Clara Clemens - Accident and Marriage

Accident and Marriage

At 10:00am on December 20, 1908 in Danbury, Clemens went for a sleigh ride with Russian concert pianist Ossip Gabrilowitsch who was staying with her father at his residence, Innocence at Home, in Redding. While passing through Redding Glen, the horse took fright at a wind-whipped newspaper and bolted with driver Gabrilowitsch losing control. At the top of a hill, next to a 60-foot (18 m) drop, the sleigh overturned, throwing Clemens out. Gabrilowitsch leaped to the ground and caught the horse by the head, stopping it as it was about to plunge over the bank, dragging Clemens with her dress caught in a runner. Having only sprained his right ankle, Gabrilowitsch returned Clemens to home, unharmed except for the shock of the accident. Twain biographer Michael Shelden doubted the truth of this heroic tale and supplied a motive for why the story might have been planted in the press, namely, to quiet rumors that Clara was having an affair with her former accompanist, a married man.

Clemens had been introduced to Gabrilowitsch in 1899 in Vienna by Theodor Leschetizky who was also training Gabrilowitsch. At noon on October 6, 1909, she subsequently married Gabrilowitsch in the drawing room at Stormfield, the Clemens home with Rev. Dr. Joseph H. Twitchell presiding. (Twitchell was a great friend of her father.) Her father said that the engagement was not new, having been "made and dissolved twice six years ago." He also said that the marriage was sudden because Gabrilowitsch had just recovered from a surgical operation he had undergone in the summer and they were about to head off to their new house in Berlin where he would begin his European season. Her sister, Jean Clemens, drowned in the bathtub on December 24, 1909 after having an epileptic seizure. On April 21, 1910, her father died and left his entire estate to her in a will dated August 17, 1909 which provided for quarterly payments of interest to keep it "free from any control or interference from any husband she may have." On July 9, she announced that she was giving practically the entire library of her father, comprising nearly 2,500 books, to the Mark Twain Free Library. On August 19, 1910, her only child, Nina, was born in Connecticut at Stormfield. Nina, the last known lineal descendant of Mark Twain, died January 16, 1966 in a Los Angeles hotel. She had been a heavy drinker, and bottles of pills and alcohol were found in her room.