By the beginning of June, John Stanchfield had placed a lien on Lyonesse, and, in an extraordinarily malevolent move, he attached Isabel’s mother’s home in Farmington. Isabel, having accompanied her spouse on a Plasmon-related business trip to England, was informed upon landing on June 9 that Twain had obtained a lien of $4,000 against her farmhouse. Panic-stricken, Isabel returned to New York on July 14 and gave an interview to The New York Times: “I believe the whole trouble is caused by his daughter. Miss Clemens is of the artistic temperament, but in this affair I believe that she has been wrongly advised into taking a step she would never have taken had she the right understanding of the case.” The fight was now very public and the newspapers were only too willing to print article after article. The New York Times alone published five headline stories over the summer, and there were articles in the New York Telegram, the New York American, the New York Sun, the New Haven Union, and the Connecticut Courant.
On July 17, Isabel and her mother were confronted by Charles Tressler Lark, Twain and Clara’s lawyer, with Jean as a witness, at her farmhouse and informed that a complaint would go forward to the grand jury unless Isabel signed over the deed to Twain. When Isabel asked for time to consult with her lawyer, Lark refused to allow her to do so. A horrible scene ensued, leaving Isabel and Mrs. Lyon in hysterics. That same day an utterly intimidated Isabel, near collapse, signed the agreement and also wrote a check to Twain for $1,500. Mark Twain stole Isabel Lyon’s home. Three days later, Lark returned, demanding that Isabel sign a lease agreement binding her to vacate her home by September 1. This time Clara accompanied Lark to enjoy Isabel’s distress. Twain recorded all these events in the “Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript,” exulting in the extreme misery he was inflicting upon Isabel.
When Ashcroft returned to the United States at the end of July, he sent Stanchfield a furious letter expressing his amazement at how Isabel had been “inveigled into transferring her cottage and land at Redding to Mr. Clemens.” He noted that Isabel had not been charged with “moral turpitude, embezzlement or defalcation,” and threatened that if “any such charge be made by any responsible person, please consider the after part of this letter withdrawn, and we will immediately prove to the satisfaction of a court or jury that not $1. was ever misappropriated or misapplied by Miss Lyon, and will justify her reputation by holding those responsible for the defamation, in addition to enforcing whatever rights she may have in the matter.” Displaying an impressive grasp of detail and legalistic jargon, Ashcroft provided ledger entries and a copy of the agreement he and Twain had signed on “General Clean-Up Day” about costs and payments connected with the farmhouse, remarking that he doubted Stanchfield knew of its existence.
Ashcroft asserted that a total of $3,000 was “paid in cash to Miss Clara Clemens for her accompanist, Mr. Wark, her manager, Mr. Charlton, part of the expense of her concert trips, a trip to Nova Scotia, and many other items.” His not so very subtle intimation was that this information might become public if a quiet and quick conclusion could not be reached, and the undesirable attention of the press would expose not only Clara’s profligate ways, but also her connection to Wark. Ashcroft expressed the couple’s desire to settle the matter without further public attacks or legal action, although seven conditions would have to be met in advance. Stanchfield likely found Ashcroft’s letter equally insulting and menacing. Yet Ashcroft’s threat proved effective and the parties, through their lawyers, commenced working on a settlement.
However, even though an agreement was in the offing, Ashcroft went public a final time. Perhaps he thought that this last interview might gain him leverage in achieving a more profitable resolution. He also could not resist extracting a measure of revenge against Clara for orchestrating the attack that resulted in the couple’s losing Lyonesse, their most valuable asset. The New York Times’s headline shouted: “Ashcroft Accuses Miss Clara Clemens. Says Mark Twain’s Daughter Made Charges Because She Was Jealous of Her Success. Quotes Humorist’s Letter. In It He Praised His Secretary and Rebuked Daughter.” In the course of the lengthy article, Ashcroft made available to the reporter passages from a personal letter Twain had sent to Jean two years earlier in which he defended Isabel. The excerpt included mention of Dr. Peterson and Dr. Hunt, referencing them as “nerve specialists,” in effect revealing to the public Jean’s epilepsy, the scourge the Clemens family had tried to keep a secret for so many years.
Ashcroft was not finished in exposing what he considered to be the hypocrisy of the Clemenses. He dismissed to the reporter Clara’s latest gambit, namely the accusation that Isabel had stolen large amounts of cash, and he was also contemptuous regarding her supposed singing talent: “One’s vocal ambitions, however, sometimes exceed one’s capabilities in that direction, and the bitter realization of this has, in this instance, caused the baiting of a woman who has earned and kept the admiration and respect of all of Mark Twain’s friends. … Miss Lyon is in a position to prove that the bulk of the money was paid to Clara Clemens herself for the expenses of concert tours and the delightful experience of paying for the hire of concert halls destined to be mainly filled with ‘snow’ or ‘paper,’” Ashcroft grimly continued, “for the maintenance of her accompanist, Charles E. Wark, and to defray other cash expenditures that an embryonic Tetrezzini is naturally called upon to make.”
Ashcroft pointed out that legally he was still the manager of the Mark Twain Corporation, with two years remaining on his contract. The public mugging was so hostile that the Connecticut Courant delicately declined to publish his full statement (The New York Times was not so diplomatic), explaining to its readers: “It involves an attack on the two Misses Clemens, put in the way to hurt these sensitive young women most keenly.”
Another letter to Stanchfield by Ashcroft, sent on August 18, 1909, itemized in detail Clara’s musical expenses (excluding the thousands of dollars paid to her manager) for the years 1907 and 1908. Ashcroft wrote, in summary, that during those two years Clara “and her troupe [Will Wark and Miss Nichols, the violinist] received $13,220.48 by check.” What his account reveals is that along with checks cut for Clara, Miss Nichols, and Will Wark, there were numerous large cash disbursements paid directly to Clara. Noteworthy were two checks for $50.00 each, made out to the Hotel Brevoort in November 1907. Clara was covering Wark’s living costs.
An agreement was finally reached on September 7, 1909, in which Twain, his daughters, and Paine agreed to a “discharge of all indebtedness and obligations of Ralph W. Ashcroft and Isabel Lyon Ashcroft from the Mark Twain Company.” The matter appeared, finally, to be concluded. Yet to Twain’s fury, on September 13, 1909, another headline in The New York Times blared, “Mark Twain Suits All Off. All Litigation Between Him and the Ashcrofts Is Finally Dropped”:
The differences between Mark Twain and his daughter, Miss Clara Clemens, on the one side, and his former secretary, Mrs. Ralph Ashcroft, and her husband, have been settled without an appeal to the courts. All criticism of the conduct of Mrs. Ashcroft has been withdrawn and all suits have been dropped. …
Mark Twain has agreed to drop his suit against Mrs. Ashcroft for an alleged loan of $3,050 and has removed the attachment which he had caused to be placed on the property of his former secretary at Farmington. Reparation has also been made for the hard things which the Ashcrofts alleged had been said of them by the author and Miss Clemens. Mark Twain has signed a document acquitting Mrs. Ashcroft of all blame for her conduct of his affairs while she was in his employ as his secretary. Miss Clara Clemens has also to the satisfaction of Mr. and Mrs. Ashcroft retracted the criticisms she is alleged to have made on Mrs. Ashcroft.
Enraged, Twain wrote a letter to Adolph S. Ochs, publisher and owner of the Times, accusing him of bias with his sympathetic coverage of the Ashcrofts:
The facts in my case are simple; the matter is a private one, the public has no concern in it, and not the least right to know anything about it. …
None of the interview was up to the standard o
f matter fit to print in The Times without examination as to their truthfulness, since they assailed the private character of a respectable family. That examination should certainly have been made, but for two quite apparent reasons: the interviewer had a personal grudge against me, & the sub-editor who accepted the interviews without verification of their alleged facts had also a personal grudge against me.
Eventually, Twain decided not to send this rebuttal but to drop the matter. For someone usually enamored with the press’s attention, The Times’s coverage must have been particularly galling. The next day Clara insisted that her father prepare and send a news release to Melville Stone at the Associated Press representing their side of the issue, which Twain reluctantly did.
The end result of all this squabbling and legal positioning was that Ashcroft resigned from the Mark Twain Corporation and retained his position with the Plasmon Company, which would collapse before long. The officers for the Mark Twain Corporation then included Twain; Jervis Langdon, Olivia’s nephew (for the period 1909–43); Charles Lark (1910–43); Edward Loomis, the husband of Twain’s niece Julia Langdon Loomis (1909–37); and Paine (1909–13).
As for Isabel, her hopes of editing Twain’s letters were dashed; her dream house, Lyonesse, along with twenty acres of property, had been lost; she had entered a marriage which years later she would call “a mistake;” and she had lost her King forever. Albert Bigelow Paine, who survived the falling-out, became Twain’s secretary and nurse; he entered into an agreement with Twain at the end of July 1909 specifying that he would edit and publish an edition of Twain’s letters in co operation with Clara. (In keeping with earlier contracts, Jean was excluded.)
At some point during this long summer of contentious newspaper stories and malicious exchanges, Twain decided to enlist the newest form of media to assist in making his case to the public: he allowed the Edison Company to come and film at Stormfield. With the approval of the Clemens family, a short silent film was made, entitled Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) Photographed by Thomas Edison 1909 (now accessible on YouTube). Twain, dressed in his white suit and smoking a cigar, stands in the doorway of his new home and then strolls around the back of the house. The second portion of the film is titled “With Daughters, Clara and Jean, at ‘Stormfield,’ Redding, Connecticut, 1909.” All three family members sit in the loggia calmly sipping tea and politely chatting with one another. Claude Beuchotte enters the frame carrying Clara’s hat, which he gives to her, and he quickly departs. Clara puts it on, using three hat pins to anchor it, and the family then rises and exits the scene. This was the only film Twain appeared in, and the idyllic tableau of peace and genteel elegance was the image he wanted seen and remembered. The carefully cultivated projection of a happy family, an elderly father with his patrician daughters (both looking well and pretty), was an opportunity for the media-savvy Twain to recapture some of the credibility he must have felt he had lost in his battle with Isabel and Ashcroft.
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An exhausted Isabel and Ashcroft quickly disappeared from public view. With the two of them dispatched, and with Clara based at the Stuyvesant and Jean living at Stormfield, Twain might have finally found a measure of peace. Yet nothing could have been further from the truth. The real story was deliberately suppressed by Twain, Clara, and Paine; as a result, it has been unknown for the past hundred years. The events of the fall of 1909 were so shocking and resulted in such extraordinary turmoil that considering his frail health Twain was fortunate to have survived the month.
Along with fighting with Ashcroft and orchestrating press coverage, over the summer Twain welcomed a seriously ill Ossip Gabrilowitsch back to Stormfield. Gabrilowitsch had long been ailing, plagued by a number of health issues that, according to Katy Leary, finally culminated in “a terrible operation.” He was diagnosed as suffering from an infection of the mastoid process (also known as the mastoid bone, located behind the ear), and was forced to undergo three separate operations. Such an infection occurs when an untreated, severe ear infection spreads from the middle ear to the bone. It is excruciatingly painful. Symptoms include difficulty in hearing, severe tinnitus, fetid discharge, headache, and an increase in temperature. Treating an infected mastoid process in 1909 required a grisly operation, involving slicing open the back of the ear. The operating physician would chisel out a section of the mastoid bone, and ream out the infection, after which the ear would be reattached. A large, unsightly scar ran the length of the ear. Postoperative complications included deafness, cranial nerve palsies, infection, and death. Based on the number of operations Gabrilowitsch underwent and their invasive nature, it is certain that he suffered significant hearing loss in one ear. As a professional musician, he must have been enormously concerned about the effect his illness would have on his career. Years later, when Gabrilowitsch was the conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, local music critics wondered how he was able to endure Clara’s singing. Ralph Homes, the music critic for the Detroit Times, observed, “I’ve always heard that love was blind. But I never knew it was deaf.” He did not realize at the time just how right he was.
When Gabrilowitsch first arrived at Stormfield, according to Katy, “he was pretty near dying.” She nursed him back to health, regularly massaging his head, “just as I used to rub Mr. Clemens’s” (to encourage Twain’s hair growth). By Tuesday, September 21, 1909, just over a week after the New York Times article declaring a truce had been struck between the Clemenses and the Ashcrofts, Gabrilowitsch had recovered sufficiently to be able to perform with Clara at Stormfield to raise funds for the Mark Twain Library in Redding. The program lasted nearly two hours and the encores added a half hour. A profusion of guests traveled to Stormfield, 525 in all, according to Twain, and the press reviewed the evening positively. When Twain rose to make a brief speech he managed simultaneously to recognize and insult his daughter. While acknowledging how fortunate everyone was to have the well-known pianist Gabrilowitsch and the internationally famous baritone David Bispham from the Metropolitan Opera Company there to entertain them, Twain concluded, “We shall now hear from my daughter Clara. … She is, they tell me, a mezzo-soprano. She is not quite so good a musician as Mr. Gabrilowitsch and Mr. Bispham, but she is much better looking.” Good-looking Clara certainly was and she was also unquestionably a contralto, not a mezzo-soprano, as her father undoubtedly must have known.
The concert would prove to be the least exciting event that evening. After the concert Clara and Gabrilowitsch took an evening stroll. In her memoir My Husband Gabrilowitsch, Clara melodramatically recounted that when Katy Leary was bidding her goodnight that evening in her bedroom Clara told her,
“Katy, the date is set.” Cautiously she approached my bed. “Miss Clara, is it set to stay?” “Yes, indeed.” “God be praised!” Then, fervently seizing my hands, “When—when?” “In ten days.” I said. “No waits this time, because the stars are with us!”
While certainly dramatic, Clara’s version is, at best, doubtful. Katy offered an entirely different account of the conversation, saying that upon Clara’s return to the house that evening, she had a “funny look on her face.” When Katy met Clara in the city several days later, Clara told her not to prepare her apartment for the opera season because “‘I’m going to be married next week!’” The engagement stunned everyone. Jean expressed her astonishment in a letter to her friend Bébé Schmitt, saying Clara “will wed Gabrilowitsch next Wednesday and leaves to reside at Potsdam or at Berlin the 12th of October!” Even The New York Herald’s story the day before the event mentioned its weird suddenness:
News of the wedding will come as somewhat of a surprise to most persons except the close friends of the family, for although the names of the pianist and Miss Clemens have been linked at various times, no formal announcement of the engagement has been made. Stories have been printed of a romance dating from the time when Mr. Gabrilowitsch went to the rescue of Miss Clemens, who met with a sleighing accident while driving near her father’s house last win
ter. …
Twain attempted to defend the abruptness of the wedding to The New York Times by claiming that the rush was necessitated because the beginning of Gabrilowitsch’s European season was imminent. In his biography, Paine echoed the same explanation, that Gabrilowitsch “had signed for a concert tour in Europe, and unless the marriage took place forthwith it must be postponed many months.” On the surface a reasonable explanation, but no one had informed Clara’s tour manager, R. E. Johnston, who upon reading about Clara’s wedding in the newspaper wrote to Twain complaining that thirty-one of her engagements had to be cancelled. Johnston told Twain he expected him to explain the situation in a public letter. Five days later, on October 12, Twain wrote to Johnston that the two needed to marry in haste because
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