Empty Mansions (31 page)
Authors: Bill Dedman
The largest space in the home is the music room, measuring forty-six feet by twenty-three feet. This is where Anna played her forty-three-string pedal harp, a marvel made for her in a Louis XVI style adorned with gilt sculptures and paintings, and Huguette played her second-best
violin by Stradivari, which she kept wrapped in four Japanese scarves. Two Steinway pianos sat back-to-back for duets. Bellosguardo was alive with music when the Clarks were in residence.
In the wood-paneled library, above the fireplace, is a large Styka portrait of Andrée, who died fifteen years before the house was built. Matching portraits of the girls show them sitting on benches, Andrée with a book, the younger Huguette cradling a doll. The house is full of portraits of Andrée, paintings sometimes two to a room. Her deep-set eyes are everywhere. In one large painting by Styka, the older sister sits on a giant cut log in a rushing mountain stream, dressed in a middy blouse with neckerchief, surrounded by the nature she loved. Her sad blue eyes are filled with portent.
• • •
The lost sister is also remembered in two memorials outdoors at Bellosguardo. The first is a small brown-and-white cottage tucked behind the tennis court and framed by green tamarix junipers. This cottage wouldn’t have been out of place in England or Normandy in the fifteenth century. It’s a half-timbered structure in the mock Tudor style, with a thatched roof, a stone chimney, and oddly undulating windowpanes. Built of clear heart redwood, the two rooms are rustic, with a black cast-iron stove from the early 1900s and simple country furniture.
The Clarks didn’t build this cottage but inherited it from the Grahams, who built it as a playhouse for
their daughter, Geraldine. The Clarks took down the sign in Old English script reading “Geraldine Graham’s Cottage” and replaced it with a nearly identical one saying “Andrée’s Cottage.” The cottage was lovingly maintained. When the roof needed repairs, for example, thatchers came from England to do the work. Although Barbara Hoelscher Doran, the estate manager’s daughter, remembers using it as a playhouse, to the Clarks it was more of a memorial, and they spoke with solemn voices in its vicinity.
That’s how Anna’s goddaughters recall the cottage. In addition to their regular visits to 907 Fifth Avenue, Anna allowed each goddaughter one trip west to the summer home at Bellosguardo. Leontine went with her family for Huguette’s wedding in 1928. Her mother was the maid of honor, and Leontine was two and a half.
Music filled the rooms at Bellosguardo. In this photo from about 1940, one of Anna’s harps and a piano sit at one end of the music room, with portraits of Huguette, right, and her late sister, Andrée, prominently displayed
. (
illustration credit8.1
)
Ann’s trip came when she was eight, nearly nine. In May 1937, her godmother pulled her out of school for a surprise cross-country train trip. Ann’s mother and a governess also made the trip. Huguette, at age thirty-one, did not.
The leg from Chicago to Los Angeles was the first regular run of the Super Chief, a new high-speed train also known as “the Train of the Stars.” The passenger list included ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his sidekick Charlie McCarthy. Anna, having been married to railroad royalty, had lifetime courtesy passes on all the nation’s railroads, a perk recorded on a list registered with Congress. On this train, she had her own china in her stateroom to use for tea parties with her goddaughter. “She was,” Ann recalled, “a sweet person to children.”
Ann remembers that while they were at Bellosguardo, the Paganini Quartet played a concert just for them. “It was idyllic.”
Both goddaughters said that the subject of Anna’s elder daughter
never came up. The girls knew that something bad had happened, so bad that it was never spoken of. Ann recalled the thatched-roof Andrée’s cottage as “a shrine—we had to be very quiet around that.”
• • •
The second memorial to Andrée was provided by Huguette. In August 1928, before her wedding here,
Huguette honored her sister by giving $50,000 to the City of Santa Barbara to create the Andrée Clark Bird Refuge on city land just behind Bellosguardo. Her donation eventually turned the marshy inlet from a foul-smelling eyesore into a lake with three man-made islands. The city had drawn up plans for the refuge at Anna’s request, and Huguette came up with the donation from her own money. This donation benefited the Clarks, too, removing a blight from the neighborhood, but the thirty-one-acre refuge was primarily Huguette’s memorial to her sister, just as Camp Andrée was her parents’.
For more than eighty years, the Andrée Clark Bird Refuge has been a serene lagoon and garden for wild ducks, snow geese, and other waterfowl heading south for the winter, as well as a year-round home for herons, cormorants, and other water birds. It is also a sanctuary for people, but on Huguette’s terms. Her donation included strict limits on its use: no camping, no boating, no swimming, no concessions, and no parking alongside the boulevard. And it must forever be named for Andrée.
After the lake filled up with algae, in 1989 Huguette donated an additional $30,000 for its cleanup and for educational programs. Still in some years a foul odor comes off the water from decomposing algae, and in 2012 the cost of needed rehabilitation was estimated at $1 million. The lake, like a life well lived, needs constant replenishment with fresh oxygen.
T
HE DAUGHTER
of the estate manager, Barbara Hoelscher Doran, recalls playing dolls with Huguette in the early 1950s at Bellosguardo. Little Barbee, as she was called, said she didn’t think for a moment about the difference in ages. Barbee Hoelscher was born in 1944 and was still a child in the early 1950s, while Huguette was in her forties. “Huguette would phone our house and invite me over for afternoon tea. I would walk over with the dogs and sit with Huguette and Anna on the terrace under the big umbrellas, overlooking the great lawns and ocean. I remember having lemonade, tea, and lovely cakes and cookies made by the French chef who came with the ladies from New York.”
Usually the Clark estate had no Clarks, only servants. There was work to be done, of course. Anna’s English butler, the tall and quite proper Thomas Morton, was responsible for the dining room, with its hundreds of dark wood panels. This is one of three rooms in the house salvaged from the old Clark mansion on Fifth Avenue. (Anna, who of course didn’t inherit the house, did not save these rooms, but had to buy them back from an antiques dealer.) The ceiling is a wonder, made of canvas, trimmed in gold, and painted with comical human figures and colorful cherubs. There were maids to supervise, but no work of urgency. Morton found time to become expert at cultivating bonsai.
Into the 1960s, Bellosguardo operated on the forty-eight-hour rule. The staff was expected to have the house ready for the family within two days’ notice of a Clark visit. Sometimes, Barbara recalls, Anna and Huguette “
would arrive on such short notice that Mother offered to help whip off the dust sheets covering the furniture and brighten the rooms with flower arrangements.”
Then the house would spring to life. Anna would show off to visitors her harps and her collection of ladies’ fans from the courts of France. Huguette had her own enthusiasms: photography and painting.
Her photo albums show that she roamed the grounds freely with her camera, capturing the symmetrical steps by the reflecting pool and a still life of
fruit leaves in a bowl. She documented every room repeatedly. Years later, she would astonish the staff by calling to request a certain book on Japanese culture, telling them which shelf it was on, and that it was the seventh book over from the right.
Her artist’s studio was tucked into the back for maximum privacy. There she kept not only paintings but the Japanese dolls that she loved to paint. The studio has its own kitchenette, and a private stairway up to the bedrooms, allowing Huguette to live and work without having to pass through the main hallway of the house.
Huguette was not content to work on her own paintings, but also offered a bit of editing. Outside the music room hangs a depiction of an older W.A. with a wild shock of white hair and brilliant blue eyes. Nattily dressed in a vest, her father is wearing a pearl stickpin and also a pinkie ring. The surprising part is the signature. At the lower right is “Tadé Styka 1925.” Below that is another signature, “Hugo C.” Huguette made amendments to this work, touching up her painting instructor’s view of her father, and co-signed it with her nickname.
On the upper level of the east wing are suites for Anna and Huguette—W.A. needed no room here, as it was built after he died. Each suite includes a sitting room with a fireplace and a wardrobe closet paneled in book-matched bird’s-eye maple. In Anna’s suite, a portrait of W.A. sits on the desk by the window, near photos of both girls playing as children. One of her enormous golden French harps stands at the foot of the bed. Her bathroom features an astonishing oversize bathtub, carved from a solid block of yellow-and-pink marble with gold trim. She had a French kneeling desk, or prie-dieu, for prayer, and a felt-lined box from Cartier held a crucifix.
Through the windows, they could see Anna’s rose garden, once the grandest in Santa Barbara. Its concentric circles were separated by low hedges of dwarf myrtle and walkways of red sandstone. At the center of the garden stands a fountain, a three-tiered Italian stone sculpture, topped by a bathing nude woman fixing her long hair.
The estate manager’s daughter, living at Bellosguardo year-round, had far more time to explore these wonders than Huguette did. Amid all this luxury, she remembers the Clarks most of all for their generosity. “
Huguette wanted my mother to have the very best piano for our home
on the property, and spent days trying out pianos until she found one that had the quality she wanted,” Barbara Hoelscher Doran recalled. “She loved the latest technology and innovations, and would buy the newest camera or sixteen-millimeter projectors, one for her and one for our family.
“They were very quiet, lovely, giving ladies.”
O
N
D
ECEMBER
3, 1941, Huguette wrote a jaunty note in French to Tadé Styka from Santa Barbara. She was still in touch with her former painting instructor, who had sent her chocolates and a corsage for her journey west. She wrote that she was tanning in the beautiful sun, “
turning the color of chocolate.”
Four days later, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor drew the United States into World War II. Huguette, who had studied Japanese culture and art, told her friends she was crushed by the sneak attack.
Bellosguardo changed during the war, as fear of invasion dominated the Pacific coast. An infantry regiment brought up to Santa Barbara had a post in the Clark beach house. The estate manager, Albert Hoelscher, became a civil defense warden, his home the district headquarters. Along the cliff, there were posts in the ground with time clocks to make sure the armed sentries made their rounds.
The young sentries were a little goosey and shot at anything, recalled Barry Hoelscher, Barbara’s older brother. The children were issued 1917-style steel helmets and gas masks. Anna was generous to the staff and showed concern for their safety. Each year during the war, she gave the Hoelscher family a $1,000 war bond and each of the children a $75 bond. She also outfitted the Hoelschers with a rifle, a .45-caliber pistol, and $10,000 in case they had to evacuate.