The Publisher

by Alan Brinkley

  Luce was not an emotional man, and ordinarily he would have recoiled from the treacly sentiments that ran through the “Camelot” interview in Life. But he was not immune to the deep sense of loss that permeated American public culture in the weeks after Kennedy’s death. His view of Kennedy was, in fact, mostly consistent with the image that Theodore White’s article had unleashed. Luce’s relationship with Kennedy had been intermittent and not always warm; but he found himself nevertheless deeply shaken by the death of what he called “this memorable figure, this young man … [this] great and courteous person” whom he had known and admired for more than twenty years. “For my part,” he said later, “it was a great privilege to know him for himself and to have had the privilege of knowing him when he was President of the United States…. There is no question that he made a tremendous contribution to the intangible attitude of the American people—toward government, toward life, toward the things that mattered.”64

  *Luce’s contributions to their correspondence remained in Bancroft’s possession into the 1970s, when she apparently lent them to the writer W. A. Swanberg, who was writing a biography of Luce at the time. Swanberg took notes from the letters, which survive in his papers at Columbia, but the original letters seem to have vanished. Elizabeth Bancroft may have destroyed them at some point, or directed Swanberg to do so, but there is no available evidence to support any theory of their disappearance.

  *Joseph Kennedy had left Los Angeles early to avoid allowing his own controversial reputation to draw attention away from his son.

  XIV

  Letting Go

  Luce’s professional life in the late 1950s and early 1960s remained one of ambition, purpose, and commitment. But for a time, his private life was in turmoil. In late summer 1959 Clare discovered Harry’s affair with Jeanne Campbell, after overhearing a telephone conversation between them and then asking friends, who were surprised she did not already know. Not long after she confronted him, Harry asked her for a divorce. For almost a year they battled over their future—a period of misery and anxiety for them both.

  Harry wanted a divorce only partly because of his infatuation with Jeanne. As he looked ahead to the remainder of his life, he saw a bleak picture. His marriage, he had concluded, was irreparably broken. For years now he and Clare had lived mostly separately, with occasional reconciliations and periods of chaste companionship, among them the aberrantly pleasant years in Rome. He complained of the emptiness of his life—that he had no real friends other than his colleagues at Time Inc., that he was “not getting enough out of life,” a problem he attributed to a “regrettable and even serious flaw in my make-up.” There was, he wrote, “literally nobody in this big town [New York] who ever asks me to a friendly dinner or slightly social dinner, not even my good Time Inc. friends ask me…. What I get asked to is banquets or group-meetings.” The affair with Jeanne was, in short, an effort to bring some companionship and warmth into an otherwise lonely life.1

  Clare was at least equally unhappy, deeply resentful of Harry’s neglect and what she considered his betrayal; but she was also fearful of life without him. Both Harry and Clare had conducted multiple affairs during their years of sexual estrangement. There was a tacit understanding between them that they would ignore these relationships as long as they were casual and brief. But as the Jean Dalrymple episode had made clear years before, Clare became almost obsessively frightened and angry when there was a real threat to their marriage. Harry’s request for a divorce therefore threw her into a psychological tailspin that made both their lives much more difficult. In many ways the battle over Jeanne Campbell raised the same issues that the battle over Jean Dalrymple had raised more than a decade before.

  Clare, suddenly removed from the political world, had been working on a novel through much of 1959 in an effort to relaunch her now long-deferred literary career. She was, she later claimed, making good progress on the book, working mostly in Caribbean resorts and in Phoenix. But when Harry proposed divorce, her work on the novel abruptly stopped, never to be resumed. Instead Clare spent the better part of a year writing almost obsessively about the travails of her marriage, in dozens of letters to Harry (many of them unsent); in multiple and redundant accounts of conversations about their troubles (some of them based on real conversations and some of them fictional ones in which Clare tried to inhabit Harry’s mind and imagine his own view of their relationship); and in long private memos, filling hundreds of pages, in which she poured out her fears, hopes, resentments and, at times, self-loathing. Her titles suggest the range of her emotions: “A Memorandum on Bitterness,” “‘Go in Peace,’ or ‘Stay in Peace,’” “Suspicious of HRL’s Motives,” “A Questionnaire on Love and Warmth,” “What Happens to Me Without You,” “The Situation.” Sometimes she reproached herself for her treatment of Harry: “I have too long deeply wounded your masculine pride and your self esteem,” she wrote shortly after learning about the affair with Jeanne. “The wounds continue raw and bleeding.” But she blamed Harry as well: “You also have wounded, quite as badly, my femininity.” Late one night a few weeks later, very drunk, Harry poured out a self-pitying story of what he now described as his many years of agony and humiliation, in boyhood “and well into manhood,” a story that, Clare perceptively concluded, “formed in him the habits of extreme sensitivity to criticism, humorlessness, and lack of self confidence, which in succes, have turned him into an aggressive, overly assertive and talkative man who will not be interrupted.”* On another night she poured out her own self-loathing: “I was absolutely overcome by rage … rage with myself…. I suddenly did realize it—that out of cowardice, funk, despair, I had ruined my own life. For twenty years I had lived alone—alone as a woman—in a cage whose door was always, at all times, open.” She was obsessed at times with money and possessions, even though she had always had significant resources of her own from her first marriage and her plays. “I do not own one acre or brick of any of our ‘homes,’” she lamented. “The paintings [Harry] gave me for birthdays and Christmases … were not really gifts to me” but the property of Harry’s estate.2

  Despite all the anger, all the regrets, and all the recriminations, both Harry and Clare once again found it difficult to imagine ending their marriage. When Clare said she would not fight the divorce, Harry backed away from his initial demand and said he would do nothing unless Clare “made the divorce decision mutual.” Eight months later, after “endless” discussions of their plight, Clare announced what she called a “‘unilateral decision’ that I would not consent to a divorce ‘now or ever.’” Harry—having now visited Jeanne in Paris to discuss the future of their relationship—returned to New York to tell Clare that, despite her ultimatum, he would continue the affair with Jeanne and that he “would still marry her if I were in a position to do so.” In the meantime he proposed a “legal separation” to allow him to live with Jeanne, while Clare remained officially (and financially) his wife. But a few days later, when she acquiesced and offered to allow the divorce, Harry once again changed his mind and insisted that he wanted the marriage to continue. His reasons, he said, were the immorality of divorce, “our long involvement: 25 years of marriage,” and “prudential” reasons: “my family is against it, business associates, the church, my age,” and the “damage to my public image and public responsibilities.”3

  The struggle over their marriage was never private. As with almost every aspect of their lives during their long marriage, both Harry and Clare relied on others to smooth their way and facilitate their needs, even in the midst of emotional chaos. At the center of this group of retainers was Harry’s sister Beth—as always his confidante and now his intermediary between both Clare and Jeanne. Beth was always working in what she believed were Harry’s best interests (even if Harry himself sometimes disagreed with her). Her husband, Maurice “Tex” Moore, a partner in one of New York’s leading law firms and the chairman of the Board of Trustees of Columbia University, protected Harry’s legal and financi
al interests. Roswell Gilpatric, a lawyer in Tex Moore’s firm (and soon to be deputy secretary of defense in the Kennedy administration) was assigned at one point to mediate their marital dispute. People whom Clare called “the Timeincers” also intruded occasionally: Allen Grover, Roy Larsen, C. D. Jackson. Clare considered all of them her enemies. (“Any other vitally interested parties in this line up, which is about 10-to-1 against you and me?” she asked Harry caustically.)4

  There were, of course, other participants as well—most prominently the press, which began publishing speculations about Harry’s affair with Jeanne in 1959. The rumors attracted little attention until early 1960, when the story appeared in a column by the nationally syndicated gossip columnist Leonard Lyons. Harry, Lyons said, had decided to marry Jeanne. Clare publicly brushed the rumors aside and joked that “if I divorced Harry, and married the Beaver [Lord Beaverbrook], I would become Harry’s grandmother.” Harry denied the rumors too, but damningly. “Clare and I are here together,” he responded to a press inquiry when they were both in Ridgefield. “It is all very premature to say the least.” The early signs of public scandal almost certainly helped them both to begin reconsidering divorce.5

  After months of fruitless discussions, Harry proposed the use of a “qualified witness” to help them mediate their differences. Their choice was John Courtney Murray, a Jesuit priest and eminent theologian with whom Harry and, more important, Clare had spent much time together. Murray had been helpful to Clare during her conversion to Catholicism and had become a frequent fixture in the Luces’ many houses—seeming, some friends said, “more at home there than the Luces were.” He had been a spiritual and moral adviser to both of them. During the marital crisis he worked steadily to avert a divorce, to the frequent irritation of both parties. But Father Murray was the only person with whom Harry and Clare felt comfortable sharing their troubles. Both of them wrote lengthy accounts for Murray of their feelings, and they used him frequently to mediate conversations that might otherwise have become unbearable. Clare poured out her misery in many letters to Murray: “All of the experiences of my life, public and private, have convinced me we live in an age fraught with violence, hatred, futility, greed, lust—in which ‘the great’ are often uglier and meaner than the small … an apocalyptic age—the age of the aborted American Century—a century reflected in the very confusions, weaknesses, greeds of its author.” Harry was less melodramatic but equally frank. “I have resigned myself to a ‘marriage of convenience’ and have given up on love.”6

  In the midst of this agony, yet another group of companions and facilitators entered their lives: Gerald Heard, a writer, self-proclaimed philosopher, and sometime mystic, and his secretary and partner Michael Barrie. Clare had met them originally during her short stay in Hollywood in the 1940s, and they had been frequent visitors to Clare since then in Connecticut and more recently in Phoenix. Heard, who liked to call himself a “historian of consciousness and its evolution,” had been experimenting with various hallucinogens and other drugs that would, he hoped, help break down the barriers that separated people from their deepest feelings and instincts—a goal that predicted some of the popular literature of the later 1960s, among them Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body and Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture. In 1960 Heard was particularly interested in LSD, which some psychiatrists were beginning to consider a possibly useful method of treatment.7

  Clare had first tried LSD when Heard introduced her to it in 1958 in Connecticut, around the time of her withdrawal from the ambassadorship to Brazil. LSD was, she later wrote, responsible for “the serenity with which I faced that ordeal” and also for the later “burst of creative vitality” that took her to the Caribbean to start her new novel. Heard and Barrie came to Phoenix again the next year, in the midst of the Luces’ marital crisis. They were accompanied by Dr. Sidney Cohen, one of the most prominent psychiatrists studying LSD. Clare began taking frequent doses under the supervision of Cohen, who kept careful records of her behavior and her statements during her periods of hallucination. (Correspondence from the time also suggests that she became infatuated with him, although there is little evidence that the feelings were reciprocated. “I flirted with you,” she later wrote, but “you had not the slightest wish to flirt back.”) Once again she found in LSD a refuge from her misery and anxiety.8

  Perhaps hoping that LSD would provide Harry with the same “serenity” that it had given her, Clare persuaded him to join the experiment during one of his trips to Phoenix. Dr. Cohen kept a meticulous record of Harry’s reactions, which were something of a letdown for both the doctor and the “patient.” After taking “100 Gamma of LSD” at 11:45, Harry sat at his desk, lit a cigarette, and began reading Lionel Trilling’s biography of Matthew Arnold, interrupting himself occasionally to discuss the relationship between Arnold and Cardinal Newman with Gerald Heard. About an hour and a half later Dr. Cohen recorded the following exchange: “CBL enters. She puts flowers near HRL and asks if he sees color vividly. HRL: ‘No.’ Reads aloud from Trilling re the religious life.” Half an hour later Harry no longer felt “in command of myself” and said he wished “this stage would pass.” But he was alert enough to begin a new conversation: “Talks about visit to Oxford last summer…. Talks about Lord Halifax…. Talks of Chartres Cathedral.” At 2:50 p.m., more than three hours after he had taken the drug, Harry finally noticed a change in his response to his surroundings. As Cohen recorded Luce’s reactions: “Now things are getting sharper, … I’m beginning to see what Clare said. The aliveness…. This perception is fantastic. Oh yes, quite wonderful. Not the visionary gleam, but quite wonderful.” At 3:50, Cohen noted, Luce “goes off to think for a while.” Luce never tried LSD again, although he retained an interest in hallu-cinogenics. When asked later about his reactions, he said he had “not particularly enjoyed it” but had found it “bio-chemically speaking interesting.”9

  Years later, when her experimentation with LSD became public, Clare insisted that her use of the hallucinogen had “saved our marriage.” Nothing in her voluminous contemporary writings about her marital problems suggests that this was true. But the marriage did survive.

  In the spring of 1960 Harry promised to break off his affair with Jeanne, although in fact he continued it intermittently for almost another year, until Jeanne herself ended it in favor of a relationship with—and ultimately a brief marriage to—Norman Mailer. (Clare speculated that one reason for his breakup with Jeanne was that a prostate operation in 1960 had affected his sexual performance, but by then the affair was already unraveling.) Once the decision was made to continue the marriage, however, recriminations continued for a time. Harry was intermittently bitter about the diminished prospect of what he liked to call a “free life.” “Okay,” he said with unhappy resignation during one of their many conversations about their reconciliation. “As usual, you get what you want, but I have to take the Castor Oil.” During another tense discussion he said, “I can’t win against you.” Most of all he wearied of the “incessant scenes and quarrels with Clare.” It “had to stop,” he told Father Murray. “I can’t get any work done.” Clare—emotionally exhausted—continued to express distrust. She was, she said, nothing but a “resident housekeeper” to Harry. He had chosen to continue “a marriage with me, because for a variety of prudential reasons, having nothing to do with me, it seems best on the whole for you.” In July 1960 she wrote melodramatically in her diary, “I am of this morning, faced with the total disintegration of my personality and the final, fatal collapse of my ego…. I don’t know who I am in relation to anybody in this world.” Harry, clearly, was not the only cause of her misery. After years of professional and social prominence, she was no longer a major celebrity. She was mourning not only the problems of her marriage (problems she had once compartmentalized and largely ignored) but also the end of her dazzling public life. That was in part what made the survival of her marriage so important to her. Being married to Harry was, she feared, the on
ly distinction she would have in the years to come. And so she fought ever harder to keep the marriage going and to force Harry to commit to it.

  Clare imposed conditions on her reconciliation. Harry would have to end the affair with Jeanne, “unequivocally and finally,” to “tell Beth and Tex … in my presence that the affair is over for good and that you desire to stay married to me,” that he “escort me personally through the new TIME and LIFE Building as though you were pleased and proud to show it to me,” and that he “write me a letter telling me … that you hope we can make a good life together for the rest of our lives.” “Why is that letter so important?” Harry asked when Clare complained that he had delayed writing it. It would, she said, make clear that “he was in it ‘for keeps’” 10

  Little by little, as Clare put it, “the terrible storm … subsided.” Harry wrote, without anger, that “we should go on for the rest of our lives together … after all the needless amount of words, quarrels, arguments…. The decision to do so should be by a simple yes from me and a simple yes from you.” They had no illusions about a great romance. They would, Harry said, “live from day to day and from season to season,” and enjoy “Christian fellowship” and “affectionate companionship.” By the fall of 1960, while Clare was spending several weeks in Hawaii, he was able to write to her with something of the warmth that had once been a more common part of their marriage. “Darling, I do miss you so, but it seems so useless to cry about that—except just to keep telling you that there is still a dream of real companionship I cling to despite all the ravages of war and time. We will have our Peace in our time because we are making it in love.” And Clare, too, gradually found her way to a calm affection. “Your voice on the telephone this morning, so full of warmth and strength and lovingness … made me very happy…. I seem to have some sort of vision—very akin to LSD really!—that all is as it must be, ‘everything composes.’” Years later, making notes while looking back at her diaries on what she called their time of “sturm und drang,” Clare wrote: