Henry Luce left New York the next day for five weeks in Europe. Clare was to have gone with him but begged off at the last minute. She meant to spend the next six months writing at Sugar Hill.37
Although Harry was traveling ostensibly on business, his letters showed that a good part of his tour amounted to a spiritual quest. He visited cathedrals, attended Masses, and lunched with clerics. Most important of all, Clare arranged for him to meet Pope Pius.
In her letter to the Pontiff, she reminded him of her own three audiences: in 1940 with a group of tourists, in 1944 with the House Military Affairs Committee, and in 1945 alone. “During that third interview did Your Holiness see what I did not know myself: that I yearned for the Light and the Truth that were nowhere to be found in this melancholy world except in His Church? And did you then, while we talked of large impersonal matters, say a little prayer for my conversion? Oh, I do believe that you did!”
She requested the Holy Father’s help in persuading her husband, who “will shortly arrive in Rome,” to become a Catholic. “For he is longing in his heart—as I once did in mine—for the ineffable riches of Christ, the fullness of the Faith. He is not wholly aware of this.” She closed with a request that the Pope “say a prayer for his conversion just like the one you may have said for mine,” and signed off, “Your obedient daughter in Christ.”38
When not working in her study or running the house, Clare was diverted by the beauty and lushness of spring on her hillside. She reveled in a splash of hot-gold daffodils, apple and dogwood blossoms, and budding maples. At night, she educated herself in classical music, listening to records of Bach’s Mass in B Minor, Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata, and Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol, interspersed with Gregorian chants.39
By the end of April, however, she felt isolated, and summoned Constance O’Hara for a long weekend, installing her in Harry’s suite. During the day, both women read and walked. After dinner, they “went on a spree of confidences.” On her return to New York, O’Hara had few misgivings about the intimacy that had developed, in spite of warnings that “rained down on me like hailstones.”40
The next visitor was Elsa Maxwell, who was pleased to find that Clare’s change of faith had left her sense of humor intact, along with “a greater sense of humanity.”41
If so, it did not help write the play Clare had planned. But she did complete “Under the Fig Tree,” an essay on personal travails and religious epiphanies. Encouragement was not lacking for her to start producing dialogue again. A letter praising The Women came from Moss Hart. He and his frequent collaborator, George S. Kaufman, had given her professional advice before the satire opened on Broadway. He now confessed that he had not admired it at the time.
It’s a first-rate job, and to my mind a highly under-rated play.… It’s a highly civilized and biting comment on the social manners and morals of our society, and women’s place in it. I had no idea it was so good a play—I don’t think you ever got the credit you deserved for it—and I just thought I’d write and tell you so.42
As if in proof of Hart’s judgment, there was renewed interest in The Women among regional companies such as the Little Theater of Walla Walla in Washington State and another in Reno, Nevada. Both productions sold out.43
For a while Clare flirted with politics again, agreeing to see a group of local Republican officials who wanted her to run for the Senate in 1950. They assured her that having a better grasp of foreign affairs than anyone in Connecticut, she was “the only possible candidate” to challenge the state’s Democratic senior senator, Brien McMahon.44 “Do you suppose God could possibly want me to do any such thing?” she asked Thibodeau. “My puritan streak makes me imagine sometimes that He might want it precisely because it would be such a horrible penance.”45
Representative John Lodge, who had won her House seat, was reported to hanker for the nomination, as did former Governor James C. Shannon. The eagerness of two qualified rivals further discouraged Clare, who wrote Lord Beaverbrook that the more she was pressed for a decision about returning to politics, “the less appetite I have for it.”46
She retained, however, her avid interest in world affairs and began to write an article for Plain Talk magazine entitled “The Mystery of Our China Policy.” Questioning the State Department’s doctrine of Communist containment in all areas vital to American security, she asked why the United States was allowing a free China to collapse, while permitting Stalin to expand in the Pacific. The rationale was that Chinese Communists were nothing more than “agrarian reformists.” But she pointed out that Mao and his revolutionaries “never made a secret of their Soviet orthodoxy.” In fact, “agrarian reform is their platform promise. Communism is their party principle.”
Of course, Clare went on, corruption—“mostly a product of war’s tyrannies and tribulations”—existed among Chiang’s Nationalists, as it did elsewhere. “The European black marketeer in his black Rolls Royce is a familiar figure today on the lush, unbombed French Riviera.” Yet corruption was the excuse Washington made for not giving further aid to Chiang. Meanwhile, Mao’s Reds had an official policy of mass murder and genocide.
She warned that America must be willing to tap its resources to the limit to defend itself. “A budgeted war is a lost war. If our desire to contain Communism in Asia or Europe is conditioned by how much it will cost—we are defeated now.”47
On May 17, Clare rounded up about forty people in a New York cinema to see a preview of Come to the Stable. They were mostly friends such as Bernard Baruch, as well as Catholic magazine editors, intellectuals, and clergymen. She seated herself between Constance O’Hara and Father Thibodeau. It was her first chance to assess what Oscar Millard and another screenwriter, Sally Benson, had done with her story.
The movie was directed by Harry Koster, known for his work on early Deanna Durbin pictures, and starred the Oscar-winning Loretta Young and Celeste Holm as the two nuns. It looked as though it had been shot in and around Bethlehem, Connecticut, but in fact derived almost entirely from a sixty-thousand-square-foot lot, the largest at 20th Century-Fox. Only the tennis-playing scene had a real locale, Henry Fonda’s court in Brentwood. Young played Sister Margaret, and Holm Sister Scholastica, while Elsa Lanchester was the artist Amelia Potts, and Hugh Marlowe the handsome popular-song composer Robert Masen.48
Few of Clare’s original lines survived, but her plot was largely intact, allowing for an overlay of slapstick humor and religious sentimentality. The movie represented the two sisters as belonging to a fictitious nursing order, for the obvious reason that contemplative Benedictines were unlikely to exchange feisty dialogue. Nor would they be inclined to drive a Jeep down Fifth Avenue in New York, importune land from a gambler, and lustily pound stakes through water lines. A not unwelcome commercial addition was to have a pretty chanteuse sing a song called “Through a Long and Sleepless Night,” based on a Gregorian chant. It was composed by Alfred Newman, with lyrics by Mack Gordon, and was catchy enough to become a huge hit when it was recorded by Dinah Shore, Peggy Lee, and Vic Damone.
The screening came to an end with the triumphant dedication of the abbey and hospital of St. Jude. As the lights came up, there was applause and cries of “Author!” Clare stood and told the true story of the struggles of Mothers Benedict and Mary Aline to build the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem.
On leaving the theater, Baruch said that Come to the Stable had made a “moving picture fan of him again.”49 But Constance thought it “no more than pleasant,” and Gretta Palmer accused Clare of “marring the spiritual lives” of the real nuns whose adventures she had researched for her. Fathers Thibodeau and Wiatrak both expressed disapproval of the shenanigans of the screen Sisters.
When Clare and Constance took Thibodeau home to St. Jean Baptiste in the Luces’ chauffeur-driven Cadillac, he sheepishly asked to be dropped off across the street, so his fellow priests would not see him step out of a limousine. As he walked away, Constance remarked, “He’s a very holy man.”
“He’s too nice to see through us,” Clare said with a knowing grin.50
Discomfited by the reactions of orthodox Catholics, she reconciled herself to Stable being “a commercial success but a mild spiritual failure.”51 But then she heard that Cardinal Spellman had been seen “rocking with laughter” at another preview.52 Not quite truthfully, she wired Darryl Zanuck that “without exception all present” at her screening had found the movie “happy, inspiring and rewarding.”53 In his reply, Zanuck apologized for “some rather extensive alterations from the original version.”54
The changes evidently paid off. Hollywood’s trade papers hailed Come to the Stable as “inspiring,” “tremendous,” and “irresistible,” predicting big grosses for the “charming original story by Luce.”55 Variety added that the movie had moments of poignancy and was directed with sensitivity. Clare proudly sent Beaverbrook a newspaper clipping trumpeting the picture’s general release in late July. “It threatens to be a big box-office success,” she wrote, “and these days … that makes my stock high in Hollywood.”56
Thomas Merton—henceforth to be known as “Father Louis”—was ordained on May 26, 1949, in Bardstown, Kentucky. Clare missed the ceremony to welcome Harry back from Europe. But she left the following day to see the new priest conduct his first Mass. He used a chalice consecrated by Cardinal Spellman and told her afterward that she had been “explicitly remembered” in his prayers, and would be at every future service he conducted.57
She now had at least four clergymen concerned with her spiritual welfare, and recorded a dream she had about potential rivals for her attention and affection.
I am in a room. Fr. Wiatrak and Monsignor come in. I am very tired. I go to bed. So is Monsignor. He curls up alongside of me, and goes quietly to sleep. Fr. Wiatrak leaves the room, angry.58
June was unusually hot, so Clare retreated to her country study to work on the final draft of The Twilight of God and write a pile of letters to Catholics. She thanked Evelyn Waugh for sending her a copy of Ronald Knox’s Sermons.
“A conversion is not easy in mid-stream, as Knox says. I had thought when I first became a Catholic that the feeling of strangeness that it brought into my relations with non-Catholics must soon wear off.… Does it sound most awfully bigoted and intolerant to say that I feel comfortable … only in the company of Catholics who are aware that Catholicism is the central fact of their lives?” Eager for more exposure to Waugh’s nuanced mind, she invited him to visit Connecticut on his next trip to the States. Perhaps in the tranquil surroundings of Sugar Hill, he might be less “cruel” in arguing theology with her than he had been in New York.59
One particularly scorching day, Clare called Constance O’Hara and asked her to take some time off from her job for Sheed & Ward for some last-minute research help on The Twilight of God. “I’ll want you to telephone all sorts of people … check every one of my quotes from Communist authorities. I have to be exact. I’ll work you like a dog, and of course I’ll give you a credit line, and a percentage of royalties after publication. O.K?”
As soon as Constance started work in the Russian room of the New York Public Library, she realized she had signed on for a formidable task. Clare had misattributed some words of Lenin to Trotsky and others of Marx to Stalin. Old Bolsheviks helped her authenticate quotations in vast Cyrillic tomes. One day she went to track remarks of Earl Browder at the Daily Worker offices on West Sixteenth Street.
A female archivist asked her, “Are you workin’ for Mrs. Luce? Want to see somethin’ about your lady friend?”
The file was copious and included a number of unflattering photographs of Clare at the Lido in Venice and in Hollywood. There were two particularly vicious examples of trick camera work, one superimposing her head on the near naked body of a bathing beauty, the other giving her a bogus mouth uttering incitements to class warfare.
The archivist asked, “You still want to be her friend?”60
Constance’s participation in the Catechism project neared its end in late June. She did not care to stay in New York as a researcher and gofer, and Clare said nothing more about collaborating on a play.61 No sooner had she announced her intention to leave than Dorothy Farmer called.
“You mean you’re going back to Philadelphia without a word to Clare? It isn’t fair. Don’t throw away her friendship.”
“Dorothy,” Constance said, “I’m a realist. Women like Clare don’t want friends. They don’t need them. This time next year she’ll have forgotten I ever lived.”
“We haven’t helped you at all,” Dorothy conceded. “If only you hadn’t left the church and gotten yourself all mixed up.”
Constance called Clare to say good-bye, half hoping to hear regrets and further blandishments. But there was only a sudden aloofness at the end of the line. In a few adroit words, Clare established the fact that they did not know each other well.62
The younger woman never heard her dulcet tones again, except on the radio and television.63 She blamed the split on their both being so self-centered that they “created Hell for themselves.”64 This was more true than she knew, for soon she had to write Clare and warn her that gossip about their suspected lesbianism was “emananting from the Convent of the Sacred Heart.… The Church broke up our friendship, as I had an excessive affection.”65
This she candidly admitted to Gretta Palmer, whom she saw as a rival for Clare’s love. “I thought she had great sweetness, even simplicity, and that she like myself was lonely. Her treatment of me was unbearably harsh. The pain is deep.… And even if it hurts butch—she liked me the best.”66
In a letter to Father Thibodeau, Clare graphically described her own capacity to upset people “without knowing it.” She felt that a Daliesque artist would portray her as “tripping thru salons like the Eisenmadchen of Nuremburg turned inside out, my delicate spikes tipped with blood, as I trailed blue chiffon, and passed out bunches of red roses. But I DON’T mean to wound, I just must have porcupine blood in me.”67
Whatever her disappointment with Constance, she had a residue of feeling and at Christmas sent her a strange present, stuffed in a shabby box marked “Shaving Kit, $40.” Inside, with layers of old newspaper and Life covers, lay a small porcelain lamb.68
The consequence of this gesture was a bombardment of letters from Constance that eventually so disturbed Clare that she wrote to a mutual acquaintance, the Catholic psychiatrist Dr. Karl Stern, that it had become clear to her that the woman was “both mentally and physically ill.” Constance was now casting her as an “icy-hearted arch-fiend … whose lack of charity had achieved her final spiritual undoing,” and was also sending venomous letters about her to mutual friends. Claiming to be baffled “when our ‘friendship’ was so slight,” Clare said what bothered her most was that Constance might do herself physical harm. She asked Dr. Stern if he could help her, without the risk of being added to Constance’s list of demons if he failed.69
Behind the communication with Stern lay Clare’s dread that she might be prominently featured in the autobiography she had heard Constance intended to write. It was important, therefore, for him to have her version of their relationship.
In July, Clare took in a young houseguest. He was Wilfrid Sheed, the eighteen-year-old son of Frank and Maisie. Recently crippled by polio, he had a well-stocked mind, droll wit, and equable temperament that endeared him to her. In turn, he developed an adolescent crush on a fellow Catholic who treated him without condescension toward his handicap.
Her face was as clear as Harry’s was clouded, with a radiance that was not simply sexy but … like lights going on in a dark house. It was almost as if she had chosen Luce as a foil to emphasize her own good qualities, which included manifest ease, friendliness, and uptake: you didn’t have to tell her you were tired or hungry or, as you might with Harry, that you’d just fainted.70
Clare planned every detail of Wilfrid’s stay. After a late breakfast, they usually read on the patio until lunch. In the afternoon, sin
ce he was an avid baseball fan, it was Dodgers games on an outdoor television set or laps in the pool. Clare, who had tried out for the 1920 Olympics, remained an excellent swimmer, but when they raced, she let the disabled youth win.71
Most of their talk, however, centered on religion. Clare spoke of her favorite saint and role model, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, and said she was trying to emulate “The Little Flower’s” simple aim to be unspectacular and “sanctify the small things in life.”72 But Wilfrid was already shrewd enough to see that Clare could never hope to match a divine who was “virtually the patron of anti-celebrity.”73
Clare and Wilfrid Sheed at Sugar Hill, summer 1949 (illustration credit 25.2)
During one of their discussions, Clare marveled at Wilfrid’s observation that “evenness of temperament is the true mark of spirituality.”74 It was only a mirage for her, as she continued to battle extremes of elation and melancholy. He saw a manifestation of the latter when she fell into “a cold, inexplicable burst of silence … which lasted two days and disappeared as strangely as it came.”75
One reason for her black moods, she told him, was her pitiful failure to write a worthy play. She complained that since becoming a Catholic she had lost her talent to compose anything with bite.76 Instead, she was writing a book on religion and politics, in yet another attempt to fulfill her contract with Blanche Knopf, and laboring on a sleep-inducing section called “The Congressional Investigation on Atheism in the Scott Decision.”77
An aspiring writer himself, Wilfrid understood her frustration. Yet at times she was so calm and ethereal as to be almost spectral. “She was in the process of recovering from Politics, but it didn’t show. In fact, her breezy serenity suggested she had never had a bad day in her life.”78 Teasingly, she said she had taken him up because he “looked like a bright sort of chap who might have an idea every now and then.” He suspected a more likely reason was that he “satisfied a deep passion in her, which was simply to instruct.”79
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