Chapter Five

The Reinvention of Anna

In New York society, an upper-class British or French accent has long added cachet, conveying Old World elegance and culture. When Anna Evangelina La Chapelle Clark, the mother of Huguette Clark, entertained in her Fifth Avenue apartment in the 1930s and 1940s, guests came away convinced that she was originally from Paris. The impeccable widow of Sen. William Andrews Clark served French food, and her décor included Louis XIV antiques and Impressionist paintings. The guests at her chamber music concerts or dinners were often from France—such as harpist Marcel Grandjany—or conversed with her in French, like Polish portrait painter Tadé Styka.

“I always assumed that she was French,” says Leontine “Tina” Lyle Harrower, now in her late eighties, who spent childhood Sundays wearing white gloves to attend four-course lunches at the home of her godmother Anna, known by the nickname “Lani.” “It never occurred to me that Lani was born in the States,” says Harrower, now based in British Columbia. “She had a very marked French accent when she spoke English. I was totally shocked when I learned just recently about her past.”

Harrower’s older brother, Gordon Lyle Jr., was also under the impression that Anna was foreign-born, asking even now—“Was she French?”—and expressing surprise at the answer. Dr. William Gordon Lyle, the father of Tina and Gordon, had been the chief physician to Senator Clark and his family. “Lani was an absolutely wonderful woman, poised and charming,” says Lyle Jr. His imagination was sparked by Anna’s description of her husband’s Wild West past. As Lyle Jr. recalls, “She told me that when the senator used to go to bed for the night, he always put a pistol under the pillow.”

Anna Clark was more than a turn-of-the-century adornment for a business magnate; she was a master of reinvention. The patina of money plus a Parisian education smoothed over the rough edges of her frontier Montana upbringing. As a result, she was the shimmering picture of refined glamour in middle age, adorned with diamonds, emeralds, and rubies that were compared favorably in the press to the jewels worn by Astors and Vanderbilts.

Anna was not pretentious but she was proper, impressing on the children of her friends the importance of etiquette as if to train them as she had been trained. “Lunch there was always such an ordeal because I had to have such good manners,” says an octogenarian who was a child when her parents socialized with Anna. “I can see the dining room, where Lani sat, where I sat. She had so much silver and gold cutlery and I was absorbed with that. She spoke French fluently, which I had to do when I was with her. But she was sweet and real and loving.”

Anna never tried to hide her Montana girlhood. But as the years went by it had become ancient history—unknown to most New Yorkers—so this sophisticated woman with a mischievous sense of humor could enjoy the hard-won status that she had achieved in upper-crust Manhattan. If exquisite manners and a French accent gave people the illusion that she was wellborn, so be it.

In truth, Anna’s accent had a less glamorous origin than the boulevards of Gay Paree—her parents were French-Canadian Catholics from Montreal. Her father, Pierre (who often used the Americanized version, Peter) La Chapelle, claimed to have trained as a physician at a medical school in Montreal, at least according to a bio in Progressive Men of the State of Montana. After he married the farmer’s daughter Philomene Rock de Dubie, the couple moved to Calumet, Michigan, where Anna was born in 1878. She had two younger siblings: sister Amelia, born in 1881, and brother Arthur, born in 1883.

When Anna was ten years old, the family moved to Butte and Peter set up a practice as a physician. Two years later he got into trouble with local authorities for practicing medicine without a license. ONE OF BUTTE’S FAKIRS FOUND GUILTY BY A JURY, trumpeted a headline in the November 14, 1890, Anaconda Standard. At the trial, an engineer testified that La Chapelle had professed to be a doctor and treated his wife for an illness; a pharmacist showed prescriptions written by La Chapelle. A member of the board of medical examiners stated that La Chapelle had never applied for a license. If Peter La Chapelle did indeed have Canadian medical training, this would have been the moment to present his documentation. But he did not testify, and his lawyer offered no defense witnesses. The jury returned a guilty verdict in fifteen minutes: the defendant was fined $100 and told to find another profession. La Chapelle hung out a shingle as an eye specialist, listing his profession as “oculist.”

Anna’s mother, Philomene, ran a boardinghouse in the seedier part of town on East Park Avenue, close to Butte’s bars and brothels. The wide-open city was infamous for its whorehouses on “Venus Alley” servicing the miners and the well-to-do. The La Chapelle family was on the downhill slide. Anna was a pretty teenager with long, lustrous hair, blue eyes, a high forehead, and a serene smile, and her performances in school plays had been favorably received. Her practical sister, Amelia, enrolled in secretarial school and her brother, Arthur, worked as an elevator operator in an office building. And then—suddenly—everything changed.

What brought Anna La Chapelle and William Andrews Clark together? Historians have relied on a spitefully entertaining 1904 account in the Anaconda Standard. Anna is portrayed in this article as a brazenly ambitious fifteen-year-old who went searching for a sugar daddy in the early 1890s.

“About nine or ten years ago,” the Standard wrote, “a little golden haired girl of prepossessing appearance walked into the banking house of James A. Murray in this city, and without much ceremony, asked Mr. Murray to bear the expense of her education, adding that he was wealthy… At that time, she possessed an ambition to become an actress… Mr. Murray did not know the girl and had never heard of her, so he declined to accept the girl’s invitation to help her.” According to the article, the altruistic banker suggested that she contact William Andrews Clark, telling Anna, “Mr. Clark was unmarried, had plenty of money and would undoubtedly help her along the road she desired to travel. Miss La Chapelle then asked Mr. Murray if he would introduce her to Mr. Clark and he declined…”

The problem with this tantalizing account is that it ignores the classic tenet of journalism: consider the source. The owner of the Anaconda Standard was Marcus Daly, who despised William Clark. The newspaper staff delighted in running stories aimed to embarrass the Butte copper mogul. James Murray, a gambler turned millionaire mine owner, was one of Marcus Daly’s close friends, and he ran a bank that competed for business with Clark’s bank. Murray was a Republican, and his name was floated as a potential rival to William Andrews Clark for a Montana Senate seat.

Yes, maybe Anna La Chapelle strolled into a rich banker’s office and tried to insinuate herself into his good graces. But the article is equally likely to reflect the yellow journalism efforts of William Clark’s enemies to tarnish the reputation of his beloved.

William Clark’s version also strains credulity. Clark claimed that he first spied Anna La Chapelle at a July Fourth parade in 1893, a few months after the death of his wife. Anna, an appealing beauty, was dressed in a toga to portray the Goddess of Liberty. The age gap between them was thirty-nine years—she was young enough to be his grandchild. After the parade, Clark made inquiries and met her parents. “Anna La Chapelle early displayed an unusual musical talent,” he later told reporters. “She was bright and studious. I encouraged her inclination for study by placing her in the young ladies’ seminary at Deer Lodge, of which institution I was a member of the executive board.”

Clark became an enthusiastic backer of not just Anna but her entire family. The copper king paid for her father’s tuition at a genuine medical school in Chicago and her sister Amelia’s education at St. Mary’s Academy in Salt Lake City, followed by a stint at the National Park Seminary in Forest Glen, Maryland. The youngest member of the family, Arthur La Chapelle, became a timekeeper at one of Clark’s mines.

In August 1895, all three La Chapelle siblings performed at Maguire’s Opera House in Butte at a well-attended show called “Dream of Fairyland.” Anna displayed her graceful physique with a Spanish dance. Amelia played an orphan in a skit, and Arthur sang the aptly named song, “I Am Not Old Enough to Know.”

After Anna graduated from high school, Clark offered her a trip to Paris to study the harp under the auspices of Alphonse Hasselmans, a professor of harp at the National Conservatoire of Music. To reassure Anna’s parents of his virtuous intentions, Clark came up with a chaperone—his sister, Lizzie Clark Abascal.

Lizzie was married to one of William Clark’s closest friends, Joaquin Abascal, an older, well-to-do Spaniard who ran mining and mercantile businesses in the small town of Bear Gulch, Montana. The parents of two daughters, Lizzie and her husband split their time between Montana and Los Angeles. As William Clark would later tell reporters, “Anna had shown such disposition for the study of music and languages that I sent her abroad with my sister, Mrs. Abascal, who was going to Paris to educate her daughters.”

Paris was such a de rigeur destination that the Chicago Daily Tribune chronicled the goings-on of expatriates in an 1893 feature, AMERICANS IN PARIS: BRILLIANT WOMEN WHO LIVE IN THE FRENCH CAPITAL. The article described the opulent homes occupied by the likes of Mrs. Joseph Pulitzer and the competitive social circuit revolving around literary salons, art exhibitions, and “tender philanthropies.” “Many old and well-known American families have been or are represented in Paris,” the newspaper noted, reeling off a list including Vanderbilts, Winthrops, and Morgans. Anna’s trip to France was planned as a short-term educational tour to enhance her musical abilities and give her language skills an upper-class polish. Instead, Paris would end up becoming Anna’s home for more than fifteen years.

Clark visited Paris in March 1896 to see his protégée, but their happy reunion was cut short when Clark received devastating news: his sixteen-year-old son, Paul, had died of a strep infection while at boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts. Paul was his father’s favorite, a rugged, manly boy who planned to study law. Clark sailed back to New York, burying his son at Woodlawn Cemetery in the family mausoleum. In Butte, he underwrote the Paul Clark home, a refuge for orphans. The robber baron would often stop by around Christmas bearing gifts for the orphans, according to newspaper accounts, and tear up at the memory of his son.

Clark had mercurial relationships with his two surviving sons from his first marriage. Like so many self-made men, he had high expectations for his progeny. His well-educated oldest son, Charles, dabbled in the family enterprises but his second son, Will Jr., made more of an effort to live up to his father’s name as a lawyer and businessman. Despite their sophisticated upbringing in Europe and at elite boarding schools and colleges, both of Clark’s sons fell for small-town Butte girls from undistinguished backgrounds. William Clark showed his paternal disdain by skipping the wedding in July 1896 of his son Charles to legal stenographer Katherine Roberts. The copper mogul sent his regrets along with a $100,000 check. He always publicized his gifts to his children, flaunting his wealth.

Rather than attend his son’s wedding, William Clark chartered a private train in Butte to take him to Chicago in July 1896, as a delegate to the Democratic Convention. The events of the next few days would have embarrassing repercussions for him. At the raucous convention, William Jennings Bryan, a young Nebraska congressman, gave his “Cross of Gold” speech championing silver coinage. On the fifth ballot, Bryan won the Democratic nomination. (He would lose to William McKinley.) Clark was a Bryan man for a simple reason: the potential boost in the value of silver mines.

At the hotel housing the Montana delegation, Clark noticed a pretty young New Yorker, Mary McNellis, who identified herself as a newspaper correspondent. They struck up a conversation and discussed having dinner. Clark was favorably impressed, later describing her as “rather agreeable and highly intelligent.”

A few weeks later, Clark checked into the Waldorf Hotel in Manhattan, a fact mentioned in the New York Times (HOME NEWS: PROMINENT ARRIVALS IN HOTELS, July 26, 1896). The enterprising McNellis dropped by and sent up her card. Clark came right down and took her for drinks in the hotel’s Turkish room, a romantic setting with plush banquettes. Dinner, gifts, and other assignations followed.

An ocean away in Paris, Anna La Chapelle was in mourning for her father, who had died unexpectedly of a stroke at age forty-nine in the spring of 1896. But despite her grief, she had no desire to return to Butte and her old life. Now accustomed to living in luxury, Anna had taken to the harp as a serious student and had a circle of talented and noteworthy friends. Her entrée was eased by William Andrews Clark’s generosity as a patron of the arts. He gave large sums to the American Art Association of Paris to support exhibitions and prizes; the judges included sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and painter Jean Charles Cazin. Clark purchased two nude sculptures directly from Auguste Rodin and a striking painting by Edwin Austin Abbey, Who Is Sylvia? What Is She, That All the Swains Commend Her?

Anna was soon accompanied by a new live-in chaperone, Madame de Cervellon, whose expenses were paid by William Clark. Clark would later pointedly praise Madame de Cervellon’s respectable credentials, referring to her as “a woman of education and means, the widow of an officer of the French Army.” The widow played the delicate role of intermediary, a confidant to Anna and a spy for her benefactor, reporting back to Clark when other men expressed interest. Madame de Cervellon was worldly enough to look the other way at the sexual overtones between the visiting Clark and his young protégée.

As a widower, Clark was free to remarry. But he found it preferable to have a young paramour stashed away in Paris, keeping his private life private, while he once again pursued what he saw as his manifest destiny—a seat in the United States Senate.

The 1899 Montana Senate race cemented Clark’s reputation as a man willing to do anything—bribe, threaten, risk public ridicule—to get what he wanted. This race was one of several turn-of-the-century election scandals that led to the country’s ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, taking away the power of state legislatures to elect senators and mandating a popular vote.

To influence political coverage, Clark bought Montana newspapers (the Great Falls Tribune, the Helena Herald), gained leverage over others by making investments or purchasing their debts, and sent emissaries around the state to directly grease the palms of key editors and writers. “The spree of bribery and newspaper buying that accompanied William A. Clark’s push for the Senate made most charges of journalistic prostitution seem plausible,” wrote historian Dennis Swibold in Copper Chorus: Mining, Politics, and the Montana Press, 1889–1959.

When the Montana State Legislature convened in January 1899, Clark set up his headquarters at the Helena Hotel. Since he did not want to be seen making questionable deals, he brought in his twenty-six-year-old son Charles as a bagman. Charles Clark took on the job with filial enthusiasm, declaring in an oft-repeated but perhaps apocryphal quote, “We’ll send the old man to the Senate or the poor house.” State Senator Fred Whiteside promptly threw a grenade into the race when he plausibly claimed that Clark’s allies had given him $30,000 for his vote and that of two other legislators. Clark claimed that this charge was a setup by Daly.

A Helena grand jury launched an inquiry (finding that the evidence was inconclusive) even as the balloting continued. During the eighteen days that the Montana legislature wavered, Clark’s son and his other allies reputedly offered enticements to Democrats and Republicans for their votes—deeds to valuable real estate, new jobs, debt repayment, and good, old-fashioned bundles of cash.

After Clark finally won the election, he celebrated by giving the citizens of Helena free unlimited champagne at the bars. The newly anointed senator was not scheduled to take office until January 1900, which gave Marcus Daly nearly a year to regroup. Daly filed charges of corruption with the Senate Committee on Elections, which began an investigation.

Witnesses trooped from Montana to Washington to testify in the winter of 1900. With the capital mesmerized by the corruption charges, there was tremendous interest in this eligible widower poised to be the richest man in the Senate. A syndicated story hit the wires on March 19 announcing that Clark would soon be married. “Gossips say Miss Ada La Chappelle, Protegee of Copper King, Will Probably Become His Bride,” trumpeted the Chicago Daily Tribune. The femme fatale was described as “tall, dark and slender, with a typical French face and the great soulful eyes which are associated with artistic temperament.”

The story was rife with errors, including the name of the supposed bride: not only was there no “Ada,” but the background description and accompanying sketch fit Anna La Chapelle’s sister, Amelia, now attending finishing school in Forest Glen, Maryland, and training as a vocalist.

Clark indignantly denied the marital rumor and stressed that he was a father figure to both La Chapelle sisters, insisting, “I would as soon think of marrying one of my own daughters.” But stories about the romance kept appearing with salacious variations. The Pharos-Tribune of Logansport, Indiana, wrote, “There has been much gossip about Miss La Chappelle, most of it to the effect that she once began a breach of promise suit against her benefactor.” The newspaper delicately added, “Somewhat different rumors, which are not so flattering to the copper king, are persistently circulated.” The Davenport Daily Republican insisted that Clark’s children vehemently disapproved: “Mr. Clark’s daughters have been opposed to his marriage to so young a wife.”

Amelia La Chapelle was so upset that she fled the Washington suburbs to return to Butte. A second round of articles followed, claiming that the feisty Amelia was going to marry former Montana senator Lee Mantle. “This is the first I have heard of it,” Mantle responded, diplomatically adding, “and unfortunately for me there is not a word of truth in it.”

While gossip columnists feasted on this family drama, Clark was on Capitol Hill, facing his accusers. He was so confident that he would prevail that he purchased “Stewart’s Castle” on Massachusetts Avenue near Dupont Circle, a four-story mansion built by Nevada senator William Stewart. But Clark’s election trophy was snatched away when he was unable to convince the Senate that he had won the election legitimately. SENATE COMMITTEE AGAINST MR. CLARK, blared the New York Times on April 24, 1900. DECISION BASED ON BRIBERY. REPORT SAYS CLARK IN HIS TESTIMONY ADMITTED CORRUPT PRACTICES BY HIS AGENTS.

Clark resigned before he could be thrown out. Then the crafty mogul tried to make an end run. Montana governor Robert Smith was lured to California on a business trip, and Lt. Gov. A. E. Spriggs used his temporary power as Montana’s highest official to appoint Clark to the empty Senate seat. Crying fraud, the outraged governor named his own candidate. The Senate adjourned without acting on either appointment, leaving the Montana Senate seat vacant.

Some humiliated office seekers might have opted for a low profile after such a searing defeat. But William Andrews Clark threw an extravaganza of a wedding in Manhattan on May 28, 1900, for his daughter Katherine to Dr. Lewis Rutherfurd Morris, the scion of a family who traced its lineage back to a Founding Father. Clark invited four thousand guests including President McKinley, Cabinet members, generals, and fellow robber barons J. Pierpont Morgan and E. H. Harriman. (The La Chapelle sisters did not make the cut.) Crowds thronged St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue to see the dignitaries. The reception was held at Clark’s apartment at the Navarro Flats on West Fifty-Eighth Street, where the lines for the elevators were so long that many people walked up seven flights. As a Hungarian orchestra played, guests could scarcely make it through the melee to reach the sumptuous buffet tables.

Clark had already decided that his residence at one of New York’s premier buildings—featuring seven-bedroom duplexes with extra-high ceilings and Gothic and Queen Anne architectural details—was not sufficient to display his burgeoning art collection. After purchasing land on Fifth Avenue at Seventy-Seventh Street, he began planning a French-style mansion that would rival the palaces of the Astors and Vanderbilts.

Returning to Butte, Clark plotted another zigzag route to take him back to Washington and a Senate seat. He teamed up with mining mogul Augustus Heinze, and the duo came up with a plan to stack the Montana legislature with like-minded Democrats. They courted the labor vote by announcing that they would grant their miners an eight-hour day. Then Clark went off to Europe to spend two months with Anna. In the November 1900 election, the Clark-Heinze slate of Democrats won the statehouse by a landslide. In January 1901, the new Montana legislature elected Clark to the Senate seat he had long craved.

The most widely quoted description of the robber baron’s political career came from Mark Twain, a friend of Marcus Daly, and therefore not an entirely objective source. Twain excoriated Clark in 1907 as the epitome of corruption: “He is said to have bought legislatures and judges as other men buy food and raiment… he is as rotten a human being as can ever be found anywhere under the flag; he is a shame to the American nation and no one has helped to send him to the Senate who did not know that his proper place was the penitentiary, with a ball and chain on his legs.”

Rumors spread that the Montana senator would be arriving in the capital with a bride. A new name emerged: Hattie Rose Laube, of Huron, South Dakota, announced that she was engaged to Senator Clark, claiming that they had kissed and that he had written her a letter proposing matrimony. Clark issued a public denial. Even the Anaconda Standard, which gleefully trumpeted Clark’s every peccadillo, sided with him, stating that the stunt appeared designed to advertise “her pa’s spiritualism racket…”

Other tales of Clark’s romantic entanglements circulated. The copper mogul had taken under his wing a new Montana protégée, Kathlyn Williams, an acting student at Montana Wesleyan College who had appeared in Butte productions. Another hard-pressed teenager (her father had died), Kathlyn had approached the senator and asked him to pay for her tuition at the Sargent School, now known as the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. Kathlyn was later described as the senator’s “ward” by the Washington Post. She publicly credited Clark for his financial support but was discreet about their relationship. The blonde ingenue would go on to become a silent film star, appearing in dozens of serials and movies such as Rendezvous at Midnight, Everything for Sale, and The Politician’s Love Story.

In the fall of 1901, Anna La Chapelle was seen in Washington, staying at the Arlington Hotel and being entertained by the senator’s friends, including the sister of his first wife. Then Anna moved to Butte temporarily, sharing an apartment with her sister, Amelia, within easy walking distance of Clark’s Granite Street mansion.

Anna had now been involved with the copper mogul in some fashion for eight years. Whether on purpose or by accident she became pregnant. On February 6, 1902, she was accompanied by Amelia on a ship to France, and then she headed south to a villa near the Bay of Algiers with the ever-loyal Madame de Cervellon. In August 1902, Anna gave birth to Louise Amelia Andrée Clark, known as Andrée. The news was kept so quiet that not even a hint of a new Clark descendant was heard back in America. In fact, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an article that month announcing: “Rumor is persistent that Senator W. A. Clark of Montana will marry during the coming autumn or winter either the widow of a well-known New Yorker of distinguished lineage or the recently divorced wife of a Missouri Congressman.” The story drily commented that the senator had a “partiality” for the ladies and “is constantly credited with being about to marry this or that prominent woman in whose company he may have been seen.”

His fortune made him attractive, and the senator knew how to charm women. He was able to knowledgeably discuss art and literature—he collected rare books—as well as business. But he was deeply in love with Anna, a bond that would only become stronger through the years. Two decades later, he would still be writing impassioned letters to his “Darling Wife” and “Sweetheart Cherie” and “Ma Chere Anna,” signing them “fondest love.”

Even as Anna was giving birth to her first child, Andrée, Clark’s children from his first marriage were preparing their own engraved birth announcements. (These children were the grandparents and great-grandparents of the Clark relations who, a century later, would express interest in Tante Huguette.) Clark’s oldest daughter, Mary, had given birth several years earlier to a daughter. Now his second daughter, Katherine Clark Morris, was pregnant; plus his son and namesake Will Jr., a University of Virginia law school graduate, and his new wife, Mabel Foster, were also expecting.

Senator Clark took sibling rivalry to new heights by promising $1 million to his first male grandchild. Katherine gave birth to a girl, but a month later, Mabel produced William Andrews Clark III, nicknamed Tertius. Will Jr. jubilantly wired his father: “I claim the million!” But the celebration was short-lived. Mabel became ill with blood poisoning and died a month later.

Although William Andrews Clark had been obsessed with winning entry to the world’s most exclusive club, as the Senate was known, once the prize was attained he was more interested in enlarging his financial empire than bothering with the details of crafting legislation. Constantly traveling, he went to Russia to look at potential mining acquisitions; visited Paris to see Anna and purchase paintings, tapestries, and antique lace; headed to Los Angeles to check on his widowed mother and meet with his brother Ross to inspect their new sugar beet farms; and traveled to Arizona and Montana to look in on his mining operations. He spent many hours hammering out the settlement of a long-running fight with E. H. Harriman over constructing a railroad from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles. Clark chose a dusty Nevada outpost as a railroad refueling stop, which was incorporated as Las Vegas. Grateful Nevada citizens christened the area Clark County. The Los Angeles Times gushed in a headline: W.A. CLARK THE BUSIEST MAN IN THE SWIM.

His triumphant march through the business pages hit a snag, however, with the eruption in April 1903 of a long-brewing scandal. Mary McNellis, the New Yorker whom he had wined and dined back in 1896 at the Chicago convention, went public with the details of her $150,000 breach-of-promise lawsuit against him. McNellis complained that her lawsuit, filed many years earlier, had been unfairly dismissed in secret proceedings and demanded a new trial. An irate Clark announced, “I would rather stand publicity than give up money when I am innocent.” In McNellis’s version, Clark had been a frequent caller at her Forty-Second Street apartment, helped her with her German lessons, and sent her notes signed “Votre ami.” Clark admitted that he’d met McNellis four times and had been fond of her but was offended when he began receiving letters from her lawyer “trying to induce me to pay money. I would not submit to the demands and I will not do so now.” Clark prevailed and the lawsuit was thrown out.

At the end of 1903, William Andrews Clark was in a reflective mood. Anna La Chapelle had become pregnant again earlier that year but this time the baby—a boy—died within an hour of his birth in France. Anna’s place in the senator’s life remained a secret, so his children and colleagues were unaware of the loss of the child.

Sitting in his Wall Street office, the senator gave an unusually candid interview to the Dallas Morning News (SENATOR W. A. CLARK, CROESUS, TELLS ABOUT HIMSELF). Clark came across as a lonely and self-important man consumed by work yet eager to be admired for his good taste as a patron of the arts. “His shoulders are spare, his frame is lean, his features are sharply cast. He has the eyes of an eagle,” the writer noted. “It was his quiet demeanor, his soberness, his seriousness which can, if necessary, give way to dramatic and forceful denunciation, which impressed me.”

Clark described himself as an early riser, up for an energetic stroll around his Central Park neighborhood at dawn and finished with breakfast by 8 a.m. He often walked from his Fifty-Eighth Street apartment down to Wall Street for the exercise and at night avoided rich meals, limiting himself to one cigar and poring over business until late at night. “So what if I do work twelve, fourteen and sixteen hours a day?” the sixty-four-year-old Clark said, emphasizing that he still felt like a young man. “I can do good by working. Thousands of men and women are depending upon my energies for their bread and butter.”

He cited two great passions: fine European wines that he took with him by the case when traveling, and splurging on art. “I was born with the innate love of the beautiful in nature and in the arts,” he said, bragging that he had sixty-four masterpieces in storage in Vienna awaiting the completion of his Fifth Avenue mansion. He stressed that he had rarely relied on art advisers and instead relied on his own taste and judgment. (Which may explain why the Corcoran Gallery later identified numerous fakes in his collection.) Reciting the countries where he had toured galleries and museums—England, France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Italy, and Holland—Clark said, “I acquired a distinctive perception and correct notions and taste in painting, sculpture, architecture and other beautiful arts.”

With a nod to his children, he mentioned that in his rare time off, he took pleasure in the Sunday afternoon musicales given by his two Manhattan-based daughters, Katherine and Mary, as well as attending the opera.

Asked about his philanthropic plans, Clark gave a surprisingly honest answer, noting that he especially liked to help young women. “I find that a direct application of aid to young people—especially girls without means—to prepare themselves for the unequal struggle in life is fruitful in gratifying results,” Clark said. Gratifying indeed, judging by the devotion expressed toward him by Anna La Chapelle.

The journalist ended the interview by asking Clark whether he would follow in the footsteps of three other senators who, “in the autumn of their lives,” had recently wed. Clark laughed at the question, replying, “I can not tell you how happy I was with my beautiful wife, who died in 1893. I believe in marriage when one can afford that luxury, but I am not seriously considering it.” Then he added, with another chuckle, “I am quite too young to think of it yet.”

A few weeks later, Clark was reminded of his own mortality when he developed mastoiditis, an acute ear infection that spread into his skull. With a high fever and intense pain, Clark underwent two operations and was confined to bed for several weeks at his New York apartment. Even as he was recovering, tragedy struck the family yet again. The wife of his son Charles, who was visiting friends and staying at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, became ill and died suddenly in January 1904. Both of Clark’s sons had now become widowers, within just two years of each other.

In April, word spread that Clark was on his deathbed. MODERN CROESUS A VERY SICK MAN. CLARK MAY NOT LIVE TO RETURN TO BUTTE. HIS WEALTH, ESTIMATED FROM $50,000,000 TO $200,000,000, LIKELY TO GO TO HIS SONS AND DAUGHTERS AND HIS GRANDSON, W.A. CLARK III was the headline of the April 22, 1904, story in the Minneapolis Journal. The article noted that the senator had recently had a falling-out with his namesake lawyer son. “It has been reported in Butte for a year or more that W. A. Clark Junior has become estranged from his father and the rest of the family and certain things have happened to lend color to this report.” (The reason for the estrangement never became public, but years later a Clark family retainer went public with a vivid description of Junior’s energetic sexual pursuit of attractive young men.)

The deathbed reports were exaggerated, but Clark’s health remained poor. Clark sailed to Europe on the American liner Princess with plans to cruise the Mediterranean, announcing that he was taking a trip that might last seven weeks to “put the finishing touch” on his convalescence. Anna joined him.

By now, William Andrews Clark had painted himself into a corner in terms of his relationship with Anna La Chapelle. He had repeatedly insisted publicly that the relationship was platonic. He had lied to his four older children, neglecting to mention his bouncing new baby, Andrée. He told the Dallas newspaper that he had no plans to remarry.

But Clark had decided that he was ready to officially acknowledge Anna in his life as his wife. He was sixty-five years old, and there was never going to be a good time to explain their tangled past. But before he went public, he needed to break the news to his children. Clark’s dilemma: finding a palatable way to explain the existence of his and Anna’s nearly two-year-old daughter. There was only one quasi-respectable solution: backdate the year of a supposed wedding and claim it occurred prior to Andrée’s birth.

On June 30, the senator returned from Europe and met with his two daughters, Katherine and May, to apologetically break the news of their new stepmother and half sister. Katherine described her reaction to this painful revelation in a letter to her younger brother Will Jr., writing: “A line only, dearest Will, as of course you know by now of our father’s marriage—while May and I are greatly grieved and disappointed we must all stand by our dear father and try to make it as easy for him as possible because he realizes his mistake—your heart would have ached could you have seen him the night he left us for St. Louis, and I can’t get over the way he looked so badly. Don’t let anyone know that I have written you…”

While attending the St. Louis Democratic Convention, the senator remained discreet about his personal life as his party nominated New York justice Alton Parker for president. (Parker would be trounced by incumbent Teddy Roosevelt in the fall.) Then on July 12, 1904, Clark issued a terse announcement, stating that he had married Anna La Chapelle three years earlier, on May 25, 1901, in Marseille and that they had a two-year-old daughter.

The secret to getting away with a big lie is making sure that all the minor facts are straight. The senator should have checked his calendar before choosing a date and place for the alleged ceremony. It turned out that his own newspaper, the Butte Miner, had interviewed Clark on June 1, 1901, and published a detailed account of his recent European trip in which Marseille was not on the itinerary or even close to the cities named.

Newspapers went wild over the news of Clark’s marriage to his former ward. The New York Times reported that Anna’s mother, Philomene La Chapelle, was “dumbfounded” to hear of the secret wedding. In a story with a Washington, D.C., dateline, the Minneapolis Journal noted that the tale of Clark’s not-so-new bride had created “feverish interest” in the capital: “Official society is particularly concerned. Indeed, it is viewing the situation with anxiety, not to say alarm. It is wondering, for instance, whether or not the senator will attempt to secure social recognition for the wife. The consensus of opinion seems to be that if he is a wise man he will not.”

Behind the scenes, Clark’s friends tried to sanitize the tale, insisting that the couple had indeed wed back in 1901 but that it was a religious ceremony, explaining the lack of an official license. These statements, from anonymous sources, were treated with skepticism.

This was such a delicious melodrama that no angle went unexplored, most notably the concerns of William Clark’s four older children that their inheritance would shrink due to his new marriage and child. “The whole family of Senator Clark resent his last matrimonial alliance and it is doubted if they will ever become reconciled to receiving Audree [sic], the little interloper, into the bosom of their confidence,” wrote the Seattle Star, in words that proved prophetic. To ameliorate his children’s concerns, Clark had quietly transferred assets to them; Will Jr., for example, received title to Clark’s Butte home plus an interest in several mines. Meanwhile, Charles Clark was embarking on a new chapter of his life and had just become engaged to the polo-playing California banking heiress Celia Tobin.

William Andrews Clark was forced to defend the virtue of his bride. He issued a carefully worded statement that appeared in the one newspaper that would not challenge his account: the Butte Miner. He explained the supposed two years of secrecy by saying, “Mrs. Clark did not care for social distinction nor the obligations that would entail upon my public life. She was anxious to remain in Europe for a time to continue her studies and felt she could do with more freedom.” Then he added the busy-man excuse, saying, “Personally, I would have preferred to have her with me at all times, but my extensive interests compelled me to spend a great deal of time traveling through the United States…”

He attempted to address the reports that his children were mortified by his marriage. “It has been stated that my family objected to this union. Whatever apprehension, if any, may have existed in this respect on my part was entirely dissipated when the facts were disclosed by the cordial reception of the information and their approval of these relations which were so essential to my happiness. Then again, I wanted my child to be educated in America and brought up as a resolute and patriotic American.”

His older children found it impossible to remain simultaneously honest and diplomatic. His eldest daughter, Mary Clark Culver, made grudgingly supportive comments to reporters, making it clear that she and her siblings had been caught off-guard. “My father’s happiness is the first consideration of his children,” Mary said. “All talk of opposition to my father’s marriage is ridiculous. He literally gave us no time for opposition. It came as a complete surprise.” She admitted that the family was not entirely clueless about her father’s romance. “Oh, yes, we had heard rumors of it before but never considered them seriously at all… we gave them no credence whatever. When we learned the fact here from my father’s lips, it was completely unexpected.” Mary acknowledged that she had been startled to learn that she now had a new half sister. Mary and her siblings were wary of Clark’s new wife due to her youth, her undistinguished background, and her religion—Anna was a practicing Catholic, while they had been brought up Presbyterian.

Anna La Chapelle Clark remained in Paris with Andrée during her trial by press. After spending so many years in a country tolerant toward affairs of the heart, Anna felt the judgmental reaction of post-Victorian America as a brisk slap. She was in no rush to join her newly announced husband at his homes in New York, Washington, or Butte. Anna delayed her return to the United States for nearly six months, which gave her plenty of time to plan her revenge on the naysayers.