Empty Mansions (26 page)

“I had sixteen dates to meet her, a proper social date,” Darry said. “Every time, her hair wasn’t right, or she had to do something else, or there was some other excuse. Every time, she couldn’t go. Sixteen times it got called off at the last minute.”

He soon found another woman to marry, and they had children and grandchildren. In 2010, when Huguette Clark was in the hospital at age 104 and Darry Semple was suffering from Parkinson’s disease, both of them in the last year of their lives, he still had his sense of humor. “If I saw her now,” he said, “I’d say, ‘Let me know if you got your hair one.’ ”

He never knew that Huguette already had a boyfriend.

LOVE OF HALF A LIFE
 

T
HE CLOSEST ROMANTIC CONNECTION
of Huguette’s life began on the beaches of Normandy. On their summer jaunts to Trouville before World War I, the Clarks made friends with a family by the name of Villermont. The grandfather was a painter, as were the mother and father, and they must have had much to discuss with the art-collecting Americans. The Villermonts were a proud old Roman Catholic family, with roots in the French nobility but not much money to show for it since the Revolution. One of their sons was just two years older than Huguette.

Etienne Allard de Villermont was called Etienne (pronounced AY-tyin), the French name for Stephen. Although Etienne and Huguette played together as school-age children, they didn’t cement their friendship until he came to America in the 1930s. The Marquis de Villermont was a well-known name in the society columns of New York and Los Angeles from 1935 to 1944. He attended parties with Hollywood royals Errol Flynn and Pola Negri, and also with actual royalty: Russian princes, British countesses, and Indian maharajahs. And he was a frequent guest of Anna and Huguette Clark at society dinners, musical afternoons at 907 Fifth Avenue, and during their summer vacations at Bellosguardo in Santa Barbara.

Etienne was tall, with brown hair, a kind face, and a debonair manner. He looked dapper in his black bow tie, with a sharp jaw and high forehead.
A French book about high-society parties in Trouville in the late 1930s described the marquis as a handsome man with a flair for playing the piano at parties.

Marquis Etienne de Villermont in 1936.
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illustration credit7.1
)

In 1936, an announcement was made of the engagement of the French nobleman to an American heiress, not from a copper fortune but from coffee. Before there was Starbucks, there was Arbuckles’, the first national coffee brand, known as “the cowboy’s favorite.” Etienne snagged an Arbuckles’ heiress.
Newspaper front pages across the country showed Etienne with tall redhead Claire Smith, who was known for wearing $1.5 million in jewels just for an average evening.

It was not unusual for Europeans of noble birth to come to America shopping for heiresses to refill their coffers, as the Irish duke had done in 1931 when his name was linked to Huguette’s. The newspapers in 1936 said the coffee heiress had chosen the marquis over his best friend, a Russian prince. But a month later,
Walter Winchell, the nation’s best-known gossip columnist, said mysteriously that it had been called off.

In May 1939,
Etienne was back in Winchell’s “On Broadway” column in more than two thousand newspapers, with a new heiress: “The Marquis de Villermont and Huguett [
sic
] Clark probably will wed this summer.” It had been three years since Etienne’s engagement broke up, and nine years since Huguette was divorced. Both were now approaching their middle thirties.

Etienne’s source of income was a bit vague. While Winchell said the marquis was “due for a post with the French Diplomatic Service,” one newspaper said he was an importer of French perfumes. Another said he was representing France at the New York World’s Fair in 1939–40, as the French fell under the thumb of the Nazis.

In fact, the family’s greatest source of support was Anna Clark. W.A. and Anna had sent money to the Villermonts for decades. In 1942, during World War II, the Clarks apparently
helped Etienne find a position with the new Vermont Copper Company, formed to take advantage of the wartime demand for the metal. Etienne became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1943. The president of the copper company was a Clark attorney, the father of Anna’s goddaughter Ann Ellis—who also visited the family in France in 1949, a visit arranged by Anna. She recalled Etienne as “a quite handsome Frenchman,” and the family farm quite simple. Etienne’s extended family kept mentioning how grateful they were to him for helping support them, Ann Ellis recalled, though she said it seemed clear that in fact the money was coming from Anna Clark.

Though Huguette never became
the Marquise de Villermont, she remained deeply interested in royalty the rest of her life, a theme infusing her artwork and her reading. For one of her Japanese projects in the 1950s, she was ordering a silk costume for a marquise, the wife of a marquis, when her intermediary sent the bad news that noble titles had been abolished in Japan. Still, into old age, she was an avid reader of the magazines that follow the goings-on of the nobility.

Curiously, Etienne continued to be a frequent social guest of the Clarks. In 1941, he took a long train ride to the West Coast to visit Bellosguardo, and was their guest at a party for Santa Barbara’s big fiesta, the
Old Spanish Days. Gloria Vanderbilt was there, along with the dukes and duchesses of the Montecito summer colony.

It’s hard to imagine that Anna broke up the marriage—tying her family to French nobility must have appealed to her, especially when she knew the Villermont family so well; and if she opposed the marriage, why would she still play host to Etienne at Bellosguardo? It’s hard to imagine that Etienne ended it—why would he pass up a chance at a wealthy American bride? So it must have been Huguette who opposed the marriage—perhaps any marriage. After all, she never did marry again. There is one secondhand account that Huguette and Anna had a spat on that 1941 stay at Bellosguardo, and that Huguette’s reclusivity became more pronounced when they returned to New York. “It was roughly right around there that she started, well, stopped coming out of the house.” That’s the story Huguette’s personal assistant, Chris Sattler, said he heard decades later. But we can’t be sure. Sattler knew no details, referring to the Marquis de Villermont as “the duke of something from France.”

One could suppose that this connection between Etienne and Huguette was simply another nobleman’s play for a fortune, if not for the fact that these two remained friends and pen pals for life. If Huguette Clark ever had a soul mate, he was the Marquis Etienne Allard de Villermont.

• • •

From the 1940s to the early 1980s, Huguette and Etienne exchanged hundreds of postcards, letters, and telegrams. Dozens of his notes to her
survive, and a few of hers to him as well—mostly telegrams, nearly always in French. And their relationship was not only long-distance. Etienne crossed the Atlantic to New York a couple of times a year, staying in an apartment that it seems Huguette paid for.

They stayed in touch even after Etienne married in 1953 at age forty-nine. His wife, Elisabeth, got on with Huguette, and they corresponded as well. Elisabeth was sickly, and she and Etienne had separate bedrooms. Even though Etienne described himself to Huguette as “split emotionally,” there is no hint in their correspondence that his relationship with her was a threat to his marriage.

On March 21, 1965, Etienne wrote to Huguette:

In February 1968, he sent Huguette a postcard with a picture of two young lovers about to kiss, protected from a shower of hearts by the
broad white brim of the young woman’s hat. The woman hides a gift behind her back in a white-gloved hand, and he offers a bouquet of roses. Etienne wrote, in French:

From Etienne de Villermont, writing in French to Huguette in 1965 from France: “I join you through my thoughts, and neither distance nor time alters the bond of love of half a life, which will never disappear.…”
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illustration credit7.2
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He added in English, “Much love, always, Etienne.”

Like her mother,
Huguette sent money to the Villermont family, $10,000 and $20,000 at a time, and even helped Etienne and Elisabeth adopt an orphaned girl born in 1962, Marie-Christine. Huguette began to shower the child with gifts: a bicycle, a stuffed toy donkey. Etienne sent back photos of himself with Marie-Christine. In one snapshot taken on a street corner in France, handsome Etienne is standing beside his little girl, buttoned up in her gray coat, and the toy donkey, both about the same size. They had named the donkey Cadichon after the mischievous character in a children’s book.