Empty Mansions

by Bill Dedman

  Huguette had always been a mysterious presence in family lore. Though they were essentially the same age, my father had never met her, even when he was a guest in Senator Clark’s monumental mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York. When I was a youngster, on family trips on the Pacific Coast Highway through Santa Barbara, my father would point out a promontory by the sea and tell me of Bellosguardo, the great Clark vacation estate. I had heard him speak of Huguette’s shyness and reclusive tendencies, but I knew little more about her.

  Years later, while traveling through Santa Barbara in the 1990s, I checked under Clark in the phone directory, and to my great surprise I found not one but two listings for Huguette M. Clark, giving her phone numbers and street address on the oceanfront Cabrillo Boulevard. Remarkable openness, I thought, for someone whose life was enveloped in secrecy. I dialed one of the numbers and reached her estate manager, John Douglas. He told me a little about his work and said that Madame Clark was a wonderful person to work for, though he said he had never met her. I asked how I might make contact with Huguette, and he provided me with the name of her attorney in New York, Donald Wallace. In November 1994 I wrote to her, through Wallace, introducing myself and saying that I hoped she might cooperate in my family research.

  Within ten days I received a voice mail message, chipper and tantalizing. “Hello, Paul, this is your Aunt Huguette. I’m sorry I missed you, Paul, because I do want to speak with you. I’ll call you back soon, Paul, so we can talk. Bye-bye.”

  Her voice was high-pitched, with a hint of a foreign accent, perhaps reflecting her early years in France or revealing a minor speech impediment. Although she was then eighty-eight years old, her voice was steady. She left subsequent messages, but never a phone number to call her back. Why not provide me with her phone number? I pictured her at home in her commodious apartment on Fifth Avenue. Surely she employed a butler or secretary to receive and screen her calls. I telephoned her attorney to inquire about the situation.

  “She’s not going to provide you a number,” he replied curtly.

  She missed me again the next month, leaving this message:

  Hello, Paul, this is your Aunt Huguette, and I did call the other number, but I didn’t get an answer. So I will call you up soon again, because just now I have the chicken pox—of all things to get at my age. Imagine! So, anyway, I’m getting along fine. The fever went down and everything’s okay. And thank you for the photos. Your daughter is beautiful! And your little grandson, Eric—

  At that point, the message timed out. Surprisingly, this aged relative, so well known in the family for being reclusive and on guard, seemed comfortable going on informally about personal medical matters and inquiring about my immediate family even though we had never met. But I still didn’t have her number.

  I continued writing to her through the next year, and in October 1995 I let her know I would be in New York, and gave her the phone number of my hotel. I had accepted an invitation from one of my Clark cousins, André Baeyens, at the French consulate up Fifth Avenue from Huguette’s apartment. André, a great-grandson of the senator and a career diplomat, was the French consul general in New York. Huguette had asked André to contact me, and we became friends. Upon my return to my hotel room that night, around eleven, the phone rang.

  “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.

  Bill Dedman and Paul Newell

  IN MAY 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

  DR. HENRY SINGMAN, 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 Centr
al 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

  BELLOSGUARDO 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.

  ON 29 NOVEMBER 2001,

  I MOVED A WHITE,

  WOODEN STEP STOOL FROM

  THIS ROOM TO THE MAIN

  WING ELEVATOR AS AN AID

  TO RESCUE IN CASE THE

  ELEVATOR GETS STUCK.

  Harris

  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

  HUGUETTE AND ANDRÉE, 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.

  Huguette Marcelle Clark was born in Paris on June 9, 1906. Her parents’ apartment was on avenue Victor Hugo, at No. 56, a short walk down the wide, tree-lined avenue from the Arc de Triomphe. The baby girl, like the avenue, was named for France’s beloved novelist, poet, and dramatist, who had lived just down the block in his last days. The child’s name may also have been a nod to her father’s French Huguenot ancestry. As a young woman, Huguette sometimes signed her name Hugo, and some of her friends called her Hugs. Andrée was nearly four when Huguette was born. When she had been told that a baby sister was due, Andrée said to her mother, “Let me think it over.” Even one hundred years later, Huguette loved to laugh at her sister’s cleverness. Huguette’s father was old enough to be her great-grandfather. When Huguette was born, W.A. was a vigorous sixty-seven with four grown children from his first marriage, while Huguette’s mother, Anna LaChapelle Clark, was only twenty-eight.

  Although both parents had accompanied the girls on the ocean crossing, W.A. is the proud parent in the photographs on the pier. Anna stayed off to the side out of the camera’s view. In the rare public photos of her, Anna appears standoffish, coolly looking out from under her tilted formal hats. But in the private photos in Huguette’s albums, we see another Anna. Wearing her fashionable Continental dresses with a sash around her waist, she smiles warmly, playfully.

  When the family arrived in 1910, they had no house in New York to go to. The greatest mansion in the city wasn’t quite ready, even after ten years of construction. W.A. sent his wife and daughters west to the Rocky Mountains to Butte, Montana, where he had made his fortune in copper mining. He stayed behind in his New York apartment, sometimes spending the night in the unfinished Clark mansion, changing the plans to make it grander.

  • • •

  “When this modern palace is completed,” the New York World reported, “it will rival in beauty and richness the mythical palace of Aladdin.” W.A. had selected the site in 1895, paying $220,000 for the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Seventy-Seventh Street, prominently situated in the middle of New York’s Millionaires’ Row, up the avenue from Vanderbilt and Astor, down from Carnegie. By the time it was finished in 1911, observers called it the “biggest, bulliest and brassiest of all American castles,” “the most remarkable dwelling in the world,” and “without doubt the most costly and, perhaps, the most beautiful private residence in America.”

  The 121-room mansion was also Huguette’s childhood home from age five to eighteen. This was a fairy-tale castle come to life, with secret entrances, mysterious sources of music, and treasures collected from all the world. When Andrée and Huguette would arrive home in their chauffeured automobile, accompanied by a private security guard, they passed through the open carriage gates—bronze gates twenty feet high, fit for a palace.

  The bottom half of the six-story Beaux Arts mansion was not so unusual in its day, and might not have stood out if it were W.A.’s bank building. But on the top half, every inch was decorated with Parisian Be
aux Arts ostentation, a profusion of lions, cherubs, and goddesses. Oh, but the architects weren’t done. Soaring above the mansion was an ornate domed tower reaching nine stories, so pleased with itself that it continued to an open cupola. The overall effect was as if a lavish wedding cake had been designed in the daytime by a distinguished chef, and then overnight a French Dr. Seuss sneaked in to add a few extra layers.

  Andrée and Huguette were outdoor girls. In the winter, dressed in matching red coats and red broad-brimmed hats, they went coasting down hills on sleds in Central Park. In the summer, they romped in matching sailor shirts and bloomers gathered above the knee. From any corner of the park, they had a specific home base for navigation: the tower of the Clark mansion. And when they stood in the tower itself, one hundred feet above the sidewalk, Andrée and Huguette could see all of Manhattan spread out below them.

  Reporters who toured the home counted twenty-six bedrooms, thirty-one bathrooms, and five art galleries. Below the basement’s Turkish baths, swimming pool, and storage room for furs, a railroad spur brought in coal for the furnace, which burned seven tons on a typical day, not only for heat but also to power dynamos for the two elevators, the cold-storage plant, the air-filtration plant, and the 4,200 lightbulbs.

  As the girls pulled into the U-shaped driveway, they rode first into an open-air main courtyard and then under an archway into a vestibule decorated with a fountain of Tennessee marble. The fountain displayed a satyr’s head projecting from a great clamshell, while two marble mermaids played in the spray. Their carriage then passed into a rotunda, where the young ladies of the house could disembark.