Price of Fame

by Sylvia Jukes Morris

  As Harry’s voice droned in the background, Walton’s thoughts ranged back over his long courtship of Ann. He recalled that two years before, he had motored with her to an out-of-town football party, and she had locked his car door, telling him about her grandmother being flung from an automobile at a railroad crossing in Florida.55 After the party, he had escorted her to her sleeping quarters in an old school on the coast, and was perplexed when she failed to say good night. Later, he had gone to her room and found her lying in the dark, staring at the ceiling.

  She seemed to be in a strange state, not responding when he told her he was going down to the beach to listen to seals barking in the moonlight. But then, as he made his way through pines and cypresses toward the water, a figure in a long white dress had stumbled past him and fallen. He recognized Ann, and rushed to take her in his arms.

  “I know how I’m going to die,” she wailed. “It will happen to me very soon.”

  Desperate to divert her, Walton had suggested that they continue to the shore. But she had risen and, brushing away tears, said, “This is silly,” before abruptly returning to her bed.

  The incident—not improbable in a gothic novel—plagued Walton. Had Ann’s behavior that strange night betrayed “a sublimated yearning … for high romance”? Had her sexual frustration peaked with a premonition of death, before she was fulfilled as a woman? He thought of Goethe’s line “Stay, for thou art blissful,” fearing he had lost an opportunity to consummate their relationship at its most intense, by merely offering his love a walk on the sands.56

  Ann Brokaw’s funeral service, conducted by the university chaplain, took place in Stanford’s Memorial Church at 4:00 P.M. on Thursday, January 13. The undertaker had offered to deliver the coffin into the chapel on a gurney, but James Rea objected to strangers carrying his dead friend any part of the way.57 In spite of having one leg weakened by polio, James joined Walton Wickett and Norman Ross as pallbearers. None of them knew the fourth man, a shy Southerner in naval uniform who seemed extremely distraught.58

  Harry had ordered the casket closed for the ceremony, with a blanket of gardenias on top. He sat with his wife and other dignitaries on a platform at the front of the chapel. Clare was partly screened by potted plants, but at one point during the service, Walton heard a loud sob from behind the shrubbery.59

  The texts, chosen by Harry, were from Psalms 46, 91, and 130: “God is our refuge and strength,” “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty,” and “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.” There were also verses from chapter 14 of Saint John’s Gospel, “In my Father’s house are many mansions … I go to prepare a place for you,” and from chapter 8 of the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans: “Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the Love of God.”60

  IIluminating for Clare were lines from Ann’s own thesis, read by her Oriental philosophy professor.

  The more we learn, the more we realize how little we know, for at those times we seem to feel the great and sometimes terrifying mystery of everything about us … the way lies in broadening our consciousness to the maximum so that it might better grasp … the most limitless and infinite reality that is God.61

  8

  AFTERMATH

  Becoming famous creates a fortunate remedy against utter despair, but it does not cure suffering.

  —CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ

  Photographers swarmed around as Norman Ross escorted Clare to a limousine after the ceremony. He raised an arm to protect her, thinking how often Life cameramen had intruded on similar moments of private sorrow.1

  After she was back in seclusion, Harry completed plans for the complicated rail journey to Ann’s final resting place. The girl had expressed a wish to be interred at Mepkin in South Carolina, where the family had spent many blissful days before Pearl Harbor. But for as long as the plantation remained closed and unkempt—most of its personnel were at work in wartime factories—Clare preferred to bury her at the nearby graveyard of Strawberry Hill, where the ashes of her grandmother and namesake already lay.

  She and Harry left San Francisco on Friday, January 14, at 4:30 P.M. They occupied separate bedrooms on the Union Pacific streamliner, and Ann’s coffin rode in a third. When they reached Washington, Clare met briefly with her aide, Al Morano. “I don’t know why this happened,” she said, still uncomprehending.2

  At 6:40 on Monday evening, the Luces began the last segment of their trip South. They traveled now in a private parlor car, with a small group of fellow mourners riding in the attached train. Waiting to pick them up in Charleston the next morning was Harry’s ever-dependable factotum, Wesley Bailey. He had selected the burial plot, planned the service to be held in an eighteenth-century chapel adjacent to Strawberry Hill, and arranged for lines from Psalm 45 to be etched on Ann’s headstone.

  HEARKEN, O DAUGHTER

  AND CONSIDER

  AND INCLINE THINE EAR

  FORGET ALSO THINE OWN PEOPLE

  AND THY FATHER’S HOUSE

  SO SHALL THE KING

  GREATLY DESIRE THY BEAUTY

  FOR HE IS THY LORD

  WORSHIP THOU HIM

  The last rites for Ann Clare Brokaw took place on Wednesday, January 19, at 11:30 A.M. An Episcopal priest officiated.3 Joining the Luces at the graveside were a few of Harry’s relatives, including his sister Elisabeth Moore and his nineteen-year-old elder son, Henry (“Hank”) Luce III, a Hotchkiss and Yale alumnus, about to be commissioned as a naval ensign in the Pacific.4 Other mourners included Maggie Case, Clare’s decorator Gladys Freeman, John Billings, and Bernard Baruch, who saw how distraught Clare was and offered her his nearby estate, Hobcaw Barony, as a place to begin recovery. Harry said he would keep her company for a day or two.

  A week later, he was still there. The crisis they had shared eased their estrangement of the past year. Clare wired after he left for New York, using a nickname from the early, romantic days of their marriage: “The day is bright again but I fear darling I am not and yet I was so very glad to have found ‘Mike’ for a little while.”5

  Harry’s efforts to console Clare and shake off his own sadness affected his attitude toward the outside world. When Billings asked what editorial position Luce periodicals should take in the coming presidential election, he said it was not important. “The country has gone to hell anyway.”6

  It was clear to a top Luce aide, Allen “Al” Grover, however, that the boss had “swung far to the right in his hatred of Roosevelt.” Executives at Time Inc. would have to control this phobia during the campaign, lest the Editor in Chief alienate millions of readers, and “ruin himself and his magazines.”7

  Clare’s return to the Hill in early February was preceded by a major profile of herself in Look magazine. Written by Maxine Davis, an experienced correspondent, it began by saying that Representative Luce was “not a great woman” but might well become a force in national and international affairs. She had “a consuming ambition … to direct the destinies of nations.” No veteran legislator was “in more deadly earnest” about the business of Congress. But Davis was skeptical regarding her idealism. “In her eyes the nation’s interests and Clare Boothe Luce’s are identical.”8

  Among the stack of condolences awaiting the Congresswoman were notes from Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Clare replied that she hoped the future would hold “no such irremediable sorrows” for them, and hinted that personal tragedy had revived her dormant spiritual side.

  The terrible pain of it is not one bit lessened by the knowledge that I have been held lovingly, or sympathetically in the hearts and minds of many friends, but that knowledge has, most strangely, assuaged my anguish. And then, too, I have been helped by the great communion of grief which I find myself sharing with thousands of others all over the country who have lost their beloved sons, the bravest and finest of America’s boys, in this war. What a crowding and a jostling and a milling there is of y
oung people at the gates of Paradise these days.9

  To Laura Hobson, Clare wrote, “I shall never be truly happy again, I know … agony reaches down to the depths of the heart.”10

  Another sympathy letter came from Lieutenant John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Ann’s occasional escort. “I thought I had become hardened to losing people I liked but when I heard the news today I couldn’t have been sadder.”11

  David wrote from New Guinea: “I cried. For the first time in many years, not even when mother went. How can a man believe when people like … myself have continued on and a kid like Ann is snuffed out. If there’s a God in Heaven it’s high time he gave you a break.”12

  Perfectly coiffed, but with strands of gray visible at her temples, Clare resumed her seat in the House on February 15.13 She was soon her old acerbic self, airing her preconvention views to The New York Times. Franklin Roosevelt, she said, would be the most desirable Democratic nominee, since he was indisputably qualified to “answer for the last twelve years.” If he chose to campaign mostly on foreign policy, she thought General MacArthur or Wendell Willkie would be ideal Republican opponents, and if on domestic issues, Governor Dewey of New York, an honest and efficient administrator.14

  She suggested no vice presidential candidates, perhaps in tacit acknowledgment that the boom for her had abated. Now she was being touted only as the keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention.15 Before that, she faced a crucial decision: whether to run for reelection in the fall.

  Harry, who had always been more enthusiastic about her career as a politician than as a playwright, urged her to commit to a second term.16 It was a prospect, in her current emotional state, that filled Clare with more dread than joy.

  With six weeks to go until the Easter recess of Congress, Clare continued grieving. “She didn’t eat and was consumed by a terrible restless energy,” a friend noticed. “I did not think she would survive. She took long furious walks.”17

  Some legislative agenda absorbed her, particularly questions of immigration reform. But her chief interest remained the progress of the war—particularly the Fifth Army’s fight against tenacious German resistance at Anzio, Italy. Most of General Mark Clark’s troops who had fought in the baking deserts of North Africa were now deployed in the freezing Italian midsection, suffering from high rates of exhaustion and disease. Many thousands were already dead, captured, or missing. Soldiers trying to advance along valley roads were being bombarded by enemy redoubts in the mountains. The historic monastery of Monte Cassino had just been devastated by Allied bombers, in the mistaken belief that Germans were sheltered there. Clark was at last poised to take Rome, but before he did, more than sixty thousand Wehrmacht and Allied servicemen would be killed, and countless more wounded in one of the harshest campaigns of the war.18

  Allegations of military mismanagement in Europe and the Pacific circulated in American political and publishing circles. Clare and twenty-two other Republican Congressmen signed a letter to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, asking for an elucidation of the administration’s current war and peace policy. He responded evasively, and Clare had no luck trying to get him to say more in a follow-up interview. She concluded the White House had no overall strategy.19

  Contrary to her misgivings, the Pentagon was shipping legions of men and hundreds of thousands of tons of matériel to both war theaters. American manufacturers were hiring millions of unenlistable men and women, and producing vast quantities of armaments. Training camps were turning out lean, fit recruits for all services at breakneck speed. Ill equipped and undermanned only three years before, the United States military was benefiting from a productivity unprecedented in the annals of warfare.20

  Clare remained hypersensitive about the manner of Ann’s death. Unable to forget how brutally her assistant had woken her on that bleak January day, she announced in early March that Miss Blood would leave her employ to work for the GOP in Connecticut.21 She had many sleepless nights, and at times contemplated suicide.22 Ann, she wrote Irene Selznick, had been “all my hopes for the future, all the justification for the past.” Though she managed to put up a good enough show in public, “grief has shortcircuited the mechanism of me rather badly. Perhaps time will restore and repair this strange and deep disorder.” She doubted it ever could.23 “Where else shall I plant the hopes of my heart, what else encompass with so much love. Where else give or get such gay, tender, unquestioning loyalty and companionship. Motherless, fatherless, childless—and in my forties! How odd for ‘the woman who has everything.’ ”24

  Debilitated and gaunt, she lost interest in her appearance, a sure sign of clinical depression. At the end of the month, she checked into a New York hospital for a thorough examination, and remained there ten days.25 It was whispered around Time Inc. that Clare had become “a heavy secret drinker.”26 But no reports of that appeared in print. Dependency on drugs was another matter. A lifelong insomniac, Clare often needed sedatives to sleep, and occasionally seemed frail at early morning appointments. She wrote to Alice Basim, “I go places, do my work, laugh and talk with people. But inside me is … a grief too deep for words.”27

  9

  CAMPAIGN ’44

  Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.

  —RICHARD YORTY

  The Wisconsin primary on April 4, 1944, made plain that Thomas E. Dewey was far ahead of all other GOP candidates. Of twenty-four delegates to the convention, he won seventeen, Harold Stassen four, Douglas MacArthur three, and Wendell Willkie none, leading to his withdrawal from political life.1 Dewey’s victory was a rebuff to both Luces. Harry had been pushing for Willkie in his magazines since 1940—an advocacy complicated by his more recent infatuation with MacArthur.2

  Though impressed and charmed by the latter, Clare felt that he was too old at sixty-four to undergo on-the-job presidential training. In addition, there was the important question of character. Whatever his virtues, the general was hugely self-enamored. “He wasn’t conceited, he was vain,” she said, meaning he was unaware that military expertise did not necessarily guarantee political acumen.

  In view of Dewey’s apparent lock on the nomination, Harry and Clare transferred their allegiance to him. The GOP Arrangements Committee formally considered a proposal that she should be keynote speaker at the convention in June. This would “not only constitute recognition of the part women have taken in politics, but would also assure the brilliant delivery of a forceful speech, and would bring to the convention and the party unprecedented attention.”3 Dewey, however, felt no need to ingratiate himself with either of the Luces, and gave the honor to Governor Earl Warren of California.4

  In compensation, the Connecticut GOP elected Clare as one of its delegates, and the national committee asked her to introduce former President Herbert Hoover.

  A keynote speech she did give was to a meeting of the United States wing of the Revisionist Zionist movement in New York City on April 23. She was prompted to do so by a reading of Pierre van Paassen’s The Forgotten Ally, which argued the right of oppressed European Jews to settle in Palestine without restriction. Taking up the cause in typically bold language, Clare castigated British authorities in the Mandatory for turning back ships of would-be refugees. She blamed them for the fact that “Jewish blood stains the blue Mediterranean red.”5

  The executive director of the Revisionists, Benzion Netanyahu, acclaimed her address as historic, “one of the great expressions of the American conscience.” He distributed tape recordings of it to radio stations around the country, and reprinted excerpts in large newspaper advertisements.6

  Clare continued to beat the same drum in an article for the journal Zionews. “As a well-fed person can never truly understand the sensation of starvation,” she wrote, “so it is impossible for most of us to … grasp the plight of a people who have neither a roof over their heads nor even a homeland they can call their own.” In May, she introduced a House resolution urging the creation of temporary havens in the United States fo
r displaced Jews. “For eleven years now … while we deplored and lamented, millions of refugees were savagely murdered. Others escaped death only to wander … across the face of a world which was sympathetic but coldly inhospitable. They have life but no place to live.”7

  A personal task she now had to brace for was the disposition of her daughter’s possessions. Ann had left no will. The lawful beneficiary of her share in income from Brokaw trust funds, worth some $200,000, along with her share of two Fifth Avenue mansions, was her half-sister, Frances “Pan” Brokaw. As next of kin, Clare received just $60,000 in bonds, cash, and jewelry.8

  She sent mementos to Ann’s suitors and pallbearers: a gold filigree ring for Walton Wickett, cuff links for James Rea, and for Norman Ross a black jet ring with a secret poison compartment, a gift from Madame Chiang Kai-shek. The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia received Ann’s 1860 Vuillaume violin, and Georgetown University her Baldwin grand piano.9

  It was too soon, Clare felt, to decide on a memorial. But she commissioned a posthumous portrait of Ann by Boris Chaliapin, a Time cover artist, and made the first of several interim donations to Stanford, suggesting the creation of a campus music room with a library of records and listening facilities.10

  With fewer resources, Walton Wickett gave the university $100 annually to buy books and sheet music “in memory of Ann Clare Brokaw … whose incomprehensible death I regard not only as a personal loss … but as a loss to the thousands of people with whom she would have come in contact and whose thinking she would have stimulated.”11

  Fighting sorrow with frenetic activity, Clare gave eight further speeches up and down the East Coast, on topics ranging from America’s relations with Indochina to legislation of consequence to women. She rattled Democrats in Philadelphia by saying that the United States should return to the coherent foreign policy of the President’s Republican cousin Theodore Roosevelt.12 She published several articles on themes such as “Why We Should Have a Woman at the Peace Table” and “How a Woman Can Get Along in State Politics.”13