The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (8 page)

Clark buried his wife in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, a four-hundred-acre spot with rolling hills known as New York’s most prestigious final address. The large plot was in a serene central location, perched on a rise with a view. He hired the noted architecture firm of Lord, Hewlett and Hull to construct a $150,000 family-sized stately white mausoleum. Fluted Ionic columns support the soaring portico and stained-glass windows permit colored light to flow in, but the most distinctive element is a Beaux Arts bronze door designed in 1897 by Rodin disciple Paul Wayland Bartlett. Entitled
The Vision
, it
features the mysterious likeness of a woman with long flowing hair and a windswept gown. Her head is slightly tilted and she gazes out at the world with sad, thoughtful eyes.

More than a century later, Clark’s last surviving child, Huguette, continued to pay for a standing weekly order of fresh flowers to be delivered by a Bronx floral shop to the mausoleum, including holly wreaths for Christmas, lilies for Easter, pots of cheerful chrysanthemums, and special arrangements to honor the birthdays of family members.

I
n New York society, an upper-class British or French accent has long added cachet, conveying Old World elegance and culture. When Anna Evangelina La Chapelle Clark, the mother of Huguette Clark, entertained in her Fifth Avenue apartment in the 1930s and 1940s, guests came away convinced that she was originally from Paris. The impeccable widow of Sen. William Andrews Clark served French food, and her décor included Louis XIV antiques and Impressionist paintings. The guests at her chamber music concerts or dinners were often from France—such as harpist Marcel Grandjany—or conversed with her in French, like Polish portrait painter Tadé Styka.

“I always assumed that she was French,” says Leontine “Tina” Lyle Harrower, now in her late eighties, who spent childhood Sundays wearing white gloves to attend four-course lunches at the home of her godmother Anna, known by the nickname “Lani.” “It never occurred to me that Lani was born in the States,” says Harrower, now based in British Columbia. “She had a very marked French accent when she spoke English. I was totally shocked when I learned just recently about her past.”

Harrower’s older brother, Gordon Lyle Jr., was also under the impression that Anna was foreign-born, asking even now—“Was she French?”—and expressing surprise at the answer. Dr. William Gordon Lyle, the father of Tina and Gordon, had been the chief physician to Senator Clark and his family. “Lani was an absolutely wonderful
woman, poised and charming,” says Lyle Jr. His imagination was sparked by Anna’s description of her husband’s Wild West past. As Lyle Jr. recalls, “She told me that when the senator used to go to bed for the night, he always put a pistol under the pillow.”

Anna Clark was more than a turn-of-the-century adornment for a business magnate; she was a master of reinvention. The patina of money plus a Parisian education smoothed over the rough edges of her frontier Montana upbringing. As a result, she was the shimmering picture of refined glamour in middle age, adorned with diamonds, emeralds, and rubies that were compared favorably in the press to the jewels worn by Astors and Vanderbilts.

Anna was not pretentious but she was proper, impressing on the children of her friends the importance of etiquette as if to train them as she had been trained. “Lunch there was always such an ordeal because I had to have such good manners,” says an octogenarian who was a child when her parents socialized with Anna. “I can see the dining room, where Lani sat, where I sat. She had so much silver and gold cutlery and I was absorbed with that. She spoke French fluently, which I had to do when I was with her. But she was sweet and real and loving.”

Anna never tried to hide her Montana girlhood. But as the years went by it had become ancient history—unknown to most New Yorkers—so this sophisticated woman with a mischievous sense of humor could enjoy the hard-won status that she had achieved in upper-crust Manhattan. If exquisite manners and a French accent gave people the illusion that she was wellborn, so be it.

In truth, Anna’s accent had a less glamorous origin than the boulevards of Gay Paree—her parents were French-Canadian Catholics from Montreal. Her father, Pierre (who often used the Americanized version, Peter) La Chapelle, claimed to have trained as a physician at a medical school in Montreal, at least according to a bio in
Progressive Men of the State of Montana
. After he married the farmer’s daughter Philomene Rock de Dubie, the couple moved to Calumet, Michigan, where Anna was born in 1878. She had two younger siblings: sister Amelia, born in 1881, and brother Arthur, born in 1883.

When Anna was ten years old, the family moved to Butte and Peter
set up a practice as a physician. Two years later he got into trouble with local authorities for practicing medicine without a license.
ONE OF BUTTE’S FAKIRS FOUND GUILTY BY A JURY
, trumpeted a headline in the November 14, 1890,
Anaconda Standard.
At the trial, an engineer testified that La Chapelle had professed to be a doctor and treated his wife for an illness; a pharmacist showed prescriptions written by La Chapelle. A member of the board of medical examiners stated that La Chapelle had never applied for a license. If Peter La Chapelle did indeed have Canadian medical training, this would have been the moment to present his documentation. But he did not testify, and his lawyer offered no defense witnesses. The jury returned a guilty verdict in fifteen minutes: the defendant was fined $100 and told to find another profession. La Chapelle hung out a shingle as an eye specialist, listing his profession as “oculist.”

Anna’s mother, Philomene, ran a boardinghouse in the seedier part of town on East Park Avenue, close to Butte’s bars and brothels. The wide-open city was infamous for its whorehouses on “Venus Alley” servicing the miners and the well-to-do. The La Chapelle family was on the downhill slide. Anna was a pretty teenager with long, lustrous hair, blue eyes, a high forehead, and a serene smile, and her performances in school plays had been favorably received. Her practical sister, Amelia, enrolled in secretarial school and her brother, Arthur, worked as an elevator operator in an office building. And then—suddenly—everything changed.

What brought Anna La Chapelle and William Andrews Clark together? Historians have relied on a spitefully entertaining 1904 account in the
Anaconda Standard
. Anna is portrayed in this article as a brazenly ambitious fifteen-year-old who went searching for a sugar daddy in the early 1890s.

“About nine or ten years ago,” the
Standard
wrote, “a little golden haired girl of prepossessing appearance walked into the banking house of James A. Murray in this city, and without much ceremony, asked Mr. Murray to bear the expense of her education, adding that he was wealthy… At that time, she possessed an ambition to become an actress… Mr. Murray did not know the girl and had never heard of her, so he declined to accept the girl’s invitation to help her.”
According to the article, the altruistic banker suggested that she contact William Andrews Clark, telling Anna, “Mr. Clark was unmarried, had plenty of money and would undoubtedly help her along the road she desired to travel. Miss La Chapelle then asked Mr. Murray if he would introduce her to Mr. Clark and he declined…”

The problem with this tantalizing account is that it ignores the classic tenet of journalism: consider the source. The owner of the
Anaconda Standard
was Marcus Daly, who despised William Clark. The newspaper staff delighted in running stories aimed to embarrass the Butte copper mogul. James Murray, a gambler turned millionaire mine owner, was one of Marcus Daly’s close friends, and he ran a bank that competed for business with Clark’s bank. Murray was a Republican, and his name was floated as a potential rival to William Andrews Clark for a Montana Senate seat.

Yes, maybe Anna La Chapelle strolled into a rich banker’s office and tried to insinuate herself into his good graces. But the article is equally likely to reflect the yellow journalism efforts of William Clark’s enemies to tarnish the reputation of his beloved.

William Clark’s version also strains credulity. Clark claimed that he first spied Anna La Chapelle at a July Fourth parade in 1893, a few months after the death of his wife. Anna, an appealing beauty, was dressed in a toga to portray the Goddess of Liberty. The age gap between them was thirty-nine years—she was young enough to be his grandchild. After the parade, Clark made inquiries and met her parents. “Anna La Chapelle early displayed an unusual musical talent,” he later told reporters. “She was bright and studious. I encouraged her inclination for study by placing her in the young ladies’ seminary at Deer Lodge, of which institution I was a member of the executive board.”

Clark became an enthusiastic backer of not just Anna but her entire family. The copper king paid for her father’s tuition at a genuine medical school in Chicago and her sister Amelia’s education at St. Mary’s Academy in Salt Lake City, followed by a stint at the National Park Seminary in Forest Glen, Maryland. The youngest member of the family, Arthur La Chapelle, became a timekeeper at one of Clark’s mines.

In August 1895, all three La Chapelle siblings performed at Maguire’s Opera House in Butte at a well-attended show called “Dream of Fairyland.” Anna displayed her graceful physique with a Spanish dance. Amelia played an orphan in a skit, and Arthur sang the aptly named song, “I Am Not Old Enough to Know.”

After Anna graduated from high school, Clark offered her a trip to Paris to study the harp under the auspices of Alphonse Hasselmans, a professor of harp at the National Conservatoire of Music. To reassure Anna’s parents of his virtuous intentions, Clark came up with a chaperone—his sister, Lizzie Clark Abascal.

Lizzie was married to one of William Clark’s closest friends, Joaquin Abascal, an older, well-to-do Spaniard who ran mining and mercantile businesses in the small town of Bear Gulch, Montana. The parents of two daughters, Lizzie and her husband split their time between Montana and Los Angeles. As William Clark would later tell reporters, “Anna had shown such disposition for the study of music and languages that I sent her abroad with my sister, Mrs. Abascal, who was going to Paris to educate her daughters.”

Paris was such a de rigeur destination that the
Chicago Daily Tribune
chronicled the goings-on of expatriates in an 1893 feature,
AMERICANS IN PARIS: BRILLIANT WOMEN WHO LIVE IN THE FRENCH CAPITAL
. The article described the opulent homes occupied by the likes of Mrs. Joseph Pulitzer and the competitive social circuit revolving around literary salons, art exhibitions, and “tender philanthropies.” “Many old and well-known American families have been or are represented in Paris,” the newspaper noted, reeling off a list including Vanderbilts, Winthrops, and Morgans. Anna’s trip to France was planned as a short-term educational tour to enhance her musical abilities and give her language skills an upper-class polish. Instead, Paris would end up becoming Anna’s home for more than fifteen years.

Clark visited Paris in March 1896 to see his protégée, but their happy reunion was cut short when Clark received devastating news: his sixteen-year-old son, Paul, had died of a strep infection while at boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts. Paul was his father’s favorite, a rugged, manly boy who planned to study law. Clark sailed back to New York, burying his son at Woodlawn Cemetery in the
family mausoleum. In Butte, he underwrote the Paul Clark home, a refuge for orphans. The robber baron would often stop by around Christmas bearing gifts for the orphans, according to newspaper accounts, and tear up at the memory of his son.

Clark had mercurial relationships with his two surviving sons from his first marriage. Like so many self-made men, he had high expectations for his progeny. His well-educated oldest son, Charles, dabbled in the family enterprises but his second son, Will Jr., made more of an effort to live up to his father’s name as a lawyer and businessman. Despite their sophisticated upbringing in Europe and at elite boarding schools and colleges, both of Clark’s sons fell for small-town Butte girls from undistinguished backgrounds. William Clark showed his paternal disdain by skipping the wedding in July 1896 of his son Charles to legal stenographer Katherine Roberts. The copper mogul sent his regrets along with a $100,000 check. He always publicized his gifts to his children, flaunting his wealth.

Rather than attend his son’s wedding, William Clark chartered a private train in Butte to take him to Chicago in July 1896, as a delegate to the Democratic Convention. The events of the next few days would have embarrassing repercussions for him. At the raucous convention, William Jennings Bryan, a young Nebraska congressman, gave his “Cross of Gold” speech championing silver coinage. On the fifth ballot, Bryan won the Democratic nomination. (He would lose to William McKinley.) Clark was a Bryan man for a simple reason: the potential boost in the value of silver mines.

At the hotel housing the Montana delegation, Clark noticed a pretty young New Yorker, Mary McNellis, who identified herself as a newspaper correspondent. They struck up a conversation and discussed having dinner. Clark was favorably impressed, later describing her as “rather agreeable and highly intelligent.”

A few weeks later, Clark checked into the Waldorf Hotel in Manhattan, a fact mentioned in the
New York Times
(
HOME NEWS: PROMINENT ARRIVALS IN HOTELS
, July 26, 1896). The enterprising McNellis dropped by and sent up her card. Clark came right down and took her for drinks in the hotel’s Turkish room, a romantic setting with plush banquettes. Dinner, gifts, and other assignations followed.

An ocean away in Paris, Anna La Chapelle was in mourning for her father, who had died unexpectedly of a stroke at age forty-nine in the spring of 1896. But despite her grief, she had no desire to return to Butte and her old life. Now accustomed to living in luxury, Anna had taken to the harp as a serious student and had a circle of talented and noteworthy friends. Her entrée was eased by William Andrews Clark’s generosity as a patron of the arts. He gave large sums to the American Art Association of Paris to support exhibitions and prizes; the judges included sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and painter Jean Charles Cazin. Clark purchased two nude sculptures directly from Auguste Rodin and a striking painting by Edwin Austin Abbey,
Who Is Sylvia? What Is She, That All the Swains Commend Her?

Anna was soon accompanied by a new live-in chaperone, Madame de Cervellon, whose expenses were paid by William Clark. Clark would later pointedly praise Madame de Cervellon’s respectable credentials, referring to her as “a woman of education and means, the widow of an officer of the French Army.” The widow played the delicate role of intermediary, a confidant to Anna and a spy for her benefactor, reporting back to Clark when other men expressed interest. Madame de Cervellon was worldly enough to look the other way at the sexual overtones between the visiting Clark and his young protégée.

As a widower, Clark was free to remarry. But he found it preferable to have a young paramour stashed away in Paris, keeping his private life private, while he once again pursued what he saw as his manifest destiny—a seat in the United States Senate.