The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (12 page)

The family headed for England in late May on the
Adriatic
to attend the coronation of King George V. Once again photographers snapped shots of Huguette and Andrée, accompanied by William Clark’s young grandchild, Katherine Morris. The family spent a leisurely summer at the French seaside. In late August, William Clark wrote to Walter Bickford, “Mrs. Clark and the children are still at Trouville where we have a beautiful villa. We have had a six weeks period of unceasing heat in Paris but out there it has been very pleasant.” At Trouville, the Clarks befriended a French couple, Andre and Noemie de Villermont, artists with two sons, Etienne—two years older than Huguette—and Henri, two years younger. The childhood playmates would remain close for decades.

William Clark had been listed in
Who’s Who in New York
as a member of numerous well-known private clubs (Manhattan, New York Yacht, Downtown, City Ardsley, National Arts), but he had never been fully included in the life of New York’s 400, the top echelon of society. He and his wife frequently stated that they had no interest in
clubs that would not have them. When Clark was in Los Angeles in late October that year on a business trip (Anna and the girls were still in France), reporters asked whether he planned to entertain society in his new Fifth Avenue palace. “That depends on what you call society,” replied Clark, giving a windy and defensive answer. “If you mean giving big parties, these will be very few; if you mean meeting our friends and the people of the artistic and professional world, I hope these occasions will be many.”

In this interview, the senator was eager to boost the artistic credentials of his wife. “Mrs. Clark is a woman who enjoys the beautiful side of life, which means that side which includes artistic expression and effort,” Clark said. “She is a brilliant harpist herself and is intensely fond of music and the kindred arts, as I am, and we both like the sort of people of similar tastes and inclinations. Formal society, that which devotes itself to formal society affairs, has little attraction for either of us.”

Noble sentiments to be sure, but in truth, Clark was hungry to be recognized as a sophisticated art collector. He had scoured Europe and the auction houses of New York for treasures, outbidding his fellow robber barons to amass a cornucopia of art. He told the reporters that he felt a civic obligation to allow others to see his masterpieces, saying that he did not think he had “a right to be selfish with the objects of art that I have collected.” So he and Anna, who returned to New York with the girls in mid-December, decided they would give a grand party to showcase their collections.

The evening was a disaster. Anna was mortified by what occurred. Huguette was quite young, but she undoubtedly heard about the night. As one newspaper account put it, “When the new house was completed, Senator Clark gave a huge party. Hundreds of invitations were sent out to all the best people in New York but all the best people did not come for these were many in high society who always spurned the advances of the aspiring senator and to whom he was always just an ‘upstart’ from the wild west.”

Many years later, when Anna was a widow living several blocks away, she would confide her memories of that humiliating experience to Robert Samuels, an elite decorator. The story became part of the
mythology surrounding Anna and Huguette, and their two-against-the-world, mother-daughter relationship. Samuels passed the story on to Neal Sattler, Chris Sattler’s older brother and the contractor who renovated Huguette’s apartment. “Bob told us about the debacle when the father had the big party and they were shunned by society,” Neal Sattler recalled. “The senator did not have a great reputation and none of the important people showed up. They were very hurt by this.” The Clarks would entertain again, but not for a while and not on this kind of scale.

Anna remained close to her mother, who had been able to relocate to a much larger home in Butte thanks to the generosity of her son-in-law. Philomene La Chapelle was sixty years old, nearly thirteen years younger than William Clark, and had always been the picture of good health. In January 1912, Philomene was on the phone with her son Arthur’s wife and complained of feeling ill. Eight hours later, she was dead from pneumonia. “The death of Mrs. La Chapelle was a very sad affair and it was so sudden and unexpected, and Mrs. Clark was all worked up about it,” wrote William Clark to Walter Bickford. “However, she is very brave about it and started yesterday for Butte.” Rather than accompany his wife to the funeral, Clark left instead on a business trip to Chicago, Arizona, and Los Angeles. Once again, their daughters were on their own on Fifth Avenue with the servants.

The death of their grandmother was a shock to Huguette and Andrée. But another untimely death, just a few months later, would haunt Huguette for the rest of her life. She would obsess about what happened, read about it, talk about it, and conflate the events in her mind until she imagined that she could have been among the dead, too. The unlucky family member who passed away: her first cousin Walter Miller Clark, the twenty-eight-year-old son of William Clark’s younger brother and business partner James Ross Clark. Walter Clark had spent his early years in Butte, then moved with his parents to Los Angeles. A graduate of the University of California, he had joined the Clark family sugar beet operation and become the supervisor of the Los Alamitos Sugar Factory. He had married a Butte woman, Virginia McDowell, in January 1909, and the couple had a baby boy,
James Ross II. The couple decided in 1912 to take a belated honeymoon to Europe, leaving their two-year-old son with his maternal grandmother. When it was time to return home, Walter Clark and his wife boarded a luxury ship in Southampton destined for New York: the
Titanic
.

“All the way over, we had such beautiful calm weather, in fact up to the accident, the sea had been like glass,” Virginia Clark later told reporters. She had retired to their first-class stateroom when she felt a jolt at 11:30 p.m. She got dressed and went to find her husband, who was in the smoking room playing cards with friends. Alerted that the ship had struck an iceberg, the couple went to their room to change their clothes. “We took with us our heavy overcoats, I my furs, two life preservers, and what valuables we could pick up. My husband also saw that I was provided with money in case we should be separated.” On deck with John Jacob Astor and his pregnant wife, Madeleine, Virginia and the other women were helped by officers into lifeboats, but the men were not allowed to board. “I know from the way he bade me good-bye that he felt no apprehension and fully expected to join me later. There was room for fifteen others in our boat and three men could have been taken as well.” Walter Clark perished at sea.

William Andrews Clark, who had been fond of his nephew, wrote to Walter Bickford, “We have been shocked by the disaster to the
Titanic
and filled with the deepest regret at the drowning of Walter Clark. We had hoped for a day or two that he had been saved but now it seems as if all the saved have been accounted for.”

Huguette was only five years old, but as a veteran of several ocean crossings, the news left her terrified. Later in life, she would frequently inform people that her father had purchased tickets on what was meant to be the next voyage of the
Titanic
, from New York back to Europe. The story became convoluted in the telling, as if Huguette imagined that she had nearly been in danger herself. Her physician, Dr. Henry Singman, recalled, “She told me about somebody who died on the
Titanic
, who went down, and that she was supposed to be going back to the States but her father had changed the time of the departure from Europe.” She told the same story to her best friend, Suzanne Pierre, who passed it to her granddaughter, Kati Despretz
Cruz. “Huguette and her mother were supposed to be on the
Titanic
but changed their plans at the last minute,” Cruz says. Huguette fixated on her cousin’s death and the near miss for herself for decades, going obsessively over all the might-have-beens. Her night nurse, Geraldine Coffey, recalled that she often talked about this disaster that befell “a young person, newly married man, a relative.”

Judging by William Clark’s letters, his family was never in danger. They spent the winter of 1912 in the United States: he noted that Anna was in Chicago in February, and mentioned her plans to return to Europe in May. Clark wrote to Walter Bickford on May 25 that he was en route to Jerome, Arizona: “Before I left my wife and the children sailed on the good ship
George Washington
, which I hope will not get Titaniced before its arrival at the French port.”

Children are often resilient on the surface—frightening moments can be held at bay, reemerging later in life—and Huguette did not seem unduly troubled to her parents. On July 15, 1912, Clark reported, “I have just heard from Mrs. Clark and they are all very well. She has taken a place at Fontainebleau for the summer.” Five weeks later, Clark was in France himself, noting approvingly that son William and his second wife, Alice, had come to visit, and adding, “Mrs. Clark never looked better in her life than now, and the children are growing fast and are having the time of their lives.”

For the next two years, the Clark family continued their transatlantic commute. Huguette would later mention her father’s frequent absences. The mining mogul had founded a new town—Clarksville, Arizona—for the employees of his booming United Verde Copper company in nearby Jerome. This was one of the first planned communities in the United States, and Clark had built six hundred homes, a school, a library, a church, and the entire infrastructure of water, sewage, and power lines.

Anna’s sister, Amelia, who did not have children of her own, often joined the family in Europe for months at a time. Amelia’s first marriage in 1901 to Edward Hoyt, a Minneapolis securities dealer, had unraveled within a few years, and she had begun listing the Clark’s Fifth Avenue mansion as her home address on shipboard immigration forms. Amelia played the role of second mother to Andrée and
Huguette, and Huguette would later talk about her with love. “She was very close to Aunt Amelia,” says Hadassah Peri, Huguette’s nurse for two decades. “Amelia was married to a guy and he walk out. The first husband is no good.”

For Anna La Chapelle Clark, her musical skills were an asset in her New York life, perceived as an admirably genteel hobby. She won a favorable mention in
Town & Country
for her proficiency in playing the harp, a sign that she was starting to win acceptance among the members of the
Social Register
. “A pretty woman playing the harp makes a very delightful picture and stirs the memory with scenes from Jane Austen and suggests dainty little watercolors in gilt frame,” stated the magazine story about the newly fashionable artistic pursuit. “The society women who are taking the harp seriously include Mrs. William A. Clark, wife of the ex-senator, who makes the instrument a feature of her beautiful new music room.”

The spring of 1914 found Anna once again headed for France and the Château de Petit-Bourg. But Clark was preoccupied over labor unrest at his Missoula operations, and concern about socialists running for office in Montana. He could not get away until mid-July, writing to a friend that he was eager to see his family and “get a little rest.”

Clark crossed the Atlantic just as war was about to erupt in Europe. On June 28, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo. As Clark was arriving on the continent, on July 28 Austria declared war on Serbia, and within days Russia and Germany mobilized their troops. When Germany declared war on France on August 3, the Americans in Paris began scrambling to get out.

American ambassador to France Myron Herrick was deluged with cries for help, as his assistant and biographer, T. Bentley Mott, later recounted. “It was the height of the tourist season, and upon the declaration of war, from every quarter of Europe whence they could escape, travelers poured into Paris on their way to the channel ports of France and England… They expected that their troubles would be over when they reached Paris, when in fact they had often only begun. Train service was everywhere disorganized by the requirements of mobilization, busses and private automobiles had been requisitioned,
taxis became scarce, hotels began to close, the whole mechanism of modern life was topsy-turvy. And they had no money and could get none.”

The French banks refused to cash checks from foreigners. Even William Clark, who was now with his family and Anna’s sister, Amelia, at the Château de Petit-Bourg outside Paris, was unable to secure the money to pay their way out of town. William Clark’s name was on a list released by the State Department of well-known Americans in Europe whose safety was at risk. The United States government announced it was sending a battleship, the USS
Tennessee
, to bring in a supply of gold to France and then transport Americans to England.

Huguette vividly remembered what happened next, because she had been the little heroine. As her assistant Chris recalled, “They had to get to Le Havre, the port, but they had no cash. Millionaires don’t walk around with cash. The senator had given her a gold coin every week, and she never spent it.” The eight-year-old and her sister volunteered their savings; their parents used the contents of Huguette’s and Andrée’s piggy banks to pay for their escape. According to Sattler, “They took these gold coins, hired a carriage, and it took them to Le Havre.” Even the hardened William Clark was sobered by the journey, later telling reporters, “Every road from the city is choked with fleeing refugees. From what we heard in Paris, a great battle will soon be fought in the region of Marne.” Huguette cherished a photo taken on the deck of the USS
Tennessee
. Her father looks up from his newspaper at the camera; Anna and Andrée are smiling while Huguette gazes shyly at the ground.