Empty Mansions

the Clarks’ beloved France in the Great War of 1914–18. Pershing, with salt-and-pepper hair and a gray mustache, stands weary but resolute, his thumb tucked confidently in the belt of his high-collared uniform, which is adorned with three rows of ribbons. This portrait, like so many others in the house, was painted by Tadé Styka.
    The house is mostly a U-shaped structure, with east and west wings extending away from the sea in the front and toward the Santa Ynez Mountains in the back. Between the wings, visible as one enters the home, is a courtyard with a long, dark reflecting pond with blue-black stone tiles. One enters via a great central corridor, or galleria, that runs nearly the full length of the main section of the house. Portraits show an older W. A. Clark, with his intense blue eyes and white beard, and Anna, with her dark bangs and pearls.
    The largest space in the home is the music room, measuring forty-six feet by twenty-three feet. This is where Anna played her forty-three-string pedal harp, a marvel made for her in a Louis XVI style adorned with gilt sculptures and paintings, and Huguette played her second-bestviolin by Stradivari, which she kept wrapped in four Japanese scarves. Two Steinway pianos sat back-to-back for duets. Bellosguardo was alive with music when the Clarks were in residence.
    In the wood-paneled library, above the fireplace, is a large Styka portrait of Andrée, who died fifteen years before the house was built. Matching portraits of the girls show them sitting on benches, Andrée with a book, the younger Huguette cradling a doll. The house is full of portraits of Andrée, paintings sometimes two to a room. Her deep-set eyes are everywhere. In one large painting by Styka, the older sister sits on a giant cut log in a rushing mountain stream, dressed in a middy blouse with neckerchief, surrounded by the nature she loved. Her sad blue eyes are filled with portent.
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    The lost sister is also remembered in two memorials outdoors at Bellosguardo. The first is a small brown-and-white cottage tucked behind the tennis court and framed by green tamarix junipers. This cottage wouldn’t have been out of place in England or Normandy in the fifteenth century. It’s a half-timbered structure in the mock Tudor style, with a thatched roof, a stone chimney, and oddly undulating windowpanes. Built of clear heart redwood, the two rooms are rustic, with a black cast-iron stove from the early 1900s and simple country furniture.
    The Clarks didn’t build this cottage but inherited it from the Grahams, who built it as a playhouse fortheir daughter, Geraldine. The Clarks took down the sign in Old English script reading “Geraldine Graham’s Cottage” and replaced it with a nearly identical one saying “Andrée’s Cottage.” The cottage was lovingly maintained. When the roof needed repairs, for example, thatchers came from England to do the work. Although Barbara Hoelscher Doran, the estate manager’s daughter, remembers using it as a playhouse, to the Clarks it was more of a memorial, and they spoke with solemn voices in its vicinity.
    That’s how Anna’s goddaughters recall the cottage. In addition to their regular visits to 907 Fifth Avenue, Anna allowed each goddaughter one trip west to the summer home at Bellosguardo. Leontine went with her family for Huguette’s wedding in 1928. Her mother was the maid of honor, and Leontine was two and a half.

    Music filled the rooms at Bellosguardo. In this photo from about 1940, one of Anna’s harps and a piano sit at one end of the music room, with portraits of Huguette, right, and her late sister, Andrée, prominently displayed
. ( illustration credit8.1 )
    Ann’s trip came when she was eight, nearly nine. In May 1937, her godmother pulled her out of school for a surprise cross-country train trip. Ann’s mother and a governess also made the trip. Huguette, at age thirty-one, did not.
    The leg from Chicago to Los Angeles was the first regular run of the Super Chief, a new high-speed train also known as “the Train of the Stars.” The passenger list included ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his sidekick Charlie McCarthy. Anna, having been married to railroad royalty, had lifetime courtesy passes on all the nation’s railroads, a perk recorded on a list registered with Congress. On this train, she had her own china in her stateroom to use for tea parties with her goddaughter. “She was,” Ann recalled, “a sweet person to