TWILIGHT MAN
Love and Ruin in the Shadows of Hollywood and the Clark Empire
by Liz Brown
Penguin Books. 383 pages, $17.
ONE THEME of this extraordinary exploration of a hidden gay story concerns the lessons parents teach their children—two sons, in this case, coming from vastly different circumstances.
Will Clark, the son of William Andrews Clark, the vastly wealthy mining tycoon known as “The Copper King of Montana,” learned from his father how to manage scandals. For the elder Clark, the scandals included sending a girl in her teens from Montana to Paris, where she would become his mistress and later his second wife, and bribing his way into the U.S. Senate in 1901.
Albert Harrison, the son of Mark and Jennie Harrison—a young Jewish couple disowned by her well-to-do parents—learned from his parents that he could become someone else. Jennie left her alcoholic husband and changed her name to Genevieve. Every time Mark lost a job, he and his son started over in another city. After his father’s death, an impoverished Albert, undoubtedly prompted by his homosexuality, attempted suicide in a hotel room. Failing to end his life, he decided to reinvent himself, changing his name to Harrison Post.
In 1919, Will Clark walked into the San Francisco antiquities store where the very good-looking Harrison Post, twenty years his junior, was working. Soon after that, the two men boarded a train for Los Angeles. Once there, they would come to refer to Harrison as Clark’s “secretary.”
In 2003, Liz Brown, the author of Twilight Man, returned to San Francisco for her grandmother’s funeral. Going through drawers in her house, she came across a glamorous photograph of Harrison Post inscribed to her grandmother. Brown’s grandmother, Alice McManus, was the niece of Will Clark’s second wife. Growing up, she’d spent time with her rich relatives and their circle. Brown took the photograph with her when she returned to New York. She writes in the book’s introduction: “I won’t pretend I didn’t have an agenda when I started to track Harrison Post’s life with Will Clark. I wanted to recuperate a lost gay history as a way to assert my own queer lineage.”
What Brown discovered through her exhaustive research into the lives of a rich and famous man and a poor and obscure one was more complex than a hidden love story. Twilight Man is a gaudy tapestry of money, greed, corruption, and betrayal. Will Clark did not expand the family fortune. Instead, he launched the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Hollywood Bowl. He collected enough rare books to fill the Clark Library, which he built in honor of his father and bequeathed to the University of California. Clark’s generosity had an ulterior motive: to protect himself from scandal. When the seventeen-year-old son of the Copper King went to Europe to study the violin, he was described in the press as “a very delicate boy” and “extremely nervous”—code words for a gay male at this time. Clark’s very public philanthropy was intended to distract attention from the rumors of his sexual involvement with young men and boys.
This involvement included plans, made shortly before his death, to adopt George Palé, his housekeeper’s son, a boy who lived in his house and was probably molested by Clark. In his will, Clark left George $500,000, hush money of sorts. Will Clark was a predator, enabled by his wealth and protected by lawyers skillful at offering bribes. In his library, Clark amassed a major collection of Oscar Wilde books and papers. Wilde is a resonating presence throughout this book. Men like Will and his father were able to deflect scandal, whereas Wilde, an openly gay man, was destroyed by his challenge to prevailing norms.
A singular achievement of Twilight Man is Brown’s reconstruction of Harrison Post’s life. Early public records are scant. Once Will set him up in luxurious circumstances, he appeared in the society pages of newspapers. He knew Hollywood stars, gave parties, rode horses, collected books, traveled to Europe. At some point, his sister Gladys joined him in his invented life. In 1934, the fairy tale ended. The possibility that his relationship with Will might be exposed in a defamation suit brought by a disgruntled Clark employee caused Harrison to have a nervous breakdown. He entered a posh sanitarium for treatment. Soon thereafter, Will died, and Gladys became Harrison’s court-appointed guardian.
The final years of Harrison’s life would make for an improbable plot in a novel. His sister and her husband kept him sedated in his own house while they sold off his properties and most of his possessions. Oscar Tryggestad, a gay hired nurse, rescued Harrison, taking him to his hometown in Norway, where Harrison lived from 1938 to 1945. After the German occupation, the Nazis imprisoned him as an enemy alien suspected of being Jewish. By this time, Harrison was keeping a journal, which enabled Brown to track his movements and gain insight into his personality.
The portrait of Harrison that emerges is that of a childishly naïve dreamer, a charming man who lived in the moment and expected others to take care of him. For the most part, they did. Even German prison guards gave him bread and cigarettes. He survived two years of imprisonment. After the war, he returned to the U.S. on funds provided by Will’s lawyer and began a futile attempt to retrieve his lost fortune, which ended with his death from a heart attack in 1946.
There is no record of Will and Harrison’s feelings for each other, because any revealing letters between them were destroyed. Apparently, they were devoted to each other and had what we would call an open relationship. Of the two men, Harrison is the more appealing, earning our respect for his resilience in the face of adversity, whereas the powerful, unscrupulous Will Clark inspires little sympathy. Twilight Man is less about a hidden love story than it is a chronicle of the loathing for gay men of all social classes that prevailed in their times.
