Empty Mansions

by Bill Dedman

  Huguette hugs her dapper father on a family weekend in Connecticut about 1912. He showed great affection for his youngest child, whom he called Huguetty. She called him Papa. (illustration credit5.2)

  IN CONVERSATION WITH HUGUETTE

  Huguette in 1999 described her memories of a family trip to Hawaii. Even at age ninety-three, her memory was excellent, as she remembered clearly the name of the beautiful trees in Honolulu, and the name of the handsome Olympic champion who took them out paddling on surfboards. I had begun by asking if she’d traveled to the islands.

  Huguette: Oh yes, I was there.… I went there several times.

  Paul: You traveled with your family there?

  Huguette: With my father, in 1915. We went to Honolulu at Waikiki Beach. It was lovely there! I think it was more pleasant in those days, because it wasn’t so built-up.

  Paul: It’s very commercial now.

  Huguette: Very commercial.

  Paul: Yes. Was the Royal Hawaiian Hotel built at that time?

  Huguette: Yes, that’s where we were, the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.

  Paul: Oh, how nice!

  Huguette: Is it still there?

  Paul: It’s still there, yes, it is. And the other one, I think it’s called the Awani, or something like that, is also still there.

  Huguette: That’s the one where we went in 1915! The Moana Hotel. Is it still there, too?

  Paul: Yes, in fact Leslie [my daughter] said she was there just recently.…

  Huguette: Did you ever see the rainbow shower blossoms? They’re beautiful! They’re called Rainbow Shower.

  Paul: It’s a blossom? On a tree, you mean?

  Huguette: Yes.

  Paul: I don’t think so. How did your father enjoy Hawaii? Did he like it over there?

  Huguette: He enjoyed it. He used to go in the water. He went swimming there.

  Paul: With all his high-finance and business activity, was he able to have some fun, too?

  Huguette: Oh yes. We used to surfboard ride with Kahanamoku, you know. The Hawaiians, they used to take us out on the surfboard. Duke Kahanamoku, he was the champion swimmer at the time.… Because, you see, they used to have sharks around there. And if you go with them, you’d be more safe. Sometimes the sharks would come through the coral reef.

  And then, as she often did, she ended the call abruptly but cheerfully.

  Huguette: Well, nice talking with you, Paul. I won’t keep you.… And I’ll talk to you soon again. I’ll get you on the phone. Bye-bye.

  W.A.’s wife and children showed him great affection as well. A relative recalled Anna snuggling up to the old man and tugging on his whiskers playfully, with frolicsome affection.

  As W.A. passed his eightieth birthday, his weight began to fall, from his usual 125 to about 108. He continued to walk up to five miles a day, and he continued smoking his cigars. He remained devoted to his business correspondence on “the Clark interests,” approving expenditures on political committees, deflecting requests to give to colleges and convents. But he was growing weaker, and in 1922 he signed his last will and testament.

  That year, W.A. traveled to France with Anna and Huguette. They had been forced to wait four years after the end of the Great War until the mines were cleared from the French coast. Forever a friend of France, W.A. laid roses at the new Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe. In the photograph from that day, he looks noticeably weaker. This would be his last trip to France.

  By 1925, W.A. was no longer going to his office at 20 Exchange Street, off Wall Street, instead having his mail brought to him at home. “Becoming vaguer all the time,” he seemed “not to grasp matters regularly,” his son Will wrote in January of that year. W.A., who shunned automobiles after a couple of bad accidents, also had hurt his leg severely in a fall while running to catch a bus.

  Then a cold turned worse, and he was dead within a few days. He died on March 2, 1925, at age eighty-six, attended by Dr. William Gordon Lyle, the same doctor who had tried to save Andrée. Anna, Huguette, and most of the children from his first marriage were by his side.

  “Ex-Senator Clark, Pioneer in Copper, Dies of Pneumonia,” read the front-page headline in The New York Times. The headline continued, “His Career Picturesque. Went to Montana with Ox Team and Acquired One of Biggest Fortunes in America.”

  W.A.’s last will and testament called for a “decent and Christian burial in accordance with my condition in life, without undue pomp or ceremony.” More than three hundred people gathered for a service at the Clark mansion, in the main art gallery on the second floor, under his beloved Corot landscapes. “Thanatopsis” was read aloud, as it had been at Andrée’s funeral, and the thirty boy choristers from St. Thomas Church again sang as the organist played an old Scottish hymn: “Swift to its close, ebbs out life’s little day./Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away./Change and decay in all around I see./Oh, Thou who changest not, abide with me!”

  Among the more than four hundred floral tributes were orchids and lilies of the valley sent by President Calvin Coolidge, a Republican.

  Anna and Huguette joined the cortège, which also included W.A.’s children and grandchildren from his first marriage, accompanying his coffin north to the mausoleum he’d had built on the hilltop at a prominent intersection of Woodlawn Cemetery. His new neighbors were Pulitzer, Macy, Gould, and Woolworth.

  Andrew Carnegie’s theory was that life should be divided into three stages: education, making money, and giving all the money away. Little towns all across America still have Carnegie libraries. In a similar vein, Rockefeller Center in New York City and the Rockefeller Foundation carry on that name. Clark did donate to churches and universities, and he frequently opened his home for charity galas. He built Columbia Gardens for the people of Butte. However, he rejected a friend’s advice to endow a great university in Montana. Though he lived to age eighty-six, he never fully entered Carnegie’s third stage.

  Out of his estate, estimated to be worth between $100 million and $250 million, W.A.’s will left only about $600,000 in cash to charity, mostly to social welfare causes emblazoned with the Clark name: $350,000 to the Paul Clark Home for children in Butte, named for a son who died as a teenager; $100,000 to the Katherine Stauffer Clark Kindergarten School in New York, named for his first wife, including money to continue his custom of giving Christmas presents to the children and to allow the children to spend a fortnight each year in the country; $100,000 to benefit his company mining town of Clarkdale, Arizona; and $25,000 to the Mary Andrews Clark Memorial Home for Women, honoring his mother, in Los Angeles.

  W.A. also remembered friends from long ago in Montana. He left $25,000 for aged, indigent, and disabled Masons; $2,500 to the Masons in Deer Lodge to be used for charity; $25,000 to each of his sisters; $10,000 each to two nieces and nephews; $10,000 to his business managers in Butte; $5,000 to his managers in Missoula; $2,500 to the editor of his newspaper and political adviser in Butte; $2,500 to his butler; his gold watch and chain to his elder son, Charlie; and his gold match safe to his younger son, Will.

  To Anna he left a limited sum, as he had promised his children from his first marriage. She received $2.5 million in cash, the furnishings from the Paris apartment, and an unknown amount already paid to her as a result of an antenuptial agreement referred to in the will. Although it was not specified in the will, Anna also received Bellosguardo, their summer home ninety miles up the coast from Los Angeles, in Santa Barbara.

  The rest of the estate, including all of Clark’s mining companies and his business empire, was divided among his five surviving children, Huguette and her four older half-siblings.

  It’s impossible to know the exact amount of W.A.’s estate. For tax purposes in Montana, it was reported to be only $48 million. If one uses $250 million, a commonly cited value, he easily ranks among the fifty richest Americans ever, relative to the economy of his time. The only ones more affluent at Clark’s death during the Roaring Twenties were the oilman John
D. Rockefeller, the automobile maker Henry Ford, the banking Mellon brothers, and Cyrus H. K. Curtis, publisher of The Ladies’ Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post. To put it another way, W.A. died with personal wealth equivalent to one day’s share of the entire gross national product in 1925. On that scale, he would rank third today on the Forbes 400, far ahead of Google’s founders or Rupert Murdoch, behind only Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, and just ahead of the industrialist Koch brothers, who have brought a new spotlight to the influence of money in politics.

  As an indication of his great love for his youngest child, who was still a minor when he signed his will, W.A. took special care to provide for her. In addition to her housing and education, he specified that Huguette should receive an allowance, up to $90,000 a year, or in today’s dollars about $1.1 million, until she reached age twenty-one. He explained that he wanted her to experience “the actual handling and care of money during her minority.”

  Others also wanted that opportunity, as Huguette had to face false claims to the copper fortune. In 1926, three sisters from Missouri presented themselves to the probate court in Butte, saying they were the daughters of W. A. Clark. Their case was a farce. The man whom Alma, Effie, and Addie Clark described as their father, William Anderson Clark, had, like W.A., taught school in Missouri and was a Mason, but for most of his life he’d been a druggist in Stewartsville, Missouri, a dealer in books and notions, while William Andrews Clark had graced the halls of Congress and the galleries of Paris. As Charlie Clark testified, his father “would not have been content to operate a farm, to conduct a small business, a picayune business, when he was engaged in the big development that he was concerned with here in the West, banking, mining, the development of the country.”

  W. A. Clark’s family apparently wanted to make a show of defeating the claim of the three sisters so thoroughly as to scare off any others. Who knew what offspring W.A. might have in Iowa or Montana or New York. Witnesses to support Huguette and her half-siblings as the true heirs were found by Pinkerton detectives and brought out to Butte from Missouri and Pennsylvania on the train. They testified that the two men looked nothing alike, with the druggist standing about five feet eleven, weighing about 160 pounds, having brown hair, and usually being clean-shaven. The jury quickly rejected the three sisters’ claim, securing Huguette’s inheritance.

  “LOOK ON MY WORKS”

  W.A.’S WILL DIRECTED that his art go to America’s most prominent museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, just up Fifth Avenue from the Clark mansion. The Clark collection would be a permanent monument to his name—if the Met would accept certain terms. Here, even after death, W.A. overplayed his hand.

  The Met could have most of his art—more than 800 objects, including 225 paintings and drawings—if it agreed to three conditions: The entire collection must be kept together, in a separate gallery solely for its display, forever.

  The first problem, the Met’s leaders said, was that keeping the Clark collection together would prevent the pieces from being integrated into the Met by time period and style. Second, the collection was huge, and unless the Met bought Clark’s home, it had no suitable space for it.

  Left unsaid by the Met, but pointed out by the press in 1925, was the fact that Clark’s collection was also uneven—spectacular in some areas but no better in others than the pieces the Met already had, not to mention a few frauds or “misattributed” pieces, as was common in most private collections. His version of The Judgment of Midas was apparently not by Rubens but by another artist in Rubens’s studio. His Man with a Sheet of Music, attributed to Rembrandt, had the same uncertainty.

  Even Clark’s Hope Venus, it turned out, was a fake, or at least a copy. Lord Duveen had assured Clark that Canova made more than one version of the statue. But Clark’s Venus had been offered first to newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, who had seen the original in Florence and knew better than to buy this copy. After Clark’s death, his Venus was judged to have been made by an English artist after Canova’s death.

  People wrote to the Met, some urging that it accept the Clark collection, despite its flaws, even if it meant the Met had to buy the Clark mansion to hold it all. Others urged the Met not to indulge a millionaire’s vanity. After long debate, the Met said no.

  The collection was offered next to W.A.’s backup choice, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., a second-tier museum in a city with a culture more political than artistic. Clark was no stranger to the Corcoran, having donated $100,000 to endow prizes for American painters and serving as a trustee from 1914 until his death. He lent the museum eighty-six works in his collection to be shown while his New York house was under construction, taking President Theodore Roosevelt on a private tour there in 1904. Despite T.R.’s environmental regulations and his criticism of the “malefactors of great wealth,” he and W.A. shared a love of art.

  The Corcoran quickly said yes, eager to bring to Washington’s cultural swamps a major collection of European paintings. Although W.A. had insisted on a private space for his collection, he hadn’t left the museum any funds to pay for it. His heirs put up $700,000 for the Corcoran to add a neoclassical Clark Wing to its Beaux Arts building, located just southwest of the White House. Anna made a contribution, as did Huguette and her half-sisters, Mary Joaquina and Katherine. The Corcoran built a space exactly designed to fit W.A.’s golden room, Salon Doré. President Coolidge opened the W. A. Clark Collection in 1928. The heirs relaxed their father’s restrictions, agreeing that not all the collection had to be on view at once and pieces that turned out to be misattributed could be kept off the walls.

  In New York, the Clark house-museum was now without its art.

  ONE GOOD CIGAR

  THE DEATH OF HER FATHER meant that Huguette would soon be evicted from her childhood home. This, she may not have anticipated.

  W.A. had promised his grown children that his second wife, Anna, would not inherit the mansion. His will gave Anna and Huguette until June 1928 to move out. At his death in March 1925, only three more years were left. Anna didn’t need three years. The house was W.A.’s hobby, not hers, built for social standing, in which she had no interest. In less than a year, she and Huguette had moved into an apartment down Fifth Avenue.

  “The most remarkable dwelling in the world,” which had taken thirteen years to move from architect’s drawings to becoming the Clark family home, had been occupied for only fourteen years.

  These showgirls on the console of the pipe organ at the Clark mansion were hired by the home’s buyer to lead public tours before the demolition. (illustration credit5.3)

  Huguette and her half-siblings had trouble, however, finding a buyer for the mansion. Exactly as W.A. had told the property assessor, the Clark mansion was fit for only one owner. It was too expensive to operate, almost too expensive to tear down. Built for $7 million to $10 million, it sold for less than $3 million. The money from the sale was divided among the children.

  In the summer of 1927, the tower of the Clark mansion came down, making way for the next wave in architecture, an apartment building with elegant interiors. Other mansions on Fifth Avenue were disappearing as well. The palace of Vincent Astor, the château of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt—many mansions yielded to modernity. The Gilded Age was past.

  At auction, the Clark heirs sold a silver candelabra, hundreds of yards of red velvet wall hangings, porcelain soup plates with gold trim and the Clark crest—nearly half a million dollars in furnishings, or in today’s values more than $6 million. A collector took the bronze carriage gates to his farm. W.A.’s daughter May moved the walls of two entire rooms to her mansion on Long Island. The mirror-paneled walls and doors went to the city’s children’s hospital. When no buyer was found for the grand marble staircase, it was loaded onto a scow and dumped at sea.

  The Clark mansion’s marble staircase, made of creamy, ivory-tinted Maryland marble, lasted only sixteen years. (illustration credit5.4)

  Before the pinch ba
rs and hammers began the demolition, the new owner of the Clark mansion allowed curiosity seekers inside to gawk at its bones, stripped of its art collection and furnishings. Among more than sixteen thousand tourists paying fifty cents for a peek was Charlie Chaplin. To promote the tours, showgirls posed for photographs: eight showgirls standing in front of the dining room fireplace, then the same eight clowning on the pipe organ.

  Ah, the pipe organ. No one thought to auction off Anna and W.A.’s $120,000 marvel. The real estate developer asked the man handling the demolition if he could take it home, thinking the organ might look good in his home or his church. He was prepared to pay a few thousand dollars, but the wrecker told him, “You can have the organ, if you’ll give me a cigar.” The developer soon realized his folly. The pipe organ was too inextricably built into the walls of the house to be removed intact. It was dumped to fill a swamp in Queens. He had wasted a perfectly good cigar.

  NEW YORK’S DISAPPEARING MILLIONAIRES’ ROW

  Prominent residences on Fifth Avenue in 1914, shown as a walking tour from south to north. Dates indicate the life span of each building.

  1. William H. Vanderbilt. 1881–1942. Replaced by commercial buildings.

  2. Morton Plant. 1905–. Cartier since 1917.

  3. William Kissam Vanderbilt. 1882–1926. Replaced by a commercial building.

  4. Cornelius Vanderbilt II. 1882–1927. Replaced by Bergdorf Goodman.

  5. Elbridge Gerry. 1897–1929. Replaced by the Pierre hotel.

  6. Caroline Astor, son John Jacob Astor IV. 1896–1926. Replaced by Temple Emanu-El.

  7. George J. Gould. 1908–1961. Replaced by apartments.

  8. William C. Whitney. 1884–1942. Replaced by apartments.