Empty Mansions

estate, and from the chauffeur’s widow, Alma Armstrong, both of whom receivedpensions until they died. When maid Sylvia Morales retired in 1993 after thirty years of cleaning the estate manager’s house, Huguette approved a pension at 92 percent of her regular pay.

    Still in the garage at Bellosguardo, under an ornate light fixture, are two of Anna and Huguette’s automobiles, including a 1933 Cadillac seven-passenger limousine with a gilded hood ornament and a 1933 Chrysler Royal Eight convertible. Both have license plates from 1949
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    Beginning in 1987, Huguette spent nearly a million dollars on an eight-hundred-foot rock seawall to protect the cliff and, as a consequence, the main driveway, which is the only way for fire trucks to reach the house. This project destroyed a beautiful cliff face and removed a line of Monterey cypress trees along the cliff top. In exchange for permission to build the wall, Huguette allowed the city to designate most of the estate as a landmark, limiting its future development and perhaps its resale value.
    John Douglas, who never met her in the twenty-eight years he managed her most valuable property, talked with her on the phone only twice. During those conversations, as he described any improvements on the estate, Huguette replied politely, “Yes, Mr. Douglas.” But when she heard of work to keep the property just as it had always been, as it was in her mother’s time, she exclaimed, “Isn’t that wonderful!”

“WE DON’T WANT ANY!”

 
    J UST AS A NNA HAD her emergency retreat in California at Rancho Alegre, Huguette added her own country refuge in the leafy Connecticut suburbs. It was called Le Beau Château. The castle takes its name from an old French children’s song, the music for a circle game in which two concentric circles of children alternate singing verses. Here’s one translation of the refrain:
    Oh! My beautiful castle!
    My auntie turns, turns, turns
.
    Oh! My beautiful castle!
    My auntie turns, turns beautifully
.
    The verses follow, with a new beginning line modifying each round:
    Ours is more beautiful!
    We will destroy it!
    How will you do that?
    We will take your girls!
    Which one will you take?
    We will take this one!
    What will you give her?
    Beautiful jewels!
    We don’t want any!
    In 1951, the Clarks’ chauffeur drove Huguette and Anna out to New Canaan, a Connecticut suburb an hour north of New York City. Huguette later explained to her man Friday, Chris Sattler, that it had been her mother’s idea to have a refuge for family and friends in case of a Russian attack on New York. (This was, after all, during the Cold War, which had heated up with North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in 1950.)
    In appearance, Le Beau Château is an echo of the château de Petit-Bourgfrom the Clarks’ happy summers in France. Huguette bought the property, expanded the house, and bought more land for a buffer,eventually owning fifty-two acres, twenty-two rooms, and more than fourteen thousand square feet of emptiness. She never moved a stick of furniture into the house during the six decades she owned it.
    The senator’s daughter was buying the house of a senator. The château was built in 1938 byDavid Aiken Reed, former Republican senator from Pennsylvania. Reed was best known for the Immigration Act of 1924, which tried to keep Jews and Asians out of the United States, with the goal of “keeping American stock up to the highest standard.”
    New Canaan is one of the most affluent communities in the nation, with little notice taken of quiet wealth. Nearby neighbors now include musician and actor Harry Connick, Jr., and others not far away during Huguette’s ownership were architect Philip Johnson in his Glass House,
NBC Nightly News
anchor Brian Williams, and singer-songwriter Paul Simon.

    Huguette bought the Connecticut estate, Le Beau Château, in 1951, the year she turned forty-five. Her annual property tax bill reached $161,000, but she never moved in. It was maintained but unfurnished for more than sixty years. She was nearly one hundred before she agreed to put it on the market.
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    As the years passed and the mysterious property remained unoccupied, neighbor children sneaked through the woods to peek at the house, and townspeople passed around legends about the missing owner. Her fiancé had built the house for her, one story went, and after he died at sea on the