Chapter Ten

Alone Again

At the end of January 1931, Edward FitzGerald, the seventh Duke of Leinster, sailed for America on the ocean liner Europa. His fellow passengers included movie producer Samuel Goldwyn and heavyweight boxing champ Max Schmeling. The duke had a dinner date scheduled with Huguette’s mother, Anna, and her aunt Amelia for the day after he arrived in New York.

Long on pedigree but short on funds, the duke was what wags of that era would call a “no-account count.” Dating back to the fourteenth century, the FitzGeralds had been among Ireland’s wealthiest dynasties, amassing multiple glossy titles—the Dukedom of Leinster, Marquess of Kildare, Earl of Kildare, Baron of Offaly, Viscount Leinster—and building massive castles and Georgian mansions. Edward’s older brother Maurice FitzGerald, the sixth Duke of Leinster, came into his title in 1893 as a six-year-old after both of his parents died. As the eldest of three sons, Maurice inherited a huge family fortune plus the 1,100-acre family estate, Carton.

Edward FitzGerald grew up with all the affectations of great wealth, but as the third son in a country built on primogeniture, he was entitled to a mere fraction of his family’s riches. At age twenty-one, this ne’er-do-well fell in love with showgirl May Etheridge, known as the “sweet little pajama girl” for her preferred onstage attire (presumably, offstage she wore less). To break up the match, the FitzGerald family kidnapped Edward and spirited him out of London. Promising to end the romance, he was set free—and promptly returned to England and married the actress in 1913. The couple had a baby boy but separated in 1923 and finally divorced in 1930.

During World War I, Edward’s middle brother, Desmond, a major in the Irish Guards, accidentally set off a bomb in his tent in France that killed him. Edward had a good war and came away physically unscathed. But unaccustomed to living within his means, he gambled and racked up huge debts, filing for bankruptcy in 1918. Described by the British newspapers as a “daredevil sportsman” who liked fast cars and fast yachts, Edward was in constant need of cash.

Assuming that he would never inherit, Edward sold his life interest in the family’s $50 million estate to Harry Mallaby-Deeley, a financier and Conservative member of Parliament. Edward FitzGerald received approximately $365,000 and the guarantee of a $5,000 yearly payment for life. It was a decision that Edward would quickly regret.

In 1922, his oldest brother Maurice FitzGerald died suddenly while locked up in what the newspapers called a “lunatic asylum.” Edward assumed the title of the Duke of Leinster, but Mallaby-Deeley continued to live in the family’s historic homes and receive the income from the duke’s estates. The profligate duke filed for bankruptcy again in 1922, with creditors claiming that he owed more than $1.5 million. The following year, the duke was briefly jailed in London for borrowing money without alerting gullible lenders that he was bankrupt.

Even before his 1930 divorce, the Duke of Leinster had begun prospecting for an American heiress to save him from his creditors. It was a transatlantic tradition: riches in exchange for a title. A handsome man with a raffish charm, Edward began his search during trips to New York in the late 1920s. The duke would later admit that he lived “at an extravagant rate,” entertaining lavishly to give the right aristocratic impression as he attempted to “marry somebody rich.” Edward FitzGerald set his sights on two women who could afford to keep him in style: the name of the first heiress remains shrouded in mystery, but his second prospect was Huguette Clark. As he later described it in distinctly unromantic terms, he then began negotiations.

While he was en route to New York on the Europa to close the deal, the duke’s plans became public in a series of front-page stories in America. “His Grace, the Duke of Leinster, first Duke of Ireland, whose arrival in New York City is said to portend wedding bells with himself and Mrs. Huguette Clark Gower, as principal figures,” reported the syndicated item. “Mrs. Gower is a daughter of the late Senator William A. Clark.” Huguette’s debutante photo and a picture of the duke looking dapper in his fedora ran side by side.

Besieged by reporters when the Europa docked in New York, the panicked duke denied any talk of an engagement to Huguette. Edward insisted that he was “not going to be married to anyone” during his American holiday. DUKE DENIES PLANS TO WED was the New York Times headline, stressing that he was refuting rumors that he had marital intentions toward Huguette. The duke still attended the scheduled dinner with Huguette’s mother and aunt at the Fifth Avenue home of mutual friends Mr. and Mrs. Irving Hogue. It must have been an awkward evening.

Was Huguette ever interested in this Irish bounder? Perhaps fleetingly. She was enough of a woman of her era to be flattered by the notion of a European title. And with his wild Irish hair and daredevil smile, the Duke of Leinster was undeniably handsome. But the European fortune hunter was not artistic, he did not share any of Huguette’s interests, and he was nakedly avaricious.

For Huguette, still recovering from the humiliation of being forced to state that she had been deserted by William Gower, it was an unpleasant jolt to see her name dragged through the press with the implication that she had been rejected by a man yet again. Five years later, the duke would admit that Huguette and her mother had walked away from his marriage proposal. But that was not the impression that he fostered at the time. Later in life, Huguette acted as if this embarrassing chapter of her life had never occurred. She would often discuss the men who had mattered to her, but she never mentioned the Duke of Leinster.

Nonetheless, the tale dogged her for years. In 1932, when the duke married an American, Agnes Raffaela Kennedy Van Neck, the ex-wife of a bandleader, articles stressed his near miss with Huguette. In 1936 when the duke filed for bankruptcy for the third time, he told a courtroom of creditors about his search for a rich American bride. Huguette was portrayed as a savvy woman who had broken off the ill-suited romance. As the Boston Globe put it, “Mrs. Gower, as wise as her father the late Senator Clark, scoffed as ridiculous all rumors and reports that she was to enter into any matrimonial alliance with the Premier Duke of Ireland. Indeed, the Clark millions were not to be exchanged for a title and a lot of debt-burdened castles.” Those Clark millions were an inescapable part of Huguette’s public identity. A woman who prided herself on being an artist, time and again she was portrayed as a walking dollar sign.

As a newly minted divorcée, Huguette developed a distinct rhythm to her life: winters in her twelfth-floor New York apartment with her mother four floors below, summers with Anna in Santa Barbara, with an occasional side trip to Hawaii. Huguette’s days in Manhattan revolved around her painting lessons four days a week with Tadé Styka. Even though she was a divorced woman, she still brought along her mother’s overbearing and protective social secretary, Adele Marié, known as Missy, who would sit in another room and wait for her twenty-five-year-old charge.

Seventeen years older than Huguette, Styka was a courtly man, Old World in his ways, a man who painted while wearing a suit. As his daughter Wanda says, “My father was used to traveling in rarified circles and his family was of nobility. In Europe, he had many friends who were counts and baronesses. In his manner, he was very reserved with people he didn’t know well. If he knew someone well, he was vivacious and warm.”

The art magazine Apollo, in a lengthy feature on the artist, wrote, “On personal contact with Tadé Styka, one was bound, sooner or later, to experience the feeling that he was the spiritual exile of another and a greater age. Beneath his large, warm kindness, which was of the heart, there was a melancholy of the spirit, a shade of impatient, unresigned indignation—never expressed—as of a banished monarch or a caged lion.”

Each year, Huguette and her painting teacher, who spent his summers in Europe, were separated for several months either by a continent or by an ocean. For all her girlish warmth and enthusiasm, in Huguette’s many letters to Tadé there is a sense that the watchful Anna Clark or her social secretary was monitoring the correspondence. Her chatty letters have an undertone of unrequited passion, but she seems reluctant to express herself for fear of rejection. Huguette comes across as cheerful and independent, with bubbly descriptions of her activities. On July 18, 1931, she sent him a four-page missive, in French, on monogrammed stationery from Bellosguardo.

Cher Maitre,

I thank you very much for your nice letters. My intention was to respond immediately, but the lizard life that we are leading here at the beach makes one very lazy.

I have begun to daub a canvas. You are going to tell yourself, “It was about time!” We have greatly regretted not being able to call you in accordance with our promise. Maman’s amplifier was not working well.

Our trip to Honolulu is not quite yet decided upon. The weather here is superb and the small dogs are fine. Maman and Madame Bellet thank you for your kind greetings and send their fond regards, to which I add my own.

Your pupil, Huguette

Painting gave her a sense of purpose. An Associated Press story on September 6, 1931, updated readers on Huguette’s postdivorce life with a favorable mention of her talent. “Huguette Clark, who inherited millions from her father, William A. Clark, copper magnate and senator, has won considerable recognition as an artist. Her paintings received high praise at the Corcoran Galleries in Washington last year and now she’s planning an exhibition in Paris. She is an accomplished musician.” Huguette’s lush painting of a blue night-blooming flower was featured in the prestigious 1932 Winter Exhibit of the National Academy of Design in Manhattan. She was beginning to make a name for herself.

Tadé was also making news. A syndicated item noted: “The talk of Paris being ‘gay’ is rot and drivel, so far as Tadé Styka, Polish portrait painter, has been able to observe. New York is more wicked than Paris and Harlem is much ‘hotter’ than anything gay Paree has to apologize for.” Tadé presumably had gone up to the Cotton Club in Harlem to see the uninhibited scene—jazz greats, gangsters, movie stars, ample alcohol despite Prohibition—but there is no evidence that he ever brought his devoted pupil along.

As the nation plunged deeper into the Depression, Anna and Huguette felt the stirrings of philanthropy. They helped friends: Dr. William Gordon Lyle’s finances had taken a hit from the market crash; the Clarks underwrote tuition for his son Gordon at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire. Anna sent a $250 check to the Fund for Relief of the Unemployed in the fall of 1931. Huguette, who read the New York Times religiously, was touched by the heartrending stories featured in the Christmas fund-raising effort for New York’s Neediest Cases. For two years in a row—1930 and 1931—Huguette wrote the largest checks received by the newspaper charity, $2,500 each year, the equivalent of more than $34,000 in current dollars. Throughout her life, Huguette was moved by individual appeals rather than organized charity.

The crime broke the nation’s heart: on March 1, 1932, Charles Lindbergh’s two-year-old son was snatched from the second-floor nursery of his parents’ New Jersey home. The police fielded thousands of tips as they hunted for the baby, and the aviator eventually paid a $50,000 ransom. Two months later, the baby’s body was found less than a mile from his home. After a marked bill from the ransom turned up in the possession of German immigrant Bruno Hauptmann, he was charged and convicted of the crime. Still protesting his innocence, he died in the electric chair in 1936.

At the time of the kidnapping, Huguette Clark was an adult, but the crime obsessed her and panicked Anna. Beyond imagining the agony of the Lindbergh parents, mother and daughter worried that the extensive publicity about Huguette’s inheritance might make her a ransom target. If an innocent baby’s life could be bartered for a $50,000 ransom, what were the odds of threats to an heiress said by the newspapers to be worth $50 million?

Mother and daughter knew that they were not immune to crime. Robbers had attempted to break into the Clarks’ Fifth Avenue mansion many years earlier. William Andrews Clark was so worried about his family’s safety that he kept a pistol under his pillow and traveled with bodyguards. Anna now employed a chauffeur who doubled as the protector for both women. After the Lindbergh kidnapping, Anna and Huguette continued to go out in New York but were more careful about their travels. “They never came to our house,” says Gordon Lyle Jr., although his family lived a few blocks away from the Clarks. “We always went there. I guess they felt safer there. They were on their own turf.”

The Lindbergh tragedy was imprinted on Huguette’s consciousness, an event that increased her sense of vulnerability and reminded her yet again that her fortune singled her out for uncomfortable attention. Beyond the symbolism, the fear of kidnapping stayed with her. In 2000, when Huguette was ninety-four years old, she offered to buy a Manhattan apartment for the granddaughter of her friend Suzanne Pierre. Huguette became agitated when she learned that the young woman, Kati Despretz Cruz, had chosen a second-floor unit, insisting that she move to a higher floor. Cruz had a two-year-old son, Julian, the same age as the Lindbergh toddler. “I was only there a year because Mrs. Clark thought it was too dangerous,” Cruz recalls. “She thought that someone could get access to Julian through a window.”

Even as the Lindbergh kidnapping was fading from the headlines, Huguette suddenly lost a family member only four years her senior, who had been constantly around during her childhood. William Andrews Clark III, known in the family as Tertius, had become an amateur pilot and hired as his full-time instructor Jack Lynch, the pilot who taught Charles Lindbergh how to fly. The twenty-nine-year-old Clark was in Arizona taking a flying lesson from Lynch on May 15, 1932, when their plane went into a spin and plunged two thousand feet into foothills near Clemenceau. Both men were killed. The senator had doted on his clever grandson and namesake; Tertius was a frequent visitor to the family’s Fifth Avenue home and a big-brother figure to Huguette.

In the seven years since William Andrews Clark’s death, the copper mogul had vanished from public consciousness. The death of Tertius sparked the Boston Globe to publish an editorial noting how quickly the family patriarch had been forgotten. “Traditionally, the American cycle is from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. Though William Andrews Clark Third was not exactly in his shirt sleeves when he was killed in an aviation accident the other day, the Clark family fairly illustrates the proverb. Today, the name is hardly known and the once vast fortune of its founder has been divided up and diminished till it has almost disappeared.”

The following year, Huguette’s half brother Charles Clark, the big spender known for his love of horse racing, died at age sixty-one of pneumonia at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Charles Clark was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in his father’s mausoleum. He had disapproved of his father’s marriage to Anna and had minimal contact with his stepmother after the death of the senator. Charles had ended contact with his own four children after divorcing their mother, Celia, in 1925. He had skipped the 1929 Paris wedding of his daughter Mary to French baron James Baeyens, so her uncle gave her away. The newspaper obituaries conveyed that Charles had been more enthusiastic about the running times at the racetrack than running his father’s enterprises.

The ties binding the Clark relatives were fraying. Mary de Brabant, William Clark’s oldest daughter, had separated from her third husband, Marius; he had returned to Riverside, California, and moved in with his older sister. Mary was nonetheless still giving parties at her Manhattan mansion and her Long Island estate, a twenty-five-room waterfront mansion with a farm building, greenhouses, and kennels, right next door to the residence of William K. Vanderbilt. But when her guest lists made the society columns, Anna and Huguette were no longer mentioned. Katherine Clark Morris, William Clark’s second daughter, spent time at her three properties—a Fifth Avenue apartment, a large estate near Oneonta, and a plantation in Savannah—but did not see much of Anna and Huguette, who lived only twelve blocks south on Fifth Avenue.

During her marriage, Anna had worked to nurture her relationships with her stepchildren, and she resented being cast aside. Huguette would later say that her mother felt abandoned by her stepchildren. As Huguette’s assistant, Chris Sattler, recalls, “She told me that they did not treat her mother well. They ignored her. There was very little interaction between the first family and her mother.” Huguette confided in her nurse Hadassah Peri about the estrangement between Anna Clark and her stepchildren. Peri recalls hearing that William Clark’s first family “didn’t have much communication with her mom.”

There was one exception: Anna remained close to Celia Tobin Clark, Charles Clark’s ex-wife. Banking heiress Celia had become a patron of the arts, hiring George Bellows to paint a portrait of her son, Paul, and supporting San Francisco music groups. Celia and her children—Mary, Patricia, Agnes, and Paul—visited Anna and Huguette at Bellosguardo and eventually brought the next generation along, too. Anna had a special fondness for Agnes Clark, who trained as a pianist and debuted with the San Francisco Orchestra in 1932. In 1933, Agnes married Alexander Albert, the son of a German industrialist and an American socialite, and began to split her time between Europe and California. When Agnes came through New York, she often stopped by 907 Fifth Avenue to visit Anna and Huguette.

For a divorcée, there is one piece of information that is inevitably jarring: learning that your spouse has remarried. On the morning of June 4, 1932, if Huguette had picked up the Sun at the breakfast table, she could have read all about it: her ex-husband, William Gower, was getting married that very day to Constance Baxter Tevis McKee Toulmin. A follow-up New York Times article a day later mentioned that “Mr. Gower’s marriage to Huguette Clark, youngest daughter of the late ex-Senator William A. Clark, ended in divorce in August 1930.”

Constance had been living in a château in the French countryside but spent the winter at the Waldorf Astoria, the site of the couple’s wedding. The newspapers tracked her comings and goings: the newlyweds honeymooned in Italy at her summer home, the Palazzo Brandolini on the Grand Canal in Venice, then moved into an apartment at 1 Sutton Place on the East River, a luxurious 1926 co-op designed by Rosario Candela.

Huguette harbored complicated feelings toward her ex-husband. Her initial bitterness was wearing off, and in the years ahead, she allowed herself to remember what she had liked about him in the first place. She did not sound angry when she talked about Bill, simply telling friends that it was not meant to be.

The heiress was now developing her own alternate life, taking pleasure in Tadé Styka’s companionship. Tadé appreciated and encouraged her creativity. No one knew better the extent of her artistic talent. After arriving in Santa Barbara for her annual vacation, Huguette was giddy with joy when she received an artist’s palette that Tadé had crafted for her. Not only did she send him a grateful telegram but she followed up immediately with a letter in French, on July 20, 1932.

Cher Maitre,

What an enjoyable surprise you have given me. I am delighted by my palette. It’s amazing! So light and so balanced. Thank you very much for the great pleasure I felt in receiving this beautiful gift!

I am still on vacation, which means that I have yet to pick up a paintbrush since we have been here, as all of my mornings are busy with Italian lessons and swimming in the afternoon, golf.

But this palette is so tempting that I will be starting another painting. I hope that you are spending an enjoyable summer and that you are still in good health.

Maman’s eye is still the same but she looks healthy and plays three to four hours of golf a day. We both send you our best regards, hoping to hear from you soon.

Huguette.

Huguette cherished this gift so much that when she managed to break it, she was distraught. Anna sent an urgent telegram to Tadé: “An accident has befallen the superb palette that you gave to Huguette. A painting fell on it, split and flattened it. Would it be possible for you to send her a new one? Huguette is disconsolate and heartbroken by this accident. Kind regards, Anna Clark.”

Of course, the artist complied.

That summer in Santa Barbara, Huguette stopped into the G. T. Marsh shop, a branch of the San Francisco emporium of Japanese antiques, and became enthralled by the items on display. The original store was founded in California in 1876 by Australian George Marsh, who ran away from home as a boy, jumped ship, and landed in Japan, where he began collecting jade and porcelain. Renowned for his expertise in all things Japanese, Marsh designed the Japanese garden at Golden Gate Park. When he died in 1932, the business was taken over by his son Lucien.

During her childhood, Huguette had been fascinated by the Oriental room in her father’s Fifth Avenue mansion, and she owned several Japanese dolls, depicting them in a painting for her Corcoran show. Now the Marsh shop, with its antique screens, kimonos, and intricate fans, reawakened her interest in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Huguette began purchasing Japanese artifacts in 1932—the Marsh family still has the invoices—but then had an idea far more artistic. She began to commission miniature castles based on Edo-era Japanese structures, as well as tiny furniture, painted screens, doll-sized Japanese food, doll-sized kabuki theatres, and the costumed characters to go with them. These were her own versions of Queen Mary’s dollhouse but with an Oriental flair. The Marsh family tracked down Japanese artisans to do the work. Huguette was so pleased with the first miniatures that this enthusiasm became a lifelong passion.

She turned herself into a scholar on Japanese architecture and culture: her collection of books about Japan would eventually fill three large bookcases in her Fifth Avenue apartment. “She was a great teacher for me,” says Caterina Marsh, an Italian who married into the Marsh family and became Huguette’s contact at the firm. “She was very knowledgeable.” Huguette would look at blueprints before agreeing to the work and ask for extensive revisions, fixated on getting the tiny details right. As Marsh puts it, “The pleasure for her was in creating something.”

In her own way, Huguette was mimicking her father’s passion when he built his fantasy Fifth Avenue mansion and looted Europe to stock it with art and antiques. The understated Huguette was re-creating history on a smaller but no less artistic scale. William Andrews Clark had been a perfectionist, focusing on such details as the color of the marble, while his daughter fretted over the precise proportions of doll-sized rooms. With fond memories of her girlhood in France, Huguette commissioned a Parisian toy store, Au Nain Bleu, to arrange for the construction of miniature French châteaus.

After growing up in a haunted hotel-sized home—with a mother who could not always hear her, a preoccupied elderly father, and a beloved sister who died young—here was a kingdom that Huguette could control. This artistic enterprise was time-consuming and intellectually challenging, requiring historic research and imagination.

Even as Huguette was embarking on her new artistic venture, Anna had a much larger project in mind: improving her California real estate. Huguette had previously donated $50,000 to turn a wetland across the street from her property into the Andrée Clark Bird Refuge. Now Anna decided to tear down Bellosguardo and put up an entirely new and grander mansion on this cliffside property with unobstructed ocean and mountain views. She told her daughter and friends that she felt inspired to offer employment to the struggling local workmen ravaged by the Depression. Anna hired Pasadena architect Reginald Davis Johnson, whose Mediterranean and Spanish Revivalism helped define the look of that community just as Addison Mizner’s designs did for Palm Beach. Johnson, who had designed the Santa Barbara Country Club and the Santa Barbara Biltmore Hotel, created the new house with a budget of $1 million, the equivalent of more than $17 million today.

The original Bellosguardo, an Italianate country villa, was replaced with a twenty-three-thousand-square-foot eighteenth-century French-style formal gray reinforced concrete mansion. Unlike the over-the-top excess of Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach mansion built a few years earlier by heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, Bellosguardo has an austere elegance. The airy house, with six large bedrooms plus servants’ quarters, features parquet floors, richly colored marble fireplaces (gold, green, rose), antique chandeliers sporting crystal and amethyst glass, as well as fanciful gold-plated bathroom fixtures in the shapes of dolphins’ and swans’ heads. The building is U shaped, with a reflecting pool and orange trees tucked into the outdoor middle space between the two wings. The formal driveway features a mosaic made of black and white stones.

Upon entering the building at the center of the U, a small reception area leads to a long central hallway. Down the hallway to the left is the magnificent dining room with antique Sherwood Forest woodwork from the senator’s Fifth Avenue mansion, 167 distinctive panels, each carved with images including dragons, peacocks, oak leaves, fish, and horns of plenty. At the other end of the grand hallway—past the powder room and an Oriental-style carved-wood-paneled reception room with Chinese-themed paintings on the ceiling—is the right wing of the house and the large corner music room, with two Steinway pianos and Anna’s harp. An avid bridge player, Anna chose chairs and a table that could be used for a game, as well as plush couches and armchairs to accommodate guests listening to musicales. Portraits by Tadé Styka of a girlish Huguette in a pink dress and pearls, and a thoughtful-looking Andrée, grace the walls, as does a charcoal sketch by Italian artist Edmondo Pizzella of the serene Anna in an evening gown.

Next to the music room is the library, featuring ornate wood paneling from the senator’s home and stocked with leather-bound volumes by Voltaire, Molière, and Goethe. Anna commissioned what she called the “bureau room” next door, another wood-paneled room with Fragonard-style cherubs painted on the ceiling. She used this study to conduct correspondence and handle the estate’s business.

Huguette had the equivalent of a private duplex wing situated at the very end of that hall, the right-hand top of the U, with a small ground-floor kitchenette, a bathroom with a silver leaf ceiling, and a large closet to store her easels and canvases. Her large painting studio featured sixteen-foot-high ceilings and views of the ocean and the gardens. The room was austere compared to the rest of the house, without elaborate molding and with an oak-pegged floor rather than parquet. A staircase tucked into the studio led to the second floor and her bedroom, directly above the studio.

Her single bed, with an upholstered wood frame, was angled so that her first sight in the morning was the lawn and the rose garden, although if she looked out the window to the right she could see the Pacific. Huguette ordered a dozen half-size Empire-style chairs to display her antique doll collection; she could line the chairs up against the walls of her bedroom, or put them in her adjoining dressing area. She rotated her selection; when the dolls were not in use they were stored in numbered boxes. Her bathroom included a gold-colored marble tub and a scale built into the floor, with the dial at eye level on the wall.

Anna had spared no expense for her own second-floor master bedroom, an enormous sea-green room with unusual curved molding, furnished with a bed with a carved wooden headboard, a velvet daybed, an antique desk and bureau, and a large standing mirror. A large balcony overlooked the ocean. Her bathroom included a marble bathtub large enough for two people. The suite included a dressing area as well as a second music room. In the built-in bookcases tucked into two closets, Anna stored her bridge books and medical literature, including volumes on surgery and eye diseases.

In the family quarters, one large bedroom was dedicated for the use of a family retainer (likely Anna’s social secretary Adele Marié). The three ample-sized guest rooms included a gold-painted luxurious haven with a spectacular chandelier made of porcelain flowers, as well as a masculine wood-paneled suite. Anna decorated the upstairs hallway with riotously colorful Hawaiian paintings with an Impressionist-style flair by Anna Woodward, a Pittsburgh painter who studied in Paris in the 1860s and then made her home in Hawaii.

The property boasted a tennis court, a thatched-roof play cottage named after Andrée, and a plant nursery. An Italian fountain with a marble nymph was installed, and Anna hired landscapers to create the largest rose garden in Santa Barbara, featuring every possible shade of pink. Concerned about privacy, Anna decided to sacrifice part of the view, planting one thousand trees directly in front of the house to block beachgoers below from peering up. A private beach below included wooden cabanas.

Huguette admired her mother’s vision. More than fifty years later, she would reminisce about the construction of the new Bellosguardo in a June 10, 1988, handwritten letter to Santa Barbara mayor Sheila Lodge. “My dear Mother put so much of herself into its charm and had the satisfaction of knowing that during the great depression she was a bit helpful in giving much needed employment.” Once the rebuilt Bellosguardo was complete, the Clarks employed a large year-round staff: twenty-five gardeners, two full-time painters, a plumber, an English butler, a chauffeur, and a complement of housekeepers, maids, and chefs.

Anna began a practice that her daughter would emulate: loyal employees were taken care of for life. Most of the Clark staff continued to receive salaries after they retired, and even after they died, checks kept going to their spouses and children. Huguette was so grateful to a childhood nanny that she supported the woman’s daughter, Ninta Sandre, for decades, buying her a New York apartment, paying for nursing home bills and, finally, burial expenses. Although Anna was a long way from her impoverished adolescence in Butte, she still remembered what it was like to worry about money. Treating employees like extended family, she and her daughter were strong believers in rewarding devotion.

When Huguette returned to New York and her painting lessons in 1933, Tadé Styka began work on a haunting portrait that shows her seated in front of the easel, intent on her artwork. He was painting her to amuse himself; this was not a commission. Wearing lace-up leather shoes, a skirt well below the knee, and a blouse and jacket, she is totally focused on her work, with her brush on the canvas as she tries to capture an image. The back of the canvas faces the viewer so that one cannot see what she is painting. But off to the right is a well-proportioned, naked male model, posing with his back to Huguette.

Explaining his efforts to psychoanalyze his subjects, Tadé once told a journalist, “I do not paint the mask, I paint the character beneath.” This painting is simultaneously serious and humorous as Tadé reveals Huguette’s earnest schoolgirl determination to appear blase against the backdrop of the glorious sexuality of the male model. Tadé understood Huguette’s quirky mixture of shyness and adventurousness in a way that no one else ever had or would.

The artist was a quick study, giving his undivided attention to his subjects. As Apollo later wrote in its obituary, “It was a memorable experience to watch Tadé Styka at work during these short seances that left him exhausted, as after a fencing match, so rapid and violent were his lunges and strokes—while the sitter was hardly aware that the tediousness of posing was over almost before it had begun…”

Those hours at Tadé’s studio on Central Park South were what Huguette lived for—the fulfillment of her own creativity plus the chance to bask in the teasing and supportive friendship of her teacher. They had an ongoing game: making silly bets for a dime. Tadé saved a drawerful of Huguette’s dimes as an amusing symbol of how often he won. Tadé was still resolutely single, and Huguette fantasized that one day the relationship could turn to requited love. For her, it already was love.

One day in 1933, a visitor arrived at Tadé’s studio during Huguette’s lesson, a young woman who had heard about the famous Polish artist and wanted to see his work. A twenty-one-year-old model with high cheekbones, porcelain skin, and long wavy brunette hair, Doris Ford had posed for magazine fashion spreads and illustrations. A New Jersey native, her father was a naval architect and her mother was a pianist and painter. An art student herself, Doris had called Tadé in advance to ask permission to visit, and he invited her to come by at 1 p.m. Huguette took morning lessons and was usually gone by then, but today she was caught up in her work and her art teacher and lingered on.

When the elevator door opened and Doris walked into the room, she and Tadé took one look at each other—and it was a coup de foudre. Huguette saw the way they reacted to each other, and she knew at that moment that the spinning globe of her life had just tilted off its axis. She put down her brush, politely excused herself, and left for the day. Tadé then invited Doris to show her painting technique by taking a brush to his current work-in-progress, his portrait of Huguette at her easel. Doris was nervous but began to touch up his version of the heiress. It was a symbolic moment that Doris never forgot. “She was so astounded that he would do that,” says Wanda Styka, the couple’s daughter, who heard the courtship tale from her parents. “She was so beautiful and he enjoyed it.” When Huguette decided to buy the completed painting several years later, Doris was dismayed to lose the artwork that held so much meaning for her, too. She propped it on a chair and snapped a final photograph, right before Huguette took possession.

Now Huguette had a rival for the painter’s affections. She and Doris would circle around each other in the coming years, the blonde heiress and the younger brunette fashion model, waiting for this sophisticated older European artist to make up his mind.