Empty Mansions

Rockefeller Center in New York City and the Rockefeller Foundation carry on that name. Clark did donate to churches and universities, and he frequently opened his home for charity galas. He built Columbia Gardens for the people of Butte. However, he rejected a friend’s advice to endow a great university in Montana. Though he lived to age eighty-six, he never fully entered Carnegie’s third stage.
    Out of his estate, estimated to be worth between $100 million and $250 million,W.A.’s will left only about $600,000 in cash to charity, mostly to social welfare causes emblazoned with the Clark name: $350,000 to the Paul Clark Home for children in Butte, named for a son who died as a teenager; $100,000 to the Katherine Stauffer Clark Kindergarten School in New York, named for his first wife, including money to continue his custom of giving Christmas presents to the children and to allow the children to spend a fortnight each year in the country; $100,000 to benefit his company mining town of Clarkdale, Arizona; and $25,000 to the Mary Andrews Clark Memorial Home for Women, honoring his mother, in Los Angeles.
    W.A. also remembered friends from long ago in Montana. He left $25,000 for aged, indigent, and disabled Masons; $2,500 to the Masons in Deer Lodge to be used for charity; $25,000 to each of his sisters; $10,000 each to two nieces and nephews; $10,000 to his business managers in Butte; $5,000 to his managers in Missoula; $2,500 to the editor of his newspaper and political adviser in Butte; $2,500 to his butler; his gold watch and chain to his elder son, Charlie; and his gold match safe to his younger son, Will.
    To Anna he left a limited sum, as he had promised his children from his first marriage. She received $2.5 million in cash, the furnishings from the Paris apartment, and an unknown amount already paid to her as a result of an antenuptial agreement referred to in the will. Although it was not specified in the will, Anna also received Bellosguardo, theirsummer home ninety miles up the coast from Los Angeles, in Santa Barbara.
    The rest of the estate, including all of Clark’s mining companies and his business empire, was divided among his five surviving children, Huguette and her four older half-siblings.
    It’s impossible to know the exact amount of W.A.’s estate. For tax purposes in Montana, it was reported to be only $48 million. If one uses $250 million, a commonly cited value, he easily ranks among the fifty richest Americans ever, relative to the economy of his time. The only ones more affluent at Clark’s death during the Roaring Twenties were the oilman John D. Rockefeller, the automobile maker Henry Ford, the banking Mellon brothers, and Cyrus H. K. Curtis, publisher of
The Ladies’ Home Journal
and
The Saturday Evening Post
. To put it another way, W.A. died with personal wealth equivalent to one day’s share of the entire gross national product in 1925. On that scale, he would rank third today on the Forbes 400, far ahead of Google’s founders or Rupert Murdoch, behind only Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, and just ahead of the industrialist Koch brothers, who have brought a new spotlight to the influence of money in politics.
    As an indication of his great love for his youngest child, who was still a minor when he signed his will, W.A. took special care to provide for her. In addition to her housing and education, he specified that Huguette should receive an allowance, up to $90,000 a year, or in today’s dollars about $1.1 million, until she reached age twenty-one. He explained that he wanted her to experience “the actual handling and care of money during her minority.”
    Others also wanted that opportunity, as Huguette had to face false claims to the copper fortune. In 1926, three sisters from Missouri presented themselves to the probate court in Butte, saying they were the daughters of W. A. Clark. Their case was a farce. The man whom Alma, Effie, and Addie Clark described as their father, William Anderson Clark, had, like W.A., taught school in Missouri and was a Mason, but for most of his life he’d been a druggist in Stewartsville, Missouri, a dealer in books and notions, while William Andrews Clark had graced the halls of Congress and the galleries of Paris. As Charlie Clark testified, his father “would not have been content to operate a farm, to conducta small business, a picayune business, when he was engaged in the big development that he was concerned with here in the West,