Price of Fame

by Sylvia Jukes Morris

  Another reason for visiting the impoverished province was to measure the support of southerners for the Communist Party. Again Clare found reason to be encouraged. In the main square of a small town near Bari, a thickset man elbowed his way through the crowd, brandishing a pasteboard that proclaimed his intention to renounce Communism. He turned out to be the president of a local cooperative, and wanted to give Signora Luce his party membership card. Laughing, Clare accepted it. “I hope Senator McCarthy won’t investigate me for this.”50

  The Ambassador tours southern Italy (illustration credit 33.5)

  Rome’s leftist newspaper Il Paese accused her of traveling through Apulia merely “to carry on electoral propaganda in favor of the center parties.”51

  Clare planned to visit all Italian cities in due course, and chose Milan for her first major ambassadorial speech on May 28. She had to be careful not to sound partisan two weeks before the general election. It was a “period of tension and verbal violence,” as The Reporter magazine warned.52 Any controversial remark might affect her relationship with the contending parties. The situation was made more delicate by a controversial move on the part of De Gasperi. Confident of victory for his Christian Democrats, he had pushed through a new election law that gave any party winning over 50 percent of the vote an automatic working majority in Parliament.

  It was normal procedure for the embassy’s Press Relations Office to write an envoy’s formal addresses, with various department chiefs contributing. Clare read the draft and showed it to her husband. “Harry, look, you know all the briefing I got in the State Department about the sensitivity of these people. There’s a phrase in this speech that might make a little trouble.” The words that bothered her intimated that if extremists on either side of the centrist coalition gained too much power, America might have to reexamine its foreign policy toward Italy. “I don’t think the speech would lose anything if we left that out,” she said, and blue-penciled it.

  Durbrow objected to the excision. “No, the time has come for us to get a little tough. We have to tell them where we stand. Put it back in.” Clare understood that the words represented the policy of the Eisenhower administration, but did not know that her staff had intended them to combat erroneous rumors that Washington favored a neo-Fascist victory in the polls. After restoring the remark, she sent a text mimeograph to the Italian Foreign Office.53

  When she arrived for her dinner engagement with the Milan branch of the American Chamber of Commerce for Italy, she wore a plain black dress and a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles. Evidently, she was still following Baruch’s advice to play down glamour. She began her speech ingratiatingly, with the promise of $22 million in new American aid. As Italy progressed “along the ancient highways of her natural greatness,” Clare said, its people could depend on the goodwill of the United States. “We should—we Americans—be very sad to see that forward march checked or diverted.” Then came the passage Durbrow had insisted she deliver.

  Clare delivers her provocative Milan speech, May 28, 1953 (illustration credit 33.6)

  But if—and I am required in all honesty to say this … the Italian people should fall unhappy victim to the wiles of totalitarianism of the right or the left, there would follow—logically and tragically—grave consequences for this intimate and warm cooperation we now enjoy.54

  She sat down to enthusiastic applause. Next morning, there was little comment in the Milan press. The Ambassador proceeded to Genoa, where she blasted Russian expansionism, and reminded transportation executives that since the war, the United States had given Italy $650 million in direct aid, and another $300 million as part of the Offshore Procurement Program.55

  Within days, Rome-based Monarchist, neo-Fascist, and Communist editorials condemned Signora Luce’s rhetoric as interference in Italian affairs. They said that her Milan threat might have an explosive effect on the coming election. In Candido, Guareschi suggested she was deranged.56 Adverse criticism spread to other countries. In France, Le Parisien libéré said her “well-meaning statement” had been “as unfortunate … as it was conspicuous.”57

  Emilio Taviani, the Italian Under Secretary of State, reassured Clare that her oratory would probably not affect the outcome of the election. But he said that diplomacy bent on making Communists “look like devils” might have a counterproductive effect on the labor vote.58 He and De Gasperi privately felt that some of her judgment was questionable, such as the way she equated “socialism and marxism with nazism.” Yet they recognized that Clare’s ardor could be useful for their policy purposes, especially concerning Trieste.59

  After six weeks in Rome, Harry announced that he needed to go to America for hospital treatment. He was suffering from neuritis, but with his usual stoicism did not complain.60 He set off on Saturday, June 6. Fortunately for Clare, Maggie Case had arrived three days earlier, for a prolonged stay.

  That night, election eve, the two women attended a reception at the British Embassy “on the occasion of the Coronation of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.” For Case, at sixty-one, it was also a crowning moment. She and Clare had known each other for twenty-four years, going back to their days at Vogue, Maggie as the short, plain society editor, Clare as caption and then essay writer. Maggie had been smitten. In December 1936, she had gone to Philadelphia to see the curtain go up on the first tryout of The Women. Later, in rapid succession, she had rejoiced in Clare’s success as war correspondent, book author, and politician. In November 1942, she had heard the radio announcement that the votes of Connecticut apple farmers had sealed Clare’s election to Congress. Now she was in Rome, sharing in the achievement of her adored one.61

  The following morning, Italians went to the polls. De Gasperi’s Christian Democrats lost forty-five seats in the Chamber of Deputies and fifteen in the Senate, with a vote drop from 48.5 percent to 40.1 percent. More alarming to Clare was that 22.6 percent of voters backed Togliatti’s Communist Party, and 12.7 percent Nenni’s Socialists—a combined total of well over a third of the electorate. More disturbing still, the Popular Front had bettered its share of the vote by 4.3 percent. This was counterbalanced, to some extent, by an even bigger advance scored by the Monarchists and neo-Fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano, which together got 12.7 percent of the electorate, a joint increase of 7.9 percent.62

  Nevertheless, De Gasperi’s center, with the support of Republicans, Liberals, and some Socialists, maintained control of Parliament—albeit by a margin so slim that it was doubtful he would be able to form a viable government. If not, the election would amount to a sad defeat for the Prime Minister, who had built Italy’s postwar democracy.

  In her seventeen-page report to the State Department, Clare wrote, “His task is certain to be a hard and exhausting one. He will have to be prolific in expediency and yet fertile in prudence to prevent his own party from splitting towards left and right in some new coalition.”63

  As she dictated this, her Milan warning of punitive withdrawal of American aid was being blamed, on both sides of the Atlantic, for at least some of De Gasperi’s misfortune. Togliatti declared that Ambassador Luce had “brought bad luck” to the Prime Minister. The British left-winger Michael Foot agreed.64 Red newspapers exulted that Washington would soon have to recall the “Old Woman with the Evil Eye,” a folklore epithet implying the Ambassador had witchlike powers.65 However, a majority of Italians felt that De Gasperi had suffered because of his manipulative election law, as well as overconfidence.

  “There is no shadow of doubt in my mind or in the mind of any thoughtful person in Italy,” Clare wrote, “that if America had not supported De Gasperi and the CD party in 1948 and until now, all of Italy would have been Communist.” It was more imperative than ever for the center parties to find a solution to the diplomatic and military question of Trieste, otherwise the NATO concept in Italy would crumble. “The grand lesson of the election,” she went on portentously, “is that [Italy] is slowly but steadily moving—towards the Kremlin.”66

 
; As if in proof of her words, local Communists, enraged by the execution on June 19 of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, began bombarding the U.S. Embassy with hundreds of threatening phone calls and letters. Rumors of a plot to blow up the building spread, and Jeeps full of armed police appeared to protect it. Security officers arrived at the Villa Taverna to walk the halls and hide in the bushes. The two carabinieri on guard at the gate were reinforced by a defense patrol in the Viale Rossini. Suddenly, the walled residence felt like a citadel.67

  34

  CRISIS AT SEA

  The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

  —HENRY KISSINGER

  For fifty-seven days after the election, the Italian government remained in a state of suspense. De Gasperi tried to form a new coalition, but with his reduced number of seats he found it impossible to win a governing majority in the Chamber. On July 28 he admitted defeat, and amid left-wing jeers his historic premiership came to an end. Emboldened, Togliatti insisted on a role for Communists in any future cabinet. President Einaudi was left with the difficult task of finding a Christian Democratic leader who could ignore this demand and yet succeed where De Gasperi had failed.

  In the meantime, calm returned to the Villa Taverna and U.S. Embassy, and Clare resumed her daily diplomatic routine. She usually had a light breakfast at 8:00 A.M. and on arrival at her office at 9:00 or 9:30 went over cables and dispatches from Washington and notes and démarches (position papers) from the Italian government. Consultations with heads of embassy sections followed. She regularly quit her desk for meetings at the Chigi Palace, where she had to demonstrate an informed familiarity with European politics, economics, commerce, labor, transportation, communication, science, and religion.

  The fall of De Gasperi had left the Italian Foreign Service leaderless. Ranking diplomats in the Chigi were essentially ideological heirs of Count Ciano, though lacking his tono fascista. All were rich, well-bred men from titled families of conservative and nationalistic bent. Conveniently for Clare, who was still not fluent in diplomatic Italian, almost all spoke English.1

  Since there were sixty other embassies and legations in Rome, she had to attend about 300 cocktail parties and 150 dinners each year, let alone host entertainments of her own. Each weekday, she found time for “grip and grin” encounters with American politicians and businessmen visiting Rome. On Sundays, she found that if she went to Mass in local churches, she was invariably mobbed, so Pope Pius gave her permission to celebrate the Eucharist in the Villa Taverna, or any “fitting and properly appointed home in Rome.”2

  At about 9:30 P.M. most nights, a U.S. Marine guard arrived at the villa, carrying a dispatch case full of late-breaking documents. He would wait while the Ambassador plowed through them. Often it was midnight before he returned them to the embassy.3 Only after his departure could Clare tackle a few of the hundreds of letters a week she received from people around the world.4 Some asked for money, a loan, or help in publication of enclosed manuscripts. Others sent gifts, ranging from a Sicilian shawl to a model boat made of mother-of-pearl.

  Most acknowledgments were left to Dorothy Farmer, now working at the embassy, importantly styled the Ambassador’s “Executive Secretary for Official Matters.” A fierce protector of her boss from predators, she joked that she could be more accurately called “the anti-social secretary.” This was a dig at Clare’s new recruit to manage Villa Taverna events.

  Twenty-eight years old, blond, and six feet tall, Letitia “Tish” Baldrige was from a more exclusive background than Dorothy. She had been educated at Miss Porter’s School and Vassar College. Since graduating, she had traveled widely in America and Europe, including Yugoslavia, and was well tutored in diplomatic etiquette, having worked at the U.S. Embassy in Paris for the supersophisticated David and Evangeline Bruce. Just before coming to Rome, she had heard allegations that Clare was “a bitch.” But after arriving at the Villa Taverna one Sunday afternoon, for what was supposed to be an interview with the Ambassador, she was quickly disabused. “I came in terror, and remained to adore.”5

  The meeting took place in Clare’s boudoir.

  She was wearing blue bedroom slippers and a pale blue peignoir over her blue nightgown.… I sat down across from her on one of the pale blue satin bergères. An oversized square inlaid marble coffee table separated our chairs. The table was covered with magazines that had been airmailed by Time as well as straw letter baskets full of embassy work and writing projects. The table was littered with almost every electronic gadget that had been invented: dicta-phones, minirecorders, tape recorders, record players, and … generators to transform American electrical voltages and watts into Italian.

  All her life, Clare had loved gadgets for work and entertainment. She enjoyed the mental challenge of mastering the latest technology, but complained that none of the transformers functioned in Rome.

  For the next two hours, the Ambassador did most of the talking. As early evening shadows began to creep across the grounds, Baldrige experienced one of Clare’s most disconcerting characteristics: a tendency to be overly confiding with strangers.

  She told me about her daughter Ann, who was killed during her college years at Stanford in an auto accident. A great cloud seemed to lower itself over her. The voice changed, becoming lower in volume and tone, and her eyes were now half shut. She explained that she welcomed working like a demon at this embassy job because she did not want to give in to the grief she felt.

  Clare said nothing formal to indicate that Baldrige had passed muster, only warning, as the young woman took her leave, that tomorrow she would be plunged into pandemonium. “Hell has been waiting impatiently for your arrival.”6

  With horselike energy and strength, Tish endured eleven- or twelve-hour days during the week and six hours on Saturdays. Speaking fluent French and serviceable Italian, she handled the press, and helped with the Ambassador’s wardrobe, steering her toward Italian designers such as Fabiani, Simonetta, Irene Galitzine, and Sorelle Fontana. She even cared for her boss’s silver-gray and black poodles, Scusi and Prego.7

  Her biggest challenge was planning large formal entertainments. “I don’t know one pasta, veal dish, or tiramisu from another,” Clare told her, “and I don’t want to know, so just decide.”8 Harry picked up the tab for everything over the State Department allowance, including new china, crystal, and linens.

  Typical functions ranged from working lunches to elaborate dinners. Eminent artists such as Leopold Stokowski, who came to Italy to conduct a production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, meant lavish parties with great numbers of guests.9 Roman socialites complained that Clare associated mainly with politicians and top industrialists.10 So she used the maestro’s visit as a reason to invite them to an evening reception in the rose-scented garden, illuminated by antique iron oil lamps on fragments of antique wall. Showing a twinge of guilt, she wrote to tell Carlos Chávez that she might likewise fete him, if he managed after all to premiere Ann’s symphony in Italy.11

  She also had to take notice of American citizens living in Rome, as well as tourists. She spent $3,000 out of her own pocket for a Fourth of July party, with truckloads of chicken, ice cream, and Coca-Cola set on tables in the villa’s verdant grounds. Dressed in a patriotic outfit of white dress, blue hat, and red rose, she received all her guests individually. Standing for hours, flanked by U.S. Army and Navy officers, she posed for snapshots in front of a Greco-Roman statue. One young woman in the reception line awkwardly told her, “I’m over here to study the romantic old ruins—and I’m so glad to have seen you.”12

  Back in New York, Harry had been treated for his neuritis, but was still in pain. Recuperating in his apartment, he felt wistful for the stimulating new life he and Clare had in Rome. John Billings stopped by one evening, and found him alone in the huge pink-and-crystal living room overlooking the river. Post–Billy Baldwin, it had been refurnished with French pieces. There were ugly marks on the walls, since many of the major
paintings—works by Delacroix, Fragonard, Pissaro, Redon, Renoir, Goya, Van Gogh, Matisse, Monet, Rouault, Sisley, and Chagall—were now hanging in the Villa Taverna. Harry had begun amassing paintings because he thought that was what rich men did, but he had little judgment as to their aesthetic worth, leaving the choice largely to his wife or dealers.

  Other art and objets had been sent from Sugar Hill, including sixty Japanese prints, Ming horses, busts of both Luces by Jo Davidson, and the Brockhurst oil of Clare.13 Before the year was out, Time Inc. would have spent approximately $100,000 for the purchase or shipping of everything from furniture to tableware.14

  In spite of his stripped surroundings, Luce was in an expansive mood. Clare was “doing fine” in Rome, he said. Time was making heaps of money, and seemed likely to have its best year on record. Perhaps it was an opportune moment, he mused, to start a sports magazine, and maybe buy the New York Herald Tribune.15

  The next day, struggling to hold a pen, Harry wrote Clare. He commiserated over the fall of De Gasperi, and in a self-mocking reference to his status as consort signed himself “your devoted servant.” Clearly missing his wife, he added that at a recent viewing of the movie Moulin Rouge, he had kept an empty seat for her.16

  On August 13, President Einaudi invited De Gasperi’s former Finance Minister, Giuseppe Pella, to form a provisional government and take Italy through the fall season of budgetary deadlines in the Chamber of Deputies.17 An austere, fifty-one-year-old economics technocrat, Pella assumed not only the premiership, but the portfolios of Budget and Foreign Affairs. He was known to be cautious, courteous, and frugal. Italians referred to him as uomo di equilibrio, man of balance.18 On one subject, however, he was anything but balanced. Like his Monarchist backers, he was an extreme nationalist on the subject of Trieste.