Free The Phantom of Fifth Avenue: The Mysterious Life and Scandalous Death of Heiress Huguette Clark by Meryl Gordon Page B

Clark made a bid to become one of its first senators. He lost again, this time amid charges that he and Daly both flagrantly bribed state legislators. Clark eked out revenge by orchestrating a vote by the state legislature to defeat Daly’s efforts to shift the state capital from Helena to Anaconda.
    As Clark schemed in Butte and plotted his political future, he and his wife, Kate, were living separate lives. She visited Montana but spent more time in Garden City or their suite in the luxurious Navarro Flats apartments on West Fifty-Eighth Street in Manhattan. In October 1893, Kate Stauffer Clark traveled to Chicago for the Columbian Exhibition in honor of the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in America. The fair featured two hundred temporary pavilions designed by famous architects, the very first Ferris wheel, and gardens by Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmsted.
    For Kate Clark, Chicago was a city with sentimental memories. On her honeymoon in 1869, she and her husband had stopped off in Chicago so he could purchase merchandise to sell to miners in Montana. Now twenty-four years later, she could see the sweeping changes in the city and in herself, transformed from a provincial single woman to the sophisticated wife of a multimillionaire and themother of five children aged thirteen to twenty-three. Just two years earlier, she had presided over the Manhattan wedding of her oldest child, Mary, to Dr. Everett Mallory, with a guest list that included two senators (Delaware, New Jersey) plus financier Cyrus Field, a society-page testament to the family’s upward mobility. Kate’s mother, back home in Pennsylvania, was still alive, and Kate had every reason to anticipate watching the rest of her children walk down the aisle. The Butte friends who saw her at the Chicago exhibition would later report that she “looked the picture of health.”
    But after she returned to New York, Kate became feverish. William Clark was in Butte when he received a telegram announcing that his wife was ill but appeared to be rallying. He and his son Charles got on a train to New York, but they were delayed in Chicago. Clark learned by telegram that his wife was sinking rapidly. Before he could reach Manhattan, Kate died of typhoid fever at their Navarro Flats apartment at 10:30 a.m. on October 19, 1893.
    William Clark shut down his Butte mines and banking office for a day. Clark’s newspaper nemesis, Marcus Daly’s
Anaconda Standard
, ran an obituary: “Of strong intellectual traits and of marked elegance in manner, cordial towards all yet entirely without affection toward people of whatever station in life, tactful yet always sincere, a delightful hostess, a faithful wife, a devoted mother and the gracious matron of a cultured home which found in her its chief adornment—such was Mrs. Clark.” (The words “without affection” may have been a typo, meant to be “without affectation,” but it is possible the writer, the typesetters, or even Marcus Daly subtly inserted the dig.)
    Clark buried his wife in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, a four-hundred-acre spot with rolling hills known as New York’s most prestigious final address. The large plot was in a serene central location, perched on a rise with a view. He hired the noted architecture firm of Lord, Hewlett and Hull to construct a $150,000 family-sized stately white mausoleum. Fluted Ionic columns support the soaring portico and stained-glass windows permit colored light to flow in, but the most distinctive element is a Beaux Arts bronze door designed in 1897 by Rodin disciple Paul Wayland Bartlett. Entitled
The Vision
, itfeatures the mysterious likeness of a woman with long flowing hair and a windswept gown. Her head is slightly tilted and she gazes out at the world with sad, thoughtful eyes.
    More than a century later, Clark’s last surviving child, Huguette, continued to pay for a standing weekly order of fresh flowers to be delivered by a