Empty Mansions (28 page)

Marie-Christine continued to correspond with Huguette for many years, and Huguette counseled her through a difficult divorce, praising her for her bravery in striking out on her own. She says she doesn’t know what her father’s relationship with Huguette was, except that they were friends. She has now seen her father’s correspondence with Huguette. In a letter dated September 5, 1966, apparently after a gap in communication, Etienne describes returning to the beach at Trouville, where he and Huguette were children together:

• • •

Andrew Etienne Allard de Villermont died on April 8, 1982, in one of the nicer neighborhoods of Cannes on the French Riviera. He was seventy-seven. A funeral Mass was said in a church in the wealthiest district of Paris. Etienne was entombed in the ancient monumental cemetery in Rouen, the historic capital city of Normandy, an hour from the beach at Trouville where Huguette met the young marquis.

As it turns out,
Etienne was not a marquis, despite being called so by the newspapers for years. His family held no noble title, though it had come close. Known for centuries as the Allards, the family had been on the way to nobility—Etienne’s great-great-great-grandfather bought an office as adviser to the king, but didn’t hold the post long enough—when the French Revolution interrupted their ascent.
Etienne’s obituary, placed by Elisabeth and Marie-Christine, makes no mention of nobility. In Paris, the association of French noble families does not list his family. In the early 1900s Etienne’s father added a gloss, changing the family name to Villermont, which to French ears would have suggested nobility.

Though Etienne’s tomb is near those of the novelist Flaubert, the artist Duchamp, and many people with noble-sounding names, his position even after death is insecure. His spot in the cemetery is not guaranteed forever, but lasts only as long as someone pays to maintain his monument.

Huguette would outlive Etienne by twenty-nine years. She continued for nearly all that time to wire money to his widow, Elisabeth. The two women carried on a fond correspondence, sending love and kisses with all their hearts.

THE LITTLE PEOPLE
 

T
HE HOUSE OF
C
HRISTIAN
D
IOR
held fashion shows at the palatial French consulate in New York, just up Fifth Avenue from Huguette’s apartment, with models showing the latest Parisian fashions. On the afternoon of one of these shows in the late 1950s, a familiar name showed up on the guest list.

“Mrs. Huguette Clark!” exclaimed the consul general, Baron Jacques Baeyens, who had married Huguette’s niece. “Look, she’s not going to come. She’s my aunt, and she never goes out.”

The representative from Christian Dior replied, “Oh, yes, she will. She wants to see the dresses to dress her dolls.”

And she did. Huguette, then just past fifty, walked the three blocks up Fifth Avenue to the consulate to view the latest fashions from Paris.

• • •

Huguette Clark, who grew up in the biggest house in New York, was, like her father, a meticulous designer of extravagant houses, only on a smaller scale. These were dollhouses, but more than dollhouses. These one-of-a-kind tabletop models were story houses, theaters with scenes and characters painted on the walls. And like her father with his art collection, Huguette spared no expense. She commissioned religious houses with Joan of Arc, forts with toy soldiers, cottages with scenes from old French fables, and house after house telling her favorite fairy tales: Rapunzel, the long-haired maiden trapped in the tower. Sleeping Beauty, the princess stuck in sleep until a handsome prince awakens her with a kiss. Rumpelstiltskin, with the girl forced to spin straw into gold.

Focused on every detail, Huguette tried to get the artisans, some of them up to four thousand miles away, to be more careful with their measurements when they made her dollhouses. The houses had to be in proportion to the dolls that went with them. The following cable is typical, sent when Huguette was fifty-eight years old to an artist who made
small, posable dolls based on fairy-tale characters and sold them door-to-door in a Bavarian town.

Cable of October 6, 1964, to Mrs. Edith von Arps, Burgkunstadt, West Germany:

• • •

Rudolph Jaklitsch, born in Austria-Hungary in 1910, immigrated to New York from Yugoslavia before World War II and fought in the U.S. Army during the war. Trained as a cabinetmaker and restorer of antiques, Rudolph was hired by Huguette after the war to work on her dollhouses. When the houses arrived from their makers, Huguette would send them to Rudolph’s apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, for modifications. His wife, Anna, made the little curtains.

Their daughter Linda Kasakyan recalls the frequent phone calls at home in the evening. It would be Madame Clark with an idea for a change to one of her houses. Then five minutes later, another instruction. The phone might ring six times in a night. Rudolph would say, it would be so much easier to know what she wanted if he could sit down with her. But she would talk with him only on the phone or through her apartment door. Rudolph worked for Huguette for thirty years and saw her only twice.

His daughter said it bothered Huguette terribly if the measurements weren’t right. She liked to place dolls in the houses and move them through various activities—drinking tea, walking in the garden, having conversations. Sometimes, however, the ceilings in the houses were
too low for the dolls. One time Huguette called Rudolph with an urgent problem:

“
The little people are banging their heads!”

• • •

In her dollhouse building, as in her many other art projects, Huguette blended an artistic sensibility and imagination with a meticulous drive for precision, a commanding self-assurance, and an overwhelming generosity.

Even as an adult, she was not happy with the fables and fairy tales as they were written, often excising the unpleasant parts. On August 16, 1962, she cabled instructions to Manon Iessel, a renowned French illustrator, who was helping her with illustrations for a story house:

In the rest of the story, Sleeping Beauty and the prince marry and have children. An ogress demands that the children and princess be cooked and served to her, though they are saved. Disney’s animated films also left out that part, agreeing with Huguette’s editing.

Huguette also ordered dollhouses from Au Nain Bleu in Paris. When she didn’t get what she wanted, she’d send it back, politely but firmly. For example, in a cable to Au Nain Bleu dated June 14, 1963, she wrote:

She desired not only the dolls and dollhouses but also the accessories that gave the appearance of daily life. For a breakfast scene, she cabled Au Nain Bleu asking for tiny French breads: croissants, brioches, madeleines, mille-feuilles, and turnovers. But she wasn’t done. In a May 7, 1956, cable to the store, she wrote:

The dolls needed costumes. From Paris, Huguette ordered satin for her antique dolls with musical recordings inside them. She was having trouble finding the right satin for the Jumeau dolls, famous for their great beauty and big, soulful eyes.

On August 9, 1962, in a cable to “Mme. Gervais, La Maison Christian Dior, Paris,” she wrote:

• • •

Rudolph, her dollhouse cabinetmaker, found Huguette charmingly frustrating. But she paid so extravagantly that he could never say no. In addition to paying for his time, she sent gifts to his children and grandchildren, including an early computer, a puppet theater with one hundred
fairy-tale characters, and a second puppet theater so large that the family gave it to a school. She sent monetary gifts to the family as well.

At Christmastime, Huguette would take three weeks to send out her dozens of Christmas cards,
carefully redrafting each one until it suited her. (“
I don’t like holidays,” she said with mock suffering, “because there is so much to do. Too much!”) Rudolph’s family was one of many to receive her “small gift,” a check for $20,000. Later, the little gifts grew to $30,000, then $40,000.

When Rudolph died in 2000,
Huguette kept sending the checks to his widow. When his widow died, the checks kept arriving in the names of their children. All the grandchildren of Rudolph and Anna Jaklitsch went to good colleges, paid for by Huguette and her “little people.”

A LITTLE PECULIAR
 

I
N
J
APAN
,
a rare type of cedar was reserved by the so-called sumptuary laws for use only in imperial buildings and castles, where a roof made of its bark could last for seventy years. But a wealthy woman in the United States sought permission to buy and export a small quantity of this cedar. After months of discussion, the normally formidable bureaucracy of the prefecture finally knew it was beaten.

The cedar was purchased, and an aging Japanese artist cut the valuable wood into tiny slivers. He was making tiles for the roof of
a dollhouse-size castle. This authentic model took two or three years to construct and cost $80,000.