Chapter Six

A Parisian Girlhood

When the German ocean liner Kronprinz Wilhelm docked in New York City on January 11, 1905, reporters jostled on the pier, awaiting the arrival of Senator Clark and his newly unveiled bride. Anna had stayed in her stateroom for much of the crossing complaining of seasickness, although nerves may have accentuated her desire for privacy. But now she appeared by her husband’s side, dressed from head to toe in furs and carrying a bunch of purple violets, smiling shyly as she clutched his arm. The usually somber senator was in a jovial mood. “How are we?” Clark said. “Why as happy as sunflowers.”

The reporters inquired about the whereabouts of the newest sunflower, the couple’s toddler, Andrée, and were told that she had remained in Paris with a governess. “Oh, we hated to leave her,” Anna quickly explained. “But we are going back in the spring as soon as the Senator attends to some business here and in Montana.” Clark added this update on his youngest daughter: “She has grown so fast that we felt no anxiety over leaving her on the other side. She is in excellent hands.”

Six months had passed since the Clarks’ wedding announcement, but press curiosity about the unusual circumstances lingered. “Our marriage was not a secret one,” Clark insisted to the reporters. “It was known to our friends. I did not take the public into my confidence because I did not have to.”

The senator and his bride had returned home just as the New York subway system had opened and the Wright brothers were fine-tuning their flying machine. Later that year Edith Wharton would publish her first best seller about the fault lines in New York City’s upper classes and an ambitious young woman’s efforts to land a socially acceptable rich husband, The House of Mirth.

For the senator and his wife, this trip had been carefully orchestrated to introduce Anna to society at events such as President Teddy Roosevelt’s 1905 inauguration in Washington and the intimate second wedding of Senator Clark’s divorced daughter Mary, followed by a Butte homecoming. But three weeks after arriving in New York, Anna was rushed into surgery for an unspecified ailment. Since Clark’s four children had scarcely welcomed their new stepmother into the family, Anna was probably relieved to miss the wedding at the Navarro Flats, where her husband gave away his daughter, Mary Clark Culver, to lawyer Charles Potter Kling, a Harvard graduate and native of Maine.

After a few weeks in the hospital, Anna telegraphed to her brother, Arthur La Chapelle, announcing that reports of her illness had been exaggerated: “Don’t pay attention to the papers, I am perfectly well.” When the senator and his wife arrived in Butte on April 16, a large crowd greeted them at the Northern Pacific depot. In the years since Anna had first met William Clark, she had been in and out of Butte, quietly visiting her mother and siblings, aware of the gossip that swirled around her. Now, she was back in triumph as Clark’s wife, and Butte society was eager to witness her transformation into the spouse of the richest and most powerful man in Montana.

This was the moment that Anna had been waiting for, her chance to step out of the shadows onto center stage. Her cue came with a knock on the front door. Three of the most prominent women in Butte showed up together at the redbrick mansion on West Granite Street to call on the new Mrs. Clark. A butler ushered them into the grand entry hall and took their cards. They waited. The women could hear the servant, in an adjourning room, announcing their arrival, and arranged their faces in friendly anticipation. But instead of coming out to greet them, Anna told the butler, in a voice meant to be overheard, to inform the visitors that Mrs. Clark was not at home.

Not home? This was a social slap heard from coast to coast. Everyone gasped over the cleverness of the new Mrs. Clark, especially since she was welcoming old friends who knew her when she lived near the red-light district. Newspapers lapped up the story. SENATOR CLARK’S WIFE GETS EVEN, blared the headline in a Rhode Island newspaper. SOCIAL WAR IN BUTTE, announced the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Boston Herald urged readers to learn from her etiquette lesson: “Treat kindly every poor and good-looking girl, shop girl, telephone girl, stenographer, for at any moment she may become the wife of a multimillionaire and society queen.”

Anna gave an interview elaborating on her feelings, which was quoted in the Chicago Daily Tribune. “As far as society is concerned, I know nothing about it and care nothing about it,” she said. “It has absolutely no charms for me. I am domestic in my habits. I love family life. I like to read, study and above all, to look after the interests of my little girl. I have been told that society people rarely mean what they say or say what they mean. As for me, I always wish to say what I think and I believe I do so.” Anna, always an independent woman, would mellow over time in deference to her husband’s desire to entertain. But this was a coming-out party that Butte would never forget.

The senator’s twenty-eight-year-old wife headed to Paris to join her daughter Andrée, but her aging husband then had a health scare that sent Anna racing back to Manhattan. In mid-July, an abscess began pressing down on the senator’s brain, which if untreated might have left him paralyzed. A radical two-hour operation was performed in which part of his skull was removed. Once he was able to travel, the couple sailed for Paris on August 23 and then went on to Italy, bringing three-year-old Andrée. Clark lingered in Paris, since in those slow-moving times the Senate was not in session until December.

This was one of the longest stretches of uninterrupted time the couple had spent together. Celebrating Clark’s return to health, they did the most life-affirming thing possible: conceive a new child. Their daughter Huguette would be born June 9, 1906. Rumors later spread that Huguette was the product of an affair between Anna and her doctor. While nothing is certain without a DNA test, all accounts indicate that the Clarks were together during the relevant time.

As he approached fatherhood at age sixty-seven, following two frightening health crises, William Andrews Clark was ready to change his life. The month before the birth of his new child, he sent a telegram to the Butte Miner to announce that he was retiring from the Senate at the end of his six-year term in early 1907 and would not run again. His departure was not treated as a major loss for the Senate, where he had served on eight committees, including foreign affairs, Indians, and mining, but had not been influential on any of them. With a Republican majority in Congress, as a Democrat, Clark was in the minority during his entire Senate career. Political observers suggested that the aging Clark had fallen under the sway of his young spouse, or as one headline put it, WIFE RULES THE SENATOR: MRS. W. A. CLARK’S LIKING FOR PARIS AT THE BOTTOM OF HIS RETIREMENT. He flatly denied it, insisting that Montana would always be his true home.

Anna had retreated into the background in Paris, keeping her pregnancy secret while caring for her ailing former chaperone. She probably either heard about or saw the sensation in the art world that spring: two new paintings by prodigy Tadé Styka were exhibited at the prestigious Salon of the Société des Artistes Français. Born in 1889 to the aristocratic Polish painter Jan Styka, Tadé had been the youngest artist ever chosen to show his work at the 1904 salon. Now he was back with two sophisticated offerings: a scene of Tolstoy on his deathbed, surrounded by sad-eyed peasants and greedy family members, and a portrait of prominent American lawyer Donald Harper and his hunting dog. His father was known for florid religious works and creating what was then the largest painting in the world, Golgotha, while Tadé specialized in refined lifelike portraits. His striking painting of Donald Harper brought in many new commissions from Americans in Paris.

As Anna’s pregnancy bloomed, she explained to Andrée that she was going to have a sibling. The precocious four-year-old Andrée’s reply: “Let me think that over.” It became a family joke. Once Huguette was old enough to understand it, she thought the comment was funny and adopted that phrase for herself. “She thought it was a clever remark and she had a great relationship with her sister,” recalls Huguette’s night nurse, Geraldine Coffey, who recalls that whenever she’d ask her patient to do anything, “She would raise her finger and say, ‘Let me think it over.’ ”

Once again, William Clark was not in the vicinity brandishing cigars when Anna gave birth in Paris to Huguette Marcelle. Instead, the senator had chosen this moment to visit his son Charles in San Mateo, California, and see his newest grandchild, a six-month-old girl. William Clark waited six weeks before turning up in Paris to admire his new daughter.

The occasion was commemorated by a formally posed family photograph. Anna is seated, looking elegant in a floor-length dark skirt, matching jacket, and lacy white blouse, with her hair carefully put up and crowned with an enormous hat with a feather. On her lap, she is holding the baby. Tiny Huguette, with her wispy blonde hair, looks doll-like in a white lace christening dress that trails several feet to the floor. Andrée, now nearly four, has been posed by the photographer on a chair, her expression sulky, her brunette hair flowing to her shoulders, clad in a short white dress, white knee socks, and a straw hat. The senator, with a full head of hair, bushy mustache, and beard, is dressed like a dandy in a summer white suit, white shirt, and tie. Looking directly into the camera with a formal but proud expression, he has one arm protectively around his wife and another encircling Andrée.

The photo previewed the family’s dynamics: Andrée’s closeness to her father, Huguette’s tie to her mother. William Clark affectionately described Andrée as “a little charmer,” and he was so indulgent with her that his wife was forced to play the disciplinarian. Huguette would develop into a shy child, eager to please, quietly hungry for the affection dispensed so freely by her father toward her sister, seeking warmth instead in the arms of her doting mother.

Two months later, in September 1906, the parents left their children at home with the servants, taking a jaunt together in their new Mercedes touring car. The chauffeur was speeding up a hill on a country road outside Marseille when a tire blew. The car flipped over, and the Clarks were thrown out. “I had quite a knackering on account of [a] busted tire and the chauffeur I think lost his head,” wrote Clark, in a handwritten letter to his Montana lawyer, Walter Bickford, on September 17. “I had a rib broken… Mrs. Clark is with me. Fortunately she was not hurt, only bruised a little.”

In the spring of 1907, they brought Andrée with them to America while Huguette was left behind in Paris with nannies. The Clarks gave Andrée a party at their Butte home in June, complete with performances by trained dogs and singing and dancing in the ballroom. In honor of the absent Huguette’s first birthday, they put her picture on the table next to a small cake. This was an era when wealthy parents considered long absences to be acceptable, and before the existence of such phrases as “attachment disorder.” But for a baby to be without her mother and the rest of her family for several months—unable to see and hear familiar faces and voices—is frightening, creating inchoate fears of being abandoned that can linger beyond a reunion.

Even though he had retired from the Senate, Clark remained in the headlines because of the grandiosity of his nine-story Fifth Avenue mansion, which had been under construction for six years with no end in sight. The Beaux Arts structure, complete with an enormous tower topped with a cupola, had been nicknamed the “Fifth Avenue Horror” and “Clark’s Folly.” The senator had hired a French architect, Henri Deglane, to design the house and the New York architectural firm of Lord, Hewlett and Hull to build the hotel-sized 121-room dwelling. The supervising New York architect, Washington Hull, had taken to pointing to his gray head of hair and joking, “They were brown when we broke ground for the Clark mansion.” The mansion was known as the most expensive private home in America: the original cost had been estimated at $3 million, but as the years passed that number grew to more than $7 million. Fifth Avenue was known as Millionaire’s Row, dotted with the Vanderbilt Petit Chateau, the Carnegie Mansion, and the Astor palace, but Clark sought to outdo them all.

Clark’s oldest daughter, Mary, had originally been involved in planning the Fifth Avenue palace, since she had expected to live there with her family and serve as her father’s hostess. Mary liked amateur theatricals and had customized the design to include a large theatre with a hydraulic lift for scenery and changing rooms for the actors. But Mary had lost her hoped-for social position now that her father had remarried; Anna would now be hosting parties at the senator’s side. The theatre plans were scrapped, and the mansion was reconfigured to accommodate the Clarks’ two young children and eliminate living quarters for Mary and her family.

Clark instructed workmen to create a magical nursery for his young daughters including hand-painted tiles illustrating nursery rhymes and fairy tales. (LUXURY FOR THAT CLARK BABY, announced the Syracuse Journal.) Concerned about pandemics and the health of his children, Clark had even created a secure room in a turret if they needed to be quarantined.

Clark demanded every modern convenience: a swimming pool, dressing rooms fitted with Carrara glass, a Turkish bath, a wine cellar, safe deposit vaults for Anna’s impressive jewelry, an air filtration system, three boilers, and an eighty-ton coal storage room, all in the basement. An elevator large enough for twenty people had been installed, as well as a spectacular white marble staircase suitable for a grand entrance, with balustrades of gold and bronze. Clark built four large art galleries to showcase his paintings, sculpture, tapestries, Egyptian antiquities, and majolica. The banquet hall, paneled in English oak, was carved in the style of Henry IV. Now that every robber baron was installing an organ in his home—including John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, and Andrew Carnegie—Clark had trumped them all with a massive instrument that cost $120,000.

The copper mogul commissioned sculptors such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Paul Bartlett, and George Grey Barnard to create bronze decorations for the house. Raphaël Collin, a painter and professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris who had painted panels used in the Opéra-Comique and Hôtel de Ville, advised on the décor. An Oriental art expert honored by the Japanese government with the medal of the Order of the Rising Sun, Collin created an Oriental room with hand-painted panels. This room would fascinate the young Huguette, sparking her lifelong interest in all things Japanese, from geisha-clad women to kabuki theatre to the royal family.

The showstopper in the Clark mansion was the Salon Doré. The widowed Count d’Orsay, renovating his Parisian mansion in 1770 in honor of his second marriage to a princess, had commissioned a profusion of gold leaf panels for the walls depicting love, music, victory, and the arts. On the third floor, Clark imported a library from a Normandy château with carved woodwork dating from 1523. That floor included his-and-hers suites. Anna’s opulent living quarters overlooked Central Park: the parlor was paneled in yellowish white satinwood from Ceylon and carved with flowers, and the boudoir was made of bird’s-eye maple. Her bathroom featured onyx and alabaster set with precious stones, and tiny faucets to dispense perfume so she could scent her bath with roses or violets.

Frustrated with cost overruns, Clark decided to seize the means of production after a granite quarry owner tried to triple the contractual price to $650,000, claiming that design changes had pushed up the price. He bought the Bangor, Maine, quarry and five other industrial facilities for the sole purpose of completing his dream mansion: a stone finishing plant, the Henry-Bonnard bronze foundry in Manhattan, a New Jersey marble woodworking plant, a woodworking factory, and a Long Island decorative plaster plant.

Against this backdrop of conspicuous consumption, Clark practiced ludicrous frugality. He took the subway in New York and caused a scene one day when he lost a penny in a chewing gum machine at the Fourteenth Street station. One of the richest men in America, he was sufficiently annoyed that he complained to the station manager, missing two uptown trains until he got his money’s worth, much to the merriment of his fellow passengers.

Clark was consumed with the idea that people were trying to cheat him, which had some basis in reality. Art dealers frequently tried to sell him fakes and sometimes succeeded. Clark’s architects sued one another over charges involving misappropriation of funds. In his business dealings, Clark repeatedly sued other companies—and was sued by them—and hated to give in. “This man who is said to have one of the largest incomes in the world is a born fighter for the sake of winning, no matter what the cause,” wrote the Washington Post, in a story about Clark’s efforts to avoid being fleeced on home building costs. “He would slash when driven into the last ditch to accomplish his goals.”

While waiting for the house to be completed, Clark loaned eighty paintings to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington and had the pleasure of taking President Roosevelt there on a private tour to see his treasures. As word spread about Clark’s prodigious spending on art, the Metropolitan Museum’s curatorial staff began to send him solicitous letters. Clark was not considered socially eminent enough to be invited to join the Metropolitan’s board, one of the most desired honors in the city, but presumably his Corots and Gainsboroughs might be welcome. He invited the Met’s curators to an exhibit of his artworks at the Lotos Club.

The construction of his colossal mansion at 927 Fifth Avenue dragged on in comic fashion. Clark kept announcing that it was almost done and he and his new family would be moving in soon. Then that deadline would pass. Anna saw no need to uproot herself and her daughters from Paris until the Fifth Avenue palace was finished.

The painting pulses with life. The brightly colored scene depicts children playing at a park in Paris, young girls in their pinafores playing with friends, well-dressed indulgent mothers watching nearby and knitting or gossiping to pass the time. There is energy and exuberance and carefree joy captured in the brushstrokes. Painted in 1906 by American Impressionist William Glackens, purchased courtesy of William Clark’s copper fortune, the painting Luxembourg Gardens hangs in the Corcoran Gallery, as if providing a window into the early life of Clark’s two youngest daughters.

Huguette and Andrée lived with their mother and the servants in a magnificent home on the Avenue Victor Hugo in the 16th arrondissement, close to the Bois de Boulogne. Sheltered in a cocoon of luxury, the girls had a pampered existence that was radically different from their parents’ hardscrabble childhoods. Even the girls’ miniature jewelry was exquisite, tiny gold trinkets crafted with care. Both of their parents had worked with their hands—William Clark doing chores on his father’s farm, Anna helping at her mother’s boardinghouse—but the two girls would never have to set a table or make a bed, much less earn their keep.

Huguette was fey and otherworldly, a sunny child who in family photos often looks like she is skipping along by herself, content with her own company. Andrée was the adventurous one, more likely to rebel and get into trouble. Huguette would remember their mother exploding with anger when Andrée began to whine one day about being bored. “Look at all that you have compared to people who have so little,” Anna lectured her eldest daughter. “You have the nerve to complain when you live in a palace.” Huguette idolized her mother and never wanted that furious tone directed at her. That maternal outburst was so unforgettable for Huguette that even as a centenarian, she remembered her mother’s comments word for word, recounting them to her assistant, Christopher Sattler.

Andrée and Huguette spoke French as their primary language. “Huguette giggled when she talked about her father’s French accent,” says Huguette’s goddaughter Wanda Styka, the daughter of painter Tadé Styka. “Everyone around her was speaking Parisian French, but he spoke with an American accent.” The girls were tutored in English, Spanish, Italian, and German. Anna, consumed by the harp, was eager for her children to embrace music lessons. Huguette took up the violin and Andrée studied the piano. In the summer Anna took her daughters to a villa in Cabourg on the coast of Normandy—the favorite watering spot of Marcel Proust—or to the Château de Petit-Bourg. That majestic property had belonged to a Bourbon duchess before the French Revolution. Huguette would talk about these carefree days as among the happiest of her life.

William Clark spent long stretches in Butte and Manhattan, occasionally summoning his family back to the United States. When the White Star liner Teutonic landed in New York in July 1910, an enterprising photographer snapped the senator alighting with his daughters, and the photo was sent around the country as newsworthy: “Former Senator Clark and his daughters: First photograph taken in the United States of the little girls, both of whom were born abroad.” Huguette, four years old, is staring shyly at the ground and trying to avoid the camera as the senator adjusts her straw hat; Andrée smiles, enjoying the attention.

From then on, these two young heiresses were treated as American royalty. The two pretty Clark girls were frequently photographed by the newspapers, and even the smallest revelation about their privileged lives was devoured by the public. Huguette hated being on display. When her mother took family photographs, Huguette would fetchingly pose and smile, but when photographed by strangers in public, she would usually look away from the camera.

They were well-traveled children, covering thousands of miles in any given year in a Paris-Manhattan-Butte circuit, traveling first-class on luxury liners across the Atlantic and in their father’s private railcar in America (extra-large car No. 2001, paneled in oak from Sherwood Forest, seating twelve at dinner, sleeping compartments finished in vermillion, buttons to summon servants). The Clark family stayed in Butte long enough on this visit that the girls were listed as residents in the 1910 local census. These trips allowed Huguette and Andrée to become close to their grandmother—Anna’s mother, Philomene La Chapelle—who lived in Butte. Clark’s children from his first family, however, had long since scattered to the coasts: his two daughters were in New York City, his son William Jr. had remarried and moved to Los Angeles, and son Charlie was in San Mateo.

Huguette enjoyed Butte and described those trips fondly in later years. “She mentioned that house many times, the steps where she used to line up her dolls, the pansies that they planted just below it, she really liked it,” recalls her assistant, Chris Sattler. Clark took his wife and two young daughters to William Jr.’s fishing camp near Missoula; Anna was so enamored of the natural beauty that Clark wrote to his lawyer inquiring about renting a similar spot for future vacations.

At the end of 1910, the Clarks returned to Paris for Christmas, and then began preparing for the moment that William Clark had been anticipating for a decade: taking up residence in his much-ridiculed Fifth Avenue mansion. “There may be uglier structures, but none come to mind,” harrumphed the Boston Journal, calling the Clark house “towering and massive in its arrogant hideousness.” Shortly before William Clark and his family moved in, the Chicago Daily News joked that the copper mogul had actually shown restraint: “In the description of the residence, we find no hint that he has incorporated a game reserve, a section of Adirondack mountains, a slice of Mediterranean shore, a volcano for heating purposes, a glacier for refrigeration, or a geyser for hot water.”

The public be damned—William Clark was happy with his new home. He expressed his good cheer on January 29 in a letter to his Montana-based lawyer, Walter Bickford. “Mrs. Clark and the rest are all well and we are gradually getting settled down,” Clark wrote. “We have been on the fourth floor for some time but soon expect to be ‘promoted’ to the third. I am engaged in hanging pictures, and you may be sure I am somewhat busy.”

In public, Clark conveyed a dour and pompous persona, presenting himself as a world-weary, self-important captain of industry. Yet in his letters to Walter Bickford, the mogul comes across as a man with a sense of humor, engaged and curious about politics and business. He writes fondly of his late-blooming sons and their prowess in business, but he is truly effusive when it comes to Anna. He sings her praises in chatty postscripts like a man very much in love, and often adds affectionate words about his two youngest daughters. (Even jaded journalists had noted the success of the marriage. The Chicago Tribune, in a story headlined WOULD YOU LET YOUR DAUGHTER MARRY A MAN OLD ENOUGH TO BE HER FATHER, wrote that “the senator appears to be devoted to his one time ward and she to him.”)

For Huguette and Andrée, moving into the mansion on Fifth Avenue was an adventure—the vast house was great fun to explore. There were shrieks of childish laughter in this forbidding palace. William Clark urged them to be careful about colliding with the art, or as Huguette would later tell Christopher Sattler, “Her father didn’t like her to run around in the gallery, the Salon Doré.”

The girls shared a room in the vast quarters. Huguette would later describe Andrée to her nurse, Geraldine Coffey. “Her sister was a wonderful writer and reader and she would tell her stories at night. She would not finish them,” says Coffey. Inspired by Scheherazade of the Arabian Nights, Andrée would keep Huguette in suspense and pick up the tale the following evening.

These happy scenes were marred by two scares during the family’s first few weeks in the Manhattan mansion. Anna was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital on a Sunday night in terrible pain. The doctors pronounced her condition critical. The senator spent most of the night by her side. The next morning she was successfully operated on for appendicitis. For her two young daughters, their mother’s near-death experience was terrifying. Then just a few days later, while Anna was still recuperating at the hospital, and Andrée and Huguette were at home with their father and the servants, thieves tried to break into their Fifth Avenue mansion via the roof.

It happened late at night. After hearing reports from neighbors about an attempted robbery nearby, Clark’s watchman went up to the fourth floor of the house and spotted a flashlight shining on the roof of one of the art galleries. He called the local precinct, and thirty policemen responded to the call, a massive show of force, but the would-be burglars escaped. Clark sat in his library calmly reading a book as the search took place.

The family headed for England in late May on the Adriatic to attend the coronation of King George V. Once again photographers snapped shots of Huguette and Andrée, accompanied by William Clark’s young grandchild, Katherine Morris. The family spent a leisurely summer at the French seaside. In late August, William Clark wrote to Walter Bickford, “Mrs. Clark and the children are still at Trouville where we have a beautiful villa. We have had a six weeks period of unceasing heat in Paris but out there it has been very pleasant.” At Trouville, the Clarks befriended a French couple, Andre and Noemie de Villermont, artists with two sons, Etienne—two years older than Huguette—and Henri, two years younger. The childhood playmates would remain close for decades.

William Clark had been listed in Who’s Who in New York as a member of numerous well-known private clubs (Manhattan, New York Yacht, Downtown, City Ardsley, National Arts), but he had never been fully included in the life of New York’s 400, the top echelon of society. He and his wife frequently stated that they had no interest in clubs that would not have them. When Clark was in Los Angeles in late October that year on a business trip (Anna and the girls were still in France), reporters asked whether he planned to entertain society in his new Fifth Avenue palace. “That depends on what you call society,” replied Clark, giving a windy and defensive answer. “If you mean giving big parties, these will be very few; if you mean meeting our friends and the people of the artistic and professional world, I hope these occasions will be many.”

In this interview, the senator was eager to boost the artistic credentials of his wife. “Mrs. Clark is a woman who enjoys the beautiful side of life, which means that side which includes artistic expression and effort,” Clark said. “She is a brilliant harpist herself and is intensely fond of music and the kindred arts, as I am, and we both like the sort of people of similar tastes and inclinations. Formal society, that which devotes itself to formal society affairs, has little attraction for either of us.”

Noble sentiments to be sure, but in truth, Clark was hungry to be recognized as a sophisticated art collector. He had scoured Europe and the auction houses of New York for treasures, outbidding his fellow robber barons to amass a cornucopia of art. He told the reporters that he felt a civic obligation to allow others to see his masterpieces, saying that he did not think he had “a right to be selfish with the objects of art that I have collected.” So he and Anna, who returned to New York with the girls in mid-December, decided they would give a grand party to showcase their collections.

The evening was a disaster. Anna was mortified by what occurred. Huguette was quite young, but she undoubtedly heard about the night. As one newspaper account put it, “When the new house was completed, Senator Clark gave a huge party. Hundreds of invitations were sent out to all the best people in New York but all the best people did not come for these were many in high society who always spurned the advances of the aspiring senator and to whom he was always just an ‘upstart’ from the wild west.”

Many years later, when Anna was a widow living several blocks away, she would confide her memories of that humiliating experience to Robert Samuels, an elite decorator. The story became part of the mythology surrounding Anna and Huguette, and their two-against-the-world, mother-daughter relationship. Samuels passed the story on to Neal Sattler, Chris Sattler’s older brother and the contractor who renovated Huguette’s apartment. “Bob told us about the debacle when the father had the big party and they were shunned by society,” Neal Sattler recalled. “The senator did not have a great reputation and none of the important people showed up. They were very hurt by this.” The Clarks would entertain again, but not for a while and not on this kind of scale.

Anna remained close to her mother, who had been able to relocate to a much larger home in Butte thanks to the generosity of her son-in-law. Philomene La Chapelle was sixty years old, nearly thirteen years younger than William Clark, and had always been the picture of good health. In January 1912, Philomene was on the phone with her son Arthur’s wife and complained of feeling ill. Eight hours later, she was dead from pneumonia. “The death of Mrs. La Chapelle was a very sad affair and it was so sudden and unexpected, and Mrs. Clark was all worked up about it,” wrote William Clark to Walter Bickford. “However, she is very brave about it and started yesterday for Butte.” Rather than accompany his wife to the funeral, Clark left instead on a business trip to Chicago, Arizona, and Los Angeles. Once again, their daughters were on their own on Fifth Avenue with the servants.

The death of their grandmother was a shock to Huguette and Andrée. But another untimely death, just a few months later, would haunt Huguette for the rest of her life. She would obsess about what happened, read about it, talk about it, and conflate the events in her mind until she imagined that she could have been among the dead, too. The unlucky family member who passed away: her first cousin Walter Miller Clark, the twenty-eight-year-old son of William Clark’s younger brother and business partner James Ross Clark. Walter Clark had spent his early years in Butte, then moved with his parents to Los Angeles. A graduate of the University of California, he had joined the Clark family sugar beet operation and become the supervisor of the Los Alamitos Sugar Factory. He had married a Butte woman, Virginia McDowell, in January 1909, and the couple had a baby boy, James Ross II. The couple decided in 1912 to take a belated honeymoon to Europe, leaving their two-year-old son with his maternal grandmother. When it was time to return home, Walter Clark and his wife boarded a luxury ship in Southampton destined for New York: the Titanic.

“All the way over, we had such beautiful calm weather, in fact up to the accident, the sea had been like glass,” Virginia Clark later told reporters. She had retired to their first-class stateroom when she felt a jolt at 11:30 p.m. She got dressed and went to find her husband, who was in the smoking room playing cards with friends. Alerted that the ship had struck an iceberg, the couple went to their room to change their clothes. “We took with us our heavy overcoats, I my furs, two life preservers, and what valuables we could pick up. My husband also saw that I was provided with money in case we should be separated.” On deck with John Jacob Astor and his pregnant wife, Madeleine, Virginia and the other women were helped by officers into lifeboats, but the men were not allowed to board. “I know from the way he bade me good-bye that he felt no apprehension and fully expected to join me later. There was room for fifteen others in our boat and three men could have been taken as well.” Walter Clark perished at sea.

William Andrews Clark, who had been fond of his nephew, wrote to Walter Bickford, “We have been shocked by the disaster to the Titanic and filled with the deepest regret at the drowning of Walter Clark. We had hoped for a day or two that he had been saved but now it seems as if all the saved have been accounted for.”

Huguette was only five years old, but as a veteran of several ocean crossings, the news left her terrified. Later in life, she would frequently inform people that her father had purchased tickets on what was meant to be the next voyage of the Titanic, from New York back to Europe. The story became convoluted in the telling, as if Huguette imagined that she had nearly been in danger herself. Her physician, Dr. Henry Singman, recalled, “She told me about somebody who died on the Titanic, who went down, and that she was supposed to be going back to the States but her father had changed the time of the departure from Europe.” She told the same story to her best friend, Suzanne Pierre, who passed it to her granddaughter, Kati Despretz Cruz. “Huguette and her mother were supposed to be on the Titanic but changed their plans at the last minute,” Cruz says. Huguette fixated on her cousin’s death and the near miss for herself for decades, going obsessively over all the might-have-beens. Her night nurse, Geraldine Coffey, recalled that she often talked about this disaster that befell “a young person, newly married man, a relative.”

Judging by William Clark’s letters, his family was never in danger. They spent the winter of 1912 in the United States: he noted that Anna was in Chicago in February, and mentioned her plans to return to Europe in May. Clark wrote to Walter Bickford on May 25 that he was en route to Jerome, Arizona: “Before I left my wife and the children sailed on the good ship George Washington, which I hope will not get Titaniced before its arrival at the French port.”

Children are often resilient on the surface—frightening moments can be held at bay, reemerging later in life—and Huguette did not seem unduly troubled to her parents. On July 15, 1912, Clark reported, “I have just heard from Mrs. Clark and they are all very well. She has taken a place at Fontainebleau for the summer.” Five weeks later, Clark was in France himself, noting approvingly that son William and his second wife, Alice, had come to visit, and adding, “Mrs. Clark never looked better in her life than now, and the children are growing fast and are having the time of their lives.”

For the next two years, the Clark family continued their transatlantic commute. Huguette would later mention her father’s frequent absences. The mining mogul had founded a new town—Clarksville, Arizona—for the employees of his booming United Verde Copper company in nearby Jerome. This was one of the first planned communities in the United States, and Clark had built six hundred homes, a school, a library, a church, and the entire infrastructure of water, sewage, and power lines.

Anna’s sister, Amelia, who did not have children of her own, often joined the family in Europe for months at a time. Amelia’s first marriage in 1901 to Edward Hoyt, a Minneapolis securities dealer, had unraveled within a few years, and she had begun listing the Clark’s Fifth Avenue mansion as her home address on shipboard immigration forms. Amelia played the role of second mother to Andrée and Huguette, and Huguette would later talk about her with love. “She was very close to Aunt Amelia,” says Hadassah Peri, Huguette’s nurse for two decades. “Amelia was married to a guy and he walk out. The first husband is no good.”

For Anna La Chapelle Clark, her musical skills were an asset in her New York life, perceived as an admirably genteel hobby. She won a favorable mention in Town & Country for her proficiency in playing the harp, a sign that she was starting to win acceptance among the members of the Social Register. “A pretty woman playing the harp makes a very delightful picture and stirs the memory with scenes from Jane Austen and suggests dainty little watercolors in gilt frame,” stated the magazine story about the newly fashionable artistic pursuit. “The society women who are taking the harp seriously include Mrs. William A. Clark, wife of the ex-senator, who makes the instrument a feature of her beautiful new music room.”

The spring of 1914 found Anna once again headed for France and the Château de Petit-Bourg. But Clark was preoccupied over labor unrest at his Missoula operations, and concern about socialists running for office in Montana. He could not get away until mid-July, writing to a friend that he was eager to see his family and “get a little rest.”

Clark crossed the Atlantic just as war was about to erupt in Europe. On June 28, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo. As Clark was arriving on the continent, on July 28 Austria declared war on Serbia, and within days Russia and Germany mobilized their troops. When Germany declared war on France on August 3, the Americans in Paris began scrambling to get out.

American ambassador to France Myron Herrick was deluged with cries for help, as his assistant and biographer, T. Bentley Mott, later recounted. “It was the height of the tourist season, and upon the declaration of war, from every quarter of Europe whence they could escape, travelers poured into Paris on their way to the channel ports of France and England… They expected that their troubles would be over when they reached Paris, when in fact they had often only begun. Train service was everywhere disorganized by the requirements of mobilization, busses and private automobiles had been requisitioned, taxis became scarce, hotels began to close, the whole mechanism of modern life was topsy-turvy. And they had no money and could get none.”

The French banks refused to cash checks from foreigners. Even William Clark, who was now with his family and Anna’s sister, Amelia, at the Château de Petit-Bourg outside Paris, was unable to secure the money to pay their way out of town. William Clark’s name was on a list released by the State Department of well-known Americans in Europe whose safety was at risk. The United States government announced it was sending a battleship, the USS Tennessee, to bring in a supply of gold to France and then transport Americans to England.

Huguette vividly remembered what happened next, because she had been the little heroine. As her assistant Chris recalled, “They had to get to Le Havre, the port, but they had no cash. Millionaires don’t walk around with cash. The senator had given her a gold coin every week, and she never spent it.” The eight-year-old and her sister volunteered their savings; their parents used the contents of Huguette’s and Andrée’s piggy banks to pay for their escape. According to Sattler, “They took these gold coins, hired a carriage, and it took them to Le Havre.” Even the hardened William Clark was sobered by the journey, later telling reporters, “Every road from the city is choked with fleeing refugees. From what we heard in Paris, a great battle will soon be fought in the region of Marne.” Huguette cherished a photo taken on the deck of the USS Tennessee. Her father looks up from his newspaper at the camera; Anna and Andrée are smiling while Huguette gazes shyly at the ground.

William Clark had asked the American embassy to keep an eye on his Paris home, but after a few weeks in England, he and Anna decided it was safe for them to cross the English Channel again. “Mrs. Clark and I have just returned from Paris where we went to get a lot of things that we left there when Paris was supposed to be almost within the grasp of the enemy and we had a pleasant time,” he wrote to his lawyer in Butte.

When the Clarks arrived in New York in late October, they were photographed yet again disembarking from the boat, with Huguette clutching one of her constant companions, a doll. “When she traveled in the early years with her family, she always took her dolls,” says Geraldine Coffey, Huguette’s night nurse. “She knew everything about dolls.”

Now that the family planned to live in Manhattan full-time, the two girls were enrolled in private school. Huguette did not last long at her first placement. Since she was the only blonde in her class, the teacher asked her to play a German girl in a skit. Since Huguette and her family had just fled the Germans, she refused to take the part. She was so proud of her protest that she still spoke about it years later. Her supportive parents moved Huguette to Miss Spence’s school instead. Their youngest daughter was showing some spunk.