Ann was also frequently frustrated and depressed by her inability to love any of her boyfriends. “It is a terrible thing how very often the idea of suicide occurs to me,” she wrote in her diary. “I long to know the beyond—to see Granny again.”6 Like Clare, she was haunted by memories of the first Ann, killed in a car crash in January 1938.
Walton Wickett remained her emotional anchor in California. One day she felt “very much in love,” the next disdainful of the way he looked in swimming trunks.7 “There just isn’t the feeling in my heart.”8 Walton admitted to Clare that his attraction to Ann was materialistic as well as romantic. Although he loved her for her “sublime” self, “the idea of [your] having a plantation in South Carolina, a country home in Connecticut, and an apartment at the Waldorf Astoria intoxicates me.”9
Perhaps a love of the lavish life was what primarily linked the young couple. “A question I have asked a thousand times,” Ann said, “is—what weight does my ‘brilliant setting’ have compared to the true me.”10 She accused Walton of using her to impress his Pan Am business associates.11
He sometimes recoiled from Ann’s less appealing traits. She could be imperious, frivolous, and snobbish. “I was not born to ride on streetcars.”12 She was also acquisitive. “Did you see that ring?” she said to Walton, eyes blazing, after they ran into Henry and Frances Fonda at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.13 “Did you see the solitaire diamond? That belongs to me, and she’ll have to give it to me.” Bizarrely, Frances had succeeded Clare as the second wife of George Brokaw, and was therefore Ann’s stepmother at the time she acquired that family heirloom. Walton had seldom seen Ann so exercised.14
He learned that she had once visited Frances and Henry in their Brentwood mansion, and tried in vain to befriend her much younger half-sister, “Pan” Brokaw, as well as the Fondas’ own children, Jane and Peter.15
After toasting the arrival of 1944 en famille in Palm Springs, Ann accompanied her mother to Los Angeles for another round of socializing with Hollywood luminaries, while Harry took a train to New York.
Longing to be done with college so that she could rejoin the world of adults that she preferred, Ann wrote Greenwich friends, “July doesn’t seem so far away. And then—whee—I’m coming back to help win the war—to do my bit to bring the end closer.”16
On the evening of January 5, Clare was feted by cinema moguls in the Thalberg Executive Dining Room at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. One participant was the studio’s chief story editor, Sam Marx, who found her both regal and remote.17 The following night, with Ann looking on, Representative Luce gave the first speech of her Western tour. She denounced the administration’s handling of foreign policy, and said that domestically conditions were deteriorating: America had become a nation of “hypochondriacs, introverts and psychotics” in the “tragic era of Franklin Roosevelt.”18
Her next engagements were a radio talk and evening lecture in San Francisco. Ann preceded her north to Palo Alto to register for Stanford’s spring semester. They arranged to spend three more days together at the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill in San Francisco, where Clare had reserved a suite. She meanwhile remained behind to see Irene Selznick again, telling her that she thought raising children was the chief reason “for living and loving and learning … for being born and growing old.” All her difficulties with Ann were over, “the childish troubles and adolescent misunderstandings had all been long forgotten.” They now understood and loved each other “about as perfectly as a child and mother ever can.” 19
Reunited on Saturday, January 8, Ann and Clare posed together for a publicity photograph. Ann wore one of her mother’s dresses in blue-and-white-striped silk with large buttons. On Monday evening, their last before college classes began, they dined with a former schoolmate of Clare’s. Ann excused herself early to have a drink with Walton at the Top of the Mark bar.
The two young people sat looking out at the nightspot’s panoramic views of Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay, dotted with warships that would soon be embattled in the Pacific. They talked little, though Walton felt there was much to say. Their intimacy had mellowed into friendship, and Ann acknowledged that the last two years had been her happiest, that her fondness for him had “stood the test of time.” Not long before, she had waxed nostalgic over their shared love of music. “I’ve just been listening to the waltz from Der Rosenkavalier. It sent the usual tingles up and down my spine and now I’m enjoying for the umptiest [sic] time the Album you gave me—Yehudi’s rendition of Symphonie Espagnole by Lalo.” They agreed to see each other in Palo Alto the following evening. Before saying good night, Walton promised Ann he would listen to her mother’s radio talk.20
Clare and her daughter, January 8, 1944 (illustration credit 7.1)
Clare returned to the suite at about eleven o’clock, finding Ann prone and already asleep. She smacked her bottom. “Lazybones, why aren’t you out enjoying yourself?”
Ann opened her eyes and groaned, “Mo-ther.”21
The next morning, Tuesday, January 11, Ann crept out of the hotel without waking Clare and took a lift back to Stanford in the 1941 Mercury Club coupé of a friend, Virginia Lee Hobbs. By approximately 9:45, the two students were traveling southeast through a residential district of Palo Alto, just minutes from their destination. Virginia kept to the twenty-five-mile-an-hour limit along Byron Street, slowing slightly as she entered the intersection of Everett Avenue. She was about halfway across when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a car approaching on her right. Sensing that its driver may not have seen her, she gripped her steering wheel and accelerated—too late to avoid being hit on her rear fender and wheel hub. She braked, but her car was already spinning. Both doors flew open as the vehicle circled 180 degrees onto the left sidewalk. Ann was flung out, and her door, swinging wildly on its hinges, smacked her body toward a roadside tree. Her head bore the brunt of the impact, which was compounded by the force of the chassis as it wedged her torso against the trunk.22
Virginia, thrown with less velocity, landed more gently on the pavement. Finding that she had only minor leg scratches, she rushed to Ann and found her crushed half shapeless. Feeling her pulse, Virginia thought she detected a faint throb. Within minutes a policeman appeared, along with a doctor from a nearby clinic, and declared Ann Clare Brokaw “dead at the scene.”23
At the Palo Alto Hospital, another physician noted that Ann’s face was unscathed, except for a small cut at her mouth’s right corner. But her other injuries were extensive: a fractured skull and pelvis, twenty-four broken ribs, lacerations of the liver, spleen, lung, and brain, and a pancreatic hemorrhage. The police report stated that had her door not broken open, she could have survived with minor or no injuries. Even so, the crash had been violent enough to strew the contents of her suitcase, and to splatter a bottle of lotion from her toiletry bag on the upper reaches of a house twenty feet away.24
Ann’s briefcase, retrieved from the debris, revealed the seriousness and breadth of her interests, as well as the promise of a fruitful life. It contained notes on Eino Holsti’s International Relations and library call cards for three books on the life and philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson. There was a list of works she had recently studied: The Taming of the Shrew, Of Human Bondage, The Last Puritan, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as well as others to be read—The Scarlet Letter, The Ambassadors, and Nehru’s Autobiography. She had kept three articles, including the flattering piece about her “perliteness” that Clare had sent from Washington. Another, on foreign policy, was from a recent issue of Time, and had been assiduously underlined. There was also a page of Spanish vocabulary, a map of Iberia, a pamphlet on Indian symbols as used on silver-and-turquoise jewelry, and an invitation to meet Madame Chiang Kai-shek at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco on March 29.25
Most poignant of all was a paper tissue with a dark red kiss. In one of her last communications with her daughter, Clare had advised Ann to “study the effect of too darn much lipstick.”26
&
nbsp; Shortly after 10:00 A.M., Virginia Hobbs’s father, who worked as a sales director at a department store near Byron Street, assumed the unenviable task of reporting the accident to Clare. Her assistant, Miss Blood, took the call.
“Ann is seriously hurt but I don’t know the details,” Mr. Hobbs said. “They are calling me just as soon as they find out.”27
Miss Blood told him that her employer was still asleep, and that it would be best not to disturb her until they knew how severe Ann’s injuries were. Some ten minutes later, Hobbs called with the final news, and asked her to break it.
“Wake up! Wake up! Your daughter is dead!”28
Clare, barely conscious, tried to absorb what the hysterical woman was telling her. Miss Blood knew only a few flimsy facts, and the tragedy she tried to describe made no sense. Nightmarishly, it seemed to Clare a duplicate of another collision—the one that had dismembered her mother. Two Anns, born in August and dying in January.
The supreme irony was that Clare had always been terrified of car accidents. At Ann’s graduation from Foxcroft, she had refused to give her the customary convertible, because she thought it unsafe.29 In another macabre foreshadowing, Ann had bumped lightly into a car some months before, while also approaching Palo Alto’s main street, and Clare had written her a warning note: “Please please please drive more cautiously. It is such an irretrievable thing … to have your pretty face all bashed up, or be crippled for life, for a silly moment of speed or inattention … for my sake, be careful. It would be a stupid meaningless world without my Annie in it.”30
Now just such a world confronted her, and she struggled to comprehend it.
Further items of information arrived at the Mark Hopkins suite. The coroner had released Ann’s body to the Roller and Hapgood Funeral Parlor in Palo Alto. A college friend had dressed Ann’s hair, knotting it strand by strand, and artfully arranging it to conceal the cracked skull.31 One side of her body was so badly mutilated that the undertaker advised no viewing until that evening, giving the mortician time to make the corpse look as natural as possible.32
Charles Hobbs called again to speak to Clare. She was still in a dazed state, making his task especially awkward. He had once reprimanded her for writing too infrequently to Ann, who “admires and adores you,” and she had answered with veiled sarcasm that unlike Mrs. Hobbs, who wrote to Virginia daily, she had a career to maintain as well as correspondence.33
Now he did all he could to spare the stricken mother. Offering to complete the death certificate on her behalf, he asked for biographical details, and requested a change of clothing for Ann’s laying out. Miss Blood contacted the university to schedule a funeral service in the college chapel, and spoke to the chaplain, who suggested that part of Ann’s last class paper, on Oriental religions, might be read at the service. He knew it had received a high mark, and contained some of her own philosophy.34
Seeing Clare succumbing to hysteria too, Miss Blood asked a West Coast Time employee to help her cope. He had worked as a police reporter, and saw at once that the Congresswoman was a typical “survivor in shock.” She kept trying to talk through tears and gasping groans, as he tried to console her. A doctor sent by Irene Selznick gave Clare a sedative. This calmed her enough to be able to place a call to Harry.35
He had arrived back in New York just that morning, but could not be reached either at work or at home.36 It was left to his secretary to tell him once he got to the office. John Billings noted how ravaged Luce looked, as if Ann had been his own child.37 Yet when sharing the news with another confidant, Harry seemed oddly unsympathetic toward Clare, saying that any grief she might feel would be out of guilt, because she had treated Ann “abysmally” in earlier years.38
After booking an overnight flight for his return to California, Harry wired Clare to expect him in San Francisco the next morning, Wednesday, January 12.39 He would be traveling in a DC-3 propeller plane, stopping every 250 miles or so to refuel. Knowing that she was due to make a speech at the local Press Club the evening of his arrival, he offered to deliver it in her stead.40
Before he left, Harry gave instructions that the announcement of Ann’s death in Time must identify her as the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Henry R. Luce. “That’s the way it goes in.” West of Chicago at 12:50 A.M., he radioed his wife: “Thoughts ever with you and our darling.”41
Clare was in no condition to travel to Palo Alto anytime soon. Nor did she seem ready to contact Virginia Hobbs to hear exactly what had happened. Instead, she reached out for sympathy, calling Bernard Baruch, Maggie Case at Vogue, and her New York physician, Dr. Milton Rosenbluth. She asked her assistant to telephone Walton Wickett and read a dictated message: “Even under the influence of dope, I know in a cockeyed sort of way that my Annie loved you and I know that you loved my Annie.”42
Reeling with disbelief, Walton managed to muster a few lame words about his good times with Ann and their “little spats,” which, he stressed, had meant nothing.43 Now, of course, they meant everything. The violence of his bereavement left him feeling naked.44
Close to nervous collapse as the day ground on, Clare distracted herself with correspondence, some of it official. She sent a message to the family of a soldier captured on Corregidor, informing them that she had heard from their son, now imprisoned in a Japanese camp. She wrote David in New Guinea, sure that he would promptly tell Charles Willoughby of Ann’s death.
As the news spread by radio, two emergency switchboards had to be installed in a room adjoining Clare’s suite, to cope with condolences from America and around the world.45 Norman Ross, another of Ann’s friends, took calls from Winston Churchill and the Chiang Kai-sheks.46 Isabel Hill reported that Luce offices in Washington and New York were similarly bombarded with letters and telegrams of sympathy.47
To escape the incessant ringing of phones, Clare went for a walk with Colonel William Cobb, an aide to a general she had known in Burma. She was grateful to him for having delivered Ann’s funeral outfit to Palo Alto, and for bringing back details of the accident.
Not far from the hotel, they came upon Old St. Mary’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, and went in. Clare had been fighting surges of bitterness all day, as the reality of her bereavement took hold. Keeping despair at bay required more spiritual strength than she could muster on her own. Though she thought of herself as Episcopalian (rather than Lutheran like her mother or Baptist like her father), she had long lost the habit of praying. Now she needed to reconcile herself to her pointless loss, and maintain her equilibrium through the coming obsequies.
Cobb sensed Clare’s struggle, and marveled at her determination to surmount self-pity. He stood at the back of the church as she sat motionless in a pew halfway along the nave. Shafts of colored light from stained-glass windows beamed on her. A priest went up and said a few words. On the way back to the hotel, she seemed more at peace.48
Late that night, Clare received a platitudinous, self-exonerating telegram from Kurt Bergel, the driver who had killed Ann. He was a thirty-two-year-old German refugee working as a language instructor in Stanford’s Army Program. Clearly dreading a manslaughter lawsuit, he claimed not to have been at fault. He said that he had devoted his life to the education of youth, felt the tragedy deeply, and conveyed his “heartfelt sympathy.”49
It transpired that Bergel was wholly to blame. His landlady testified that he had been late for breakfast, and left her lodging house in a hurry. She said that he had only recently learned how to drive, and was fast as well as erratic behind the wheel. Police investigators discovered that he had mislaid his driver’s license several days before, and not applied for another. Incredibly, they dismissed this as “a technicality.”50 A garage inspection revealed that the brakes of Bergel’s 1934 Buick sedan had frozen cables and oil-soaked linings. Subsequent road tests proved that in such a vehicle, travel at any speed over 15 mph was dangerous. Even at the 20 mph he had professed to be going (tests showed that his speedometer was faulty), he would have skidded
twenty-five feet before coming to a standstill.51 His only injury was a bruised knee.
Several people who had been walking in neighboring streets said they had heard a car engine racing, followed by the clang of colliding metal. But there were no eyewitnesses to confirm that Virginia Hobbs had entered the intersection before the Buick appeared. Bergel could therefore claim right of way.52
A weary Henry Luce appeared on Nob Hill at lunchtime on Wednesday. His wife’s near catatonic state brought out the executive in him. First, he canceled the rest of her speaking tour. This was a blow to the GOP, because thousands of tickets had been bought to benefit local party organizations, and the money would have to be refunded. Next, Harry contacted the Palo Alto Police Department and heard that they had decided not to prosecute either driver. Clare raised no objection. Litigation could not bring her daughter back.
She let Harry answer Bergel’s telegram. In an astonishingly forgiving letter, he wrote that his wife was wholly absorbed in living memories of Ann, not in details of her death. “The time will undoubtedly come when she will want to know everything that can be known—for it is characteristic of her to face facts and to wish to know the truth as exactly as possible.” Once she did, “you may be sure that you will have all her sympathy in the sorrow which this tragic event has brought you.”53
In another gesture of compassion, Harry contacted Walton Wickett and proposed that they go to see the Hobbs family. Virginia might need consoling. Walton agreed, and they made the pilgrimage together.
Overawed by Luce’s eminence, Walton let him do the talking.54
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