The Publisher
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More visible to readers was Luce’s increasing identification with the Republican Party. His full-throttled support of Willkie in 1940 had exposed him to considerable criticism; but in that campaign Luce had been less a Republican loyalist than an insurgent supporting a maverick candidate promising (however unconvincingly) a new kind of postpartisan politics. Luce’s 1940 position had in many ways been a critique of the Republican Party’s hidebound conservatism and an effort to move it toward a more moderate course. As the 1944 election approached, Luce once again supported Willkie’s candidacy, although with far less emotional engagement than he had in 1940; but Willkie himself withdrew from the race early in April after coming in last in the Wisconsin primary. (“I had been encouraged to believe that the Republican party could live up to the standards of its founders,” he explained bitterly, “but I am discouraged to believe that it may be the party of negation.”) Luce responded equally glumly to the prospect of Thomas E. Dewey, the governor of New York, as the Republican nominee. “In the past few weeks,” Luce told Willkie in June, “what I have been doing, as relates to politics, comes about as close as possible to zero.” A month before the election, Willkie died of a heart attack following a strep infection. There had been much speculation in late summer 1944 that Willkie would have ultimately supported Roosevelt, with whom he had worked closely during much of the war and with whom—unknown to the public (and to Luce)—he had begun discussions about the possibility of a new party that they might form together.
Luce hardly paused before throwing his support to the front-runner, Dewey, a man he had previously viewed with considerable contempt. Life openly endorsed Dewey not long before the election. Time was more restrained. But Luce instructed his staff that the magazines should “render not merely passing judgments, but, practically, verdicts on candidates for and occupants of offices other than President of the United States.”29
“What has been going on in TIME in the last several years,” Luce explained, when he began to receive criticism from some of his colleagues, “has not been the sudden acquisition of prejudice or conviction but the attempt to make our implicit convictions explicitely [sic] coherent and rational.” With that cursory justification, he began talking and writing about the Republican party with almost the same breathless enthusiasm and confidence with which four years earlier he had written of Willkie. “The nation is today actually Republican,” he announced in 1942. “Taking into account Conservative Democrats, the New Deal (what remains) is a distinctly minority party.” By 1944 he had convinced himself that the nation was as weary of Roosevelt as he was, that supporting the Republicans was almost as obvious a position for his magazine to take as supporting the war. “If we want the ‘better side’ to win in November,” he wrote in 1943, “what we do now may be no less important than what we do (or don’t do) on election eve…. It seems to me that we may as well agree that our disposition is definitely in favor of the Republican Party.” So certain was he that the tide was turning toward Dewey that he asked Billings in early August “to throw out the monthly Roper survey [in Fortune] because it showed gains for Roosevelt.” Billings protested, and Luce compromised by running a Gallup Poll showing Dewey ahead alongside the Roper. Not until shortly before election day did he finally acknowledge that Roosevelt would likely win. Even so, Billings noted, he was “deeply wounded” when some of his most intimate colleagues decided to “desert him politically” by voting for Roosevelt. Some prominent readers were also deeply alienated. Time had become a “Republican magazine,” he heard increasingly from Democratic politicians and other public figures. And while Luce denied the charge, he could not honestly refute it. Shortly after the election he even began to consider working with the Republican National Committee on a reorganization of the party. “I am in no mood to perform an ‘act of leadership,’” he explained. “But maybe we have got some moral obligation to give expression to some words of helpful wisdom to the Republican party … the whole to be scanned and evaluated by some top writer [from Time] … and the chief points assayed by [a] LIFE editorial. All this might really ring a bell.”30
For a time in 1942 and 1943, there was speculation—some of it fueled by Luce’s friends and colleagues—that he would run for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut or become secretary of state or otherwise thrust himself into public life. Luce himself publicly repudiated that idea and insisted (unpersuasively) that he would not only not run for office but that he would “retire completely from politics or personal leadership in public affairs.” But in the fall of 1942 he rallied behind another political proposal—that Clare run for a seat in the House of Representatives in a district that had until recently been occupied by her stepfather, Elmer Austin.31
Clare’s decision to run—a decision over which she publicly agonized for several months before entering the race—was not due just to ambition. It was also a result of her declining fortunes as a writer. Her effort to transform herself from playwright into political and war reporter, which began so promisingly in 1939 with her successful publication of Europe in the Spring, had by 1942 become something of an embarrassment. Her articles for Life, once eagerly published, became a source of awkwardness for editors who found them glib and superficial but feared the consequences of turning them down. Billings described them in his diary as “just a jumble of words … a mess.” Colleagues from Time Inc. and from other publications began to balk at the number and the triviality of her articles in Life. “On all sides,” Billings noted, “we are running too much ‘Clare Boothe,’ and her pieces are becoming a general joke.”32
Both Harry and Clare almost certainly (if not openly) considered the state of their marriage as much as her career as they pondered whether or not she should run. By early 1942 the coolness that had begun to envelop their marriage only a few years after their wedding was rapidly increasing. They were already spending much of their time apart; and Clare, at least, was becoming increasingly morose about what she sometimes considered her complete isolation. “Such a mess,” she wrote in her diary of a lonely trip to Greenwich not long after their marriage. “Such a place—God! It has a wild look to it…. No greetings are here for me … a twist of pain … So hurt here.” Things had only gotten worse in the following years.
Their sexual relationship, troubled from the beginning, had come to a virtual end in 1939—a source of pain and frustration to them both. Harry blamed his inactivity on stress and exhaustion, but repeated efforts at escape and relaxation failed to restore his sexual appetite. After a while he began to claim that he had become impotent, which he may actually have believed for a time. But by late 1942 he had found himself with a healthy sexual appetite for other women, which suggests that his problem was not physical but psychological and probably specific to Clare—perhaps a product of their increasingly intense, and often bitter, competitiveness with each other. They fought constantly during their 1941 visit to China and were, Clare wrote, “not very happy.” Guests in their homes sometimes sat in mute astonishment as Harry and Clare engaged in furious arguments from opposite ends of the dinner table. It seemed at times in 1942 that she was running against her husband almost as much as against her Democratic opponent. However partisan Harry became, Clare became more so. She openly rejected the muscular idealism of Harry’s “American Century” vision for a tough, pragmatic, power-driven stance in the world. “I believe any means justify the patriotic end of helping our country to survive,” she wrote Harry early in 1942. “If it should prove necessary in our lifetime and our children’s to scrap ‘our American way of life,’ our free enterprise system, our two-party system of government, and our constitution to get it, I am for that.” In her campaign in the fall of 1942 she expressed none of Harry’s hopeful visions of the future and focused instead on what she described as the negligence and incompetence of the Roosevelt administration. “If we permit another year of bungling and muddling we will be a very long and bloody time winning it.”33
Harry loyally supported Clare’s congressiona
l race. He partially funded it. He recruited Time Inc. employees to help her campaign. And he expressed great pride, both publicly and privately, when she won the election in November by a modest but comfortable margin. But they both understood that the move to Congress was not just an impressive new chapter in Clare’s career but a way of distancing themselves from each other. Harry had long expressed his disappointment with the marriage through barbed self-criticism: “Others find me in excellent health and spirits. Only to you does it matter that my hair is falling out, that my teeth are decaying and that chances of my ever becoming a moderately respectable example of Nordic strength are rapidly vanishing.” Clare had complained that “we have had so many arguments about the war in the past three or four years.” Both spoke in almost identical language of the stress their marriage was creating. Harry wrote of “living through rather long periods of nervous strain,” and Clare of “a strain on our nervous systems…. Bitter arguments still flourish like an evil tangleweed.” Her move to Congress relieved some of the tension, but it left unanswered the question of their future. “We paused, and parted, perhaps forever?” Clare wrote Harry shortly before she left for Washington, just at the moment that he was beginning a new romance.34
A little more than eight years after his fateful meeting with Clare in 1934 at a party given by Elsa Maxwell at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Harry attended another Elsa Maxwell event in 1943, also at the Waldorf. Clare was in Washington that evening, and Harry found himself in the company of Jean Dalrymple, an attractive forty-one-year-old theatrical agent and publicist to whom he was immediately drawn. He had had brief relationships with other women in recent years, none of them serious. But he soon began courting Jean in the same aggressive and slightly awkward way in which he had pursued Clare. Dalrymple responded at first to Harry’s obvious loneliness. “He looked so unhappy, as if he needed somebody to talk to,” she later recalled. But gradually their relationship became more serious, socially and sexually. It also became more public. Unlike during his secretive pursuit of Clare, he dined openly with Dalrymple and even accompanied her to occasional social events. He spoke often with her of his unhappiness with Clare. “The marriage was terrible for him,” Dalrymple remembered. From time to time Luce tried to persuade Dalrymple to marry him, but she brushed the offers aside. While she insisted years later that she was never deeply in love with him, her real concern was her conviction that, however bad their relationship might be, he would never leave Clare. But that did not stop her from continuing the relationship for several years.35
For a while Harry seemed content with his double life—a public marriage to Clare and a quasi-private romance with Jean. He continued to live with his wife on the relatively rare occasions when they were in New York or Connecticut at the same time. But despite Clare’s intermittent efforts to salvage their marriage, she too began a long and not particularly secret relationship, also more serious than the numerous and usually brief affairs in the earlier years of her marriage. She became involved with the American general Lucian Truscott, Jr., whom she met on a trip to England and for whom she briefly considered divorcing Harry until it became clear that Truscott would not leave his wife. Harry wrote Clare gloomily of “the dreary landscape of our two lives.” He spent as much time with Jean as he could. He even stayed away from the office in a way he had not done since his early infatuation with Clare.36
Under other circumstances their blighted marriage might have come to an end in the early 1940s had it not been for a tragedy that changed both their lives. Clare embarked on a national speaking tour during the congressional recess in late 1943, and she spent the Christmas holidays in Palm Springs, California, with her daughter Ann and, briefly, Harry. He was very fond of his stepdaughter, perhaps in part because Ann’s long absences from her mother and her deep loneliness mirrored some aspects of his own childhood. He wrote her often, and lovingly, signing his letters “Dad.”
After the New Year the three of them traveled together to San Francisco for a few more days. On January 11 Harry flew back to New York, and Ann accepted a ride with a friend back to Stanford, where she was a senior. As the two young women drove through Palo Alto, their open convertible was struck by a car entering the road from a side street. Ann was thrown from the car and killed instantly. (Her companion suffered minor injuries.) When Clare called Harry with the news, his first griefstricken words were, “Not that beautiful girl. Not that beautiful girl.” He returned immediately to San Francisco, wiring Clare along the way: “Well west of Chicago proceeding and thoughts ever with you and our darling.” In the meantime Clare—never before a religious woman—visited a Catholic church and summoned a priest to comfort her. The notice in Time of Ann’s death identified her as the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Luce. The Time editors pointed this inaccuracy out to Luce. But Harry insisted, and the magazine complied. Clare chose Mepkin as Ann’s burial site (a place they then infrequently used and that Ann had rarely visited). After the burial, she could not bear to stay in the house she had occasionally shared with Ann, and moved instead to Bernard Baruch’s nearby estate. Harry remained with her there for weeks. When he tried to return to work in New York, Harry’s secretary reported that Clare “was throwing fits in South Carolina and thus keeping Luce from coming back here.” Clare later described her reaction to Ann’s death as a “nervous breakdown.” Their shared grief brought them briefly closer together than they had been in several years. Harry loyally supported her successful reelection to Congress in 1944, again pressured his magazines to cover her more favorably, and briefly suspended his affair with Jean Dalrymple. But it was not a lasting reconciliation.37
Despite the turbulence of his personal life, Luce’s wartime missionary zeal remained undiminished. Barred from the war zones, he continued to focus on the postwar world as a major project of his magazines. As with other issues, the role of the Time Inc. publications was not to chronicle the many postwar visions being debated in American life. Instead, Luce insisted, the company must itself present its own vision of the future—a vision to be determined ultimately by Luce himself.
Little came of the “Postwar Department” he established early in the war, until 1943, when Luce began to prod and dominate the project. He did so in part because of his contempt for what he considered the Roosevelt administration’s failure to take postwar planning seriously. But even without that incentive, he surely would have been drawn to the great task of imagining a new world. As was often the case with Luce’s enthusiasms, they took their most advanced form in the internal memos he wrote to his staff—hoping, expecting that they would be translated into copy for the magazines, and then raging when he discovered that they did not. “If there is any gospel around here it is the Post-War Memos,” Luce wrote testily in May 1943 after sensing that his editors were taking them lightly. “If any ‘gospels’ contrary to or inconsistent with the Post-War Memos are to be uttered or implied in Time—then the Editor of Time has a right to be given notice and to consider said contrary-gospel before publication…. or has all my yammer to Senior Editors for four years been so much crap? And how much longer do I have to say that in order to be understood?”38
Luce’s thinking about the postwar era was not entirely coherent. He wrote almost maniacally, memo after memo, with idea after idea, trying to come up with a philosophy that would explain the importance of American influence in the coming years while also imagining major transformations in other parts of the world. At one point he wrote ardently about the ascendancy of the middle class, as if that were the solution to the world’s problems. “What you left-wingers have scornfully called ‘middle-class ideals’ built America, which, with all its faults, marked ‘a decisive step in the ascent of the human race.’” Middle-class “leadership,” he insisted, would “achieve the salvation of society.” At times he dismissed the increasingly popular idea of a new League of Nations. “We are not currently in favor of any World Organization,” he wrote in 1943. But less than two years later he enthusiastically endo
rsed the idea of a postwar United Nations and complained that Roosevelt and his international partners were not making it strong and effective enough. Not surprisingly he put enormous emphasis on the future of Asia: “We believe that the long range happiness of the U.S. depends more upon the salutary relations between Asia and the ‘white man’ than upon any other factor. That is, the inter-relationship between Asia and ‘The West’ is the greatest new factor in human life.” Overflowing with ideas, enthusiasms, and frustrations, he drove his editors to distraction. In the end, he failed to goad them into publishing very much of what he wanted to say.39
Perhaps the most revealing statement of his beliefs came not in a memo to his colleagues but in a miserable letter to Clare in the midst of their marital difficulties in 1943. He seemed to believe somehow that their political disagreements were as much of a problem in their relationship as their personal ones, and he set out to establish his views in response to her claim that Time Inc. was guilty of “inconsistent shilly shallying.” He presented her with what he called Time Inc.’s “Fourteen Points,” even though they were his alone, never shared with his editors. He was “for the United Nations in prosecution of the war,” “antiadministration in nearly everything,” “pro-Chinese,” “pro-Indian freedom,” “pro Civil Rights including for Negroes,” “pro, if not the Republican party, at least many Republicans,” “pro air power,” “pro free enterprise,” “pro-collective bargaining and labor’s just rights,” “pro Henry Kaiser” (the progressive and widely admired aluminum executive), “pro art,” “pro Free French and anti-Vichy,” and “against the Imperial House of Japan.” Taken together these positions represented the views of many moderately liberal Americans and suggested that at heart his vision of the postwar world was not very different from an emerging consensus among American elites. But it was also clear that Luce’s hopes for the postwar world had no coherent structure.40