Marlene Wagman-Geller

Nov 02, 2025 by Marlene Wagman-Geller

 And No Friends

“A menace to happiness.” (Pronouncement on money)

–Huguette Clark

 

Bellosguardo Foundation (opened 2018)

Santa Barbara, California

 

     In 1797, in the grip of an opium-induced dream, British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge imagined a fantastic paradise that inspired his poem, “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure-dome decree/Where Alph, the sacred river ran/Through caverns measureless to man/Down to a sunless sea.” The nonfictional Kubla Khan was Huguette Clark whose pleasure dome offered panoramic Pacific Ocean views. To gaze upon a mansion whose halls echo an enigma, enter Bellosguardo.

                     

The most storied of Xanadus belonged to an enigmatic heiress whose biography offers a peephole into the era when the Astors, Guggenheims, Rockefellers, and Vanderbilts ruled the social registry roost. Huguette Marcelle was the daughter of copper king William Andrews Clark, the Gilded Age robber baron who founded Las Vegas. Her mother, French-Canadian Anna Evangelina, had undergone the transition from fifteen-year-old ward of William to his lover to his wife. His children from his first marriage learned of the newest Mrs. Clark from a newspaper and were far from pleased with their stepmother, many years their junior. The Clarks second child, Huguette, was born in Paris in 1906 to her sixty-seven-year-old father and twenty-eight-year-old mother. A photograph of the toddler captures her impeccably dressed in white, surrounded by her doll collection. The main family home was a Fifth Avenue Victorian mansion, excessive even in an excessive age, built at a cost that surpassed the construction of Yankee Stadium. The mansion held 121 rooms, 31 bathrooms, four art galleries, theater, and swimming pool. The walls were bedecked with masterpieces by Degas, Monet, and Renoir. As a teen, Huguette took dancing lessons from Isadora Duncan.

                     

Tragedy entered with the death of sixteen-year-old Andrée from meningitis, a loss that shattered her family. She had eluded death seven years earlier when the Clarks had failed to use their passenger tickets for the Titanic. Six years later, upon William’s passing, his will divided his fortune amongst his four children from his first marriage and his only child from his second. The bequest left the nineteen-year-old Huguette with a half a billion-dollar inheritance. At twenty-two, America’s most eligible woman fell for William MacDonald Gower, a Princeton grad of modest means. Anna spared no expense for her daughter’s 1927 Bellosguardo wedding. Their union lasted nine months; she charged desertion; his take-they had never consummated their marriage. After their 1930 Reno divorce, the heiress went by the name Mrs. Huguette Clark, or Madam. The end of her marriage marked the beginning of a retreat into gilded real estate shells. While Coleridge’s dream envisioned a damsel with a dulcimer, Anna’s Fifth Avenue sanctuary echoed with the strains of her harp and Huguette’s violin. The music loving Huguette owned four Stradivari violins including the 1709 The Virgin, a gift from her mother for her fiftieth birthday; another bore the engraving of Joan of Arc.

                     

When Anna died in 1963, her passing left Huguette the only survivor of the Clark Camelot. Anna’s estate to her daughter included Cartier jewelry, museum-worthy canvasses, and antique French furniture. Huguette also became the sole possessor of a real-estate treasure chest: the twenty-three-acre oceanfront Santa Barbara mansion, Bellosguardo–along with its nearby Rancho Alegre–three Fifth Avenue suites: Anna’s former home, Huguette’s marital one, and an apartment adjacent to her mother’s. Another charm on her property portfolio was Le Beau Chateau, a twenty-two-room Connecticut mansion where she never spent a night.

                     

The loss of her mother was gut wrenching, and the fifty-seven-year-old heiress transformed to a Great Expectations Miss Haversham. Part of her reclusive nature, as was the case with fellow multi-millionaire recluse Howard Hughes, was a fear of germs, a result of Andrée contracting her fatal disease. In a sense, Huguette did not feel alone as she had the company of her French dolls. The modern-day Greta Garbo only ventured forth from her insulated splendor to attend Christian Dior fashion shows where she ordered scale replicas for her porcelain-faced girls who sat in silk miniature armchairs. The heiress had arranged for one flown in from France where the doll occupied a first-class seat. An artisan from Bavaria created dollhouses; the heiress once contacted him explaining that one of the ceilings had to be raised as, “The little people are banging their heads!” A housekeeper ironed the dolls’ couturier dresses. Another interest was television, and Huguette favored The Dick Cavett Show, The Forsyte Saga, and cartoons such as The Flintstones. While watching her shows, she ate her daily lunch of sardines and crackers.

               

The pages of the calendars turned with the regularity of a metronome until skin cancer ravaged the eighty-four-year-old Huguette. When Dr. Henry Singman paid a house call, he was the first person–other than her staff–she had seen in more than a decade. He discovered a home caught in a time warp:  the rotary phones still identified the exchange number as Butterfield 8. Amid the fallen splendor was an emaciated centenarian, dressed in a filthy robe, lips and eyelids disfigured by disease. Huguette insisted on going to theospitall on a stretcher to avoid the stares of the apartment’s staff and residents. Suzanne Pierre, the wife of her former physician, hired Hadassah Peri, an immigrant from the Philippines, to work for Madame. Hadassah and Huguette hit it off, and the nurse agreed to work for twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Suzanne delivered the dolls to Huguette’s bedside.

                     

After two months, with skin lesions under control, the doctors pronounced their patient ready for discharge. Unbelievably, Huguette insisted on remaining in her hospital room with its view of an air-conditioning unit rather than gazing upon Belloguardo’s Pacific Ocean, or her Fifth Avenue window that looked upon the sailboat pond of Central Park. As always, Huguette had her way when she waved her checkbook. Fiercely private, her patient’s name was Harriet Chase. While the hospital-bound Huguette’s habits did not change–she continued to order dolls and watch The Flintstones–Hadassah’s life underwent a drastic transformation. She had gone from tenuous nursing assignments and her Israeli husband’s job as a cabbie to a six-figure annual income. In addition, her boss gifted her a series of ever more pricey cars: a Lincoln Navigator, a Hummer, a $210,000 Bentley. Throughout the years, Hadassah received $30 million dollars that made her the highest paid nurse in history. 

                      

While Citizen Kane died in his Xanadu, the mansion that held Rosebud, his childhood sled, Huguette passed away in Beth Israel Medical Center in the company of her beloved dolls.  Her internment was with her parents and sister in the Clark Woodlawn Cemetery mausoleum in the Bronx. Upon her death at age 104, the forgotten heiress became media fodder that centered on the million-dollar question: why would the possessor of palatial homes not have visited them in decades? Perhaps a hint lies in her favorite French fable whose moral holds that is better to live quietly as a cricket than flamboyantly as a butterfly. For the woman who hated to be in the limelight, she would have been aghast when her paternal relatives, who she had cut out of her fabulous fortune, girded for battle, claiming Tante Huguette, in the words of King Lear, was not “in her perfect mind.” The best glimpse into the soul of Madam is her home-museum.

                     

Bellosguardo: The translation of the mansion is  “beautiful look-out in Italian,” a name that does not begin to describe the breath-taking architectural jewel. Although the Clarks had last visited their summer home during the Truman administration, Huguette turned down the Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s offer of one hundred million dollars for the 1936 twenty-seven room property, twice the size of President Jefferson’s Monticello. Her will left her summer home to the Bellosguardo Foundation “to foster and promote the arts.”  In keeping with the family’s priority for privacy, the estate is perched on a bluff, its only neighbor the Santa Barbara Cemetery. In the ground-floor music room–the estate’s largest–are two large paintings of Andrée and Huguette, two Steinway pianos, and two of Anna’s gold, custom created harps, her instrument adorned with sculptures and paintings. The old house echoes the silence. Flourishes hint at the eccentricity of its former chatelaine: her dressing room’s covered chairs come in two sizes–one for the adults, the other for “the little people.” The white 1904 carriage house holds a 1933 Chrysler Royal Eight convertible and a black 1933 Cadillac seven-passenger limousine, both bearing yellow and black license plates dated 1949. When Huguette’s cousin, Paul Newell, asked why she never visited Bellosguardo, the heiress responded, “When I think of Santa Barbara, I always think of times there with my mother, and it makes me very sad.”

                     

Upon entering the once upon a time estate, visitors are overcome with its grandeur; upon their departure, they are left wondering how magical it would be to live in such Gatsbyesque splendor. However, upon learning about the woman who turned its key, the golden pleasure dome takes on a less magical aura. In a sense, all Huguette’s homes were cells that imprisoned her with memories, with loneliness. Intermingled with awe of the magnificence is the realization that money cannot buy love, happiness, or a shield from pain. The poet Ezra Pound’s words prove prescient: “Let us pity those who are better off than we are…the rich have butlers and no friends.”

 

The Window of Her World: Perhaps when Huguette gazed upon the hospital air-conditioning unit, memory took over and she was once again in Bellosguardo, with her mother and her progeny, the girls with the porcelain faces.      

 

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