Empty Mansions (24 page)

Clark never acknowledged any awareness of such resentments. He described himself as one of “
those men, those brave pioneers who have come out here and made the wilderness bloom as the rose, and opened up these great mountains and brought their hidden wealth to light.”

THE GODDAUGHTERS, LEONTINE AND ANN
 

W
ITH ONE DAUGHTER DECEASED
and the other occupied with her painting,
Anna befriended other children, two goddaughters, who came to her apartment for weekend lunches and chamber music concerts.

The first goddaughter, Leontine Lyle, was also known as Tina. She was born in 1926, twenty years after Huguette, and was the daughter of the family physician, Dr. Lyle, who had attended to Andrée and W.A. at their deaths.

The second, Ann Ellis, born in 1928, was the daughter of the family attorney, George Ellis, of Clark, Carr & Ellis, a law firm that had represented the Clarks for many years.

Anna invited Leontine and Ann, usually one at a time, over for Sunday lunches or private chamber music concerts. The girls would put on their party dresses and shiny black patent leather shoes for an afternoon among the Renoirs. Both goddaughters
called Anna “Lani” (LAH-nee), which she fancifully told them meant “godmother” in Hawaiian.

They ate in the formal dining room, with place cards in silver holders to mark their spots. Water was poured into crystal glasses from a Tiffany pitcher. Bread was served in a double-ended sterling silver barge engraved “W.A.C.” and stamped on the bottom with the Clark crest (the lion, anchor, and Gothic C).

They loved Anna, both goddaughters recall. She gently corrected their manners, watching the placement of every silver butter knife, being very firm that they were not to drink if they had food in their mouths, and to sip, not gulp.

The lunches were not about etiquette alone. As the years passed, Anna wanted to soak up every detail of their lives: school, boys, their débuts, dating, marriage. Anna gave Leontine a Cartier gold watch for her debutante season and sent her personal assistant, Adele Marie, known as “Missie,” to Bergdorf Goodman to buy clothes for Leontine’s wedding. “She was to me a completely caring person, beyond belief generous,”
Leontine said. “You never felt the generosity had a string attached.”

She recalled, “One day I can remember clearly, I was almost in tears. I wanted Mummy to let me have a dog, and I was telling Lani all this, at age thirteen or fourteen, very dramatic. And the next thing I knew, three days later, a miniature black poodle arrived at the house, with instructions that it was not to be returned. We called it Parie, like Paris.”

Both goddaughters remember Anna as stunning, mannered, very French, immaculately dressed, trim, tactful, and not at all nouveau riche. There was no talk of Butte or Jerome, no talk of Butte copper or political scandals. There was no talk of where Anna came from either, no mention of Calumet or Quebec. Her French-accented English sounded Parisian to their ears. “It never occurred to me,” Leontine said, “that she was anything but French.”

The goddaughters remember Huguette shyly stopping by their little parties with Anna, but only once did she stay for lunch. Ann remembers Huguette sending her gifts, but not to her taste: “horrible, formal dolls.” These weren’t Huguette’s friends, but the very young friends of her mother. They knew nothing of her paintings or art projects. “She was a waif that passed through the room,” Ann said. “A fairy light that came and went.”

• • •

Once you were Anna’s friend, you stayed friends. This was a trait Huguette inherited. Anna talked regularly on the phone with Leontine’s mother, the widow of the family doctor, and sent her checks for years. After Anna died, Huguette kept on sending the checks, increasing the amounts.

Both goddaughters, born in the decade after the Nineteenth Amendment gave all American women the right to vote, seized on new opportunities. Ann Ellis Raynolds raised four children, then went back to school for a doctorate and became an instructor in psychiatry on the Harvard Medical School faculty and a professor at Boston University. Leontine Lyle Harrower worked on the staff of Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut, father of a president and grandfather of another. She served on the Republican National Committee and worked in the gubernatorial
campaign of Nelson Rockefeller of New York, the grandson of W.A.’s contemporary John D. Rockefeller.

Anna hosted many musical afternoons at 907 Fifth Avenue, the luxury apartment building at Seventy-Second Street and Central Park. Eventually Huguette had fifteen thousand square feet
. (
illustration credit6.5
)

The only foray into politics by Anna and Huguette seemed to be in 1940, when they supported the Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, who was urging greater American intervention to stop Germany in Europe. This policy would have appealed to the Francophile Clarks, who each gave $5,000 to
Democrats for Willkie—the largest contributions in New York. Anna and Huguette, the wife and daughter of a U.S. senator, never registered to vote.

Only now, the goddaughters say, have they begun to realize that Anna’s relationship with them was a bit odd. “It seems strange,” Leontine said, “that so much attention was paid to a little girl. In a funny way, I filled a need, like a surrogate daughter. There was a sadness there.”

These girls were the daughters of the family doctor and lawyer, prominent but not in the same social class as the Clarks. As Ann’s father
explained to her, in his legal work for rich families he was merely a servant. But that sort of distinction didn’t seem to matter to Anna. Nevertheless, Leontine said, it was odd that Anna restricted her social circle so tightly to people paid by the family: the family doctor, the family lawyer. Anna made some friends through music and art but seemed not to be comfortable developing relationships unless she was the boss. Perhaps these friendships showed an admirable sort of class neutrality on Anna’s part, but also a kind of self-limiting only to circumstances she could control.

And then Leontine stopped speculating and said, “It’s too complicated. You can’t know someone’s mind.”

MADAME CEZANNE
 

O
NE MIGHT HAVE GUESSED
that Anna, as the much younger second wife, would have had little connection with W.A.’s children from his first marriage. Indeed, the terms “gold digger” and “adventuress” were thrown around a bit in some quarters of the family, but quite a few Clarks speak of Anna fondly, remembering her as vivacious, a warm hostess, a lot of fun at a cocktail party, and a bit salty in her humor. Even the closest Clarks, however, never developed a connection with Anna’s daughter Huguette.

In the years between the world wars, Anna often invited the children of her stepson Charlie Clark over for musical afternoons in Apartment 8W at 907 Fifth Avenue. She enjoyed playing the harp and gossiping about music and musicians with Charlie’s three daughters, Mary, Agnes, and Patsey. They were close to Huguette in age, her half-nieces, though that sort of “half-niece” phrase was not one the family ever used. Raised in California, all three had spent some time in New York with Huguette at Miss Spence’s, and attended debutante parties at Pierre’s. Huguette said later that she was very fond of Agnes and her sisters and that her mother had continued to invite the nieces for short summer visits to Santa Barbara so the girls could stay in touch.

The next generation, however, never made much of a connection with their great-aunt Huguette. Patsey’s son, Jerry Gray, recalled a time in the early 1940s when a group of them were sitting on the sand or in low chairs near the beach house at Bellosguardo. He was about nine and Huguette was in her thirties. Anna was animated and participated in the conversation, but Huguette, staring silently at him, never said a word. Afterward, Jerry’s father said, “
She has never been able to grow up.” And his mother said, “It’s so sad that all she can do is play with dolls.”

Huguette’s attachment to her dolls was indeed unusual.
A photograph survives of a Clark dinner party in a restaurant, with a group including Anna and Huguette, who looks to be about sixteen, so this would be about 1922. Anna is recognizable in her bangs, resting her chin on her
white-gloved hand. One of Huguette’s half-nieces, wearing a corsage, is also at the table. The three gentlemen in the photo are dressed in black tie. Seated at the right, next to one of the men, is Huguette, wearing a party dress and a strand of pearls, her eyes fixed on something in the distance. In her lap, she holds a doll with well-coiffed coal-black hair, wearing its own party dress.