After the death of her first husband, Clara Clemens relocated to Hollywood. There she met another Russian musician, Jacques Samossoud, and married him when she was 70 years old. She described the marriage as “positively miraculous in its multifarious strata of rainbowism.”

Sammosoud, who was 50, made wild claims about the major orchestras he had conducted and celebrities he was acquainted with, almost all untrue. He began borrowing heavily from the inheritance and royalties Clara had earned from her father’s and her first husband’s fame, spending the money on investment schemes, visits to Las Vegas, and racetrack betting. His debt was so large by 1951 that the couple held a massive auction not only of their Hollywood house, but also Clara’s large collection of her father’s letters, manuscripts, books, and artifacts.

They relocated to San Diego, where their financial situation worsened. When she died in 1962 she left what was left of Samuel Clemens’s estate to Samossoud and a horse-racing friend of his, Dr. William Seiler.

Samossoud died in 1966 and is buried in an unmarked grave in Woodland Cemetery in Elmira, New York near the rest of the Clemens and Langdon family members. While his reputation as a kind of musical conman and gambler who wore down Clara’s inheritance persists, the actor Hal Holbrook, who was able to visit Clara and Jacques after one of his Mark Twain Tonight performances, described Jacques as a loving and attentive husband to Clara.