Empty Mansions (30 page)

When Félix died in Paris in 1964, at age ninety-one, Huguette cabled Lily:

• • •

Félix Lorioux was not the only French artist to benefit from Huguette’s patronage. She sought out others. At least four illustrators—Jean Mercier, Manon Iessel, J. P. Pinchon, and the pen-named Chéri Hérouard—were all supported by Huguette until they died. She commissioned illustrations of children’s songs, drawings of all the female saints of France, and maps of the history of each region of the country. “
You know how loyal I have remained,” she wrote to Pinchon, “to the French traditions and folkloric past of France.”

Huguette became
closest to Hérouard, known for his lighthearted and fantastic covers and illustrations for the society magazine
La Vie Parisienne
. He was a specialist in fairy godmothers, witches, ogres, and dragons. He also, under the pen name Herric, illustrated erotic books with scenes of sadomasochism: sex with the maid, sex between the maids. He sent Huguette a crate of his original drawings,
including a few of his “daring” ones.

Huguette put Hérouard to work painting watercolors of Sleeping Beauty, instructing him to make the costume changes historically accurate when the princess wakes up after a hundred years. She also sent him to Petit-Bourg to draw the ruins of her family’s summer castle, which the retreating Nazis had burned during World War II. And she had the old man tracking down more old copies of
Suzette
. At age seventy-five, the artist was placing classified ads for the magazines in French newspapers, supplementing his effort with prayers to Saint Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of seekers of lost items. After finding the last issue of 1912, Hérouard was philosophical, thinking of that innocent time before France was plunged into conflict:

He did have just one request, from the Frenchwoman who was giving up her
Suzette
collection to the heiress in America: “The person who provided them is a widow. She has been keeping them since her youth, and in her response to my purchase offer, she asked if she could keep them for another two weeks to give her a chance to look at them one last time.”

After Hérouard’s death in 1961, his widow sent along his last drawing, which he had intended for Huguette’s birthday.

Another of the artists, J. P. Pinchon, summed up his relationship with the American heiress. He wrote to Huguette in 1953, accepting in his eighties a new commission, even as he recognized he was near death. “
The fairy tale continues, and you make my life beautiful. At the beginning of our acquaintance, I compared you to a good fairy who made the dream of any artist at the end of his career come true. Your magic wand never stopped, and I work with joy.”

These artists never knew what their good fairy looked like. The Lorioux family sent photos to Huguette but never received any in return.
They knew only her telegrams and her high voice, as
Huguette would call to inquire about the illustrator’s grandchildren.
The Lorioux family had invited Huguette to France many times, but she always begged off. No, she said, she wouldn’t be able to return there. They asked why. She explained: the French Revolution.

Huguette said she was afraid she might be kidnapped or killed if there were another revolution, sounding as if a guillotine were always ready for the highborn. After all, to the long-lived Huguette, the French Revolution was only a little more than one lifetime before her birth.

ANDREE’S COTTAGE
 

E
NCHANTED FOR MOST
of the twentieth century by the mystery of the Clark summer estate hidden on a hill, the residents of Santa Barbara created their own legends of Bellosguardo. One day in 1986, Huguette’s California attorney sent to her New York attorney
a detailed report of misinformation spread as a new trolley bus for tourists made its daily run past East Beach toward Montecito. The tour guide explained over the loudspeaker that the Clarks were the owners of the Anaconda Copper Company. (False.) The Clarks didn’t think they were going to be able to have children. (False.) So they adopted a French orphan. (False.) She never married. (False.) And the daughter maintains a home in Paris. (False.)

Huguette’s New York attorney discussed with her what action to take to correct these falsehoods. None, she said. Wanting to maintain her privacy at all costs, she agreed that they wouldn’t make a fuss. Still, from time to time, the California attorney sent his secretary to ride the Montecito trolley, just to monitor the tour guides.

Though the details were all wrong, the legend of Bellosguardo was, in essence, true. The mansion had been frozen in Huguette’s memory, unchanged since the Truman administration. It was the most important place to Huguette, her mother’s place.

The name Bellosguardo (“beautiful lookout,” pronounced BELL-os-GWAR-doe) was attached to the coastal estate on this oceanfront mesa by the Oklahoma oilman William Miller Graham and his wife, Lee Eleanor Graham, who built a 25,000-square-foot Italian villa there in 1903. One party thrown by the theatrical Mrs. Graham included a psychic, a juggler, and a trained monkey. The estate was used several times as a film set during the silent film era, serving as a Roman emperor’s palace for the 1913 one-reeler
In the Days of Trajan
.

After a divorce and bankruptcy put Lee Eleanor Graham into a house-poor situation, she leased Bellosguardo to Frederick W. Vanderbilt, grandson of the Commodore. The next summertime tenants were
Anna, W.A., and their seventeen-year-old daughter, Huguette. The copper king’s family liked the house so much that in December 1923, W.A. offered Mrs. Graham $300,000 cash for it, adding, “Take it or leave it.” W.A. had only a year and a few months to enjoy this acquisition before his death. Bellosguardo would be Anna’s mansion, not his.

In 1933, eight years after the Santa Barbara earthquake and five years after Huguette’s wedding there, Anna began to have the old Graham home razed. It had been too severely damaged by the earthquake, and Anna wanted something more quakeproof—a home built of reinforced concrete and sheathed in granite, with walls sixteen inches thick.

She also wanted something more French. The architectural style is late-eighteenth-century French with Georgian influences, a formal style somewhat unusual for an oceanfront setting in California. It was designed by the renowned architect Reginald Johnson, who had designed the Santa Barbara Biltmore. After Anna allowed extensive archaeological explorations of the site, the house was completed in 1936, with twenty-seven rooms and 23,000 square feet, or about twice the size of Jefferson’s Monticello. The building permit estimated the cost at $300,000, but it ended up at $1 million, in Depression prices, or about $17 million today.

The Clarks were proud of a side benefit of Anna’s project—creating jobs in a desperate time—and Huguette often repeated the story that Anna ordered her overseer to hire as many workers as possible. “
My dear Mother put so much of herself into its charm,” Huguette wrote to Santa Barbara’s mayor, Sheila Lodge, in 1988, “and had the satisfaction of knowing that during the great depression she was a bit helpful in giving much needed employment.”

• • •

Anna and Huguette visited Bellosguardo regularly from the mid-1920s until the early 1950s. The Clarks’ Pullman car would park on a siding at the Santa Barbara train station, and chauffeur Walter Armstrong would pick them up in the black 1933 Cadillac limousine or the gray-green 1927 Rolls-Royce, while the baggage followed in the wood-paneled Plymouth station wagon.

Although the Clarks’ Bellosguardo had none of the social whirl of the
Graham era, guests were welcome on occasion. Anna opened the grounds to garden clubs and held small concerts for friends. The Paganini Quartet played on an elevated platform set nine feet up in an oak tree near the tennis court, the world-famous musicians bowing Anna’s priceless Stradivarius instruments as their music rested on stands made of bamboo.

Anna and Huguette
made social connections, too. Huguette was a founding member, in 1928, of the Valley Club, a prestigious golf course and social club, though it’s not known if she ever golfed. She also joined the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1949, subscribing to its newsletters on contemporary and Asian art.

• • •

Bellosguardo is located just inside the eastern boundary of the city, adjoining the
affluent community of Montecito, home to many movie stars. The Clark estate has twenty-three and a half acres, with nearly one thousand feet of ocean frontage, incongruously sharing the bluff with the Santa Barbara Cemetery. The cliff-top site, sixty feet above the public beach, affords great privacy. Visitors entered the grounds through a gate, usually locked, on Cabrillo Boulevard, from which the house can barely be seen.

The main driveway ascends cliffside next to tall eucalyptus, pine, and Monterey cypress trees. A short way up the driveway, one can stop at a pergola, an open structure of white columns, to sit in the mottled sunlight under the latticed arbor, surrounded in summer and fall by the flowering San Diego Red bougainvillea. The vast Pacific Ocean fills the view.

An enormous floating wooden deck was stored near the rustic beach house, ready to be towed out at the beginning of the summer, so that Huguette and her guests could go swimming, protected by a “lifeline” with wooden floats leading to the shore.

By the driveway, an enormous sign, nine feet wide, blares a warning: “PRIVATE KEEP OUT.” The vast expanse of lawn sweeps out to a tree-lined pathway that skirts the sharp drop where the cliff falls off to the beach. On a clear day, one can see to the south as far as the Channel Islands, twenty-four miles offshore. On a foggy day, one can barely make out the volleyball players on Santa Barbara’s East Beach below.

At the top of the cliff, with a hairpin turn to the left, one gets the first glimpse of the house, or one wing of it at least. The massive light gray structure gives a stately, institutional impression, with exquisite granite masonry in an interlocking pattern of grays and tans. This house is the creation of the quiet Anna, not her flamboyant husband. It is framed by a wall covered with green Boston ivy, which turns brilliant shades of orange and red in the fall. A queen palm soars over the thirteen chimneys.

The gardens close to the house are examples of symmetry, restraint, and severity. A field of orange California poppies leads up to the front of the house, with its entrance court. The court is itself a work of art, a floral design of beach stones in grays, whites, and blacks hand-selected from nearby Carpinteria Beach. No parking was allowed on the court, which is still trimmed in the pink, sweet-smelling flowers known as naked ladies.

Up two short flights of stairs, through the front door, and into the main entry hall, one is greeted by a portrait of a proud older gentleman in a military uniform. The most prominent place in the house is given not to W. A. Clark but to General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, the man who saved the Clarks’ beloved France in the Great War of 1914–18. Pershing, with salt-and-pepper hair and a gray mustache, stands weary but resolute, his thumb tucked confidently in the belt of his high-collared uniform, which is adorned with three rows of ribbons. This portrait, like so many others in the house, was painted by Tadé Styka.

The house is mostly a U-shaped structure, with east and west wings extending away from the sea in the front and toward the Santa Ynez Mountains in the back. Between the wings, visible as one enters the home, is a courtyard with a long, dark reflecting pond with blue-black stone tiles. One enters via a great central corridor, or galleria, that runs nearly the full length of the main section of the house. Portraits show an older W. A. Clark, with his intense blue eyes and white beard, and Anna, with her dark bangs and pearls.