Empty Mansions

that she loved to paint. The studio has its own kitchenette, and a private stairway up to the bedrooms, allowing Huguette to live and work without having to pass through the main hallway of the house.
    Huguette was not content to work on her own paintings, but also offered a bit of editing. Outside the music room hangs a depiction of an older W.A. with a wild shock of white hair and brilliant blue eyes. Nattily dressed in a vest, her father is wearing a pearl stickpin and also a pinkie ring. The surprising part is the signature. At the lower right is “Tadé Styka 1925.” Below that is another signature, “Hugo C.” Huguette made amendments to this work, touching up her painting instructor’s view of her father, and co-signed it with her nickname.
    On the upper level of the east wing are suites for Anna and Huguette—W.A. needed no room here, as it was built after he died. Each suite includes a sitting room with a fireplace and a wardrobe closet paneled in book-matched bird’s-eye maple. In Anna’s suite, a portrait of W.A. sits on the desk by the window, near photos of both girls playing as children. One of her enormous golden French harps stands at the foot of the bed. Her bathroom features an astonishing oversize bathtub, carved from a solid block of yellow-and-pink marble with gold trim. She had a French kneeling desk, or prie-dieu, for prayer, and a felt-lined box from Cartier held a crucifix.
    Through the windows, they could see Anna’s rose garden, once the grandest in Santa Barbara. Its concentric circles were separated by low hedges of dwarf myrtle and walkways of red sandstone. At the center of the garden stands a fountain, a three-tiered Italian stone sculpture, topped by a bathing nude woman fixing her long hair.
    The estate manager’s daughter, living at Bellosguardo year-round, had far more time to explore these wonders than Huguette did. Amid all this luxury, she remembers the Clarks most of all for their generosity. “Huguette wanted my mother to have the very best piano for our homeon the property, and spent days trying out pianos until she found one that had the quality she wanted,” Barbara Hoelscher Doran recalled. “She loved the latest technology and innovations, and would buy the newest camera or sixteen-millimeter projectors, one for her and one for our family.
    “They were very quiet, lovely, giving ladies.”
A FRIEND ATTACKS

 
    O N D ECEMBER 3, 1941, Huguette wrote a jaunty note in French to Tadé Styka from Santa Barbara. She was still in touch with her former painting instructor, who had sent her chocolates and a corsage for her journey west. She wrote that she was tanning in the beautiful sun, “turning the color of chocolate.”
    Four days later, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor drew the United States into World War II. Huguette, who had studied Japanese culture and art, told her friends she was crushed by the sneak attack.
    Bellosguardo changed during the war, as fear of invasion dominated the Pacific coast. An infantry regiment brought up to Santa Barbara had a post in the Clark beach house. The estate manager, Albert Hoelscher, became a civil defense warden, his home the district headquarters. Along the cliff, there were posts in the ground with time clocks to make sure the armed sentries made their rounds.The young sentries were a little goosey and shot at anything, recalled Barry Hoelscher, Barbara’s older brother. The children were issued 1917-style steel helmets and gas masks. Anna was generous to the staff and showed concern for their safety. Each year during the war, she gave the Hoelscher family a $1,000 war bond and each of the children a $75 bond. She also outfitted the Hoelschers with a rifle, a .45-caliber pistol, and $10,000 in case they had to evacuate.
    On February 23, 1942, a Japanese submarine surfaced off Santa Barbara and began to fire shells at the Ellwood Oil Field and its fuel storage tanks, about ten miles west of Bellosguardo. Though little damage was done, fear of a Japanese attack bordered on hysteria. A week later, President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the removal and internment of Japanese Americans living on the Pacific coast. A government pass was needed to get through the barbed wire checkpoint on Cabrillo Boulevard near the Clark estate. Curtains had to be closed at sundown because of the blackout. Streetlights were painted over, and cars had to drive with only their parking lights on, so as not to help the unseenenemy spot the