She received the Monsignor first, apologizing for having asked him to make the long trip. It was a characteristic of hers to want people to make inconvenient gestures on her behalf. One day she took him for a long walk on the beach. Sheen wore his black cassock, which struck Clare as comical in the bright sun and warm breeze. They spoke at length of God and the universe. Clare recalled her girlhood in Old Greenwich, where she had courted danger by swimming out far into Long Island Sound, as if to defy the sea’s immensity. These forays had made her aware of her own insignificance, futility, and finiteness. Sheen countered by picking up some of the shells abundant on that stretch of sand, pointing out the microscopic intricacies of their shapes, sizes, and patterns.
After he left, she wrote asking him to choose an especially human saint to look out for her, one not too good or too clever. “What about this St. Helena you spoke about today? I rather liked the vigorous way she set about building churches.”41
As if Willoughby’s pending arrival were not distraction enough, Clare now received a letter from Ray Stecker, to whom she had recommended a study of Catholic doctrine. Ardent as ever, he wrote that he missed her “like the devil” and loved her “as I will never love again.” He was annoyed that she never made promised phone calls.
If you think I love you as I do because you beat your gums, get your picture in the paper, can write plays, save the nation, do all these things better than anyone else, then lambchop you have been reading your press clippings too frequently. And if I were to treat you any differently our marriage (if it ever happened) would not last a year.… Once and for all, you are just a woman to me and once in bed, at home, and by ourselves, your accomplishments won’t get you by, only your ability to be a woman, and my darling you are not superior at that.
He confessed that he could not figure out what she wanted from life. As far as he could gather, her current alternatives were:
A. You are going to get out of politics.
B. You are going to live in your house by the river.
C. You are going to divorce Harry.
D. You are going to marry me.
E. You are going to become religious.
Stecker thought she would do A, B, and E, while C and D were only remote possibilities.42
Her reunion with Charles turned out to be heart-wrenching for him. Straining to be poetic afterward, he wrote of an intimate evening “in the restless flicker of the hearth fire” as a descent into “the valley of shadows,” because it lacked consummation. He recalled a maddening glimpse of her “lovely body, iridescent, ivory-like—gleaming in a half-light,” and the feeling of something warm draped about him “like the mantle of the Madonna.” Her perfume lingered in memory, as did the profile of her “pale, noble face, the face of a saint delineated as thru a transparent veil.”43
Clare could be inaccessible emotionally as well as physically and was especially preoccupied at the moment. Charles tried to be sympathetic and supportive, but felt excluded and told her he was baffled and hurt by her immersion in matters of faith and doctrine. Everything now seemed “so far removed from the time when we were lovers.” 44 He was so wretchedly frustrated at one point that he crouched before her, while she laid a sympathetic hand on his head.45
After a few more emotionally turbulent days, Charles went north to stay with friends in Bronxville, and Clare headed for Washington. While she was in transit, her office released a bombshell statement, datelined January 30:
I feel I must make it quite plain and definite to the people of Fairfield County, Connecticut, that I do not intend to be a candidate for reelection in 1946.
My good and sufficient reasons for this will become abundantly clear in time.
Some commentators took the “will become abundantly clear” phrase to be an arch reference to pregnancy.46 Others guessed the Congresswoman was quitting out of disappointment. The Kansas Emporia Gazette stated unequivocally that “boredom and a sense of frustration” had overtaken her in the House.47 A rumor circulated that Mrs. Luce wanted Senator Thomas C. Hart’s Connecticut seat.48
Clare decided she would be ready for her still-secret conversion ceremony in New York by the first week of Lent. On Sunday, February 10, she flew to Johnson City, Tennessee, where she was due to deliver a speech at a dinner in honor of Lincoln’s Day. Her views on race relations had so startled fellow Republicans at a similar dinner in Washington that some of them had walked out on her. “As Christians,” she said, “we know that there are no such things as ‘Negro rights’ or ‘white rights.’ There are only human rights.”49
Upon arrival, Clare learned that Walter Winchell had heard about her religious intent and was about to broadcast the news on his ABC radio show. She urgently telephoned him to ask if he would drop the report, since it would make it doubly difficult for her, in the anti-Catholic South, to attack the Truman administration’s race policies. Winchell reluctantly consented, if only because Clare had occasionally substituted for him in his newspaper column.50
Before leaving Johnson City on Tuesday, she was confronted by, of all people, her husband. He was en route to a two-week tour of California, coincidentally timed to absent him from New York on the day she was to be received into the Church of Rome. Clare sensed he wanted to tell her something, but for whatever reason he changed his mind.
Puzzled, but used to Harry’s mysterious spells of reticence, she returned East to meet up with Willoughby in the capital. They had no more than three days together before she must go to New York and he return to Tokyo. For him, at least, those final hours turned out to be so disillusioning that he left his bed at the Wardman Park Hotel to write an anguished letter to Clare headlined simply “In the night.”
First, he recalled his last “glorious visit” to the West Coast in 1943 and the understanding they had achieved there, after which he had considered her his “wife, and friend and confidante.” He said he sympathized with her struggle for peace of mind, believing she would attain it, and that Father Sheen would approve of him. But as a man deeply in love, he wanted her to know that she was making him suffer the “torture of humiliation,” which could not be assuaged until he possessed her again.
That is why I have been insistent. To stop this corrosive poison that is planted in my mind. To restore my self confidence that has been shattered. You chide me of little faith? You have dealt me a mortal blow, that will emasculate me forever—except that it is in your power to restore to me my pride, my confidence and my hope.
He needed to recapture the talisman that during their separations had protected him from temptation and forgetfulness. “Do not let me go, I implore you, without this solace and this strength, so that I can carry with me, once more, the golden image that has kept us together so long.”51
Clare and General Willoughby with Japanese mementos, January 1946 (illustration credit 17.3)
Willoughby left partially satisfied, since his notes written en route to Japan were affectionate and optimistic. But once he reached Tokyo, he found Clare’s cold letter of January 5. He returned it with a scribble on the back, asking if it was “an adieu.”
For her it was certainly a rite of passage. Charles’s visit and her change of faith had complicated her life to such an extent that she finally grasped what G. K. Chesterton meant when he wrote that “the process of conversion involves turning yourself inside out.”52
Completing that scrutiny had taken almost five months of intense discussion and argument. Summing up her Catechism, Clare concluded that Sheen had presented the whole body of Catholic doctrine to her “in a form that [had] the solidity of a pyramid, the progression of a symphony, and the inevitability of a mathematical equation.”53
For the Monsignor, it was the longest period of instruction he ever undertook.54 He gave his student and God the credit. “No man could go to Clare and argue her into the faith. Heaven had to knock her over.”55 Only those who had witnessed the transformation could “realize the depth of her, the spectacular sublimity of her motivation.
”56
Sheen was willing to perform her conversion service, but not to serve as her confessor afterward. When he offered to find her one, she self-mockingly asked him to choose “someone who has seen the rise and fall of empires.”57
On the afternoon of Saturday, February 16, 1946, Clare Boothe Luce entered St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City to be received into the Roman Catholic Church. Since Harry had conspicuously absented himself in California, only a handful of friends and a lone reporter witnessed Father Sheen perform the rites of Conversion and Baptism, in an otherwise deserted side chapel.
18
OTHER ARENAS
No one ever has enough power. Power will not overcome one’s inferiority.… Power increases the person’s narcissism and reinforces the underlying insecurity.
—ALEXANDER LOWEN
The conversion of Congresswoman Luce was front-page news in newspapers across the country. She had issued a formal statement, saying she had wanted for some time to become a Roman Catholic. But cynics had tried to inject her choice into a state campaign, even though tolerant people of all faiths surely did not want religion to obscure important political issues. “Therefore, I have chosen to be unavailable by design or draft for elective office.”1
This did not stop further speculation that she wanted to succeed Senator Hart, an appointee incumbent who had no desire to run for election. A New York Journal-American columnist went further. Commenting on press predictions of a woman president by 1952, he said his bet was on Clare Boothe Luce.2
Tere Pascone, the Bridgeport Post reporter who had been at St. Patrick’s, might place the same wager. The more she saw of Clare the politician, the more impressed she became. After spending Saturday night at the Luces’ Waldorf apartment, she became infatuated with the private woman, too. Next morning, on her way to Clare’s Confirmation and First Communion services at the cathedral, she met Father Sheen in the elevator. He assumed that she knew some of the reasons for her friend’s conversion and added one of his own: “Great people have great problems and they need the Divine.”3
During Mass in the Archbishop’s Chapel, the communicant knelt on a velvet prie-dieu to receive the host from Bishop Francis McIntyre. Pascone thought she looked thin and forlorn, yet had a profile “as beautiful as a saint.”4
Sheen marked the ceremonies with a gift to his most brilliant convert. “I am more proud of you than any child I ever begot in Christ. I thank God daily that He used me as His poor instrument.”5 A framed photograph of himself carried the inscription “To my darling Clare, an arrow shot from the bow of God.” She placed it on her bedside table.6 In return, she commissioned an oil portrait of Sheen by Gerald Brockhurst, who had once painted her. It showed the Monsignor seated against a Lourdes background, dressed in clerical garb, his hair perfectly groomed and his piercing eyes looking straight ahead.7
After the momentous events of the weekend, Clare felt a step nearer to the spiritual state of Saint Augustine when he wrote: “God created us for Himself, and our hearts will always be restless until they rest in Him.”8
While Clare had been on her knees making her Catholic vows, Harry was on his at the Beverly Hills bedside of his mistress, the theatrical agent and producer Jean Dalrymple.
For the past three years, he had managed to keep their relationship—which Jean would always insist was platonic—a secret from his wife and from the eagle-eyed gossips at Time Inc.9 One night in 1943, Harry had gone alone to a party given by the journalist Elsa Maxwell and had met Jean, a blond, hazel-eyed, amply bosomed divorcée about six months older than Clare. She claimed to have discovered both James Cagney and Cary Grant in vaudeville. Now she represented the opera singer Grace Moore and the pianist José Iturbi, who was also her lover. Professionally and sexually content, with homes in both New York and Los Angeles, Jean had not encouraged Harry’s first attempts to woo her. One reason was she had known and admired Clare since the early 1930s and retained a lasting memory of the managing editor of Vanity Fair at a Condé Nast penthouse party, wearing white and carrying a white rose. Only when a copy of Clare’s autobiographical first play, Abide With Me, came her way had Jean been horrified “that anybody would expose her tawdry life to the world that way.”10
Jean Dalrymple, c. 1947 (illustration credit 18.1)
All these years later, she found herself in danger of involvement in a melodrama of her own. But Harry’s power and intellect fascinated her, and she had gotten into the habit of wining and dining with him—sometimes in his apartment when Clare was out of town—and even tolerated his occasional attempts at a pass. His intensity and palpable loneliness intrigued her. She was also touched by his clumsy compliments (“If Betty Grable is the legs, you’re the mind”) as they slowly attained an intimacy just short of total commitment. Harry had gone so far as to install Jean in a house not far from the Waldorf.11
His current posture before her was one not of supplication but of necessity, because she was flat on her back with influenza. She had been reluctant to see him, but he insisted, wanting to tell her about Clare’s conversion. “Now I can ask you to marry me,” he said.
Jean shook her head and burst into tears. “You never will.”
More concerned about Clare’s emotional fragility than Harry appeared to be, she warned of dire consequences if he asked for a divorce. “If she loses you, she loses everything. She’ll never, never, never give you up.”12
Still smarting over his wife’s second life-changing move in little over two weeks, Harry called John Billings to say brusquely that he did not want to know the content of any “Clare-Catholic” item in Time. Billings’s own reaction to her conversion was more colorful. “Fantastic! Yet logical for a half-crazy woman who must always be doing the bizarre to attract notice.”13
The disapproval of both men paled in comparison with that of Harry’s mother. As the widow of a Protestant missionary, and part of a team that had competed vigorously with the Roman Church for Chinese souls, Mrs. Henry Winters Luce frowned on her daughter-in-law’s defection. In a note to Clare signed, “All my love, Mother,” she wrote, “The glorious Faith … which generations of my forebears have lived and died by, is of such surpassing worth that I am filled with wonder and sadness that anyone should deliberately exchange it for another.”14
Caustic remarks from skeptics who knew Clare were plentiful. Brock Pemberton, the Broadway producer of Kiss the Boys Goodbye, worried that Clare’s preoccupation with religion would hinder her creativity. “There’s a brilliant woman, and all she does is run around proselytizing people!”15
Jack Kennedy said to her, “You’re still young, my God. Why strap the cross on your back? I never thought that the Catholic religion made much sense for anyone with brains.”16
Martha Gellhorn, the veteran reporter, was appalled and saddened to hear of Clare’s capitulation to “Mother Church.” She predicted that politically, it would steer a minor, fairly liberal player in the House toward the “dangerous machine” of the Far Right. Psychologically, Gellhorn felt that the move signified deep unhappiness. If Clare had embraced “that consolation, that shutting of the eyes and cowardice of the mind, and means really to renounce all else, then I am terribly sorry for her. Life must have been too much … having worked so hard and singlemindedly to be given the apple, [she] found it tasted sour and had a worm.”17
The screenwriter Lamar Trotti took Clare to a party and was irritated by the way she dropped the names of monsignors, archbishops, cardinals, and even the Pope. “I got the impression that she’s not so much joined the church as affiliated with the hierarchy.”18
Helen Lawrenson, too, scoffed at Clare’s top-of-the-ladder approach to religion, noting how quickly she ingratiated herself with Cardinal Francis J. Spellman of New York. She was amused to see Clare wearing a floor-length crimson cape, and hanging a glittering crucifix over her bed. “My first impression was that it was covered with sequins but I must have been mistaken.”
When Clare invited Helen and her hus
band, Jack, a left-wing union official, to dinner, they were disappointed to find her with Fulton Sheen instead of Harry. The Monsignor tried his best to recruit the couple for instruction but failed, not least because he gave Jack “the creeps.” This did not stop Sheen from later dropping in on the Lawrensons when they were sick and sending them rosaries, religious tracts, and even a foot-high statue of the Madonna.19
Undeterred by all the opprobrium, Clare attended daily Mass, either at St. Thomas Apostle in Washington, St. Patrick’s when she was in New York, or a small rural church, Our Lady Queen of Peace, during visits to Mepkin. In response to letters asking why she had converted, she began to write “The Real Reason,” a three-part account for McCall’s magazine of the spiritual crisis that had led her to Father Sheen and the long path to belief that followed.
With publication many months away, she used her powers of persuasion to convince friends that faith had steadied her intellectually and emotionally, deepened her sympathies, and quickened her sense of humor, as in her mock complaint, “Freedom from worship prevails everywhere.”20
On March 5, President Truman escorted Winston Churchill to the small town of Fulton in his home state of Missouri. The former Prime Minister was to deliver one of the most important orations of his life there, at Westminster College. Entitled “The Sinews of Peace,” it would soon be known by a more graphic name. A crowd of thirty thousand watched the statesmen drive to the college gymnasium in an open limousine. Two thousand more waited inside, while across the nation, multitudes of radio listeners gathered around their sets to hear Churchill’s oratory.
He began by saying that America currently stood “at the pinnacle of world power.” This primacy brought with it “an awe-inspiring accountability” to protect vulnerable nations from future war and tyranny. To do so required an end to the current precarious counterbalance of East and West, as well as a need to cement the “special relationship” between English-speaking peoples, and a United Nations that would become “a force for action, and not merely a frothing of words.”
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