AY
2011, just two weeks before her 105th birthday, Huguette Clark died in Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan. Court records soon answered one mystery while raising another. Huguette had not signed “a will” to distribute her fortune, but had signed two wills with contrary instructions. Both had been signed in the spring of 2005, when she was nearly ninety-nine.

The first will left $5 million to her nurse and the rest of her fortune to her closest living relatives, who would have inherited anyway if she had signed no will at all. These heirs were not named in the document.

Six weeks later, Huguette had signed a second will, leaving nothing to her relatives. She split her estate among her nurse, a goddaughter, her doctor, the hospital, her attorney, and her accountant, but directed that the largest share go to a new arts foundation at Bellosguardo, her California vacation home.

Thus began a court battle—with more than $300 million at stake—to determine Huguette’s true intentions. Nineteen relatives, from her father’s first marriage, challenged her last will, saying that Huguette was a victim of fraud, that she was mentally ill, unable to understand what she had signed.

• • •

In
Empty Mansions
, we have joined together to explore the mystery of Huguette Clark and her family. Our aim is to tell their story honestly, wherever it leads. We believe it’s a story worth telling, not only for Huguette’s sake but because of the light it may throw on American history.

On one level, our tale of the copper king and his family traces the rise and fall of a great fortune. Americans are familiar with the names Rockefeller and Carnegie and Morgan, but why has W. A. Clark nearly vanished from history? At what cost, with what sacrifices, did he achieve wealth and political power? What sort of life did his young wife, Anna, and their daughters, Andrée and Huguette, enjoy amid such incredible wealth and public scrutiny? Why did Huguette withdraw from the public eye? In her old age, was she competent to control her finances or was she, as her relatives assert, controlled by her nurse and her money men? And who would, or should, inherit her fortune?

Yet on another level, above such worldly considerations, the story of the Clarks is like a classic folk tale—except told in reverse, with the bags full of gold arriving at the beginning, the handsome prince fleeing, and the king’s daughter locking
herself
away in the tower. The fabulous Clarks may teach us something about the price of privacy, the costs and opportunities of great wealth, the aftermath of achieving the American dream. They can take us inside the mountain camps of the western gold rush, inside the halls of Congress, the salons of Paris, and the drawing rooms of New York’s Fifth Avenue amid the last surviving jewels of the Gilded Age.

This book is drawn from interviews, private documents, and public records, as described in the authors’ note and line-by-line notes at the back. We have invented no characters, imagined no dialogue, put no thoughts into anyone’s head. The sources include more than twenty thousand pages of Huguette’s personal papers and the testimony of fifty witnesses in the legal contest for her fortune. Though no work of nonfiction can pretend to map anyone’s interior terrain, the Clarks have left enough bread crumbs to lead us back into their fairy-tale world.

AN APPARITION
 

D
R
. H
ENRY
S
INGMAN
, an internist, was making an emergency house call on a new patient on New York’s old-money Upper East Side. It was a sunny early-spring afternoon, March 26, 1991. Dr. Singman had received a call from a retired colleague, whose former patient had sent out an SOS.

At the luxury apartment building at 907 Fifth Avenue, the uniformed doorman greeted the doctor, leading the way up the marble steps and through the lobby with its elegantly coffered ceiling. The elevator, paneled in mahogany like a plutocrat’s library, carried them to the eighth floor. The doorman then did something he had never dared before. He unlocked Apartment 8W, admitting the doctor.

Drawn shades blocked the sunlight from Central Park. A single candle lit the entryway—an art gallery nearly forty feet long. The parquet floor was an obstacle course of French dollhouses and miniature Japanese castles. Mannequins populated a side room, a gaggle of geishas wearing kimonos. The draperies were green silk damask and red velvet, the furniture Louis XV gilded oak, the paintings signed by Renoir, Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Monet.

In the half-light, Dr. Singman came face-to-face with “an apparition,” a tiny woman, nearly eighty-five years old, with thin white hair and frightened eyes the color of blue steel. She wore a soiled bathrobe and had a towel wrapped around her face.

His medical notes give the grim details. The patient was suffering from several cancers, basal cell carcinomas that had gone untreated for quite a while. She was missing the left part of her lower lip, unable to take food or drink without it gushing from her mouth. Her right cheek had deep cavities. Where her right lower eyelid should have been, there were large, deep ulcers exposing the orbital bone. She weighed all of seventy-five pounds, “looked like somebody out of a concentration camp,” and “appeared nearly at death’s door.”

Dr. Singman urged her to go immediately to a hospital. The patient
chose Doctors Hospital, which wasn’t Manhattan’s finest but was close to a friend’s apartment. The patient had no insurance, so her attorney sent over a $10,000 check to the hospital, and the ambulance came that night.

The patient never saw this apartment again, except in photographs. Though she recovered to excellent health, she chose to spend the next twenty years and nearly two months, or exactly 7,364 nights, in the hospital.

As she left her home that spring evening in 1991, Huguette Clark insisted on being carried through the lobby and down the marble steps on a gurney, held high above the shoulders of the ambulance men, like Cleopatra riding on a litter—not for ceremony but for privacy, so the doormen and her neighbors couldn’t see her face.

STILL LIFE
 

B
ELLOSGUARDO REMAINS TODAY
as Bellosguardo was the last time Huguette saw it sixty years ago. The Clark summer estate in Santa Barbara, with its sweeping view of the shimmering Pacific, has been lovingly preserved since the early 1950s at the cost of only $40,000 per month.

Inside the gray French mansion, in the back of the service wing in a room off the kitchen, on the green tile floor lies a white sheet of paper. This typeset sign bears the signature of one of the housemen and has been in place for more than a decade now. It marks the former location of a piece of furniture.

Out in the massive garage, formerly a carriage barn and staff dormitory with a ballroom for dances, the automobile shop was once the domain of Walter Armstrong, the Scottish chauffeur for the Clarks. With no Clarks to drive most of the time,
Armstrong filled the quiet afternoons at Bellosguardo with the low drone and high melody of his bagpipes.

Armstrong is long gone. After he retired,
Huguette paid him his full salary as a pension until he died in the 1970s. Then Huguette paid the pension to his widow, Alma, until she died in the 1990s. But
two of the automobiles that Armstrong lovingly cared for are still here, carefully preserved. Huguette turned down repeated offers to buy them.

On the right is a 1933 Chrysler Royal Eight convertible, its top perpetually down, with black paint and cream wheels. The chrome hood mascot of a leaping impala soars over a massive front grille. Huguette recalled Armstrong letting her drive the convertible on the coast road in the Santa Barbara summers of the Great Depression.

On the left is an enormous black 1933 Cadillac V-16 seven-passenger limousine. Its golden goddess hood ornament gleams under the garage’s chandelier. Spare tires are affixed at the front of the running boards. Pull-down shades, like those in a drawing room, are ready to provide privacy to occupants of the coach.

On both automobiles, the yellow-and-black California license plates say 1949.

THE MOST REMARKABLE DWELLING
 

H
UGUETTE AND
A
NDRÉE
, daughters of the multimillionaire former senator W. A. Clark,
arrived in New York Harbor in July 1910, immigrants to their own country. They had sailed from Cherbourg, France, in first-class cabins on the White Star liner
Teutonic
. Wearing broad-brimmed sun hats, the Clark girls posed for newspaper photographers on the pier. Andrée, the adventurous eight-year-old brunette, looked confidently at the cameras, as her tag-along sister, blond four-year-old Huguette, looked down uncertainly.

Huguette’s first day in America was filled with conjecture and misinformation. Reporters wrote that the heiresses didn’t speak a word of English. Yet their parents were born in Pennsylvania and Michigan, and the girls held American passports, citizens since birth. In fact, they were being well educated by private tutors and governesses, with lessons in three languages: English, Spanish, and French.