The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (50 page)

Huguette playing with her dolls on the porch of her family’s home in Butte, Montana.
(Courtesy of Christopher Sattler)

Huguette with her father and her elder sister, Andrée (left), at Columbia Gardens, an amusement park that her father built in Butte.
(Courtesy of Montana Historical Society)

Huguette in a grass skirt in Hawaii with a friend circa 1920. The Clark family made numerous visits to the island, where Huguette befriended and learned to surf from Olympic champion Duke Kahanamoku.
(Courtesy of Roberto E. Socas)

Huguette, in the background, frolicking on the beach with her violin teacher, Jaquita Vidal. The Clarks hired Vidal and her sister Margarita as tutors and traveling companions for their daughters.
(Courtesy of Roberto E. Socas)

Huguette on the day of her wedding to William MacDonald Gower, a Princeton man and the son of her father’s longtime accountant. It was a very small wedding at her family’s Santa Barbara estate.
(Courtesy of Tina Harrower, the flower girl)

The marriage was brief and the press chronicled the details. (
A $30-A-WEEK HUSBAND FOR THE $50,000,000 HEIRESS
was a 1928 headline in the
Salt Lake Tribune
.) From the time she was a child Huguette’s life was tabloid fodder.
(Courtesy of newspaperarchive.com and the
Salt Lake Tribune
)

Tadé Styka, who was one of the most sought-after painters of his day—his works included a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt that hangs in the White House. He was also Huguette’s painting teacher and confidant. She called him “Cher Maitre,” and for twenty-four years after her divorce Huguette came for weekly painting lessons at his Central Park South studio. She eventually became godmother to his daughter, Wanda.
(Courtesy of Wanda Styka)

A photograph of a Styka portrait of Huguette painting a male nude. She showed her work at both Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery and New York’s National Academy of Design.
(Courtesy of Wanda Styka)

Bellosguardo, the twenty-three-acre Clark family compound in Santa Barbara overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Huguette spent several months a year there for three decades but ceased visiting the estate in the early fifties, even though she continued to pay for its upkeep until her death in 2011. Bellosguardo became a key asset in the battle over her estate.
(Photograph by @JohnWiley/flickr.com/jw4pix)

Irving Kamsler (above) was Huguette’s accountant (seen here with his wife, Judi), and Wallace Bock (right) was her attorney. In her later years the two men acted as gatekeepers.
(Kamsler photograph by Martha FitzSimon; Bock photograph by Christopher Sadowski)

Hadassah Peri became Huguette’s private duty nurse in 1991 and was eventually given $31 million in gifts, which included real estate, cash, a Bentley, and antique Cartier jewelry.
(Photograph by J. C. Rice)