Chapter Nine

Society Girl

Huguette first appeared in the black leather–bound Social Register as a twelve-year-old in 1918 but only now, as a young woman ready to enter society and find a husband, did the status-oriented designation truly matter. Even though her family had not arrived on the Mayflower, thanks to her late father’s fortune, she was perceived as a good catch. Social mores were changing as the Jazz Age and the suffragettes’ victories made women more adventurous, but the time-honored rituals for an heiress of Huguette’s generation endured. The mating dance officially began with a round of parties culminating in coming out.

Huguette and her mother sailed back from Europe to New York in October 1926 on the Berengaria, the most luxurious ship in the Cunard fleet, which featured a palm garden, a ballroom, a tea room, a grill, and large promenade decks for the seven hundred first-class passengers. Other notables included Vincent Astor, his sister Alice, and her husband, the polo-playing Russian prince Serge Obolensky. Within days of her return to her new Fifth Avenue apartment, Huguette was deluged with invitations from friends and former Spence classmates for their debutante parties.

She was eager to reciprocate, giving a luncheon in honor of her friend Carolyn Storrs at Pierre’s Park Avenue restaurant, a society haven owned by Monte Carlo émigré Charles Pierre Casalasco, who would later launch the Pierre Hotel. Carolyn Storrs, an outgoing blonde beauty who never missed a chance to perform an undulating dance at a charity gala, was the daughter of advertising entrepreneur Frank Vance Storrs. The self-made Storrs, an Ohio native, had launched the theatre program Playbill in 1884 in Manhattan, distributing it to theatres for free and amassing enough advertising revenue to subsequently buy and build two dozen movie theatres in New York and New Jersey.

A show business character known for his block-long black limousine with snow-white doors, he had changed his name from Strauss to Storrs during World War I, claiming that he was concerned about anti-German prejudice. His ties to Anna Clark and her sister, Amelia, were due in part to their mutual love of France. Storrs had been given the French Legion of Honor in 1926 for promoting French culture in the United States. The families had many mutual friends, including Tadé Styka. Storrs’s daughter Carolyn had studied in Paris, and she and Huguette could converse in French. Storrs and his wife, Amanda, gave opulent parties, and Huguette, her mother, and her aunt Amelia were regulars on the guest lists.

William Andrews Clark had celebrated the coming-out festivities of his two New York granddaughters by giving large and lavish parties at his Fifth Avenue palace. The debutantes could descend his marble staircase to the sound of his magnificent organ. But Anna, now a widow for less than two years, opted for a more subdued affair in honor of Huguette, just a simple luncheon. But even without the senator’s excess, Huguette was featured in the New York Times on December 5, 1926, as one of the debutantes of the season. She looks slender and attractive in the studio photograph. She has bobbed her wavy hair to ear-length and is wearing pearls and a dark short-sleeved dress with a lacy shawl collar. In contrast to her joyous and relaxed appearance in family snapshots, she has a vulnerable and dreamy expression in this photo, as if gazing into the future for clues about the next stage of her life.

Architectural critics had once attacked her father’s palace as a vulgar eyesore. But now the mansion was a hulking ghost presence, a vestige of bygone times, and on the verge of being dismantled. After more than a year on the market, no buyer had emerged who had the money and the moxie to become the new lord of the nine-story manor. By now the grandiose Fifth Avenue residences built by robber barons had fallen out of fashion—the taxes and upkeep were ruinous—and the châteaus of Cornelius Vanderbilt and John Jacob Astor had already succumbed to the wrecking ball, replaced by luxury apartment buildings. Henry Frick saved his Fifth Avenue home for posterity only by turning it into an art museum. The New York Times lamented that “the great gargoyle-fronted bronze villas of New York’s admitted social set” were being torn down “with magic swiftness” and pronounced the Clark house “doomed.” Indeed, developer Anthony Campagna spent less than $3 million for William Clark’s “folly,” which had cost the senator more than $7 million to build. Campagna planned to replace it with a twelve-story, sixty-eight-unit apartment building.

In February 1927, the doors of the Clark mansion were opened to the public for a final viewing. A crowd lined up to pay the fifty-cent admission charge, with proceeds going to the Travelers Aid Society and the Junior Emergency Relief Society. The curious New Yorkers marched through the marble halls, the billiard room, the music room, and even the once-intimate bedroom suites of Mr. and Mrs. Clark. Charlie Chaplin was among the gawkers, bringing along several friends and admiring the banquet hall. The place had been denuded of most of the furnishings. The Genoese red velvet wall hangings, blue Sèvres porcelain plates, silverware with a fruit pattern for twenty-four, Italian Renaissance lamps, Chinese furniture in black lacquer and teakwood, embroidered screens, and Circassian walnut bedroom furniture had all been sold at auction a year earlier.

Film companies, hotels, and interior decorators came in to bid for the hand-carved paneling and remaining fixtures. William Fox, the founder of the Fox Film Company, bought the Sienna marble dining room fireplace for use in a movie theatre. The decorating firm Maison Cluny of Paris purchased parts of the state dining room. Mary Clark Culver Kling de Brabant proved to be the lone sentimental member of the family. William Clark’s oldest daughter hired an artist to sketch the interiors of the house and purchased the wood-paneled library for her eighty-acre estate Plaisance, located on Long Island’s northern Gold Coast at Centerport. Anna Clark would regret that she had not made a similar bid, and later acquired some of the Sherwood Forest paneling from a decorator for use in her renovation of her California estate, Bellosguardo.

On March 27, 1927, a symphony of hammers and wrecking balls could be heard on Fifth Avenue as workmen began reducing the mansion to rubble. With William Andrews Clark’s home torn down just sixteen years after its completion and his art collection shipped to Washington, he had left no tangible legacy in New York.

Huguette, now living just a few blocks away, could see her childhood vanish. The rooms where she had played with Andrée, the music room where she had practiced the violin, the pool where she had done laps, would soon be gone. She was experiencing a rarified form of downward mobility, adjusting to fewer servants and apartment living, which required sharing a common elevator with neighbors, albeit mostly of the proper social class.

That spring Huguette’s dance card was filled with engagements: luncheon parties at Sherry’s, joining fellow Spence alumnae at a theatrical review at Pierre’s, helping out with other debutantes at a charity concert at Carnegie Hall. At the April wedding of her friend Grace Cuyler to Count Albert de Mun of Paris, Huguette was treated as quite the catch. “The reception at the Park Lane is said to have set some new marks by bubbling exuberance and enthusiasm,” according to a syndicated feature writer. “And two or three of the French count’s groomsmen elbowed each other again and again to get closer to fair-haired Huguette Clark whose French is so excellent.”

A familiar face from her childhood was also dancing the Charleston on the debutante circuit that season: William MacDonald Gower, the tall, good-looking son of her father’s longtime accountant, William B. Gower. The younger Bill Gower had grown up in New Rochelle but attended Manhattan’s elite Trinity School (then an all-boys “brother” school to Huguette’s Spence), where he was popular enough to be elected class secretary and was a member of the track team and the Dramatic Society. At Princeton, he had roomed with his Trinity classmate Frank Warburton, who was from a socially prominent family. Gower joined the literary and debating society Whig Hall, whose notable recent members had included F. Scott Fitzgerald and Adlai Stevenson. But while his roommate was chosen for the selective Tower Club, Gower did not get into one of the college’s prestigious eating clubs and had to settle for the undistinguished Terrace Club. He listed himself as Republican and Presbyterian, like many of his classmates.

After graduating from Princeton in 1925, Gower had spent a year in California, and then returned to Manhattan to take a job at a well-known banking firm, J. and W. Seligman and Company at 54 Wall Street. Unsure whether he was cut out to be a banker, Gower was thinking of attending law school.

Gower was a well-groomed man with a high forehead and deep-set eyes, and his tuxedo was getting a workout that season. Carolyn Storrs invited him to a small dinner with friends at the Ritz-Carlton roof garden as an extra man, the sort of event where he came across the willowy Huguette. He soon began to quietly woo her. Gower had attended the right schools, his prospects appeared bright, and they had an overlapping social circle. There was a comfort in the fact that the young people had known each other for years and their parents were friendly. While Bill Gower had no money of his own, he did not convey any of the warning signs of a fortune hunter.

For Huguette, this romance seemed to be the path of least resistance. The man she had a crush on—Tadé Styka—had returned to Paris. She had continued to paint even without his instruction, and they wrote and saw each other whenever they were both in the same city, Paris or New York. But as much as Tadé had flirted with her, he was an older, sophisticated artist who was linked to movie stars, quoted by newspapers for his opinion of the most beautiful women in the world. Here was William Gower, not only attentive and interested but preapproved by her late father.

Anna had discouraged her daughter’s crush on Tadé, and she had complicated feelings about Huguette’s romance with Bill Gower. She confided her thoughts to her in-law Celia Tobin Clark, and those tales were later passed down to Celia’s granddaughter Karine McCall. “Anna wanted Huguette to get married and she didn’t want her to—she was worried that someone would take advantage of Huguette,” said Karine. “She thought the artist wasn’t the right type of person. She opposed Bill Gower, but Huguette thought she was in love with him.”

Anna took Huguette to Paris that June for their usual seasonal trip, and gave her daughter a party in conjunction with the Quai d’Orsay Ball, a Franco-American charity that drew Vanderbilts and other well-known Americans. Anna might have been keeping an eye open for a titled husband. Many of Huguette’s friends were either marrying European royalty (Carolyn Storrs would wed the son of the Countess Napoleon Magne of Paris) or at least young American princes of industry.

Following their trip to Paris, the two Clark women spent the summer at Bellosguardo. Santa Barbara was still recovering from a devastating 1925 earthquake, but there was an active summer social scene—polo matches, dances at the Biltmore Hotel, croquet on the lawns of the large estates.

Around this time, Gordon Lyle Jr. recalls that his family visited Huguette and her mother in Santa Barbara. His father, Dr. William Gordon Lyle, was married to the much younger Leontine De Sabla Lyle, who had been one of Huguette’s classmates at Spence. This was a close and enduring family friendship: Gordon’s younger sister, Tina, was Anna Clark’s goddaughter. “We’d stay at the Miramar Hotel for a month, but we went swimming almost every day at their beach. I saw a gay young girl,” he recalls. Lyle remembers meeting Bill Gower and being unimpressed. “He was tall and nice looking, and it didn’t seem to me that he was in the same social league that the Clarks were in,” Lyle says. “We didn’t think he belonged in that family.”

On December 14, 1927, Anna Clark announced to the world’s social editors that her daughter Huguette was engaged to marry William Gower. The two photos that ran in newspapers accompanying the story show Huguette looking surprisingly matronly but laughing and looking happily at the camera, while Gower sports a smug smile of satisfaction.

PRINCETON GRAD TO MARRY HEIRESS read the headline in the Trenton Times, as if Gower’s Ivy League pedigree made him fit to be her consort. But the New York Sun cast a more jaundiced eye, writing of William Gower: “Neither he nor his father are listed in the New York Social Register.” The Sun pointed out that Huguette could have had her pick among available men, noting, “Miss Clark was one of the popular debutantes of last season.” Virtually every article mentioned her eye-popping inheritance. The Havre-News of Montana helpfully suggested that Gower’s profession as a banker might prove useful: “One of the city’s wealthiest debutantes is to have a husband who should know how to help her take care of her money. Huguette M. Clark, who is in her minority, receives an allowance of $7,500 a month and will have control of millions later.”

Huguette and Bill Gower made their first appearances as an engaged couple at two December holiday parties at the Ritz-Carlton given by the ubiquitous Frank Storrs. The first party was built around an elegant Southern garden theme but included a miniature airplane hanging from the ceiling, a nod to Charles Lindbergh’s historic New York–to–Paris flight earlier that year. Frank Storrs’s next extravaganza two weeks later celebrating his younger daughter, Anne, caught the attention of jaded society writers, who termed it “the jungle party.” Hearst society editor Maury Paul, who wrote a syndicated column under the pseudonym “Cholly Knickerbocker” and made his nightly rounds wearing a white tie and his signature red carnation, devoted an entire article to the hedonistic event. The man who invented the phrase “café society” explained that Mrs. Storrs had been so captivated by a jungle-themed restaurant in Europe that she purchased the props and had them shipped to the Ritz-Carlton.

The roof of the hotel’s ballroom was hung with Southern moss, live monkeys cavorted about, the waiters wore monkey costumes, and the tables were decorated with exotic flowering plants and displays of coconuts and pineapples. As Knickerbocker wrote, “All in all, Mr. and Mrs. Storrs provided the debutante set with the unique party of the season.” Professional theatre entertainers amused the crowd, and after dinner, the tables were cleared away and two orchestras played so that the guests could dance until the wee hours. Photos of Bill Gower in his tuxedo and Huguette wearing her ubiquitous pearls and a simple, well-tailored sleeveless gown made the newspapers.

The new year of 1928 entered with a cold snap and brought with it a round of celebrations for Huguette and her fiancé. Carolyn and Anne Storrs were so happy about the engagements in their social set that they gave a dinner for four couples, including Huguette and Bill, at the Ritz-Carlton, then took their guests to a performance of Rosalie at the New Amsterdam Theatre. The Gershwin musical featured an airy merengue of a plot about a princess who comes to America and falls in love with a West Point lieutenant, with a score including, “How Long Has This Been Going On?”

Huguette was given a formal engagement party by Lewis Latham Clarke and his wife, the parents of her Spence classmate Florence Kip Clarke. A descendant of Emperor Charlemagne via his father and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence via his mother, the pedigreed Clarke was the president of the American Exchange National Bank. This was as upper-crust Manhattan as one could get. An orchestra played for eighty guests at the Clarke home at 998 Fifth Avenue. The popular songs that season included “Someone to Watch Over Me.” Huguette had never enjoyed being the center of attention, but this was her moment to take a whirl on the dance floor. Despite her father’s dire warnings—that no one would love her for herself; her money was the draw—she believed she had found the man of her dreams.

That March, Huguette, her fiancé, and her mother went to Washington for the Corcoran Gallery’s official opening ceremony for the newly built William Andrews Clark annex. President Calvin Coolidge, who arrived at 9:10 p.m., gave his arm to Anna Clark, and they led a procession to the entrance of the new wing. Silent Cal cut the cord, and the crowd applauded; news reports noted that Coolidge responded with a broad smile. Designed by architect Charles Platt, known for creating the Freer Gallery in Washington, the pink granite building included seven rooms to display the former senator’s artworks, including a special room for the Salon Doré. For Huguette this evening was a chance to show her husband-to-be the treasures that had surrounded her as a child.

The Washington Post gushed about Clark’s gifts in a grateful editorial, noting, “Some of these rarities are beyond price, notably the Gothic rugs and thirteenth century windows…” But the New York Times art critic Elisabeth L. Cary took a more acerbic view of the Corcoran’s new offerings. She bluntly stated that as a collector, Clark was the victim of his own taste: “He bought only what pleased him, and if, as not infrequently happened, he was deceived in the quality of his purchases he accepted disclosure philosophically and shouldered the blame.”

Huguette’s engagement had been announced in December, but she and her mother were coy about setting a wedding date. Anna arranged to rent and decorate an eighth-floor apartment in the same building, 907 Fifth Avenue, for herself, so that her daughter and Bill Gower could begin married life on the twelfth floor. Huguette had been a bridesmaid and a guest at the weddings of many friends, and it was expected that Huguette would reciprocate with a large wedding at her family’s usual religious locale, St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue.

So New York society was taken aback when Huguette opted for a small wedding at Bellosguardo on August 17, 1928. “The wedding will be extremely quiet, with only members of the family present and there will be no attendants,” according to an item in the local Santa Barbara newspaper. A wedding photo shows the bride and groom with Anna Clark; William and Helen Gower; Anna’s sister, Amelia, and her husband, retired mining engineer Bryce Turner; Anna’s brother, Arthur La Chapelle, and his wife, Hanna; and Dr. and Mrs. William Gordon Lyle and their impish, blonde, four-year-old daughter, Tina.

Despite the understated ambience, Huguette wore an elaborate white wedding gown with a veil and a train that stretched out six feet, and she carried an enormous bouquet of flowers. Just a week earlier, she and Bill had happily joined in the annual Santa Barbara fiesta celebration, featuring polo matches and garden parties. But now in the group wedding portrait, Huguette seemed nervous and downcast. In a formal photograph given to the newspapers, the newlyweds look more serious than joyous.

For Bill Gower, marrying Huguette elevated his social status by several notches. In the discussions leading up to the wedding, Anna and Huguette had agreed to give the groom a large dowry estimated at around $1 million. William Andrews Clark had settled money on Anna La Chapelle when they married. Perhaps Anna saw this as a way to try to start off her daughter’s marriage on a more equitable footing. But to put it bluntly, William Gower was being paid to marry Huguette. “They were so mismatched,” says Gordon Lyle Jr. “I don’t know why she married him, whether she got pushed into it or lured into it.”

From the groom’s perspective, the substantial sum quieted any qualms he might have felt about embarking on matrimony with his sheltered and unworldly bride. He could not lose: he would either be rich and happy with Huguette, or he could move on with his finances assured for life.

The couple honeymooned in San Francisco: their wedding night was a disaster. Huguette could never bring herself to reveal the full details. But later in life, when her friend Suzanne Pierre and her nurses asked why her marriage did not last, Huguette always referred to how unprepared she had been for the shock of sex. She used phrases like, “It hurt, I didn’t like it.” As Kati Despretz Cruz says, “Huguette told my grandmother [Suzanne Pierre] that the marriage was never consummated.”

Many years later, Huguette’s assistant, Chris Sattler, was organizing the thousands of books in her apartment when he came across a poignant find: a dozen how-to sex manuals. “They were all from the 1930s, after her marriage,” says Chris. “They were very clinical, unhelpful, written by doctors. But she was interested in knowing about it.”

Despite their apparent sexual incompatibility, the newlyweds did not immediately separate. A month after their marriage, a syndicated article analyzed the financial inequities in the marriage and concluded that the couple would not last together. A $30-A-WEEK HUSBAND FOR THE $50,000,000 HEIRESS: THE NEWEST MONEY ROMANCE-DOMESTIC PROBLEMS OF THE POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL CLARK AND HER DAILY $333 was the headline of the article in the Salt Lake Tribune. “The average young man refuses to live on his wife’s money,” wrote society writer Eleanor Town. “He thinks it is a disgrace. And of course, that is the manly and proper way for him to feel.” The author added that for the couple to try to live on Gower’s meager income would be equally disastrous: “Who pays the club dues? Is Mr. Gower’s income sufficient to enable him to travel with her friends? If not, what happens?”

In keeping with the national obsession with Huguette, on October 28, 1928, an item appeared in the Salt Lake Tribune reporting that she and her husband would be passing through Salt Lake on the Union Pacific at 9:30 p.m. “The young couple are returning from a honeymoon spent in Los Angeles,” the newspaper said. “Gower is to enter Columbia upon his return and begin the study of law.”

William Gower moved into Huguette’s apartment at 907 Fifth Avenue. The overly blushing bride marked her return to Manhattan by treating herself to jewelry. On October 31, 1928, the new Mrs. William MacDonald Gower went to Cartier and splurged on $15,500 earrings combining emeralds, pearls, and diamonds, a $2,640 diamond wristwatch, and a $3,125 diamond bracelet. In January, she returned to the store to purchase a $320 gold cigarette case. The Gowers continued to appear in public as a couple with their whereabouts charted in the society columns, such as attending a wedding anniversary party for friends at the ever popular Sherry’s. On April 8, Mrs. Gower bought herself a Steinway piano, but as always she remained more passionate about painting than music.

That dedication was rewarded in a way not normally available to fledgling artists—with a show in a major museum. The Corcoran Gallery freed up wall space from April 28 to May 19 for a showing of seven paintings by Huguette Clark, who used her maiden name for the exhibit. The museum’s gratitude to the Clarks shone through the catalogue, yet the curator went beyond boilerplate politeness, announcing that the twenty-two-year-old heiress was creating impressive work:

“From the day of her birth Huguette Clark has lived in an artistic atmosphere. She has been surrounded by many treasures of various Schools and Periods, contained in the notable art collection bequeathed to this gallery by her father, the late William Andrews Clark. She has had the benefit of extensive European travel; and added to these advantages, she is endowed with unusual natural talent.”

Huguette included two scenes of Central Park as viewed from her Fifth Avenue home, one of the sparkling oasis at night and the other a pristine wintry scene after a snowstorm. The show also included two intricate portraits of her dolls, a party scene, a study of hydrangeas, and a work entitled “Portrait of Myself.”

A self-portrait by Huguette, included many years later in a Christie’s catalogue, might have been the one shown at the Corcoran. In the painting, the artist is standing in front of a canvas holding a brightly-hued palette of paint, and turning to look over her shoulder. She wears a flowing rose-colored painting jacket, her wavy, blonde hair shines, and her mouth is a lipsticked red bow. She looks serene, an artist deeply involved with her work, taking a momentary break. The painting is striking and well-executed.

The Corcoran exhibit was a triumph for Huguette. Her painting teacher, Tadé Styka, was in Paris but returned to the United States to see the show. A few weeks later, Huguette, her husband, and her mother attended a dinner and concert on May 9 at the home of Huguette’s half sister Mary de Brabant. The guests that night included Huguette’s other half sister, Katherine Morris, and her husband, Lewis Morris, plus Dr. William Gordon Lyle and his wife, Leontine. The grand de Brabant stone mansion at 7 East Fifty-First Street, on a block then known as Millionaire’s Row, would later be occupied by the jewelry store Harry Winston. This was a festive family evening, with no apparent sign that trouble was bubbling just below the surface.

The bombshell dropped five days later in the Cholly Knickerbocker column in the New York American. “The distressing task of reporting, exclusively, that Huguette after nine short months of married life is about to divorce ‘Bill’ Gower comes to my lot,” Knickerbocker wrote. “The possession of untold wealth, all the luxuries vast wealth will provide and enviable social position failed to make the union a success and about a week hence, Mrs. Clark and Huguette will start westward to spend the summer at their palatial estate in Santa Barbara, formerly the home of Mrs. William Miller Graham. From Santa Barbara, Huguette will go to Reno to establish residence and seek a divorce. The above is certain to cause a sensation in society for the Gowers were supposed to be happy and there have been no rumors of an estrangement.”

Even though her marriage was over, Huguette did not actually go to Reno for another year. But she did immediately sign a new will, leaving everything to her mother. As Christie Merrill, a San Franciscan whose mother, Aileen Tobin, attended Spence with Huguette, recalls, “My mother told me that the family paid him a million to marry Huguette, and after he got the money, he ran off.” Cholly Knickerbocker would later write in a follow-up column about Huguette that at the time of her marriage, she had given “her none-too-well dowered bridesgroom a cool million dollars so he would ‘feel free.’ He felt so ‘free’ Huguette had to divorce him and resume use of her maiden name.”

That was an inside reference to Gower’s romantic life. Within months of separating from Huguette, William Gower began squiring around a new woman who would never have wedding-night jitters: Constance Baxter Tevis McKee Toulmin.

Gower’s new love collected wealthy husbands the way some women add charms to their bracelets. The daughter of rancher George Baxter, who served as the territorial governor of Wyoming, and his Southern belle wife, Constance (sometimes known as Cornelia) had been shipped to convent school in Paris. It didn’t take. At age eighteen, she jilted her wealthy Denver fiancé to wed forty-year-old San Francisco widower Hugh Tevis. On their honeymoon to Japan in 1901, Hugh Tevis died suddenly in Yokohoma. Constance returned a pregnant widow and claimed her husband’s million-dollar fortune.

But a million dollars only goes so far. Four years later, she befriended Pittsburgh playboy Hart McKee Jr., whose deceased father had made $20 million as a glass manufacturer. McKee was in the middle of divorcing his wife for a married woman. But as soon as his divorce came through, he dumped his paramour and married Constance in a quickie ceremony in 1905. The couple moved to Paris and she gave birth to a second son, but the marriage dissolved in spectacular fashion. The couple’s 1908 divorce was a publicly covered brawl. She claimed that he stole her jewels and beat her, and that thirty-five maids quit one after another, fleeing McKee’s sexual advances. McKee charged that Constance had conducted a flagrant affair with an Italian marquis. The scorching testimony produced such headlines as BEAUTY WILL TELL STORY OF GROSS CRUELTY followed by NOT SO INNOCENT AS SHE PRETENDS. She won custody of her son with McKee, but the French judge issued an order excoriating both parties for bad behavior.

Constance’s saucy past would have been well-known to Huguette’s mother, since they moved in the same social circles in Paris, prior to 1914. Constance was more than twenty years older than Bill Gower, and in fact, two of her three children were older than Gower. Newly divorced from her third husband, Evelyn Toulmin, Constance split her time between Paris and America.

Had Gower been a junior bank clerk, she would not have seen him as a serious suitor. But thanks to Huguette’s dowry, he was a wealthy man. While some of Constance’s luster had dimmed with age, she more than compensated by offering social entrée. Her well-connected parents entertained in style at their Southampton estate, and the family boasted new publishing connections, since her twenty-year-old niece, Leslie, had just become the second wife of fifty-five-year-old Condé Nast.

Huguette appeared to be sad and subdued after her marriage ended, pained by feelings of rejection. Gordon Lyle Jr. says, “I’m guessing it had a very negative effect on Huguette.” The carefree, naïve young woman had learned a sobering lesson about the ways of the world.

Since Anna believed in the healing balm of a change of scenery, mother and daughter headed west for several months, spending time in Santa Barbara followed by Hawaii (where Huguette was listed on the Malolo’s ship manifest as Huguette Gower) and then back to Santa Barbara for the remainder of the summer. The vacation seems to have lifted Huguette’s spirits, and she found solace in painting, judging by her letter to Tadé Styka, written in French on August 8 from Bellosguardo.

Cher Maitre,

I found your letter upon our return from Honolulu. What to tell you about my work? You will certainly be disappointed in your pupil. The heat was so strong that it stripped me of a little of my energy.

I only did five paintings, having only stayed five weeks and I have two in progress that I can finish here.

Really, you would create wonders if you spent a few months on this enchanting island. The color of the water is jade, sapphire, mauve and varies every day. The streets were lined with trees garnished with fiery red flowers, other flowers formed pink, yellow or mauve clusters.

The prettiest are the rainbow trees. I painted a branch, also a marvel of a white flower that lives but one night and dies with the sunrise.

One night we saw a moonlit rain shower followed by a magnificent rainbow, very visible. I so would have liked to paint this beautiful scene.

The departure is very moving, the Hawaiian music plays Aloha and they cover you with flower garlands and wish you a good trip.

The hotel is so trendy, they even clean the change. For my personal taste I would have liked it better at a more primitive time.

Maman joins me in sending you our kindest regards, Huguette

In October, Tadé Styka moved from Paris to live in Manhattan full-time, renting an apartment with a studio on Central Park South. Huguette wrote a note to him from Santa Barbara, expressing her enthusiasm.

Cher Maitre,

I would like to welcome you to New York and am sending you five brushes so that you will quickly get to work.

I hope that they will please you.

We send you our best regards; your studious pupil, Huguette.

In December 1929, Walter Winchell mentioned the artist in his newspaper column, writing, “Tadé Styka, who charges them 10 G’s for their portraits, is here from Paree looking for chumps.” That was a plug since the chumps, of course, were the rich and famous regularly featured in Winchell’s column. Tadé had shown his work at a Chicago gallery in January and the Clarks sent him a telegram from California: “With all of our best wishes for a huge success in Chicago, Anna and Huguette Clark.”

The Chicago art critics ran out of adjectives in enthusing about his work at the branch of the Knoedler Gallery. “It is a very rare exhibit that leaves you wordless,” wrote Eleanor Jewett of the Chicago Daily Tribune. “It is astonishingly and astoundingly fine. The sweep of it rushes you from your feet… if there is genius in the world today, Styka is possessed of it.”

But with the onset of the Great Depression, fewer wealthy patrons could afford to splurge on a portrait, even by a “genius.” So Tadé had the free time and financial motive to resume his two-hour, four-times-per-week painting lessons with Huguette once she returned to Manhattan. (The market crash did not daunt Huguette, who dropped $2,700 in January 1930 at Cartier on a diamond, onyx, and emerald brooch, and also bought Monet’s painting Nympheas from the Durand-Ruel Galleries.)

Bill Gower had been fond of his mother-in-law, and a year after he and Huguette separated, he wrote an apologetic note to Anna on March 19, 1930.

Dear Mrs. Clark,

I have wanted for some time to write to you, but have hesitated because it seems quite impossible to convey with words what I want to say.

I am very sorry that there had to be parting. I am sorry that the end came as it did in anger. I wish that there could have been the success we hoped for but were unable to attain.

Your friendship and esteem always meant more to me than I can ever express. Your tireless efforts in every possible way to make things turn out for the best I shall always remember. There has been a loss greater than I have ever had. Sincerely, Bill.

A month later, Huguette and her mother made the trip to Reno for the required three-month residency to get a divorce. In 1930, divorce was still a novelty: census records show that 196,000 divorced that year. New York State’s unforgiving laws required proof of infidelity and a yearlong wait, but in wide-open Nevada, a spouse could list such grounds as desertion, neglect, or habitual drunkenness. Reno had become the nation’s divorce capital, with dude ranches opening up to accommodate the flow of soon-to-be single women, a world chronicled in Clare Boothe Luce’s 1936 catfight of a play, The Women. In petitioning for divorce, Huguette claimed that Gower had deserted her. The New York Times tried unsuccessfully to reach William Gower for comment, stating “he is understood to be in New York.”

Huguette’s arrival in Reno created a stir. She had brought along a large entourage including her dogs, a cook, a butler, several maids, a chauffeur, and a social secretary. Her uncle Arthur La Chapelle had arranged for Huguette to lease an entire floor at the Riverside Hotel, a redbrick luxury property, at the cost of $2,000 per month. In a syndicated feature that ran on June 28, 1930—WHY AMERICA’S $50,000,000 HEIRESS CAST OFF HER $30-A-WEEK PRINCE CHARMING—Huguette was criticized for violating the social mores of divorce land. “Extravagance and exclusiveness may be all right for Park Avenue, but they’re out of place in Reno,” the article huffed. “The majority of even the wealthiest divorce hunters have been satisfied with a suite at the most. It was recalled that Cornelius Vanderbilt was content with a single room… while even Mary Pickford selected an unostentatious home.”

Avoiding other would-be divorcées, Huguette remained cloistered with her mother and the servants. Her vulnerability is palpable in a poignant letter that she wrote in French on hotel stationery on July 4, 1930, to Tadé, in which she expresses the desperate hope that she can count on him:

Cher Maitre,

I intend to return to New York by October 1rst and I hope to be able to get to my work on the fifteenth by the latest. Would you write to me as soon as possible, if I can count on you, as I would like to seriously work with you this winter?

It is still very hot here but fortunately we do not have New York’s humidity.

The small dogs are fine and Shan is getting so fat he looks like a ball.

I hope your health leaves nothing to be desired.

Maman would like me to extend her greetings, to which I add my own, Huguette

When she did not hear back from him, Huguette was so upset that she sent him a needy telegram on July 26, 1930, which was uncharacteristically written in English.

DEAR MR. STYKA,

How are you standing the terrific heat. Did you receive my letter? Please wire.

All Good Wishes from us, Huguette Clark Gower.

She received her decree on August 11, which stated that she had been “granted an absolute divorce on the ground that the defendant has willfully deserted plaintiff for a period of more than one year, and the bonds of matrimony now and heretofore… dissolved.” Given legal permission to return to her maiden name, Huguette nonetheless held on to the honorific “Mrs.,” identifying herself for the rest of her life as Mrs. Clark.

Within hours of receiving her decree, Huguette and her mother left for Santa Barbara. Five days later, they sailed from San Francisco to Hawaii. Some newspapers used an unflattering photo of Huguette that had been taken by the Associated Press while she was on her honeymoon. She is wearing a fur coat, cloche hat, pearls, and two diamond Cartier Art Deco bracelets. She looks much older than her age and her expression is unbearably sad. This was the last public photograph of Huguette.