Price of Fame

by Sylvia Jukes Morris

  Their “seminars” usually lasted until the early hours, often in her bedroom, under the gaze of Chagall’s Blue Angel.80 In a memoir of Clare written when he was in his early sixties, Sheed raised the question of whether their intimacy was comparable to the delicate attraction between the wife of a professor and a sensitive student in Robert Anderson’s play Tea and Sympathy.

  I can only pass on my hazy impression that she was too courteous to rule out the possibility. One evening, she reclined on my bed in a way that was over too fast to be called an invitation by anyone short of Harpo Marx, but which suggested the possibility: in a different time and circumstance, perhaps.81

  Expanding her generosity, Clare arranged for Wilfrid to have driving lessons in her capacious blue Buick. He practiced on the grounds and on quiet surrounding roads, becoming proficient enough to acquire a license. Then, to his amazement, Clare told him on August 22 that an Oldsmobile Series 76 was on its way to him from Detroit. It was her habit, she said, to give a surprise present to someone on that date, the anniversary of Ann Brokaw’s birth. This gift came with the proviso that no one outside his family should know who gave it to him. The new automobile had been custom-fitted with the same special mechanisms as that produced for Franklin Roosevelt.82

  Clare admired how well Wilfrid walked in heavy metal leg supports. He even managed to kneel when they recited the rosary, unsnapping his braces and dropping them to the floor.83

  Weekends at Sugar Hill were more formal, with Harry arriving from town and talking almost exclusively about current subjects: a rise in tranquilizer drug use, the peptic ulcer boom, how many trucks it took to deliver his magazines. Wilfrid’s predominant impressions of him were that his real life was elsewhere, and he had an “unflickering distaste” for his wife.84 For her part, Clare made no secret of the fact that their marriage had cooled.85

  Social life seemed to consist largely of a steady stream of slow-thinking businessmen and politicians, of the kind Clare had satirized in her book Stuffed Shirts. Wilfrid, hearing her pontificate, concluded that she settled for “slightly dumb company in order to shine the more.” Only when friends like George Waldo or the amusing, raspy-voiced, and exceedingly plain Buff Cobb Rogers dropped by, did she relax her effort to impress and was “as girlish and funny as she was one-on-one.”86

  While Wilfrid profited in countless ways from proximity to his multifaceted benefactor, he would never forget a warning she gave him that summer. It related to his prodigious knowledge of sports lore, literature, theology, publishing, and American musicals.

  “Watch out for envy,” Clare said.

  He was taken aback. “I don’t see why anyone would envy a guy with polio.”

  “Yes, I guess that might slow them down some. But they’ll find a way.”87

  Wearing an ill-fitting dinner jacket, Wilfrid escorted Clare to the New York premiere of Come to the Stable at Broadway’s Rivoli Theatre on July 27. The street and sky were flooded with rays from a fifty-thousand-watt electric lamp, highlighting the marquee and numerous stage and screen stars entering the foyer.

  The following day, the New York Telegraph reported that the movie was so full of sweetness that it “tended to become, on occasion, somewhat sticky.” In contrast, the New York Herald Tribune found the picture humorous, tasteful, and sometimes moving, “with the same blend of faith as Going My Way.” Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote that the film “dishes up … an assortment of happy conceits which not only tax credulity but verge on the absurd.” He cited the scene where Celeste Holm played tennis in her long black habit and wimple, trying in vain to win a bet that would help finance the abbey hospital. Furthermore, Loretta Young kept flashing a beatific smile even in adversity, making the experience of watching her “exhausting, even to the most romantically inclined.”88

  Nevertheless, nationwide audiences made Come to the Stable a box office hit. Clare received countless laudatory letters from nuns, and when the list of the year’s ten best movies was released by Film Daily, hers came in at number six, behind The Snake Pit, The Red Shoes, and A Letter to Three Wives, and ahead of Home of the Brave, Command Decision, and The Heiress.89 It would receive no fewer than seven Academy Award nominations—for Young as best actress, for Holm and Lanchester as best supporting actresses, for cinematography, art direction, best song, and, in a huge compliment to Clare, for “Best Writing, Motion Picture Story.”90

  26

  PILGRIMAGES

  We are so accustomed to disguising ourselves from others that we end up disguising ourselves from ourselves.

  —LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

  Soon after the launching of Come to the Stable, Clare was besieged by national and local GOP leaders, begging her to run again for office. The fact that she listened to them, and showed some interest, proved that for all her newfound spirituality, she still missed public life. Evelyn Waugh might well have said of her, as he had of the similarly diverted Cyril Connolly, that “the cold dank pit of politics [was] the most insidious of all the enemies of promise.”1

  With the United States in recession, Mao Tse-tung’s Communists displacing Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government in China, and the Soviet Union pursuing nuclear parity, the prospect of returning to the capital daunted Clare. By a freak coincidence, both of the state’s Democratic Senators would be on the ticket that year. William Benton was an appointee incumbent seeking a two-year extension of his current tenure, and the senior Senator, Brien McMahon, intended to run for another six-year term. Clare had no interest in the “short term” junior alternative and suggested that Republicans nominate Representative John D. Lodge. If so, she might consider running against McMahon.2

  She said nothing further until mid-September, when she was on vacation at the Greenbrier Spa in West Virginia and Senator Margaret Chase Smith issued a statement: “The party that nominates a woman for Vice-President or President will win the 1952 election.” In response, a Hartford Times editorial suggested that “Mrs. Luce would make an excellent choice” for either.3

  A reporter from the New York Herald Tribune asked Clare to comment. “A woman on the ticket would be an asset to either party,” she said, “if one could be found twice as good as the average male vice-presidential candidate. This shouldn’t be too difficult.”

  She reminded him of her suggestion that Eleanor Roosevelt be President Truman’s running mate in 1948. When he asked if voters might be worried at the prospect of a female heir apparent in the White House, she quipped, “A President might of course die of heart failure if a woman were elected Vice-President.”

  Coyly, she suggested that if the Republicans were short of a good vice presidential candidate in 1952, they should nominate Senator Smith “or an equally able woman.”4

  From other quarters calls came for her to run for Governor of Connecticut, while a Dallas banker announced he was forming an organization to nominate and elect Clare Boothe Luce as President of the United States. Quoting statistics from her speeches, he noted that women were already a formidable power in American life, with 51 percent of the vote, and 70 percent of private wealth, owning 40 percent of real estate, and spending 85 percent of family income. Why not, he asked, have a former Congresswoman of superior intellect, who was well versed in foreign and military policy, as Chief Executive?5

  On September 23, President Truman announced that “we have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR.” Despite his careful avoidance of the word bomb, it was clear that America’s four-year monopoly of nuclear weaponry was at an end. This chastening development inaugurated the age of mutually assured destruction between the two superpowers. Clare scrapped a speech about free enterprise that she was scheduled to give to the Bridgeport Chamber of Commerce three days later, and instead delivered an apocalyptic oration on nuclear war policy.6

  When she rose to address the gathering, her simple gray dress with white collar and cuffs and black felt beret made her look, to one reporter, “like a French student headed
for school.” But she quickly revealed her mature command of defense strategy. Stalin’s acquisition of the atom bomb made war “more and more likely,” she warned. Congress therefore must enact a “push-button plan” to mobilize and deploy servicemen and civilians—women included—where they could effectively respond to a Russian atomic attack. The United States should also offer “every diplomatic concession possible, short of appeasement,” to Stalin to induce him to accept Bernard Baruch’s plan for a global nuclear control agency, stymied in the UN since 1946. She would support “any other similar plan of atomic control, which calls for penetration of the Iron Curtain by an international fact-finding or inspection body with power to punish a nation illegally hoarding fissionable material or making bombs.” Loud applause followed her remarks.7

  Within three weeks, congressional advocates of an accelerated American nuclear arms production program, led by none other than Senator McMahon, put such pressure on Truman that he authorized the Atomic Energy Commission to expand all nuclear bomb manufacturing plants.8

  Clare’s speech, and a passionate article by her in The New Leader appealing for a “second emancipation of the Negro,” led commentators to speculate further that she was contemplating a return to politics.9 At issue for the GOP was the possibility that in 1950 it might be able to gain control of the Upper Chamber.10 An even more exciting scenario was that General Dwight D. Eisenhower might be the Republican candidate for President two years later.11

  Clare left for a five-week tour of Europe in mid-October with her latest convert, Buff Cobb. Italy took up much space on their itinerary, giving the trip a spiritual cast, especially since it included a meeting with the Pope. They were assured of a particularly receptive audience, because Clare had recently heard that Pius XII and Monsignor Sheen had been corresponding about her.

  Sheen had passed on a startling remark of hers, that she had a “desire and intention of some day abandoning the world.” It was unclear if by this she meant to enter a convent, but Sheen felt the Holy Father should be informed. Pius had responded in terms unusually complimentary of a layperson. The Monsignor had shared these encomiums with Father Thibodeau, who in turn had forwarded them to Clare.

  The Pope described her as “a great apostle and a great orator,” one of the most intelligent, eloquent, and “truly great women of the world” he had ever met. But apparently he did not see her in a wimple. With such attributes, he wrote, it was a pity she had given up Congress. She should consider returning to Washington, where she was needed “in these tragic and critical times, to write, give talks and illumine the public on moral and spiritual issues.”

  Thibodeau told Clare that her papal audience could be a turning point. “This is quite an assignment, quite a mission the Holy Father is giving you.”12

  Clare and Buff traveled south from Rome on October 21 to the Pope’s country residence, the old gray Castel Gandolfo. Its ambience was of the sixteenth century, with clerics in crimson and spear-carrying guards in multicolored baggy trousers.

  Far from instructing Clare as to how she could be a lay evangelist for the Church, Pius seemed more interested in talking about current political and diplomatic concerns. He launched into a review of the repercussions of World War II and noted that the United States had been magnanimous in victory. “This is the first time in history that conquerors have won a war and bound up the wounds that they have inflicted.” Looking ahead, he hoped that “the difficulties of the time and the burdens placed upon Americans will not be so great that they will forget the children of less fortunate lands.”13

  He then flabbergasted Clare by suggesting that now that Myron C. Taylor, the longtime American representative to the Holy See, was about to retire, her husband would be a welcome successor. The Pope seemed to like the idea of a Protestant in that position. He suggested that Mr. Luce could serve without having to resign from Time Inc. and would be free to spend every other two months in America, if he chose.14

  The audience lasted twenty minutes, confounding Clare, who had expected Pius to speak more about her.

  After an excursion to see Rome’s pagan ruins and churches, she told a Catholic journalist that it felt like “coming home.”15 She knelt in the crypt at St. Paul’s Outside the Walls and prayed for her husband over the bones of the Apostle.

  On Sunday, October 30, Clare and Buff attended an early Mass in the catacombs, where early Christians had buried their dead. This vast labyrinth of narrow galleries beneath the Appian Way stretched six hundred miles in various directions. In one vault, equipped with a rough wooden altar, iron crucifix, and flickering candles, Clare became aware of a yellow skull in a niche above her left shoulder. “Its sexless, sightless stare held my liquid, living glance.… I was face to face with my own secret face.”16

  Before leaving the city, she went to see Augusto Marchesi, the red-haired boy whose school fees she had been paying for several years. She learned from his teachers that he had an aptitude for machine work, so she arranged for him to be trained as a mechanic.

  On November 2, at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Clare sauntered ahead of Buff into a room of Italian Renaissance paintings. She paused in front of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and became aware of a man in a bright red shirt standing beside her. He began speaking knowledgeably about the picture in a Latin American accent. She turned toward him, and her glance was met by the flashing dark eyes of a swarthy Creole, his mixture of Spanish and Indian blood showing clearly in his rugged facial features. He had thick black hair and brows and seemed to be about her own age.

  Just then, Buff caught up and was alarmed to hear Clare giving the stranger her name and that of her hotel. Buff was filled with dread at the prospect of “all that beautiful jewelery, and more particularly her beautiful person,” falling prey to this attractive foreigner.17 But Clare had sensed the stranger’s quality and breeding. He turned out to be Carlos Chávez, the internationally distinguished Mexican composer, conductor, and founder of the Orquesta Sinfónica de México.

  For two decades the fifty-year-old Chávez had been well-known in New York music circles, having lived in Greenwich Village in the 1920s, befriended the composer Aaron Copland, produced concerts for the Museum of Modern Art, and deputized for Arturo Toscanini with the NBC Symphony Orchestra. Had Clare not been tone-deaf, and until recently biased against music (on account of her father’s incessant violin practicing), she might have heard of him. As it was, the Uffizi encounter would flower into a twenty-eight-year relationship.18

  The last three weeks of the tour demonstrated her range of acquaintance with Europe’s international set. She and Buff dined with the art connoisseur Bernard Berenson in I Tatti, his villa in the Tuscan hills northeast of Florence. At eighty-four, he was in physical decline, his tiny hands bony and his skull so thin that it looked crushable. Peevish at first, he soon warmed to Clare’s charm and preferred exchanging spicy gossip to discussing paintings.19 In Paris, Clare shopped at Dior and dined, unaccompanied by Buff, with Chávez. She also saw André Malraux, who had written articles for her at Vanity Fair, and the political philosopher Raymond Aron. Charles Murphy, a Time Incer who was writing a biography of the Duke of Windsor, arranged a dinner with His Royal Highness and the Duchess at their mansion on Boulevard Suchet. Buff was impressed by their cuisine and couture. “But oh!” she wrote in her diary, “they are a frail, lost unhappy little pair of might-have-beens!”20

  The two women went on to London, where on November 17 they attended the British premiere of Come to the Stable. That same night, Evelyn Waugh gave a dinner for Clare at the Hyde Park Hotel and introduced her to several prominent Catholics, including Ronald Knox and Father Martin D’Arcy, who had converted him in 1930.21 Waugh later complained to Nancy Mitford that his “great party for Mrs. Luce” had cost him a lot of money, and he thought it odd that everyone followed up with thank-you notes except the guest of honor.22

  Before flying home, Clare heard Winston Churchill, now leader of the opposition, make a major speech in t
he House of Commons, and later had tea with him. Winston was about to turn seventy-five and had recently had a stroke, but it had not stopped his work on the third volume of his magnum opus, The Second World War. Afterward, Clare asked Harry to send the old man a thousand newfangled plastic paper clips, because he was “nuts about gadgets.”23

  While Clare was in London, twenty-eight Trappist monks left the Gethsemani monastery in Kentucky by charter bus and traveled more than six hundred miles to establish a new commune, Our Lady of the Immaculate Heart, at Mepkin. The move was the culmination of eighteen months of complex negotiations involving the Luces, the order, and the Vatican, which had to sanction the handover of the plantation’s structures and remaining grounds.

  Clare had almost compromised the deal with her indiscreet letter of the previous August to Thomas Merton, stating that Berkeley County was “the most illiterate, most disease-ridden” in America. This had given the Abbot of Gethsemani pause. He was reluctant to send his monks to such an insalubrious spot. “I have the responsibility, dear Mrs. Luce, of the pioneer community on my soul and I [fear] whether we could keep our Rule under these conditions.”24

  She had tried to rectify matters by pointing out that air-conditioning, refrigeration, and DDT spray had made Mepkin tolerable year-round.25 In further encouragement, she donated original maps of the area, landscaping sketches, and blueprints of the main residence and three guest cottages. An advance party of surveyors reassured the Abbot about the terrain, flora, and fauna of the county, so the transfer went ahead, and the monks—six priests, twelve novices of the priesthood, and ten lay brothers—settled in without mishap.