After World War II, Heard had emerged as something of a guru himself, founding the monastery-like Trabuco College in the Santa Ana Mountains, becoming a proponent of celibacy and six hours a day of meditation. In his extreme frugality, he eschewed having a telephone or a car. But that did not prevent him from using those of others, and enjoying the hospitality of rich friends. Nor did the apparent brilliance of his rhetoric prove, on analysis, always to have depth or coherence: “The really possible utopia is this world experienced by a psychophysique at full aperture.” In conversation he would solemnly refer to “the sober certainty of waiting bliss.”13
Heard’s interest in liberating “the inner man” had led him in 1954 to experiment with Huxley in taking mescaline, a psychedelic derivative of cactus plants, which caused him to have conversations with imagined personalities. Late the following year, he had moved on to experiment with LSD, which had first been synthesized in Switzerland in 1938. Its abbreviated initials came from the original German word lysergsäurediethylamid, whose particle säure translated as “acid.” Found naturally in ergot, a rye kernel fungus, the drug had become exclusively available in 1949 free of charge from the Sandoz Laboratory in Basel, but only for research purposes.14
Not being an accredited scientist or physician, Heard had to obtain his supplies from a friend, Dr. Sidney Cohen, chief of psychosomatic medicine at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Los Angeles. So far, Dr. Cohen had been cooperative with Heard’s interest in the effect of LSD on highly intelligent, creative people, even though his own field of research focused on therapeutic treatment of psychotic cases. In exchange for limited supplies, Heard submitted reports of his sessions with people like Clare.
He was drawn to her because, as he wrote, “You and I share this struggle with melancholy.” Dr. Cohen believed that Gerald had a way with “certain neurotics,” and informed him that depression, rather than psychosis, was “now the mental pandemic.”15
Clare recalled that her two previous trips had been “delicious, wonderful … a fantasy high,” even though in Phoenix there had been some tearful episodes, moments of irritation, and tingling sensations as well as chills. Images of beauty—a dragonfly alighting on a glass ornament that turned to fire and water, a petunia whose petals seemed to undulate—were compromised by distress at her overfurnished house with its excess of “bits and bobs and doojiggers.” These were followed, as she attained what Cohen called “the upper register,” by more enigmatic visions: a harp swallowed and broken, with blood surging around it. (“Where does the sorrow come from?” she asked, crying. “From the harp.”) She also had memories of a lost child, of playing with pebbles on a beach, and of having her creativity questioned by an uncomprehending mother. At one point in Phoenix a maid had interrupted a session to say Vice President Nixon was on the phone. “CL says will talk later,” Barrie scribbled.16
Feeling creatively revitalized by her psychedelic intake, Clare began a three-month literary sojourn on the Caribbean island of St. John.17 She stayed in the most secluded and luxurious cottage at Caneel Bay Plantation, a resort with beautiful beaches developed by Laurance Rockefeller. Her intent was to resume work on her memoirs, but she got no further than an opening page that drifted off into fragmentary fantasy.
One gets born. From there on it’s hell, or a little better, with a rare touch of heaven, all the way to the grave. If you hadn’t been born who you were, when you were, who would you have liked to be?… There is only one answer that is not sheer nonsense: who I was.… So. I was born in 1903, a girl child. I wish f[ather] had not left mother. More money. A better education; not such wide hips, a smaller nose and ears. Of course, a Strawberry Duchess, England 19th Cent. a great family. A Princess, a Duchess of course. Doesn’t every woman?18
A few more jottings later, she gave up in favor of writing a detective novel set in Brazil, called “The Memoirs of T. Parkington Quinn.” Some of the research for her congressional hearings could be put to use. At first the prose flowed effortlessly. She told Gerald Heard that her facility must be due to the prolonged effects of LSD, and pestered Dorothy Farmer for material on Brazilian food—“some 20 good dishes for Quinn to eat at various times when he is in São Sabato.”19
Harry joined her for a while, returning to New York for a minor prostate procedure in early July.20 As soon as he left, she started having trouble with the novel. “I may be too old to do any creditable creative writing now.” Again she fretted about producing even “a passable autobiography.” Mina Shaughnessy, a Washington researcher hired to go through some of her papers, sensed her waning enthusiasm for the project, and offered to write an authorized biography instead, for an annual salary of $10,000. Clare turned her down, and continued to procrastinate.21
By now she was spending only a couple of hours each morning on her manuscripts, preferring to answer dozens of letters before going to the beach. She swam at least two miles a day. Her “merry chit chatterer,” Dorothy, came for a few days, but disliked the sun and left. Louisa Jenkins briefly filled the void.22
On July 21, Clare, having not heard from Harry for several days, wrote to tell him she was reasonably at peace, and “could wish for only one thing: companionship. A presence. But my fate is my fate, and with whatever pangs I do grow every year a little more reconciled to being alone, and in your life a thing very much apart from all your most eager and passionate concerns.”23
By way of explanation, a letter arrived at the end of the month from Father John Courtney Murray, S.J. It revealed that Harry was experiencing an unspecified emotional crisis.24
Murray, professor of Catholic trinitarian theology at Woodstock College, a Jesuit seminary in Maryland, had become Clare’s spiritual adviser after the departure of Father Thibodeau. Having worked in Rome and Heidelberg, he was, to her, “one of the few American priests to have a real European mind.”25 During her time in Italy, he had also become a golfing buddy and confidant of Harry, and was now recruited as an intermediary to solve the problem of Clare’s feeling of marital isolation.
The priest told her that her husband would return to Caneel Bay soon. Quoting Harry’s typically fuzzy language when dealing with personal matters, Murray wrote: “He mentioned that … he did not have in mind to do any discussing or planning, since he ‘wanted to let the river of time flow quietly for a while.’ ”
As if this were not vague enough, Murray recommended that Clare avoid “a full-dress confrontation,” and “let the summer interval be dominated only by the mutual question ‘What do I want to do.’ ” He apologized for giving so much advice. “If I need an excuse, it is that I am fond of him and I love you.”26
Clare’s reaction was a sudden frenzy of underwater killing. It began after spearing a tarpon as big as her off Hawksnest Beach, and concluded with a written mea culpa. “I am afraid of my own hate, or do I hate my own fear? All the dark unconscious things—the sea serpent, the phallus, rise.… There is a joy and anguish, fascination and horror about killing something which is not molesting you.… I shot box fish through the skull, ungainly fish … mass slaughter of the sea urchins. The little crab prodded with my spear. You can’t go cutting everything in half.…”27
The following afternoon, Harry arrived.
After a few uneasy days, he mumbled something about not wanting to commit to yet another apartment at the Waldorf Towers in the fall. He offered no reason. Clare lost her temper, and on August 12, he left, some forty-eight hours earlier than planned.28
Before she could figure out his mysterious behavior, she received another letter from Father Murray. “Harry’s problem is the same as yours—the problem of loneliness, of the ‘unshared life.’ ”29
In her reply, Clare asked Murray to try to “get behind the wall” of her husband’s self-concealment. But after spending a weekend with Harry, and hearing little but inchoate stories of his life and religious doubts, the priest concluded that he was an enigma. “He goes in spurts and fragments and splinters of ideas.” Addressing a complaint from Clare that she
was having even more literary difficulties, Murray chastised her self-absorption. “Well, damn it, keep on writing.”30
Clare was back in New York by September 1, shortly before Harry left for a “business trip” to Europe. On the eve of his departure for France, she sensed that he was already absent in heart and spirit. It dawned on her that he was having another affair. He left next day with wifely abuse ringing in his ears.31
Perplexed by Harry’s perennial inability to articulate his needs, Clare made a summary of arguments for and against divorce. In the pro column, she listed “physical, emotional, psychological freedom,” enabling both of them to find another “mate.” As a single woman, she would be able to write her memoirs without having to consider Harry’s personal and corporate sensitivities. She would also find out “where I belong, if anywhere, and to whom I matter—if anybody.” In the con column, she mentioned financial insecurity for herself and a “loss of public respect” for him. “Couples divorcing for incompatibility in their 60s always look damn silly.” Crucial for her was “the damage to me who am vulnerable—to the point of neurosis on the score of being ‘rejected’ and ‘abandoned.’ ”32
Using the third person, she recorded a nightmare of being carried “with infinite tenderness” in the arms of a tall, strong man, who suddenly turned into a monster of sadism. “He was absolutely without pity. She realized he would now torture her to death.”33
On September 19, Harry returned to face the first of what Clare described as “agonized nights” of confession and recrimination.34 For the past three years, he confessed, he had been seeing and sleeping with Lady Jeanne Campbell, granddaughter of Lord Beaverbrook.
Now thirty, she was a more mature version of the tall, dark-haired, peachy-cheeked twenty-year-old Clare remembered from her 1949 stay with Max in Jamaica. Since her parents had divorced when she was a child, Jeanne had seldom lived at Inveraray Castle, the ancestral home of her father, Ian Campbell, the Duke of Argyll, in Scotland’s Western Highlands. Instead, she had stayed at her grandfather’s multiple establishments, dabbling in acting and having a fling with the Fascist Sir Oswald Mosley. It was at Beaverbrook’s villa on the French Riviera that Harry had met Jeanne again, become besotted, and admitted to Mary Bancroft his desire to seduce her.35
Lady Jeanne Campbell, c. 1959 (illustration credit 43.3)
But it was not until September 1956, when Clare was winding up her ambassadorship in Rome, and Jeanne was working as a photo researcher at Life, that Harry had seized the chance to make his fantasy a reality. That fall, he had dined with her at his Waldorf apartment a couple of times, and made tentative passes, Then, in early January 1957, after he had spent several weeks in Italy with Clare, they had what Jeanne characterized as “an explosive coming together,” declaring and consummating their love.36
After this, Harry, naively afraid of being recognized, would visit her at night, with his hat pulled way down and coat collar turned up. He was the “cuddlyist” man in the world, Jeanne told an office colleague, “but it took him six months to get it up!”37
When they were apart, Harry wrote, telephoned, and sent so many dozens of roses that Jeanne ran out of vases.38 “The most romantic man I’ve ever come across,” she said.39 He knew reams of verse, and could recite all of Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night.” In return she quoted Yeats: “And pity beyond all telling / Is hid in the heart of love.” Harry disagreed. “Pity has nothing to do with love.”
At the height of their relationship, he often said, “If only you could get pregnant that would do it. She would have to give me a divorce.” But Jeanne had difficulty conceiving.40 Their claustrophobic assignations continued with copious drinking and talking. Jeanne discovered that Harry “had a tremendous secret love for his mother.… He was like a lost little boy—I’ve never seen such a combination of power and lostness.”41
On March 15, 1959, afraid Harry might be happy to continue indefinitely with their clandestine couplings, Jeanne proposed marriage. Now thirty, she felt an urgent need to have children, and asked that he try to alleviate his chronic impotence—what he called his “inadequacy”—by having his prostate “fixed.”42 She then left for Europe, setting a deadline of July 15 for him to accept or reject her proposal. If the former, she expected him to begin at least separation proceedings. On that exact day, while Clare was worrying about him in Caneel Bay, Harry accepted Jeanne’s proposal in writing, and had his prostate operation.
In hindsight, Clare saw that when Harry had jibbed about moving back to the Waldorf, he was about to commit to someone half his age. She now discovered that on his latest European trip, Harry had been dallying with his “girl” in Paris, on the assumption that Clare would agree to a separation pending divorce. In a further blow, Harry informed her that he had not really loved her for twenty years, was not attracted to older women, and had stuck with her primarily because he was “sorry” for her. But since she had seemed “so well, so happy, so confident,” in her work on the Caribbean island, he felt that he, too, “had the right to happiness.”43
Harry’s condescension and betrayal were bad enough, but as Clare absorbed the longevity of his deceit, her fury grew.44 For two decades the man standing before her had feigned impotence, when all along it had been a revulsion to her body that caused his incapacity.45 He had a nerve assuming she would accommodate his current wish to dump her. This was a moment to take a cue from The Women, written twenty-three years before: “What has any woman got to gain by a divorce? No matter how much he gives her, she won’t have what they have together.”46
She put this now to Harry. It left him unmoved. “My girl,” he informed her, “will fight for me.”47 Evidently “the Lady Jeanne,” as society columns called her, was a determined young woman. Clare bounced an ashtray off Harry’s balding head, and followed up with a torrent of gutter language that reminded him of the sordidness of her background.48 His penchant for Jeanne, she said, was “all sex,” in contrast with their own twenty-year lack of it.49
Harry denied that his relationship with Jeanne was one-dimensional, and claimed that it was “the last great love” he could expect.50 Yet he admitted in the same breath to suffering from “post coitus triste.” Clare attributed this sadness not only to Presbyterian guilt, but to egotistic regret that the possession of his partner had been rushed or incomplete. “Orgasm,” she told him, was not “the sole and final end of sex.” If it were, “prostitutes would be the happiest instead of the most miserable of women. There can be in one gentle kiss, one generous caress, one entwining of fingers more sexuality than in a whole whore house.”51
Immersed in her own anguish, Clare saw with some pity that Harry suffered, too. In worldly and family terms, he had so much. But from long experience, she knew “how desperate is the heart’s need to love and be loved.” All the better for him, she charitably conceded, if, in his declining years, he had found a “sunlight love,” rather than continue the chaste “moonlight love” that she and he had long settled for.52
This access of sympathy did not last. As the confrontation wore on, Clare suspected that Harry saw her as his jailer, and wanted her dead.53 He intuited her misery, and in a conciliatory gesture took her in his arms. He said “a love deeper than love” existed between them. “I can never leave you, if you cannot bear it.”54
The following night, Harry had a colloquy with Father Murray. He said he could not forsake “this pitiful woman,” and might have to “sacrifice” Jeanne for his wife’s “greater need.”55 Murray passed these remarks to Clare, and sent Harry an analysis of his difficulties.
If he was “using” Jeanne merely to prove his sexual potency, Murray wrote, “this is rather a dreadful thing.” Doubtless she was sincere in wanting to marry him, but his desire to unite with her was probably a vain yearning to fill a vacuum in himself. The priest shrewdly guessed that there must be “something wrong in the woman” if, after spending much of her life in the company of an old press lord, she now aimed to have
an aging substitute.
Murray deduced that Harry’s attraction to Jeanne was not so much sexual as childlike. In playing the roles of nurturer and sounding board, Jeanne was acting like his much-loved mother. “Better—or a lesser evil—that she should be [your] mistress,” Murray advised, adding, “Is she to be a sort of mirror in which you hope to see reflected an image of yourself that you want to be admired, and yourself to admire?”56
Unwittingly, he was echoing some other lines from The Women. “A man has only one escape from his old self: to see a different self—in the mirror of some woman’s eyes.”57
On Saturday, September 26, in a state of exhausted armistice, the Luces were having dinner à deux at Sugar Hill when Harry was summoned to the telephone. The caller was Igor Cassini, alias the gossip columnist “Cholly Knickerbocker” of the New York Journal-American—William Randolph Hearst’s biggest scandal sheet. Cassini asked Harry to comment on reports that he and his wife were separating.
Taken aback, Harry said, “Clare and I are here together. It is all very premature, to say the least.”
After a short pause, during which he realized he had given credence to the rumor, he blustered, “There is nothing to it at all.”
The result was a headline story on Sunday morning, illustrated with a photograph of a bravely smiling Clare.
The Big Topic in the Intelligentsia Set as well as in the Smart Set these days is that Henry Luce, publisher of Life, Time and Fortune, and his talented wife Clare, onetime playwright, Congresswoman and U.S. Ambassadress to Italy, are planning a separation—or a divorce.
Reports reaching this reporter from London and Paris, where Luce visited recently, say that the powerful publisher has admitted to intimate friends that he and his wife intend to separate.
Luce has been often seen in the company of the Lady Jean [sic] Campbell, lovely daughter of the Duke of Argyll and granddaughter of a fellow-publisher, England’s omnipotent and vociferous Lord Beaverbrook.
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