Empty Mansions

by Bill Dedman

  IN CONVERSATION WITH HUGUETTE

  On June 28, 1998, Huguette and I spoke of my recent tour of Butte and her memories of the town. She said that she had not been to Butte for years, explaining that it was “too sad for me, with memories of my father.” She sent me a photo of herself, at about age four, on the porch of her father’s mansion there. She is sitting on the railing, wearing an enormous white hat, and is surrounded by a dozen of her dolls.

  She told me she understands that Butte is not a healthful place to live.

  Early on the morning of August 1, 1917, Frank Little was found hanged from a railroad trestle in Butte. On his chest was a note with the words “First and last warning” and the numbers 3-7-77, an obscure code used by the Montana Vigilantes. With copper prices and demand at record levels, the war was going to make a lot of money for Butte, its workers, and its mine owners.

  • • •

  The following year, the girls’ vacation in Montana ended in tears. The parting had gone badly, with a quarrel between Anna and sixteen-year-old Andrée, who wrote her mother this letter:

  Mowitza Lodge, Aug. 27, 1918

  My Dearest Little Mother,

  I know that you will not answer me nor do I think that you will read this letter, but if you do, you will know that you are the best friend that I ever have had, or will ever have. We all had a most beautiful, wonderful time at the Lake, and we regret so much that it is all over!!! And we are all indebted (especially me) to you for this lovely summer we have had. We had a very sunny, windy, incidental trip to Butte and we arrived here at quarter to seven. We all had dinner at the house and then, separated. This afternoon Daddy is going to take me to the Gardens to see his marvelous begonias.…

  I am ever so sorry to have made you unhappy yesterday for I was heartbroken to see you cry and send me away without one of your smiles and fond kisses which are worth to me more than a world. I hope you will forgive me. Whether you write to me or not or do not open my letters, I am going to write to you, every week or so and it may prove to you, or it may not, that I love you above anybody else on this earth and that though I am selfish, I’d die first, before anything could happen to you. Good-by, dearest little Mother, and please forgive me.

  Your loving daughter,

  Andrée

  WHAT LIFE MAY BE

  THE CLARK SISTERS SHARED a bedroom in the Clark mansion until Andrée was fourteen and Huguette ten. Decades later, Huguette told her night nurse about the bedtime routine of the young sisters. “Her sister was a wonderful writer and reader,” said the nurse, Geraldine Lehane Coffey, “and she would tell her stories at night. And she would not finish them.”

  So, each night, Huguette would ask, “Will you continue tomorrow night?” And Andrée always would.

  At age sixteen, Andrée had grown moody and tempestuous, which is to say she was a teenager. She also had a physical ailment, a bad back, and was taking exercises at home with a gym teacher, Alma Guy, who saw that the older daughter needed more than physical therapy. Andrée needed to have some time out of the smothering atmosphere of the Clark home.

  Andrée was “shy and timid and afraid to call her soul her own,” Miss Guy recalled. “Her parents were so occupied with other things that they really did not know what was happening to their daughter in the hands of maids and governesses. Andrée was never allowed to do anything for herself.”

  Miss Guy pressed for Andrée to be allowed to join some activity outside the home, an outlet for self-expression. She suggested the Girl Scouts, a group that had formed in 1912 and was flourishing during World War I. At first Anna wasn’t sure this was a proper activity, saying that it sounded “too democratic for the daughter of a senator,” but finally she relented.

  And so in the winter of 1918–19, after the armistice was signed, Andrée joined Sun Flower Troop, which drew its recruits from the wealthy homes of Manhattan. She exchanged her au courant French fashions for the dark blue middy blouse and skirt, light blue sateen cotton neckerchief, blue felt campaign hat, and black shoes and stockings of the Girl Scouts. Each Tuesday afternoon, Girl Scout day, she worked toward her Tenderfoot pin, then her Second Class patch, struggling to make an American flag with all forty-eight stars. “I have made everything of the flag except the stars!” she wrote to a friend. “They are hopeless!!!” She learned Red Cross work, such as wrapping bandages and treating wounds, and built an open-air fire in the woods. She also volunteered with the Scouts at the Lighthouse, a recreational program of the New York Association for the Blind, where Miss Guy was the activities director.

  “Scouting really made a different girl of Andrée,” Miss Guy recalled. “She was quite determined to come down to the Lighthouse and start a troop for the blind girls there, she loved it so.”

  Andrée had other adventures with her Girl Scout friends, far from the overbearing reach of governesses. At age sixteen, in a letter to a friend, she described riding with a group of girls through a suburban town in a Scout leader’s yellow jalopy, nicknamed the Yellow Peril, “a topsy-turvy, yellow flivver and we had our bloomers on, and were packed up in sweaters and coats, like sausages!!!! And the whole family of dogs was with us! Can you imagine us, bumping up and down on the crowded Main Street!!!!”

  • • •

  The summer before Andrée’s seventeenth birthday, in July and August 1919, she and Huguette took an outdoors trip with their mother, traveling north to a fishing club in Quebec, not far from the hometowns of Anna’s parents, and then to a resort area in the Maine woods near the Canadian border. Hotels and primitive camps lined Maine’s Rangeley Lakes, below Saddleback Mountain, a few years before the area became well known to hikers on the new Appalachian Trail.

  On the trip, Andrée fell ill, first with a simple fever, which quickly grew worse and was accompanied by a severe headache. Anna and the girls were two days’ travel from home, far from the quarantine suite in the tower at 962 Fifth Avenue. Their father’s personal physician, William Gordon Lyle, rushed up from New York to assist the local doctor. For four days, Andrée lay ill at a house on Rangeley Plantation, on the south side of the lake, with Anna and Huguette by her side.

  The doctor found that Andrée’s ailment was “probably tubercular meningitis,” a devastating inflammation of the membranes covering the brain and spinal cord. It would be twenty-five years before penicillin would be reported as effective in treating meningitis. On August 7, 1919, Louise Amelia Andrée Clark, the firstborn child of Anna and W.A. and the older sister of Huguette, died a week before her seventeenth birthday. W.A., who had been in Butte on business, was speeding eastward on the Empire State Express when he received a cable with the news.

  The funeral service “was most beautiful,” W.A. wrote to a friend. “We had the entire boy choir of the church,” W.A. wrote. “We laid the precious body away in the mausoleum in Woodlawn Cemetery.”

  The Episcopalian rector from St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue read W.A.’s favorite poem, “Thanatopsis,” a young man’s meditation on death, from Andrée’s poetry book. The poet, William Cullen Bryant, argues that death should not be feared, for there is great company in it.

  Yet not to thine eternal resting-place

  Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish

  Couch more magnificent.

  Thou shalt lie down

  With patriarchs of the infant world, with kings,

  The powerful of the earth, the wise, the good,

  Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,

  All in one mighty sepulcher.

  W.A. wrote to his brother Ross, “Mrs. Clark is very sad, but very brave.” And to a business associate he wrote, “Mrs. Clark has wonderful fortitude, and little Huguette is also very courageous.”

  • • •

  After the funeral, W.A. and Anna discovered Andrée’s diary, which revealed that their older daughter had had an unhappy childhood, more desperately unhappy than they had suspected. She’d had great difficulty making the transition from France to Am
erica. Her father told a friend how devastated he was by reading it.

  The diary brightened, however, when Andrée wrote about her Tuesday Girl Scout meetings. She told of the camaraderie of hiking with the girls and of the uplifting effect of being allowed to do a task however she decided was best. She included a folded manuscript of a story she had written, “The Four Little Flowers,” with characters from Sun Flower Troop.

  “Scouting has been a hand in the dark to me,” she wrote. “It has changed me from a moody, thoughtless girl, and has shown me what life may be.”

  Her family sought solace in making a contribution to the Girl Scouts. The Clarks knew an area around Scarsdale, north of the city, where they often spent weekends with W.A.’s daughter Katherine in her twenty-one-room manor house. Looking for a proper memorial, Anna and W.A. helped scour the countryside for just the right spot. In 1919, they donated 135 acres in the village of Briarcliff Manor, where primitive land with a brook and a small lake became the first national Girl Scout camp, called Camp Andrée Clark.

  Thirteen-year-old Huguette stood grimly at her father’s side as he handed over the deed to the camp at a Scout office in the city. While sixteen uniformed Girl Scouts sat or kneeled on the floor, Huguette stood. Not a Scout herself, she was dressed in city clothes, with her long blond hair flowing down her back toward the fur cuffs of her coat. During the ceremony, she held her emotions in check, resting her hand reassuringly on her eighty-year-old father’s shoulder.

  For the rest of Huguette’s life, members of her family would speculate about the great emotional trauma she must have felt at her sister’s death. She had lost her only sibling, her playmate, an older sister with whom she had spent her entire life. In later years, at her bedside on Fifth Avenue, she kept a photograph of her sister in a small, oval Cartier frame. She also kept Andrée’s letter to their mother from the year before she died, and a lock of Andrée’s hair.

  Camp Andrée, as the girls called it, became a progressive camp, democratic in spirit, with the girls directing many of their own activities. Each group of girls had its own rustic quarters; there was no dining hall, no dormitory, though Anna made certain that the camp had a small hospital and a nurse. Still in existence today, the camp has trained thousands of Scout leaders and given generations of girls a summer experience of close community in the wilderness.

  For years after Andrée’s death, Girl Scouts wrote letters to Anna, thanking her for making it possible for them, too, to see what life may be.

  CULTIVATE IMAGINATION

  HUGUETTE’S UPBRINGING was already artistically strong, with music lessons, painting lessons, and a family home that was essentially a public art gallery. Her sense of imagination was enhanced by her high school education in the 1920s at Miss Spence’s Boarding and Day School for Girls.

  Miss Spence’s was one of the favorite schools in Manhattan for the daughters of the elite. Admission was a patent of American nobility. The same year that Huguette enrolled as a day student at the school, three of her half-nieces, her peers in age, enrolled as well. These were the daughters of Huguette’s half-brother Charlie. Karine McCall, the daughter of one of those nieces, Agnes Clark Albert, said that Agnes had been told by her mother to keep an eye on Huguette, to watch out for her, as though Huguette needed protection. Her protector, Andrée, was gone.

  Classes at Miss Spence’s met in a converted brownstone residence on West Fifty-Fifth Street, where the chauffeurs of the Carnegies, Fricks, and Clarks lined up at the curb.

  The school’s lively, artistic tone was set by its founder, Clara Spence, a Scottish actress who loved to read Shakespeare aloud and could be talked into dancing the Highland fling. Miss Spence emphasized standards of scholarship, for this was the highest education most of her young ladies would receive. Of the fifty-six students in Huguette’s class of 1925, only fourteen were aiming for college. The rest, including Huguette, were on the marriage track. Within a few years after Huguette’s class of 1925, that ratio would reverse, with most Spence girls headed to college. Along with elocution and Latin, Huguette and her classmates studied sewing and practical math, needed to manage a home budget. The sewing class, in which the girls made baby clothes to be pinned into a scrapbook, was a Spence tradition.

  The teaching was warm and the curriculum innovative, with options such as fencing lessons. The art classes appealed particularly to Huguette. She recalled that one of her dance teachers was Isadora Duncan, known for her modern choreography, her outspokenness about political and sexual matters, and her flowing silk scarves, including the one that killed her when it became caught in the wheel of an automobile.

  Miss Spence’s motto for her school was the Latin “Non scholae sed vitae discimus,” meaning “Not for school but for life we learn.” She urged her ladies to emphasize more than just book knowledge, more than reason:

  I beg you to cultivate imagination, which means to develop your power of sympathy, and I entreat you to decide thoughtfully what makes a human being great in his time and in his station. The faculty of imagination is often lightly spoken of as of no real importance, often decried as mischievous, as in some ways the antithesis of practical sense, and yet it ranks with reason and conscience as one of the supreme characteristics by which man is distinguished from all other animals.… Sympathy, the great bond between human beings, is largely dependent on imagination—that is, upon the power of realizing the feelings and the circumstances of others so as to enable us to feel with and for them.

  Decorum, morals, and good judgment were expected. The girls wore simple skirts extending at least three inches below the knee. Parents were urged to send their girls to school without extravagances: no jewelry except a simple ring and a simple pin, no perfume, no scented face powder, no lipstick. Church attendance was mandatory. Spence girls curtsied to their elders. One student who received an overly affectionate telegram from her beau was surprised to learn that she had two choices, either leave school or announce her engagement.

  Each spring the girls took turns playing host at a round of teas for their classmates. Huguette threw other parties as well. “Miss Huguette Clark, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. William Andrews Clark of 962 Fifth Avenue entertained a party of girlfriends yesterday at Sherry’s,” the popular restaurant, The New York Times reported in May 1922, when Huguette was nearly sixteen.

  At commencement, as the entire school filed in to Mozart’s “March of the Priests” from The Magic Flute, the youngest led the procession. Huguette’s commencement was held at the old Waldorf-Astoria, where in five years would rise a new structure, the Empire State Building. In a photo, the girls are dressed all in white, holding flowers. Everyone has the newly fashionable short hairstyle. Huguette would become the last surviving member of the Spence class of 1925, but we do have a few memories of her from classmates, secondhand.

  Eighteen-year-old Huguette, middle front, with her 1925 graduating class at Miss Spence’s Boarding and Day School for Girls. Even at the most exclusive school in New York, she was far wealthier than nearly all of her classmates. (illustration credit5.1)

  Louise Watt, a banker’s daughter, recalled having good times with her, including a clandestine visit to a speakeasy—the proper Spence girls exploring the city during Prohibition, when whom should they see at a table but Jimmy Walker, the mayor of New York. Louise described Huguette as her best friend.

  A different portrait came from Dorothy Warren, a classmate from an old Yankee family and a year older than Huguette though in the same grade. She described her as always polite and gracious but often not socializing with the other girls. Most of the Spence girls had visited one another’s houses, but none had been to the Clark home. Warren said that Huguette was something of an odd bird, and the girls who knew her only casually were flummoxed by her. Was she too proud of her family, which was so much richer and better traveled than most of the other families? Was she embarrassed about her father’s wealth or his failed campaign for social standing? The other girls couldn’t quite figure
her out.

  WITHOUT POMP OR CEREMONY

  ONE OF THE PHOTOGRAPHS in Huguette’s album, one she particularly liked to share in her later years, shows her in an American Indian costume and feathered headdress, sitting beside her father. She looks about seven years old, which would make him about seventy-four. The family was on a sojourn in Greenwich, Connecticut, known for its art colony. Huguette had taken a fall while playing in the yard and had cried a bit before the photo was taken. Her eyes are puffy, but she’s smiling, and her arm is draped across the old man’s shoulder. W.A. looks dapper in his black sport coat, white pants, and white nubuck shoes, his gray hair billowing as he hugs her proudly.

  Given Huguette’s shyness, in contrast to her outgoing father, it’s not surprising that there were Clark family stories claiming that W.A. wasn’t keen on her, even that he wasn’t actually her father, but these tales are belied by his warm mentions of her in his correspondence. In 1921, for example, W.A. wrote to a friend while he, Anna, and Huguette were on a Hawaiian vacation, describing with enthusiasm how mother and daughter sunned and rode surfboards at Waikiki Beach: “They take great delight in swimming and the beach at the Moana Hotel is very good. The board riding is particularly interesting to them.” Later he wrote, “They enjoy the swimming very much and go in generally twice a day.” In this letter, he refers to his daughter affectionately as Huguetty.