The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (26 page)

Huguette spent the next few months under the care of doctors, suffering from a psychological breakdown. She cut off contact with the outside world. On September 24, she finally emerged to tentatively make her way to Tadé’s studio. Doris described in her notes what happened: “Miss Clark came today for the first time in over two months. TS had amazingly divined her reason for staying away… She called the other day to confirm the words that TS had told me weeks ago—that she had been taking a rest cure to gain weight. She was not even allowed to talk because this wasted energy.” Where Huguette spent these months recovering from her breakdown was not spelled out, but her inability to make phone calls suggests an institutional setting.

Huguette remained in fragile shape for the remainder of the year. On December 3, Doris wrote, “Miss Clark has been staying home trying to gain weight.” To cheer her up, Tadé sent Huguette a dozen long-stemmed red roses and a new artist’s palette that he had spent months meticulously carving and sanding, with wood specially
chosen from the Steinway factory to match the color of Huguette’s blonde hair. It was a Christmas gift, meant to remind Huguette of her identity as an artist and to entice her to pick up a brush again. Tadé had finally married Doris in August with a simple City Hall ceremony, but he remained attached to his favorite pupil.

Anna worried about her daughter’s emotional health. “Lani would sometimes make little semicritical comments about Huguette,” recalls Gordon Lyle Jr. “That Huguette wanted to be sheltered from all the problems of the world. For which I don’t blame her.” From then on, Anna appeared to family and friends to be especially protective of Huguette, concerned about keeping her sensitive daughter on an even psychological keel. At the end of the year, the family suffered another loss when Amelia La Chapelle Turner’s husband, Bryce, died of a heart attack on December 26. The former mining engineer had been a constant presence at family events, and the three women had now lost their final male anchor.

Once Huguette recovered enough to reengage with the world, she did her small part to aid in the war effort. She donated money to the YWCA for hospitality for the troops, loaned a painting to the Museum of Modern Art for a fund-raising exhibit for Navy relief, and appeared at a morale-boosting USO party to cheer up soldiers headed to war. She kept a photo from the event as a souvenir, which she showed to Chris Sattler. “She is sitting with three other society women, with a sailor, a Marine, and a couple Army guys, young roughhousing guys,” he says. “She looked incredibly uncomfortable.” Making small talk with homesick soldiers was not in her repertoire.

She returned to painting Japanese scenes again, although she bought a zipped case to carry her paintings out of Tadé’s studio, to avoid arousing hostility from strangers on the street.

Huguette’s disappearance from public life had the inadvertent and undesired effect of making her even more of a figure of public curiosity. In May 1943, Cholly Knickerbocker devoted an entire column to Huguette, noting that she was keen to keep her “activities out of the news.” As the columnist wrote:

Huguette and Anna finally returned to California that August. Worried about possible food shortages, Anna bought a 218-acre ranch nearby with grazing cows and vegetable gardens. Anna and Huguette never lived at Rancho Alegre but relied on its produce. For Anna, the ranch was a psychological safety net, a place where she and Huguette and the staff could flee if the coast of California came under attack. Anna held on to it even after the war when the previous owner, publisher Thomas Storke, tried to buy it back.

Infants were not a regular part of Huguette’s life. But when Tadé Styka’s wife, Doris, gave birth to a daughter, Wanda, on August 19, 1943, the Clark women were besotted. Huguette was on her own in California at the time, but her mother and aunt paid an immediate visit. Tadé wrote to Huguette: “Votre dear Mother and your Aunt came to see Wanda and true to her sex, she seems to have been born with the art of winning hearts.”

Huguette accepted the mantle of godmother with joy, showering baby Wanda with affection and gifts including musical dolls, French
illustrated children’s books, and $1,000 bonds. Encouraging Tadé and Doris to take home movies, she sent them an early projector. She wrote frequent notes to Doris in English conveying how much she reveled in watching Wanda grow up. Proud father Tadé painted numerous portraits of his enchanting daughter and crafted busts of her likeness, sending a bronze sculpture of Wanda to Huguette as a gift.

In a handwritten note from Santa Barbara dated June 16, 1944, a week after her own thirty-eighth birthday, Huguette wrote,

Six months later, Huguette sent another note gushing about Wanda. She uses a surprisingly formal address for her painting teacher, as if still trying to get used to their changed relationship.

Huguette frequently requested visits. “I love my little godchild,” she wrote. “Wanda has to spend the afternoon with us when you and Mr. Styka go to the movies or are otherwise engaged. Will call up very soon as I should also like you both to come to dinner one of these days.”

Once Wanda learned to talk, Huguette asked to be called “Marraine,” the French word for “godmother.” Huguette liked coming up with ways to amuse Wanda, such as demonstrating her new Polaroid camera. She wrote to Doris Styka: “I have a new camera which in minutes develop its photos. You can play a joke on Wanda. Snap her and then show it to her a minute later.”

When Huguette came to the Styka family’s duplex complex of apartments—living quarters and studio—at 222 Central Park South, Wanda would often be kept company by Anna and Huguette’s social secretary, Adele Marié. “I had to be very quiet,” Wanda recalls. “It seems to me that the lessons were two hours, but of course a child thinks that everything is very long.” Bizarre as it seems, even after Huguette reached her late thirties and was visiting a full household, she still brought along a companion.

Looking back on her early years when she was a young observer in her father’s studio, Wanda recalls being struck by how her father and Huguette expressed their very different personalities in their art. “My father was a virtuoso—he painted fast, he had an unerring touch. He liked to let the viewer finish some of the lines, to leave something unsaid in the paintings. Marraine liked everything very precise, finely delineated. She was very careful. I don’t think she was a fast worker.” For Huguette, it was all about control. She labored to show every ripple in the fabric of a gown and every flower petal unfolding, creating lifelike images.

As avidly as Huguette pursued painting, her mother remained devoted to music. Undaunted by her diminished hearing, Anna still played the harp and often invited chamber music groups to perform at her Fifth Avenue music room. In 1945, she played host to her visiting California relative, pianist Agnes Clark Albert, the daughter of Celia Tobin and Charles Clark. Agnes had proposed a musical afternoon and brought along Robert Maas, the former cellist of the Pro Arte Quartet, a Belgian group that had been stranded in America by the war. Maas had parted company with the quartet and told Anna that he was unsure of his musical future. As Agnes Clark Albert later told her daughter Karine, Anna responded with a wildly extravagant gesture. Pointing to a Cézanne painting of his wife, Anna announced,
“My daughter Huguette won’t come into this room because she hates this painting so much.” Then she took the Cézanne portrait of his wife off the wall and left with it.

When she returned a few hours later, Anna announced that she had just sold the painting at the Wildenstein Gallery and spent the proceeds at the finest music store in New York. She then produced four Stradivarius violins that had belonged to the nineteenth-century Italian violinist Niccolò Paganini. Anna offered to lend them to Robert Maas if he would launch a new string quartet. (The exact details of the story may have been exaggerated through frequent retellings but Anna Clark definitely purchased the instruments and inspired the formation of the Paganini Quartet.)

After the debut performance of the chamber music group at Manhattan’s Town Hall in November 1946, the
New York Times
praised the Bartók and Schumann selections and expressed gratitude toward “Mrs. William A. Clark” for supplying the historic instruments. As the quartet performed across the country, Anna was credited time and again for making this heavenly music possible, an artistic legacy of her own.

The quartet performed at Bellosguardo, where Anna and Huguette continued to hold court. “The Clarks sponsored the Paganini Quartet and held concerts in the music room with its back-to-back Steinway concert grand pianos and harps,” wrote Barbara Hoelscher Doran in an essay for the
Santa Barbara Independent
. Born in 1944, Doran grew up on the estate, where her father, Albert Hoelscher, was the caretaker. In her essay, she described “lawn parties at the tennis court, with a quartet playing in a tree-house platform, and plays in the outdoor setting.” The Clarks were democratic enough to socialize with favored retainers and their children. “When Huguette and Anna E. Clark came out to the estate, Huguette would phone our house and invite me over for afternoon tea,” Doran wrote. “I would walk over with our dogs and sit with Huguette and Anna E. on the terrace under big umbrellas overlooking the great lawns and ocean.”

Huguette led a quieter life when she was in Manhattan, continuing to take her painting lessons. She had begun to correspond frequently with longtime family friends based in the South of France—not only
man-about-town Etienne de Villermont but his younger brother, Henri. Their letters back and forth were always in French. Ever generous, she sent them checks, and they wrote back with family news. “I thank you endlessly and with eternal gratitude for all you have done and are still doing for us,” wrote Henri.

In April 1951, Huguette became weak and ill, ending up at St. Luke’s Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for several weeks. The hospital, which had a specialty in respiratory diseases, had an upscale clientele, treating bankers, politicians, and actresses. Tadé made note of Huguette’s illness in his appointment calendar but did not specify the problem. Henri de Villermont wrote to her on June 5: “We were so sorry in learning that you had suffered and worried about it.” On November 23, Henri reiterated his concerns, saying, “I hope, dear Huguette, that your health is definitively back to normal and that you don’t feel anything anymore. You have suffered so much for several months.”