Empty Mansions

its first eight years of operation. He was also a major donor in the construction of the Hollywood Bowl, an outdoor amphitheater.
    Will died in June 1934 at age fifty-seven of a heart attack at his Mowitza Lodge in Montana. At his funeral in Los Angeles, his father’s favorite poem, “Thanatopsis,” was read by a Shakespearean actor. He was laid to rest in the most exquisite private mausoleum in Los Angeles, on an island in the center of a scenic pond at Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery.
    Will’s reputation was marred after his death by the tell-all biography published by a college friend and former employee, William Mangam. Will was labeled as a binge drinker and a profligate and reckless homosexual and chaser of much younger men. Such claims were more shocking in the Los Angeles of the 1930s than today, and their truth has not been established. Mangam made other conjectures that turned out to be wrong. We have only his word, because Will’s papers were burned after his death.
    His generosity is better documented. He willed his home compound and his library to the public institution that became the University of California, Los Angeles. He gave a building to the University of Nevada, Reno, to honor his first wife, and another to the University of Virginia to honor his second. A statue of Beethoven marks Will’s founding of the Philharmonic—in unusual fashion for a Clark, he said he didn’t want a statue of himself. The statue now stands forlornly in a remote corner of Pershing Square, a gathering area for the city’s homeless.
    Will Clark left little to his relatives, and a large share of his estate went to the seventeen-year-old son of his housekeeper. George Palé, child of a Basque immigrant whose husband had abandoned her, was eight or nine when he met Will, who paid for his schooling. They spent most weekends together, and George spent weeks during the summer at the lodge in Montana. After Will’s own son died in 1932, Will began to talk of adopting George, with George’s mother’s permission. He began signing his letters “Your father” and “Daddy Clark.” He also referred toGeorge fondly as “Sonny” and “General Pershing,” reflecting the family’s fondness for the general who saved France. Will’s letters to young George show a touching paternal love. George explained, “Mr. Clark told me that I filled a void in his heart after the death of his son.” After receiving his inheritance, George married a trombonist’s daughter from the Los Angeles Philharmonic and named his first son Clark.
    The family’s best hope for an executive had been Will’s only child, the manager of the United Verde. W. A. Clark III was known as Billy, or within the family as Tertius, the Latin word for third. In May 1932, at age twenty-nine, W. A. Clark III died while taking flying lessons with Jack Lynch, a former barnstorming buddy of Charles Lindbergh. It’s not clear who was at the controls, but Clark and Lynch were practicing flying blind, with the windshield covered, just as Lindbergh had flown from New York to Paris in 1927 with a gas tank blocking his forward view. They crashed near Clemenceau, Arizona, not far from the United Verde mine. Tertius’s young wife saw the plane go down.
    This run of male self-destruction left the empire in the hands of W.A.’s daughters, who showed little interest in business. Katherine died in 1933, May had no husband or son with business experience, and Huguette was in her twenties.
    Although copper was at a historic low price during the Depression days of 1935, May and Huguette sold off the United Verde mine in Arizona. The last mine of W. A. Clark, who had built a model company town with good healthcare and fair wages for his workers, was sold to the Phelps Dodge Corporation, notorious for its anti-union activity.
    W. A. Clark’s empire had been dissolved, and his name drifted toward obscurity. The abandoned home of his grandson W.A. III outside the model mining town of Clarkdale remained vacant for eighty years. It was eventually used as a set for a low-budget film about a haunted brothel and in 2010 was destroyed by fire.
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    In Montana, the legacy of W. A. Clark is still debated.
    First, mining is a proud part of the state’s history. Fourteen steel structures from the mines still rise over Butte today. These headframes were used to support the ten-ton cables that hoisted men, mules, and equipmentin and out of the mines. The men called them