Empty Mansions
Page 17
Among the charities, Anna left $125,000 to the Girl Scouts to support the memorial to her older daughter, Camp Andrée Clark; $100,000 to the Corcoran Gallery to support her husband’s art collection; and $100,000 each to the United Hospital Fund of New York, the Red Cross, and the Juilliard School of Music. Smaller bequests included $10,000 to the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement to serve the needy and $5,000 for the orphans at the Paul Clark Home in Butte.
Anna was interred in the mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery, the one with the image of W.A.’s first wife, Kate, on the brass door. She was laid to rest in a crypt next to W.A. and below Andrée.
At that moment, Huguette herself had no place to be buried. Every spot in the mausoleum was occupied. But Huguette was only fifty-seven years old. She would wait more than forty years to address this issue.
• • •
Writing to Etienne’s family in France about Anna’s death, Huguette was protective of their feelings, while masking her own grief. She cautioned that there was no need to upset any of their older relatives with such news: “It would be useless to give this great sorrow.”
Etienne comforted Huguette, making plans to visit her in New York. He wrote to her on October 14, 1963:
My dear friend Huguette: Your news of your mother passing filled me with sadness, but she left us only temporarily, and she is in a better place now with the angels, Andrée, her parents and God. She is probably happier since her last years were difficult. She will be with you forever, though there is emptiness for you now. Wish I could be with you and I want to come back as soon as possible. Her memory will always live among us, with her great kindness and courage. She will be a star in our lives. Heaven will have one more great soul, which will shine forever to bring light and guidance to your life. And on earth you will always have the ones who love you. I am so anxious to see you again, dear, dear Huguette. I am not forgetting your dear mother in my prayers, and also you, dear Huguette. I kiss you with all my heart, with much love. Your devoted, Etienne.
Huguette replied to this letter with a short telegram on October 30:
Thank you for your letter, dear Etienne, and for your words of sympathy which touched me very much. I am fine.… I wish Elisabeth a prompt recovery. Affectionate kisses. Huguette.
Her words seem more formal than his, less intimate. This may always have been the case, yet it’s worth noting that we have copies of only Huguette’s papers, not Etienne’s. We see only the confirmation copies of her telegrams, and do not have her letters. Of course, he also was married.
In a letter dated November 2, 1963, Etienne tells Huguette of his plan to have his wife, Elisabeth, and daughter, Marie-Christine, come to New York in the spring:
Thinking of you and your mother, I have a cold again, Elisabeth is staying here for the treatments which seem to help. She is helped by a nice country woman, so I will be able to leave in peace, and the cute little orphan we were entrusted with will keep her company. Once her treatments are finished and she is completely recovered, she and the little Marie-Christine will join me in New York. In the meantime I am going alone again and I can’t wait to be in New York. You know how I am split emotionally and how hard it is for me to be away so long, so I will come as soon as possible.… Here is a photo of Marie-Christine and my vegetable garden. Alas, my hair is so gray! Thinking of you and your dear mother who left such emptiness! See you soon …
He signed the letter, in English, “With much love always. Etienne.”
• • •
Huguette had projects to throw her grief into. First, she arranged to move into her mother’s apartment, spending much of the next year redecorating and updating Apartment 8W, while holding on to 12W. A.d before Etienne’s next visit she went on a clothes shopping binge. She was looking furiously for the right style, not by visiting one of the boutiques on Madison Avenue, one block from her home, but by sending telegrams to Paris. She contacted La Maison Jean Patou, the fashion designer, in an effort to find two-piece silk dresses, for summer and winter. She was especially eager, at age fifty-seven, to find styles that would be slimming. The house of Jean Patou was about to get a dose of the Huguette Clark experience.
Cable of March 19, 1965, to Mme. Peggy, Jean Patou, Paris:
The two-piece pleated silk dress is less slimming than the shantung dresses, which are perfect measurement-wise. Please make the black pleated silk dress that I ordered with 3 inches extra above and below the chest, and the belt looser. The skirt is fine. Try to make this dress in a style that would be as slimming as possible. With all my thanks.
• • •
Etienne did visit several times after Anna’s death, including at least one visit with his wife and daughter. On his way home from one of his trips, as he crossed the Atlantic, he described how difficult the parting was. On May 29, 1966, he wrote:
Very dear Huguette: It was wonderful to see you, even though it was too short.… It was hard to leave you. You are always in my thoughts and heart. Kisses … [In English] With much love, always, Etienne.
Marie-Christine, now in her fifties, said she remembers visiting Huguette at 907 Fifth Avenue when she was a child, with her father and mother. She said she can bring up only three details.
Tante Huguette was germophobic, afraid of catching an illness.
The long gallery in her apartment was completely lined with armchairs, each providing a seat for a doll.
After dinner, Marie-Christine had a delicious tarte aux pommes, the best apple tart she ever tasted.
• • •
Huguette also continued her financial support of Etienne and his extended family, spreading her generosity widely. From 1960 into the 2000s, she sent monthly bank drafts to half a dozen of Etienne’s relatives. She helped Etienne’s sad-sack younger brother, Henri, always starting a new agricultural venture while struggling as a bureaucrat. Huguette made sure that her physician saw all of Etienne’s family for checkups on his annual trips to Paris. She sent her handyman all the way to France to deliver vitamins and to help Etienne with the chores. After hearing that a drought had affected the cows in Normandy, she sent the family powdered milk.
Huguette established an account with Monsieur Cognin, the grocer at 42, rue Gambetta in Deauville, sending him orders for essentials and treats to be delivered to Etienne and his extended family. From 907 Fifth Avenue in New York, transatlantic telegraph cables, made of seven twisted strands of pure copper strung across the ocean floor, carried Huguette’s messages to the corner grocer 3,517 miles away. She even made sure to ask for the trading stamps, so the family could save on other purchases.
On July 2, 1962, she cabled to Monsieur Cognin:
Received your nice letter. I just sent you a little more than the price of the order because I would like to order four cartons of fat-free milk, a few bars of Cemoi chocolate, and also a can of instant chocolate Nesquik. With my thanks, Huguette Clark.
She also sent the family gifts, including the high-priced Rolleiflex cameras from Germany, the newest film projectors. She sent small televisions to her French friends so they could watch America’s Apollo space flights. From the fabled Parisian toy store Au Nain Bleu in Paris, she ordered thoughtful gifts for the children, suited to their ages: for the girls, a musical blue goblin, Barbie dolls, a bedroom mirror and dresser with little perfume bottles, porcelain boxes filled with jewels, and lots of bows and ribbons; for the boys, not only a train set but an entire wooden village.
The Villermont family was already grateful to America for defending their country in the great wars. “Without your country,” Etienne wrote in 1968, “there would be no more France.” But they were also grateful to their Tante Huguette. An older relative prayed for her on pilgrimages to Lourdes. Henri, Etienne’s brother, wrote in 1954, “I will never forget that you saved us from utter misery and that you eased our dear mother’s last years with your tireless kindness.… You distribute happiness every chance you get for the well-being and joy of others. It is an admirable form of ideal,
from which everyone must draw the most beautiful Christian virtue—forget the self in favor of the others. You practice this virtue incessantly.”
In 2001, when Huguette was ninety-five, Marie-Christine’s cousins made an illustrated French children’s book for her called Une Princesse Merveilleuse (A Marvelous Princess). They wrote:
Once upon a time there was a princess who loved children very much. Every Christmas, she gave them lots of wonderful presents, and every time, the children were very happy. This princess loved the children’s toys a lot, and she would have liked to get presents, too. And this year in 2001, she received some mail. In this letter there was a gift. This gift was made by children. These children had made a book, the drawings and story were created by them. The princess was very, very, very happy. It was the first time that she had received a gift from the children who had made the book. And this princess, guess what her name was? Tante Huguette.
When Huguette got too hard of hearing to talk with Etienne’s family on the phone, she had a friend make the calls to swap news, which from the French side usually involved complaints about transit workers on strike—except when the postal workers were on strike.
Marie-Christine continued to correspond with Huguette for many years, and Huguette counseled her through a difficult divorce, praising her for her bravery in striking out on her own. She says she doesn’t know what her father’s relationship with Huguette was, except that they were friends. She has now seen her father’s correspondence with Huguette. In a letter dated September 5, 1966, apparently after a gap in communication, Etienne describes returning to the beach at Trouville, where he and Huguette were children together:
Very dear Huguette: It was wonderful to receive your cable. Although your note “as well as possible” is worrisome, this note from you was a flower in my life as it is very hard not to hear from you, since in spite of our separate lives, my heart always beats with you. The years will always live.…
On the Trouville-Deauville beach, I thought a lot about you and your mother while looking at the same place where your vacation home was. The houses have been remodeled so it’s not possible to identify which house from among the others. Very nice restorations. In spite of the rain, there were lots of families and children.… I kiss you with all my heart. With much love, always, Etienne.
• • •
Andrew Etienne Allard de Villermont died on April 8, 1982, in one of the nicer neighborhoods of Cannes on the French Riviera. He was seventy-seven. A funeral Mass was said in a church in the wealthiest district of Paris. Etienne was entombed in the ancient monumental cemetery in Rouen, the historic capital city of Normandy, an hour from the beach at Trouville where Huguette met the young marquis.
As it turns out, Etienne was not a marquis, despite being called so by the newspapers for years. His family held no noble title, though it had come close. Known for centuries as the Allards, the family had been on the way to nobility—Etienne’s great-great-great-grandfather bought an office as adviser to the king, but didn’t hold the post long enough—when the French Revolution interrupted their ascent. Etienne’s obituary, placed by Elisabeth and Marie-Christine, makes no mention of nobility. In Paris, the association of French noble families does not list his family. In the early 1900s Etienne’s father added a gloss, changing the family name to Villermont, which to French ears would have suggested nobility.
Though Etienne’s tomb is near those of the novelist Flaubert, the artist Duchamp, and many people with noble-sounding names, his position even after death is insecure. His spot in the cemetery is not guaranteed forever, but lasts only as long as someone pays to maintain his monument.
Huguette would outlive Etienne by twenty-nine years. She continued for nearly all that time to wire money to his widow, Elisabeth. The two women carried on a fond correspondence, sending love and kisses with all their hearts.
THE LITTLE PEOPLE
THE HOUSE OF CHRISTIAN DIOR held fashion shows at the palatial French consulate in New York, just up Fifth Avenue from Huguette’s apartment, with models showing the latest Parisian fashions. On the afternoon of one of these shows in the late 1950s, a familiar name showed up on the guest list.
“Mrs. Huguette Clark!” exclaimed the consul general, Baron Jacques Baeyens, who had married Huguette’s niece. “Look, she’s not going to come. She’s my aunt, and she never goes out.”
The representative from Christian Dior replied, “Oh, yes, she will. She wants to see the dresses to dress her dolls.”
And she did. Huguette, then just past fifty, walked the three blocks up Fifth Avenue to the consulate to view the latest fashions from Paris.
• • •
Huguette Clark, who grew up in the biggest house in New York, was, like her father, a meticulous designer of extravagant houses, only on a smaller scale. These were dollhouses, but more than dollhouses. These one-of-a-kind tabletop models were story houses, theaters with scenes and characters painted on the walls. And like her father with his art collection, Huguette spared no expense. She commissioned religious houses with Joan of Arc, forts with toy soldiers, cottages with scenes from old French fables, and house after house telling her favorite fairy tales: Rapunzel, the long-haired maiden trapped in the tower. Sleeping Beauty, the princess stuck in sleep until a handsome prince awakens her with a kiss. Rumpelstiltskin, with the girl forced to spin straw into gold.
Focused on every detail, Huguette tried to get the artisans, some of them up to four thousand miles away, to be more careful with their measurements when they made her dollhouses. The houses had to be in proportion to the dolls that went with them. The following cable is typical, sent when Huguette was fifty-eight years old to an artist who made small, posable dolls based on fairy-tale characters and sold them door-to-door in a Bavarian town.
Cable of October 6, 1964, to Mrs. Edith von Arps, Burgkunstadt, West Germany:
Rumpelstiltskin house just arrived. It is beautifully painted but unfortunately is not same size of last porridge house received. Instead of front of house being 19¾ of an inch wide it is only 15½ inch wide. Please make sure religious house has front of house 19¾ of an inch wide. Would also like shutters on all the windows. Would like another Rumpelstiltskin house with same scenes with scene where hay is turned to gold added as well as scene before hay is turned but with wider front and also wooden shutters on every window. With many thanks for all your troubles and kindest regards. Huguette Clark, 907 Fifth Ave NYC.
• • •
Rudolph Jaklitsch, born in Austria-Hungary in 1910, immigrated to New York from Yugoslavia before World War II and fought in the U.S. Army during the war. Trained as a cabinetmaker and restorer of antiques, Rudolph was hired by Huguette after the war to work on her dollhouses. When the houses arrived from their makers, Huguette would send them to Rudolph’s apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, for modifications. His wife, Anna, made the little curtains.
Their daughter Linda Kasakyan recalls the frequent phone calls at home in the evening. It would be Madame Clark with an idea for a change to one of her houses. Then five minutes later, another instruction. The phone might ring six times in a night. Rudolph would say, it would be so much easier to know what she wanted if he could sit down with her. But she would talk with him only on the phone or through her apartment door. Rudolph worked for Huguette for thirty years and saw her only twice.
His daughter said it bothered Huguette terribly if the measurements weren’t right. She liked to place dolls in the houses and move them through various activities—drinking tea, walking in the garden, having conversations. Sometimes, however, the ceilings in the houses were too low for the dolls. One time Huguette called Rudolph with an urgent problem:
“The little people are banging their heads!”
• • •
In her dollhouse building, as in her many other art projects, Huguette blended an artistic sensibility and imagination with a meticulous drive for precision, a commanding self-assurance, and an overwhelming generosity.
Thank you for your kind letter. I would like that the Sleeping Beauty house tale not continue after the kiss as I do not like the rest of the story. I also would like an interior staircase going from the first to the second floor, and a detachable garden with rose bushes (with thorns) placed in the garden and on the surrounding fence. Also, the house should be able to be opened on one side, but not the garden side. The figurines should be sketched according to the models you received, in color, with some fairies wearing pointy headdresses.
In the rest of the story, Sleeping Beauty and the prince marry and have children. An ogress demands that the children and princess be cooked and served to her, though they are saved. Disney’s animated films also left out that part, agreeing with Huguette’s editing.
Huguette also ordered dollhouses from Au Nain Bleu in Paris. When she didn’t get what she wanted, she’d send it back, politely but firmly. For example, in a cable to Au Nain Bleu dated June 14, 1963, she wrote:
Received the wall and garden. Unfortunately, they are useless. The door for the wall being in front of the elevator, it is impossible to open it. This door should open into the kitchen. The second-floor windows are not necessary as there is so little space to place the furniture. The window to the left of the door is the only one that is well-placed. The measurements of the garden are not the same as in the model I sent you, and the sides are too short. I am sending it back to you. With all my thanks. Huguette Clark.
She desired not only the dolls and dollhouses but also the accessories that gave the appearance of daily life. For a breakfast scene, she cabled Au Nain Bleu asking for tiny French breads: croissants, brioches, madeleines, mille-feuilles, and turnovers. But she wasn’t done. In a May 7, 1956, cable to the store, she wrote: