Mark Twain's Other Woman

by Laura Skandera Trombley

  Twain, however, was interested in more than just protecting the copyright on his books. He was the first important author-celebrity immediately recognizable worldwide with a resoundingly positive popular association. Since the beginning of his writing career, his pen name and face had been frequently used to sell products without his permission and without remuneration. During his lifetime, the image and pseudonym Mark Twain sold playing cards, Oldsmobile cars, Pullman train passenger cars, baking flour, jumping-frog mechanical banks, scrapbooks, photograph albums, cookbooks, postcards, sewing machines, shaving soap, fine china, decorative silver spoons, and, of course, whiskey and cigars. Twain was quick to credit Ashcroft for the formation of the Mark Twain Corporation. He was now an official commodity and possessed the right to control the usage of his likeness. And Twain applauded Ashcroft’s zealousness in enforcing his copyright with those who would dare to use his image and words without compensating him.

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  Connected to a genuine desire to provide for his two feckless, unmarried daughters was Twain’s insatiable desire for his name to live in perpetuity. He was determined that his fame and wealth would exist beyond the grave, and he undertook this quest with utter gravity. The root of his obsession can be found in the nineteenth century’s veneration of the self-made man. Twain came of age during a time in America when to fail did not merely describe one’s lack of business acumen; it characterized the totality of one’s being. The dark side of the self-made man was failure, and failure had become synonymous with having a deficient self. The poor, it was commonly held, deserved their lot because they possessed insufficient character. People who failed did so due to a “problem native to their constitution,” and it was believed that their children would inherit “the particular biological identities of both parents.”

  By the latter part of the nineteenth century, failure had become defined, much as it still is today, as “the most damning incarnation of the connection between achievement and personal identity.” This widely held belief was even expounded from the pulpit. The Reverend Russell Conwell, famed orator and educator, directly linked the pursuit of capitalism with the pursuit of God in his well-known speech “Acres of Diamonds,” delivered over six thousand times to enthusiastic congregants:

  The opportunity to get rich, to attain unto great wealth is … within the reach of … almost every man and woman who hears me speak tonight. … I have come to tell you what in God’s sight I believe to be the truth. … Never in the history of the world did a poor man without capital have such an opportunity to get rich quickly and honestly. …

  Some men say, “Don’t you sympathize with the poor people?”… But the number of poor who are to be sympathized with is very small. … there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings. … It is all wrong to be poor anyhow.

  To describe the salvation of one’s soul, the clergy had appropriated the language of business.

  The specter of failure had a particular resonance with Twain. As has been mentioned, while a young child he had watched his father repeatedly fail in his business endeavors, and the family was eventually forced to move into a small apartment above the office of a successful physician in Hannibal. Upon John Marshall Clemens’s death, his family was plunged into poverty. The fear of failing like his father tormented Twain throughout his life, and his appetite for success was insatiable. His brother Orion, a decade older than Twain, tried many different ventures—journalism, printing, politics, law, chicken farming, and writing—all unsuccessfully, and was considered to have inherited his father’s “aptitude for failure.”

  In 1862, when Twain was twenty-seven and living out west, he sent this chilling message to his older brother:

  I shall never look upon Ma’s face again, or Pamela’s [his sister’s], or get married, or revisit the “Banner State,” until I am a rich man—so you can easily see that when you stand between me and my fortune (the one which I shall make, as surely as Fate itself,) you stand between me and home, friends, and all that I care for—and by the Lord God! You must clear the track, you know!

  After Twain had achieved a level of financial sustainability, he subsidized Orion for nearly thirty years.

  Forced to declare bankruptcy at age fifty-nine as the result of bad business investments, Twain must have felt that he had finally shown what he had most feared—that the father’s deficiencies would surface in the son. The only possibility of salvation, according to the prevailing ethos of the Gilded Age, lay in embracing a capitalist identity. Max Weber’s argument in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) was that “striving for success is a compulsory virtue, even a sacred duty in American culture.” To be successful meant “the rational pursuit of profit, the perpetual increase of capital as an end in itself, the development of an acquisitive personality, and the belief that ceaseless work is a necessity of life.”

  Henry Rogers

  Twain proved a receptive audience to the message, and he ultimately regained financial solvency by embarking upon his worldwide lecture tour and continuing to publish. But more important, he left the management of the bulk of his business affairs to Henry Rogers. Twain’s method of thwarting his biological destiny was to sign over power of attorney to Rogers just months after meeting him for the first time, in the fall of 1893. Rogers ably managed Twain’s business investments, negotiated his book contracts, and reestablished his positive financial position, allowing Twain to pay off his creditors in full, which earned him a worldwide reputation for integrity. This experience might help explain why Twain later granted power of attorney to Isabel and Ashcroft. By that time, Rogers was in failing health. Twain’s belief that financial failure might be his family’s biological destiny included the fear that his daughters were vulnerable to the same failing and therefore needed to be protected.

  Rogers’s influence upon Twain extended far beyond the positive effect he had on his bank balance; Twain’s mood was always lighter when he was in Rogers’s presence, and he looked forward to their increasingly infrequent outings together. Isabel was so pleased (and probably relieved) to see the cheerful effect Rogers had that she was inspired to compose verse:

  The King last night went gambling.

  With the Lord of Standard Oil.

  He came rolling home this morning

  With his pockets full of spoil.

  He had played with Mrs. Rogers

  ’Gainst her Lord of provenience,

  And Melville Stone [general manager of The Associated Press] so naughty—

  And won, by five & seventy cents.

  It makes him proud & happy,

  Till his face is fair to see.

  And Dorothea Gilder said

  She could have hugged he!

  (But she took it out on me.)

  So there’s no Such Thing as

  headache—

  There’s no Such Thing as grief.

  And I’m on my knees a-worshipping—

  A-worshipping my Chief.

  Since their initial meeting, Rogers had become Twain’s most trusted friend. “His wisdom and steadfastness saved my copyrights from being swallowed up in the wreck,” Twain gratefully acknowledged, “and his commercial wisdom has protected my pocketbook ever since.” Without Rogers’s help, Twain was convinced he would have died a ruined man. Yet even with Rogers’s firm guidance, Twain still could not entirely resist the lure of quick money and he continued to speculate—always at a loss.

  During the fall of 1908 at Stormfield, guests arrived one after the other, and everyone was expected to conform to Twain’s particular daily schedule. He was a late riser and typically enjoyed breakfast in bed shortly before noon. When he was feeling well, billiards was a daily event. Dinner started at eleven o’clock at night and was always accompanied by wine (despite the fact that Redding at the time was legally dry under a local ordinance) and “a big dish of radishes” (Twain believed radishes warded off heartburn). During the third week of Novemb
er, Mr. and Mrs. Doubleday visited, Judge Case and Mr. Styles Judson dined, and Lord Northcliffe and Colonel Harvey spent the night. By the twenty-first, when Captain Dow arrived for his visit, even Twain had finally become “very very tired.”

  What bed rest or doctor’s orders could not improve, however, was the increasingly obvious break between Clara and Isabel. When one is playing the game of Hearts, the player to the left of the dealer leads first. The following players must play in suit if they can, and the highest card of the suit led wins the trick. The winner of the trick leads to the next trick. A player cannot lead with a heart until a heart has been “broken,” or played in the game. Clara, Twain, and Isabel would soon commence playing their last game of Hearts, but this time they would not be playing with cards; instead, the tricks would be people.

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  The first hand was dealt by Twain. On November 25, 1908, Thanksgiving Day, an ill Isabel wrote a brief note in her daily reminder: “Will came early & Santa came later.” This simply worded entry, innocuous at first glance, actually signaled that many changes were afoot. By November 1908, Clara and Wark had been involved for nearly two years. But Thanksgiving Day 1908 signaled a watershed moment because after that date Wark seemingly vanished from the Clemenses’ lives. The rumors about Clara and Wark and the nature of their relationship had intensified after the newspapers covered their return from Europe, and Twain must have finally discovered Wark’s marital status. Exactly how he found out is unknown, but instantly upon receiving the information, he made it clear to Clara that Wark was no longer welcome to visit Stormfield or to see her. Already antagonistic toward each other, father and daughter shared volcanic tempers, and the two must have had an epic battle. In the end Twain prevailed (after all, Clara was totally financially dependent upon him) and Clara’s freewheeling life of magic-carpet travel and free love was over.

  In addition to Wark’s sudden disappearance, Twain played two other hands over the next four weeks. After settling into her new life in Berlin, Jean had eagerly become part of the regular social circuit of teas and luncheons. Dr. von Reuvers had given her newfound hope that her epilepsy could be cured, and on December 11, 1908, she happily purchased Christmas presents for her family and Isabel, and mailed them to Stormfield. Six days later, a shocked Jean received the following terse telegram:

  YOU SAIL JANUARY NINTH STEAMER PENNSYLVANIA

  PASSAGE PREPAID. SEND MARGUERITE HOME. DON’T CABLE.

  FATHER.

  Jean had expected to remain abroad for at least six months. Twain offered no explanation for his change of mind, and the pages in Isabel’s daily reminder for December 13–17 were left blank. Isabel’s only reference to Jean’s homecoming was on December 30, 1908, when she mentions in passing that she will go into the city the next day to speak with Dr. Peterson about finding Jean housing. After an extended voyage due to bad weather, Jean sailed into New York Harbor on January 25, 1909. She was initially placed in a group home called Unkeway Farm in Babylon, on Long Island, although that quickly proved not to be to her liking, and she moved to a more palatable facility, Wahnfried, in Montclair, New Jersey, in March.

  The final hand was played on December 18, 1908, when an old friend of Clara’s suddenly reappeared at Stormfield. A piano prodigy, Ossip Gabrilowitsch (his birth name was Osip Salomonovich Gabrilovich) was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and had studied piano and composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with Anton Rubinstein, Anatoly Konstantinovich Lyadov, and Alexander Glazunov. After graduating, in 1894, he had traveled to Vienna, where he spent two years studying with Teodor Leszetycki. He successfully débuted in Berlin in 1896 and subsequently toured the United States and Europe.

  Gabrilowitsch met the Clemenses in April 1898, while they were living in Vienna. Clara was four years older than the talented Russian, but the two became close and remained in touch over the years. In April 1902, Clara traveled to Europe with a chaperone, and visited Gabrilowitsch in Paris, where he was living. Much to her parents’ consternation, she remained abroad until August 12. On July 5, 1902, in Harper’s Weekly, Twain published an article entitled “Why Not Abolish It?” The “It” he was referring to was the age of consent: “Why should there be an age at which a member [of a family] may help a criminal to destroy that far more valuable asset, the family’s honor?” The timing of the article and of Clara’s extended absence might be sheer coincidence, but it is noteworthy.

  Isabel’s first mention of Gabrilowitsch came shortly after beginning her employ with the Clemenses. On January 1, 1903, while she was visiting with Clara “his voice rang out in happy laughter,” and Gabrilowitsch thoughtfully volunteered to “run this morn for scissors” for Isabel. Clara put a red carnation in his buttonhole, and Isabel commented, “The year began well for him.” After Olivia’s death the two drifted apart, although they continued to correspond. Isabel’s next mention of Gabrilowitsch came four years later, on January 19, 1907, when she and her mother went to an afternoon concert and heard him play selections from Arensky along with a Chopin sonata. That same evening, he dropped by to see Clara. Clara had just started her relationship with Wark. Over the next three months Isabel recorded three visits from Gabrilowitsch: in February, when Clara was not at home, and in both March and April, when he played for Clara, Twain, and Isabel.

  Ossip Gabrilowitsch and Clara Clemens at the piano

  For the next two years Gabrilowitsch went unmentioned in Isabel’s writings—until December 18, 1909. “Such a rich personality,” Isabel effused. “He has a fortnight holiday & must spend it … somewhere in studying & perhaps will stay here.” Gabrilowitsch was encouraged by Twain to pursue Clara during his stay, although the first few days of his visit certainly did not prove propitious. Just two days after his arrival at Stormfield, The New York Times reported that tragedy had been narrowly averted on the morning of December 20:

  Miss Clara Clemens, daughter of Samuel L. Clemens, (Mark Twain) was saved from serious injury and possible death this morning through the action of Ossip Gabrilowitsch, a Russian pianist, who is a guest. …

  M. Gabrilowitsch, who is making a tour of America, and Miss Clemens went for a sleigh ride this morning, leaving the Clemens residence at 10 o’clock. While passing through Redding Glen, about three miles from Miss Clemens’s home, the horse took fright at a wind whipped newspaper and bolted.

  Mr. Gabrilowitsch, who was driving, lost control of the horse. At the top of a hill the sleigh overturned, and Miss Clemens was thrown out. At the right of the summit of the hill is a drop of fifty feet. When the sleigh turned over the Russian leaped to the ground, and caught the horse by the head, stopping it as it was about to plunge over the bank, dragging Miss Clemens, whose dress had caught in the runner.

  In leaping to rescue Miss Clemens he sprained his right ankle. Miss Clemens was picked up uninjured, but suffered greatly from the shock of the accident. The injury to the pianist’s ankle was painful, but he helped Miss Clemens into the sleigh, and drove her to her home.

  Oddly enough, this traumatic incident goes unmentioned by Isabel: the entry for that date in her daily reminder is left blank, and there is no surviving correspondence by anyone in the family that refers to it. Clara recovered with lightning speed from her “shock,” leaving Storm-field by herself on December 21—the same day the Times article was published—to return to her studio apartment at the Stuyvesant.

  If Twain’s plan was to reunite Clara and Gabrilowitsch at Stormfield for the purpose of encouraging a union, he must have been annoyed about the lack of time the two spent together. After Clara’s departure that evening at 9:30, Gabrilowitsch, despite his reportedly sprained ankle (perhaps he sprained his left ankle), gave Isabel and Twain a private concert. “Gabrilowitsch played to us for an hour,” Isabel wrote, “He is a darling musician & it is so good to have him in the house.” Two days later Gabrilowitsch traveled to New York City and returned with a truculent Clara the next day. The next mention of Gabrilowitsch by Isabel comes on December 29: “Gabrilowitsc
h & I walked down to the gorge in the Early moonlight.” Clara apparently was not present. In fact, Clara would not resurface in Isabel’s record until January 25, 1909, when she was in the city waiting for Jean to sail home from Berlin.

  The sleigh accident story handily served to link Clara’s name publicly with another man, someone of appropriate social status, unencumbered by a spouse and children. To try to strengthen the perception that Clara and Gabrilowitsch had been romantically involved over a period of years, Twain wrote in 1909 to one of his Angelfish that the two had been engaged in 1901 but “the engagement was broken twice in 6 months.” In a written statement to The New York Herald, Twain told the same story about the engagement being broken twice but gave the year as 1903. Twain’s claim regarding Clara’s supposed engagement is suspect, not just because he could not seem to remember the year when she was twice engaged, but also because the bohemian Clara had long been vehemently opposed to the proposition of marriage, having declared to her parents years earlier that she intended never to marry.

  Gabrilowitsch’s abrupt reappearance after such a long absence and Jean’s curt order to return home were not unrelated. Faced with possible public embarrassment over Clara’s behavior, Twain decided to circle the wagons, and The New York Times story about the miraculous rescue certainly could not have hurt. Yet it did not seem to help much, either. Just three weeks later, on January 11, 1909, Isabel nervously remarked that when the Reverend and Mrs. Twichell came to visit Twain at Stormfield, Mrs. Twichell confided in her that “all the Hartford world is talking about Clara’s reported engagement to Wark—saying that she is only waiting for Mrs. Wark to get a divorce from him, when the marriage will take place. It is a sickening report. The Country people around here have got hold of a similar Tale.” This kind of scandal, horrifying to polite society in 1909 and ruinous to Clara’s reputation, was enough to give the old man a stroke. Knowing Twain’s extreme sensitivity regarding propriety and his obsession with his image, this “sickening report” confirmed by two of his oldest friends must have inflamed all of his worst fears and insecurities. Sexual scheming, adultery, and licentiousness on the part of the King’s daughter were, in a word, forbidden.