Free Empty Mansions by Bill Dedman

it, of the fair sex.”
    His first protégée from the boardinghouses of Butte became an early star of American silent films, but she would not become Mrs. W. A. Clark. Kathlyn Williams was sponsored by W.A. in her early theater career. A blond beauty and the daughter of a boardinghouse operator in Butte, she was born Kathleen Mabel Williams in 1879 but adopted Kathlyn as her stage name. Her father died when she was young, and her mother paid the bills by renting out rooms to miners. As a teenager in the 1890s, Kathlyn starred in Butte theater productions, where she met W.A., the richest man in town.
    He agreed to send Kathlyn to New York to study opera, on the condition that she first finish her studies at Montana Wesleyan University, seventy miles away in Helena. The year she graduated, 1901, she turned twenty-two. W.A. was sixty-two.
    Kathlyn soon switched from opera to acting, and W.A. paid for her to begin training in New York. By 1903, with W.A. occupied in the U.S. Senate, Kathlyn was married and had moved on to other male sponsors, eventuallystarring in more than 170 films. In a fan magazine in 1912, Kathlyn thanked Senator Clark, who she said “took a great interest in my welfare.” She explained that the senator “has helped so many boys and girls to realize their ambitions.” The names of no boys survive.
    • • •
    At the same time, W.A. was supporting another girl from a Butte boardinghouse, Anna LaChapelle, who had her own plans to become a musician and singer.In 1893 or 1894, soon after Kate’s death, W.A.’s eye fell on Anna, who was fifteen or sixteen. After she was well into her twenties,she would become his second wife and the mother of two daughters, Andrée and Huguette.
    There are competing stories of how W.A. met Anna. The family version, the official version, has W.A. spotting her on the Fourth of July in a community pageant in which she played a chaste Statue of Liberty. Anna loved to sing and play music, but she was shy and reserved in public. The teenager stood a shapely five feet four with cascading brown hair, a prominent round chin, and an inviting, gap-toothed smile. W.A. recognized her talents immediately.
    The unofficial version, printed in anti-Clark newspapers, casts Anna as the forward one. According to this story, Anna called on a banker in Butte, asking him to sponsor her acting career. That man declined but suggested that she contact another banker who might receive her more generously, W. A. Clark.
    The family also put forward another story about Anna, one describing her as the daughter of an honored physician who had died before the wealthy W. A. Clark became her guardian and she his ward, as though she were an orphan in need of his legal and financial protection. The facts were quite different, however: Anna’s father wasn’t quite a doctor, and he was very much alive.
    Anna Eugenia LaChapelle was born in the Michigan copper mining town of Red Jacket, now known as Calumet, on March 10, 1878. Her parents were immigrants from Montreal, in French-speaking Quebec, who had arrived in the United States six years earlier as part of a great French Canadian wave of immigration. The family later moved to Butte, settling in one of the rougher neighborhoods on the Butte hill, right below the smoke-belching smelters.Anna was the oldest of three children, two girls and a boy.
    The LaChapelles rented out rooms to miners.Anna’s mother, Philomene, could speak English, but not read or write it. She worked as a housekeeper. Anna’s father, Pierre, had been a tailor and then began selling medical potions such as eye lotions. Later he dispensed eyeglasses. Though his tombstone in Butte’s Catholic cemetery identifies him as “Dr. Pierre J. LaChapelle,” his obituary says he was studying medicine at the time of his death.
    The father was still living when Anna fell under W.A.’s sponsorship. The father’s obituary from 1896 places eighteen-year-old Anna already in Paris,studying the