Mark Twain's Other Woman

by Laura Skandera Trombley

  After Twain’s death, the Mark Twain Corporation officially appointed Albert Bigelow Paine as literary executor, and he exercised almost total control. He had a keen understanding that the key to remaining in such a powerful position was directly related to his ability to placate Clara. To that end, when his mammoth three-volume Mark Twain, a Biography: The Personal and Literary Life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens was published, in 1912, he dedicated his work to Clara, expressing his appreciation for her upholding “the author’s purpose to write history rather than eulogy as the story of her father’s life.” Paine’s biography was not a critical study by any means, and upon this aspect of his work he and Clara were utterly united. Clara initially had been somewhat lukewarm about Paine’s biography, writing Mrs. Whitmore a year after its publication that she thought it “very fine,” but wondered “if it struck you as being too long—as it did some people—it was hard for me to judge.”

  Almost twenty years later, in Clara’s memoir My Father Mark Twain, her earlier opinion had improved considerably. She, in turn, dedicated her book to Paine, “who understood my father and faithfully demonstrated his love for him.” Clara pronounced “Mr. Albert Bigelow Paine’s biography of my father a remarkable exhibition of a most exact and truthful picture of his characteristics, general talents, and habits.” The subtext to Clara’s praise was a warning to future biographers not to trifle with the image of the man that Paine had projected, an image in which she had such great personal investment.

  Isabel Lyon was somewhat more critical in a 1936 note she wrote commenting on Paine’s opus:

  After 21 years I am scanning. Skimming. … I think Paine’s Biography is very mushy in spots, inaccurate in other spots. Too much like “Good Housekeeping” or “Ladies Home Journal” style of writing—but also in spite of these … defects, it is a very grand achievement. He has woven from the rich incidents of Mark Twain’s life & from an unusual insight into these early days, a rare & fine fabrick.

  Regarding Isabel’s existence, Paine set the standard for subsequent biographers by including only a single, offhanded reference: “The building of the new home at Redding had been going steadily forward for something more than a year. John Howells had made the plans, and in the absence of Miss Clemens, then on a concert tour, Mark Twain’s secretary, Miss I. V. Lyon, had superintended the furnishing.” Paine and Clara had effected the biographical equivalent of damnatio memoriae. Isabel’s presence in Twain’s life had been effectively erased.

  Clara approached her responsibilities in caring for the Clemens estate with a kind of manic zeal. She and Paine made an effective team, combining their efforts to suppress any publications about Twain or by him that they deemed inconsistent with his “wholesome” image. Such was Clara’s sensitivity about the Angelfish that former Aquarium Club members were actively discouraged from writing about their time with Twain. At Clara’s request, Paine contacted Elizabeth Wallace, a former Angelfish, and told her she was forbidden to publish any photographs of her and Twain together in her memoir Mark Twain and the Happy Island (1913). Dorothy Quick waited for Clara to pass away before publishing her reminiscences in Enchantment: A Little Girl’s Friendship with Mark Twain (1961).

  In 1924, Harper and Brothers published Mark Twain’s Autobiography, a two-volume work edited by Paine. Paine’s edition was an abridged version of Twain’s transcriptions. Paine wrote to Harper and Brothers in 1926 to say that no one else should ever be allowed to write about Mark Twain: “As soon as this is begun (writing about him at all, I mean) the Mark Twain that we have ‘preserved’—the Mark Twain that we knew, the traditional Mark Twain—will begin to fade and change, and with that process the Harper Mark Twain property will depreciate.” Twain was a valuable commercial property, not a person to be examined in depth.

  A pair that Clara was resolute about keeping in check was the Ashcrofts, and her constant vigilance became a personal obsession. After moving from Redding to Wisconsin, the Ashcrofts departed the United States for Montreal, Canada, in 1913, where Ashcroft had secured a position as the advertising director of Dominion Rubber Company. During his years in Canada, Ashcroft also worked as the general manager of the Trans-Canada Broadcasting Company and manager of radio station CKGW. While the first few years of the couple’s marriage were apparently happy ones, ultimately Isabel had little good to say about the experience. In total, she was married for eighteen years; her divorce decree is dated June 13, 1927. In the cold language of a legal document, the sad story of a failed marriage is laid bare. Ashcroft deserted Isabel on May 24, 1923, and never returned, “with total neglect of all duties of the marriage covenant.”

  Isabel requested that her married name be dropped and that she henceforth be known again as Isabel Van Kleek Lyon. Permission was granted. According to Doris Webster, Isabel’s ex-husband proved to be “very unsatisfactory. He drank, ‘never could keep a job,’ and was fundamentally dishonest. He even accused her of doing some of the things he had done. He had taken a number of manuscripts and various other things from Twain’s house. But they were all returned.” Isabel went back to New York City, where she found employment with the Home Title Insurance Company. Ashcroft married a second time in 1927, and died on January 8, 1947, at age seventy-two, in Toronto after a short illness. At the time of his death, he was the Toronto manager of the Canadian Advertising Agency.

  In Europe, Gabrilowitsch conducted the Munich Konzertverein Orchestra from 1910 to 1914; however, his and Clara’s comfortable life ended in 1914, with the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife and the onset of World War I. In 1917, Gabrilowitsch was swept up in a pogrom aimed at Jews and was briefly imprisoned in Munich, where he and Clara were living. Once he was released, the Gabrilowitsches returned to the United States via Zurich. After spending some time in New York City and Philadelphia, in 1918 the family finally settled in Detroit, where Gabrilowitsch was named the founding director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. He was well liked there and enjoyed a very successful career. Clara insisted upon giving private recitals from time to time, her audience consisting of invited guests with Gabrilowitsch gamely accompanying her on the piano. The family appeared to be fairly happy, with Gabrilowitsch a steadying influence upon Clara. Before dying of stomach cancer at age fifty-eight, on September 14, 1936, Gabrilowitsch requested that he be buried at Mark Twain’s feet. At the time of his death Clara was sixty-two years old and their daughter, Nina, had just turned twenty-six. A public funeral, attended by more than fifteen hundred mourners, was held in the Orchestra Hall in Detroit where Gabrilowitsch had conducted. Wife and daughter did not attend.

  Over a quarter of a century had passed since Twain’s death, and in all that time Clara had never erected a memorial to her father. The year after Gabrilowitsch died, Clara asked the Elmira sculptor Enfred Anderson to create a memorial for her husband. Anderson thoughtfully offered her two different designs, one recognizing Twain and Gabrilowitsch (two public celebrities), and the other memorializing her mother and father. The two models represented an interesting Freudian choice. The first, the memorial for her mother and father, featured a bust of Twain on top, with his birth name, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, beneath it. Olivia was in profile below, with her maiden name, Olivia Langdon. At the bottom, Anderson envisioned a sculpture of a kneeling Huckleberry Finn. The second memorial stood two fathoms high, her father in right profile, with his pseudonym underneath, and Gabrilowitsch’s face below in right profile, over his name. Clara chose the second memorial, and the first was forgotten. A model of the memorial to her parents was discovered in 1989 at the Elmira Historical Society. Clara wrote the inscription for the base of the second memorial:

  DEATH IS THE STARLIT STRIP

  BETWEEN THE COMPANIONSHIP

  OF YESTERDAY AND THE REUNION

  OF TOMORROW

  TO THE LOVING MEMORY OF

  MY FATHER AND MY HUSBAND

  C.C.G.

  1957

  Rejected Enfred Anderson design for a Mark Twain
monument

  Epitaph on grave marker erected to Mark Twain and his son-in-law, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, by his daughter Clara Clemens Gabrilowitsch

  Despite Paine’s injunction that no one else should ever be allowed to write a biography of Twain, two scholarly works had been published in the two decades since Twain’s death: Van Wyck Brooks’s The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920) and Bernard DeVoto’s Mark Twain’s America (1932). DeVoto’s efforts to complete his manuscript were significantly hampered by Paine’s refusal to grant him access to Twain’s unpublished papers. Paine died in 1937, and a year later the Mark Twain Corporation named DeVoto “custodian and editor of the Mark Twain papers.” Interestingly, the estate did not give DeVoto the title of literary executor, which Paine had held; instead that title reverted to Clara. DeVoto had to seek her permission before any previously unpublished Twain manuscripts could be published.

  DeVoto and Clara had a difficult relationship, with Clara wrongly suspecting DeVoto of trying to enhance his own fame through his position as editor and accusing him of wanting to publish manuscripts that would hurt her father’s reputation. She proved so intractable that DeVoto resigned in January 1946, after she suppressed his edition of Twain’s bitter polemic Letters from the Earth. Clara also had her squabbles with the Mark Twain Corporation during this time, when she discovered that the other officers had signed contracts without informing her and had allowed Warner Brothers movie rights to her father’s life story without giving her approval rights or requiring the studio to put her on an extravagant salary. She later claimed that the corporation had hired DeVoto without her consent. This bickering led to the resignation of Lark and Langdon in 1943; Thomas Chamberlain, a lawyer, and the Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company replaced them.

  The directors of the Twain Corporation, including Clara, next asked Dixon Wecter, an English professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, to succeed DeVoto as literary editor, and he accepted. In December 1946, Wecter moved the Twain papers from Harvard University to the Huntington Library in Pasadena where he had an affiliation, and in November 1949, he took them from the Huntington to the University of California at Berkeley. Wecter and Clara enjoyed a positive working relationship; once he had brought the papers to Berkeley, he persuaded Clara to change her will so that Berkeley would remain the papers’ permanent repository.

  Resurrecting old battles, Wecter had apparently argued with DeVoto against publishing Twain’s letters en masse because Wecter feared that such a volume would usurp interest in a biography that he, Wecter, planned to write. Wecter died unexpectedly on June 24, 1950, and the first (and only) volume of his biographical series, Sam Clemens of Hannibal, was published posthumously in 1952. Henry Nash Smith was next appointed literary editor, on August 31, 1953, and signed an exclusive publication contract for Twain materials with the University of California Press. He resigned his position in 1964 to Frederick Anderson, although he remained involved with the papers by serving on the editorial board of the Mark Twain Corporation. Anderson created the structure for the long-term editing projects of the papers and assembled a competent staff. Anderson passed away suddenly in 1979 and Henry Nash Smith returned as general editor until 1980, when Robert Hirst was named editor. Hirst remains editor of the Mark Twain Papers today.

  After Gabrilowitsch’s death, Clara immediately published the hyperbolic and, in places, fictionalized My Husband Gabrilowitsch. She and Nina relocated to Hollywood in 1939, purchasing a home, Italianate in style, on five acres with a pool in the front, located directly beneath the Hollywood sign on La Brea Terrace. Accompanying Clara and Nina in their move was Clara’s social secretary, Phyllis Harrington, and her chauffeur, Edgar Glanzer. Looking for a fresh start, Clara named her new residence Casa Allegra, or “Happy Home.” Even in her new surroundings, Clara could never bring herself to leave behind her long obsession with Isabel.

  In August 1940, Clara asked her lawyer, Charles Tressler Lark, to send someone to spy on Isabel. Clara was still afraid that Isabel might speak publicly about Clara’s relationship with Wark and forced marriage to Gabrilowitsch, and she remained convinced that Isabel had stolen some of her father’s personal papers. The lawyer arranged for an unnamed individual to get in touch with Isabel, posing as a representative of an anonymous Chicago buyer interested in purchasing Twain’s manuscripts. In his “A Report of Miss X,” the individual identified himself as “an agent of the enemy” (namely Clara) and regretted that he had been unable to win Isabel’s trust. Lark gave Clara his report, and on August 28, 1940, he sent a copy to Bernard DeVoto. In the report, the spy relayed Isabel’s explanation about how Twain’s daughters and Paine

  were jealous of [Isabel’s] entirely friendly relation with Mr. [Clemens] and that, “to save the good name of Mr. C” and to avoid further trouble, she had taken a husband without loving him. She stated that her marriage was part of a deal whereby she would thus legitimize her standing in the household in consideration of the breaking off of all relations between C.C. and “Will.” This deal, originated by Mr. C., who objected strongly to “Will,” was honorably carried out by both women.

  The marriage of Miss X to Mr. A., while not precisely of the shot-gun variety, proved to be anything but a happy one. Miss X stated that she soon discovered that she had taken a viper unto her bosom; that her new husband soon learned of her reason for marrying him and proceeded to make her life a living hell. … Thus, for offering herself as a martyr to the cause of peace and harmony in the C. household, her character had become eternally damned.

  The report certainly offered Clara little comfort. And while she and her daughter might have hoped that their move to California would be the balm to heal old wounds, sadly that would not prove to be the case. Due to their incompatibility, Nina lived with her mother only briefly before finding other lodgings.

  Nina Clemens Gabrilowitsch

  Nina was a lost soul, estranged from her mother and without a sense of purpose. She suffered from severe addictions to sex, drugs, and alcohol; over the decades she was hospitalized multiple times trying to cure herself of her alcoholism. None of the treatments worked for long. Small in stature at five feet two and insecure about her physical appearance, Nina underwent plastic surgery to reduce the size of her nose. Her best friend during the 1940s and ’50s, Alice Henderson, described Nina as unattractive and lonely. Nina confided in Alice that when she had been a child Clara had “pawned her off on nannies” and that her mother was “very self-obsessed.” According to Nina, Clara had never loved Ossip Gabrilowitsch; Nina told Alice that the only way her mother could bear to have sex with her father was to wear a wig and full makeup.

  Clara’s entire relationship with her adult daughter apparently consisted of a required daily afternoon tea. Nina and Alice Henderson would drive over to Clara’s estate from Nina’s apartment, wait by the pool, and at the expected hour Clara, wearing a frilly dress and carrying her purse, would emerge from her house. After approximately thirty minutes of polite conversation, Clara would walk back up the hill. Alice remembered Clara as “being a little lightweight and living in a dream world. … There was no love there.” Neither Clara nor Nina ever mentioned Mark Twain in Alice’s presence. After seeing her mother, Nina, who lived on a monthly allowance provided by Clara, would return to her apartment at 1922 North Highland Avenue in Hollywood and immediately start drinking.

  Clara grew lonely in Hollywood, and at age seventy, on May 11, 1944, eight years after Ossip’s passing, she was married a second time, to another Russian musician, Jacques Samossoud, who was twenty years younger than she. Clara had been introduced to Samossoud when she was still living in Detroit. Jacques was a gambler, regularly playing the horses at Santa Anita, and he expected Clara to cover his debts. His losses were so great that on one occasion, after he had lost $25,000 playing dice in Las Vegas and had written a bad check, the Los Angeles Times published a story about him. With such an ill daughter and troublesome spouse, Clara may have retreated to a “dream world” because
she could not emotionally confront the harsh, depressing reality of her life. Just as her father had given over the care of Jean to his secretary, so Clara entrusted Nina’s care and personal finances to Phyllis Harrington.

  Amazingly, Clara’s relocation to the West Coast, her remarriage, her sick daughter, and the passing decades did nothing to diminish her determination to squelch any possibility that Isabel Lyon might somehow reemerge to claim a place in Twain’s life and spill her secrets. During DeVoto’s term as custodian and editor of the papers, lawyers for the corporation kept an eye on Isabel because of Clara’s contention that she had stolen documents belonging to the estate. DeVoto specifically suspected that some manuscripts that Isabel had fully annotated for the collector Irving Howe were things she had possession of illegally.

  At the end of her life, Isabel Van Kleek Lyon was living quietly in the back half of a basement apartment at 7 Charles Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Despite entreaties from loving relatives to come live with them in Connecticut, Isabel refused to consider moving. Treasured memorabilia from her time with Mark Twain were kept on a large table in the corner of her small living room, and tucked away in her sewing workbasket was a pair of his colored socks. Dozens of photographs covered all the available surfaces of the room, and books overflowed the limited shelf space and were piled on the floor.

  Among her friends and family, Isabel’s energy level was renowned. At age sixty-nine she suffered a car accident in New York City, and a close friend joked, “You are certainly a tough human being. I was just thinking about your getting hit with a taxicab, and, as I remember now they were never able to do anything with the taxicab—it was so broken up that I think they swapped it for a new one. You in the meantime went on to work and did an extra day’s work just for the inspiration you received from the taxicab.” Isabel peered alertly at her world through old-fashioned black pince-nez and possessed a “cultured voice and manner.” A lover of hats and colorful dresses in her youth, in old age she wore formerly elegant dresses twenty years out of date. She had retired with a pension from her secretarial position at the Home Title Insurance Company in Brooklyn in 1948 at age eighty-four, but she longed for another job so she would feel useful. Stubbornly independent, she lived unassisted into her mid-nineties despite multiple heart attacks and a painful, debilitating leg condition.