Empty Mansions

Angeles.
    Yet Mangam may have been right. Seventy years later, Huguette would be asked about her brief marriage by her nurse, Hadassah Peri. An immigrant, the nurse summarized Huguette’s answer in broken English: “It didn’t stay long. On my honeymoon, I have to go home.”
RENO-VATED

 
    T O FORMALLY END HER MARRIAGE , Huguette left New York by private railcar, headed for Reno, Nevada. Anna went with her. It was May 1930, nearly two years after her wedding, though the couple had already been separated for more than a year. Before leaving on the trip, Huguette completed the purchase of a painting, one of Monet’s Water Lilies, from a dealer in Paris.
    Divorces were difficult to obtain everywhere in the United States in the early 1900s, especially in heavily Roman Catholic states such as New York, where the only legal ground for dissolving a marriage wasadultery. These restrictions presented a business opportunity for states willing to grant divorces easily with short residency requirements. Before Nevada had gambling, it had divorce. In 1927, it had reduced its residency rule to three months, solidifying the state’s status as “the Great Divide.” Before the decade ended, more than thirty thousand couples had “Reno-vated” their marriages.

    Newspapers speculated about the reasons for Huguette and Bill’s Reno divorce in 1930. This article says the heiress was more interested in art, and the young financial clerk more interested in making a fortune. The floor plan shows the Reno hotel floor Huguette and her mother occupied.
( illustration credit6.4 )
    Though the Clarks kept to themselves for their three months in Reno, their desire for privacy attracted attention. The town usually yawned at wealthy divorce vacationers—Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., had made do in Reno with a single room—but Huguette and Anna rented an entire floor of the fashionable Riverside Hotel, arriving with a retinue of six servants. One headline summarized crisply, “Reno Agog.”
    The deed was done on August 11, 1930, with a quick visit to court. Bill did not appear to contest the divorce, which in the court papers was ascribed to his alleged desertion.
    Her divorce secured,Huguette sailed again from San Francisco to Honolulu, this time with her mother, on a reverse Hawaiian honeymoon.
DISSOLUTION

 
    T HE W. A. C LARK BUSINESS EMPIRE was not built for longevity, collapsing soon after its founder handed it to his children.
    While his Gilded Age contemporaries typically operated through hierarchies of executives and managers, creating vast corporate entities, W.A. ran his companies as essentially sole proprietorships, which he ruled autocratically. Having attended to every detail of his companies personally W.A. failed in succession planning.
    In August 1928, three years after W.A. died, his heirs cashed out of the Clark interests in Montana, selling out to his longtime opponent, the Anaconda Company, which had taken over the Daly interests. Now the Clarks had no real connection to Montana except Will’s lakefront lodge. They still held the family’s largest asset, the United Verde copper mine in Arizona.
    Sons were expected to take over a business, but W.A.’s two sons were dissolute in their personal habits and enthusiasms. And they were not blessed with their father’s longevity.
    Charlie Clark, the older son and chairman of the United Verde Copper Company, lived like a European prince. His drinking, gambling, and womanizing were well chronicled. He had his own private racetrack at his San Mateo estate, El Palomar, and the longest private railcar ever built, which he sold to Howard Hughes. Charlie married three times and gave hardly anything to charity. He died of pneumonia in April 1933 in New York, at age sixty-one, having never achieved the sobriety his father hoped for him.
    His younger brother had pursuits of a more intellectual sort. W.A. Jr., known as Will, had a law degree from the University of Virginia, ran minor industries with his father’s financing in Montana, and was vice president of the United Verde. After settling in Los Angeles in 1907, Will built an elaborate jewel-box Italian Renaissance library with rare books on shelves made of copper. He specialized in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature, and also built perhaps the finestcollection pertaining to Oscar Wilde. A music lover and skilled violinist, Will founded the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in 1919 and subsidized it for