Empty Mansions

deal of time travelling through the United States. I did not have the necessary time myself to devote to social obligations and their extensive requirements.… Then again, I wanted my child to be educated in America and brought up a resolute and patriotic American.
    • • •
    The marriage—and the baby—were a surprise to W.A.’s grown children from his first marriage. They suddenly had a new half-sister, not to mention a new stepmother who was younger than they were. His children were, as one headline put it, in for “A Very Rude Shock.” Their inheritance was now in peril. Their father was a widower, free to do as he pleased, but this match, to a nobody from Butte, certainly didn’t enhance the social standing of the Clark scions.
    After sending his announcement from Paris, W.A. visited his daughter Katherine in New York. After talking with her sister, May, she wrote to their brother Will:
    A line only, dearest Will, as of course you know by now of father’s marriage—and while both May and I are greatly grieved and dreadfully disappointed we must all stand by dear Father, and try and make it as easy for him as possible as already he realizes his mistake—your heart would have ached could you have seen him the night before he left us for St. Louis, and indeed I can’t get over the way he looked so badly. Don’t let anyone know I have written you—father will tell you himself—and dear, be as good and kind to him as you can be for it is hard for dear father.… Poor May is all broken up.
    If W.A. indeed realized the wedding was a mistake, there’s no indication that he treated Anna rudely. He spent far more time with her than he had with his first wife during their marriage, when he was primarily engaged in the acquisition of wealth and political power. He showered Anna with jewels and presents, and there is no indication that W.A. continued his tomcatting around. Well into his sixties, W.A. finally matured.
    The week after the announcement, W.A. wrote to son Will from the 1904 Democratic National Convention in St. Louis, assuring him that his “alliance” with Anna would not dim his affections for his adult children, that Anna did not have designs on his fortune, and that she would receive only a small sum after his death.
    In his public statement, W.A. had acknowledged that “it has been stated that my family objected to this union.” But he said that any initial apprehension of his children had been overcome and “their approval of these relations were so essential to my happiness.”
    There was speculation in the family that the birth of Andrée had been followed by a second pregnancy, a boy, Paul, who died within hours of his birth, and that this second event sparked Anna to pressure W.A. to announce a backdated marriage. The birth of a son, if it happened, is undocumented.
    Not everyone believed that W.A. and Anna were legally married, certainly not married in May 1901 in Marseille. Clark’s political opponents quickly pointed out that his own newspaper in Butte had interviewed him that month about his European travels, which by his account hadn’t taken him anywhere near Marseille. The supposed marriage also caused a legal complication. Montana law required a married man to obtain his wife’s signature if he signed a deed, and during recent years W.A. had signed several deeds, indicating on each one that he was an unmarried man. Either he was lying on the deeds or he was lying now.
    Aside from such political sniping, there wasthe Clark family Bible, where family marriages and births are listed. W.A.’s 1869 marriage to Kate L. Stauffer is recorded in his handwriting, but no marriage to Anna is mentioned there, though later deaths are listed. Perhaps that’s merely a sign of his first family’s reluctance to accept the younger second wife. The Bible had been in the home of W.A.’s mother in Los Angeles.
    When Anna was required to show proof of their marriage, in a Montana court after W.A.’s death, all she could offer was a postnuptial declaration that the couple signed in 1909 at the American embassy in Paris. In this document, W.A. and Anna swore under oath that “no record of said marriage is known to exist.”
    With or without a marriage certificate,Anna was now writing letters with her eighteen-carat-gold Cartier fountain pen, opening replies with her fourteen-carat-gold Tiffany letter opener, checking the time on her Cartier gold and diamond watch, applying a bit of dark