Clare got on best with the younger generation crowding the Moores’ hearth that festive season. Among them were seven youths, all “hairy and Hippy,” including Michael Moore with a frizzy Afro, and Claire’s sons from a former marriage, Jim and William Hurt, the latter a handsome blond eighteen-year-old destined for movie stardom. Two of the granddaughters of Harry’s sister Emmavail Severinghaus particularly attracted her: the teenage Leslie Dingle, and her little sister, Libby, “blissfully undisturbed by the tinselled pandemonium all around.”34
On January 20, 1969, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Luce III escorted Clare to Richard Nixon’s swearing in as thirty-seventh President of the United States. The occasion was less joyous for Hank, a Humphrey supporter, than for his stepmother, who, in jeweled rainbow chiffon, celebrated the accession of her candidate.35
In mid-March, Clare moved into Halenai’a (“House of Dolphins”), her twelve-room Hawaiian house, which had taken two years to complete. High white walls and a powered security gate protected the property from Kahala Avenue’s heavy traffic. The wide driveway curved past the caretaker’s cottage to a courtyard, and a long, trellised loggia led to the entrance hall, guarded by two huge, dark blue Chinese temple dogs. Over the doorway was a three-thousand-year-old mosaic of a dolphin. Inside, an open-topped atrium was dominated by two large banyan trees soaring toward the sky. Surrounding them were orchids, bougainvillea, air plants, and a profusion of drooping ferns. Against one wall sat Harry’s favorite artifact, a life-sized wood-carved statue of the goddess Kwan Yin, at least five hundred years old. Off a central corridor running the length of the house were two spacious sitting rooms, each with eighteen-foot ceilings, one facing the ocean, the other looking toward lush gardens, a swimming pool, and distant mountains. The twelve-seat dining room also faced the sea. At the eastern end of the corridor was Clare’s blue-and-green bedroom suite, with an adjoining skylit study, a dressing room with space for thirty-six feet of clothes, and a private patio and garden. Elsewhere in the open-plan structure was a library, a den, and a tiny guest bedroom, purposely scaled to discourage long-term visitors.
Clare’s bedroom in Halenai’a (illustration credit 46.2)
Although Ossipoff had given Clare a sleekly Modernist building with tiled floors and straight, clean lines that called for the simplest interior decoration, she had been unable to resist cozying it up with curving, padded, patterned furniture and floral rugs, as well as a variety of pottery, needlepoint cushions, shells, and other tchotchkes. A ceramic female leopard with cubs reclining on a zebra-skin rug fought with the cool beauty of Isamu Noguchi’s bust of herself, and artworks by Gauguin, Magritte, O’Keeffe, and Nevelson.
Her current color preference was green, but in the carpeted dining room with a Venetian chandelier, pinks and beiges prevailed. The faux French rococo table was embellished with gilt rosettes, and the matching chairs were embroidered with pink flowers. In the south “rattan room,” tubular lamps, also by Noguchi, overhung a miscellany of bamboo tables and chairs.36
Full-length glass doors opened onto a white-tiled, bonsai-decorated bar lanai near the pool, with mango and monkeypod trees shading the adjacent patio. Beyond stretched the largest lawn in Honolulu, surrounded by plumeria (frangipani) and sago and coconut palms. Another lawn and stands of taller palms graced the south side of the house, with velvety grass sloping down to 240 feet of beach and magnificent views across Maunalua Bay to Diamond Head.
All this design and landscaping had cost Clare almost half a million on top of the quarter million that Harry had paid for the property. But it fulfilled her lifelong desire to have a tropical, saltwater retreat. Everywhere in the house, through louvered doors and numerous floor-to-ceiling windows, she could feel Hawaii’s gentle breezes, and hear the sound of the sea.37
In May, Clare made the close to five-thousand-mile trip to Washington, D.C., for another state dinner, this time for John Gorton, the Prime Minister of Australia. The first thing she said to President Nixon was, “What about China?” He replied, “Well, yes, we have to get on with a new policy for China.”38 Before returning to Honolulu, she managed to outshine the movie star Raquel Welch on The David Frost Show, and sell $747,000 worth of paintings that would not do well in Hawaii’s salty sea air, including Harry’s gift, Madonna of the Roses.39
The way Clare disposed of her art collection did not endear her to John Richardson of Christie’s auction house. She asked him for individual estimates of paintings before placing them in his hands en bloc. Richardson thought most of the collection “boring and second rate,” except for Fragonard’s “lovely” Education of the Virgin by Saint Anne. An instinctive aesthete, he also recoiled at her “hotel-like” furniture. Ostensibly satisfied with his numbers, Clare promised to ship the art to Christie’s in a matter of days.40 Yet, as a canny if not devious businesswomen, she first sought another opinion, asking William H. Kennedy, the director of the Contemporaries Gallery, to confirm Richardson’s appraisal of the paintings, and the fairness of Christie’s 15 percent commission.41
Kennedy, an attractive forty-seven-year-old Midwesterner, seized the opportunity. Years later, he remembered every detail of his encounter with the former Ambassador, even identifying her rose-scented perfume as Joy.
I went over to her place, a big apartment on the 26th floor of the Sherry Netherland with a lot of windows overlooking the Park. The place was hung throughout with blue chip paintings and some Churchills the artist had given her, whose whole value lay in their source. She was in a silk, peach colored peignoir and when she stood against the windows, it became transparent. She said she was 66; I said I didn’t believe her, but I had to because I’d heard of her for a long time. She had the slender figure of a woman in her 30s.
Having reviewed the paintings, Kennedy assured Clare that he could get the same prices, or better, by selling to his regular customers and fellow dealers directly from her own walls.
“What’s your end of it?” she asked. “Christie’s takes 15 percent.”
“Five percent from you, 10 percent from my customers.”
“OK,” Clare said. “It’s Tuesday; I’m giving the whole collection to Christie’s next Monday; you’ve got from now to Saturday.”
A day or two later, between the hours of 10 A.M. and 5 P.M., potential buyers came to view the Luce Collection. Those who made purchases were asked to drop their checks in a large Chinese urn placed near the exit door. The sale was a success, and when Clare and Kennedy were left alone that evening, she poured tumblers of Chivas Regal scotch to celebrate. They talked for a while about politics, his Illinois origins, and a summer she once spent in Wisconsin.
We touched glasses and she promptly pulled up her skirt and put a leg across my lap; it was a very good leg; and she went on about her childhood and the theater of those days. After we got out of the Midwest she said, “I have to get dressed for dinner; you can help me.” And I did.… I never got my 5 percent, but it was worth it.42
On July 10, Clare held a formal house-opening cocktail party at Halenai’a for about two hundred people, many of them prominent in Hawaiian society. She received her guests wearing a long yellow gown decorated with orange blossoms that complemented her silver-blonde hair and still-flawless skin. A guest hung around her neck a rare ‘ilima lei woven from thousands of paper-thin petals whose golden color matched the flowers in her outfit.
“I’m told these are very special—meant for royalty,” Clare said.43
If by that she implied she intended in future years to hold court as the queen of all of Oahu society, she was mistaken. Hawaii’s leading Democrats, including Governor George Ariyoshi, would never invite her. But she did entertain an ever-widening circle of other distinguished islanders, from ali’i princesses and pineapple and sugar barons, to the high-ranking military of Pearl Harbor, as well as artists, publishers, and faculty from the University of Honolulu. With her social, political, and theater connections, she was to host international celebrities, starting with a large event for Pat Nixon
later that month.
Over the years they came in droves, and she welcomed them by draping leis of ginger, tuberose, and jasmine—pikake—around their necks, while kissing them on both cheeks: Ronald and Nancy Reagan, the Marquess and Marchioness of Bath, Betty Friedan, Rudolf Nureyev, Yousuf Karsh, Henry Kissinger, Diana Vreeland, Rex Harrison, Admiral John McCain, Imelda Marcos, Milton Friedman, Margaret Mead, Gerald and Betty Ford, Buckminster Fuller, Cary Grant, Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, Bill and Pat Buckley, Dan Rather, James Michener, Terence Cardinal Cooke, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Emilio Pucci, Edward Teller, Irene Dunne, Leon Edel, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Barbara Walters, Baron and Baroness Philippe de Rothschild, Chief Justice Warren Burger, Loretta Young, Mortimer Adler, Kenneth Galbraith, Sir Robert Helpmann, Marshall McLuhan, De Witt and Lila Wallace, Merle Oberon, Isamu Noguchi, Gloria Steinem, General William Westmoreland, and Gore Vidal.44
At the time of Nixon’s election, Dorothy Farmer had remarked that Clare did not want to be rewarded with another embassy position. “She really is too old and tired for all that.” So now, when President Nixon offered her a post in Paris as United States Member of the Executive Board of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), she turned it down, saying she did not want a job that would keep her away from her new paradise for four years.45
Since Clare was writing little journalism and giving few speeches these days, she spent her time managing a staff of nine, reading—Robertson Davies novels, as well as policy papers—writing letters, swimming, playing bridge, watching television or movies, and, as a penalty of her increased assets, dealing regularly with accountants, brokers, and insurers.46 For a while she took painting lessons with a young, good-looking Honolulu professional, Edward Stasack, producing some remarkably lifelike portraits, and at least one surrealistic Mother and Child in oil on Masonite that resembled a fake Salvador Dalí. Under a cloudy sky, in which a giant pair of red lips floated, a pretty blonde woman with a tiny head offered an oversize bare breast to an enormous, piglike baby. Shortly after completing it, Clare discontinued her instruction. “I found I could lose myself in painting,” she told an interviewer, “and I was really enjoying it when my eyes starting going bad.”47
Clare and feathered friends in Honolulu, c. 1970 (illustration credit 46.3)
Her teacher felt “she was frustrated because she couldn’t be as good at painting as she was in all her other endeavors.”48 But the eyesight problem—double cataracts—would soon give her serious trouble.49
Clare spent practically all of 1970 jet-setting around the world, being toasted in bad verse by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., at the Four Seasons in New York and hailed as “a phenomenon” by George Cukor at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, attending a rain-soaked royal garden party at Buckingham Palace and a weekend in Sussex with Fleur Cowles, cruising in the Aegean, resting up in Malaga, addressing the International Sea Frontier Conference in Malta, partying in a petit palais at Cap Ferrat (“all the villas of the Riviera are going full blast”), spending midsummer first in Newport and then on Fishers Island with the Hank Luces, accompanying the Bentons to Tokyo, and in November dining opposite Queen Elizabeth II at the World Wildlife Banquet in London’s Talk of the Town nightclub, with Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and Neil Armstrong, fresh from his moon walk, at the same head table.50
The only creative writing Clare published that year was a one-act playlet entitled Slam the Door Softly. A modern parody of the last scene of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, it was intended more for reading and discussion than theatrical production, and first appeared in the October 16 issue of Life magazine.
Her script features just two characters, Thaw and Nora Wald, a married couple in their thirties. He is a businessman, and she has a master’s degree in English. Nora enters the living room of their house with a packed suitcase and finds Thaw watching two feminists debate on television, arguing that marriage is little more than “legalized and romanticized prostitution.” Thaw disgustedly bets that one is “a Lesbo,” and switches off the set. Nora recommends he read the works of Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan. His response is to try to carry her upstairs to bed, and she upbraids his male philosophy of “sock ’em and screw ’em.” Determined to leave, she asks for no alimony, but says he owes her $53,000 for ten years of domestic labor. She plans to take a job in the research department of Time Inc., the “intellectual harem” of that corporation. Conceding that he will soon replace her with another “sleep-in” servant, Nora says that she still loves him and will therefore only slam the door softly on their marriage—and suits her action to her words.51
The chief point that Clare seemed to be making was that not much had changed in marital relationships during the ninety-one years since Ibsen’s Nora walked out on the original Torvald.52
Stephen Shadegg’s biography Clare Boothe Luce was published in April 1971 by Simon & Schuster. It was the product of exhaustion on the author’s part, after a four-year literary struggle in which his relations with his subject had deteriorated sharply, especially after Clare saw the second draft, which she thought was more riddled with errors of fact and interpretation than the first. She justifiably objected that he had skimped on her tenure as Ambassador to Italy. When Shadegg would not or could not rewrite the book to her satisfaction, even with the help of a ghostwriter, she had gone to his editor at Meredith Publishing and demanded that the book be withdrawn. When Michael Korda at Simon & Schuster bought the contract, she voiced the same objections to him. Unintimidated, Korda told her that everything she said made him all the more eager to publish.53
Under the circumstances, William F. Buckley, Jr.’s review in the The New York Times was remarkably equable.
It is a favorable biography, though not gushy. It obviously required a degree of cooperation from Mrs. Luce.… Yet the book’s stylelessness suggests that [her] relationship to it was perfunctory; that she flatly declined … to shape the book, and so she must not be held accountable for distortions in it, and, of course, she cannot be held responsible for the principal failure of the book, which is that somehow it does not sufficiently communicate the flavor of her, and that has nothing whatever to do with the silly question whether you do or don’t approve of her political views.54
During the third week of August, Clare received a distressing letter written on thin blue airmail paper with a thick blue marker. It was from Maggie Case.
Dearest Clare—
Forgive what I am about to do—I have cancer and do not wish to live any longer—an object of pity poor old Maggie—a care for my friends. You are the one I loved the most and regret to let down. You gave me great happiness in my life—a friend of a lifetime. Take care—and pray for my soul.
Forever
Your Maggie.
Sunday Aug. 22nd.55
She and Clare had become estranged in recent years, after the latter had heard that Maggie (whose airfares she usually paid when she visited) was complaining that she was no longer a generous friend. Clare might have been less upset had she known that Maggie sent an almost identically worded suicide note to Cecil Beaton. But the details of her old friend’s death, related in a phone call from Tish Baldrige, were horrifying. Maggie, approaching eighty, had been dismayed by the recent firing of Vogue’s editor Diana Vreeland, and her own forced retirement after forty-five years at the magazine. So, feeling useless as well as ill, she had put on a raincoat and scarf and jumped from the window of her fifteenth-floor Park Avenue apartment.56
The almost simultaneous news that Hank’s wife, Claire McGill, had died of pancreatic cancer at forty-seven, and that Gerald Heard had also expired, having suffered no fewer than twenty-four strokes, persuaded Clare that she must live for the living, and try to remain relevant in a rapidly changing world.
To this end, she appeared in Westchester, New York, on October 16 for a weekend of “film, food and talk” centering on a screening of The Women. It was hosted by New York magazine’s movie critic, Judith Crist, at Tarrytown Conf
erence Center, on the Mary Duke Biddle estate. After the Saturday night show, Clare, Crist, and Gloria Steinem had a panel discussion of George Cukor’s direction. Steinem said that it was such a parody of femininity that it should have been played in drag. Clare responded that although the cast was female, her play was about heterosexual men, because the women of that era saw fulfillment in looking after them. All the panelists favored the three characters she portrayed as amoral go-getters: Crystal (Joan Crawford), the husband stealer; Countess de Lage (Mary Boland), who uses younger men for sex; and Miriam (Paulette Goddard), the seducer of the spouse of catty Sylvia (Rosalind Russell).
It was not surprising that Steinem, at thirty-seven a glamorous icon of the new “women’s lib” movement, should have such opinions. But Clare, at sixty-eight, had evolved to the point where she could be publicly tolerant of free sex and adultery. “After a long life and a long night,” she told the audience, “I think [that] most men do not know what love is, because they don’t ever love as equals, and the master never really loves the slave.” She seemed to have in mind the theme of Slam the Door Softly. “To love an equal—it takes big men and big women.”
The crowd enjoyed the debate so much that it lasted until 1:30 A.M. Clare had the last word: “I think Gloria and I would agree on most things. But if we didn’t, we still could not air them publicly.… It would be announced that we had had a hair-pulling contest.”57
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