Empty Mansions (33 page)

John Douglas, who never met her in the twenty-eight years he managed her most valuable property, talked with her on the phone only twice. During those conversations, as he described any improvements on the estate, Huguette replied politely, “
Yes, Mr. Douglas.” But when she heard of work to keep the property just as it had always been, as it was in her mother’s time, she exclaimed, “Isn’t that wonderful!”

“WE DON’T WANT ANY!”
 

J
UST AS
A
NNA HAD
her emergency retreat in California at Rancho Alegre, Huguette added her own country refuge in the leafy Connecticut suburbs. It was called Le Beau Château. The castle takes its name from an old French children’s song, the music for a circle game in which two concentric circles of children alternate singing verses. Here’s one translation of the refrain:

The verses follow, with a new beginning line modifying each round:

In 1951, the Clarks’ chauffeur drove Huguette and Anna out to New Canaan, a Connecticut suburb an hour north of New York City. Huguette later explained to her man Friday, Chris Sattler, that it had been her mother’s idea to have a refuge for family and friends in case of a Russian attack on New York. (This was, after all, during the Cold War, which had heated up with North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in 1950.)

In appearance, Le Beau Château is an echo of the château de Petit-Bourg
from the Clarks’ happy summers in France. Huguette bought the property, expanded the house, and bought more land for a buffer,
eventually owning fifty-two acres, twenty-two rooms, and more than fourteen thousand square feet of emptiness. She never moved a stick of furniture into the house during the six decades she owned it.

The senator’s daughter was buying the house of a senator. The château was built in 1938 by
David Aiken Reed, former Republican senator from Pennsylvania. Reed was best known for the Immigration Act of 1924, which tried to keep Jews and Asians out of the United States, with the goal of “
keeping American stock up to the highest standard.”

New Canaan is one of the most affluent communities in the nation, with little notice taken of quiet wealth. Nearby neighbors now include musician and actor Harry Connick, Jr., and others not far away during Huguette’s ownership were architect Philip Johnson in his Glass House,
NBC Nightly News
anchor Brian Williams, and singer-songwriter Paul Simon.

Huguette bought the Connecticut estate, Le Beau Château, in 1951, the year she turned forty-five. Her annual property tax bill reached $161,000, but she never moved in. It was maintained but unfurnished for more than sixty years. She was nearly one hundred before she agreed to put it on the market.
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illustration credit9.1
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As the years passed and the mysterious property remained unoccupied, neighbor children sneaked through the woods to peek at the house, and townspeople passed around legends about the missing owner. Her fiancé had built the house for her, one story went, and after he died at sea on the honeymoon, she couldn’t bear to move in. Another story had Huguette’s father paying the fiancé a million dollars to go away.

• • •

Le Beau Château would have been a pleasant hideaway for enjoying her Impressionists, for listening to violin sonatas and partitas, and for painting portraits quietly into old age. As one enters on the long driveway, deer bound out of the woods. The balcony of the magnificent bedroom with its double-height window is only twenty steps from the woods near a waterfall on a trout brook. But Huguette had her own private castles and dollhouses to attend to in New York.

The spiral staircase was grand, but for sixty years no wedding photos were taken there. The water heater in the basement, the length of a Rolls-Royce limousine, never heated water for a bath. An old green Jaguar
belonging to the caretaker was parked in the garage. The combination to the walk-in safe was lost long ago.

Huguette’s enormous bedroom at Le Beau Château is quiet, except for the sound of a waterfall on a trout brook running through the nearby woods.
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This Connecticut home was never maintained with the care lavished on her Bellosguardo. There were no memories to preserve. In California, the annual salary of estate manager John Douglas reached $110,000 plus use of the beach house. But at Le Beau Château, caretaker Tony Ruggiero got the use of a guard cottage and only $16,800. Huguette did keep paying the property taxes—they eventually reached $161,000 a year—and in 1997
she spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on repairs and painting.

Today the white paint is peeling off the red brick on the back of the house. The New England stone walls are collapsing. The tennis court is so overgrown that it’s easy to miss. And creeping vines have the kitchen shutters firmly in their grasp.

Le Beau Château has served for years now as an informal wildlife refuge for turkeys; deer; screech owls, barred owls, and great horned owls; goshawks, sharp-shinned hawks, and Cooper’s hawks; an occasional bald eagle; yellow-spotted salamanders; rare box turtles; and red and gray foxes. Chimney swifts nest in the stacks. The caretaker’s son
rehabbed injured and orphaned animals: raccoons, cottontail rabbits, deer. When Huguette’s attorney Don Wallace once came out for a tour, a goose named Curly untied his shoes.

When Huguette built a two-story addition at Le Beau Château in 1951, the stairway received a touch of whimsy: paintbrushes.
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The only personal touch in the twenty-two rooms is in the wing Huguette had constructed in the early 1950s. A graceful wooden staircase leads from the thirteen-hundred-square-foot bedroom up to a loft, a painter’s studio with sinks for washing brushes. On the staircase, every other baluster holding up the handrail is hand-carved in the shape of an artist’s brush.

THE VIRGIN
 

A
S SHE APPROACHED HER FIFTIES
and her mother grew frail, Huguette bought not only Le Beau Château but also major pieces of art and musical instruments, showing her father’s eye for betting on winners.

In May 1955, she added her third violin by Stradivari. These violins were hers, not among the four that Anna was lending to the Paganini Quartet. Huguette’s new violin was not just any ordinary Stradivarius. This was perhaps
the finest violin in the world not in a museum. Huguette selected the violin herself, making sure to negotiate a discount.

Made in 1709 in Cremona, Italy, this is the great Stradivarius violin, the one used by experts to date the beginning of his finest years. Aficionados can distinguish this violin at a great distance by sight, as easily as an electric guitar fan would know Keith Richards’s 1953 Fender Tele-caster, “Micawber.” A purchaser in Paris in the mid-1800s, seeing that the violin had never been opened for repair, exclaimed, “
C’est comme une pucelle!”
(It’s like a virgin!), and thereafter it was known as “La Pucelle,” meaning “the maid” or “the virgin.” That purchaser not only gave it a name but immediately added a distinctive carved wooden frontpiece representing Joan of Arc, “the Maid of France.”
The asking price for La Pucelle in 1955 was $55,000 at the famed Rudolph Wurlitzer Company on Forty-Second Street, but Huguette inquired what discount she could receive for paying cash. She was told 5 percent. A week later, when the bill of sale was drawn up, she had negotiated the discount to 10 percent, making the final price $49,500, or about $450,000 in today’s dollars, for one of the finest violins ever made.

Huguette took great care of La Pucelle, making sure it was serviced annually. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was one of her few regular adventures away from 907 Fifth Avenue. But when she played the violin, she used a lesser Strad from 1720, which she called her Traveler.