Empty Mansions

with the automobile’s driver careful to park in front of the horse.
    From the carriage rotunda, Andrée and Huguette could stop on the ground floor to see their father in his private office, situated at the street corner for maximum light. With Santo Domingo mahogany walls, the office was dominated by a Gilbert Stuart portrait above the mantel—the familiar face of George Washington now on the one-dollar bill.

    Huguette’s girlhood home, the most expensive house in New York, afforded 121 rooms for a family of four. Note both types of carriages awaiting passengers at the Clark mansion on Seventy-Seventh Street at Fifth Avenue.
( illustration credit 1.1 )
    IN CONVERSATION WITH HUGUETTE

 
    Saints, and religion in general, were more important to the Roman Catholic Anna and her daughters than they were to W.A. He had been a Presbyterian as a youth, then as a prosperous banker he became a more fashionable Episcopalian. Though he helped to build most of the churches in Butte, he admitted, “I am not much of a churchman.”
    Huguette told me that as a child she asked her father, “Oh, Papa, why can’t you be Catholic?”
    His reply: “All religions are lovely, my dear.”
    —P AUL N EWELL
    If Andrée and Huguette sneaked through their father’s waiting room and down the mirror-lined hallway past his office library, they could peek into the house’s male domain, a Gothic-style great hall for smoking and billiards. The room was twenty feet by ninety feet, decorated with a thirteenth-century stained-glass window from a cathedral at Soissons in France.
    The billiard room had another oddity: six paintings depicting the heroism, trial, and cruel death ofJoan of Arc, France’s maiden heroine. Her story was a particular favorite of Andrée’s. The French artist of these paintings, Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel, had done a children’s history of the maiden Joan, and the girls met the artist in France. At first the artist intended these paintings for a chapel near Domrémy, Joan’s birthplace. But W.A. had to have them, so instead of being on view for the faithful who made pilgrimages to honor Joan, they were hanging in W.A.’s billiard room.
    The cost of building the Clark house, not counting the furnishings, had been predicted to be $3 million, which would have made it as expensive as Rockefeller’s and Carnegie’s homes combined. As so often happens with home construction projects, the cost climbed—to $5 million, then $7 million, and some newspapers said $10 million, a bill that works out to a bit more than $250 million in today’s currency. For perspective, the fifty-seven-story Woolworth Building, a neo-Gothic cathedral ofcommerce completed in 1913 in Lower Manhattan, cost $13.5 million, and the Woolworth would reign for nearly two decades as the tallest skyscraper in the world. Still, the Clark mansion cost no more than two years’ profits flowing from a single Clark copper mine, the United Verde in Arizona. Always watching his pennies, W.A. was able to persuade the courts to lower his property tax bill by valuing the home at only $3.5 million, on the legal theory that it was so expensive to operate that it was of no use to anyone else.
    The girls could ride up to the main floor in the elevator, or climb the grand circular staircase. Made of ivory-tinted Maryland marble, the stairs wound their way through a ceiling of oak overlaid with gold leaf. At the top of the stairs, Andrée and Huguette passed two exquisite bronze statues on white marble pedestals, each showing classical Greek heroes in scenes of struggle: on the left a muscular Odysseus bending his bow to show his strength and prove his identity, and on the right a chained Prometheus enduring his endless torture, an eagle eating his liver.
    From the top of the stairs, the girls could look down the hallway, of white marble with mottled Breche violette columns, to the marble sculpture hall, with its thirty-six-foot-high octagonal dome made of terra-cotta, in the center of which hung an antique Spanish silver lamp. Here the girls enjoyed playing a game of hide-and-seek. If Andrée, the braver one, climbed to the third floor and passed through an alcove to the top of the dome, she could look down to see Huguette three floors below.
    IN CONVERSATION WITH HUGUETTE

 
    On November 3, 2003, Huguette called, her voice strong and clear as usual. I thanked her for the packet of family photos she had sent and asked her about the photo of her father and his