Name |
Clemens, Clara Langdon (1874–1962) |
Variant Name |
Bay |
Short Biography |
Clara Clemens, SLC’s second daughter, was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and was mostly educated at home by her mother and governesses. During the family’s sojourn in Europe between 1891 and 1895, Clara enjoyed more independence than her sisters, returning alone to Berlin to study music. She was the only one of SLC’s daughters to go with him and Livy on their 1895–96 trip around the world. The death of her sister Susy, and the first epileptic seizure of her other sister Jean, both came in 1896: “It was a long time before anyone laughed in our household,” Clara recalled. The family settled in Vienna in 1897. Clara aspired to be a pianist, studying under Theodor Leschetizky, through whom she met the young Russian pianist Ossip Gabrilowitsch. By 1898 Clara’s vocation had changed from pianist to singer, a career in which she found more indulgence than acclaim. After her mother’s death in 1904 Clara suffered a breakdown and was intermittently away from her family at rest cures in 1905 and 1906. She was financially dependent on her father but spent less and less time in his household, traveling and giving occasional recitals. Increasingly suspicious of the control exerted by Isabel V. Lyon and Ralph Ashcroft over her father and his finances, Clara convinced SLC to dismiss the pair in 1909. She married Gabrilowitsch in 1909; their daughter, Nina Gabrilowitsch (1910–66)n was SLC’s last direct descendant. Between 1904 and 1910 Clara lost her mother, her sister Jean, and her father; at the age of thirty-five, she was sole heir to the estate of Mark Twain, which was held in trust for her, not to be disposed in its entirety until her own death. For the rest of her life she used her influence to control the public representation of her father. Gabrilowitsch died in 1936; in 1944 Clara married Russian conductor Jacques Samossoud (1894–1966). Her memoir of SLC, My Father, Mark Twain, was published in 1931. She spent the last decades of her life in California. Clara’s bequest of SLC’s personal papers to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962, formed the basis of the Mark Twain Papers now housed in The Bancroft Library. |