Empty Mansions

red with her eighteen-carat-gold and diamond lipstick holder, fixing her hair with her Cartier diamond and rock crystal hairpin, mending clothes with her fourteen-carat-gold safety pins, trimming her nails with her fourteen-carat-gold manicure set, carrying coins in her eighteen-carat-gold-mesh purse with five inset emeralds, and praying with fourteen-carat-gold and jade rosary beads. Her Tiffany toiletry case was engraved AEC, for Anna Eugenia Clark.
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    * The chaperone was Elizabeth Clark Abascal, who accompanied Anna to Paris with Elizabeth’s daughters, Anita and Mary.

SATURDAY AFTERNOONS FROM THREE TO SIX

 
    W HEN S ENATOR W. A. C LARK brought his newly revealed young bride to New York from Paris for a visit in 1905,he began a public campaign for acceptance into fashionable society. With an absence of subtlety, W.A. announced in the newspapers his plan to join the Social 400, New York’s informal list of old merchant and landowning families, a list guarded by Caroline Astor. The 400 may have been a dying concept by this time, but the Clarks and other nouveau riche newcomers still chafed under Mrs. Astor’s impenetrable defenses.
    Along with another “westerner” from Pennsylvania, Charles M. Schwab, who gave the world the steel beam and thus the skyscraper, W.A. threatened to set up their own social set if not added to the 400. After all, if the Vanderbilts had been admitted to the list, albeit with some reluctance, why not a couple of newer millionaires?
    A spouse with an outgoing personality might have helped W.A.’s social standing. But Anna, uninterested in the celebrity and gossip that their secret marriage had engendered, preferred to stay at home. W.A.’s wealth was enough to gain his admission to the proliferating social clubs of the era: the New York Yacht Club (with J. P. Morgan), the Lotos Club (called “the Ace of Clubs” by member Samuel Clemens), the National Arts Club (with Theodore Roosevelt), and, outside the city, the Sleepy Hollow Country Club (with the Astors and the Vanderbilts). His wife, however, rarely accompanied him, except to the opera and chamber concerts. Now in possession of wealth and power, Anna exhibited no ambition for social glory.
    So W.A. brought society to his home. After he settled his young family into the Clark mansion in early 1912, W.A. printed up cards, distributing them whenever he met a friendly face of the right social caste.
    This Card Will Admit _______ to the galleries at my residence, 962 Fifth Avenue, on _______, from 3 to 6 o’clock.
    Bearing a facsimile of his signature, the cards allowed New Yorkers to visit the Clark home, usually on Saturday afternoons, and to tour his five art galleries. If W.A.’s lineage could not impress the members of the 400, he could demonstrate his good taste through one of the best art collections in America. The art, said his eldest daughter Katherine, was “my father’s great joy in life.”
    Starting in 1878, W.A. was one of the best customers of the art dealers of Europe. At home in Butte, he was derided as “the Paris millionaire,” but he was more swayed by the opinion of a French ambassador, who praised Clark’s “finest collection of French art in the United States.”
    The mansion’s five art galleries were enormous windowless rooms under large skylights, with dark red woolen baize lining the walls of Istrian limestone. The art filled the walls, in rows stacked two or three high, as was common then in the galleries of Paris and the homes of New York.
    W.A.’s collection was an eclectic mix of the best of Europe: Rembrandt’s
Man with a Sheet of Music, The Judgment of Midas
by Rubens, the ephemeral ballet dancers of Degas, Van Goyen’s panoramic Dutch landscapes and seascapes, a sunny field in France by Rousseau, Gainsborough’s flattering portraits of the landed gentry, and drawings by Titian, Leonardo, and Raphael.
    The main picture gallery, a full ninety-five feet by twenty feet, doubled as a ballroom. Beyond was the small picture gallery, then two more galleries framing the music room, which contained Anna’s gilded concert pedal harps and a few of the seven pianos in the house. W.A. fancied more than paintings, with his galleries fringed by easels holding delicate lace from Venice and France. Guests walked on the finest great silk carpets from Persia and India and Turkey, fit for a royal tent or a throne.
    After W.A. had all these treasures installed in the house, he added few more,