The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (7 page)

Clark later painted a romantic picture of that gritty time, highlighting the virtuous Sundays when he would contemplate nature and read poetry. “My partner, who was very fond of cards, usually passed the day and sometimes the night at the Dorsett camp, a mile below,” he told the Montana Pioneers. “I usually spent Sunday mornings sauntering in the hills or mountains, looking for gold-bearing quartz ledges… frequently taking a book to amuse myself while reposing on some grassy plot under the shade of the majestic pine trees.” His reading matter, or so he claimed, was the
Elements of Geology
plus a book on contract law and
The Poems of Robert Burns
. In telling the story of his life, William Andrews Clark always stressed that he was never a common workingman and had an educated sensibility.

Prospecting was backbreaking labor, and once the snows came, Clark took his stake of $2,000 in gold dust and began his career as a merchant. He went to Salt Lake City to buy supplies and spent twelve days on the road hauling those groceries back to the mining camp in
Bannack. As he told the Pioneers, “I had taken the risk of shipping quite a lot of eggs, well knowing they would freeze, yet they were admirably adapted for the making of ‘Tom and Jerry,’ which was a favorite beverage in Bannack, and I disposed of them at a price of $3.00 per dozen.” (The British eggnog and brandy drink had been popularized in America by the noted bartender Jerry Thomas.) Clark’s price was quite a markup, since eggs then cost roughly twenty-five cents per dozen.

He found moneymaking opportunities everywhere. Clark and a friend opened a store in a mining area near Helena, selling everything from New York butter to California lemons. Clark and his brother Joseph landed a contract to bring the U.S. mail from Missoula, Montana, to Walla Walla, Washington, making the nearly four-hundred-mile trip themselves by horseback and even snowshoe. He continued delivering marked-up goods to remote mining camps. His price gouging was resented by the miners, but Clark could set his own rates given the minimal competition. With profits rolling in, he came up with another gambit: making loans at the rate of 2 percent a month.

By 1869, at the age of thirty, Clark was a well-to-do man in search of a bride. Taking a trip with his mother to his childhood home in Pennsylvania, he courted a former classmate, Kate Stauffer. She came from a prominent local family; her father owned a manufacturing company. Her sister had married a man who would become the chief clerk of the U.S. Senate.

Clark and his bride took a meandering honeymoon train and stagecoach journey, stopping off in Chicago and St. Louis, eventually settling in the small Montana town of Deer Lodge. Their first child, Mary, was born in 1870, and Charles would follow a year later. Clark was known as ruthless, but his wife softened his image; she was appreciated for her “generous hospitality and sunny sociability,” according to a newspaper account.

Clark joined with partners to establish a bank that bought up gold dust and shipped it to an assay office in New York at a sizable profit. Clark later spun that off into yet another banking venture,
W. A. Clark and Bro., bringing in his brother, James Ross Clark. Eleven years younger, Ross proved to be a valuable partner, willing to run the operations that his sibling amassed. William Andrews Clark realized that loan terms could be structured in ways that made it virtually impossible for a miner to repay on time. A default allowed his bank to snap up valuable property for pennies on the dollar.

In 1872, Clark ventured from Deer Lodge to Butte to examine shallow quartz mines reputed to be worthless. Taking an astute gamble, he bought the claims to four Butte mines. But before investing in expensive equipment, he decided that he needed to learn more about geology and the science of mining.

Taking a leave of absence from his bank, Clark moved to Manhattan to attend Columbia College’s mining school, founded in 1864. Clark was so eager for knowledge that he was willing to take classes with undergraduates nearly half his age. The couple left their young children with family members in Pennsylvania so they could experience New York unencumbered.

The Clarks arrived in Manhattan, then a metropolis with nearly a million residents, during the post–Civil War boom when the city was rife with newly minted millionaires and served as a destination for those who had made their fortunes elsewhere. The 1872 guidebook
Lights and Shadows of New York Life
, by James McCabe, depicts the social-climbing follies of the nouveau riche, terming them the “Shoddyites.” “They are ridiculed by every satirist, yet they increase,” McCabe wrote. “They occupy the majority of the mansions in the fashionable streets, crowd the public thoroughfares and the Park with their costly and showy equipages, and flaunt their wealth so coarsely and offensively in the faces of their neighbors, that many good people have come to believe that riches and vulgarity are inseparable.”

The Clarks, with their shiny new Montana fortune, fit right in with the Shoddyites. The couple had a hunger for culture, satisfied by the proximity of the newly opened Metropolitan Museum at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Third Street. The new Grand Opera House featured the top talents of Europe, and the Knoedler Gallery’s art exhibitions drew the monied social set. Clark would purchase many works at the
Knoedler in the years to come. During his studies at Columbia, he and his professors examined mineral samples from his newly purchased Butte mines, and the results confirmed his instincts: he had tapped into major copper veins.

Once back in Montana, Clark developed those mines, relying on modern technology to maximize their potential. He built a mill in Butte that used machinery to break down raw ore into metal residue, a process previously done by hand with a hammer. The environmental desecration accelerated when Clark built the first smelter in Butte to process raw ore. The smelter sent plumes of chemicals into the skies. The process of roasting ore in open pits made things worse. The miners, with their lungs damaged from their time underground, were especially vulnerable to deadly pneumonia. Vegetation dwindled down to only four trees in the entire city.

William Andrews Clark would later sing the praises of the pollution that his mining operations created. “I must say that the ladies are fond of this smoky city, as it is sometimes called,” Clark told the Montana Constitutional Convention in a speech in the late 1890s, “because there is just enough arsenic there to give them a good complexion, and that is the reason that the ladies of Butte are renowned wherever they go for their good complexions.” He added that Butte’s physicians perceived the smoke as a “disinfectant” that destroys “the germs of disease.”

Eager to provide his family with a sophisticated social milieu and probably cleaner air, Clark embarked on a European sojourn in 1878 and moved his wife and children to Paris. The City of Lights, a fashionable destination for the American upper class, had an expatriate community that included the Boston Brahmin Henry James and painters John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt. Kate and the children, who became fluent in French and German, spent three years in Paris (another son, Paul, was born in 1880), followed by two years in Dresden. Clark learned French and a smattering of other languages and began avidly collecting art. An absentee but indulgent father, Clark spent winters in Europe and the rest of his time in Montana or visiting his increasingly far-flung enterprises.

His parents never had the wherewithal to give him the Grand Tour of Europe, that British tradition embraced by wealthy Americans who sent their aristocratic young heirs on cultural tours to Roman ruins. So he belatedly gave it to himself. Clark took his family to Italy (Pompeii), Greece (Athens), and Turkey (Ephesis), and even took a steamer to Algeria. When the Clarks returned to America, Kate and the children settled on Long Island, while her husband went back to Butte to supervise construction of their mansion on Granite Street.

A trip to the 1884 New Orleans World Exposition led Clark to his next bonanza. Intrigued by a display of ore by Arizona’s mineral department, he asked where the rocks were from. The source was the United Verde Copper Mine in Jerome, which the owners had been unable to make profitable after digging down one hundred feet. Clark purchased the mine for a pittance. Under his auspices, United Verde produced eight million pounds of high-quality copper per month at a time when demand for the metal was surging due to the newly invented telephone.

Clark was set on a collision course with another Montana mining titan: Marcus Daly, an upstart Irish immigrant with an even better eye for undervalued assets. Daly scored with a silver mine in Butte and then purchased an even richer copper mine, the Anaconda. He was backed by a syndicate that included George Hearst, the California mining magnate who was elected to the U.S. Senate and bankrolled the newspaper aspirations of his son William Randolph Hearst. Just as Clark put his money into developing Butte, Daly turned the tiny town of Anaconda, twenty-four miles from Butte, into his company town, building a courthouse and library and starting his own newspaper, the
Anaconda Standard
.

The two Montana moguls were opposites in appearance and personality. “William Andrews Clark is a little man with a big head,” wrote the
San Francisco Call
. “He is as dapper as a fashion plate from his feet to his glossy hat. His tailor works wonders with his frock coats. Clark’s fingers are manicured and not a hair lies awry on the bushy red thatch which covers his head.” The newspaper wrote of his opponent: “Marcus Daly is big, broad-shouldered, deep chested and
powerful. He is of mercurial and choleric Irish temperament, genial to friends, vindictive to an enemy, quick of speech and given to a lusty swear word on occasions.”

William Andrews Clark and Marcus Daly hated each other so much that they were willing to spend millions of dollars to blacken each other’s names and corrupt their fellow citizens. The origin of this feud has mystified historians, who cite possible causes ranging from insulting remarks the men made about each other to business deals gone awry. The feud went viciously public when William Andrews Clark was unanimously nominated in 1888 by Montana’s Democrats as the territory’s delegate to Congress. Daly was a Democrat but bolted his party to block Clark from winning. In this era before the secret ballot, Daly arranged for his Anaconda shift bosses to view and change miners’ ballots in favor of Clark’s Republican opponent.

Clark lost but he was undeterred in his effort to seek national office. In 1889, when Montana became a state, Clark made a bid to become one of its first senators. He lost again, this time amid charges that he and Daly both flagrantly bribed state legislators. Clark eked out revenge by orchestrating a vote by the state legislature to defeat Daly’s efforts to shift the state capital from Helena to Anaconda.

As Clark schemed in Butte and plotted his political future, he and his wife, Kate, were living separate lives. She visited Montana but spent more time in Garden City or their suite in the luxurious Navarro Flats apartments on West Fifty-Eighth Street in Manhattan. In October 1893, Kate Stauffer Clark traveled to Chicago for the Columbian Exhibition in honor of the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in America. The fair featured two hundred temporary pavilions designed by famous architects, the very first Ferris wheel, and gardens by Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmsted.

For Kate Clark, Chicago was a city with sentimental memories. On her honeymoon in 1869, she and her husband had stopped off in Chicago so he could purchase merchandise to sell to miners in Montana. Now twenty-four years later, she could see the sweeping changes in the city and in herself, transformed from a provincial single woman to the sophisticated wife of a multimillionaire and the
mother of five children aged thirteen to twenty-three. Just two years earlier, she had presided over the Manhattan wedding of her oldest child, Mary, to Dr. Everett Mallory, with a guest list that included two senators (Delaware, New Jersey) plus financier Cyrus Field, a society-page testament to the family’s upward mobility. Kate’s mother, back home in Pennsylvania, was still alive, and Kate had every reason to anticipate watching the rest of her children walk down the aisle. The Butte friends who saw her at the Chicago exhibition would later report that she “looked the picture of health.”

But after she returned to New York, Kate became feverish. William Clark was in Butte when he received a telegram announcing that his wife was ill but appeared to be rallying. He and his son Charles got on a train to New York, but they were delayed in Chicago. Clark learned by telegram that his wife was sinking rapidly. Before he could reach Manhattan, Kate died of typhoid fever at their Navarro Flats apartment at 10:30 a.m. on October 19, 1893.

William Clark shut down his Butte mines and banking office for a day. Clark’s newspaper nemesis, Marcus Daly’s
Anaconda Standard
, ran an obituary: “Of strong intellectual traits and of marked elegance in manner, cordial towards all yet entirely without affection toward people of whatever station in life, tactful yet always sincere, a delightful hostess, a faithful wife, a devoted mother and the gracious matron of a cultured home which found in her its chief adornment—such was Mrs. Clark.” (The words “without affection” may have been a typo, meant to be “without affectation,” but it is possible the writer, the typesetters, or even Marcus Daly subtly inserted the dig.)