Empty Mansions

French.
    Pour vivre heureux, vivons caché
. To live happily, live hidden.

AUTHORS’ NOTE

 
    T HE LIVES OF H UGUETTE C LARK and her mysterious family, hidden in the shadows for so long, are illuminated now by an array of human sources, private documents, and public records.
    Our sources begin with Huguette herself, through her telephone calls with co-author Paul Newell. We also interviewed more than a hundred people—relatives, friends, employees, attorneys—who gave generously of their time and memories, sometimes with the understanding that we would not use their names. Their accounts are supplemented by the sworn testimony of fifty witnesses in the legal battle over Huguette’s estate, including her goddaughter, personal assistant, nurses, and doctors, as well as the relatives seeking her fortune.
    Luckily for us, Huguette kept nearly every important document in her life, and many papers that most of us toss out, even the first drafts of Christmas cards. We weren’t able to see everything in her archives, but we were able to read some twenty thousand pages of her personal and financial correspondence, including four thousand pages we had translated from the French. We read thousands of pages of notes made by her nurses in her twenty years in the hospital. We read correspondence that Huguette received from her attorneys and accountants; her income tax returns, bank statements, and canceled checks; and bills of sale for artwork, musical instruments, and furniture back to the early 1900s, as well as more recent inventories of her property. We read historical papers, including sections of her father’s journal and ledger from the 1860s and 1870s in Montana and genealogical entries in the Clark family Bible.
    To understand the Clarks and their world, we examined more than five thousand previously unpublished photographs from Huguette’s apartments, including those in her personal albums and snapshots of her dolls and dollhouses and her art projects. Perhaps more fascinating were her paintings, including those she owned, those she painted herself, and those painted of her by her painting instructor. Although private tours of her empty mansions were a window into her style and tastes duringvarious periods, the detailed photographs, both historic and recent, in which one can see the books and sheet music on her shelves and the framed photos on her bedside table, brought those empty rooms to life.
    Add to these the public records of her life: the 1900 Senate investigation and trial resulting in W. A. Clark’s resignation from the U.S. Senate; the transcript of a 1920s court battle in Montana over W.A.’s estate; marriage and divorce certificates; burial records; property records; census rolls; passenger registries from ocean liners; passport applications; and hundreds of books, scholarly theses, and newspaper and magazine articles.
    Also telling are the ephemera: a lock of her sister’s hair, a harp composition of “Sleeping Beauty,” and a menu in French from W.A.’s dinner celebrating his first election to the Senate. The menu, like the man, bears a permanent stain, a single drop of Bordeaux.

Huguette Clark was shy but not sad. Her friends and the few relatives who knew her described her as cheerful, gracious, stubborn, devoted to her art, and generous to friends and strangers.
( illustration credit ins.1 )

    The flamboyant W. A. Clark and his first wife, Kate, built this home in the mining town of Butte, Montana, in 1884–88. Designed to confer social status, it was easily the most expensive home in town, costing about $6 million in today’s currency.
( illustration credit ins.2 )

    Huguette, at about age four, sits with her doll collection on the porch of her father’s Butte mansion. W.A.’s two daughters from his second family—Andrée, born in 1902, and Huguette, born in 1906—stayed here in 1910–11 while their grand new home in New York was being finished.
( illustration credit ins.3 )

    On a family vacation in Connecticut in about 1912, near the time when the family held tickets on the
Titanic’s
return trip to Europe, Huguette sits with their father, W.A., while Andrée is beside their mother, Anna Eugenia LaChapelle Clark. The girls were about six and ten.
( illustration credit ins.4 )

    Though appearing reserved and even cold in public, Anna was warm and easygoing in private and had a salty sense of humor. The child of French Canadian immigrants who lived in a smoky mining section of