Price of Fame

by Sylvia Jukes Morris

  More personally that October, Charles wrote that he had just seen an old Time magazine photograph of Clare that to him had “the luminous quality of Sargent.”16 She was shown getting into a car in a small toque hat, giving a queenlike glance at the camera, and her stylish loose coat suggested “the subtle outline of a beautiful and ravishing body.” The apparition undid him.

  I was seized with the most frantic longing … like a fever, that shook me and devoured me … a savage, savage fire that consumed me … a sudden knowledge of the menace of slow years; a fierce jealousy of your time and milieu; and yet … a sense of belonging; and the hope of the hour between us that will set everything right again; and the feel of your lips that will vanish all these months as if they were not.… Love me, my dearest, my wife, my own.17

  He added that he appreciated the intimate notes she wrote him in the small hours, saying how much she loved and longed for him. He desired her, too, “maddeningly so at times, as if some fire were dormant and suddenly, with a gust of wind, roars into a fierce blaze. Then my imagination runs riot—but it is wholly delightful.”

  Clare “in bed” with General Willoughby (illustration credit 6.2)

  Apparently, Willoughby saw his long-term future in the Far East, because he talked of Clare joining him there. But could she bear the dislocation and the material sacrifice? “You have been unconsciously accustomed to a certain scale of living: it would jar you to change it.”18

  Clare was again a little down when she wrote Ann on Sunday, November 7, but tried to sound cheerful. “Annie my pudding-cake, my peach pie, and all assorted delicacies.” She enclosed a flattering newspaper reference to Ann by a reporter who had met her in Washington. Every word of the piece was true, Clare said, and showed that “perliteness pays—to the press, anyway!” Her daughter certainly had “enchanting” manners, “except of course sometimes about one o’clock in the morning, when you don’t have to get up and I do the next day, and you insist … on a pow-pow with mom-ma.”19

  Aware that Ann might be concerned about the strain between her and Harry, Clare reported that he was due in Washington that afternoon. They had to perform the kind of formalities expected of a power couple: pay a hospital visit to the ailing President of the Philippines, Manuel Quezón, then attend a party at the Soviet Embassy to dutifully “celebrate” the Bolshevik Revolution.

  The news from Mepkin was not good. Two years of neglect had taken a toll. “Dat ole debil jungle,” she wrote, had crept over the cottages, infusing their furnishings with mold. In contrast, winter had come to the Potomac. “The lawn outside is covered with a tattered carpet of brown and yellow leaves, the tennis courts are shut, a few roses still bloom.… I am lonely and depressed, and wish you were here.” Instead she had only her dog, Speaker, who looked at her with tragic eyes and drooled so much as she ate that she ended up giving him her dinner.

  Closing on a hopeful note about the war, Clare predicted that it would end in Europe in 1944 and in the Pacific a year later.

  And then whoops it’s off we go, you and I, to assay the damage the whole thing did, around the world. Better get yourself ready by then with typing and shorthand, because together we will get a lovely book out of it. Notes by CBL, footnotes by her shrewd little tochter.

  Kiss, hugs, moist smacks, and all other embraces such as slaps on derrières, and pinches on the cheek, which show that a fond mamma wishes to convey the impression that she idolizes her only offspring.20

  That fall, Clare spoke out increasingly against imperialism. In a speech at the University of Rochester on November 18, she accused Great Britain of holding on to India for economic rather than altruistic reasons. If 390 million Indians wanted to be free and self-sufficient, she declared, they should be. Britain’s commercial losses could be made up by the United States, which might then assume responsibility for the security of all Asia. She repeated what she had prophetically written Harry after Pearl Harbor, that if the Allies won a “multiple-front war” against the Germans and Japanese, freed subject nations might then ally themselves with their “former master’s enemies.” Hence America was fated “to police the world.”21

  A few nights later, she attended a dinner in New York for the famous British explorer Freya Stark. Perhaps the last of the empire-trotting travelers in the tradition of Sir Richard Burton, Stark was fifty years old and at the crest of an enviable literary career. She was in America to lecture on the Middle East, with the approval of the British Foreign Office, which hoped she would persuade audiences that Palestinian Arabs deserved their own homeland along with the Jews. This mission met with disapproval in Zionist circles, but Stark was charming, well-informed, and not easily thwarted.

  Clare seized the occasion to pontificate about the fate of colonies, and Britain’s obligation to free India. Stark said before that happened, the conflicting ambitions of Hindus and Muslims had to be reconciled, or independence would bring civil war and bloodshed.22

  “Let there be massacres,” Clare shot back. “Why should the white races have a monopoly on murder?”

  Stark, smiling, said that if the Congresswoman wanted to give poor countries immediate independence, she might coin a slogan, “Freedom for Fratricide.”

  Clare countered with an icy stare.

  In a report to London, Stark dismissed her as “an enemy on sight, with lovely eyes firmly fixed on the middle distance.”23

  November also saw the publication of Au Clare de Luce: Portrait of a Luminous Lady, a biography that did not enhance Clare’s reputation.

  The author was Faye Henle, a business reporter who had monitored her election campaign, and the controversy surrounding the “Globaloney” speech, and concluded that she was a dangerous symbol “of press agentry.”24 Henle had since been in pursuit of the real woman (as she thought), talking to Clare, observing her in Congress, and interviewing friends such as the novelist Laura Z. Hobson. Having no access to private documents, she relied on morgue articles (in particular a 1941 New Yorker profile by Margaret Case Harriman) for information about her subject’s early life.25 She thus recycled misconceptions, many of them propagated by Clare herself. Had Henle taken more time with her 205-page book, completed in three months, she might have avoided such checkable errors as the date of Clare’s birth, the fact that “Joyce Fair” was not young Miss Boothe’s stage name, but that of another actress, and that Europe in the Spring had been dedicated to Harry, not David. Nevertheless, the book was occasionally perceptive, as in a metaphorical description of Congresswoman Luce’s effect on the House. “The new member was politely attentive to the goings-on, but those who continued to observe her began to realize that this radiance, this aura or spotlighted circle that seemed to surround her invisibly, was not merely the cool of magic moonlight; there was insulation in it, too—something of the thin chill that protects dry ice from careless handling.”26

  Henle harped throughout on Clare’s presumed coldness, and also questioned her intentions.

  Practically all the desirable accomplishments are credited to her except warmth … which causes people to give things away. Not that Clare does not give things away, for she has made many and substantial gifts. Curiously, however, few people seem able to identify the motive as “love and affection.” … It may be that the legend needs a new casting director to take her out of the typed role of shrewd commercialism.27

  Clare read the text in galleys and telephoned Henle to say that she supposed biographical subjects got the book they deserved. “It’ll all come out in the wash, you little so-and-so.”28

  She could do nothing about negative assessments of her character and motives, but factual mistakes belittling her honesty and professionalism were another matter. John Billings could help with at least one of these, so she called him to say she was in trouble. He wrote in his diary, “A nasty book is coming out in which she is accused of palming off on us photos from Burma as her own whereas they were really taken by George Rodgers at the risk of his life.” He was able to come to Clare�
��s rescue and get the erroneous attribution excised.29

  When Au Clare de Luce duly appeared, it received much adverse criticism, of both writer and subject. The Birmingham News called it “the outline of a good biography by a poor biographer.” A Chicago Sun critic felt that Clare was portrayed as a “composite of Theda Bara, Joan of Arc, Helen of Troy and Cato the Younger.” The Bridgeport Herald, seldom kind toward her, agreed with Henle that Lillian Hellman was a better playwright, Edith Nourse Rogers a superior Congresswoman, and Dorothy Thompson a more accomplished journalist. Another Connecticut newspaper, the Hartford Times, wrote that readers were left with the impression that Clare Boothe Luce was shrewd, calculating, audacious, egocentric, and opportunistic, as well as facile, witty, and clever. “She doesn’t like people, except a few, chiefly Clare.” However, she had “made a career of knowing the right ones.”30

  The New York Post took the long view. “Books will undoubtedly be written about Clare and Henry Luce that will one day tell us just what they stood for in American life. Just now we are a little too close to them to measure their merit or lack of it with any accuracy.”31

  Clare sought solace in her oft repeated maxim, “Even bad publicity is better than none.”32

  On Tuesday, November 23, the Luces commemorated their eighth wedding anniversary with an exchange of gifts. Harry gave Clare a jade Kwan Yin.33 She presented him with an extraordinary piece of needlepoint, designed by herself and embroidered over the span of several years, mainly while he read aloud to her after dinner. Six feet wide and three deep, it was a complex, basket-weave composition showing his accomplishments in multicolored yarn: covers of Time, Life, Fortune, and the Architectural Forum, a newsreel camera recording The March of Time, and an aerial perspective of Rockefeller Center, headquarters of the Luce publishing empire.34

  More personally, a corona of sharp red pencils and zigzagging radio waves signified the communicative reach of husband and wife, and a curving globe and soaring airplanes their international travels. Clare’s own career was represented by graphic symbols of three of the plays she had written since 1936—The Women, Kiss the Boys Goodbye, and Margin for Error—as well as her book Europe in the Spring. A Willkie presidential campaign button and a view of the Capitol bespoke her political interests. The tapestry was bordered by the flags of the American states and territories, meticulously rendered.

  Clare’s needlepoint gift to Harry, November 1943 (illustration credit 6.3)

  Originally, she had conceived it as a representation of the unity of their lives, “a Penelope’s job … while my Ulysses was on his great journalistic journeyings.” But finding herself unable, as their marriage fractured, to execute the last few icons, she had asked a professional to complete the work. In a letter to Harry, significantly cast in the past tense, Clare wrote, “It was for a long time a labor of great love, the proof that once at least we were a very happy couple.… I have never ceased to regret the circumstances which kept me from finishing it myself.”35

  Thanksgiving came two days later. Never keen to celebrate with Harry’s relatives (“the only thing worse than having no family,” she joked, “is having family”), Clare stayed in Greenwich. “I’ve spent two days at a job of war work,” she wrote Ann, “investigating for the Military Affairs the termination of contracts and renegotiation. Yes, it’s as dull as it sounds.”36

  As she set off on another committee chore—to inspect Ford’s Willow Run bomber plant in Detroit—the “Big Three” were meeting in Tehran. This was Roosevelt’s first encounter with Josef Stalin. During their initial tête-à-tête, they discussed the war in Eastern Europe and China and, in particular, Indochina. Clare the anti-imperialist would have been pleased to hear Roosevelt say it was time to prepare that region for postwar independence from Britain, France, and the Netherlands. But Stalin’s additional suggestion that India needed total reform “somewhat on the Soviet line” was not what she or Nehru had in mind for the subcontinent.37

  On her return to Washington, she found that Faye Henle’s book had done little to damage her reputation. A local letter saluted Representative Luce as “one of the zippiest citizens that has hit this town in a long while.” Another, from Kansas City, urged her to throw a vice presidential hat into the ring for next year. A third of her fan mail came from women. One wrote: “I prophesy that your name will stand out in this country as Madame Chiang is outstanding in China, if the men will but give you the chance.”38 There were many requests for photographs. “Imagine me, a pin-up at 40!” she gushed to a reporter.39 Her celebrity seemed to spread to fashion pollsters. At the beginning of December, Clare Boothe Luce tied with the Duchess of Windsor as the best-dressed woman in the world.40

  Simultaneously, a “Draft Mrs. Luce Committee” was formed by Connecticut constituents eager to win her the number two spot on the GOP ticket in 1944, whether it was headed by General MacArthur, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, or Governor John W. Bricker of Ohio. Clare affected humility. “What have I ever done to deserve such high office, outside of having a burning desire to serve my country? There are plenty of Republicans who are better equipped … the whole idea is too fantastic.”41

  Nevertheless, it was she, on December 15 in Fairmont, West Virginia, who launched the Republican presidential campaign with an attack on FDR and the New Deal. She praised her congressional colleagues for being united on foreign and domestic policies, while Democrats were “wracked by internal strife.” Whomever the GOP chose as its standard-bearer, she went on, was bound to be, in contrast with Roosevelt, “a man not given to impulsive experimentation, to self-whims, and love for personal power.”42

  Talk of Clare Luce as a potential nominee continued. Even the quintessentially British Noël Coward, on a visit to New York, was asked what he thought about Mrs. Luce’s vice presidential prospects. Tactfully, he said, “I think she’s a very good playwright.”43

  As it happened, Coward and Clare knew each other. They had first met backstage in a London theater when he was twenty, and she seventeen, and vainly infatuated with him. In the early 1930s, she had been his editor at Vanity Fair. Just after the fall of France in 1940, they had run into each other unexpectedly at Lisbon airport, and shared their mutual horror of Fascism and Nazism over glasses of red wine. Coward had then been one of several entertainers, including Cary Grant, Leslie Howard, and David Niven, who had been recruited to sound out foreign opinion as to Hitler’s intentions.44

  Now they were to be reunited. On December 20, Clare attended a dinner party for Coward in the New York apartment of the producer Gilbert Miller, and lectured him on British foreign policy, as she had with Freya Stark. Later he wrote in his diary, “She became rather shrill over the Indian question, about which she knows only a little more than I do.” He had taken her on to the Stork Club, where the discussion continued, with the American travel writer John Gunther supporting Clare.

  I was feeling tired and ill, and I resented being made a sort of showoff target for the Luce shafts at the British Empire. I let [them] talk for ages and remained quiet. Then I upped and said that although they doubtless knew a lot about the Indian question, it was none of their damn business, and if in fifty years they had successfully settled the American Negro question, by which time our Indian problems would have settled themselves we should be perfectly prepared to let them [talk more].… All rather tedious and obvious.45

  In the last days of 1943, Congresswoman Luce could look back on a voting record liberal enough to please even Helen Lawrenson. It included support for infant and maternity care appropriations for the wives of enlisted men, as well as higher allotments for all military dependents. She had further enhanced her reputation as a public speaker, showing herself willing to travel the country and spread the Republican credo.46

  On December 25, after broadcasting a Christmas Eve message to occupied France, Clare left New York for California with Harry and an assistant, Virginia Blood. The latter was to accompany her on her postponed lecture tour for the Republican
National Committee. It was scheduled to begin in Los Angeles on January 6, and continue through ten other Western states.

  But first, the Luces were due to meet Ann in Palm Springs, to celebrate the new year.

  7

  IMPACT

  It is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.

  —OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR.

  Just before joining her parents at the Ingleside Inn in Palm Springs, Ann Brokaw told her test pilot boyfriend, James Rea, that she had lost interest in study. “I don’t really honestly care very much what grades I get … ten years hence what difference will it make?” Her routine at Stanford, she said, compared unfavorably with “the stimulating life” available back East.1

  It was not just there that she was proud to be the daughter of such a famous person. On Clare’s last visit to the West Coast, Ann had been taken to 20th Century-Fox to meet Orson Welles (then playing Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre). She had also been introduced to Claudette Colbert, Tyrone Power, and Joan Bennett over lunch, and to Budd Schulberg and David and Irene Selznick over dinner.2 Everywhere they went, the Congresswoman-elect had been respectfully received as a bona fide screenwriter.3

  Ann had not noticed a tension between her mother and the elegant and epigrammatic Mrs. Selznick. Irene resented being treated as a Rolodex card, the “accessible, available, useful” wife of a legendary Hollywood producer. She was never taken in by flattery, and would recall that Clare was “always on the verge of being very fond of me.”4

  But Ann struck her as different. Irene’s first impression was of “a bell pealing, clear and crisp with a beautiful smile.” Although Harry was gentle and loving toward his stepdaughter, Irene sensed that the girl was “starved” for signs of maternal affection and approval.5