The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (19 page)

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.

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.

H
uguette 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.