Empty Mansions (32 page)

On February 23, 1942, a Japanese submarine surfaced off Santa Barbara and began to fire shells at the Ellwood Oil Field and its fuel storage tanks, about ten miles west of Bellosguardo. Though little damage was done, fear of a Japanese attack bordered on hysteria. A week later, President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the removal and internment of Japanese Americans living on the Pacific coast. A government pass was needed to get through the barbed wire checkpoint on Cabrillo Boulevard near the Clark estate. Curtains had to be closed at sundown because of the blackout. Streetlights were painted over, and cars had to drive with only their parking lights on, so as not to help the unseen
enemy spot the silhouette of an American ship near the shore. Anna grew suspicious of outsiders and at one point mistook a kelp cutter boat for a Japanese submarine.

Because of the ever-present danger of invasion, Anna sought a refuge away from the coast for herself and Huguette, and, more important, for the staff.
She bought a 215-acre ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley, twenty-two miles northwest of Santa Barbara. Called
Rancho Alegre (“cheerful ranch”), it included a ranch house, a sloping meadow for horses and deer, a swimming pool fed by a mountain stream, and open views of Figueroa Mountain. Guests at the Clark ranch could ride horses, including a recalcitrant brown stallion named Don Antonio and the pure white Lady, who had been known in town as a flag bearer in parades.

Although the Japanese surrendered after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the closed-off feeling never left Bellosguardo. Anna was rattled when one night the electricity failed, leaving the entire estate in the dark. After that episode, whenever Anna and Huguette planned a visit of only a week or two, they would sleep at the Biltmore, saying they didn’t want to trouble the staff to open up the house.

Anna was getting older, and may have wearied of the long train rides. Anna and Huguette made their last trip west sometime around 1953.

While the Chrysler convertible and the Cadillac limousine stayed in the garage, Anna gave the Rolls-Royce to the chauffeur, Armstrong, who hadn’t used it in quite a while, except to have fun by putting on his white gloves for picking up an embarrassed Barry Hoelscher, the estate manager’s son, after classes at Santa Barbara High School.

FIRST-CLASS CONDITION
 

A
FTER
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NNA DIED
in 1963, leaving Bellosguardo and Rancho Alegre to Huguette, the daughter issued new instructions to the staff. No longer was the house to be kept in readiness for the arrival of the Clarks under a forty-eight-hour rule.

When John Douglas came on as estate manager in 1983 after Albert Hoelscher died, he was given only two instructions: Keep everything in “first-class condition” and in “as original condition as possible.”

When El Niño storms uprooted a half dozen hundred-foot trees at Bellosguardo in the 1980s, the gardeners planted replacements and sent photos to New York. Huguette sent word that one of the new trees wouldn’t do; it was too small. The tree was taken out, and a mature tree was planted. She declared that tree also too small. Finally, on the third try, she said it would have to do.

When painters finished work on the back of the service wing, Douglas sent photos of the work to New York. He received a quick reply, through Huguette’s attorney. The painting was fine, but “Mrs. Clark would like to know what happened to the doghouse that the Pekingese used.” The Pekingese had died many years earlier. Douglas asked if Mrs. Clark wanted the doghouse in place even if there was no dog. Her attorney responded that Mrs. Clark was well aware that the dog was no longer there but wanted to be sure its house was still on the property. It was.

Huguette insisted that an archway leading through a dense hedge of Monterey cypress be kept just as she remembered it. She sent word after seeing a photo that she “would like to know if the small oak tree that was outside her bedroom window could be replanted.”

One Clark relative recalled being shocked, on a rare visit to the main house, when a housekeeper barked, “
Who moved that chair?” The housekeeper moved it about four feet back to its spot.

Her mother was gone, and Huguette would have to live with that, but her mother’s house could be preserved indefinitely.

• • •

Not even for kings would Huguette allow Bellosguardo to be disturbed.

She turned down the entreaties of an agent for Mohammad Reza Pahlavi,
the shah of Iran, when he wanted to buy the property in January 1979, in the last days before he fled the Islamic Revolution. Even after his death, the shah, the last king of Iran, couldn’t meet the admission standards for the Montecito neighborhood. His sister wrote to the Santa Barbara Cemetery asking to buy space for a family mausoleum but was refused.

Huguette wouldn’t give permission for the Hollywood billionaire Marvin Davis to land his helicopter for a tour of Bellosguardo in 1989, when he was offering $30 million to $40 million for the estate.

Newspapers offered reports that the Beanie Babies tycoon, Ty Warner, had raised the possibility of paying $100 million for Bellosguardo, but Huguette wasn’t interested.

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art asked her in 1991 and 2004 to donate the home but got nowhere. Her attorney Don Wallace said she did seriously discuss leaving the home to the nearby Music Academy of the West. She said it would be nice to have chamber concerts at Bellosguardo again, but she was concerned about cars spoiling the grounds.

When the mayor of Santa Barbara asked Huguette twice to consider giving Bellosguardo to a foundation, she said that she would consider it. In a handwritten note to Mayor Sheila Lodge in 1997, Huguette wrote, “
My answer to you about Bellosguardo, is the same as it was in the year 1993 but if some day I should have a change of mind I shall let you know.”

Historians and journalists sent letter after letter, usually trying to get interviews by promising to avoid too much mention of her father’s electoral scandal. In a typical letter, a graduate student in history, Jeanette Rodda, wrote to Huguette in 1988, “
The scandal, of course, cannot be ignored but I believe I effectively reinterpret and underplay several unfortunate incidents.” Huguette’s attorneys forwarded these letters to her, but the supplicants got nowhere.

• • •

Anna had visited her mountain refuge outside Santa Barbara, Rancho Alegre, only occasionally and Huguette perhaps not at all. After Anna
died, Huguette soon donated Rancho Alegre to the Boy Scouts in her mother’s memory. She attached one condition: The kindly ranch manager, Niels “Slim” Larsen, and his wife, Oda, would be allowed to move into the ranch house, staying as long as they wished. Today many community groups use Rancho Alegre for retreats, and the Outdoor School of Santa Barbara, run by the Scouts, serves four thousand children a year through Huguette’s generosity.

Before Oda Larsen died in 2001, she said she recalled talking only once to Huguette, on the phone. Huguette asked her two questions:

“
What color is the swimming pool?”

“Are there any gazelles on the property?”

• • •

In the sixty quiet years at Bellosguardo after Anna and Huguette’s last visit, the furniture has been covered. Anna’s harps were laid on their sides to protect them from damage in case of an earthquake. The floral Aubusson rugs of raspberry and pink were wrapped in paper and labeled with photographs of the contents, each bundle dated and signed by a member of the staff.

The furniture at Bellosguardo remained covered during the nearly sixty years when Huguette no longer visited. Her instructions to her staff were to change nothing and to keep everything in “first-class condition.”
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Not everything on the Clark estate has stayed in first-class condition, however. The passage of time has been enough to bring about changes. The bathrooms throughout the house haven’t been updated since the 1930s, and warning signs in some read “DO NOT FLUSH.” Although seamstresses were brought from Holland in the 1950s to repair the Louis XV upholstery on the sofa and chairs in the sitting room, in recent years some of the cushions have rotted.

The extensive landscaping once required between twelve and twenty gardeners and two full-time plumbers to keep the grounds irrigated. In recognition of the water shortages that plague Santa Barbara, the twelve hundred rose plants were carefully removed and their location mapped so the garden could be re-created if Huguette desired. Now there are only four gardeners, and the rest of the staff consists of a houseman, two part-timers for bookkeeping and filing, and the estate manager.

• • •

Huguette kept in touch with Santa Barbara from New York. Until her death, the staff sent monthly dues to the Valley Club, though she hadn’t been there for sixty years, and annual checks to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, along with contributions to music institutions and police and fire charities.

She received clippings of news from Lorraine Hoelscher, second wife of the longtime estate manager, who kept the books at the estate, and from the chauffeur’s widow, Alma Armstrong, both of whom received
pensions until they died. When maid Sylvia Morales retired in 1993 after thirty years of cleaning the estate manager’s house, Huguette approved a pension at 92 percent of her regular pay.

Still in the garage at Bellosguardo, under an ornate light fixture, are two of Anna and Huguette’s automobiles, including a 1933 Cadillac seven-passenger limousine with a gilded hood ornament and a 1933 Chrysler Royal Eight convertible. Both have license plates from 1949
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Beginning in 1987, Huguette spent nearly a million dollars on an eight-hundred-foot rock seawall to protect the cliff and, as a consequence, the main driveway, which is the only way for fire trucks to reach the house. This project destroyed a beautiful cliff face and removed a line of Monterey cypress trees along the cliff top. In exchange for permission to build the wall, Huguette allowed the city to designate most of the estate as a landmark, limiting its future development and perhaps its resale value.