Price of Fame

by Sylvia Jukes Morris

  The Reinsch test she had taken showed that the “positive common metallic poison specimen” contained “6.0 micrograms of arsenic per 100 mls of urine.” This finding had so alarmed the Naples doctors that Admiral Fechteler had authorized a jet fighter to deliver it to Rome.9

  The Time cover that never ran. Boris Chaliapin’s watercolor portrait of Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce, late 1954 (illustration credit 38.1)

  Durbrow feared political foul play. Had Communist agents infiltrated her kitchen? “I’ve been trying to rack my brain to figure the thing out,” he wrote Clare, “but so far nothing concrete.” He said he would discuss the next step with Gerry Miller. In the meantime, it was “urgent” that she have another test. Since arsenic traces “disappeared quickly,” a clear result would prove that her ingestion was taking place in Rome.10

  Forensic evidence in New York confirmed this suspicion. Durbrow stressed the need for absolute secrecy, pending a CIA investigation. Allen Dulles authorized a covert counterintelligence intervention. Two agents hurried to Rome, on the pretext of representing an architectural firm that might renovate the Villa Taverna. They first questioned all staff members handling Clare’s meals. Satisfied, for the time being, that there were no subversives on the culinary payroll, they examined the Luces’ private quarters.11

  One agent searched Clare’s bedroom, even checking inside the heels of her shoes. He noticed that a Linguaphone record on a turntable was covered with a film of grayish-white dust, and asked a maid how often the place was cleaned. She said every day. Searching further, he found the same dust in crevices of furniture and drapery folds, even on the Ambassador’s cosmetic jars. He brushed some into an envelope and took it to a small chemistry laboratory that had been set up in the basement of Gerry Miller’s house. Analysis of the sample indicated “a high content of arsenate of lead.”12

  On January 22, Durbrow telephoned Clare to say that the investigation was now focused on the ceiling of her bedroom—specifically its terra-cotta beams, which were ornamented with clusters of white roses. Over the past hundred years, the flowers had been painted with many layers of lead-laden pigment that exuded toxic fumes in humid weather. Moreover, the paint proved to have powdered under the vibration of a washing machine, in a laundry room directly above Clare’s bed, and the constant traipsing of maids—“peasant girls clodhopping around up there,” as Durbrow put it.13

  Clare returned to Rome on February 2, and wrote Harry.

  Well darling—the “mystery” is solved. Nothing very melodramatic. It was—or rather is—the ceiling in my bedroom. Or so the toxologist thinks. There is much arsenic and lead in the old paint. It has been slowly slowly flaking off since I got here.… The flakes have dropped into my mouth when I slept, got on objects near my bed, and the slow accumulation over months of arsenic and lead became more than my system could throw off, and—there it is—it’s true I have been poisoned daily for months on end—and not even for a very good reason.

  Exacerbating the problem was her lifelong habit of spending hours in bed after a tray breakfast, drinking coffee, smoking, reading documents and newspapers, and dictating letters. If she had no evening appointments, she often went to bed early, working into the small hours. Sometimes she spent whole weekends between the sheets, her windows shut against Rome’s variable weather. While following this routine for almost two years, she had been inhaling and absorbing a deadly toxin.14

  The question then arose, why had Clare’s predecessors not suffered similarly? The answer was that they had slept mostly in the master suite now occupied by Harry. This would seem to clear up the matter, but in the weeks that followed, the CIA continued its secret sleuthing so rigorously that not a word of the Ambassador’s indisposition leaked to Italian officials or reporters. The reason went beyond any petty embarrassment she might feel, should her boudoir routine and marital sleeping arrangements become public. She compounded the mystery in a second, handwritten letter to Harry.

  There’s a new—and rather horrid development on subject “A” which has completely shattered the partial serenity I felt about the ceiling. I naturally can’t put it into a letter, except to say that you’d better … talk to Allen [Dulles].… It’s all miserable and confusing, and a little frightening. At this moment it’s hard to say how I’ll come home—in a box, or in two weeks, with Scelba.15

  She was deliberately cryptic, but Harry got her inference: the CIA suspected that not only dust threatened Clare. Conceivably, Italian Communists, in or out of government, were plotting more stringent means to dispense with the evil-eyed witch.

  Again the possibility of sabotage of her food arose. The CIA had Tish Baldrige intercept Clare’s daily breakfast tray and surreptitiously exchange it for one with “secure” food.16

  Clare’s reference to Scelba was prompted by the Prime Minister’s intent to shore up his shaky government by visiting the United States at the end of March. Her concern was that if any hint of “Subject ‘A’ ” became public, the resultant news stir could irreparably affect American-Italian relations. The mere fact that Washington was investigating whether its envoy in Rome was an assassination target would cause such outrage that Scelba might fall, precipitating new elections and—in her recurrent neurosis—a Communist victory at the polls. For that reason she, Tish, Durbrow, Miller, and Harry must maintain a wrap on the story.17

  This hardly assuaged Clare’s dread that she might precede Scelba across the Atlantic in a coffin. “I’m going to get out,” she told Durbrow. “I’m not coming back here until they find out what the devil this is, where it’s coming from.”18

  She flew home almost immediately, saying that she had to make advance arrangements for Scelba’s tour. In her absence, workmen stretched canvas over the lethal ceiling, beams and all, with the intent of painting lead-free roses on it.19

  By April 12, having accompanied Scelba around the country for two weeks, Clare was back in Rome. Three days later, she joined Harry in Siracusa, Sicily, for a weekend with Sir Winston Churchill, who had at last ceded his premiership to Anthony Eden. He now needed money to finance his extravagant mode of living. Harry obliged, paying $200,000 for Life serial rights to Churchill’s four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples.20

  The former statesman, now eighty, was staying with two friends and his wife, Clementine, at the Villa Politi. He loved bright colors, and appeared at dinner wearing a red siren suit and matching slippers.21 Clare, reporting on the visit to Eisenhower, wrote that the cold and rainy weather “was as un-Sicilian as the conversation was Churchillian.” She was intrigued to watch Sir Winston painting a picture of the ancient caves above which the house stood. For years he had been a proponent of art as therapy for public people who for long periods endured “worry and mental overstrain.”22 Clare could relate to this, and told Ike, another leisure painter, that she welcomed Winston’s offer of tuition.

  When I have learned the elementary art of getting the paints onto the canvas instead of onto myself, I will go to work on a picture for your collection of High Ranking Amateurs, tho’ the accent I fear will be on “rank.”

  But there is always the hope that if my picture is bad enough, it may inspire you to give me a painting lesson yourself. I would then have achieved the really unique distinction of having been initiated into the art of painting by Prime Minister Churchill, and “finished” by President Eisenhower. And that would easily make me the world’s most distinguished art pupil!23

  Winston Churchill painting in a Sicilian cave, April 1955 (illustration credit 38.2)

  Churchill offered to teach her husband as well, but Harry said he would stick with his hobby of collecting Tang and Ming horses. “From what we read in the papers over here,” Clare joked to Ike, “not all of Tang’s horses nor all of Ming’s men can put Chiang back on the mainland again.”24

  Shortly after returning to the embassy, she received a box of paints from her tutor. “Everything you need for your artistic career,” Churchill wired her.25 Rising to the ch
allenge, she hired Beverly Pepper, an American artist living in Rome, for further lessons, and soon completed several portraits and scenes from her childhood. “It’s become a new passion,” she told a reporter. “It provides the most complete relaxation I’ve known in years.”26

  As her second anniversary as Ambassador approached, Clare seemed to have lost the fear of death that had plagued her a few weeks earlier. However, she could not help an old trauma from becoming the subject of one canvas. It depicted her as a small girl being tossed into ocean surf by a powerful male figure, while an indifferent boy looked on, and a frantic woman rushed along the beach to save her.27

  At this point, Clare was in the satisfying position of having accomplished most of her major diplomatic challenges. The journalist Luigi Barzini, Jr., in a Harper’s Magazine article entitled “Ambassador Luce, As Italians See Her,” penned a detailed description of the fifty-two-year-old envoy.

  The hair is silky blonde, the eyes are water blue and worried, the pale face has something medieval and Flemish in its stiffness.… Her manner is “society”: she is almost always extremely kind and often listens to the answers to her questions. For a well-known satirical playwright, her repartee is remarkably subdued: she rarely allows herself the satisfaction of a good biting line.28

  “Being a playwright and casting plays,” Clare remarked to another reporter, “is really excellent preparation for diplomacy. I watch a man’s inflections, his gestures, his manner of speaking—and try to determine what his inner convictions really are.”29 Tish Baldrige observed that she also had an actor’s need to be word-perfect whenever she spoke publicly, practicing her lines in the bathtub, recording them for playback, and rehearsing the whole text at least a dozen times.30

  On social occasions, she differed from her predecessors in continuing to pay little attention to the Roman aristocracy, a small coterie with ancient names. Barzini wrote of their “immense palazzi in town and ruined family seats in the country, where dinners are still served by bewigged and powdered flunkies in eighteenth-century liveries, one for each guest, and where an empty throne, covered in red damask, always waits for the Pope’s visit.”31

  Clare was in fact under instructions to favor Italy’s political and professional classes. At the Villa, except for de rigueur diplomatic dinners, she could entertain whomever she chose. On these occasions, she liked to wear Balenciaga gowns and favorite perfumes, such as Caron’s Fleur de Rocaille or Femme by Rochas. At other times, she would splash a mixture of Patou’s Joy and bois de santal in her hair, behind her ears, and on her breasts and wrists. “It slayed you,” Tish Baldrige recalled. “It lingered on her skin so you knew when she came into a room.”32

  The parties that gave her the most pleasure as Ambassador were attended by such celebrities as Senator John Kennedy and his fiancée, Jacqueline Bouvier, Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer, Henry Fonda, Clifton Webb, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Maria Tallchief, and Eleanor Roosevelt.33 One day Joe DiMaggio paid a call at the Palazzo Margherita. After introducing him to her staff, Clare slipped her arm through his. “Joe, let’s go down to one of those little sidewalk cafés and have a cup of coffee.” Within seconds of their taking a table on the Via Veneto, the street was mobbed with hundreds of excited Italians.34

  As April drew to a close, so did the seven-year presidency of Luigi Einaudi. Clare made no secret of the fact that she preferred a liberal named Cesare Merzagora to succeed him. On the night of April 29, she was in the diplomatic gallery of Rome’s Montecitorio Palace for the fourth ballot of the parliamentary election. Giovanni Gronchi, Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, laboriously read out every vote in turn. Sleekly handsome at sixty-seven, with swept-back iron-gray hair and polished black spectacles, he was himself a candidate, and a formidable one. He led the Christian Democratic Party’s extreme left wing, which advocated Italy’s abandonment of NATO in favor of nonalignment. More alarming to Clare, he wanted eventually to allow Communists and Socialists into the cabinet.

  Clare and Joe DiMaggio on the Via Veneto, 1955 (illustration credit 38.3)

  As Gronchi read his own name for the 422nd time, the room erupted in cheers and applause. The vote had elected him second President of the Italian Republic, by a last-minute combination of support imaginable only in Italy: right-wingers from the Christian Democrats, buttressed by Monarchists and neo-Fascists, had joined forces with trade unionists, Socialists, and Communists.

  Gronchi rose and bowed while Clare left the gallery, a look of displeasure on her face.35

  Count Vittorio Cini, a veteran of Mussolini’s government, asked for a meeting with Signora Luce, and treated her to what she called a “fortissimo con brio” harangue. Reporting the encounter to the State Department, she quoted him as saying it had been “a grave mistake” for her “to give any evidence whatsoever of hostility to Mr. Gronchi.” Her obvious preference for his rival had been “an insult to all Italians who have freely chosen [Gronchi] in a democratic manner.” If America wanted to prevent a rise in the Communist/Socialist vote in the next election, Cini thundered, it ought to give his country aid to the tune of “some 300–500 million dollars a year for five years.”

  Clare replied that American taxpayers were unlikely to support such largesse, especially if Italy lagged in its own defense and anti-Red efforts.36

  On May 21, she had her first interview with President Gronchi. Speaking forcefully but mellifluously, he accused her of being responsible for his bad image in the American press, and for hinting that aid would be cut if he was elected. He assured her that his “militant catholicity” would prevent him from “doing business” with Togliatti.

  Afterward, she skeptically recalled to Durbrow and Miller that Gronchi had once been excommunicated for his Communist affiliations. It was her impression now that if his faith ever again came into conflict with his ambition, he would “without scruple choose the latter.”37

  A week later, Clare crossed the Atlantic for the third time that year. On arrival, she denied rumors that she wanted to succeed Oveta Culp Hobby as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, or to be reassigned to London or Paris.

  In Washington, she startled the President by hinting she might be ready to resign. He said he would like her to stay on at least through the year, since he needed plenty of time to pick a successor.38

  Clare also saw Joe Martin, and admitted that she was considering a run for the vice presidential nomination in 1956. Unfazed by her audacity, he promised to do what he could to help. When word of their private talk leaked to the Republican National Committee, party leaders declared that if any woman was to be nominated, it should be Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine.39

  Coincidentally, Clare was headed on June 14 for the Senator’s home state. She had a reservation there, under the pseudonym “Mrs. Farmer,” for three weeks of pampering at Elizabeth Arden’s Maine Chance spa in Mount Vernon. Continuing hair loss and dental problems plagued her, as did a nagging fatigue.40

  For extra seclusion, she took over a suite in the old farmhouse that had been modernized for Miss Arden’s personal use.41 Shirley Potash, a new friend-cum-assistant on the payroll of Time Inc., was given a neighboring room. This meant that the management had to eject a client from the Midwest, named Eleanor Nangle.

  “I moved out rather quickly,” Nangle wrote later, “but not before swarms of telephone workers appeared.” Mrs. Farmer, she was told, needed several secure lines. When she heard on the radio that the mystery guest was none other than Ambassador Luce, she understood why. Unable to resist publicity, Clare had told a radio interviewer at Augusta Airport that she was going to Maine Chance for “a brief rest.”42

  Once installed, she requested that her meals be served in her own quarters, and that the spa’s salons and exercise facilities be emptied of other guests before she used them. This meant that masseuses, beauticians, and physical therapists had to work after hours to accommodate other clients. Clare’s special privileges did not end there. On her first Sunday, wearing
a white suit and black lace mantilla, she commandeered the limousine that routinely transported Catholics to a chapel nearby. Leaving the rest of the faithful to squeeze into a utility vehicle, she went to worship in Augusta.43

  Soon enough, she learned that the woman she had dispossessed was the beauty editor of the Chicago Tribune. “I was reading one afternoon,” Nangle recalled, “content in the beautiful surroundings, the marvelous air and the sunshine, when Mrs. Luce’s secretary … sidled up to where I sat quite alone. Mrs. Luce, she said, had learned I was a ‘press person’ and she was willing to grant me an interview. I declined with all the politeness I could muster, emphasizing that I was not at Maine Chance as a reporter … and that I had been given to understand that Mrs. Luce was desperate to protect her privacy. I would not be comfortable invading it.”44

  On another occasion, a number of resident college girls were told that the Ambassador would like “to give a little talk” in the drawing room after dinner. Clare appeared in a floaty evening dress, sat on a satin-covered sofa, and implored the young women to consider careers in the diplomatic corps. Patriotic service was honorable and rewarding, she said, but it was “grueling.” She cited her own annual Fourth of July ordeals, having to stand all day long in the gardens of the Villa Taverna, “smiling and smiling and smiling” at visitors as they devoured hot dogs.45

  After she left, the students guffawed and mimicked her sonorous intonation. Nangle was amazed by the banality of Clare’s address. “We had had not a taste of the well-publicized Luce wit, brains, or the famous Luce malice. She had been dull, patronizing and surprisingly unattractive in the revelations of herself.”46

  Before leaving Maine on July 3, Clare heard that Mario Scelba’s government had fallen, as she had expected after the elevation of Gronchi. But to her relief, the embassy reported that the new Premier, Antonio Segni, had put together a similar coalition of Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, and liberals with Republican parliamentary support.47