Chapter Eight

Beginnings and Endings

Sunshine and blue skies, palm trees and white beaches, hot days and cooler nights. The summer of 1921 was magical for Huguette Clark, a perfect few months for a fifteen-year-old who was coming of age and discovering that she was attractive. Anna took her to Honolulu to stay at the most luxurious resort on the island, the Moana Hotel, a beachfront property where the Prince of Wales had tarried a year earlier. Jaquita and Margarita Vidal came along as their companions.

Huguette looks radiant in family photos as she and Jaquita frolic in the sand, hugging each other in a pose that borders on sapphic. The Vidal sisters dressed Huguette in imaginative costumes. In one photo, she has gone native in a grass hula skirt with her blonde hair wildly flying; in another, she is grown-up and alluring in a black lace flamenco-style dress, wearing dangling earrings with her hair pinned fashionably up, striking an insouciant pose. The senator was planning to join his family partly through their holiday, and Huguette, looking forward to his arrival, wrote to him about beach life.

July 12, 1921

Dear Daddy,

… It is so wonderful here, I will just hate to leave it… The other evening we visited the Duke Kahanamoku, the whole family was there, they are charming people. The Duke Kahanamoku is the champion swimmer of the world. He has about six brothers and three sisters. One of the brothers called Sam plays the guitar beautifully. Every evening after supper he plays out on the pier. The other night [illegible] and I were serenaded. It is thrilling. I practice my violin every day. And I am taking lessons on the Yukelele but I like the guitar much better and would like to take lessons on it. Mother is taking lessons and she plays well… Well, I will now say goodbye and hope you are fine.

The six-foot-three Duke Kahanamoku, the 1912 and 1920 Olympic swimming champion and the inventor of modern surfing, towers over Huguette in photographs, giving her an indulgent smile as she gazes at him with total adoration. Duke posed in the ocean with Huguette and a surfboard, and with her and her parents at the Outrigger Club, leaning against a canoe.

The Olympian was a regular at the Moana Hotel, earning extra cash by entertaining the guests, such as the Prince of Wales, whom he’d taught to surf a year earlier. Kahanamoku would paddle out on a long boat a half mile offshore with his pupils, and then show them how to catch a wave back to the beach.

Anna Clark became so fond of the Hawaiian beach boys who entertained the family that she promised to pay for the education of Duke’s younger brother, Sam Kahanamoku, as well as two of his friends, Pau Keolahu, who wanted to study the violin, and Joe Bisho, who had been accepted at a St. Louis college but could not afford the tuition. The Clarks sailed with Sam and the rest of their entourage to San Francisco and checked into the St. Francis Hotel. But the Belmont Military Academy, the school they had chosen for Sam, refused to accept the dark-skinned Hawaiian, claiming there were no slots available.

The aging senator stayed out of the resulting furor. “The affair is entirely in Mrs. Clark’s hands,” the copper mogul told the San Francisco Call from his hotel room. “I do not think any attempt will be made to put the boy into another school. We will probably send him back to Hawaii. Mrs. Clark is the only one who can say anything definitely about the case and she has gone to a moving picture show for the evening.” Sam Kahanamoku told the San Francisco Chronicle that Mrs. Clark “decided I had better start back… but I pleaded with her and she said I might remain for two weeks before returning. She is very gracious and kind.”

Anna would later tell friends that she bought Sam Kahanamoku new clothes and a car as a consolation prize. Returning to the beaches of Hawaii worked out for him: Sam won a bronze swimming medal in the 100-meter sprint at the 1924 Olympics swim meet, while his brother Duke took the silver and Johnny Weissmuller won the gold. The Hawaiian surfing brothers continued to enrapture wealthy tourists, and Duke would later become the paramour of tobacco heiress Doris Duke.

The senator’s failure to get Sam Kahanamoku into Belmont Military Academy was the least of his worries. Two of Clark’s older children were enmeshed in scandals, one hushed up for years and the other about to become embarrassingly public. His namesake, William Clark Jr., twice widowed with a teenage son (Tertius), was now pursuing young men in Los Angeles, and discretion was not his strong point. His older brother, Charles, had written Will Jr. a pained letter in 1920 urging him to break off a relationship with Harrison Post, a San Francisco store clerk.

“Post bears the reputation of being a degenerate of the Oscar Wilde type,” Charles Clark wrote to his brother. “When Maizie [their older sister, Mary] was visiting you she received two anonymous letters on the subject, which she destroyed… You can’t afford to have your name tainted and in justice to yourself, the boy, your sisters and father.” Ignoring his older brother’s advice, Will Jr. put Post on his payroll and built him a house across the street from his own mansion in Los Angeles. But Junior’s love life remained private for now.

The talk of the town in Manhattan in the spring of 1922 was the divorce of William Clark’s oldest daughter, Mary. The convent-school-educated Mary had become known for her romantic misadventures. In the midst of her first divorce, she had been sued for alienation of affection by the wife of a male friend. Now Mary was divorcing her second husband, lawyer Charles Kling, and the details were ugly. In an effort to keep the divorce out of the newspapers, she had filed the legal papers in outlying Rockland County, but the press discovered the story. It was a titillating tale: Mary insisted in court papers that Charles Kling had repeatedly committed adultery. But even though she claimed to be the injured party, she ended up paying her husband a $580,000 settlement.

William Clark was pained by his oldest daughter’s multiple trips to the altar, but what really worried him was the fate of his youngest and most naïve heir, Huguette. Realistic about his own age, Clark, then eighty-three, did not know if he would be alive when suitors came to call. To protect Huguette, he began to repeatedly tell her that she needed to be wary of the motives of men and even potential female friends. Huguette would later repeat her father’s instructions to her closest friend, Suzanne Pierre, who passed on the stories to her granddaughter, Kati Despretz Cruz. “Her father always said to her, ‘No one will really love you, you have to be careful. No one will love you for who you are. They will love you for your money,’ ” recounted Cruz. William Clark’s understandable fatherly concerns were crippling to an insecure young girl.

Huguette was going through the giggly teenage phase of longing for a boyfriend. She entertained a group of girlfriends at the society restaurant Sherry’s, just a month before her sixteenth birthday. Huguette was celebrating early because her parents had booked passage for the three of them on a steamer to Europe, with plans to see the Passion Play at Oberammergau and visit France and Italy. What Huguette remembered from this trip was an awakening sense of the possibilities of her future. Nearly eighty years later, at Christmas 2001, she wrote a revealing note to Sheila Lodge, the former mayor of Santa Barbara. After thanking Lodge for sending an account of her recent travels, Huguette added, “The trip that you made to beautiful Venice reminded me of the one I made at the age of sweet sixteen. I greatly enjoyed the gondolas and the singing of the gondoliers. It was all so very romantic.”

Huguette’s visits to Europe inevitably involved a crash course in art history, joining her parents on visits to painters’ salons, art galleries, and museums. Art remained a way that she could connect with her father. Huguette and her mother were drawn to the work of the Impressionists, the graceful dancers of Degas, the hauntingly beautiful water lilies of Monet, and the lush scenes by Renoir, while William Andrews Clark retained a taste for old masters, religious scenes, and the Barbizon school. He could talk knowledgeably for hours to his daughter about painters and their technique and the history of prices at auction. His passion was acquiring art, but Huguette’s would become creating it.

In 1922, New York State enacted its first residency law, leveling taxes on anyone who spent more than seven months living in the state. William Clark had always claimed Butte, Montana, as his primary residence, and the frugal mogul was determined to avoid high New York State taxes. So he shut down his Fifth Avenue mansion that fall. On September 11 he sent a telegram to Anna, who had lingered on in Paris: “Regrets that we had to keep the house closed and not even allow the pool to be used on account of the law on taxation.”

To allow Huguette to continue at the Spence School, the family rented a suite of rooms at the Ambassador Hotel, a luxury building at Park Avenue and Fifty-Second Street that the Clarks favored from then on whenever their residence was closed. At Spence that fall, Huguette welcomed new classmates with familiar faces, the three daughters of her San Francisco–based half brother, Charles Clark, and his wife, Celia. The couple had separated and Celia had decamped to Paris, so they sent their three teenage daughters—the music-loving pianist Agnes, the polo-playing Patricia, and the sweet-natured Mary—to attend school in New York. As William Clark wrote to his wife from Butte on October 3, 1922: “Sweetheart Cherie… I was glad to have a message from Charles of their safe arrival. I suppose the little girls will enter the Spence school. I hope that you are all well.”

Huguette became close to her niece Agnes Clark, two years her junior, thanks to their mutual interest in music. When the senator returned to New York and reopened his house, his three granddaughters often came over for Sunday lunch. After witnessing the rocky relationship between her own parents, Agnes was so struck by the evident affection between William Clark and his wife that she mentioned it years later to her son Paul. “Anna would sit on the senator’s lap and pull his beard,” recalls Paul Albert. “She was so much younger that [it] lent itself to that kind of generational play.”

Agnes also noticed that Anna seemed extremely protective of her shy daughter. Huguette’s fascination with her doll collection puzzled her nieces, since they had outgrown such childish things. The young women were especially taken aback when Huguette, in madcap heiress fashion, brought a doll dressed up in finery as an accessory to an evening black-tie event. A photo shows Huguette, wearing pearls and a gown with a doll perched in her lap, seated demurely next to an attractive young man in a tuxedo, who appears to be unfazed by his date’s prop. Huguette’s niece Mary Clark looks stiffly at the camera, as if embarrassed to be there, while Anna Clark smiles serenely. Later on, these nieces would pass along to their own children and grandchildren tales of Huguette’s eccentricities.

But the Spence School during that era was used to the quirks of its patrician students. Huguette would later recall that one of her younger classmates was a Bouvier, a cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and Lee Bouvier Radziwill. That Spence classmate was Edie Bouvier Beale, a beauty who was eleven years Huguette’s junior. Edie would later become famous with her mother as the reclusive broken-down socialites of Grey Gardens, living in a deteriorating estate in East Hampton. Their dependent mother-daughter relationship and sad lives would be the fodder for a documentary, musical, and movie.

The acclaimed Polish artist Tadé Styka sailed on the Majestic from Paris to New York on January 4, 1923, to attend an exhibit of his work at the prestigious Knoedler Gallery. Deluged with requests for portraits, he set up shop on the gallery’s second floor for six months and scheduled sittings. The onetime child prodigy was so much in demand that the Washington Post wrote, “The craze that is sweeping New York for Tadé Styka’s portraits is most extraordinary… Ain’t nature grand when one becomes the fad of the fashionable world.” William Clark, who had returned to New York from Montana, ordered eleven portraits of himself in a burst of enthusiasm as well as portraits of Anna, her sister, Amelia, Huguette, and even several versions of Andrée, based on photographs. The family members spent hours posing for the debonair bachelor artist.

So when Huguette later expressed interest in taking painting lessons, there was an obvious candidate. Tadé had not taken on private pupils before, but he could hardly refuse the blandishments of his well-heeled patron. Huguette was ferried by chauffeur to his Central Park South studio, along with a chaperone who remained in the next room. Tadé became fond of the shy and sheltered but artistically inclined teenager. They chatted away happily in French, and he liked to play practical jokes to make her laugh. He would occasionally dash off an impromptu portrait of Huguette while she was working. In one of these paintings, he depicts Huguette standing at her easel with a paintbrush and a palette in hand, a slender young girl with a thoughtful and engaged expression, alive with the pleasure of creating—an artist at work.

Anna Clark had discovered that she liked California during her visits to her brother, Arthur, in Los Angeles and her vacations at Long Beach. Now that the family needed to shut down their New York residence for five months a year to avoid taxes, they needed another home. In 1923, Anna and her husband rented a house in Santa Barbara for the summer. The sun-drenched city with its palm trees, ocean vistas, and hilly canyons had become the West Coast version of Newport, dotted with grand estates built by Goulds and Peabodys.

The Clarks took a handsome white oceanfront villa, Bellosguardo, perched on a cliff with views of the mountains and water. Bellosguardo had been built in 1903 by Tulsa oil magnate William Miller Graham and his wife, Lee, whose houseguests included the Duke and Duchess de Richelieu, Pittsburgh banker William Mellon, actress Elinor Glyn, and members of the Vanderbilt family. But the owners had recently divorced, so the sprawling property was available, with its wraparound porch, verdant gardens, football-field-sized lawn, and private white sand beach.

While Anna and Huguette played golf—the athletic Huguette also went horseback riding and tried out her surfing technique—William Clark continued to crisscross the country on business. He was now eighty-four years old, lonely for his wife during his frequent absences, but he refused to retire.

The teenage girl whom he had taken as his protégée in 1893 had become his great love, and he missed Anna so much that he wrote to her constantly. On July 23, he wrote to his wife from Butte, “I can also see you all in my minds eye around the yard in various games and on the beach and in due course of time I shall be glad to get back again.” The family man urged Anna a few weeks later to encourage Huguette to write to him, saying, “My love to Huguette and tell her I have had only two letters from her since I came away. How easy it is to forget. I am so glad that you remember me so often.”

He wrote affectionate letters to Huguette, encouraging her to keep up her golf game. “I know you will like golf when you get to playing well. This requires a great deal of practice… I am glad that you are getting along well with your studies.” The former Democratic senator lamented to his daughter the sudden death of Republican president Warren Harding on August 2: “It was such a pity as he was one of the greatest and best Presidents we have had for many years.”

With Anna, he discussed his business problems in his letters: “The Socialists are trying to induce me to sell the water system to the city at a low price so they can get cheap water. They would not care what I would lose as they would like to have the city buy it at half price the cost.” The elderly robber baron felt beleaguered and bitter about his legacy. “I sometimes feel that all that I have done for the betterment of mankind is not worthwhile as there is very little appreciation but one should not encourage that feeling…”

Andrée was always on his mind, and he wrote to his spouse on the fourth anniversary of their daughter’s death:

Darling wife,

My thoughts are with you and our darling girl who passed away and who we loved so dearly… such a great loss to us and our dear Huguette who happily has been spared to us. She had such a marvelous intellect and such a sweet disposition and such regard for the happiness of those whom she knew. I have great confidence that we will see her again and that we will all be together again. I may be mistaken but it is a comforting thought and I love to think that our hopes may be confirmed.

With all my fondest love for you and dear Huguette and hoping that you are both well and happy.

That August, the headmistress and founder of the Spence School, Clara Spence, died at the age of sixty-one while on vacation at a cottage in Greenwich, Connecticut. William Clark wrote to his wife on August 16 that he was sorry to hear the news, adding, “It is such a pity as she took such an interest personally in my girls. I hope that it will not interfere with the plans she professed to me to advance Huguette this year…” In the same letter, he mentioned he was going to the “Old Timer meeting” of the Montana Pioneers, but joked in a postscript, “Don’t worry about me at all. I am not going to do anything indiscreet. W.A.C.”

His older children were concerned about Clark’s health. His son Will Jr. alerted his sister Katherine Morris that the aging senator did not look well. Katherine sent a telegram to her stepmother, Anna, urging her to get the senator to take it easy: “Letter from Will says father doing altogether too much is losing weight and does not get proper rest and food. Cannot you get him back to Santa Barbara as we are all much worried about him.” Will Jr. followed up himself, alerting Anna in a telegram on August 29 that he would be accompanying his father from Butte to California by train and “think it would please him if you would meet us at Los Angeles.”

Once William Andrews Clark arrived in Bellosguardo, he was delighted to join in the easygoing resort life. “We are all very well and all enjoying this splendid climate,” Clark wrote to his lawyer, Walter Bickford. “Today we had the eclipse to attract our attention… the effect of it was wonderful.” In a photograph of the senator and his wife, he is sitting in a wooden chair and Anna is perched on the armrest with her arms around him, a picture of domestic tranquility. A wire dangles from her ear, attached to her hearing aid on a table nearby. She was not vain about her disability and was willing to be photographed with the box so that she did not miss a word of conversation. Anna had brought along Huguette’s tutors, the Vidal sisters, and the senator also posed with the flirtatious beauty Jaquita Vidal, looking pleased by her attention. The two young women doted on Huguette, and she beamed in their presence.

William Andrews Clark was so taken with the twenty-three-acre Bellosguardo that he bought the estate that fall for a reduced price of $300,000. The Italian-style two-story mansion featured white marble floors, oak ceiling beams, and ample porches, and the private beach included cabanas. The building was secluded on three sides by its location on a bluff at the edge of the ocean; the only neighbor was the adjoining cemetery. He and Anna decided to stay there for the fall, sending Huguette back to New York with chaperones to stay at the Ambassador Hotel. The seventeen-year-old Huguette did not seem to mind, writing a series of upbeat letters to her father as she continued to try to impress him with her dedication to classwork.

The Ambassador, New York, October 3, 1923

Dearest Daddy,

I am so glad to hear that you are well. We are fine here, the rooms are very comfortable… I found school of course very sad without Miss Spence. My program is very interesting and I have nice teachers.

Here are the subjects: English speech, mythology, geometry, psychology, spelling and reading, French modern history, chemistry, 18th Century literature, history of architecture drawing, Shakespeare. A lady will come every Thursday and read to us Shakespeare to take Miss Spence’s place and she acted with John Barrymore and a few other celebrities. Of course I am positive she could not make the class half as interesting as Miss Spence. The Clark girls are here and they are fine… The weather here is beautiful and we haven’t had a day of rain since we came, which is quite wonderful for New York. Well Daddy I’ll keep you posted on what’s going on here. I will be delighted when I see you again and I send you a million hugs.

A week later, Huguette wrote to him again. She wanted to send word that she was spending time with her Clark relatives at Spence as well as John Hall Jr., the husband-to-be of her older niece, Katherine Elizabeth Morris. Huguette had been chosen as a bridesmaid for the couple’s upcoming January wedding, with the party to be held at her father’s Fifth Avenue mansion.

Dear Daddy,

I am very busy with my school lessons and that is the reason I don’t write to you more often. But I think of you very much and I am looking forward to your arrival in New York. I hear mother is getting along very well with her riding and driving. I am so glad that she takes enjoyment in these excursions as they surely are very beneficial to her health. I see the Clark girls very often and they all look fine. Katherine’s fiance paid a call on me. He is very nice, very polite and I am sure will make Katherine very happy… Well, Daddy, it won’t be long until you will be on your way home. How glad I shall be to see you and mother again!

From your affectionate daughter. Hugs (my nickname. Do you like it?)

Her father arrived back in Manhattan in time to celebrate his eighty-fifth birthday on January 9. He was still considered such a formidable figure in the business world that the Wall Street Journal wrote a tongue-in-cheek article about this momentous birthday, joking that Clark continued to be “a driving personality so prejudiced as to be against the right of such words as ‘leisure’ and ‘vacation’ to repose in the dictionary.” The article quoted an unnamed business colleague who said Clark’s idea of fun is “to drop down to Wall Street and put in the night working.” The article closed by saying, “He’s months and months older than Mr. Rockefeller; but try to tell him—you try!” John D. Rockefeller was six months younger than his fellow robber baron, born on July 8, 1839.

That year, a new, imported fad swept the country that had a profound impact on Huguette. In London, the renowned architect Sir Edwin Lutyens built an elaborate four-story Palladian dollhouse for Queen Mary at the behest of her cousin Princess Marie. It included a tiny Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost in the garage, miniature furniture, 750 tiny paintings, and even miniature bottles of Château Lafite. James Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle wrote new stories that were included in miniature books, prompting a New York Times feature, QUEEN’S DOLLS HAVE PRICELESS LIBRARY. Prohibitionists in America complained about the display of liquor: WINE CELLAR IN DOLL HOUSE FOR QUEEN IS QUESTIONED was the headline of a Washington Post article. The dollhouse was put on public display to raise money for charity.

This much-publicized Lilliputian 1924 dwelling launched a craze among upper-class American women for dollhouses. Mrs. James Ward Thorne of Chicago, who had married into Montgomery Ward’s family, was inspired to commission craftsmen to create sixty-eight miniature rooms, with replicas of antique American furniture and European interiors, which would later go on permanent display at the Art Institute of Chicago. “This was a very female hobby,” explains Lindsay Mican Morgan, a curator at the Art Institute, explaining that wealthy women seized on the novelty constructions as a form of self-expression. “These women often didn’t have full control over their own world and their own lives. Here they were reaching out to create their own little worlds that they completely controlled themselves.”

For the already doll-obsessed Huguette, these idealized miniature worlds were a source of wonder. She already owned dollhouses, but this upscale enthusiasm made her passion a respectable hobby. Huguette would go on to commission and collect many dollhouses, paying meticulous attention to getting the period details and proportions just right.

Although her father still bragged about having the energy of a robust middle-aged man, William Andrews Clark had begun to look and feel his age. In the summer of 1924, the senator and his wife and daughter decamped for Santa Barbara again, joined by three of his grandchildren: Charles Clark’s daughters Mary, Patricia, and Agnes. Local man-about-town Marshall Bond Jr. lovingly described a party that the senator and Anna gave for the young women in his 1974 memoir, Adventures with Peons, Princes, and Tycoons. A Los Angeles band played jazz—this was, after all, the Roaring Twenties—and couples danced until twelve, after which they ate a midnight meal that included Lobster Newberg and Chicken à la King. “I later learned that the Clarks had one of the most celebrated French chefs in the world,” Bond wrote. But the senator sat out the event. “Mrs. Clark took me into the study to meet the senator, who was slumped in an easy chair, scowling like an ancient bird of prey… We had one of the shortest conversations in history, consisting of the word, ‘Hello.’ ”

The writer noticed that the copper mogul showed up at the local barber shop in the sleepy resort town “in a limousine with a chauffeur and armed bodyguard, followed by another limousine with a chauffeur and another bodyguard.” William Clark had survived the boisterous mining camps of Colorado, the outbreak of World War I, dangerous brain surgery, and a car accident, but as an octogenarian he was obsessed about his safety and that of his wife and daughter.

That August, Tadé Styka joined the Clarks in Santa Barbara to complete a series of portraits of the familly. “Eight times I have painted former United States Senator Clark’s picture,” he told the Los Angeles Examiner. “I also have painted Miss Huguette Clark, his beautiful daughter. Now I have been asked to come to California to paint Mrs. Clark.”

Tadé, who had developed a handsome physique similar to Charles Atlas, was now making as many headlines for his romantic life as his art. Tadé’s sensual portrait of film star Pola Negri, in a nearly backless gown, created a sensation, especially after newspapers reported that the duo had been a couple but the femme fatale had dumped Styka for Charlie Chaplin. The Los Angeles Times reporter Antony Anderson interviewed the artist and pronounced himself impressed, writing, “I found him as modest as anybody and quite unspoiled. Which says much for his strength of character… When you’re a Polish aristocrat and a genius, at one and the same time, and the haut-monde tries to make a pet of you, look out!”

As a man who loved art, music, and the beach, Tadé fit in well with the Clark household in Santa Barbara, admired by Huguette and her parents. But for Huguette, the idyll had to end with the start of the school year. She returned to Manhattan for her senior year at Spence, traveling home with a chaperone. Anna sent her daughter a telegram on September 24: “Dearest Huguette, We both send our dear love. Without you the house is as gay as a bell without a sound. Styka is at work on your portrait all afternoon. Love to all, Mother.” Tadé painted one portrait of Huguette playing the harp, plus another of Huguette wearing a pink dress and pearls.

Anna liked the speed of Western Union, sending Huguette another telegram a few days later: “I wish you all good luck in your senior year. All well here your father the same.” She also told Huguette that she was about to have family houseguests: Katherine Clark Morris and her physician husband, Lewis Morris; plus Charles and Celia Clark, who had separated but were showing up together in a temporary display of unity. Aware of Clark’s advancing age, his children were especially attentive.

To update her parents on her New York life, Huguette wrote to her father on October 5, 1924, listing her classes—including nineteenth-century literature, Bible literature, botany—and reassuring him that she was seeing a lot of her relatives. “The Clark girls are here in New York and have a nice apartment which I think is much nicer for them than staying at a hotel all winter as they have home cooking,” she wrote. Her mother’s sister, Amelia, who had recently married the retired mining engineer Bryce Turner, was in Manhattan watching out for Huguette, too. “Tante Amelia took me out to the theatre tonight and I had a lovely time,” Huguette wrote to her father. “The rooms here at the hotel are lovely and very comfortable… My bedroom is perfectly lovely. The sun pours in in the morning and I think it is most cheerful.”

William and Anna Clark had planned to return to New York by Thanksgiving, but he had unexpected business to attend to in Los Angeles, so Anna sent a telegram apologizing for the delay to “Dearest Hugo.” But the Clarks were back in time for Christmas, reopening their showplace of a home.

In early January Tadé Styka, who had lingered in California after a successful exhibit of his paintings at the Cannell and Chaffin gallery in Los Angeles, sent flowers to Huguette along with a teasing and affectionate letter, in French.

Chere Mademoiselle,

Because you love them, I would like to send you all of the red flowers in the world! But I fear that it would be too significant.

Here everything is so superficial that I cannot wait to return to New York.

Ten days and I hope to contemplate the canvasses smeared by your “little paws” that I kiss now.

Avec mes affectueux hommages por vos parents, Tadé Styka

That was quite a flirtatious letter to send to an impressionable eighteen-year-old.

On February 28, 1925, Clark’s oldest daughter, Mary, married her handsome third husband, Marius de Brabant, who had worked his way up from a lowly clerk to become a Los Angeles traffic manager for the Union Pacific Railroad. As a wedding gift, Mary gave him $500,000. The wedding was held at a secret location, and family members refused to give the press any information about the guests or last-minute ceremony.

The reason for the secrecy became clear a few days later: William Andrews Clark was dying. He had contracted a cold that had turned into pneumonia and was raging through his body. At his Fifth Avenue mansion, Anna, Huguette, and the copper king’s two older daughters gathered at his bedside, holding a vigil during the final few hours as he lay there unconscious. Clark died on the evening of March 2. He was eighty-six years old, and his life had spanned the era from the stagecoach to the invention of the airplane, from a frontier country with only twenty-six states to a star-spangled flag with forty-eight stars. The contents of his wallet included the totems of his life: a copper penny, a newspaper clipping of the hymn “Abide with Me,” a photo of himself with Anna, his newly renewed January 9 pistol permit, a ticket to the Metropolitan Museum, membership cards to the National Democratic Club and the Freemasons, and a business card for Tadé Styka.

Huguette had grown up worrying about her elderly father’s health, but he had always seemed indomitable. Their four-unit family was now down to her and her mother, and she felt very much alone.

Headlines coast-to-coast marked Clark’s death, and thousands of flowery words were typed on deadline to convey his only-in-America ascension from farm boy to copper Croesus. SENATOR CLARK’S VIVID LIFE: HE WON FORTUNE IN WESTERN INDUSTRY, ACHIEVED POWER IN POLITICS AND ROSE TO FAME AS AN ART COLLECTOR, summed up the New York Times headline. The most revealing accounts appeared in the Montana newspapers, where the pioneer’s passing was treated as the end of an era. In Butte, the city government ordered the flags to fly at half-staff. FROM ALL SIDES COME TRIBUTES TO BELOVED MAN, gushed the Butte Daily Post. Byron Cooney of the Montana American wrote a personal reminiscence, noting that Clark’s favorite song was “The Star Spangled Banner,” and that “he would stand on a chair, leading the chorus; at times he even stood on a table.”

There was a run on New York florists as more than four hundred arrangements were sent to Clark’s Fifth Avenue mansion, including President Coolidge’s offering of orchids and lilies of the valley. The service began with the hymn “Abide with Me.” Clark had planned his funeral to mimic that of his daughter Andrée, with the same minister presiding, Dr. Ernest Stires of St. Thomas Church, and the reading of his favorite poem, William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” a comforting paen about recalling the glories of nature on one’s deathbed, including such lines as: “The golden sun, the planets, all the infinite host of heaven, are shining on the sad abodes of death.” Montana senator Burton Wheeler attended along with the president of the Anaconda Company. But only the immediate family went up to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx for the interment. Clark had put in writing that he wanted to be buried “without undue pomp or ceremony.”

What many mourners undoubtedly were wondering was: how would the Clark millions be divided up? The answer came in early April when Clark’s will, which he had signed on May 29, 1922, was filed in Butte for probate. The same flinty-eyed instincts that helped William Andrews Clark accumulate his fortune—gouging on the price of eggs, giving miners ruinous terms on bank loans—had returned with a vengeance in his dotage, and he had punctuated his will with hurtful clauses.

Clark’s last will and testament bluntly gave Anna and Huguette an eviction notice from the Fifth Avenue mansion and even decreed a precise date for vacating. By June 10, 1928, the day after Huguette’s twenty-second birthday, they needed to be out of the home in which they had lived since 1911. Clark then wanted the house to be sold—along with virtually all of the possessions other than the art—with the proceeds divided among his five children. If Anna and Huguette wanted any of the objects that they treasured, they could bid for them at auction just like everyone else. His motivation may have been fairness to both of his families, but the tone and arbitrary date were cruel. The senator had put aside $600,000 to pay for Anna’s and Huguette’s expenses while they were in the house, but if they did not use all of the money, it was to be parceled out equally to all of his children.

His estate was underestimated for tax purposes in Montana as being worth $48 million, although unverified estimates have put it as high as $250 million, about $3.3 billion today. New York authorities mounted a court challenge to probate the will in New York to impose local taxes but lost, thanks to Clark’s meticulous record keeping of his time out of state.

Anna received a bequest of only $2.5 million, although her husband indicated in his will that he had previously provided for her needs. Clark gave her the belongings from their Paris apartment at No. 56 Victor Hugo, which included silverware, rugs, hangings, and furniture. Bellosguardo was not specifically mentioned in Clark’s will, but he had made prior arrangements to give the estate to Anna. The senator included one clause in his will that appeared to be designed to protect Anna from any efforts by his older children to seize her extraordinary collection of diamonds, emeralds, pearls, and rubies. Clark pointedly noted that if Anna had anything stored in a safe deposit box, no one could “hamper or hinder” her access.

He named Anna and his older four children as executors, but Anna promptly resigned, unwilling to tangle with her stepchildren. They had all tolerated one another while the senator was alive, but she still remembered their cool reaction when she initially joined the family and their unsubtle hints that she was an adventuress. Even though she would have received a fee as an executor, she preferred not to be in the awkward position of discussing money with her Clark relations. She had the security of a trusted adviser in place: her husband’s controller, William B. Gower, was an administrator of the estate.

Since Huguette was under twenty-one years old, her father put in special provisions including a sliding scale allowance: $5,000 per month at age nineteen, rising to $7,500 per month at age twenty. To protect her from fortune hunters, Clark decided to make the rest of her inheritance available in bits and pieces as she grew older. When Huguette reached the age of twenty-six in 1932, she would receive one-third of what she was due, and the remaining one-third portions would be paid when she turned thirty and then thirty-three. If she died before reaching age thirty-three and did not yet have children, the money would go to her half siblings. Anna was named Huguette’s guardian, with a backup of Clark’s oldest daughter, the serial monogamist Mary Culver Kling de Brabant.

Clark’s other four children initially received an estimated $15 million each—inflation adjusted, that’s $200 million today—in addition to previous gifts they had been given such as Clark’s stock in the Union Pacific Railroad. Clark was penurious in the rest of his bequests. He gave his three surviving sisters $25,000 each. His loyal butler, Frederick Dean, and his Butte housekeeper for more than twenty years, Annie Harrington, each received $2,500.

The surprising twist in Clark’s will was his plans for his art collection. Fancying himself a brilliant collector with impeccable taste, he wanted that legacy to be admired by future generations in the most prestigious museum in the country. Executives at the Metropolitan Museum were startled to learn that the copper king had bequeathed the museum more than two hundred paintings plus statues by Donatello and Canova, tapestries, seventeenth-century rugs, antique lace, and Grecian and Etruscan antiquities.

But the gift came with a catch: Clark had insisted on conditions designed to infuriate the Metropolitan’s trustees, a group that included financier J. P. Morgan and artist Daniel Chester French, best known for his sculpture of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial. Clark demanded that the museum accept his entire collection and create a special gallery in which to display it. This was an all-or-nothing offer, a display of egomania of the first order and an attempt to impose his will from the grave.

Metropolitan Museum president Robert de Forest, a blue blood who had inherited his board seat from his wealthy father-in-law, acted as if he was offended by the bequest. He immediately announced that the trustees might turn down the art because of the onerous conditions. Telling reporters that he did not want to “tie the hands” of future administrators by forcing them to showcase the entire Clark collection, de Forest added that the museum lacked the gallery space to house the artworks. This contemptuous view was echoed in the newspapers. “Not all of the items are worthy of a place in the Museum,” sniffed the New York Times, adding that if the museum gave in to Clark’s wishes, the Met was in danger of becoming a “mausoleum to enshrine the fame of American collectors.”

In a unanimous vote, the Met trustees turned down the Clark bequest. His children were outraged. “Any city in Europe would have accepted it without question,” complained Katherine Morris, Clark’s daughter. The senator had foreseen this outcome, shrewdly designating the Corcoran Gallery as an alternate recipient. He had a long history with the museum, serving as a trustee, loaning paintings, and donating thousands of dollars for art prizes. After the women in the Clark family—Anna, Huguette, and Clark’s daughters from his first marriage, Mary de Brabant and Katherine Morris—eventually agreed to contribute $700,000 to fund a museum expansion, the Corcoran accepted the art.

Shortly after Clark’s death, Tadé Styka completed his final portrait of the senator and delivered it to his widow and daughter. Huguette responded with a grateful note, written on a black-bordered condolence card.

Cher Monsieur,

Thank you a thousand times for the portrait of mon cher papa, and please accept the expression of my admiration for your marvelous talent, which makes me so happy at the moment.

Bien sincerement a vous, Huguette Clark

Huguette graduated from the Spence School that May, but it was hardly a moment for celebration. She was in mourning, not just for her father but for the life they had led as a family. On May 27, she received congratulatory telegrams from friends and family members like her aunt Hanna La Chapelle. A few of her academically oriented classmates were going on to college, while some of her school friends were already engaged. In her Spence autograph book, her classmates wrote sweet inscriptions. “Let’s hope you have the best luck in the world,” scribbled her friend Aileen. “Here’s to the time I almost killed myself by slipping on the side of your pool,” wrote Frances. Added a friend nicknamed Twinkle, “Let’s not make this a real goodbye for we must see each other a lot next year.”

For Huguette’s half brother Charles, the death of the family patriarch proved liberating. Charles Clark and his wife, Celia, had been at odds for many years. Although tired of his philandering, Celia had nonetheless balked at his request for a divorce. But the prospect of a large settlement made Celia amenable to her husband’s wishes. Celia filed for divorce within weeks of her father-in-law’s funeral and was granted her marital freedom five months later. As part of the divorce settlement, Charles set up trust funds for their four children, but even though he was now extremely rich he was also punitive—he later sued to get $860,000 in dividends from his children’s trusts. As soon as his divorce came through, Charles Clark married his latest paramour, Elizabeth Judge of Louisville. Once he remarried, he not only cut his son and three daughters out of his will but excised them from his life.

William Andrews Clark had spent his life trying to thwart adversaries from cheating him out of his money. After his death, the battle continued, but now it was his children who were forced to defend their inheritance. The most serious challenge was launched in February 1926 by three middle-aged Missouri sisters, who claimed that Clark was their father, too, and demanded millions from his estate.

Mrs. Effie Clark McWilliams, Mrs. Addie Clark Miller, and Mrs. Alma Clark insisted that their father, druggist William Anderson Clark, was the same person as William Andrews Clark. The women stated that their father had abandoned the family in Stewartsville, Missouri, in 1879, moved to Montana, and struck it rich as a miner. The women had no recollections of their father, just a tintype that they claimed was a likeness.

Despite this flimsy evidence, the sisters won the right to a jury trial in Butte in July 1926. It turned out to be less of a serious legal battle than a two-week vaudeville show with spectators clamoring for seats. A parade of witnesses on both sides came forward to detail the whereabouts of Sen. William Andrews Clark and his purported doppelganger at various dates. There were a few vague similarities: both men had briefly been schoolteachers, both had been members of the Masonic Lodge, and both had lived in Montana.

Anna and Huguette did not attend the trial but hired their own lawyer, unwilling to trust the attorneys brought in by Clark’s four oldest children. The senator’s entire life was replayed, with Montana pioneers in their seventies and eighties taking the witness stand to recount Clark’s early mining days and his honeymoon by wagon train with his first wife. His son Charles Clark testified about his own privileged youth in Paris and Long Island, emphasizing the time he spent with his father. One of Tadé Styka’s oil portraits of William Andrews Clark was even propped on an easel as evidence to demonstrate the senator’s distinctive patrician appearance.

Anna Clark submitted a document showing that she and William Andrews Clark had registered their marriage on May 5, 1909, in the state of Montana. The piece of paper stated that the couple had been married on May 25, 1901, in the Republic of France.

The decisive evidence was unearthed by the former circulation manager of the Butte Miner, Phil Goodwin. Appointed by President Wilson as the postmaster of Butte, Goodwin remembered the names of many city residents and belatedly recalled a man named William Anderson Clark. Goodwin tracked down the man, who was on his deathbed. This other William Clark admitted that he was the father of the three women and had walked out on them in Missouri. Without bothering to get a divorce, in 1880 he had married a woman named Anna Pierce, who then became Anna Clark. Worried about being charged with bigamy, he had not come forward after he read about his daughters’ faulty paternity claims. But now with only a short time left to live, William Anderson Clark agreed to give an affidavit admitting, “I left this family down there owning to disagreeable family surroundings and with the intention of never going back.”

It took the jury just forty-five minutes to reach a verdict and throw out the fortune hunters. When court officials polled the panel, the questions were framed in disconcerting fashion. The jury was asked to determine whether Anna La Chapelle was indeed Clark’s wife and “is the defendant Huguette Marcelle Clark a child of the marriage?” The jury’s answer, both times, was yes. News accounts of the verdict cited these questions, which was humiliating for Anna and Huguette.

The pragmatic Anna La Chapelle Clark recoiled at the idea of sitting in her husband’s Fifth Avenue mansion and counting the days until she and Huguette would be forced to vacate. She began looking for a new home, settling on an Italian palazzo-style luxury building at 907 Fifth Avenue, which had been built in 1915 and was located just five blocks away from the senator’s mansion. The twelve-story limestone residence, with a central courtyard, had been laid out so that each floor featured two large apartments. Advertisements for the building boasted: “The twelfth floor is considered one of the finest apartments that has ever been constructed.”

With fourteen rooms, including four bedrooms, the space was a fraction of what Anna and Huguette had grown used to. But as in many luxury buildings of the era, top-floor single-room servants’ quarters were available that could be rented by tenants; Anna signed up for several spots. In November 1926, Anna went on a spending spree to decorate the new abode, buying antiques from the London firm Charles including a $3,500 Queen Anne walnut wing chair with needlepoint and a $4,000 William and Mary sofa covered with seventeenth-century tapestry. She also spent $13,500 for a Louis XV sofa and five armchairs, and ordered thirty yards of blue chenille carpet for Huguette’s suite of rooms. The soothing color matched Huguette’s eyes.