Empty Mansions

hadsold Madame Cézanne. We’re not sure what she got for the portrait, but it was enough to continue on to her second errand, on West Fifty-Seventh Street near Carnegie Hall, where she spent $200,000 at Emil Herrmann’s penthouse studio.
    Anna and the chauffeur were carrying four instruments in their cases—each three hundred years old, with finely carved maple backs and thick orange varnish: two violins, an exceptionally rare Stradivarius viola, and, for Maas, a cello, inscribed inside in Latin in the hand of Antonio Stradivari himself: “Made in my ninety-third year.” These were among the finest musical instruments in the world, and Anna had bought them on a whim with the money from the Cézanne.
    “Now, Robert,” she said, “you have a wonderful quartet of Strads to use. Go and form a string quartet.”
    At that moment was born the Paganini Quartet, which recorded for RCA Victor, performed the full Beethoven quartet cycle in six concertsat the Library of Congress, and presented public concerts in halls around the world.
    In addition to founding a world-class quartet, Anna had removed an impediment to her daughter coming downstairs to visit.
    Besides, the Clarks had another Cézanne.
    Sometimes even Huguette’s closest niece couldn’t get in to see her. One day in the mid-1950s, Agnes brought her children by to visit, but Huguette said she had a little cold. Not one to take no for an answer, Agnes sent word through the doorman that she would go out by the street and wave to Huguette. So there they stood on the sidewalk along Fifth Avenue, waving up at the twelfth-floor windows, unable to see whether Huguette was waving back.
SIXTEEN FIRST DATES

 
    A FTER HER DIVORCE , Huguette reclaimed her maiden name, but she kept the “Mrs.,” perhaps indicating that she was no longer in the market for a husband. For the rest of her life, her staff called her Mrs. Clark or Madame Clark, in the French style of extending that title of marriage to older, unmarried women.
    There were newspaper accounts in 1931, apparently false, that Huguette was ready to wed an Irish nobleman named Edward FitzGerald, the Seventh Duke of Leinster. The duke, a compulsive gambler and ne’er-do-well, later admitted in court that he was bankrupt when he came to America “with the idea of marrying someone rich.” He died by suicide, penniless.
    Not that a marriage for Huguette was out of the question. Anna made further attempts to find her daughter a husband, even into Huguette’s forties, but only within a carefully circumscribed group of friends, even relatives. She was scheduled to go on dates with one young man in particular, appointments that became a comical series of sixteen attempted first dates.
    Anna’s dear sister, Amelia, was married to T. Darrington Semple, the treasurer of suburban Westchester County, New York. It was Amelia’s third marriage and his second. He had a son, T. Darrington, Jr., known as Darry, who served in the Army Air Corps during World War II, graduated from Harvard, and studied law in Alabama. Darry was family, but not a blood relative, and he was twenty years younger than Huguette.
    Speaking sixty years later from a nursing home in Montgomery, Alabama, Darry described how Anna and Amelia conspired to set him up on dates with Huguette. He said the Clarks were kind and generous, observing that “they gave money away like it was water.” As for Huguette, he said, “from all the family stories, she was just shy, introverted, didn’t like crowds. But very smart.” Huguette was not unattractive,with her Japanese-print, floor-length summer dresses. He was willing to go out with her, but there were complications.
    “I had sixteen dates to meet her, a proper social date,” Darry said. “Every time, her hair wasn’t right, or she had to do something else, or there was some other excuse. Every time, she couldn’t go. Sixteen times it got called off at the last minute.”
    He soon found another woman to marry, and they had children and grandchildren. In 2010, when Huguette Clark was in the hospital at age 104 and Darry Semple was suffering from Parkinson’s disease, both of them in the last year of their lives, he still had his sense of humor. “If I saw her now,” he said, “I’d say, ‘Let me know if you got your hair one.’ ”
    He never knew that Huguette already had a boyfriend.

LOVE OF HALF A LIFE

 
    T HE CLOSEST ROMANTIC CONNECTION of Huguette’s life began on the beaches of