Back in Washington, she sat for a portrait by the famous Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh, impressing him as “a person of great presence and decisiveness.”14
Less apparent, when Clare was not posing or performing, was the degree of debilitating introspection that afflicted her in depressive moments. She suffered recurring images of her bleak youth, guilt over her neglect of Ann, and remorse for her betrayals of Harry. David Boothe hinted at his sister’s trials in a letter to Isabel Hill: “I don’t believe anyone apart from myself can realize the tremendous obstacles, pitfalls and snares she’s overcome and side-stepped in her life.”15
During periods when she felt sorry for herself, she had no tolerance for what she saw as the derelictions of others, such as General Willoughby’s inability to cross the Pacific to attend Ann’s funeral. Her letters to him became less frequent and their tone chillier. He chided her for withholding news and love: “I need some sign occasionally.”16
He explained that his hope for leave had been dashed by battles for the Japanese islands fringing Australia. “The action was important, though, since we had the Grand Fleet for a few days, to stand between us and the Jap fleet, ex Singapore … hovering hyena-like to jump on us.” The navy was indispensable, Willoughby wrote.17 Japan’s empire now stretched four thousand miles, mostly across water. Its soldiers had taken seventy-eight thousand Americans and Filipinos on the island of Bataan alone. To help marines and infantry recapture territories, U.S. battleship cannons were positioned to shell the caves and jungles of innumerable hostile islands, in an attempt to make transport landings safer. Naval pilots, leaving flight decks every few seconds, helped intercept kamikaze bombers, and provided cover for men negotiating mined beaches.
David Boothe was performing his own risky role, flying supplies to the lines. Like many peacetime misfits, he found his element in war, and loved the unpredictability of the air. He kept Willoughby informed of his activities, and also unburdened himself about Clare’s emotional state. “That sister of mine has me good and worried … I know her General and when Ann died so did most of Clare.”18
To ensure that America would be a congenial place for her brother and other veterans to come back to after the war, Representative Luce supported the GI Bill of Rights. Sponsored by President Roosevelt, the legislation passed unanimously in the House on May 18. It promised career help, government-assisted college education or vocational training, unemployment insurance, and loans for servicemen or -women to buy homes, farms, or businesses.19
On June 4, 1944, General Mark Clark at last captured Rome. It was a partial victory for him, in view of the intransigence of German resistance northeast of the Eternal City. The news of his triumph was overshadowed two days later, when the biggest armada ever assembled crossed the English Channel and deposited an invasion force on Normandy beaches.
As the post-D-Day battles raged, Clare wrote her address introducing former President Herbert Hoover to the Republican National Convention. Although its purpose was clearly procedural, she could not help dwelling on the sacrifices of America’s fighting men. She sent the twelve-page first draft to Hoover, telling him that it would take about twelve minutes to deliver “without applause.”20
He replied that he would not change a word of her “powerfully affecting” speech. Moreover, he modestly proposed, in view of “the beauty of it and its high emotional pitch,” that he speak before her. He would cover such ponderous subjects as foreign affairs, freedom, and totalitarianism, then end with a paragraph that would herald Congresswoman Luce as “the Symbol of the New Generation.” Reversing the order of their presentations, Hoover said, would give a “high lift to the whole convention” and “add drama to the occasion.”21
Clare welcomed this idea, asking if he would tell the arrangements committee of the switch. She knew members were unlikely to reject a suggestion from the party’s senior statesman.22
It had been twelve years since Clare Boothe Brokaw, managing editor of Vanity Fair, had attended her first political convention—as a Democrat—in company with Bernard Baruch. Together they had witnessed the nomination of Franklin Roosevelt, and rejoiced at his subsequent defeat of Hoover.23 Now, after remarrying and switching her party affiliation, she had Harry as her escort to Chicago, and her feelings about FDR were radically altered.
The convention opened at the Chicago Stadium on Monday, June 26. In a listless, ill-attended session, delegates adopted the campaign platform, pledging postwar international collaboration for peace, and restoration of prosperity at home.
On Tuesday, the pace of politicking heated up, and by evening the hall was packed. Hoover preceded Clare to the rostrum and predicted that the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and possibly China would emerge as the dominant world powers after the fighting ended. A general assembly of nations, he said, would be necessary to moderate or circumvent potential conflicts, but it must not become a mere “debating society.” Referring indirectly to the World War I aid program that had made his reputation, he added that America should share its prosperity after the war by giving food to starving populations of countries ravaged by the enemy.24
Throughout Hoover’s address, Henry Luce, wearing a white suit with a red rose in his buttonhole, sat with his feet on the gallery rail, reading a newspaper. But when his wife stepped up to the podium, he focused on her intently.25
The temperature outside had been in the nineties for most of the day. Inside the hall, under the klieg lights, it approached a hundred as Clare, in a short-sleeved blue dress, took the microphone. She was greeted with prolonged and loud applause from thousands of delegates, alternates, and guests. After it died down, she said that she supposed party leaders expected her to speak about the millions of American women doing war work in the armed services, industries, canteens, hospitals, and Red Cross. But the timbre of her crystal-clear voice became forceful and her words incendiary as she embarked on an anti-administration diatribe.26
She attacked the “inefficiency, abusiveness, evasion, self-seeking, and personal whim” that were steadily “distorting our democracy into a dictatorial Bumbledom.” President Roosevelt had sent some twelve million United States citizens to fight abroad, with no long- or short-term plans for victory. War could have been averted by “skillful and determined American statesmanship.”27
The main body of Clare’s speech, long and meandering, aimed to stir patriotic as well as partisan feelings, and was often more heated than coherent. Resorting to allegory, she evoked a symbolic figure, “GI Jim,” killed in battle and buried in an unmarked grave, a victim of his country’s unpreparedness. “Jim was the heroic heir of the unheroic Roosevelt Decade: a decade of confusion and conflict that ended in war.” Republicans owed it to that young man to undo years of Democratic mismanagement, and ensure that his sacrifice was not useless. “For a fighting man dies for the future as well as the past, to keep all that was fine of his country’s yesterday, and to give it a chance for a finer tomorrow.” She went on to cite Jim’s equally allegorical buddy, “GI Joe,” who would return one day via Berlin and Tokyo to a “greater, freer America,” built by the Republican Party.28
The response was a tumultuous standing ovation. Clare smiled and held her arms high, while Hoover and other party dignitaries flanked her. Theatrical to the core, she lingered onstage, even though she was spent and soaked with perspiration.29
Undoubtedly, her unique aura—the combination of apparent delicacy and forcefulness that Vogue once described as “analogous to being dynamited by angel cake”—had much to do with her oratorical success.30 Her words alone, broadcast nationally and around the world on Armed Forces Radio, aroused varied reactions. John Billings wrote that she “put on a magnificent act—her voice was perfect and I was really proud of her.”31 The journalist Murray Kempton, serving in the Pacific, considered her attack on the President so “unseemly” as to put his morale at hazard.32 Critics suggesting Adolf Hitler might be responsible for more war casualties than Franklin Roosevelt
decried the speech as unpatriotic as well as demagogic. The New Yorker put its objections simply:
Clare addresses the Republican National Convention, July 1944 (illustration credit 9.1)
To hint that the American war dead died because the majority voted wrong in the last three elections is a palpable misstatement of fact as well as a staggering breach of taste, and we must in charity assume that the lady did not understand the implications of what she was inspired or advised to say.33
But inside the GOP, Clare had scored a rhetorical coup. Even isolationists chose to hear her riff on GI Jim as proof she agreed with them that non-intervention would have been best for America.
The following night, Dewey was nominated on the first ballot, and confirmed Governor John W. Bricker of Ohio as his running mate. Douglas MacArthur received only one vote. Clare was photographed in the hall’s press section, looking all business in front of a typewriter. She seemed at home in the proximity of a disheveled reporter chomping on a cigar.34
She returned East to find that the left-wing press was already gearing up to punish her for berating the President. The Sunday Worker accused her of being absent from Congress for twenty-three of seventy-one important roll calls, four of them concerning the passage of war appropriation bills. It took a lone defender on a Connecticut radio station to point out that most of Representative Luce’s absenteeism had been in the six weeks following her daughter’s death.35
Harry, meanwhile, traveled to California to give an address at Stanford on the day Ann Brokaw would have graduated.
He returned to his office feeling weary and jaded. Now forty-six, Luce had for some time appeared “rushed and distracted” to his colleagues. A rumor spread that the boss had “heart trouble”—Al Grover’s euphemism for infatuation with someone other than Clare. The fact was, Harry’s publishing empire had grown too big for him to run single-handedly. Acknowledging this, he handed over the job of editorial director to John Billings.
It was a huge promotion, rewarding the Southerner for having helped raise Life’s circulation to four million.36
With less to occupy him, Harry began to regret his ban on coverage of Clare, and wrote a rambling memo to senior staff about “the human aspects” of her situation.
Other publications—both newspapers and magazines—are not over eager to give strong favorable publicity to the wife of Publisher Luce. Meanwhile for many years one of the main smears against her has been the thousand-time repeated allegation that she owes practically everything to the enormous press build-up she has received in the enormously powerful Luce press.
It is, I think you will agree, a bit tough on her.…
She is, of course, far more in demand as a speaker than any Republican except the Presidential Candidate himself. The “pros” recognize her as one of the few speakers who can influence votes. Gradually she is getting a better press. She is getting it the hard way. Maybe that’s the best way to get things.37
Democrats drafted Franklin Roosevelt for a fourth term as President at their convention in late July. He took the advice of party leaders to drop Clare’s bête noire, the controversial Henry Wallace, from the vice presidency, and in a startling bid toward bipartisanship sounded out Wendell Willkie as his potential running mate. But Willkie declined, sure that Democrats would not accept him.38 FDR chose Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri instead. He then left for a conference with his Pacific commanders in Honolulu, where General MacArthur was shocked by his appearance.39
Roosevelt had been in abject physical and mental condition all year, suffering from high blood pressure, acute bronchitis, and cardiac disease. He was “just a shell” of the man MacArthur remembered.40 Winston Churchill was also “alarmed by the state of the President’s health” when he met with him later at Hyde Park.41
Insiders, with the election in mind, tried to conceal his condition. Truman had lunch with him and told reporters that he had eaten well, while privately informing aides that FDR was so “feeble” and shaky that he poured more cream into his saucer than into his coffee cup.42
Although he continued to be charming in social situations, Roosevelt had difficulty concentrating, and was less and less able to handle the war pressures climaxing that summer. His doctors advised him to cut back his workload to no more than four hours a day, prescribed digitalis for his irregular heartbeat, put him on a low-fat diet, and recommended fewer cocktails and a maximum of five or six cigarettes a day instead of his usual twenty to thirty.
Nothing about the President’s rapidly failing health appeared in print—even “the enormously powerful Luce press.”43
In Connecticut for the state GOP convention on August 9, Clare announced her intention to run for a second term. She took the opportunity to vilify the Soviet Union, saying that Communism was “the most deadly blight that has ever hit the spirit of man.” Clearly, her abhorrence of colonial imperialism had spread to include the ideological empire building of Josef Stalin. Galvanized by the Congresswoman’s invective against a U.S. ally, state Democrats nominated Margaret Connors, a twenty-nine-year-old attorney, to run against her. Deceptively low-key, with a pleasing voice, Connors was a Roman Catholic from an affluent Bridgeport suburb, a graduate of Wellesley and Yale Law School, and the first woman to serve as Connecticut’s Deputy Secretary of State. She had wide experience, having also worked at the Department of Justice and as counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.
Despite a promise to campaign on issues, she started off with a personal attack. Clare, she said, had done nothing in Congress except oppose the President and his administration. “Mrs. Luce is perfectly charming, lovely to look at, puts on a wonderful show—you can see the actress in every gesture—but I have long considered her a menace.”44
Connors had met Clare only twice, on public occasions. In recalling those encounters for a New Yorker reporter, she again patronized her rival’s theatrical qualities. “What a performance! She looks at you in that sweet earnest way, and it’s awfully hard not to think you’re the only person of real intelligence she’s spoken to in years.” But she saw that Clare’s celebrity worked to her advantage. “People … come up to me and say, ‘You know honey, I’d love to vote for you, but this Luce woman has really written some damn good plays.’ ”45
It was evident that Connors was a formidable candidate in one of the most closely watched contests in the country.
Clare asked William Brennan, the beefy, blue-eyed Irishman who had served as her campaign manager in 1942, to do so again. She also rehired Wes Bailey to handle publicity, radio broadcasts, and speech schedules.
Knowing that she was in good hands, Harry left for London in early September.46 He was responding to an invitation from Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Daily Express and London Evening Standard newspapers. “Max” Beaverbrook was now Minister of Aircraft Production in Winston Churchill’s government. Two weeks in a fellow press mogul’s company, discussing affairs of state, was more to Harry’s taste than tracking Clare around the hustings of Fairfield County.47
He had been gone barely a week when she cabled him: “Darling hurry home. It’s getting pretty grim without you to argue with.”48
In his absence, she indulged in an epistolary flirtation with another of the endless number of military officers who lusted after her. This time it was Colonel Stephen Mellnik, a colleague of Willoughby’s. He mailed her risqué letters. “Making presidents doesn’t substitute for a warm and sympathetic pair of feet in bed on a cold night.… To my naïve eye you were designed by nature to kiss and make love to—NOT to worry about Prexys or military affairs.”49
Mellnik also gave Clare insights into Japanese strategy for winning the war. In “Nip opinion,” he wrote, the United States would win a protracted conflict, so Japan was determined to make the cost of such ultimate victory prohibitive. If leaders in Tokyo were willing to lose ten million more soldiers, did those in Washington have the stomach to match that figure?
Meanwhile, “Luce v. Connors,” the o
nly all-woman face-off that fall, got under way, to the delight of journalists anticipating a bitchy fight. George C. Waldo, Jr., Editor in Chief of the Bridgeport Post and Telegram, was besotted with Clare and favored her in his columns, while Leigh Dannenberg’s Bridgeport Herald, an organ of the extreme Left, accused her of being anti-labor, anti-Semitic, and anti-Negro.
The last was an egregious claim, given that Representative Luce had introduced a resolution calling for equality in the armed services, and had condemned the Daughters of the American Revolution for refusing the use of its Washington hall to the Negro soprano Marian Anderson. On the trail, she won warm welcomes from black audiences, and did not flinch when one committee chairman hailed her as “the Honorable Clara Boothey Lucie.”50
Her outspokenness vis-à-vis Soviet totalitarianism elicited the wrath of America’s Communist Party leader, Earl Browder. He railed against Clare at every opportunity, and encouraged his chief mouthpiece, the Daily Worker, to malign her as “the lady with the dry ice smile, and an aristocratic contempt for the people who work for a living.”51
In Connecticut, operatives of the labor leader Sidney Hillman’s highly organized Political Action Committee handed out pamphlets, bellowed vituperations through loudspeakers, and broadcast hourly propaganda spots, assailing Clare’s looks, age, clothes, and husband. She was accused of being an isolationist, interventionist, and imperialist.52
Time magazine adhered to its policy of not mentioning Clare. In a way this helped her, because the ban included her detractors, notably President Roosevelt. He stopped his campaign train in Bridgeport to endorse Margaret Connors, and called Clare a “sharp-tongued glamor girl of 40.”53 Vice President Wallace, who had not forgiven her “globaloney” gibe, spoke at no fewer than seventeen Connors gatherings. Other big-name Democrats attacking Clare included Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, Orson Welles, and the authors Edna Ferber, Max Lerner, and Rex Stout. The tart humorist Dorothy Parker, who had once worked for Clare at Vanity Fair, charged her with visiting her own state only at election time. Most vituperative of all was the writer and broadcaster Clifton Fadiman, a resident of Connecticut. Mrs. Luce, he said, was a political “refugee from a Park Avenue fox hole.”54 Fairfield County had no need of this “photographer’s delight” as its representative in Congress. Her speeches convinced Fadiman that no woman of the time had “gone further with less mental equipment.”55
Price of Fame Page 10