When Samuel Clemens died in April 1910 his daughter Clara, who had married the pianist and conductor Ossip Gabrilowitsch the previous fall, was five months pregnant – a fact she seems not to have relayed to her father in his final days. Nina Gabrilowitsch was born in August, and was raised in the busy environs of a significant musician’s career. The family moved to Munich, Germany, where Ossip conducted the Munich Philharmonic. When World War One broke out Ossip was interned as a Russian national. Clara worked hard to get him back to the United States.

Nina traveled much in her youth and was taught by private tutors. Home movies show the family clowning around on the lawn of their large Detroit home, and Nina’s graduating from New York’s Barnard College. She began training as an actress, participating in summer stock productions, as shown in dozens of snapshots in the collection of The Mark Twain House & Museum.

In the 1940s Nina moved to California, where her mother had relocated. Clara by then had met and married her second husband, Jacques Samossoud. Samossoud, also a musician, composed music for films, and Nina hoped that this connection might help her career. Her mother helped her, paying for plastic surgery Nina felt she needed – a nose job – and for acting school. She gave Nina a house and an allowance from Samuel Clemens’s estate. But their relationship broke down as Nina became more addicted to alcohol and drugs. In 1958, she spent a year in detox at the California State Psychiatric Hospital.

When Clara died in 1962, she had cut Nina out of her will, which was contested by her daughter. Her lawyers reached a settlement with Samoussoud’s lawyers. In her last years Nina spent time in sanitariums and under the supervision of a psychiatrist. In January 1966, after telling a bartender “When I die, I want artificial flowers, jitterbug music, and a bottle of vodka at my grave,” she went home – to a motel room – and overdosed on sleeping pills. Nina is buried in Woodland Cemetery in Elmira, New York near the rest of the Clemens and Langdon family members.