Empty Mansions

by Bill Dedman

  In truth, Huguette focused more attention on her fellow Spence alumnae, playing hostess for luncheon parties for her debutante friends at Pierre’s French restaurant. A newspaper society photograph inadvertently captured her. The photo concentrates on a beautiful young woman in a sleeveless gown, seated at the center of a party, smiling as two tuxedoed young men ask her to dance. The woman is not Huguette, although she is in the photo, sitting off to the side, out of the limelight. And in the background of the party, another man sits by himself. His name is Bill Gower.

  In December 1927, Mrs. W. A. Clark announced the engagement of her daughter, Huguette Marcelle, to William MacDonald Gower. Bill was a year older than Huguette, a tall, not unattractive man. They had known each other since they were children. There are signs that it may have been an arranged marriage, an attempt by Anna to find someone close to the family to wed her quiet daughter. Or it may have been an attempt to separate Huguette from any possible entanglement with Tadé Styka, her painting instructor. It could have just been time for marriage, and this was the young man she liked.

  This was not the usual Clark marriage. W.A.’s children from his first marriage had aimed higher, shooting for European royalty or its American equivalent. When Katherine married a descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, W.A. gave her a present of $4 million in real estate and issued six thousand invitations to her wedding, held just two weeks after he was forced to resign from the Senate.

  Huguette’s husband, Bill Gower, was a Princeton graduate and law student working as a clerk on Wall Street. They wed at Bellosguardo in 1928, when Huguette was twenty-two and Bill twenty-three. (illustration credit6.2)

  The Gowers were certainly not poor. They lived in suburban New Rochelle, had a Park Avenue apartment, and spent summers playing pinochle and tennis in Lake Placid, New York. Bill had been on the track team and active in theatricals at the elite Trinity School in Manhattan and then received his Princeton degree in history at age twenty, one of the youngest members of the class of 1925. While studying law at Columbia, he was employed at thirty dollars a week at the firm of J. & W. Seligman, an investment bank that had financed Jay Gould’s railroads and the Panama Canal. While the bride-to-be was a Roman Catholic and the daughter of a Democratic senator, her fiancé was a Presbyterian and a Republican.

  Bill was also the son of W. A. Clark’s accountant, William Bleckly Gower, the longtime comptroller of the United Verde and twenty other mining companies. As part of his service to the Clarks, the elder Gower had presented a paper at the American Mining Congress in Denver in 1920 strategizing how to fight the onerous burden of taxes placed on W.A. and other mine owners by World War I, the same war that was making them rich. Because Huguette was now a co-owner of the Clark empire she had inherited from her father, her employee would now be her father-in-law.

  IN CONVERSATION WITH HUGUETTE

  Huguette recalled the 1925 earthquake in Santa Barbara in a conversation in August 1999, as she had been watching TV news of the devastating earthquake in Turkey. She was nineteen when the quake struck California.

  “I was in Santa Barbara during the 1925 earthquake.… Thirteen people were killed.… The movie theater we used to go to—that all came down. Imagine! Many people would have been killed.… It was six in the morning, so many people were saved.”

  You were at Bellosguardo in Santa Barbara at the time? I asked.

  “Yes. That’s why Mother built another house, because it wasn’t very solid.… It was something, you know, all that shaking. Terrible, yes. But it was nothing in comparison to Turkey.”

  Huguette in her wedding gown, 1928. (illustration credit6.3)

  • • •

  Huguette had the experience of an elaborate society wedding in New York, but not as a bride. When she was seventeen, in January 1924, she was a bridesmaid for her half-niece, Katherine Morris Hall. And in 1928, Huguette was again a bridesmaid for a friend, Emily Hall Tremaine, who became a prominent art collector and patron of Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. Emily credited Huguette with introducing her to great art and the value of artistic expression. At Emily’s wedding, Huguette was dressed in a pink taffeta frock and a Juliet cap; she carried spring flowers.

  Her own wedding was a private one, held in Santa Barbara at the Clark summer home, Bellosguardo. W.A. and Anna had vacationed on the California coast with Huguette in 1923 and then decided to buy a home there. A few months after W.A.’s death in 1925, the home was shaken in the June earthquake, which burst a dam and started a fire, destroying much of Santa Barbara’s downtown. After the earthquake, Anna began making plans to renovate and expand the home, but it remained livable enough for Huguette’s wedding.

  Mr. and Mrs. William Gower were married by a Catholic priest on August 18, 1928. The bride wore a formal white gown of lace with a nearly endless cathedral train. The Santa Barbara newspaper, The Morning Press, struggled for any scraps of news: “Miss Clark and her mother have been at their Santa Barbara home, Bellosguardo, since their return from Europe early this summer and have taken an active part in the summer social life.… The wedding will be extremely quiet.”

  Her maid of honor, one of the few guests other than family, was the wife of Dr. Lyle, the Clark family physician. The groom was twenty-three, the bride twenty-two. A special car was ready for the honeymoon. Anna had bought a gray-green 1927 Rolls-Royce with silver door handles and a black leather top. It cost $25,750, or about $300,000 in today’s dollars. This was the Phantom I, a town car in which the driver sat out in the open air while the passengers enjoyed the comfort and quiet in the salon, as the rear passenger seat was called. The Clark chauffeur, Walter Armstrong, described driving Huguette and Bill around the West before the couple left from San Francisco on a honeymoon cruise to Hawaii, accompanied by the bride’s governess, Madame Sandré.

  Huguette and Bill were accosted by a newspaper photographer. They posed awkwardly. And then Huguette was trapped for a photo alone. She stands swathed in fur, clutching her handbag tightly, her usual strand of pearls around her neck, her wrists decorated by Cartier Art Deco bracelets of diamonds and emeralds. She looks most uncomfortable.

  This was not the last photograph taken of Huguette, but it was the last the public would see while she lived for the next eight decades.

  • • •

  At home again in New York, the newlyweds moved into her mother’s building, 907 Fifth Avenue, with their wedding gifts, including a fifteen-inch sterling silver serving platter with Huguette’s new monogram, “H.C.G.,” and their wedding date, “8-18-1928.” They took a subscription to Box 9 for matinees at the Metropolitan Opera, and Tadé Styka painted Bill Gower’s portrait.

  “No married couple,” the New York Herald opined, “ever started married life under more brilliant auspices.”

  Within nine months, the newspapers had caught on to a split. Bill was back with his parents on Park Avenue. A typical newspaper headline of the time read: “Why America’s $50,000,000 Heiress Cast Off Her $30-a-Week Prince Charming.”

  Some papers blamed the groom. “Those who should know whereof they speak tell me the cause for the failure of the union of nine months can be laid directly at young Gower’s door,” wrote a gossip columnist. Others said Huguette was simply interested in art, while he was interested in finance. The story among Huguette’s half-siblings was that she didn’t want what marriage implied, physically. The same bell was rung in a bitter tell-all biography of W. A. Clark and his family in 1939: “Huguette refused to consummate the marriage.” The author, William D. Mangam, must have gotten his information from his former employer and law school buddy, Huguette’s half-brother Will, who lived all the way across the country in Los Angeles.

  Yet Mangam may have been right. Seventy years later, Huguette would be asked about her brief marriage by her nurse, Hadassah Peri. An immigrant, the nurse summarized Huguette’s answer in broken English: “It didn’t stay long. On my honeymoon, I have to go home.”

  RENO-VATED

&nb
sp; TO FORMALLY END HER MARRIAGE, Huguette left New York by private railcar, headed for Reno, Nevada. Anna went with her. It was May 1930, nearly two years after her wedding, though the couple had already been separated for more than a year. Before leaving on the trip, Huguette completed the purchase of a painting, one of Monet’s Water Lilies, from a dealer in Paris.

  Divorces were difficult to obtain everywhere in the United States in the early 1900s, especially in heavily Roman Catholic states such as New York, where the only legal ground for dissolving a marriage was adultery. These restrictions presented a business opportunity for states willing to grant divorces easily with short residency requirements. Before Nevada had gambling, it had divorce. In 1927, it had reduced its residency rule to three months, solidifying the state’s status as “the Great Divide.” Before the decade ended, more than thirty thousand couples had “Reno-vated” their marriages.

  Newspapers speculated about the reasons for Huguette and Bill’s Reno divorce in 1930. This article says the heiress was more interested in art, and the young financial clerk more interested in making a fortune. The floor plan shows the Reno hotel floor Huguette and her mother occupied. (illustration credit6.4)

  Though the Clarks kept to themselves for their three months in Reno, their desire for privacy attracted attention. The town usually yawned at wealthy divorce vacationers—Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., had made do in Reno with a single room—but Huguette and Anna rented an entire floor of the fashionable Riverside Hotel, arriving with a retinue of six servants. One headline summarized crisply, “Reno Agog.”

  The deed was done on August 11, 1930, with a quick visit to court. Bill did not appear to contest the divorce, which in the court papers was ascribed to his alleged desertion.

  Her divorce secured, Huguette sailed again from San Francisco to Honolulu, this time with her mother, on a reverse Hawaiian honeymoon.

  DISSOLUTION

  THE W. A. CLARK BUSINESS EMPIRE was not built for longevity, collapsing soon after its founder handed it to his children.

  While his Gilded Age contemporaries typically operated through hierarchies of executives and managers, creating vast corporate entities, W.A. ran his companies as essentially sole proprietorships, which he ruled autocratically. Having attended to every detail of his companies personally W.A. failed in succession planning.

  In August 1928, three years after W.A. died, his heirs cashed out of the Clark interests in Montana, selling out to his longtime opponent, the Anaconda Company, which had taken over the Daly interests. Now the Clarks had no real connection to Montana except Will’s lakefront lodge. They still held the family’s largest asset, the United Verde copper mine in Arizona.

  Sons were expected to take over a business, but W.A.’s two sons were dissolute in their personal habits and enthusiasms. And they were not blessed with their father’s longevity.

  Charlie Clark, the older son and chairman of the United Verde Copper Company, lived like a European prince. His drinking, gambling, and womanizing were well chronicled. He had his own private racetrack at his San Mateo estate, El Palomar, and the longest private railcar ever built, which he sold to Howard Hughes. Charlie married three times and gave hardly anything to charity. He died of pneumonia in April 1933 in New York, at age sixty-one, having never achieved the sobriety his father hoped for him.

  His younger brother had pursuits of a more intellectual sort. W.A. Jr., known as Will, had a law degree from the University of Virginia, ran minor industries with his father’s financing in Montana, and was vice president of the United Verde. After settling in Los Angeles in 1907, Will built an elaborate jewel-box Italian Renaissance library with rare books on shelves made of copper. He specialized in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature, and also built perhaps the finest collection pertaining to Oscar Wilde. A music lover and skilled violinist, Will founded the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in 1919 and subsidized it for its first eight years of operation. He was also a major donor in the construction of the Hollywood Bowl, an outdoor amphitheater.

  Will died in June 1934 at age fifty-seven of a heart attack at his Mowitza Lodge in Montana. At his funeral in Los Angeles, his father’s favorite poem, “Thanatopsis,” was read by a Shakespearean actor. He was laid to rest in the most exquisite private mausoleum in Los Angeles, on an island in the center of a scenic pond at Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery.

  Will’s reputation was marred after his death by the tell-all biography published by a college friend and former employee, William Mangam. Will was labeled as a binge drinker and a profligate and reckless homosexual and chaser of much younger men. Such claims were more shocking in the Los Angeles of the 1930s than today, and their truth has not been established. Mangam made other conjectures that turned out to be wrong. We have only his word, because Will’s papers were burned after his death.

  His generosity is better documented. He willed his home compound and his library to the public institution that became the University of California, Los Angeles. He gave a building to the University of Nevada, Reno, to honor his first wife, and another to the University of Virginia to honor his second. A statue of Beethoven marks Will’s founding of the Philharmonic—in unusual fashion for a Clark, he said he didn’t want a statue of himself. The statue now stands forlornly in a remote corner of Pershing Square, a gathering area for the city’s homeless.

  Will Clark left little to his relatives, and a large share of his estate went to the seventeen-year-old son of his housekeeper. George Palé, child of a Basque immigrant whose husband had abandoned her, was eight or nine when he met Will, who paid for his schooling. They spent most weekends together, and George spent weeks during the summer at the lodge in Montana. After Will’s own son died in 1932, Will began to talk of adopting George, with George’s mother’s permission. He began signing his letters “Your father” and “Daddy Clark.” He also referred to George fondly as “Sonny” and “General Pershing,” reflecting the family’s fondness for the general who saved France. Will’s letters to young George show a touching paternal love. George explained, “Mr. Clark told me that I filled a void in his heart after the death of his son.” After receiving his inheritance, George married a trombonist’s daughter from the Los Angeles Philharmonic and named his first son Clark.

  The family’s best hope for an executive had been Will’s only child, the manager of the United Verde. W. A. Clark III was known as Billy, or within the family as Tertius, the Latin word for third. In May 1932, at age twenty-nine, W. A. Clark III died while taking flying lessons with Jack Lynch, a former barnstorming buddy of Charles Lindbergh. It’s not clear who was at the controls, but Clark and Lynch were practicing flying blind, with the windshield covered, just as Lindbergh had flown from New York to Paris in 1927 with a gas tank blocking his forward view. They crashed near Clemenceau, Arizona, not far from the United Verde mine. Tertius’s young wife saw the plane go down.

  This run of male self-destruction left the empire in the hands of W.A.’s daughters, who showed little interest in business. Katherine died in 1933, May had no husband or son with business experience, and Huguette was in her twenties.

  Although copper was at a historic low price during the Depression days of 1935, May and Huguette sold off the United Verde mine in Arizona. The last mine of W. A. Clark, who had built a model company town with good healthcare and fair wages for his workers, was sold to the Phelps Dodge Corporation, notorious for its anti-union activity.

  W. A. Clark’s empire had been dissolved, and his name drifted toward obscurity. The abandoned home of his grandson W.A. III outside the model mining town of Clarkdale remained vacant for eighty years. It was eventually used as a set for a low-budget film about a haunted brothel and in 2010 was destroyed by fire.

  • • •

  In Montana, the legacy of W. A. Clark is still debated.

  First, mining is a proud part of the state’s history. Fourteen steel structures from the mines still rise over Butte today. These headframes were used to
support the ten-ton cables that hoisted men, mules, and equipment in and out of the mines. The men called them gallows frames, employing the dark humor of workers toiling in a deadly environment. But they are the symbols of Butte as surely as the Eiffel Tower is Paris.

  Butte is still paying for its copper past. The Clark Fork is today America’s largest Superfund environmental disaster site. The Clark Fork ends its 479-mile journey at the Pend Oreille River, where W.A. hauled the mail, exclaiming at the beauty, “The firmament sheweth His handiwork.” It begins that journey as Silver Bow Creek, near the Butte mines. Water and wind spread the copper arsenic, cadmium, nickel, and lead, from the mines and smelters of Butte and Anaconda more than a hundred miles downstream, killing fish and fouling drinking water. Remediation of the watershed has been under way for thirty years, at a cost of nearly a billion dollars. One can still find blue-green sediment alongside the river.

  Some locals lay more of the blame on Marcus Daly and his Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which remained in business longer and left more reminders. There’s “the Stack,” a massive brick smokestack built in 1919 and still standing in Anaconda, northwest of Butte, a relic nearly sixty stories tall and easily large enough to fit the Washington Monument inside it. Today the Stack is the centerpiece of Anaconda Smoke Stack State Park, a monument too toxic to allow any visitors close by.

  The successor to Daly’s Anaconda Company turned several Butte neighborhoods into an open strip mine, the Berkeley Pit, in 1955. After W.A.’s Columbia Gardens burned in a suspicious fire in 1973, the pit expanded, gobbling up the gardens so dear to W.A. and the community. The new owners, the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO), shut down the mine in 1982 in the face of foreign competition, but the Berkeley Pit remained, slowly filling with water contaminated with sulfuric acid, arsenic, and lead. Now it’s a massive lake, a Superfund disaster site with a viewing stand for tourists. Hundreds of migrating snow geese died after landing in the pit, so recorded gunfire is played at intervals to keep birds away.