Clare left for Hollywood on November 18, leaving Harry to follow. As a farewell present, he fired Eliot Janeway.2 Al Grover had only one word to describe Luce’s concessions to his wife: “infatuation.”3
En route to Los Angeles, she pondered a letter from Screwtape’s author about the task ahead of her. C. S. Lewis wrote that “those who know” had told him he was lucky to have the adaptation of his comic novel entrusted to her. “It wd [sic] be absurd of me to intrude any advice,” he wrote, before telling her how to ensure Hollywood moguls kept faith with his intentions.
That the Devils be represented as having no sense of humor whatever. The audience may laugh at them but never with them. The popular picture of the mocking or mischievous sprite wd be fatal to the whole story.… My devils ought to look like what are called “undertakers” in our country and (I think) “morticians” in yours.
If the angels [mentioned near the end of his book] are to be shown at all I implore that they shall not be female.… Make them—by whatever means—unearthly, severe, and beautiful in a rather terrifying way. Masks, if you have a good man to make them, might be far better than real faces. I couldn’t bear them to be the angels of modern church windows i.e. elongated consumptive schoolgirls with wings. And music to suit—something sharp and shrill and vibrant: nothing sentimental.4
At her first story conference with the studio head, Darryl F. Zanuck, Clare realized that he had no comprehension of the subtleties or meaning of Lewis’s book. He had made one mistake already, casting Clifton Webb in the title role, mainly because he had him under contract. Clare tactfully pointed out that Webb, being a suave and elegant actor, was unsuited to play either of Lewis’s devils. Zanuck, as Lewis had anticipated, wanted the angels to be female and played by established stars. His idea of showing satanic wickedness was to have Wormwood politely offer to escort an old lady across a street and midway shove her under a truck. Clare argued that the point of Lewis’s satire was not to demonstrate the infamy of devils, since that was understood. What her script had to show was their wily determination to coax human beings into committing sinful acts. She told Zanuck how his suggested scene should ideally play out.
The nephew and heir of an elderly woman is helping her cross the street in heavy traffic. A devil appears and whispers in the young man’s ear, “Give her a push.” He recoils. “No, I can’t do that, I’m too fond of her.” The devil persists. “She’s going to die soon anyway and, after all, you will get the inheritance.”
Clare explained, “The devil’s work is to tempt us to do evil.”
Zanuck made a lame joke about his father being a rabbi and warning him that if he went to Hollywood, he would end up doing Satan’s bidding.
“Now’s your chance to do God’s work,” Clare said, “and get this story straight.”5
Harry joined Clare in her rented Bel Air house on December 10 and stayed through Christmas. His present to her was a Madonna triptych by Adriaen Isenbrandt.6 She entered it on her art acquisition list. “This picture, given to me after the 1947 ‘settlement’ … my most sentimental possession.” The adjective would not have appealed to C. S. Lewis.7
Over the festive season the Luces immersed themselves in Hollywood society, giving a party for more than three hundred members of the movie community that cost $12,000. Adherents of the Left and Right in West Coast politics met for the first time since the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) had begun to investigate alleged Communist subversives in the picture industry. They mingled uneasily, conscious of the ideological schism that divided them, yet united in their eagerness to cultivate the goodwill of the most powerful publisher in America.8
In his fiftieth year, Henry Luce had reached a new peak. The editorial opinions expressed in his magazines were largely his own and resonated around the globe. Many policy mavens considered them to be more influential than those of the President of the United States. Even as Harry cavorted with movie bigwigs, a member of his staff was editing Churchill’s memoirs for serialization in Life.9
Clare, in contrast, was dispirited. Stalled on Screwtape, she felt in decline as a writer of dialogue.10 Her 1942 script about China, The 400 Million, had gone nowhere. Now, just as she resumed screenwriting, there was panic over a decline in movie attendance, largely attributed to the growth of television.
Leaving Clare to fulfill the final weeks of her Fox contract, Harry returned to New York on January 3, 1948. An advance copy awaited him of a new novel by Ralph Ingersoll, who had worked alongside the Luces on the first layouts of Life. It was an unflattering lampoon of them both. Entitled The Great Ones, the book portrayed Sturges Strong, the owner-editor of a fabulously successful magazine called Facts (Harry’s original name for Time), as a dull egocentric. He was saddled with a money- and power-hungry wife named Letia Long. After multiple careers as a designer, painter, and bestselling author, she had become a war correspondent and politician. Early on, Ingersoll wrote, Sturges had had visions of his queenly spouse as co-runner of his company and tried to ingratiate her with his employees. “He wanted, for her, the satisfaction of their acknowledgment of her status.”11 But his dream failed to materialize. Incidents of betrayal and adultery proliferated, until all ended badly.
Clare, meanwhile, had a surprise encounter in Los Angeles with Julian Simpson, the World War I hero she had fallen in love with at twenty.
Having failed to see him in London during the war, and after fantasizing for more than two decades about what might have been had he been bold enough to run away with her, Clare was shocked by his appearance now. At fifty-four, Julian had lost the dark good looks she had kept in her mind’s eye, and much of his quiet charm and charisma. “He was beefy,” she recalled, “with a veined, whiskey nose, and he was a little pompous.”12
How he found her in Los Angeles remained a mystery, as did his purpose for being in the country. He also elected not to tell her that in 1934 he had married an Australian heiress. She had died four years later.13
On February 2, from the house in West London he still shared with his mother, he wrote Clare that during their reunion he had “formed the impression” she was withdrawing into herself. Even so, he hoped for another chance to get to know her again and “to understand” what had kept them apart.14
In spite of Clare’s promise to look him up on her next trip to London, they never met again. Julian returned to New South Wales after the death of his mother in 1950, and he died two years later at fifty-eight, in the homosexual quarter of Sydney. He was heavily in debt despite family inheritances, yet in his will he left £200 “to my friend James Maxwell Ramsay, a Commander in His Majesty’s Royal Australian Navy.”15
Lack of money had been a crucial obstacle to proposing at the height of their youthful romance. But perhaps the real cause of his marital misgivings—his bisexuality—had eluded her, and for the rest of her life would keep her from achieving a wholly satisfactory romantic attachment. A poem expressed her feelings.
The mind has a thousand eyes
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.16
In the third week of January, Zanuck turned down Clare’s 150-page screenplay. His accompanying note proved that he had not read C. S. Lewis’s book. All he could deduce from the script was that Screwtape and Wormwood were “unpleasant characters” who talked “over the heads” of the average moviegoer. He said he had hoped for a story “about a lad who seduces a girl,” after which nobody went to hell or heaven. What people really liked to see, he said, are “not devils, or for that matter angels, but Betty Grable and Hedy Lamarr in a passionate scene.”17
Attempting to explain her failure in a five-page letter to Lewis, Clare said that her producer, Samuel Engel, had doubted her belief in Satan’s existence. After realizing that she was sincere, Engel was “torn between dreadful alternatives: that I might be daft, or that he might be doomed.”
She likened the making of movies to an automobile as
sembly belt. She had hoped “to lick the system” and be faithful to the intent and spirit of the book, even counting on Hollywood’s ignorance of Christian theology as an advantage. But she had been wrong in thinking that Fox executives had no ideas on how to portray Screwtape. On the contrary, some saw him as an Al Capone type, “brutal and thuggish,” or “a sadistic, paranoic manic depressive, first cousin to Frankenstein’s monster.” To others, he was a diabolically charming seducer.18
Clare tried to rationalize her failure to a fellow Catholic playwright, Donald Ogden Stewart: “Oh well, I had no business, in the rash pride of my new found faith, to think I could succeed where so many better men and women have failed—getting a touch of God into a movie!”19
To honor her contract with Fox, Clare sketched out a fresh synopsis for Zanuck.20 It was inspired by the recent box office successes of two Bing Crosby vehicles with pious themes, Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s.
Fifteen months before, addressing a religious audience in her home state, she had told the true story of Reverend Mother Benedict Duss, an American nun who, imprisoned in a French convent during the war, had been liberated with her fellow sisters by a troop of GIs. In gratitude, Mother Benedict and a French nun had traveled to the United States with $20 between them and, using an old factory and fifty acres of land donated by a local businessman, had built the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Clare had predicted that this Benedictine community would last as long as the one the order had established at Monte Cassino around A.D. 529.21
Intrigued by the narrative possibilities of this story, she had asked her Catholic friend Gretta Palmer to gather more recent information from Mother Benedict. The journalist had obliged with a seventeen-page history. From this, Clare now conceived a scenario in which two young and attractive nuns, one a crack tennis player, arrived in Bethlehem to found an abbey similar to Regina Laudis. They received a warm welcome from a songwriter and, among others, an artist (based on Lauren Ford, a painter of religious subjects) who—in an act of biblical symbolism—allowed them to stay in her stable. But a few local commercial interests opposed the construction scheme. Clare’s synopsis ended with the nuns using determination, guile, and charm to overcome obstacles and achieve their sacred goal.
She sent her outline to Zanuck and he responded with flowers and an encouraging note. “There is jubilation in heaven to-nite. Consternation in Hell, and great joy on earth—certainly in my heart. Your ever lovin’ producer.”22
Before continuing, Clare had conferences with a veteran script writer, Oscar Millard, who combined their ideas into a detailed treatment. Then, feeling full of energy and optimism, she checked into Arrowhead Springs Hotel, a mountain resort popular with actors, and began a screenplay tentatively called Bethlehem. Working with a Fox continuity expert, she completed a draft in three weeks.23
Harry came back to California for a few days in late February, and put off his return to New York when Clare became mysteriously ill. Her symptoms were exhaustion, nausea, and stomach and joint pains. She was diagnosed as suffering from “Virus X,” a disease that had been prevalent in America for more than two years. It was later discovered to be not viral at all, but DDT poisoning, due to the chemical’s near universal use in agricultural and household sprays.24
“I wish she’d croaked,” Miss Thrasher said.25
22
CROONERS OF CATASTROPHE
A demagogue is a man who makes a dangerous highway look smoother than it is.
—ANONYMOUS
When a recovered Clare traveled back East in the first week of March 1948, she heard that the first annual international Gallup poll had ranked her the fourth most admired woman in the world. Only Eleanor Roosevelt, Madame Chiang, and Sister Kenny, the polio therapist, were ahead. For the next fifteen years, she would remain on the list, never falling below number six.
On April 10, Bernard Baruch held a forty-fifth birthday party for Clare at Hobcaw Barony in South Carolina. She did not feel like celebrating, because Harry had told her the day before that he had been offered $250,000 in cash for Mepkin—$100,000 more than he had paid for it in 1936—and was inclined to accept. He asked if she was ready to part with the property. She was not but said, “Dear, you decide.”1
As early as 1933, Clare had been prompted to search for a winter retreat near the old rice fields of the Cooper River, after reading “The Marshes of Glynn” by Sidney Lanier. It was a poem about faith and redemption through pain and conversion.
As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God:
I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies
In the freedom that fills all the space ’twixt the marsh and the skies …2
Curiously prophetic of her own spiritual progress, the verses had haunted her until she found Mepkin, an Indian word meaning “serene and lovely.”3 She had seen its potential as a paradise on earth, and Harry had agreed to buy it.4
The plantation was still not perfected, and this made losing it doubly hard for Clare. She persuaded Harry to sell only four thousand outer acres to a local lumber merchant and to give the buildings and remaining thirty-two hundred acres to the Trappist monks of the Abbey of Our Lady at Gethsemani, near Louisville, Kentucky.5
Luce’s generous donation would enable the silent Trappists, Cistercians of the Strict Observance, to establish their third foundation in America, subject to Vatican approval. The plan, which Clare brokered, called for the transfer of a small number of monks from the Mother House to Mepkin, near the aptly named village of Moncks Corner. The plantation’s existing house and cottages would serve as their base, while they built a chapel and agricultural facilities to make a self-sustaining enterprise. The site was initially to be called Our Lady of Mepkin and with more inmates might one day become an abbey.
One member of Harry’s family who looked askance at losing Mepkin to a Roman Catholic order was his sister Elisabeth. A Wellesley graduate, fervent Calvinist, and supporter of Nationalist China, Beth was a huge influence on her brother. He talked to her so often that he had a direct telephone line from his office to her apartment.6 Unlike their mother, she was warm toward Clare and had spent many happy days at the plantation, where her two boys had learned to fish, shoot quail and wild turkey, and play Monopoly and mah-jongg with their glamorous aunt. But now she felt Clare had put Harry seriously off track.
Beth Moore put her objection in writing, hoping to divert his philanthropy in a direction more palatable to the Luce family. In an extended nautical metaphor, she likened him to a “powerful battleship” surrounded by his mother and siblings—“your cruisers and even the lowly tugs,” who nosed him into harbors, albeit of his own choosing. As he maneuvered, they served as lookouts, since it was impossible for a larger vessel “to have sufficient perspective, at all times, to steer a straight course.”
While ready to admit that America needed more places of prayer, she regretted that when he was in a position to make a “truly princely gift” to one of the Protestant causes dear to his heart and hers, he was ceding an estate to Papists.7
Clare reading under a live oak at Mepkin, 1947 (illustration credit 22.1)
But Harry’s mind was made up. In mid-April, Mepkin was shuttered for the summer, and the long process of transfer began.
Despite Clare’s desire to put electoral politics behind her, she was chosen by the GOP convention in Hartford on May 17 to be one of six delegates to represent Fairfield County at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. Two days later, she announced her support of Senator Arthur Vandenberg as the Republican candidate for President, even though he denied wanting to run.
At sixty-four, Vandenberg was tall, white-haired, majestically deep-voiced, and egotistical. He had been a power in Congress since 1929 and was now its leading internationalist. For this reason if no other, Harry also favored him and undertook to promote his candidacy in Time and Life. It was rumore
d that Luce nursed a fantasy that if the Senator was elected President, he might become his Secretary of State.8
Isabel Hill was unhappy that many of the speeches she typed that spring were, however, not political, but for the Catholic lecture circuit. She was approaching fifty and did not want to spend the rest of her working life focused mostly on religious activities. So she quit the job she had held for fourteen years and went to work for John Hay Whitney.9
Her departure was a major crisis for Clare, who thought it “far easier to get along without a maid, or even a husband! than a secretary.”10 Fulton Sheen came to the rescue, offering her one of his part-time assistants, a Georgetown University graduate and ardent Catholic, Dorothy Charnley Farmer.
At their interview, Mrs. Farmer was captivated by her prospective employer, who struck her as looking amazingly young in a gray blouse and red waistcoat with matching turban. She felt herself swept up by Clare’s theatrical persona and would remain enthralled for thirty-five years.
Plumply small (she snacked on butterballs), Dorothy was efficient, gifted at keeping unwanted callers at bay, and always cheerful. This last, along with humor, proved a crucial trait for coaxing Clare out of dark moods. More and more mutually dependent as the years went by, Dorothy and Clare formed a bond to be broken only by death.
Clare in a fashionable turban, spring 1948 (illustration credit 22.2)
In a commencement address at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, Clare coined a graphic expression when she chastised modern man for being “a moral muttonhead.” A strong faith in God, she went on, “is necessary to the preservation of national life, the enlargement of political liberty and the successful attainment of private happiness.”11 She continued her sharp coinages on June 21, the first day of the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia.
Price of Fame Page 23