Empty Mansions

Normandy. On their summer jaunts to Trouville before World War I, the Clarks made friends with a family by the name of Villermont. The grandfather was a painter, as were the mother and father, and they must have had much to discuss with the art-collecting Americans. The Villermonts were a proud old Roman Catholic family, with roots in the French nobility but not much money to show for it since the Revolution. One of their sons was just two years older than Huguette.
    Etienne Allard de Villermont was called Etienne (pronounced AY-tyin), the French name for Stephen. Although Etienne and Huguette played together as school-age children, they didn’t cement their friendship until he came to America in the 1930s. The Marquis de Villermont was a well-known name in the society columns of New York and Los Angeles from 1935 to 1944. He attended parties with Hollywood royals Errol Flynn and Pola Negri, and also with actual royalty: Russian princes, British countesses, and Indian maharajahs. And he was a frequent guest of Anna and Huguette Clark at society dinners, musical afternoons at 907 Fifth Avenue, and during their summer vacations at Bellosguardo in Santa Barbara.
    Etienne was tall, with brown hair, a kind face, and a debonair manner. He looked dapper in his black bow tie, with a sharp jaw and high forehead.A French book about high-society parties in Trouville in the late 1930s described the marquis as a handsome man with a flair for playing the piano at parties.

    Marquis Etienne de Villermont in 1936.
( illustration credit7.1 )
    In 1936, an announcement was made of the engagement of the French nobleman to an American heiress, not from a copper fortune but from coffee. Before there was Starbucks, there was Arbuckles’, the first national coffee brand, known as “the cowboy’s favorite.” Etienne snagged an Arbuckles’ heiress.Newspaper front pages across the country showed Etienne with tall redhead Claire Smith, who was known for wearing $1.5 million in jewels just for an average evening.
    It was not unusual for Europeans of noble birth to come to America shopping for heiresses to refill their coffers, as the Irish duke had done in 1931 when his name was linked to Huguette’s. The newspapers in 1936 said the coffee heiress had chosen the marquis over his best friend, a Russian prince. But a month later,Walter Winchell, the nation’s best-known gossip columnist, said mysteriously that it had been called off.
    In May 1939,Etienne was back in Winchell’s “On Broadway” column in more than two thousand newspapers, with a new heiress: “The Marquis de Villermont and Huguett [
sic
] Clark probably will wed this summer.” It had been three years since Etienne’s engagement broke up, and nine years since Huguette was divorced. Both were now approaching their middle thirties.
    Etienne’s source of income was a bit vague. While Winchell said the marquis was “due for a post with the French Diplomatic Service,” one newspaper said he was an importer of French perfumes. Another said he was representing France at the New York World’s Fair in 1939–40, as the French fell under the thumb of the Nazis.
    In fact, the family’s greatest source of support was Anna Clark. W.A. and Anna had sent money to the Villermonts for decades. In 1942, during World War II, the Clarks apparentlyhelped Etienne find a position with the new Vermont Copper Company, formed to take advantage of the wartime demand for the metal. Etienne became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1943. The president of the copper company was a Clark attorney, the father of Anna’s goddaughter Ann Ellis—who also visited the family in France in 1949, a visit arranged by Anna. She recalled Etienne as “a quite handsome Frenchman,” and the family farm quite simple. Etienne’s extended family kept mentioning how grateful they were to him for helping support them, Ann Ellis recalled, though she said it seemed clear that in fact the money was coming from Anna Clark.
    Though Huguette never becamethe Marquise de Villermont, she remained deeply interested in royalty the rest of her life, a theme infusing her artwork and her reading. For one of her Japanese projects in the 1950s, she was ordering a silk costume for a marquise, the wife of a marquis, when her intermediary sent the bad news that noble titles had been abolished in Japan. Still, into old age, she was an avid reader of the magazines that follow the goings-on of the nobility.
    Curiously, Etienne continued