The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark by Meryl Gordon Page B
Authors: Meryl Gordon
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Street, Platinum Street, Aluminum Street, and Iron Street. Walk around downtown and it’s quiet—very quiet. Butte’s population peaked at 100,000 in 1910, but now there are fewer than 34,000 residents. It is not a ghost town, butit feels that way after dark. Many street lots are eerily empty, abandoned and strewn with weeds, the result of suspicious fires during tough times when businesses were torched for the insurance money.
William Andrews Clark once reigned in Butte, controlling every vital city service. He came here in 1872 to inspect several mines believed to be played out and made fortuitous purchases that produced millions in copper riches. He became the city’s dominant employer. He built the trolleys and owned the water system, the electric light company, prime real estate, and the newspaper, the
Butte Miner
. His merchant bank doled out loans on favorable terms to friends and denied them to enemies. Clark built and ran Columbia Gardens, a sixty-eight-acre amusement park with a carousel, a zoo, and greenhouses. Butte citizens might draw a salary from Clark’s operations as his employees, but they paid it back to him for city services. His influence extended statewide as he spent lavishly to convince the Montana legislature to embrace his goals.
Clark’s power—and how he used and abused it—made him an irresistible character not only for newspaper writers but for novelists. Clark is portrayed as the ill-concealed villain in Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel
Red Harvest
, in which Butte is named “Poisonville.” Hammett describes the smelters that had “yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city… between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining.” Clark’s doppelganger owns the town “heart, soul, skin and guts.”
Residues of Clark’s past still endure in modern-day Butte. On a corner lot near the top of a hill at 219 West Granite Street is the Copper King Mansion: Clark’s grand thirty-four-room redbrick Victorian completed in 1888 for the then-astonishing sum of $250,000, more than $6 million today. The Clark mansion remained in the family until the 1934 death of the senator’s son William Clark Jr. Now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the home is open for tours and operated as a bed-and-breakfast.
The house is imposing from the street, but it’s the elaborate craftsmanship inside that shouts
robber baron
. Sunlight streaks through colorful stained-glass windows, illuminating an ornately carved wooden staircase featuring flowers and birds from many nations,ceilings with painted frescoes, parquet floors, and European chandeliers. The house was designed for entertaining with a sixty-two-foot ballroom.
Clark built this showplace with his first wife, Katherine, relocating from the town of Deer Lodge, thirty-seven miles away. The Clark family then included five children: Mary (born 1870), Charles (1871), Katherine (1875), William Jr. (1877), and Paul (1880). (A sixth child—Katherine’s twin sister, Jessie—had died at age three, and another child died at birth.) The Clarks ventured far afield, sailing off for lengthy travels in Europe and establishing a second residence in Garden City, Long Island. After his wife passed away in 1893, Clark was mostly on his own in Butte, his children either grown or off in boarding schools, when he became involved with the plucky teenage girl, Anna La Chapelle, who would become his second wife and the mother of two more daughters.
Those girls, Huguette Clark and her older sister Andrée, never lived full-time in the house on Granite Street—they grew up in Paris and then Manhattan—but visited Butte well into their teenage years. Compared to the family’s treasure-filled 121-room Fifth Avenue mansion, the Butte house was informal and relaxed, a place where children could be seen and heard. Later in life, Huguette always cast a honey-colored glow on her reminiscences as she paged through
William Andrews Clark once reigned in Butte, controlling every vital city service. He came here in 1872 to inspect several mines believed to be played out and made fortuitous purchases that produced millions in copper riches. He became the city’s dominant employer. He built the trolleys and owned the water system, the electric light company, prime real estate, and the newspaper, the
Butte Miner
. His merchant bank doled out loans on favorable terms to friends and denied them to enemies. Clark built and ran Columbia Gardens, a sixty-eight-acre amusement park with a carousel, a zoo, and greenhouses. Butte citizens might draw a salary from Clark’s operations as his employees, but they paid it back to him for city services. His influence extended statewide as he spent lavishly to convince the Montana legislature to embrace his goals.
Clark’s power—and how he used and abused it—made him an irresistible character not only for newspaper writers but for novelists. Clark is portrayed as the ill-concealed villain in Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel
Red Harvest
, in which Butte is named “Poisonville.” Hammett describes the smelters that had “yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city… between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining.” Clark’s doppelganger owns the town “heart, soul, skin and guts.”
Residues of Clark’s past still endure in modern-day Butte. On a corner lot near the top of a hill at 219 West Granite Street is the Copper King Mansion: Clark’s grand thirty-four-room redbrick Victorian completed in 1888 for the then-astonishing sum of $250,000, more than $6 million today. The Clark mansion remained in the family until the 1934 death of the senator’s son William Clark Jr. Now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the home is open for tours and operated as a bed-and-breakfast.
The house is imposing from the street, but it’s the elaborate craftsmanship inside that shouts
robber baron
. Sunlight streaks through colorful stained-glass windows, illuminating an ornately carved wooden staircase featuring flowers and birds from many nations,ceilings with painted frescoes, parquet floors, and European chandeliers. The house was designed for entertaining with a sixty-two-foot ballroom.
Clark built this showplace with his first wife, Katherine, relocating from the town of Deer Lodge, thirty-seven miles away. The Clark family then included five children: Mary (born 1870), Charles (1871), Katherine (1875), William Jr. (1877), and Paul (1880). (A sixth child—Katherine’s twin sister, Jessie—had died at age three, and another child died at birth.) The Clarks ventured far afield, sailing off for lengthy travels in Europe and establishing a second residence in Garden City, Long Island. After his wife passed away in 1893, Clark was mostly on his own in Butte, his children either grown or off in boarding schools, when he became involved with the plucky teenage girl, Anna La Chapelle, who would become his second wife and the mother of two more daughters.
Those girls, Huguette Clark and her older sister Andrée, never lived full-time in the house on Granite Street—they grew up in Paris and then Manhattan—but visited Butte well into their teenage years. Compared to the family’s treasure-filled 121-room Fifth Avenue mansion, the Butte house was informal and relaxed, a place where children could be seen and heard. Later in life, Huguette always cast a honey-colored glow on her reminiscences as she paged through
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