Price of Fame

by Sylvia Jukes Morris

  Clare’s letter to the author, March 9, 1981 (illustration credit epl.1)

  Mrs. Luce covered her head with a napkin.

  “How often does it happen,” he asked, “this coming together of a great subject and an ideal biographer?”

  She twirled her wineglass. “I’ve done too many things. My life doesn’t stack up.”

  As passionately as I could, I recapitulated her achievements. “Had you lived a little later, you might well have been President.” She rolled her eyes. I said, “You should cooperate with a writer now, or someone uninformed might do a hatchet job when you’re gone.”

  The jaw came out again. “What do I care about people’s opinions after I’m dead? I’m no Madame Curie or Margaret Sanger.”

  Nobody could disagree with this, but nobody dared agree, either. Negative feelings hung in the air. “That’s that,” I thought dejectedly. “The moment has come and gone.”

  After dinner, we went to the sitting room for coffee. Edmund moved next to Mrs. Luce while I sank onto an ottoman opposite, wondering how to rescue the situation. She was strangely subdued, introspective even, and frowned at the ceiling. All of a sudden she gave a deep sigh, and uncertainty vanished from her face. She tapped Edmund on the knee. “What are we going to do about your bride?”

  “Are you two discussing my future?” I threw up my arms in mock despair. “I have no future.”

  “Oh, yes, you have,” she said. We both stood up and clasped hands in the center of the room. The others discreetly kept their distance. “But you understand my reluctance. My father abandoned us when I was seven [sic], my mother and daughter were killed, and my brother …” Her voice trailed off when she saw me nodding. I knew about him—that charming, misanthropic suicide.

  But she still could not bring herself to say yes. “I’m going to let my secretary, Dorothy Farmer, decide,” she said. “Take her for a hamburger.”

  “How weird,” I thought. “Who is this controlling angel?”

  At lunch two days later, Dorothy Farmer did not look formidable. She was a tiny, round figure who chuckled a lot. She told me that Mrs. Luce had said, “That Sylvia Morris is going to do my biography whether I cooperate or not.”

  Apparently Dorothy approved, because shortly afterward Mrs. Luce called to give me the go-ahead. I asked what I should do next. “It seems to me you’re doing it already,” she said.

  With her permission that summer, I began to work my way through the restricted Clare Boothe Luce Papers in the Library of Congress. It appeared she had never thrown a scrap away. The collection—460,000 items spreading over 319 linear feet—was bigger than those of most Presidents in the Manuscript Division. And little wonder. Her life spanned twenty administrations of fifteen Chief Executives, eight of whom she had known personally. Her correspondence with statesmen, writers, and movie and theater people was vast, and included a letter written on papyrus paper from an Indian jail by Jawaharlal Nehru.

  After President Reagan had reappointed Mrs. Luce to PFIAB on October 8, 1981, she spent less time in Hawaii, and I was able to schedule frequent interviews. Our first took place on the last day of that month in her Watergate penthouse. She looked regal in a long white wool dress with gold threads and lots of gold jewelry. On the coffee table was a collection of calling card cases. “They’re laid out for the appraiser,” she said, sitting in an armchair opposite me. “I feel a need to simplify my life.”

  It soon became apparent that she meant to control the subject matter of our conversation, skillfully sidestepping questions she was not ready to answer. I tried to press her. “You didn’t like Mr. Luce when you first met. What did he say or do that made you change your mind? Was it his determination in pursuing you?”

  She laughed, remembering the turbulent spring of 1935, when Henry Robinson Luce was trying to get a divorce from his wife in order to marry her, and she had played hard to get by going abroad. “I shook him in Africa,” she said, then launched into another deflecting anecdote. “The most embarrassing story of my whole life was in Tunis. There was a toilet that had a great globe over it and a string, and any noise that you made was reverberated over all of Africa. Even pee-pee sounded like Niagara Falls.”

  It was not an auspicious beginning. There was another awkward moment when she said that the worst thing that happened to her was “the loss of my looks.” She seemed disconcerted by my tactless response: “When was that?” But I persevered, and in the course of an hour managed to record some hard biographical material. She spoke of how she had stayed in the Weimar Republic as a girl, and how her first husband, “a golf-playing drunk,” would wake her up in the early morning, strumming glee club songs on his banjo.

  As I took my leave, she plucked a stem from a vase, put it in my cleavage, and recited Robert Burns’s poem “My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose.”

  In early December, having sold her penthouse, Mrs. Luce moved to the Shoreham Apartments on Calvert Street in northwest Washington. By then we had taped many hours of reminiscences. It did not occur to me that I had begun to fill a void in her life, until I announced my departure for England to spend Christmas with my sister. A flash of anguish crossed her face, and I realized that she was going to be alone.

  She resembled a cadaver when I got back in early January 1982. An aspirin-based painkiller had caused old ulcer scars to hemorrhage, and she had been rushed off in an ambulance, near death. The egalitarian treatment of the emergency room, and the balls of fluff in the corners of her private suite, had not been to her fastidious taste. “A hospital,” she said sardonically, “is no place to be sick.”

  As yet, she lacked a full-time maid, so Edmund and I agreed to stay with her for a few days. Uneasy as I was about too much familiarity with Clare—she had asked me to call her that by now—I put aside the importance of maintaining objectivity, for she was extremely frail. Her brush with mortality had loosened her unwillingness to revisit painful memories, and when I took in her breakfast tray the first morning—fresh orange juice, a slice of whole-wheat toast with butter and jam, weak jasmine tea without milk or lemon—she launched into intimate details of her six years with her first husband, George Brokaw. He had drowned in the swimming pool of a drying-out institution some years after Clare divorced him.

  I was still not bold enough to ask her about the near breakup of her second marriage in 1959. Amazingly, at this time, she received a call from none other than Lady Jeanne Campbell. Now fifty-three and twice divorced, Henry Luce’s former mistress had become a Roman Catholic, and wanted to interview Clare for a book she contemplated on famous converts. As Jeanne told me later, she had never gotten over her love for Harry. At their last parting, he had said that if she ever saw his picture on the cover of Time, she would know that he had died. Sure enough, one day in early 1967, she had walked into a drugstore in Fiji, and seen his familiar face looking out from a magazine rack.

  “There doesn’t seem to be any reason not to see her,” Clare said. “I’m a forgiving soul and don’t bear grudges.” Yet the interview never took place.

  Once, I made notes on a typical day in Clare’s life. She spent the first half of it in bed, reading and dictating to Dorothy and to her other secretary, Mary Leader. About 10:00 A.M. the telephone started to ring. William Safire of The New York Times called to ask what she thought of a report that FDR had bugged Bernard Baruch’s bedroom. Bill Buckley wanted to discuss questions of conservative counsel to the Reagan administration. Both Good Morning America and the Today show invited her to appear in connection with a Harper’s cover story by Wilfrid Sheed entitled “Clare Boothe Luce: From Courtesan to Career Woman.” It was an excerpt from his forthcoming affectionate memoir about her. She declined, saying she would prefer to have gone “from career woman to courtesan.”

  Lunch was a scrambled egg and tea. During the afternoon, her old friend James Jesus Angleton, the former Chief of Counterintelligence at the CIA, stopped by for some “spy chat.” I discovered that espionage was one of Clare’s favorite s
ubjects. Later she read a pile of position papers and magazines on domestic and foreign policy. An article on the economic and social condition of the United States put her in a dark mood. She said to me in all seriousness, “I don’t see much hope for a country where you can’t get live-in servants.”

  After a dinner of chicken salad and ice cream, we watched the shipboard seduction scene from Brideshead Revisited. Clare, looking over her spectacles, said, “They only allow the missionary position on PBS.”

  When it was time for bed, she settled down with a detective story. I kissed her good night and left, not turning out any lights, because I knew she liked to fall asleep with all bulbs burning brightly.

  In early June 1982, I went to Hawaii for three weeks to work with Clare on more personal and sensitive documents that she was not ready to deposit in the Library of Congress. She invited my husband too, and sent her chauffeur to meet us at Honolulu International Airport. I noticed that the Cadillac dashboard sported a brass plaque: “This car built especially for Clare Boothe Luce by General Motors Corp.”

  As we swung off Kahala Avenue into the driveway of Halenai’a, I could smell frangipani and see trumpet vines tumbling in profusion over a high trellised wall. Beyond lay a meticulously groomed garden with orchids, hibiscus, and birds of paradise. A swimming pool glimmered in the late afternoon sun, and mangoes, guavas, and coconuts lay scattered on the bright green lawn.

  Clare greeted us with a critique of Irving Kristol’s On the Democratic Idea in America. There was never any small talk with her. After we had a swim, she went to the bar and poured herself a large Scotch. It seldom occurred to her to offer drinks to others. In no time, her speech slowed, and the timbre of her voice grew pontifical. She had a low tolerance for liquor, and frankly admitted it bothered her quarrelsome ulcers, which she nicknamed “Qaddafi and Begin.” After an early supper, we retired to sleep off our jet lag.

  The next morning, a purple orchid and a copy of the Honolulu Advertiser were laid across our lanai breakfast table. Clare appeared at ten o’clock and took me to the library. On the desk was a large scrapbook entitled “My School Days.” We looked at it together. Every picture provoked such a flood of anecdotes that I frantically tried to keep my cassette recorder going, while acting like a good listener and scribbling research leads.

  After lunch, Clare’s stories continued to flow in her best posterity voice. The Congresswoman was spending Christmas of 1944 at the Italian Front. In 1945, she was witnessing the liberation of Buchenwald. The Ambassador was solving the Trieste problem.… By now it was late afternoon, and her stories grew more intimate. “Just as I had gone to bed, someone came in and fell over the coal scuttle. It was Bernie Baruch! And I was expecting Randolph!”

  Clare and the author at Halenai’a, June 1982 (illustration credit epl.2)

  More stories flowed at dinner. Afterward, we watched The Lady Vanishes on the Betamax. I sat on the bed beside her, looking up occasionally at a ceiling-hung triptych of clouds and blue sky painted by John Wisnosky, a local artist.

  Twenty days passed. I sifted through a vast number of letters, diaries, and albums. Every characteristic of Clare was there from the start: beauty, charm, humor, coquetry, intellect, ambition. Sometimes she worked ahead of me in a study off her bedroom, going through boxes and trunks of papers. Once I had a fright when I heard tearing sounds, and rushed in, afraid she might be destroying important documents. “Oh no, I’m just taking blank pages out of the diaries, so they’ll be lighter for shipping to the library.”

  In addition to having terrifying nightmares of abandonment and mutilation, Clare was an insomniac. She also had extreme mood swings. At parties, she was gracious and amusing. The following day, she would complain of the dullness of Honolulu society. After a dinner where a conservative professor made a toast to “the American dream,” she moaned, “You can see why I’m so bored in this fur-lined rut.” She confessed to being “low in the mind” when we said good-bye on July 3. “Seeing my life paraded before me these last few weeks has been traumatic.” She hugged me with tears in her eyes.

  I returned to Washington with more research to do. Those terrifying dreams and black moods hinted at repressed truths. The circumstances of her early years confused me. I tracked down her New York birth certificate, and found that she was born in March, not April, 1903, and that her place of birth was not Riverside Drive, but the less genteel environs of West 125th Street. I told her about the date, and she stared at me. “Mother always said I was born at Easter.” As for her father being an aspiring violinist when he met her mother, I told her he had been a patent medicine salesman, and her grandfather had not been a Bavarian Catholic, but a Lutheran. Her response was that I was “one hell of a detective.”

  Over the next five years, I traveled far in search of my subject. I went to Memphis, Nashville, and Chicago to look—in vain—for her parents’ wedding certificate, and with Clare to Mepkin Abbey in South Carolina, where she wanted to be buried. I crossed the Atlantic to Herefordshire and met with her oldest living boyfriend, still carrying her picture in his wallet. On the French Riviera I saw where she had dined with Somerset Maugham, and in Scotland I uncovered details about a White Russian soldier with whom she had had a youthful romance. In Newport, Clare and I toured the Bellevue Avenue mansion where she had spent her first married summer, and we had lunch at Bailey’s Beach Club. In Palo Alto, I found the spot where her only child was killed in a car crash, and visited the Modernist chapel she had built in Ann’s memory. Together in Rome—a trip for which she bought a set of Louis Vuitton luggage—we explored the U.S. Embassy and the Villa Taverna, and Clare pointed out the infamous ceiling that had poisoned her. We went to Bulgari, where she spent $28,000 on a necklace and matching earrings to wear at a dinner in her honor. That night, when Ambassador Maxwell Rabb toasted her “brilliance, beauty, and charisma,” she rose to respond. “I despise flattery, but I do admire honest praise.” The following day, we had lunch with Gore Vidal at Vecchia Roma restaurant, and in his nearby apartment afterward, he and Clare affectionately reminisced. “For once,” Gore noted later, “she and I did not row about politics.”

  Between trips, I worked through mounds of political correspondence at the Library of Congress, and diplomatic papers at the State Department. I interviewed scores of people: members of the Luce family, relatives of the Schneiders, Fleur Cowles, William F. Buckley, Jr., Irene Selznick, Edward Teller, Yousuf Karsh, John Richardson, veterans of her congressional and ambassadorial staff, her interior designer, her confessor, her doctor, and a decaying Countess in Murray Hill. What I concluded was that few people really understood Clare Boothe Luce. Although she had the gift of apparent instant intimacy, she would distance herself at the first hint of rejection. She admitted to preferring people who asked the least of her. One of these was the devoted Dorothy Farmer, who greatly inconvenienced her by dying in 1984. “I’d hoped she’d see me out.”

  Although she was proud of her service as a senior member of PFIAB, she was disappointed that President and Mrs. Reagan did not pay her as much mind as she had hoped. Near the end of a dinner party she gave for them in her apartment there was a power outage, and they had to be escorted nine floors down the stairwell by candlelight.

  The only state dinner she attended was for Indira Gandhi, and she had to see other, younger Republican women appointed to prestigious positions: Jeane Kirkpatrick as Ambassador to the United Nations, Selwa (“Lucky”) Roosevelt as Chief of Protocol, and, most historically, Sandra Day O’Connor as the first female Supreme Court Justice. Clare said that she envied the latter most, for having risen “to the top of her particular tree,” while she herself had never become the best American playwright, politician, or diplomat of her time. I noticed that her envy was mixed with awe when the Justice invited us both to lunch and a hearing at the Court.

  Mrs. O’Connor launched immediately into a ten-minute history of the method of recording Court proceedings. Clare, unschooled in jurisprudence, tried to ask �
�clever” questions designed to bring the conversation round to her current peeve, the President’s right to conduct foreign policy without interference from Congress. Throughout, she had a tight demeanor, and was at pains to impress.

  Before the Court reconvened, Justice O’Connor briefed us on the case we were to hear, concerning the right of a small Texas town to prevent the opening of a nursing home for the mentally handicapped. Twenty minutes into the proceedings, Clare wanted to leave. But a note was passed to her from Chief Justice Warren Burger. It read, “Welcome, but what a sad case.” Her reaction was to whisper to me, “Now we’ll have to stay another ten minutes.”

  Indira Gandhi, Clare, and Nancy Reagan at the White House, 1982 (illustration credit epl.3)

  In February 1983, Clare’s feelings of neglect by the administration were mollified by being awarded the Medal of Freedom. That spring, she was also honored as a “Living Legend” by the National Portrait Gallery, where the historian Marc Pachter interviewed her before a packed audience of Washington notables. She was on her best monologic form as she recounted her 1945 thespian stint in Shaw’s Candida. Describing the scene-stealing antics of one young actor, she asked, “Have you any idea what it’s like to be upstaged?” “No,” Pachter said, “but I’m beginning to find out.”

  Clare and Marc Pachter at the National Portrait Gallery (illustration credit epl.4)

  In April, I gave a party on Capitol Hill to celebrate her eightieth birthday. The Boorstins were there, as were Mort Zuckerman, Gay and Nan Talese, and Richard Cohen of The Washington Post. Luigi Barzini happened to be in town, and stopped by to reminisce with her about their old days in Italy. After dinner, in a seductive mood, Clare sat on the couch beside Cohen, and began running her fingers through his thick hair and beard. He said to me later, “That’s the only eighty-year-old I’ve ever wanted to jump into bed with.”