Empty Mansions

by Bill Dedman

  TWO TABLESPOONS OF WHISKEY

  THE 1880S BROUGHT a flood of pioneers into Southern California. Some came to escape harsh winters elsewhere. Some sought the restoration of their health. And some were prescient entrepreneurs and land speculators. The Clark family contributed immigrants in all three categories, and through W.A.’s enterprise, they built a railroad to open up Los Angeles as the center of business on the Pacific coast, America’s gateway for trade with the Orient.

  In 1880, Los Angeles was an unimpressive town of 11,000 on the Los Angeles River. In some years, the river flooded in the winter and ran almost dry in the summer. Until 1878, when the Southern Pacific Railroad completed its line from California’s biggest city, San Francisco, to its little sister Los Angeles, the only way to make the three-hundred-mile trip was by horse-drawn stagecoach through treacherous mountain passes.

  Among the early train passengers was W.A.’s mother, Mary Andrews Clark, age sixty-six, who left Iowa with two of her grown daughters in 1880. W.A.’s father had died five years earlier. They were in the vanguard of a population boom that would push the population of Los Angeles to 50,000 by 1890 and then to 100,000 by the turn of the century.

  The Clark business empire was spreading far beyond its roots in Butte. The United Verde mine in Arizona was the biggest moneymaker. W.A. also owned all or part of one of the largest coffee plantations in Mexico; the Colorado Smelter; coal lands in Wyoming; the United States’ largest lead mine in Idaho; other mines in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; thousands of head of cattle; and Shoshone Falls (“the Niagara of the West”) on the Snake River in Idaho, where in 1883 he built a ferry and a tourist hotel.

  The Clark family was no longer centered in Montana. By 1890, all five of W.A.’s sisters had settled in Los Angeles. His brother Ross soon followed. After W.A. was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1899, then moved to New York, the only remaining Clarks in Montana were his two grown sons, Charlie and Will. Even that connection wouldn’t last long, with both sons moving to California by 1907. Although the Clarks still had major mines and other enterprises in Montana, they had become absentee landlords.

  W.A. found new investment opportunities wherever he went, and in Los Angeles he went into business again with his brother Ross. Although Joseph died in 1903, Ross was W.A.’s loyal and effective associate for the rest of their lives. W.A. had groomed his brothers in careers that enabled both of them to become very wealthy via their separate enterprises. In the 1890s, they bought land between Los Angeles and its southern neighbor, Long Beach, ten thousand acres they named the Montana Ranch. By 1897, they had planted a thousand acres in sugar beets and had built a state-of-the-art sugar refinery in Rancho Los Alamitos. W.A. saw a grander future in Los Angeles than sugar beets. He and Ross entertained the idea of getting into the steamship business.

  W. A. Clark is pictured here in Los Angeles with most of his siblings, as well as other relatives. This was in 1908, a year after he left the U.S. Senate. He had opened the railroad connecting Los Angeles and Salt Lake City in 1905. W.A., age sixty-nine, stands second from the left. His second family, including two-year-old Huguette, is not in the picture. See the appendix on this page for a key to people in this photo. (illustration credit3.2)

  In 1900, W.A. unveiled an ambitious plan. He acquired several small railroads in the Los Angeles area as the nucleus of a major new rail line connecting San Pedro, which served as the tiny port for Los Angeles, with Salt Lake City, stretching through a thousand miles of desert. W.A. announced that he was putting $25 million into developing the railroad as the last major link in the rail grid that covered the West. At the time, the shortest rail route from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles was by way of San Francisco. Clark’s railroad would shorten the trip by four hundred miles. The name of the new line was a mouthful: the San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad, often abbreviated as the Salt Lake Route. Informally, it was known as the Clark Road.

  This may be the only example in history of an individual financing an entire railroad of significance out of his own pocket. Clark sought to issue bonds through the New York banks, but the response was less than enthusiastic. A railroad to Los Angeles was inevitable, but Los Angeles, still less than one-third the size of San Francisco, was not yet the business center of the West Coast. And there was competition, with the Union Pacific planning its own line to Los Angeles. W.A. replied, “Very well then, gentlemen, I’ll build the railroad from my own purse, and I can do it from my income stream alone, without touching my principal.”

  The Clark Road sparked a bitter railroad war with E. H. Harriman’s Union Pacific. The only efficient route was through a narrow gorge in southwest Nevada called Clover Creek Canyon, and there was room for only one set of tracks. While Clark and Harriman were fighting over the issue in the courts, their competing construction crews were battling it out in the dirt. In one skirmish, two hundred Harriman men pushed their way through Clark’s forces, “driving their horses back with shovels.” In another, Clark’s men scattered Harriman’s men into retreat with picks. Harriman and Clark tried to buy the loyalty of the opposing workers, raising wages from $1.75 a day all the way up to $2.50.

  The two owners soon settled the railroad war by merging their interests, with Harriman in the shadows and Clark out front as president. It took a while for the news to reach their men, however, and even as the two tycoons were shaking hands on the armistice and toasting each other, their men in the mountains were still battling over every inch of ground.

  The Clark Road began operation in May 1905, with brass bands and gifts of flowers for the passengers slowing down the first run so much that it arrived in Salt Lake four hours late.

  W.A. threw a rolling party, inviting Salt Lake notables, including two apostles of the Mormon Church, for a return trip to Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times headline read, “Saints and Elders Greet Us—Handclasps for Our Salt Lake Friends.” The visitors wore red badges with this inscription: “We just arrived on the brand new track. You’ve a hot old town but we’re going back.” W.A. was honored at a banquet, with one of the visitors toasting him: “The two cities are wedded, and Senator Clark has provided the ring.”

  • • •

  In the Nevada desert, the Clark Road needed a maintenance point for switching railcars and storing water and fuel. W.A.’s men found a working ranch in the right spot, an abandoned Mormon missionary camp.

  W.A. had more land than he needed after the railroad opened, and saw an opportunity for profit. In 1905, he subdivided 110 acres to create a small town of 1,200 lots. People came from Los Angeles on a special Clark train for the auction, held on May 15 in desert heat above 100 degrees. Bidders paid as little as $100 for residential lots and as much as $1,750 for the corner commercial lots on the main street, called Fremont. At the end of the second day, W.A.’s auction company had sold half of his properties, pocketing more than $250,000.

  The missionary camp became Los Vegas Rancho (deliberately spelled differently from Las Vegas, New Mexico). Then it was Stewart Ranch. Clark called the new town Clark’s Las Vegas Townsite, but everyone else left off the Clark name, calling it Las Vegas, which eventually became the glittering gambling capital of the world. W.A. traveled to Las Vegas in February 1905, riding in the luxury of his new private Pullman car with its two apartments, a dining room for twelve, and an observation room finished in English oak and brass. He told the citizens they would soon have a decent town with schools, churches, water, and roads. In 1909, a new Clark County was carved out with Las Vegas as its seat, one of the few lasting memorials to the Clark name.

  Owner of the railroad that established the town of Las Vegas in 1905, W. A. Clark greets the town’s citizens from his private railcar that year. His company auctioned off the lots that became downtown Las Vegas, now in Clark County. (illustration credit3.3)

  • • •

  From the time that his mother and siblings relocated to Los Angeles, W.A. visited at least once a year, generally staying in his mother’s Victorian home
on South Olive Street, a few blocks from the current location of the Biltmore hotel and Pershing Square. He continued his visits after his mother died in 1904 and then threw himself into a philanthropic project there named for her, a group residence for young working women called the Mary Andrews Clark Memorial Home.

  W.A.’s sister Ella had proposed that they create a memorial to their mother, in anticipation of the one hundredth anniversary of her birth coming up in 1914. W.A. said he preferred something practical, rather than a park or a statue. They agreed on building an affordable place where young, single women pursuing a career could live in a safe and wholesome environment. Now into his seventies, W.A. selected the site on Crown Hill, west of downtown Los Angeles, hiring an architect and taking a hands-on interest in the design and materials, much as he had with his own mansions. The Clarks donated the massive 150-room French château to the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), which operated it from 1913 as a dormitory for stenographers, office assistants, saleswomen, dressmakers, nurses, artists. The rules were strict—no men allowed upstairs, no slacks or curlers at dinner.

  After dinner at Ella’s home when W.A. would visit, the Clark family would tell stories while enjoying their dear departed mother’s favorite dessert, île flottante, or floating island, a meringue floating on custard.

  Ella’s son, Paul Clark Newell, Sr., recalled years later those family dinners, and a demonstration of the power held by someone owning a railroad.

  Among the more vivid recollections of my boyhood, growing up in Los Angeles in the early part of the century, were the occasional visits to our home of my uncle. During the years that I knew him W.A., as the family called the senator, came out to Los Angeles about once a year, usually in the fall, arriving in his private railcar on his own railroad. He came out from his palatial home on Fifth Avenue in New York, his private railcar linked to other rail lines, by way of Butte, and on to the connection point in Salt Lake City.

  I remember his visits to our house most, perhaps, because of his eccentricities. On two occasions upon his departure he headed for the hall closet door, instead of the front door, which was considerably larger. This amused me, and suggests some absent-mindedness, resultant perhaps from his intense concentration of thought.

  On occasions when he dined with us, following the saying of grace by my minister father, W.A. would remove from his vest pocket a small flask of whiskey, pour out two tablespoons full, and enjoy a drink. My parents and my aunts were all teetotalists, except for Aunt Elizabeth, who had joined her brothers in Montana in the early days.

  On one of these visits, W.A. was relishing warm family reminiscences with his sisters, his brother Ross, and their spouses, when his valet appeared at the living room door, nervously to announce that the train W.A. was boarding for the East that evening had already been held up for an hour for his accommodation. W.A., in only slightly disguised irritation, informed his valet that the train could wait. And wait it did for an hour or longer.

  The train happened to be the evening departure of the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad, bound for Salt Lake City, to the rear of which was attached W.A.’s private car, and of which he was builder, president, and principal owner. It seemed obvious that to my uncle, being a railroad president was the ultimate power and glory.

  “STAND BY DEAR FATHER”

  IN JULY 1904, Senator W. A. Clark, one of the richest men in the world, sent a telegram containing an announcement so surprising, so incredible, that his own newspaper got scooped. The editor of The Butte Miner delayed publishing the news, fearing that W.A.’s political opponents had planted the preposterous story as a hoax.

  W.A.’s telegram explained that he and his ward, Anna LaChapelle, had been secretly married in the Mediterranean port of Marseille. The wedding hadn’t happened that week, or even that year, but three years earlier, on May 25, 1901. On that wedding day, W.A. was sixty-two years old, and Anna was twenty-three. That must have been a busy year for W.A., as he was sponsoring the actress Kathlyn Williams and dealing with newspaperwoman Mary McNellis’s paternity suit, as well as the publicity over temperance lecturer Hattie Rose Laube’s campaign for an engagement.

  The wedding wasn’t Senator Clark’s only secret: The couple had a daughter, Andrée, already nearly two years old. “THEY’RE MARRIED AND HAVE A BABY,” thundered a front-page headline in the opposition Montana newspaper, The Anaconda Standard.

  Louise Amelia Andrée Clark had been born on the southern coast of Spain on August 13, 1902, a date more than a year after the supposed marriage. The announcement was so haphazard that her name was misspelled in the newspapers as Audree.

  W.A.’s Miner took pains to stress the next day that the situation had been a chaste one, with his ward, Anna, chaperoned in Paris by the senator’s sister and nieces as she studied the harp. Over time, however, “he learned that his early affection for this beautiful girl had ripened into love.” And Anna was certainly now of legal age, twenty-three at the time of the supposed marriage. Her sixty-two-year-old bridegroom was still vigorous enough that year to defend himself during a street robbery in Paris, slugging one of the thieves in the mouth.

  W.A.’s announcement attempted to explain the delay in making the marriage public, pointing to Anna’s shy manner:

  Mrs. Clark did not care for social distinction, nor the obligations that would entail upon my public life. She was anxious to remain in Europe for a time to continue her studies, and felt she could do this with more freedom. Personally I would have preferred to have her with me at all times, but my extensive interests compelled me to spend a great deal of time travelling through the United States. I did not have the necessary time myself to devote to social obligations and their extensive requirements.… Then again, I wanted my child to be educated in America and brought up a resolute and patriotic American.

  • • •

  The marriage—and the baby—were a surprise to W.A.’s grown children from his first marriage. They suddenly had a new half-sister, not to mention a new stepmother who was younger than they were. His children were, as one headline put it, in for “A Very Rude Shock.” Their inheritance was now in peril. Their father was a widower, free to do as he pleased, but this match, to a nobody from Butte, certainly didn’t enhance the social standing of the Clark scions.

  After sending his announcement from Paris, W.A. visited his daughter Katherine in New York. After talking with her sister, May, she wrote to their brother Will:

  A line only, dearest Will, as of course you know by now of father’s marriage—and while both May and I are greatly grieved and dreadfully disappointed we must all stand by dear Father, and try and make it as easy for him as possible as already he realizes his mistake—your heart would have ached could you have seen him the night before he left us for St. Louis, and indeed I can’t get over the way he looked so badly. Don’t let anyone know I have written you—father will tell you himself—and dear, be as good and kind to him as you can be for it is hard for dear father.… Poor May is all broken up.

  If W.A. indeed realized the wedding was a mistake, there’s no indication that he treated Anna rudely. He spent far more time with her than he had with his first wife during their marriage, when he was primarily engaged in the acquisition of wealth and political power. He showered Anna with jewels and presents, and there is no indication that W.A. continued his tomcatting around. Well into his sixties, W.A. finally matured.

  The week after the announcement, W.A. wrote to son Will from the 1904 Democratic National Convention in St. Louis, assuring him that his “alliance” with Anna would not dim his affections for his adult children, that Anna did not have designs on his fortune, and that she would receive only a small sum after his death.

  In his public statement, W.A. had acknowledged that “it has been stated that my family objected to this union.” But he said that any initial apprehension of his children had been overcome and “their approval of these relations were so essential to my happiness.”


  There was speculation in the family that the birth of Andrée had been followed by a second pregnancy, a boy, Paul, who died within hours of his birth, and that this second event sparked Anna to pressure W.A. to announce a backdated marriage. The birth of a son, if it happened, is undocumented.

  Not everyone believed that W.A. and Anna were legally married, certainly not married in May 1901 in Marseille. Clark’s political opponents quickly pointed out that his own newspaper in Butte had interviewed him that month about his European travels, which by his account hadn’t taken him anywhere near Marseille. The supposed marriage also caused a legal complication. Montana law required a married man to obtain his wife’s signature if he signed a deed, and during recent years W.A. had signed several deeds, indicating on each one that he was an unmarried man. Either he was lying on the deeds or he was lying now.

  Aside from such political sniping, there was the Clark family Bible, where family marriages and births are listed. W.A.’s 1869 marriage to Kate L. Stauffer is recorded in his handwriting, but no marriage to Anna is mentioned there, though later deaths are listed. Perhaps that’s merely a sign of his first family’s reluctance to accept the younger second wife. The Bible had been in the home of W.A.’s mother in Los Angeles.

  When Anna was required to show proof of their marriage, in a Montana court after W.A.’s death, all she could offer was a postnuptial declaration that the couple signed in 1909 at the American embassy in Paris. In this document, W.A. and Anna swore under oath that “no record of said marriage is known to exist.”