Empty Mansions

something, you know, all that shaking. Terrible, yes. But it was nothing in comparison to Turkey.”

    Huguette in her wedding gown, 1928
. ( illustration credit6.3 )
    • • •
    Huguette had the experience of an elaborate society wedding in New York, but not as a bride. When she was seventeen, in January 1924, she was abridesmaid for her half-niece, Katherine Morris Hall. And in 1928, Huguette was again a bridesmaid for a friend, Emily Hall Tremaine, who became a prominent art collector and patron of Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. Emily credited Huguette with introducing her to great art and the value of artistic expression. At Emily’s wedding, Huguette was dressed in a pink taffeta frock and a Juliet cap; she carried spring flowers.
    Her own wedding was a private one, held in Santa Barbara at the Clark summer home, Bellosguardo. W.A. and Anna had vacationed on the California coast with Huguette in 1923 and then decided to buy a home there. A few months after W.A.’s death in 1925, the home was shaken in the June earthquake, which burst a dam and started a fire, destroying much of Santa Barbara’s downtown. After the earthquake, Anna began making plans to renovate and expand the home, but it remained livable enough for Huguette’s wedding.
    Mr. and Mrs. William Gower were married by a Catholic priest on August 18, 1928. The bride wore a formal white gown of lace with a nearly endless cathedral train. The Santa Barbara newspaper,
The Morning Press
, struggled for any scraps of news: “Miss Clark and her mother have been at their Santa Barbara home, Bellosguardo, since their return from Europe early this summer and have taken an active part in the summer social life.… The wedding will be extremely quiet.”
    Her maid of honor, one of the few guests other than family, was the wife of Dr. Lyle, the Clark family physician. The groom was twenty-three, the bride twenty-two. A special car was ready for the honeymoon. Anna had bought a gray-green 1927 Rolls-Royce with silver door handles and a black leather top. It cost $25,750, or about $300,000 in today’s dollars. This was the Phantom I, a town car in which the driver sat out in the open air while the passengers enjoyed the comfort and quiet in the salon, as the rear passenger seat was called. The Clark chauffeur, Walter Armstrong, described driving Huguette and Bill around the West before the couple left from San Francisco on a honeymoon cruise to Hawaii, accompanied by the bride’s governess, Madame Sandré.
    Huguette and Bill were accosted by a newspaper photographer. They posed awkwardly. And then Huguette was trapped for a photo alone. She stands swathed in fur, clutching her handbag tightly, her usual strand of pearls around her neck, her wrists decorated by Cartier Art Deco bracelets of diamonds and emeralds. She looks most uncomfortable.
    This was not the last photograph taken of Huguette, but it was the last the public would see while she lived for the next eight decades.
    • • •
    At home again in New York, the newlyweds moved into her mother’s building, 907 Fifth Avenue, with their wedding gifts, including a fifteen-inch sterling silver serving platter with Huguette’s new monogram, “H.C.G.,” and their wedding date, “8-18-1928.” They took a subscription to Box 9 for matinees at the Metropolitan Opera, and Tadé Styka painted Bill Gower’s portrait.
    “No married couple,” the
New York Herald
opined, “ever started married life under more brilliant auspices.”
    Within nine months, the newspapers had caught on to a split. Bill was back with his parents on Park Avenue. A typical newspaper headline of the time read: “Why America’s $50,000,000 Heiress Cast Off Her $30-a-Week Prince Charming.”
    Some papers blamed the groom. “Those who should know whereof they speak tell me the cause for the failure of the union of nine months can be laid directly at young Gower’s door,” wrote a gossip columnist. Others said Huguette was simply interested in art, while he was interested in finance. The story among Huguette’s half-siblings was that she didn’t want what marriage implied, physically. The same bell was rung in a bitter tell-all biography of W. A. Clark and his family in 1939: “Huguette refused to consummate the marriage.” The author, William D. Mangam, must have gotten his information from his former employer and law school buddy, Huguette’s half-brother Will, who lived all the way across the country in Los