Empty Mansions (53 page)

And her gregarious ex-husband, Bill Gower, to whom she sent money and family news.

She had a loving, artistic goddaughter, Wanda Styka, who remained a faithful correspondent for sixty years.

And her artist friends in France: The whimsical Félix Lorioux with his comical gift-giving insects. The fantastic and erotic Chéri Hérouard, her magazine hunter. And Jean Mercier, Manon Iessel, and J. P. Pinchon, for whom she was “a good fairy” in their old age.

She had her telephone friends, including her cousin Paul Newell and her half-grandnephew André Baeyens. And her art helpers: Caterina Marsh, who was the go-between with her artist friend Saburo Kawakami in Japan. Her dollhouse repairman, Rudolph Jaklitsch, and his wife, Anna, who made the curtains. The staff at Au Nain Bleu and Christian Dior.

She had her longtime friends from her childhood, the ones she supported so generously into their old age: Ninta Sandré, the daughter of her governess, and many others who received her help. Even a stranger, Gwendolyn Jenkins, whose only connection to Huguette was that she took care of Huguette’s stockbroker when he was ill.

She had her pen pals in Santa Barbara, keeping tabs on her mother’s Bellosguardo and her sister’s bird refuge: Alma Armstrong, the chauffeur’s widow, who sent newspaper clippings. And the mayor, Sheila Lodge, whose long campaign to persuade Huguette to leave the Clark estate to the arts bore fruit in Huguette’s will and the Bellosguardo Foundation.

Though many of those close to Huguette received large gifts, so much that one would naturally question their independence as witnesses to her competence, many doctors and nurses received nothing. Yet they tell the same story of a remarkable woman who knew her own mind. The audiologists tested her hearing and found her quite alert even at nearly ninety-nine. Dr. John Wolff visited frequently to bring Huguette
flowers and to hear her stories. And the neurologist, Dr. Louise Klebanoff, found the little old lady in the hospital to be as “cute as pie.”

An assistant district attorney, Elizabeth Loewy, met her obligation to check on Huguette’s well-being. An FBI agent, investigating the theft of a Degas pastel, walked right into her hospital room.

• • •

Huguette’s hobbies were not what most people would choose if they had unlimited wealth. She was unashamed about collecting dolls, building castles, and watching the Smurfs, just as other people like to collect stamps or can name the shortstop for the Boston Red Sox in 1967. Huguette took seriously Miss Clara Spence’s admonition to “cultivate imagination”—even to the point of being concerned that “the little people are banging their heads!”

We will never know why Huguette was, as she might say, “peculiar.” The people in her inner circle say they have no idea. Outsiders speculate. It was being the daughter of an older father! It was her sister’s death! Or her mother’s! The wealth! It was autism or Asperger’s or a childhood trauma! Easy answers fail because the question assumes that personalities have a single determinant. Whatever caused her shyness, her limitations of sociability or coping, her fears—of strangers, of kidnapping, of needles, of another French Revolution—Huguette found a situation that worked for her, a modern-day “Boo” Radley, shut up inside by choice, safe from a world that can hurt.

Like her attention-grabbing father and her music-loving mother, both strong-willed and private in their own ways, Huguette was a formidable personality who lived life as she wanted, always on her own terms. Far from being controlled by her money men, she drove them to frustration. Though she was firm, she was always kind. It would have been easy for anyone born into her cosseted circumstances to have abused her power. Yet in all the testimony by fifty witnesses in the battle for her fortune, in all her correspondence, there is not a single indication that Huguette ever used her wealth to hurt anyone. That just wasn’t her way.

Huguette had experienced the finest belongings and most luxurious travel. She had seen heart-stopping panoramas, owned great art, heard inspiring music. Yet in the end, she preferred to live in a hospital room,
with her hollandaise and brioche and cashmere sweaters. Huguette had the courage—or Clark stubbornness—to be an artist at a time when that wasn’t an approved path for a woman, to break away from a marriage she didn’t want, to resist the manipulations of her hospital and her museum to get more of her money, to leave most of her estate to her friends and to a charity that honored her mother’s memory. According to common belief, “just throwing money away” may be a sign of mental illness, but Huguette enjoyed giving gifts to the people she knew.

These were not acts of incompetence, but of self-expression and resilience. In her own way, she found what life may be, a life of integrity.

Huguette was a quiet woman in a noisy time. She had all the possessions that anyone could want, but she set them aside—all except her brioche and cashmere sweaters.

TO LIVE HAPPILY
 

O
N
M
ARCH
2, 2005, just a month before she signed her last will and testament, Huguette was sitting up in her hospital bed when Dr. Singman stopped by for a visit. She had a treat for him.

Huguette recited a poem. “Le Grillon” (
The Cricket) was one of the old French fables from the book of morocco leather in her father’s library at the Clark mansion on Fifth Avenue, where ninety years earlier Andrée had read to Huguette. This fable was written in the late 1700s by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian. It is also sometimes called “True Happiness.” Huguette knew it by heart.

T
HE
C
RICKET

Huguette, at ninety-eight years old, recited the childhood fable, from memory, three times.

In English.

In Spanish.

And, of course, in French.

Pour vivre heureux, vivons caché
. To live happily, live hidden.

AUTHORS’ NOTE
 

T
HE LIVES OF
H
UGUETTE
C
LARK
and her mysterious family, hidden in the shadows for so long, are illuminated now by an array of human sources, private documents, and public records.

Our sources begin with Huguette herself, through her telephone calls with co-author Paul Newell. We also interviewed more than a hundred people—relatives, friends, employees, attorneys—who gave generously of their time and memories, sometimes with the understanding that we would not use their names. Their accounts are supplemented by the sworn testimony of fifty witnesses in the legal battle over Huguette’s estate, including her goddaughter, personal assistant, nurses, and doctors, as well as the relatives seeking her fortune.

Luckily for us, Huguette kept nearly every important document in her life, and many papers that most of us toss out, even the first drafts of Christmas cards. We weren’t able to see everything in her archives, but we were able to read some twenty thousand pages of her personal and financial correspondence, including four thousand pages we had translated from the French. We read thousands of pages of notes made by her nurses in her twenty years in the hospital. We read correspondence that Huguette received from her attorneys and accountants; her income tax returns, bank statements, and canceled checks; and bills of sale for artwork, musical instruments, and furniture back to the early 1900s, as well as more recent inventories of her property. We read historical papers, including sections of her father’s journal and ledger from the 1860s and 1870s in Montana and genealogical entries in the Clark family Bible.

To understand the Clarks and their world, we examined more than five thousand previously unpublished photographs from Huguette’s apartments, including those in her personal albums and snapshots of her dolls and dollhouses and her art projects. Perhaps more fascinating were her paintings, including those she owned, those she painted herself, and those painted of her by her painting instructor. Although private tours of her empty mansions were a window into her style and tastes during
various periods, the detailed photographs, both historic and recent, in which one can see the books and sheet music on her shelves and the framed photos on her bedside table, brought those empty rooms to life.

Add to these the public records of her life: the 1900 Senate investigation and trial resulting in W. A. Clark’s resignation from the U.S. Senate; the transcript of a 1920s court battle in Montana over W.A.’s estate; marriage and divorce certificates; burial records; property records; census rolls; passenger registries from ocean liners; passport applications; and hundreds of books, scholarly theses, and newspaper and magazine articles.

Also telling are the ephemera: a lock of her sister’s hair, a harp composition of “Sleeping Beauty,” and a menu in French from W.A.’s dinner celebrating his first election to the Senate. The menu, like the man, bears a permanent stain, a single drop of Bordeaux.