ANNA

The widower W. A. Clark gained a reputation as one ever ready to help develop young artistic talent, particularly the female sort. Or, as one contemporary said, he was “an ardent admirer, if that’s what one wishes to call it, of the fair sex.”

His first protegee 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, eventually starring 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, Andree 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 concert harp and refining her French. To add some respectability to the arrangement, Anna was described as W. A.’s ward. Court records in Butte show no such guardianship.

At W. A.’s Paris apartment on avenue Victor Hugo, Anna was chaperoned by one of W. A.’s sisters,* who was there with two daughters. These nieces of W. A.’s described Anna as lively and in love with music. She had a puckish sense of humor that kept them entertained. She also liked to joke about her unusual eyes: one blue and one brown. Back in Butte, people noticed that Anna’s mother, now a widow, had moved into a fine home one block west of the Clark mansion.

By 1900, as W. A. was serving in the U. S. Senate, Anna visited him in Washington. Newspapers reported that she was “the most interesting lady in Washington,” which might have been a polite way of calling her the most gossiped-about woman. The Denver Post said she had “a typical French face and the great soulful eyes which are often associated with the artistic temperament.” The papers quoted W. A.’s friends as saying that the couple would soon wed and that W. A. planned an opera career for Anna under the stage name Montana. For good measure, the papers added the fiction that Anna’s father had been killed in one of W. A.’s mines, stirring the magnanimous industrialist to take pity on the family.

While Anna was in Paris, W. A. had other romantic entanglements as the new century began.

First, there was Hattie Rose Laube of Huron, South Dakota, a temperance lecturer and political campaigner, who let it be known in 1901 that W. A. had written her a promise of marriage from Europe. All the newspapers covered her announcement, although the Clark family dismissed the claim as false.

Then there was the paternity suit filed by a young newspaperwoman named Mary McNellis. W. A. had met Mary at the 1896 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where he was a delegate. In 1901, while W. A. was serving in the Senate, Mary brought a lawsuit against him in New York. She claimed that in October 1900, over a dinner of oysters and champagne at the old Waldorf Hotel, W. A. had promised to marry her. She sought $150,000 for breach of promise, claiming that she had been seduced, debauched, and impregnated.

W. A. admitted in court papers to knowing Mary and to socializing three or four times with this “rather agreeable and very intelligent young woman.” But he vigorously denied “that I ever promised to marry Miss McNellis, or ever made love to her or induced her to believe that I was going to marry her.” Court records show that a referee found in W. A.’s favor, ordering Mary to pay the senator $1,125 in court costs.

The court records were sealed, keeping the case out of the newspapers for two years, during which time W. A. was courting Anna. Then in 1903, it was revealed that Mary had wanted her attorney to push for a jury trial, but the attorney had persuaded her to accept the referee’s decision and give up the case. Mary was surprised to discover that her attorney had owned part of a mining company in British Columbia and that the mine had recently been purchased by W. A. Clark. She filed an appeal, and at that point all the newspapers covered the McNellis case.

Word of the case may have reached Paris, where twenty-five-year-old Anna was still studying the harp. W. A. traveled there at least twice a year by steamship. The girl from the Butte boardinghouse had adopted chic Parisian styles, with hemlines at the ankle and a high waist defined by a luxurious sash. Her brown hair was cut short in bangs hanging nearly to her deep-set eyes. And she began sporting a few expensive gifts: a bracelet with 36 sapphires and 126 small diamonds, a pair of tortoiseshell combs each with 320 diamonds, and a Cartier two-strand pearl necklace with a seven-carat diamond clasp.