Empty Mansions

at $300,000, but it ended up at $1 million, in Depression prices, or about $17 million today.
    The Clarks were proud of a side benefit of Anna’s project—creating jobs in a desperate time—and Huguette often repeated the story that Anna ordered her overseer to hire as many workers as possible. “My dear Mother put so much of herself into its charm,” Huguette wrote to Santa Barbara’s mayor, Sheila Lodge, in 1988, “and had the satisfaction of knowing that during the great depression she was a bit helpful in giving much needed employment.”
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    Anna and Huguette visited Bellosguardo regularly from the mid-1920s until the early 1950s. The Clarks’ Pullman car would park on a siding at the Santa Barbara train station, and chauffeur Walter Armstrong would pick them up in the black 1933 Cadillac limousine or the gray-green 1927 Rolls-Royce, while the baggage followed in the wood-paneled Plymouth station wagon.
    Although the Clarks’ Bellosguardo had none of the social whirl of theGraham era, guests were welcome on occasion. Anna opened the grounds to garden clubs and held small concerts for friends. The Paganini Quartet played on an elevated platform set nine feet up in an oak tree near the tennis court, the world-famous musicians bowing Anna’s priceless Stradivarius instruments as their music rested on stands made of bamboo.
    Anna and Huguettemade social connections, too. Huguette was a founding member, in 1928, of the Valley Club, a prestigious golf course and social club, though it’s not known if she ever golfed. She also joined the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1949, subscribing to its newsletters on contemporary and Asian art.
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    Bellosguardo is located just inside the eastern boundary of the city, adjoining theaffluent community of Montecito, home to many movie stars. The Clark estate has twenty-three and a half acres, with nearly one thousand feet of ocean frontage, incongruously sharing the bluff with the Santa Barbara Cemetery. The cliff-top site, sixty feet above the public beach, affords great privacy. Visitors entered the grounds through a gate, usually locked, on Cabrillo Boulevard, from which the house can barely be seen.
    The main driveway ascends cliffside next to tall eucalyptus, pine, and Monterey cypress trees. A short way up the driveway, one can stop at a pergola, an open structure of white columns, to sit in the mottled sunlight under the latticed arbor, surrounded in summer and fall by the flowering San Diego Red bougainvillea. The vast Pacific Ocean fills the view.
    An enormous floating wooden deck was stored near the rustic beach house, ready to be towed out at the beginning of the summer, so that Huguette and her guests could go swimming, protected by a “lifeline” with wooden floats leading to the shore.
    By the driveway, an enormous sign, nine feet wide, blares a warning: “PRIVATE KEEP OUT.” The vast expanse of lawn sweeps out to a tree-lined pathway that skirts the sharp drop where the cliff falls off to the beach. On a clear day, one can see to the south as far as the Channel Islands, twenty-four miles offshore. On a foggy day, one can barely make out the volleyball players on Santa Barbara’s East Beach below.
    At the top of the cliff, with a hairpin turn to the left, one gets the first glimpse of the house, or one wing of it at least. The massive light gray structure gives a stately, institutional impression, with exquisite granite masonry in an interlocking pattern of grays and tans. This house is the creation of the quiet Anna, not her flamboyant husband. It is framed by a wall covered with green Boston ivy, which turns brilliant shades of orange and red in the fall. A queen palm soars over the thirteen chimneys.
    The gardens close to the house are examples of symmetry, restraint, and severity. A field of orange California poppies leads up to the front of the house, with its entrance court. The court is itself a work of art, a floral design of beach stones in grays, whites, and blacks hand-selected from nearby Carpinteria Beach. No parking was allowed on the court, which is still trimmed in the pink, sweet-smelling flowers known as naked ladies.
    Up two short flights of stairs, through the front door, and into the main entry hall, one is greeted by a portrait of a proud older gentleman in a military uniform. The most prominent place in the house is given not to W. A. Clark but to General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, the man who saved