The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (22 page)

Mother and daughter knew that they were not immune to crime. Robbers had attempted to break into the Clarks’ Fifth Avenue mansion many years earlier. William Andrews Clark was so worried about his family’s safety that he kept a pistol under his pillow and traveled with bodyguards. Anna now employed a chauffeur who doubled as the protector for both women. After the Lindbergh kidnapping, Anna and Huguette continued to go out in New York but were more careful about their travels. “They never came to our house,” says Gordon Lyle Jr., although his family lived a few blocks away from the Clarks. “We always went there. I guess they felt safer there. They were on their own turf.”

The Lindbergh tragedy was imprinted on Huguette’s consciousness, an event that increased her sense of vulnerability and reminded her yet again that her fortune singled her out for uncomfortable attention. Beyond the symbolism, the fear of kidnapping stayed with her. In 2000, when Huguette was ninety-four years old, she offered to buy a Manhattan apartment for the granddaughter of her friend Suzanne Pierre. Huguette became agitated when she learned that the young woman, Kati Despretz Cruz, had chosen a second-floor unit, insisting that she move to a higher floor. Cruz had a two-year-old son, Julian, the same age as the Lindbergh toddler. “I was only there a year because Mrs. Clark thought it was too dangerous,” Cruz recalls. “She thought that someone could get access to Julian through a window.”

Even as the Lindbergh kidnapping was fading from the headlines, Huguette suddenly lost a family member only four years her senior, who had been constantly around during her childhood. William Andrews Clark III, known in the family as Tertius, had become an amateur pilot and hired as his full-time instructor Jack Lynch, the pilot who taught Charles Lindbergh how to fly. The twenty-nine-year-old Clark was in Arizona taking a flying lesson from Lynch on May 15, 1932, when their plane went into a spin and plunged two thousand feet into foothills near Clemenceau. Both men were killed. The senator had doted on his clever grandson and namesake; Tertius was a frequent visitor to the family’s Fifth Avenue home and a big-brother figure to Huguette.

In the seven years since William Andrews Clark’s death, the copper mogul had vanished from public consciousness. The death of Tertius sparked the
Boston Globe
to publish an editorial noting how quickly the family patriarch had been forgotten. “Traditionally, the American cycle is from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. Though William Andrews Clark Third was not exactly in his shirt sleeves when he was killed in an aviation accident the other day, the Clark family fairly illustrates the proverb. Today, the name is hardly known and the once vast fortune of its founder has been divided up and diminished till it has almost disappeared.”

The following year, Huguette’s half brother Charles Clark, the big spender known for his love of horse racing, died at age sixty-one of pneumonia at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Charles Clark was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in his father’s mausoleum. He had disapproved of his father’s marriage to Anna and had minimal contact with his stepmother after the death of the senator. Charles had ended contact with his own four children after divorcing their mother, Celia, in 1925. He had skipped the 1929 Paris wedding of his daughter Mary to French baron James Baeyens, so her uncle gave her away. The newspaper obituaries conveyed that Charles had been more enthusiastic about the running times at the racetrack than running his father’s enterprises.

The ties binding the Clark relatives were fraying. Mary de Brabant, William Clark’s oldest daughter, had separated from her third husband, Marius; he had returned to Riverside, California, and moved in with his older sister. Mary was nonetheless still giving parties at her Manhattan mansion and her Long Island estate, a twenty-five-room waterfront mansion with a farm building, greenhouses, and kennels, right next door to the residence of William K. Vanderbilt. But when her guest lists made the society columns, Anna and Huguette were no longer mentioned. Katherine Clark Morris, William Clark’s second daughter, spent time at her three properties—a Fifth Avenue apartment, a large estate near Oneonta, and a plantation in Savannah—but did not see much of Anna and Huguette, who lived only twelve blocks south on Fifth Avenue.

During her marriage, Anna had worked to nurture her relationships
with her stepchildren, and she resented being cast aside. Huguette would later say that her mother felt abandoned by her stepchildren. As Huguette’s assistant, Chris Sattler, recalls, “She told me that they did not treat her mother well. They ignored her. There was very little interaction between the first family and her mother.” Huguette confided in her nurse Hadassah Peri about the estrangement between Anna Clark and her stepchildren. Peri recalls hearing that William Clark’s first family “didn’t have much communication with her mom.”

There was one exception: Anna remained close to Celia Tobin Clark, Charles Clark’s ex-wife. Banking heiress Celia had become a patron of the arts, hiring George Bellows to paint a portrait of her son, Paul, and supporting San Francisco music groups. Celia and her children—Mary, Patricia, Agnes, and Paul—visited Anna and Huguette at Bellosguardo and eventually brought the next generation along, too. Anna had a special fondness for Agnes Clark, who trained as a pianist and debuted with the San Francisco Orchestra in 1932. In 1933, Agnes married Alexander Albert, the son of a German industrialist and an American socialite, and began to split her time between Europe and California. When Agnes came through New York, she often stopped by 907 Fifth Avenue to visit Anna and Huguette.

For a divorcée, there is one piece of information that is inevitably jarring: learning that your spouse has remarried. On the morning of June 4, 1932, if Huguette had picked up the
Sun
at the breakfast table, she could have read all about it: her ex-husband, William Gower, was getting married that very day to Constance Baxter Tevis McKee Toulmin. A follow-up
New York Times
article a day later mentioned that “Mr. Gower’s marriage to Huguette Clark, youngest daughter of the late ex-Senator William A. Clark, ended in divorce in August 1930.”

Constance had been living in a château in the French countryside but spent the winter at the Waldorf Astoria, the site of the couple’s wedding. The newspapers tracked her comings and goings: the newlyweds honeymooned in Italy at her summer home, the Palazzo Brandolini on the Grand Canal in Venice, then moved into an apartment
at 1 Sutton Place on the East River, a luxurious 1926 co-op designed by Rosario Candela.

Huguette harbored complicated feelings toward her ex-husband. Her initial bitterness was wearing off, and in the years ahead, she allowed herself to remember what she had liked about him in the first place. She did not sound angry when she talked about Bill, simply telling friends that it was not meant to be.

The heiress was now developing her own alternate life, taking pleasure in Tadé Styka’s companionship. Tadé appreciated and encouraged her creativity. No one knew better the extent of her artistic talent. After arriving in Santa Barbara for her annual vacation, Huguette was giddy with joy when she received an artist’s palette that Tadé had crafted for her. Not only did she send him a grateful telegram but she followed up immediately with a letter in French, on July 20, 1932.

Huguette cherished this gift so much that when she managed to break it, she was distraught. Anna sent an urgent telegram to Tadé: “An accident has befallen the superb palette that you gave to Huguette. A painting fell on it, split and flattened it. Would it be possible for you to send her a new one? Huguette is disconsolate and heartbroken by this accident. Kind regards, Anna Clark.”

Of course, the artist complied.

That summer in Santa Barbara, Huguette stopped into the G. T. Marsh shop, a branch of the San Francisco emporium of Japanese antiques, and became enthralled by the items on display. The original store was founded in California in 1876 by Australian George Marsh, who ran away from home as a boy, jumped ship, and landed in Japan, where he began collecting jade and porcelain. Renowned for his expertise in all things Japanese, Marsh designed the Japanese garden at Golden Gate Park. When he died in 1932, the business was taken over by his son Lucien.

During her childhood, Huguette had been fascinated by the Oriental room in her father’s Fifth Avenue mansion, and she owned several Japanese dolls, depicting them in a painting for her Corcoran show. Now the Marsh shop, with its antique screens, kimonos, and intricate fans, reawakened her interest in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Huguette began purchasing Japanese artifacts in 1932—the Marsh family still has the invoices—but then had an idea far more artistic. She began to commission miniature castles based on Edo-era Japanese structures, as well as tiny furniture, painted screens, doll-sized Japanese food, doll-sized kabuki theatres, and the costumed characters to go with them. These were her own versions of Queen Mary’s dollhouse but with an Oriental flair. The Marsh family tracked down Japanese artisans to do the work. Huguette was so pleased with the first miniatures that this enthusiasm became a lifelong passion.

She turned herself into a scholar on Japanese architecture and culture: her collection of books about Japan would eventually fill three large bookcases in her Fifth Avenue apartment. “She was a great teacher for me,” says Caterina Marsh, an Italian who married into the Marsh family and became Huguette’s contact at the firm. “She was very knowledgeable.” Huguette would look at blueprints before agreeing to the work and ask for extensive revisions, fixated on getting the tiny details right. As Marsh puts it, “The pleasure for her was in creating something.”

In her own way, Huguette was mimicking her father’s passion when he built his fantasy Fifth Avenue mansion and looted Europe to stock it with art and antiques. The understated Huguette was re-creating
history on a smaller but no less artistic scale. William Andrews Clark had been a perfectionist, focusing on such details as the color of the marble, while his daughter fretted over the precise proportions of doll-sized rooms. With fond memories of her girlhood in France, Huguette commissioned a Parisian toy store, Au Nain Bleu, to arrange for the construction of miniature French châteaus.

After growing up in a haunted hotel-sized home—with a mother who could not always hear her, a preoccupied elderly father, and a beloved sister who died young—here was a kingdom that Huguette could control. This artistic enterprise was time-consuming and intellectually challenging, requiring historic research and imagination.

Even as Huguette was embarking on her new artistic venture, Anna had a much larger project in mind: improving her California real estate. Huguette had previously donated $50,000 to turn a wetland across the street from her property into the Andrée Clark Bird Refuge. Now Anna decided to tear down Bellosguardo and put up an entirely new and grander mansion on this cliffside property with unobstructed ocean and mountain views. She told her daughter and friends that she felt inspired to offer employment to the struggling local workmen ravaged by the Depression. Anna hired Pasadena architect Reginald Davis Johnson, whose Mediterranean and Spanish Revivalism helped define the look of that community just as Addison Mizner’s designs did for Palm Beach. Johnson, who had designed the Santa Barbara Country Club and the Santa Barbara Biltmore Hotel, created the new house with a budget of $1 million, the equivalent of more than $17 million today.