Empty Mansions

father, Pierre, had been a tailor and then began selling medical potions such as eye lotions. Later he dispensed eyeglasses. Though his tombstone in Butte’s Catholic cemetery identifies him as “Dr. Pierre J. LaChapelle,” his obituary says he was studying medicine at the time of his death.
    The father was still living when Anna fell under W.A.’s sponsorship. The father’s obituary from 1896 places eighteen-year-old Anna already in Paris,studying the concert harp and refining her French. To add some respectability to the arrangement, Anna was described as W.A.’s ward.Court records in Butte show no such guardianship.
    At W.A.’s Paris apartment on avenue Victor Hugo, Anna was chaperoned by one of W.A.’s sisters, * who was there with two daughters. These nieces of W.A.’s described Anna as lively and in love with music.She had a puckish sense of humor that kept them entertained. She also liked to joke abouther unusual eyes: one blue and one brown. Back in Butte, people noticed that Anna’s mother, now a widow, had moved into a fine home one block west of the Clark mansion.
    By 1900, as W.A. was serving in the U.S. Senate, Anna visited him in Washington. Newspapers reported that she was “themost interesting lady in Washington,” which might have been a polite way of calling her the most gossiped-about woman.
The Denver Post
said she had “a typical French face and the great soulful eyes which are often associated with the artistic temperament.” The papers quoted W.A.’s friends as saying that the couple would soon wed and that W.A. planned an opera career for Anna under the stage name Montana. For good measure, the papers added the fiction that Anna’s father had been killed in one of W.A.’s mines, stirring the magnanimous industrialist to take pity on the family.
    • • •
    While Anna was in Paris, W.A. had other romantic entanglements as the new century began.
    First, there wasHattie Rose Laube of Huron, South Dakota, a temperance lecturer and political campaigner, who let it be known in 1901 that W.A. had written her a promise of marriage from Europe. All the newspapers covered her announcement, although the Clark family dismissed the claim as false.
    Then there wasthe paternity suit filed by a young newspaperwoman named Mary McNellis. W.A. had met Mary at the 1896 Democratic NationalConvention in Chicago, where he was a delegate. In 1901, while W.A. was serving in the Senate, Mary brought a lawsuit against him in New York. She claimed that in October 1900, over a dinner of oysters and champagne at the old Waldorf Hotel, W.A. had promised to marry her. She sought $150,000 for breach of promise, claiming that she had been seduced, debauched, and impregnated.
    W.A. admitted in court papers to knowing Mary and to socializing three or four times with this “rather agreeable and very intelligent young woman.” But he vigorously denied “that I ever promised to marry Miss McNellis, or ever made love to her or induced her to believe that I was going to marry her.” Court records show that a referee found in W.A.’s favor, ordering Mary to pay the senator $1,125 in court costs.
    The court records were sealed, keeping the case out of the newspapers for two years, during which time W.A. was courting Anna. Then in 1903, it was revealed that Mary had wanted her attorney to push for a jury trial, but the attorney had persuaded her to accept the referee’s decision and give up the case. Mary was surprised to discover that her attorney had owned part of a mining company in British Columbia and that the mine had recently been purchased by W. A. Clark. She filed an appeal, and at that point all the newspapers covered the McNellis case.
    Word of the case may have reached Paris, where twenty-five-year-old Anna was still studying the harp. W.A. traveled there at least twice a year by steamship. The girl from the Butte boardinghouse had adopted chic Parisian styles, with hemlines at the ankle and a high waist defined by a luxurious sash. Her brown hair was cut short in bangs hanging nearly to her deep-set eyes. And she began sporting a few expensive gifts: abracelet with 36 sapphires and 126 small diamonds, a pair of tortoiseshell combs each with 320 diamonds, and a Cartier two-strand pearl necklace with a seven-carat diamond clasp.
UNITED VERDE

 
    W.A . MOVED from rich to superrich after representing Montana at the 1885 World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans.There he