The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark (16 page)

Assigned to write a paper for Spence on “Happy Moments,” Huguette chose to describe self-sufficient activities:

Most teenagers tire of childhood toys, but Huguette still cherished her French comic books and her growing doll collection, housed in a separate room at the mansion. She treated her dolls with care. These porcelain lifelike objects reminded her of a more innocent time, when her existence was not so solitary.

S
unshine and blue skies, palm trees and white beaches, hot days and cooler nights. The summer of 1921 was magical for Huguette Clark, a perfect few months for a fifteen-year-old who was coming of age and discovering that she was attractive. Anna took her to Honolulu to stay at the most luxurious resort on the island, the Moana Hotel, a beachfront property where the Prince of Wales had tarried a year earlier. Jaquita and Margarita Vidal came along as their companions.

Huguette looks radiant in family photos as she and Jaquita frolic in the sand, hugging each other in a pose that borders on sapphic. The Vidal sisters dressed Huguette in imaginative costumes. In one photo, she has gone native in a grass hula skirt with her blonde hair wildly flying; in another, she is grown-up and alluring in a black lace flamenco-style dress, wearing dangling earrings with her hair pinned fashionably up, striking an insouciant pose. The senator was planning to join his family partly through their holiday, and Huguette, looking forward to his arrival, wrote to him about beach life.

The six-foot-three Duke Kahanamoku, the 1912 and 1920 Olympic swimming champion and the inventor of modern surfing, towers over Huguette in photographs, giving her an indulgent smile as she gazes at him with total adoration. Duke posed in the ocean with Huguette and a surfboard, and with her and her parents at the Outrigger Club, leaning against a canoe.

The Olympian was a regular at the Moana Hotel, earning extra cash by entertaining the guests, such as the Prince of Wales, whom he’d taught to surf a year earlier. Kahanamoku would paddle out on a long boat a half mile offshore with his pupils, and then show them how to catch a wave back to the beach.

Anna Clark became so fond of the Hawaiian beach boys who entertained the family that she promised to pay for the education of Duke’s younger brother, Sam Kahanamoku, as well as two of his friends, Pau Keolahu, who wanted to study the violin, and Joe Bisho, who had been accepted at a St. Louis college but could not afford the tuition. The Clarks sailed with Sam and the rest of their entourage to San Francisco and checked into the St. Francis Hotel. But the Belmont Military Academy, the school they had chosen for Sam, refused to accept the dark-skinned Hawaiian, claiming there were no slots available.

The aging senator stayed out of the resulting furor. “The affair is entirely in Mrs. Clark’s hands,” the copper mogul told the
San Francisco Call
from his hotel room. “I do not think any attempt will be made to put the boy into another school. We will probably send him back to Hawaii. Mrs. Clark is the only one who can say anything definitely about the case and she has gone to a moving picture show for the evening.” Sam Kahanamoku told the
San Francisco Chronicle
that Mrs. Clark “decided I had better start back… but I pleaded with her and she said I might remain for two weeks before returning. She is very gracious and kind.”

Anna would later tell friends that she bought Sam Kahanamoku new clothes and a car as a consolation prize. Returning to the beaches of Hawaii worked out for him: Sam won a bronze swimming medal in the 100-meter sprint at the 1924 Olympics swim meet, while his brother Duke took the silver and Johnny Weissmuller won the gold. The Hawaiian surfing brothers continued to enrapture wealthy tourists, and Duke would later become the paramour of tobacco heiress Doris Duke.

The senator’s failure to get Sam Kahanamoku into Belmont Military Academy was the least of his worries. Two of Clark’s older children were enmeshed in scandals, one hushed up for years and the other about to become embarrassingly public. His namesake, William Clark Jr., twice widowed with a teenage son (Tertius), was now pursuing young men in Los Angeles, and discretion was not his strong point. His older brother, Charles, had written Will Jr. a pained letter in 1920 urging him to break off a relationship with Harrison Post, a San Francisco store clerk.

“Post bears the reputation of being a degenerate of the Oscar Wilde type,” Charles Clark wrote to his brother. “When Maizie [their older sister, Mary] was visiting you she received two anonymous letters on the subject, which she destroyed… You can’t afford to have your name tainted and in justice to yourself, the boy, your sisters and father.” Ignoring his older brother’s advice, Will Jr. put Post on his payroll and built him a house across the street from his own mansion in Los Angeles. But Junior’s love life remained private for now.

The talk of the town in Manhattan in the spring of 1922 was the divorce of William Clark’s oldest daughter, Mary. The convent-school-educated Mary had become known for her romantic misadventures. In the midst of her first divorce, she had been sued for alienation of affection by the wife of a male friend. Now Mary was divorcing her second husband, lawyer Charles Kling, and the details were ugly. In an effort to keep the divorce out of the newspapers, she had filed the legal papers in outlying Rockland County, but the press discovered
the story. It was a titillating tale: Mary insisted in court papers that Charles Kling had repeatedly committed adultery. But even though she claimed to be the injured party, she ended up paying her husband a $580,000 settlement.

William Clark was pained by his oldest daughter’s multiple trips to the altar, but what really worried him was the fate of his youngest and most naïve heir, Huguette. Realistic about his own age, Clark, then eighty-three, did not know if he would be alive when suitors came to call. To protect Huguette, he began to repeatedly tell her that she needed to be wary of the motives of men and even potential female friends. Huguette would later repeat her father’s instructions to her closest friend, Suzanne Pierre, who passed on the stories to her granddaughter, Kati Despretz Cruz. “Her father always said to her, ‘No one will really love you, you have to be careful. No one will love you for who you are. They will love you for your money,’ ” recounted Cruz. William Clark’s understandable fatherly concerns were crippling to an insecure young girl.

Huguette was going through the giggly teenage phase of longing for a boyfriend. She entertained a group of girlfriends at the society restaurant Sherry’s, just a month before her sixteenth birthday. Huguette was celebrating early because her parents had booked passage for the three of them on a steamer to Europe, with plans to see the Passion Play at Oberammergau and visit France and Italy. What Huguette remembered from this trip was an awakening sense of the possibilities of her future. Nearly eighty years later, at Christmas 2001, she wrote a revealing note to Sheila Lodge, the former mayor of Santa Barbara. After thanking Lodge for sending an account of her recent travels, Huguette added, “The trip that you made to beautiful Venice reminded me of the one I made at the age of sweet sixteen. I greatly enjoyed the gondolas and the singing of the gondoliers. It was all so very romantic.”

Huguette’s visits to Europe inevitably involved a crash course in art history, joining her parents on visits to painters’ salons, art galleries, and museums. Art remained a way that she could connect with her father. Huguette and her mother were drawn to the work of the Impressionists, the graceful dancers of Degas, the hauntingly
beautiful water lilies of Monet, and the lush scenes by Renoir, while William Andrews Clark retained a taste for old masters, religious scenes, and the Barbizon school. He could talk knowledgeably for hours to his daughter about painters and their technique and the history of prices at auction. His passion was acquiring art, but Huguette’s would become creating it.

In 1922, New York State enacted its first residency law, leveling taxes on anyone who spent more than seven months living in the state. William Clark had always claimed Butte, Montana, as his primary residence, and the frugal mogul was determined to avoid high New York State taxes. So he shut down his Fifth Avenue mansion that fall. On September 11 he sent a telegram to Anna, who had lingered on in Paris: “Regrets that we had to keep the house closed and not even allow the pool to be used on account of the law on taxation.”

To allow Huguette to continue at the Spence School, the family rented a suite of rooms at the Ambassador Hotel, a luxury building at Park Avenue and Fifty-Second Street that the Clarks favored from then on whenever their residence was closed. At Spence that fall, Huguette welcomed new classmates with familiar faces, the three daughters of her San Francisco–based half brother, Charles Clark, and his wife, Celia. The couple had separated and Celia had decamped to Paris, so they sent their three teenage daughters—the music-loving pianist Agnes, the polo-playing Patricia, and the sweet-natured Mary—to attend school in New York. As William Clark wrote to his wife from Butte on October 3, 1922: “Sweetheart Cherie… I was glad to have a message from Charles of their safe arrival. I suppose the little girls will enter the Spence school. I hope that you are all well.”

Huguette became close to her niece Agnes Clark, two years her junior, thanks to their mutual interest in music. When the senator returned to New York and reopened his house, his three granddaughters often came over for Sunday lunch. After witnessing the rocky relationship between her own parents, Agnes was so struck by the evident affection between William Clark and his wife that she mentioned it years later to her son Paul. “Anna would sit on the senator’s
lap and pull his beard,” recalls Paul Albert. “She was so much younger that [it] lent itself to that kind of generational play.”

Agnes also noticed that Anna seemed extremely protective of her shy daughter. Huguette’s fascination with her doll collection puzzled her nieces, since they had outgrown such childish things. The young women were especially taken aback when Huguette, in madcap heiress fashion, brought a doll dressed up in finery as an accessory to an evening black-tie event. A photo shows Huguette, wearing pearls and a gown with a doll perched in her lap, seated demurely next to an attractive young man in a tuxedo, who appears to be unfazed by his date’s prop. Huguette’s niece Mary Clark looks stiffly at the camera, as if embarrassed to be there, while Anna Clark smiles serenely. Later on, these nieces would pass along to their own children and grandchildren tales of Huguette’s eccentricities.

But the Spence School during that era was used to the quirks of its patrician students. Huguette would later recall that one of her younger classmates was a Bouvier, a cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and Lee Bouvier Radziwill. That Spence classmate was Edie Bouvier Beale, a beauty who was eleven years Huguette’s junior. Edie would later become famous with her mother as the reclusive broken-down socialites of
Grey Gardens
, living in a deteriorating estate in East Hampton. Their dependent mother-daughter relationship and sad lives would be the fodder for a documentary, musical, and movie.

The acclaimed Polish artist Tadé Styka sailed on the
Majestic
from Paris to New York on January 4, 1923, to attend an exhibit of his work at the prestigious Knoedler Gallery. Deluged with requests for portraits, he set up shop on the gallery’s second floor for six months and scheduled sittings. The onetime child prodigy was so much in demand that the
Washington Post
wrote, “The craze that is sweeping New York for Tadé Styka’s portraits is most extraordinary… Ain’t nature grand when one becomes the fad of the fashionable world.” William Clark, who had returned to New York from Montana, ordered eleven portraits of himself in a burst of enthusiasm as well as portraits of Anna, her sister, Amelia, Huguette, and even several
versions of Andrée, based on photographs. The family members spent hours posing for the debonair bachelor artist.