Empty Mansions (25 page)

Family members began to say Huguette was “slow” or “emotionally immature.” Her father was too old when she was conceived, they’d say, or she must have been damaged by her sister’s death or her brief marriage. The children in the family heard these stories and accepted them as fact, having little other information to go on. They knew nothing of her life, of her painting. Some in the next generation didn’t even know that Huguette ever had a sister.

Huguette was well aware of her relatives.
She knew the names of the children and grandchildren. When she saw photos, she expressed concern when a relative seemed to appear in failing health.

After the death, in 2002, of her half-niece Agnes Clark Albert, who had gone to Miss Spence’s with her, Huguette sent a handwritten card to Agnes’s son.

Small acts of generosity were observed but didn’t change the family narrative. Another of Charlie’s grandchildren, Jacqueline Baeyens-Clerté, was about ten when she met Huguette at an afternoon tea at Bellosguardo in 1952. Huguette and Anna were excited to be spending time with these relatives living in France. “
Aunt Huguette was very shy,” Jacqueline recalled, “and her mother did all the talking.” Without prompting, however, Huguette gave Jacqueline and her cousin tiny cameras as welcoming gifts.

For the most part, however, Huguette kept her distance through the decades.
She sent flowers to a list of friends every New Year—azaleas or
triple amaryllises—but there were no relatives on the list. She called a few relatives at Christmas and Easter. And when relatives called occasionally to invite her out, she would beg off with an excuse that became a running joke in the family. Each time she would say in French, “
Je suis enrhumée”
—“I have a little cold.”

• • •

The most detailed family memory of a visit to 907 Fifth Avenue was told by Huguette’s niece Agnes, and is relayed by her daughter Karine. It’s a story of a valuable painting and of rare musical instruments, and it reveals something of the family dynamic between Huguette and her mother. In one afternoon shopping trip, Anna made it easier for her daughter to spend more time with her, and she founded one of the noted chamber music groups of the twentieth century.

Anna was mad about chamber music, quite an unusual avocation for someone with only an eighth-grade education. She sang choral music with her low contralto voice as a member of the Oratorio Society of New York. She was a dedicated student of the harp,
taking afternoon lessons at her Fifth Avenue apartment, precisely at four o’clock, from
Marcel Grandjany, a Frenchman who taught at the Juilliard School in New York. Grandjany was an influential composer and teacher on a difficult and little understood instrument and may be the third-best-known harpist of all time, after King David and Harpo Marx. He dedicated many works to his patron, Anna, and later to her daughter Huguette, including a suite based on “La Belle au Bois Dormant,” or “Sleeping Beauty.”

For years, nothing prevented Anna from going out to hear chamber music—not for the society, not to be seen, but for Haydn and Brahms and Debussy. On one occasion, a musician recalled, she attended a three
P.M
. matinee at the Town Hall in New York, stayed in her seat awaiting the five-thirty twilight concert, and was back for the evening recital at eight-thirty.

But as Anna moved into her sixties, her hearing grew dismal. She used the latest newfangled hearing aid, an electronic box that she held out to pick up sound, with a wire attached to her ear. Anna began to take her music only at home, inviting musicians to play at 907 Fifth Avenue.
Huguette sometimes came downstairs to her mother’s apartment for the music, but rarely for the conversation.

One of the musicians who encountered Huguette on these musical afternoons was violinist Henri Temianka, who offered a memory of meeting her. He said Huguette “
was strangely withdrawn and had the curious habit of maneuvering backward while engaged in conversation.” As they spoke in one of the large rooms in Anna’s apartment, Huguette stepped back, and the violinist stepped forward, continuing the conversation, “executing a series of mincing steps that ultimately landed her and her partner in conversation at the opposite end of the room.”

One afternoon in December 1945, just after the end of the Second World War, Anna had a few guests over to 907 Fifth Avenue for one of her home concerts. But the events of that afternoon were most unusual, as Anna found a clever way to solve two problems with a single excursion.

The first problem was Madame Cézanne.

“
You see Cézanne’s portrait of Madame Cézanne?” Anna told her guests. “My daughter Huguette won’t come in here because she hates the painting so much.”

Anna had bought
Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress
, one of Paul Cézanne’s portraits of his longtime mistress and eventual wife, many years earlier from a Paris dealer. Apparently, Cézanne didn’t have much understanding of women, and his wife didn’t much care for his paintings of her. One can see why. In this depiction, she is an awkward subject with disfigured hands and a confused or worried look in her eyes. Still, there is something tender or vulnerable in her affect, which is not nearly as angry as in the well-known
Woman in a Green Hat
or as grotesque as in
Madame Cézanne with Unbound Hair
. Yet, as Karine tells the story, something in Madame Cézanne’s look bothered Huguette, who came downstairs to visit her mother less often than Anna would have liked.

The second problem was how to outfit a new string quartet with proper instruments.

Anna and Huguette had long sponsored musicians, including the well-regarded Loewenguth String Quartet in Paris, for whom Huguette wrote a check to buy four instruments made by the renowned Amati
family. Word of the Clark patronage got around, and it was not unusual for musicians to play at Anna’s apartment.

Because this portrait of a stern Madame Césanne was off-putting to Huguette, Anna found a clever use for it
. (
illustration credit6.6
)

Anna had been introduced to a cellist in need of a quartet, a cellist who she had thought was dead. Robert Maas was well known for his Pro Arte Quartet of Brussels, which Anna had followed closely. Maas had been reported as killed soon after the Germans invaded Belgium in 1940, but he was only wounded. Stranded in his native country, he was ordered by the Nazis to form a quartet with German musicians. He refused and spent the war playing for meal money in a café in Brussels, while his Pro Arte colleagues escaped to Wisconsin.

Maas was a forceful cellist, his immense bald head leaning forward as he drove his bow “
deep into the strings to produce a tone of unique vibrancy and breadth,” as one fellow player described him. “Yet, for all his dramatic power and fervor, his playing was characterized by classic reserve and impeccable taste.”

On that afternoon in 1945, with the Germans and Japanese defeated,
Maas was in New York, in Anna’s living room, playing Bach sonatas. He was a frequent guest, as Anna had grown quite fond of him. Maas was accompanied on the 1940 Steinway grand piano by Agnes, Huguette’s niece.

“
Robert,” Anna said to Maas, “you must form another string quartet.” If he did, she promised to fund it. But what instruments would the new quartet play, instruments befitting the quality of the players and the reputation of their patron?

Maas told Anna that he had seen
four remarkable instruments at the New York studio of Emil Herrmann, a dealer in rare instruments. All were made by Antonio Stradivari in Cremona, Italy, between 1680 and 1736, and all had been owned by the Italian violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini in the 1800s. The four had been split up, sold off by Paganini’s heir and illegitimate son. Herrmann had reassembled the group and would sell them only if they stayed together. But who could afford to buy four Stradivarius instruments at once?

Anna immediately took Madame Cézanne down from the wall and called for the chauffeur. A couple of hours later, she returned home to find Robert Maas and Agnes Albert still playing sonatas. She told them she had gone to Fifty-Seventh Street and Madison Avenue, to Knoedler & Co., one of the favored galleries of the Clarks and their peers. There she had
sold Madame Cézanne. We’re not sure what she got for the portrait, but it was enough to continue on to her second errand, on West Fifty-Seventh Street near Carnegie Hall, where she spent $200,000 at Emil Herrmann’s penthouse studio.

Anna and the chauffeur were carrying four instruments in their cases—each three hundred years old, with finely carved maple backs and thick orange varnish: two violins, an exceptionally rare Stradivarius viola, and, for Maas, a cello, inscribed inside in Latin in the hand of Antonio Stradivari himself: “Made in my ninety-third year.” These were among the finest musical instruments in the world, and Anna had bought them on a whim with the money from the Cézanne.

“
Now, Robert,” she said, “you have a wonderful quartet of Strads to use. Go and form a string quartet.”

At that moment was born the Paganini Quartet, which recorded for RCA Victor, performed the full Beethoven quartet cycle in six concerts
at the Library of Congress, and presented public concerts in halls around the world.

In addition to founding a world-class quartet, Anna had removed an impediment to her daughter coming downstairs to visit.

Besides, the Clarks had another Cézanne.

Sometimes even Huguette’s closest niece couldn’t get in to see her. One day in the mid-1950s, Agnes brought her children by to visit, but Huguette said she had a little cold. Not one to take no for an answer, Agnes sent word through the doorman that she would go out by the street and wave to Huguette. So there they stood on the sidewalk along Fifth Avenue, waving up at the twelfth-floor windows, unable to see whether Huguette was waving back.

SIXTEEN FIRST DATES
 

A
FTER HER DIVORCE
, Huguette reclaimed her maiden name, but she kept the “Mrs.,” perhaps indicating that she was no longer in the market for a husband. For the rest of her life, her staff called her Mrs. Clark or Madame Clark, in the French style of extending that title of marriage to older, unmarried women.

There were newspaper accounts in 1931, apparently false, that Huguette was ready to wed an Irish nobleman named Edward FitzGerald, the Seventh Duke of Leinster. The duke, a compulsive gambler and ne’er-do-well, later admitted in court that he was bankrupt when he came to America “
with the idea of marrying someone rich.” He died by suicide, penniless.

Not that a marriage for Huguette was out of the question. Anna made further attempts to find her daughter a husband, even into Huguette’s forties, but only within a carefully circumscribed group of friends, even relatives. She was scheduled to go on dates with one young man in particular, appointments that became a comical series of sixteen attempted first dates.

Anna’s dear sister, Amelia, was married to T. Darrington Semple, the treasurer of suburban Westchester County, New York. It was Amelia’s third marriage and his second. He had a son, T. Darrington, Jr., known as Darry, who served in the Army Air Corps during World War II, graduated from Harvard, and studied law in Alabama. Darry was family, but not a blood relative, and he was twenty years younger than Huguette.

Speaking sixty years later from a nursing home in Montgomery, Alabama, Darry described how Anna and Amelia conspired to set him up on dates with Huguette. He said the Clarks were kind and generous, observing that “they gave money away like it was water.” As for Huguette, he said, “from all the family stories, she was just shy, introverted, didn’t like crowds. But very smart.” Huguette was not unattractive,
with her Japanese-print, floor-length summer dresses. He was willing to go out with her, but there were complications.