The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (27 page)

That year, Huguette purchased a new country refuge close to Manhattan, a sprawling twelve-thousand-square-foot French-style château in New Canaan, Connecticut. Built in 1938 with parquet floors and marble fireplaces, the twenty-two-room mansion was located on a private twenty-three-acre wooded lot with a meandering stream and waterfall. But the bucolic setting was not the primary draw: amid the nuclear panic of the early years of the Cold War era, this estate offered a ready escape from New York. “They had a place in Connecticut because people were scared about the atomic bomb,” explains Gordon Lyle Jr.

The terrified atmosphere of the era rings through in a 1951 letter that Doris Styka wrote but ultimately did not send to Huguette, in which the artist’s wife stresses “the fears that have become so much part of life in New York”:

Huguette had similar worries, which her new refuge helped alleviate. She began renovations on her Connecticut estate, importing marble fireplaces and adding a painting studio above the master bedroom with a staircase featuring fanciful balustrades shaped like paintbrushes. She would now have a place in the country to use for weekends or if anything frightening happened in Manhattan.

On June 28, 1952, Tadé and his wife and daughter went to Long Beach on Long Island for the afternoon. On this extremely hot day, he suddenly felt quite ill and was taken by ambulance to the hospital. At sixty-three, he had experienced a stroke. Worried about her dearest friend, Huguette sent him joking get-well cards at New York Hospital, with such scenes as a patient trying to lasso a nurse and gift certificates to be claimed upon leaving the hospital for a Scotch’n Soda, six Easy Rhumba lessons, or a Ride in a Roller Coaster. She reverted to writing notes in French to him on cards imprinted with colorful flowers, rather than writing in English to his wife.

Tadé spent months recuperating in warmer climes and at his country house in Ashley Falls, Massachusetts. On January 23, 1953, Huguette scribbled, “Am so glad you are getting better and better. I hope that in Cuba you will find some nice hot water that will quicken your full recovery.” A month later, she followed up with another note:

Five months later, she wrote to him in Ashley Falls to say, “I was so glad to have had this little chat on the phone with you today.” Her notes are meant to cheer him up, but her own anxiety is what comes through. Whenever Tadé left Manhattan, Huguette dropped him a line—in July, October, November—stressing how much she missed him and his family and asking to send Wanda a “big kiss.”

Tadé Styka died on September 11, 1954, at New York Hospital. The
New York Times
obituary of the sixty-four-year-old artist recalled his precocious exhibit at the Paris salon and a portrait that he had painted in 1948 of Harry Truman, presented to the president at a White House ceremony.

Shortly after the funeral, Huguette paid a condolence call to Doris and Wanda at their Central Park South apartment, the scene of decades of memories. Aware of how much Huguette had loved her painting lessons, Doris mentioned that Tadé’s artist brother, Adam, might be available to work with her. But Huguette declined. Her precious hours with Tadé could not be replicated with anyone, even his brother. A second-best consolation could not heal the hole in her heart.

When Huguette left Doris and Wanda Styka after the condolence call, they assumed that they would see her again. Huguette loved Wanda, savoring their time together and eagerly anticipating visits. Huguette remained a major part of their lives for the next half century. The heiress who blossomed as a painter under Tadé’s tutelage would engage in long, affectionate phone conversations with both Wanda and Doris. She paid for Wanda’s private-school education at the Convent of the Sacred Heart and sent frequent checks and gifts. But the visits mysteriously halted. “We were always in communication by telephone,” says Wanda. “That was her medium. We were never out of touch.” But after Tadé Styka died, Wanda would never lay eyes on Huguette again.

W
hen two people who have already been keeping a low profile decide to withdraw even further from the world, it can take years for anyone to notice. Later on, puzzled friends and acquaintances of Anna and Huguette would rack their memories for clues to explain the women’s behavior and try to recall the
last
sightings.

The first sign that something was amiss came when mother and daughter abruptly stopped going to Bellosguardo, ending a thirty-year tradition. Santa Barbara was their sunny sanctuary, and in the past, Huguette would not give it up even if it meant forgoing lessons with Tadé Styka. Barbara Hoelscher Doran, the caretaker’s daughter, believes their last trip to Santa Barbara was in 1953. Huguette was then forty-seven and her mother was seventy-five years old. They never explained why they halted their California vacations. But reflecting their free-spending heritage, Anna and Huguette continued to keep the estate well tended and fully staffed.

In 1958, the staff at Bellosguardo got the welcome news that Huguette intended to return. Sherry Howard Stockwell, then an art history student at the University of California at Santa Barbara, went to Bellosguardo with a professor who was supervising repairs to the estate’s Louis XV tapestries. Seamstresses imported from Holland were doing the work. “Huguette was supposed to be coming soon,” Stockwell recalls. “The staff was all excited and getting ready.”

Stockwell toured the art-filled house, including the library stocked with first editions, Anna’s bedroom (“She had a bust of the daughter who had died, a harp, and grand piano”), and Huguette’s painting studio (“the best oils and watercolors an artist could want”). Piled high on a wall of shelves in the studio were numbered boxes containing exquisite antique Japanese and Chinese dolls. But Huguette canceled her visit and never ventured west again. Maintaining the fantasy that she might reappear, she continued to pay her dues to her golf club, the Valley Club of Montecito, for the next half century.

A caretaker at Bellosguardo, Harry Pepper, who had worked there since 1942, wrote Huguette a heartfelt letter in 1961 to say that he needed to quit because he was suffering from “isolation fatigue.” Pepper wrote, “I do not believe it is good for one to work too many years alone… Would never have thought of leaving if Bellosguardo was open every 4 of 5 years.” The estate on the cliff had become a lonely, haunted place.

Huguette’s lawyer, Charles Bannerman, was under the impression that she and her mother were using their new Connecticut house as an alternate weekend retreat. But as the attorney’s widow, Jane Bannerman, now 102 years old, recalled in an interview at her Park Avenue apartment in 2012, “It was the funniest thing. My husband took me up to Connecticut where the Clarks had this large house. My husband had been insuring the contents for a long time, and when we went in, there was not a stick in the house.” Huguette had never bothered to furnish the place. She hired a full-time caretaker but did not visit, even for a quick day trip. Even though she was a woman passionate about nature and had hiked the Grand Canyon, splashed in the ocean in Hawaii, and endured railroad cross-country trips to Santa Barbara, Huguette was no longer leaving the concrete canyons of Manhattan.

There were, to be sure, a final few nods to society. Fondly recalling her many years in Paris, Anna Clark bought a table for an October 1954 fund-raising dinner for the American Friends of Versailles at the Waldorf Astoria. French cuisine and wine were served, and the Starlight Roof was decorated with faux Versailles-style statuary. Her patronage was noted in the
New York Times
—and that was the last
appearance in the society columns for a woman who had graced the
Social Register
since 1904.

Rumors began to circulate that the two women had become germphobic. Anna’s chauffeur passed along tales, mentioning to a friend that when the two women attended the opera, Anna bought up all the seats around them.

For Anna, her harp remained a life-sustaining pleasure and she continued studying with her longtime teacher, Marcel Grandjany, a Frenchman who headed the harp department at Juilliard and had given private lessons to Harpo Marx. Thirteen years younger than Anna, Grandjany had been taught to play the harp by Alphonse Hasselmans, who had been Anna’s teacher in Paris. Students usually came to Grandjany’s Upper West Side home for lessons, but he had always made house calls to Anna Clark. “My father was a regular visitor to her at 907 Fifth Avenue at Seventy-Second Street, going about once a week. This went on for nearly twenty years,” says Bernard Grandjany, who often drove his father there and picked him up afterward. “My father was a great listener. He would take time to listen to a person’s problems like he was a father confessor.”

In a quiet life with few daily markers, Anna’s lessons were an event to savor. Kathleen Bride, now a harp professor at the Eastman School of Music, began studying with Grandjany in 1958, and recalls that each week, “His wife would say to him, ‘Don’t forget that at four o’clock, you have to go see Mrs. Clark.’ ” Anna also made occasional pilgrimages out of the house to the salon of her hairdresser, Roger Vergnes, on East Fifty-Seventh Street, who had an elite clientele including the Duchess of Windsor.

As Anna aged, her circle of intimates had inevitably become smaller. Her brother, Arthur La Chapelle, and her suitor, Major Bowes, both died in 1946, and Anna’s close friend Amanda Storrs died in 1954. Anna’s widowed sister, Amelia, had remarried a socially prominent lawyer, Thomas Darrington Semple, a widower with two grown children. The sisters still saw each other frequently, and Huguette doted on her aunt, sending Amelia yellow roses and cakes for her birthdays. Amelia called her “Dearest Huguette” and “Darling Huguette” in her affectionate thank-you notes.

Two family confidants, who had been close to William Andrews Clark, died within months of each other. Dr. William Gordon Lyle, the physician who had tried to save Andrée’s life, died in November 1955 at the age of eighty-four. The physician had retired years earlier but had still made himself available to the Clarks. His much younger wife, Leontine—Huguette’s former Spence classmate—had a bond with both mother and daughter. “Right to the end, Lani didn’t want anyone else but Dr. Lyle and he would be there,” says his daughter, Tina Lyle Harrower. The Clarks switched their medical care to a French physician, Dr. Jules Pierre. That same year, their longtime attorney George Ellis died. While Ellis had handed over the Clarks’ legal matters to his partners, Charles Bannerman and Frederick Stokes, several years earlier, this was yet another loss. Ellis had worked for William Andrews Clark for decades; Anna Clark was the godmother to the lawyer’s daughter, Ann.

Anna and Huguette remained in touch with a few California Clark relatives, the family of Huguette’s deceased half brother Charles Clark. Celia Tobin Clark; her daughter, Agnes Clark Albert; and Agnes’s three teenage children (Karine, Paul, and Clare) would come to New York at least once a year and take a suite of rooms at the Savoy Plaza on Fifth Avenue. The grand Art Deco hotel, which was torn down in 1964 and replaced by the General Motors skyscraper, was opposite the Plaza Hotel.

Karine McCall remembered visiting her relatives at Anna’s grand apartment at 907 Fifth Avenue in 1955. Huguette was fashionably dressed in an outfit that the then teenager had never seen before, orange culottes, recalling, “I was quite fascinated by them.” Her brother Paul Albert recalls chatting with Anna and Huguette at his grandmother’s cocktail parties at the Savoy. “Anna was very outgoing and kind of vivacious,” said Paul Albert, who as a teenager in the 1950s was fascinated by Anna’s hearing aid. “She had this box with a wire to her ear and she let me play with it.”

His memories of Huguette are hazy, but he can date them. “The last time I saw her was in 1957,” he said, recalling a visit to her Fifth Avenue apartment. He was in boarding school at the time and went to see Huguette and Anna for tea; he found it odd that most of the
furniture was under dustcovers, as if the rooms were not in use. Many years later, when he and his younger sister Karine tried to retrace the family history, that date was a milestone. It was the last time that they could recall for certain that anyone from their branch of the Clark family had actually seen Anna or Huguette.

Now that Huguette was spending all of her time in Manhattan, she indulged in an upscale version of nesting, enjoying the perks of her inheritance. She purchased musical instruments, art, and jewelry—nothing but the best, of course. On May 3, 1955, she bought a 1709 Stradivarius, known as La Pucelle, from the Rembert Wurlitzer store, dispatching her mother’s social secretary, Adele Marié, to negotiate a 5 percent cash discount for a total of $50,985. Three years later, she dropped $125,750 at the Knoedler Gallery on a Renoir painting,
Girls Playing Battledore and Shuttlecock
, depicting young French women indulging in an early version of badminton. The next year, she bought a harp from a Paris dealer for $1,750. She ordered couture clothes from Jean Patou in Paris. At both Cartier and Van Cleef and Arpels, Huguette was an honored customer, treating herself, her mother, and friends to sparkling baubles: a $13,750 gold bracelet with diamonds and rubies; a $6,000 Van Cleef platinum ring with nine carats’ worth of 110 diamonds; and an array of earrings and bracelets adorned with emeralds and sapphires.

She bought a new set of Limoges china in order to entertain elegantly at home. Huguette held on to reminder notes that she scribbled to herself during this period, as well as dinner menus and grocery shopping lists for her maids. For one dinner, Huguette served thick carrot soup, shad roe, sliced tomatoes (no dressing), potato balls, string beans, peas, caramel custard, and after-dinner coffee; at another meal, guests were fed carrot soup again, lamb chops, mashed potatoes, beets, and peas. Huguette liked French treats such as brioche, petit fours, and Gaufrette biscuits, with the occasional lowbrow weakness for Twinkies.

Her long-ago admirer, Etienne de Villermont, had married in 1953, and he and his wife, Elisabeth, lived part-time in Normandy, in the village of Bonneville-sur-Touques. But he and Huguette carried on a long-running flirtatious correspondence. When Etienne came to New
York, he made a point of seeing Huguette. In several of her address books, she lists Etienne as staying at the Beekman Tower Hotel, a hotel on a quiet block near the East River with soaring views from the rooftop bar. The marquis sent her very affectionate letters in French, thanking her for financial gifts. After one long-distance France–New York phone call, Etienne wrote to Huguette on January 30, 1956, to say, “I felt an infinite joy conversing with you. It was as if I was seeing you. I don’t know how to tell you of our eternal gratitude, since I don’t know another person on earth motivated by such heavenly spirit who has done so much for others.”

From the way that Huguette spoke about Etienne in her later years, her assistant, Chris Sattler, came to believe that “he was her soul mate.” Yet Etienne was also the perfect romantic object for a woman who was scarcely leaving her apartment anymore. He sent her pink roses on her birthdays along with loving telegrams and letters, including such sentiments as “You can guess how much my thoughts and heart are with you” and “I kiss you wholeheartedly.” She could have the illusion of romance without the day-to-day and face-to-face realities of actually living with a man. He was three thousand miles away, a disembodied voice on the phone, an occasional friendly face in person. His wife, who suffered from numerous debilitating ailments, wrote to Huguette, too, treating her as a family friend.

The hobbies that Huguette had embraced as a young woman endured: she was still collecting dolls, and she even ordered doll-sized couture clothes from Maison Christian Dior in Paris. The Marsh family in California knew they could count on Huguette’s annual outlay for Japanese castles. And now she expanded her reach. As a girl, Huguette had fallen in love with the work of French illustrators who published in children’s magazines and books, notably Felix Lorioux, whose work appeared in a French weekly,
La Semaine de Suzette
, and who had briefly done work for Walt Disney. She began to commission work from Lorioux and a handful of other French illustrators such as Manon Iessel and Jean Mercier.

Huguette had developed her own new artistic passion that she could pursue right at home: photography. She had an account at the
Willoughby-Peerless camera store and constantly ordered the latest equipment. When her regular salesman lost his job, she told Wanda Styka that she felt sorry for him. “She was worried that because he was in his midfifties he would have trouble finding a job,” Wanda recalls. “I thought it was so thoughtful of her.” Huguette took photos from her apartment windows of street scenes below. At Christmastime, she would dress up in an elegant cocktail dress and pose for a self-portrait, often in front of her Steinway or near one of her Impressionist paintings. A well-dressed woman in her midfifties, she usually exuded a sense of good cheer, but in some of the photographs, she looks pensive, as if longing for something more in life.

When her mother’s health began to fail, Huguette turned to Etienne for a sympathetic ear. On September 18, 1962, he wrote to Huguette: “Have you at least managed to have your mother take some beneficial vitamins? I put myself in your shoes and it’s all very difficult.” The following year, he worried that Huguette was not taking care of herself due to her concern over her mother: “Make sure you aren’t tiring yourself too much and that you’re eating enough.”

Although frail and ill, Anna was determined to stay at home where she could see the seasons change from her windows overlooking Central Park. She was surrounded by mementoes of her life, from Andrée’s diary to the Impressionist paintings that she had fallen in love with in Paris as a young woman. Anna was tended round the clock by nurses in her eighth-floor apartment, and Huguette could look in several times a day. But one darker incident etched itself indelibly into Huguette’s memory. “One day she came in and saw that the nurse was not treating her mother well,” recalls Wanda Styka. Huguette did not describe what she saw, but it was upsetting enough that Wanda recalls, “She let go of the nurse.”