Empty Mansions

find a husband.
    A newspaper cartoon imagined the life of Huguette, the “spoiled little rich girl.” Breakfast in bed served by a French waitress. Stepping into her limousine, bound for a shopping tour to spend $333 a day. Donning gorgeous evening clothes and setting out for the opera. Attending a debutantedance, where, because of her wealth and beauty, she is the center of attention.

    Huguette poses for a photograph in her debutante days, a time when young ladies were presented to society so they could attract a husband. She graduated from high school at a time when most of the girls at Miss Spence’s planned to get married, but in a few years most in the graduating classes were looking forward to college.
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    In truth, Huguette focused more attention on her fellow Spence alumnae, playing hostess for luncheon parties for her debutante friends at Pierre’s French restaurant. A newspaper society photograph inadvertently captured her. The photo concentrates on a beautiful young woman in a sleeveless gown, seated at the center of a party, smiling as two tuxedoed young men ask her to dance. The woman is not Huguette, although she is in the photo, sitting off to the side, out of the limelight. And in the background of the party, another man sits by himself. His name is Bill Gower.
    In December 1927, Mrs. W. A. Clark announced the engagement of her daughter, Huguette Marcelle, to William MacDonald Gower. Bill was a year older than Huguette, a tall, not unattractive man. They had known each other since they were children. There are signs that it may have been an arranged marriage, an attempt by Anna to find someone close to the family to wed her quiet daughter. Or it may have been an attempt to separate Huguette from any possible entanglement with Tadé Styka, her painting instructor. It could have just been time for marriage, and this was the young man she liked.
    This was not the usual Clark marriage. W.A.’s children from his first marriage had aimed higher, shooting for European royalty or its American equivalent. When Katherine married a descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, W.A. gave her a present of $4 million inreal estate and issued six thousand invitations to her wedding, held just two weeks after he was forced to resign from the Senate.

    Huguette’s husband, Bill Gower, was a Princeton graduate and law student working as a clerk on Wall Street. They wed at Bellosguardo in 1928, when Huguette was twenty-two and Bill twenty-three.
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    The Gowers were certainly not poor. They lived in suburban New Rochelle, had a Park Avenue apartment, and spent summers playing pinochle and tennis in Lake Placid, New York. Bill had been on the track team and active in theatricals at the elite Trinity School in Manhattan and then received his Princeton degree in history at age twenty, one of the youngest members of the class of 1925. While studying law at Columbia, he was employed at thirty dollars a week at the firm of J. & W. Seligman, an investment bank that had financed Jay Gould’s railroads and the Panama Canal. While the bride-to-be was a Roman Catholic and the daughter of a Democratic senator, her fiancé was a Presbyterian and a Republican.
    Bill was also the son of W. A. Clark’s accountant, William Bleckly Gower, the longtime comptroller of the United Verde and twenty other mining companies. As part of his service to the Clarks, the elderGower had presented a paper at the American Mining Congress in Denver in 1920 strategizing how to fight the onerous burden of taxes placed on W.A. and other mine owners by World War I, the same war that was making them rich. Because Huguette was now a co-owner of the Clark empire she had inherited from her father, her employee would now be her father-in-law.
    IN CONVERSATION WITH HUGUETTE

 
    Huguette recalled the 1925 earthquake in Santa Barbara in a conversation in August 1999, as she had been watching TV news of the devastating earthquake in Turkey. She was nineteen when the quake struck California.
    “I was in Santa Barbara during the 1925 earthquake.… Thirteen people were killed.… The movie theater we used to go to—that all came down. Imagine! Many people would have been killed.… It was six in the morning, so many people were saved.”
    You were at Bellosguardo in Santa Barbara at the time? I asked.
    “Yes. That’s why Mother built another house, because it wasn’t very solid.… It was