Empty Mansions (22 page)

BILL
 

T
WENTY-YEAR-OLD
H
UGUETTE
was the most prominent debutante introduced to New York society in December 1926. Her father’s estate had been settled. She was free now to find a husband.

A newspaper cartoon imagined the life of Huguette, the “spoiled little rich girl.” Breakfast in bed served by a French waitress. Stepping into her limousine, bound for a shopping tour to spend $333 a day. Donning gorgeous evening clothes and setting out for the opera. Attending a debutante
dance, where, because of her wealth and beauty, she is the center of attention.

Huguette poses for a photograph in her debutante days, a time when young ladies were presented to society so they could attract a husband. She graduated from high school at a time when most of the girls at Miss Spence’s planned to get married, but in a few years most in the graduating classes were looking forward to college.
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illustration credit6.1
)

In truth, Huguette focused more attention on her fellow Spence alumnae, playing hostess for luncheon parties for her debutante friends at Pierre’s French restaurant. A newspaper society photograph inadvertently captured her. The photo concentrates on a beautiful young woman in a sleeveless gown, seated at the center of a party, smiling as two tuxedoed young men ask her to dance. The woman is not Huguette, although she is in the photo, sitting off to the side, out of the limelight. And in the background of the party, another man sits by himself. His name is Bill Gower.

In December 1927, Mrs. W. A. Clark announced the engagement of her daughter, Huguette Marcelle, to William MacDonald Gower. Bill was a year older than Huguette, a tall, not unattractive man. They had known each other since they were children. There are signs that it may have been an arranged marriage, an attempt by Anna to find someone close to the family to wed her quiet daughter. Or it may have been an attempt to separate Huguette from any possible entanglement with Tadé Styka, her painting instructor. It could have just been time for marriage, and this was the young man she liked.

This was not the usual Clark marriage. W.A.’s children from his first marriage had aimed higher, shooting for European royalty or its American equivalent. When Katherine married a descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, W.A. gave her a present of $4 million in
real estate and issued six thousand invitations to her wedding, held just two weeks after he was forced to resign from the Senate.

Huguette’s husband, Bill Gower, was a Princeton graduate and law student working as a clerk on Wall Street. They wed at Bellosguardo in 1928, when Huguette was twenty-two and Bill twenty-three.
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illustration credit6.2
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The Gowers were certainly not poor. They lived in suburban New Rochelle, had a Park Avenue apartment, and spent summers playing pinochle and tennis in Lake Placid, New York. Bill had been on the track team and active in theatricals at the elite Trinity School in Manhattan and then received his Princeton degree in history at age twenty, one of the youngest members of the class of 1925. While studying law at Columbia, he was employed at thirty dollars a week at the firm of J. & W. Seligman, an investment bank that had financed Jay Gould’s railroads and the Panama Canal. While the bride-to-be was a Roman Catholic and the daughter of a Democratic senator, her fiancé was a Presbyterian and a Republican.

Bill was also the son of W. A. Clark’s accountant, William Bleckly Gower, the longtime comptroller of the United Verde and twenty other mining companies. As part of his service to the Clarks, the elder
Gower had presented a paper at the American Mining Congress in Denver in 1920 strategizing how to fight the onerous burden of taxes placed on W.A. and other mine owners by World War I, the same war that was making them rich. Because Huguette was now a co-owner of the Clark empire she had inherited from her father, her employee would now be her father-in-law.

Huguette in her wedding gown, 1928
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illustration credit6.3
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• • •

Huguette had the experience of an elaborate society wedding in New York, but not as a bride. When she was seventeen, in January 1924, she was a
bridesmaid for her half-niece, Katherine Morris Hall. And in 1928, Huguette was again a bridesmaid for a friend, Emily Hall Tremaine, who became a prominent art collector and patron of Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. Emily credited Huguette with introducing her to great art and the value of artistic expression. At Emily’s wedding, Huguette was dressed in a pink taffeta frock and a Juliet cap; she carried spring flowers.

Her own wedding was a private one, held in Santa Barbara at the Clark summer home, Bellosguardo. W.A. and Anna had vacationed on the California coast with Huguette in 1923 and then decided to buy a home there. A few months after W.A.’s death in 1925, the home was shaken in the June earthquake, which burst a dam and started a fire, destroying much of Santa Barbara’s downtown. After the earthquake, Anna began making plans to renovate and expand the home, but it remained livable enough for Huguette’s wedding.

Mr. and Mrs. William Gower were married by a Catholic priest on August 18, 1928. The bride wore a formal white gown of lace with a nearly endless cathedral train. The Santa Barbara newspaper,
The Morning Press
, struggled for any scraps of news: “Miss Clark and her mother have been at their Santa Barbara home, Bellosguardo, since their return from Europe early this summer and have taken an active part in the summer social life.… The wedding will be extremely quiet.”

Her maid of honor, one of the few guests other than family, was the wife of Dr. Lyle, the Clark family physician. The groom was twenty-three, the bride twenty-two. A special car was ready for the honeymoon. Anna had bought a gray-green 1927 Rolls-Royce with silver door handles and a black leather top. It cost $25,750, or about $300,000 in today’s dollars. This was the Phantom I, a town car in which the driver sat out in the open air while the passengers enjoyed the comfort and quiet in the salon, as the rear passenger seat was called. The Clark chauffeur, Walter Armstrong, described driving Huguette and Bill around the West before the couple left from San Francisco on a honeymoon cruise to Hawaii, accompanied by the bride’s governess, Madame Sandré.

Huguette and Bill were accosted by a newspaper photographer. They posed awkwardly. And then Huguette was trapped for a photo alone. She stands swathed in fur, clutching her handbag tightly, her usual strand of pearls around her neck, her wrists decorated by Cartier Art Deco bracelets of diamonds and emeralds. She looks most uncomfortable.

This was not the last photograph taken of Huguette, but it was the last the public would see while she lived for the next eight decades.

• • •

At home again in New York, the newlyweds moved into her mother’s building, 907 Fifth Avenue, with their wedding gifts, including a fifteen-inch sterling silver serving platter with Huguette’s new monogram, “H.C.G.,” and their wedding date, “8-18-1928.” They took a subscription to Box 9 for matinees at the Metropolitan Opera, and Tadé Styka painted Bill Gower’s portrait.

“No married couple,” the
New York Herald
opined, “ever started married life under more brilliant auspices.”

Within nine months, the newspapers had caught on to a split. Bill was back with his parents on Park Avenue. A typical newspaper headline of the time read: “
Why America’s $50,000,000 Heiress Cast Off Her $30-a-Week Prince Charming.”

Some papers blamed the groom. “Those who should know whereof they speak tell me the cause for the failure of the union of nine months can be laid directly at young Gower’s door,” wrote a gossip columnist. Others said Huguette was simply interested in art, while he was interested in finance. The story among Huguette’s half-siblings was that she didn’t want what marriage implied, physically. The same bell was rung in a bitter tell-all biography of W. A. Clark and his family in 1939: “
Huguette refused to consummate the marriage.” The author, William D. Mangam, must have gotten his information from his former employer and law school buddy, Huguette’s half-brother Will, who lived all the way across the country in Los Angeles.

Yet Mangam may have been right. Seventy years later, Huguette would be asked about her brief marriage by her nurse, Hadassah Peri. An immigrant, the nurse summarized Huguette’s answer in broken English: “
It didn’t stay long. On my honeymoon, I have to go home.”