Empty Mansions

by Bill Dedman

  Huguette said she was afraid she might be kidnapped or killed if there were another revolution, sounding as if a guillotine were always ready for the highborn. After all, to the long-lived Huguette, the French Revolution was only a little more than one lifetime before her birth.

  ANDREE’S COTTAGE

  ENCHANTED FOR MOST of the twentieth century by the mystery of the Clark summer estate hidden on a hill, the residents of Santa Barbara created their own legends of Bellosguardo. One day in 1986, Huguette’s California attorney sent to her New York attorney a detailed report of misinformation spread as a new trolley bus for tourists made its daily run past East Beach toward Montecito. The tour guide explained over the loudspeaker that the Clarks were the owners of the Anaconda Copper Company. (False.) The Clarks didn’t think they were going to be able to have children. (False.) So they adopted a French orphan. (False.) She never married. (False.) And the daughter maintains a home in Paris. (False.)

  Huguette’s New York attorney discussed with her what action to take to correct these falsehoods. None, she said. Wanting to maintain her privacy at all costs, she agreed that they wouldn’t make a fuss. Still, from time to time, the California attorney sent his secretary to ride the Montecito trolley, just to monitor the tour guides.

  Though the details were all wrong, the legend of Bellosguardo was, in essence, true. The mansion had been frozen in Huguette’s memory, unchanged since the Truman administration. It was the most important place to Huguette, her mother’s place.

  The name Bellosguardo (“beautiful lookout,” pronounced BELL-os-GWAR-doe) was attached to the coastal estate on this oceanfront mesa by the Oklahoma oilman William Miller Graham and his wife, Lee Eleanor Graham, who built a 25,000-square-foot Italian villa there in 1903. One party thrown by the theatrical Mrs. Graham included a psychic, a juggler, and a trained monkey. The estate was used several times as a film set during the silent film era, serving as a Roman emperor’s palace for the 1913 one-reeler In the Days of Trajan.

  After a divorce and bankruptcy put Lee Eleanor Graham into a house-poor situation, she leased Bellosguardo to Frederick W. Vanderbilt, grandson of the Commodore. The next summertime tenants were Anna, W.A., and their seventeen-year-old daughter, Huguette. The copper king’s family liked the house so much that in December 1923, W.A. offered Mrs. Graham $300,000 cash for it, adding, “Take it or leave it.” W.A. had only a year and a few months to enjoy this acquisition before his death. Bellosguardo would be Anna’s mansion, not his.

  In 1933, eight years after the Santa Barbara earthquake and five years after Huguette’s wedding there, Anna began to have the old Graham home razed. It had been too severely damaged by the earthquake, and Anna wanted something more quakeproof—a home built of reinforced concrete and sheathed in granite, with walls sixteen inches thick.

  She also wanted something more French. The architectural style is late-eighteenth-century French with Georgian influences, a formal style somewhat unusual for an oceanfront setting in California. It was designed by the renowned architect Reginald Johnson, who had designed the Santa Barbara Biltmore. After Anna allowed extensive archaeological explorations of the site, the house was completed in 1936, with twenty-seven rooms and 23,000 square feet, or about twice the size of Jefferson’s Monticello. The building permit estimated the cost at $300,000, but it ended up at $1 million, in Depression prices, or about $17 million today.

  The Clarks were proud of a side benefit of Anna’s project—creating jobs in a desperate time—and Huguette often repeated the story that Anna ordered her overseer to hire as many workers as possible. “My dear Mother put so much of herself into its charm,” Huguette wrote to Santa Barbara’s mayor, Sheila Lodge, in 1988, “and had the satisfaction of knowing that during the great depression she was a bit helpful in giving much needed employment.”

  • • •

  Anna and Huguette visited Bellosguardo regularly from the mid-1920s until the early 1950s. The Clarks’ Pullman car would park on a siding at the Santa Barbara train station, and chauffeur Walter Armstrong would pick them up in the black 1933 Cadillac limousine or the gray-green 1927 Rolls-Royce, while the baggage followed in the wood-paneled Plymouth station wagon.

  Although the Clarks’ Bellosguardo had none of the social whirl of the Graham era, guests were welcome on occasion. Anna opened the grounds to garden clubs and held small concerts for friends. The Paganini Quartet played on an elevated platform set nine feet up in an oak tree near the tennis court, the world-famous musicians bowing Anna’s priceless Stradivarius instruments as their music rested on stands made of bamboo.

  Anna and Huguette made social connections, too. Huguette was a founding member, in 1928, of the Valley Club, a prestigious golf course and social club, though it’s not known if she ever golfed. She also joined the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1949, subscribing to its newsletters on contemporary and Asian art.

  • • •

  Bellosguardo is located just inside the eastern boundary of the city, adjoining the affluent community of Montecito, home to many movie stars. The Clark estate has twenty-three and a half acres, with nearly one thousand feet of ocean frontage, incongruously sharing the bluff with the Santa Barbara Cemetery. The cliff-top site, sixty feet above the public beach, affords great privacy. Visitors entered the grounds through a gate, usually locked, on Cabrillo Boulevard, from which the house can barely be seen.

  The main driveway ascends cliffside next to tall eucalyptus, pine, and Monterey cypress trees. A short way up the driveway, one can stop at a pergola, an open structure of white columns, to sit in the mottled sunlight under the latticed arbor, surrounded in summer and fall by the flowering San Diego Red bougainvillea. The vast Pacific Ocean fills the view.

  An enormous floating wooden deck was stored near the rustic beach house, ready to be towed out at the beginning of the summer, so that Huguette and her guests could go swimming, protected by a “lifeline” with wooden floats leading to the shore.

  By the driveway, an enormous sign, nine feet wide, blares a warning: “PRIVATE KEEP OUT.” The vast expanse of lawn sweeps out to a tree-lined pathway that skirts the sharp drop where the cliff falls off to the beach. On a clear day, one can see to the south as far as the Channel Islands, twenty-four miles offshore. On a foggy day, one can barely make out the volleyball players on Santa Barbara’s East Beach below.

  At the top of the cliff, with a hairpin turn to the left, one gets the first glimpse of the house, or one wing of it at least. The massive light gray structure gives a stately, institutional impression, with exquisite granite masonry in an interlocking pattern of grays and tans. This house is the creation of the quiet Anna, not her flamboyant husband. It is framed by a wall covered with green Boston ivy, which turns brilliant shades of orange and red in the fall. A queen palm soars over the thirteen chimneys.

  The gardens close to the house are examples of symmetry, restraint, and severity. A field of orange California poppies leads up to the front of the house, with its entrance court. The court is itself a work of art, a floral design of beach stones in grays, whites, and blacks hand-selected from nearby Carpinteria Beach. No parking was allowed on the court, which is still trimmed in the pink, sweet-smelling flowers known as naked ladies.

  Up two short flights of stairs, through the front door, and into the main entry hall, one is greeted by a portrait of a proud older gentleman in a military uniform. The most prominent place in the house is given not to W. A. Clark but to General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, the man who saved the Clarks’ beloved France in the Great War of 1914–18. Pershing, with salt-and-pepper hair and a gray mustache, stands weary but resolute, his thumb tucked confidently in the belt of his high-collared uniform, which is adorned with three rows of ribbons. This portrait, like so many others in the house, was painted by Tadé Styka.

  The house is mostly a U-shaped structure, with east and west wings extending away from the sea in the front and toward the Santa Ynez Mountains in the back. Between the wings, vis
ible as one enters the home, is a courtyard with a long, dark reflecting pond with blue-black stone tiles. One enters via a great central corridor, or galleria, that runs nearly the full length of the main section of the house. Portraits show an older W. A. Clark, with his intense blue eyes and white beard, and Anna, with her dark bangs and pearls.

  The largest space in the home is the music room, measuring forty-six feet by twenty-three feet. This is where Anna played her forty-three-string pedal harp, a marvel made for her in a Louis XVI style adorned with gilt sculptures and paintings, and Huguette played her second-best violin by Stradivari, which she kept wrapped in four Japanese scarves. Two Steinway pianos sat back-to-back for duets. Bellosguardo was alive with music when the Clarks were in residence.

  In the wood-paneled library, above the fireplace, is a large Styka portrait of Andrée, who died fifteen years before the house was built. Matching portraits of the girls show them sitting on benches, Andrée with a book, the younger Huguette cradling a doll. The house is full of portraits of Andrée, paintings sometimes two to a room. Her deep-set eyes are everywhere. In one large painting by Styka, the older sister sits on a giant cut log in a rushing mountain stream, dressed in a middy blouse with neckerchief, surrounded by the nature she loved. Her sad blue eyes are filled with portent.

  • • •

  The lost sister is also remembered in two memorials outdoors at Bellosguardo. The first is a small brown-and-white cottage tucked behind the tennis court and framed by green tamarix junipers. This cottage wouldn’t have been out of place in England or Normandy in the fifteenth century. It’s a half-timbered structure in the mock Tudor style, with a thatched roof, a stone chimney, and oddly undulating windowpanes. Built of clear heart redwood, the two rooms are rustic, with a black cast-iron stove from the early 1900s and simple country furniture.

  The Clarks didn’t build this cottage but inherited it from the Grahams, who built it as a playhouse for their daughter, Geraldine. The Clarks took down the sign in Old English script reading “Geraldine Graham’s Cottage” and replaced it with a nearly identical one saying “Andrée’s Cottage.” The cottage was lovingly maintained. When the roof needed repairs, for example, thatchers came from England to do the work. Although Barbara Hoelscher Doran, the estate manager’s daughter, remembers using it as a playhouse, to the Clarks it was more of a memorial, and they spoke with solemn voices in its vicinity.

  That’s how Anna’s goddaughters recall the cottage. In addition to their regular visits to 907 Fifth Avenue, Anna allowed each goddaughter one trip west to the summer home at Bellosguardo. Leontine went with her family for Huguette’s wedding in 1928. Her mother was the maid of honor, and Leontine was two and a half.

  Music filled the rooms at Bellosguardo. In this photo from about 1940, one of Anna’s harps and a piano sit at one end of the music room, with portraits of Huguette, right, and her late sister, Andrée, prominently displayed. (illustration credit8.1)

  Ann’s trip came when she was eight, nearly nine. In May 1937, her godmother pulled her out of school for a surprise cross-country train trip. Ann’s mother and a governess also made the trip. Huguette, at age thirty-one, did not.

  The leg from Chicago to Los Angeles was the first regular run of the Super Chief, a new high-speed train also known as “the Train of the Stars.” The passenger list included ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his sidekick Charlie McCarthy. Anna, having been married to railroad royalty, had lifetime courtesy passes on all the nation’s railroads, a perk recorded on a list registered with Congress. On this train, she had her own china in her stateroom to use for tea parties with her goddaughter. “She was,” Ann recalled, “a sweet person to children.”

  Ann remembers that while they were at Bellosguardo, the Paganini Quartet played a concert just for them. “It was idyllic.”

  Both goddaughters said that the subject of Anna’s elder daughter never came up. The girls knew that something bad had happened, so bad that it was never spoken of. Ann recalled the thatched-roof Andrée’s cottage as “a shrine—we had to be very quiet around that.”

  • • •

  The second memorial to Andrée was provided by Huguette. In August 1928, before her wedding here, Huguette honored her sister by giving $50,000 to the City of Santa Barbara to create the Andrée Clark Bird Refuge on city land just behind Bellosguardo. Her donation eventually turned the marshy inlet from a foul-smelling eyesore into a lake with three man-made islands. The city had drawn up plans for the refuge at Anna’s request, and Huguette came up with the donation from her own money. This donation benefited the Clarks, too, removing a blight from the neighborhood, but the thirty-one-acre refuge was primarily Huguette’s memorial to her sister, just as Camp Andrée was her parents’.

  For more than eighty years, the Andrée Clark Bird Refuge has been a serene lagoon and garden for wild ducks, snow geese, and other waterfowl heading south for the winter, as well as a year-round home for herons, cormorants, and other water birds. It is also a sanctuary for people, but on Huguette’s terms. Her donation included strict limits on its use: no camping, no boating, no swimming, no concessions, and no parking alongside the boulevard. And it must forever be named for Andrée.

  After the lake filled up with algae, in 1989 Huguette donated an additional $30,000 for its cleanup and for educational programs. Still in some years a foul odor comes off the water from decomposing algae, and in 2012 the cost of needed rehabilitation was estimated at $1 million. The lake, like a life well lived, needs constant replenishment with fresh oxygen.

  PRIVATE SPACES

  THE DAUGHTER of the estate manager, Barbara Hoelscher Doran, recalls playing dolls with Huguette in the early 1950s at Bellosguardo. Little Barbee, as she was called, said she didn’t think for a moment about the difference in ages. Barbee Hoelscher was born in 1944 and was still a child in the early 1950s, while Huguette was in her forties. “Huguette would phone our house and invite me over for afternoon tea. I would walk over with the dogs and sit with Huguette and Anna on the terrace under the big umbrellas, overlooking the great lawns and ocean. I remember having lemonade, tea, and lovely cakes and cookies made by the French chef who came with the ladies from New York.”

  Usually the Clark estate had no Clarks, only servants. There was work to be done, of course. Anna’s English butler, the tall and quite proper Thomas Morton, was responsible for the dining room, with its hundreds of dark wood panels. This is one of three rooms in the house salvaged from the old Clark mansion on Fifth Avenue. (Anna, who of course didn’t inherit the house, did not save these rooms, but had to buy them back from an antiques dealer.) The ceiling is a wonder, made of canvas, trimmed in gold, and painted with comical human figures and colorful cherubs. There were maids to supervise, but no work of urgency. Morton found time to become expert at cultivating bonsai.

  Into the 1960s, Bellosguardo operated on the forty-eight-hour rule. The staff was expected to have the house ready for the family within two days’ notice of a Clark visit. Sometimes, Barbara recalls, Anna and Huguette “would arrive on such short notice that Mother offered to help whip off the dust sheets covering the furniture and brighten the rooms with flower arrangements.”

  Then the house would spring to life. Anna would show off to visitors her harps and her collection of ladies’ fans from the courts of France. Huguette had her own enthusiasms: photography and painting. Her photo albums show that she roamed the grounds freely with her camera, capturing the symmetrical steps by the reflecting pool and a still life of fruit leaves in a bowl. She documented every room repeatedly. Years later, she would astonish the staff by calling to request a certain book on Japanese culture, telling them which shelf it was on, and that it was the seventh book over from the right.

  Her artist’s studio was tucked into the back for maximum privacy. There she kept not only paintings but the Japanese dolls that she loved to paint. The studio has its own kitchenette, and a private stairway up to the bedrooms, allowing Huguette to live and work without having
to pass through the main hallway of the house.

  Huguette was not content to work on her own paintings, but also offered a bit of editing. Outside the music room hangs a depiction of an older W.A. with a wild shock of white hair and brilliant blue eyes. Nattily dressed in a vest, her father is wearing a pearl stickpin and also a pinkie ring. The surprising part is the signature. At the lower right is “Tadé Styka 1925.” Below that is another signature, “Hugo C.” Huguette made amendments to this work, touching up her painting instructor’s view of her father, and co-signed it with her nickname.

  On the upper level of the east wing are suites for Anna and Huguette—W.A. needed no room here, as it was built after he died. Each suite includes a sitting room with a fireplace and a wardrobe closet paneled in book-matched bird’s-eye maple. In Anna’s suite, a portrait of W.A. sits on the desk by the window, near photos of both girls playing as children. One of her enormous golden French harps stands at the foot of the bed. Her bathroom features an astonishing oversize bathtub, carved from a solid block of yellow-and-pink marble with gold trim. She had a French kneeling desk, or prie-dieu, for prayer, and a felt-lined box from Cartier held a crucifix.

  Through the windows, they could see Anna’s rose garden, once the grandest in Santa Barbara. Its concentric circles were separated by low hedges of dwarf myrtle and walkways of red sandstone. At the center of the garden stands a fountain, a three-tiered Italian stone sculpture, topped by a bathing nude woman fixing her long hair.