clare boothe luce speech purpose

Will you join us in lighting the way for the leaders of tomorrow?

The life of the extraordinary clare boothe luce.

AMY MACDONALD:   I'm Amy Macdonald, the Forum Producer at Kennedy Library.

First, allow me to acknowledge the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums: lead sponsor Bank of America, Raytheon, Viacom, the Lowell Institute, the Boston Foundation; and our media partners, the Boston Globe , Xfinity and WBUR. 

In her review of Price of Fame in the New York Times Sunday Book Review , Maureen Dowd described Clare Boothe Luce as, "A woman who had more hyphens in her résumé than Barbra Streisand – actress-editrix-playwright-screenwriter-Congresswoman- ambassador-presidential advisor." Which explains why she is the subject of not one, but two books by our speaker today, Sylvia Jukes Morris.

After pursuing Mrs. Luce, whom she met through a mutual acquaintance, Sylvia became her official biographer in 1980, giving her access to over 460,000 items in the Library of Congress. Sylvia's first volume, Rage for Fame , was published in 1977, this second volume, 17 years later. Not only did Mrs. Luce write prolifically and save everything, she knew everyone. The result is a model biography that not only captures a truly extraordinary life, but also the times in which she lived. 

The man who this Library honors also plays a small role in the book. JFK knew Clare Boothe Luce through his father, who – JPK, that is – was most likely one of her many lovers, as she was one of his many. As a young man, JFK dated her daughter Ann. As Senator, he enthusiastically supported her nomination as Ambassador to Brazil. As President, he graciously listened to her advice, although privately confessed he did not appreciate her telling him "how to run the world." [laughter]  Most revealing, perhaps to me, is when she converted, Clare Boothe Luce, to Catholicism in 1946. JFK said to her, "Why strap the cross on your back? I never thought a Catholic religion made sense for anyone with brains." [laughter] 

I would also like to acknowledge Sylvia's husband, Edmund Morris, the biographer of Presidents Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt. Edmund graced this stage in 2011 when he discussed the last book in his trilogy of Roosevelt. Thank you, Edmund, for accompanying your wife today.

Our moderator today is also an acclaimed British-born biographer, Nigel Hamilton, who during the day is our neighbor across the way. He is a senior fellow with the McCormack Graduate School at UMass. Nigel is best known for his biography of JFK as a young man, JFK: Reckless Youth. His newest book, The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941-1942 , is on sale in our Museum store, along with Sylvia's book, and both authors would be delighted to sign copies at the conclusion of their conversation.

We're going to begin with a four-minute clip from an interview with Clare Boothe Luce and Dick Cavett in 1980, shortly after Ronald Reagan was elected President. And after the clip, we will begin the conversation. Thank you. 

DICK CAVETT:   Good evening. My guest tonight served a couple of terms during the Second World War; is rumored to have coined the term GI Joe. She was during the early months of the war a war correspondent for Life magazine, reporting from Burma and Libya. Among the many contributions my guest made while serving Congress was the introduction of a bill to establish control over the Atomic Energy Commission, a bill that would establish regulations for equal pay. Have I said "she"? Up to this point I should have. In the early '50s, she became the first woman to hold a major diplomatic post. President Eisenhower asked her to serve as Ambassador to Rome. She is, of course, Clare Boothe Luce, a woman whose contributions to American life include many articles, Vanity Fair, McCall's magazine, and justly famous, if for only writing the play, The Women , which opened in New York in 1936, probably being acted somewhere at this very minute. It's a staple of theatre all over the world.

Ladies and gentlemen, this woman about whom you could coin the cliché – they don't make them like that anymore – and a few others, Clare Boothe Luce. [applause]  Maybe they do. It's just that they aren't letting them out.

[laughter] 

CLARE BOOTHE LUCE:   Every generation breeds its new type. 

DICK CAVETT:   Yes.

CLARE BOOTHE LUCE:   So they'll be talking another ten years "they don't make them like that anymore" about some other …

DICK CAVETT:   A whole new model.

CLARE BOOTHE LUCE:   A whole new model, yes. 

DICK CAVETT:   I'm notorious for not complimenting ladies on how well dressed they are, but that is especially gorgeous. Should I know what nationality that is?

CLARE BOOTHE LUCE:   No, I have gone into partnership with a few friends on the island of Maui. You know I live in Hawaii. 

DICK CAVETT:   Um hmm. 

CLARE BOOTHE LUCE:   And we have an import shop, and we import clothes, called Mandalay Imports, from Thailand. So this is Thai silk. But you're mentioning that you pay so little attention to ladies' clothes. My husband paid almost no attention, but this being the season during which we are about to have a Presidential inauguration, I am reminded of an amusing story about the gown I bought to wear to Jack Kennedy's inauguration.

DICK CAVETT:   Could I get you to tell it?

CLARE BOOTHE LUCE:   You can't stop me. [laughter] 

DICK CAVETT:   I wouldn't be fool enough to try.

CLARE BOOTHE LUCE:   At any rate, I bought this at Lanvin, who was then a very famous French dressmaker and it cost a pretty penny of Mr. Luce's money, I can tell you. It was a beautiful dress. It arrived in a big box the night before we were going down to Washington, and I thought I'd try it on, see that everything fitted well.  So I got myself into it, and I walked into the living room where my husband was deeply immersed in a copy of Time, Life or Fortune, as the case may be. And I said, "Darling, look, see?" And I pirouetted around the room in this gown. I said, "This is the dress I'm wearing to the inauguration ball. What do you think of it?" He looked at it and he said, "It's always been my favorite dress." [laughter] 

DICK CAVETT:   Did you leave it at that?

CLARE BOOTHE LUCE: [laughter] What do you do with a man like that?

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   That's a hard act to follow, but we're going to do our best.

And I thought since Amy had raised the subject of Clare's relationship with the Kennedy family and we're here in this magnificent Library dedicated to the former President, I would just touch on very briefly some of her encounters with both Joseph Kennedy and John Kennedy over a period of 20 or 30 years.

The first one occurred when she was going to Europe in 1940 to write about the phony war, as it was then called, because the Germans had not yet invaded France, and her shipboard companion happened to be Joseph Kennedy. I think that's where the little romance between the two probably began because they were sort of in limbo. It was a shipboard romance, which would probably come to an end once they hit the docks of Southampton. But no. She went and stayed with Mr. Kennedy in his country house and continued to see him over the years because they had a lot in common politically. He became Ambassador to London, as you know. 

Then the years go by and John F. Kennedy grows up, and he starts to date Clare's young daughter, who at the age of 18 was one of the … She wasn't really a debutante in the strict sense of the word in that there was  big ball; she didn't want that. But he started to date her at about that time.  But I always got the feeling, reading between the lines, that he was really more interested in the mother than he was in the daughter. And when I came to read the girl's diaries, she confirmed it and said, "I think he really cares more for mother than he cares for me." Because he would have admired not only Clare's beauty but her extraordinary intellect, too. 

Then, unfortunately, Ann was killed in a car accident in her last year at Stanford so any possibility of that relationship continuing is unlikely. But he did write Clare a very nice letter about that. He said, "I thought I had become hardened to losing people I liked, but when I heard the news today, I couldn't have been sadder." 

Then years go by and Clare is at her Mepkin Plantation and she hears that Lieutenant

Kennedy, who's about to go out to fight in the Pacific war, would like to come to see her.

And so she received him at the plantation in South Carolina and she decided that she would give him -- since he was going off to war -- she would give him a good-luck piece to take with him.  She chose a medal, actually a coin that her mother had given to her, not knowing of course how valuable this was going to become in subsequent years, but it was the coin that Theodore Roosevelt asked his good friend Augustus Saint-Gaudens to design because they thought they might like to introduce it into our currency.  It was called the double eagle coin because it had two eagles on it, and she gave it to JFK and numismatists who scrutinized the sort of necklace that he wore around his neck when he was on the PT-109 boat, they scrutinized that and they think that that was the coin that he wore around his neck.  At the end of the war when he was rescued, as you know, by the man who lived in the Solomon Islands -- the native farmer there -- he gave that to him subsequently. That's what I think is the legend, anyway.  Of course, today, that is worth well over a million dollars, that coin, because of its beauty and its rarity. It's supposed to be the most beautiful coin ever designed. In America, anyway.

The years go by and Clare is with the Kennedys, the Joseph Kennedys, at their house on the Riviera. She's just come back from a cruise on Stavros Niarchos's yacht, where she said even the gold faucets were oozing caviar. So she goes to stay with the Joseph Kennedys in their so-called villa, but she found it was really quite a modest house near a railroad track that kept her awake all night because of the trains going by.  But then the next morning before she got up she heard that what they ate there mostly was not caviar, but yogurt and bread and rice, boiled rice, and that at 6:45, they would all be expected to come before a very nice priest for early mass. So the contrast between the two parts of her holiday was quite extreme.

Then time goes by again and shortly after that JFK is nominated to run for the Democratic Presidency and Joe Kennedy comes to the Luces' suite at the Waldorf Astoria to watch the proceedings with them. Shortly after that, Clare got a phone call from Joe Kennedy and he was very, very agitated. He said, "I would like you to do me a favor because I really have a problem now the campaign's begun because of the Catholic thing." This was the first man nominated to be a Catholic President. So he said, "I'm finding that at all the campaign at rallies, the nuns are occupying all the front seats [laughter] and they're clicking their rosaries and their dentures [laughter] in their excitement." This handsome, young, Catholic candidate. So he said, "I would ask Cardinal Spellman to help me out on this, but I really can't approach him because the son of a bitch, he hates me." [laughter] He said, "I beat him once out of some real estate."  So he asked Clare to tell His Eminence that if he wanted a Roman Catholic in the White House, he'd better keep those goddamned nuns out of the front rows. “This isn't an ordination," he said, "it's an election."

So I think over to Nigel, who's going to ask me any questions that are on his mind whatsoever. We haven't planned this at all; they're just going to come out of left field and if I stumble over some, you'll know why because it's not prepared. 

NIGEL HAMILTON:   Thank you, Clare. 

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   [laughter] I get that all the time!

NIGEL HAMILTON:   That's how identified you are with the book, Sylvia. And thank you, Amy. And thank you, everybody, for coming out on such a beautiful afternoon which you're going to miss but at least it's air conditioned here.

I'm delighted to be here with Sylvia, whom I've known for many years. I'd like to start by saying I have loved reading this book. I really, genuinely think this is one of the best biographies I've read in years. And I was puzzling over the reason why I couldn't stop reading it. I came to the conclusion that it was a bit like closely observed trains, that I could see this woman, whom we've seen on the video, in one of the trains and she is a passenger and Sylvia is watching her so carefully and recording not so much the landscape that Clare is seeing out of the train windows, but Sylvia is watching Clare and recording Clare and how people interact with Clare. We're right in that railway wagon.

Then she transfers at every subsequent station to another train and each time you think, well, has this journey come to its sort of an appointed point of we've-had-enough, she moves into another train and starts another journey.

I think that's a tribute to the way you've selected the themes, the events, the people in her life. This is a book in which you're going to meet – and I hope you're all going to buy copies of Sylvia's book -- not only extraordinary people and historic people, presidents to popes, but you're going to meet completely unknown people. You're going to meet Clare's daughter. You're going to meet Clare's brother. The daughter who is tragically killed; that in itself a beautifully, beautifully chronicled scene on the West Coast. The story of this difficult brother of hers, a ne'er-do-well. So here is Clare who's married one of the richest men and entrepreneurs in the United States and so Clare is extremely wealthy. And here is her brother who doesn't have a bean and who keeps borrowing money from her. 

The more I read in the book, the more I felt, this isn't just the biography of Clare Boothe Luce. This is a portrait of a marriage, a marriage to Henry Luce, but also what comes with that. We even have a granddaughter, is it, a great …

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   A great-niece.

NIGEL HAMILTON:   Niece of Henry Luce. You're meeting the members of the family, not just Clare Boothe Luce. And the series of dramas that that entails, the suicide of the brother, the grief that Clare feels when her daughter dies, the way it drives her to want some kind of a spiritual resolution from this and how she becomes a Catholic. I found this was utterly absorbing. I'm a Democrat and Clare Boothe Luce was a horrible Republican, but I could not stop reading this book.

And I was often reminded, Clare Boothe Luce is not a particularly … She's a physically attractive woman, but she isn't really a particularly attractive character in the sense of, like JFK, somebody you really love. She's feisty. You admire her, but you don't necessarily like her. And perhaps a bit later we can talk about this business of whether as biographer we need to like our subject.

But I think it is a tribute to you, Sylvia, that you not only follow Clare on these train journeys, but you paint in these subsidiary characters – members of her family, people she meets, the priests who indoctrinate her, and so forth – so that it's just compellingly interesting. It's not so much sort of name-dropping, because many of these are historic people. It's just this is the detail of a human life recorded from the middle, at the beginning of the volume, when she becomes a Congresswoman, through to the end.

So having said that, I want to start by asking you to remind us, tell us how you became so fascinated with this woman, how you were drawn into writing her life story and what sort of a person you found, whether it was different from the person you'd expected.

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Apropos of what you said about whether you love or hate the character that you're writing about, I feel you can have neither emotion. If you love the person, it's going to be hagiography and nobody's going to believe a word you write. If you hate the person, well, what's the point? Who wants to spend 30 years writing about somebody you hate? 

You've got to have something in between, like a mild affection for them and that has to remain throughout. And you have to see them through the good times and through the bad times, and the tragedies that happen, and all the venality and all the horrors. Sometimes she could be monstrous because she was extremely ambitious and didn't always mind who she trod on in order to get there.  But at the same time, she was totally human. And you had to admire, first of all, I think primarily her sense of humor. Her wit was absolutely legendary and her brilliance. Even Henry Luce always thought that he was the smartest person in any room. When he married her, he had to concede that he wasn't. He actually wrote her a letter one day and he said, "When I'm in a room with you and you're dealing with politicians, and you're dealing with the press, and you're dealing with the ordinary man on the street, I am so in awe that I inwardly bow to you."  So it was a marriage, as you can see, that was not going to be on an even keel. It was going to have problems, because although they adored each other, they were in competition in many ways in their various careers; and he particularly as an editor, because she had been a brilliant editor, too, in her time. 

But how I got into it is now the subject. I feel sometimes that you don't choose the subject, that they in some strange way choose you. I had finished a biography, actually, of Edith Kermit Roosevelt, who was the second wife of Theodore Roosevelt. I was looking for another subject and I keep a file on people who interest me. I still do it, actually; it's a sort of habit that I have. 

NIGEL HAMILTON:   We'll ask you later who's in the file. 

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Who's in the file, exactly. My husband always says, "Let me see the paper before you've cut it into pieces." 

Something literally dropped out, an article dropped out. I picked it up, and it was an interview with Clare Luce, written up in the New York Sunday Times Magazine of 1973, when her play, her most famous play, as Nigel already said, was revived on Broadway. And so, of course, she was very much back in the public domain; she was 70 years old at that point.  In this interview, she talked about where she came from, how she was born … She didn't say Spanish Harlem, but she wasn't born exactly in a salubrious neighborhood, and how at the age of nine her ambitious mother had put her on the stage where she understudied Mary Pickford. Then she'd gone and made a movie at the Edison Studios in New Jersey, a silent movie called Heart of the Waif , which you can still see today at the Museum of Modern Art film archive. Then she went on to marry her first millionaire at the age of 20, and then Henry Luce at the age of 32.  So I thought, who is this amazing person? She goes on to be a Congressman. Then she's the Ambassador, and she marries another millionaire. Who is this?

So I reread the piece that I cut many years before, and I thought she's absolutely fascinating. Then three coincidences happened. I won't go into them in great detail because we'd be here all day. But in the next week, I got phone calls from two people inviting me to meet with her. One of them was giving a dinner party for Clare Boothe Luce. Another one was the Librarian of Congress, who in a conversation with him said he was spending Christmas with Clare and he'd put in a word for me if I wanted to write her biography. 

And the other one was going to a television studio with my husband, who was prompting one of his Roosevelt books, and Howard Jarvis of Proposition 13, if you remember him, the California man who was trying to lower the real estate taxes – I didn't know him at all but he was on the same show – he came up to me and he wagged his finger at me and he said, "Good book you wrote on Edith Roosevelt. Next book for you, Clare Boothe Luce." And I thought, is God trying to tell me something? [laughter] These three things happened all in the space of about a week or ten days.

So I think that's how I really got into it. Then at the dinner party where I met her, the hostess was a woman known as Lucky Roosevelt; she's married to one of TR's grandsons. She said, "Oh, I'm going to put you at the table with Clare Boothe Luce." She didn't know I wanted to write about her yet. But she said, "But she won't take any notice of you, she won't take any notice of any of the woman. She's only interested in men." [laughter]  So she seated her next to the guest of honor, actually, who was Alistair Horne, the British historian who wrote the biography of Prime Minister Macmillan, for one, and many books on France and World War I and II. And she just grilled him the whole evening.

She didn't even turn to her right to talk to the person on her right.

But at the end of the evening, I was standing at the top of the stairs. I knew she was somewhat myopic; I could tell that she was having eye trouble. She was then 77 years old. And I was standing at the top of the stairs and she came up and gave me a kiss and said goodnight. I thought she'd mistaken me for the hostess, who was also short and dark. [laughter] I thought, well, is this a kind of benediction or something? She must know that I wanted to write a book about her. Does she know, has she sensed this? I didn't know.  But anyway, I wrote her a letter after that, and after many letters went back and forth in which she said she was disinclined to work with any biographer because her personal life had been so unhappy; she didn't want to go back and live those bad times in her life. 

NIGEL HAMILTON:   But she'd never written an autobiography, had she?

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   She wouldn't write the autobiography. And I asked her why, I said with all these documents you've kept. There were over 1000 boxes of papers in the Library of Congress alone and then more of the same at the State Department covering her diplomatic career. Then in Hawaii, where she was then living, she kept all the personal documents; she still had all the letters, the love letters, the diaries, everything, even her daughter's diary. All that was out there. 

So I went out there and looked at those things, but I didn't have time to Xerox anything and she didn't have a copier anyway. So I had to wait for those papers also to be shipped to the Library. I'm giving this by way of an excuse for why this book took so long, because there was just so much documentation.  But eventually she did say yes. 

NIGEL HAMILTON:   I think I read that you said that she’d been asked to write her autobiography, her memoirs, but she decided that while Harry Luce was still alive, there was too much she wouldn't be able to say without perhaps being hurtful.

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Yes, she said, "How could I write about Harry?" Which is sort of an interesting remark. But she also paused and said, "You know, autobiography is not really that, it's adding biography." She meant that you never could tell the truth about yourself, complete truth. 

NIGEL HAMILTON:   So you think in giving you her benediction, she was okay about revealing her rich personal, sexual, whatever, as well as political and artistic career?

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Another attribute of Clare was she was gutsy. She was an extremely brave person. I mean, not only brave physically – she was going to all the battlefronts. She was a reporter on the Eastern front and she went over and reported on World War II on the Western front, and she often could have been killed; she was at the front lines. Guns were actually firing right at her position, where she was. So she was extremely brave.

But she was also spiritually and intellectually brave. I think she knew she'd be famous from birth, almost; she always knew she would be a well-known person. So she kept every scrap of paper. There are even letters written when she's four years old to her mother. She kept every scrap.  So although she knew that her story in some ways would be a cautionary tale – what not to do in life or the accidents that can happen to you – but also an inspirational tale. So she kept everything and she wanted the story told, warts and all. I just have that feeling. 

NIGEL HAMILTON:   And by a woman. It's interesting that she comes across not necessarily as a feminist, but certainly somebody who wanted equal rights for women and did not feel that women were in any shape or form inferior to men.

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   No, she did not. But she wasn't a feminist in the strict Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem sense. She wasn't a militant sort of feminist. She felt that some women belonged in the home. She said, "If you're a creative person and you love home-making, you love gardening, you love decorating, you like to bring up children, you're a nurturer, you should be allowed to do that without any kind of stigma attached to it. Not everybody wants to go out in the workplace."  She was never a person who felt every woman should have a job outside the house. She never believed that. I think she deeply regretted it because she was a person who did always work outside the house after her first marriage anyway. She always had a job of some sort, even if it was just a column for some newspapers. But she did feel that you didn't have to have a career. You didn't have to.  You could be perfectly satisfied as a wife and a mother and a home-maker. 

NIGEL HAMILTON:   One of the other things that I so admire about the book is this evenhandedness that you have, that you very rarely quote a tribute or something positive said about her without also quoting the opposite. Because that was the truth about her life, that she was very controversial and there were as many people who despised her or detested her as who admired her. And there are some wonderful, dramatic scenes. I mean, I love the way you bring real documentary evidence. So rather than just say it, as I'm saying it now, you actually give the chapter and verse.

The particular drama I'm thinking of is when she is appointed. She had really quite a successful time as Ambassador to Italy and solved the Trieste problem that had been around since World War II. But she was then nominated to be Ambassador to Brazil, as we said earlier. And that was really such a contentious process that she went through for her conformation. She was confirmed, but in such a way, as you say, that she … Well, what happened?

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Couldn't take the job, yes. The position in Rome was controversial, too, because the Italians, as you know, are not for having women in high places. They said, "Why are they sending us a woman? They must think we're a secondrate power. Why are they sending us this woman?" And they wrote all kinds of horrible articles about her, even printing a photograph of the actress Clare Luce swooning in the arms of Mark Antony saying, "This is what the Americans are sending us, this actress." So she had a really hard time but she was so brilliant that … All the people at the embassy, too, resented the appointment, because they were career diplomats and one of them would have liked the job himself.

But it took her exactly one week to win them over because she just came so well prepared. Also, they found that when she went off to have a meeting with the Italian prime minister -- and there were four of them in the first ten months of her tenure, she had to deal with four different people -- but she would come back and she would give her staff chapter and verse a complete, verbatim account of what had taken place. At first they didn't believe it. "She's making this up. She's a playwright after all. She's making this up."  So they got the transcripts from the Italian foreign office and they found that word for word she'd had total recall, and she just gave them the whole hour-long interview verbatim.

Then when it came to the question of going to Brazil -- because she'd been so successful, as Nigel said, in helping to settle this horrible land dispute between Yugoslavia and Italy which had been going on really since the end of World War I when as part of the spoils of war, Italy had been given this beautiful port town of Trieste, which gave them really control of the trade on the Mediterranean, and Hungary wanted, and Stalin also wanted to get a port, an outlet to the Mediterranean for not altogether peaceful purposes probably, somewhat nefarious purposes. Anyway, she settled that. So Ike immediately wanted to appoint her to another post, this time Brazil. And she went through all the confirmation hearings but she had this acid tongue, as I've said. Things she would say, like, "Well, the difference between an optimist and a pessimist is a pessimist is usually better informed." [laughter] 

She made a quip of that kind, it was one too many, after these hearings because somebody who'd given her a really hard time during the hearings was Senator Morse of Oregon. And he resented her deeply because she'd said something during World War II, in the heat of the campaign, I must say, about FDR having lied us into a war, into which he should have led us. But nobody ever remembered the second half of that quote. They only said, "FDR lied us into war." Which in a way of course he did. He said for many, many months before Pearl Harbor, "I'm not going to send you off …

NIGEL HAMILTON:   You and I are going to disagree about FDR.

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Oh, yes, we will disagree. Everybody will. And she herself came to feel she'd committed an injustice with FDR, and she came to her mind greatly at the end of her life. But she made this quip and Senator Morse held this against her so he gave her a really hard time during the hearings.

NIGEL HAMILTON:   She was confirmed.

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Even though she was confirmed, she realized she couldn't go to Brazil because Senator Morse was head of the Latin Affairs Committee. So everything she wanted for Brazil – and they needed a lot of aid, they needed a lot of goods, they needed a lot of trade – she wasn't going to get anything. So she said it would have been a disservice to Brazilians for her to have taken the job. And with Harry's consent, he agreed, too, that they would issue a statement that although she'd been confirmed, she was not going to take the post because she realized it wouldn't be fair to Brazil after that remark. 

NIGEL HAMILTON:   I'm sure some people have actually read the book and are enjoying it, but I don't want people to think it's a book simply about Clare as a sort of public figure. Because, yes, that is an extraordinary … She was often voted one of the, whatever of the – not just best dressed, but …

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Most admired. For 16 years, she was never lower than number six on the most admired women in the world list. She usually came in second to Eleanor Roosevelt and sometimes third or fourth behind Queen Elizabeth, people like that. Sister Kenny. 

NIGEL HAMILTON:   So we're talking about a very prominent woman in the 20 th century.

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Yes. Also on the best dressed list, which the others were never on. [laughter] 

NIGEL HAMILTON:   I do want people who are thinking about buying the book to know that this is such a wonderful investigation of a human life. And to me, one of the wonders of biography is that when it's well done it allows us to some degree identify with a human figure. I mean, it's not that we imagine ourselves as ambassadress to Italy; it's just that we can see ourselves in a marriage with somebody who may have a lot of money and how that affects us as a human being. We can identify with somebody where the tensions of a marriage tend to drive us into thinking about divorce. I mean, that is a theme that runs through the book. Harry is a philanderer, but a strange one in that he seems to form these romantic attachments to other women.

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   A lot of them were not consummated, actually. He just had confidantes. He liked to talk to women because he was very close to his mother, for one thing. So he was used to having a really sympathetic person in his life, which Clare sort of wasn't, because Clare was too often away. He didn't have her to talk to; she wasn't there.

When you think four years in Washington during the war, three-and-a-half years in Rome, reporting on both fronts during the war, they were apart more than they were together really, when you think about it. And when I asked her if she'd like to have gone back to play writing after the war – she had three successful Broadway plays. They were all hits, and they were all made into successful movies. And as you know, The Women , I think has been made into a movie four times now  – made into a musical and two films and a television program, too. 

But because of all of that, the marriage was troubled a lot of the time because Harry needed that sympathetic ear, and she wasn't always there. And of course, when she was there, she was the sort of person who could cut through all of the sentimentality, cut through all the nonsense and say something actually that probably you didn't want to hear, like, "Is that a successful article, Harry?" or, "Was that a good edition of Time magazine?" She spoke the truth and sometimes it was hard for Harry, because he cared passionately about his own business and career. 

NIGEL HAMILTON:   But she does stay married to him, to the bitter end, to his death. I think that's one of the moving aspects. They go backwards and forwards, and she's releasing him from the marriage because he says he's in love with Lady Jean …

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Campbell.

NIGEL HAMILTON:   Campbell. And it's absolutely fascinating from a personal, just from a life point of view. I'm not a Catholic, but I was very moved by the way you described her grief after her daughter's death and the way she sought a kind of sanctuary from all this in the Catholic church. And like a number of prominent people, including Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, she converted. I think, again, the wonderful thing about the book is that you've accessed this vast archive to be able to give us kind of chapter and verse, if I can use that expression, of the conversion process -- the people she's dealing with who are helping her into this new religion and the ramifications of that, whether it does help her cope with her grief. Also the negative effects of it, in that she never really writes a great play again. It has such a profoundly – becoming a Catholic, it freezes her as a creative fiction writer. 

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   You've hit on a very good point there. The death of the daughter wasn't all of it because having been at least around the Western fronts – and Clare didn't just go to the battlefield; she also went and toured the hospitals and saw the soldier with the trench foot, with their arms and legs off, and things like that. She did that repeatedly; it wasn't just a once-photo-op. She went twice to the Italian front, and she went twice to the Far East.  And she was bombed in many, many world capitals – Chongqing, and also Belgium and France. She was there when the places were being bombed.

So when she came back from the war and when she had this dark night of the soul one night at the Waldorf, she just felt that her life was closing down. Her then-lover wasn't going to come back for the Eastern front. He was going to go with MacArthur to Tokyo to bring democracy to the Japanese. So her daughter was dead. She couldn't write anymore, because how can you write these acid, witty plays when you've seen what she's seen of the world and of life? 

Her brother committed suicide. Her mother was killed in a car crash. Her father left – at least the mother left the father; they probably were never married, even, earlier in Clare's life. So she had a really tough life.  And she couldn't bring herself. She tried. There are many, many unfinished plays amongst her papers, but she could never finish another play because her real gift was for satire and wit. She wrote humor very well. She couldn't do it anymore.

So she had this dark night of the soul at the Waldorf, and by chance there was a letter waiting for her, and she hadn't opened it yet. She opened it; it was from a priest who'd actually been in correspondence with her for quite a while since he'd read an article she'd written about Chinese orphans. And she thought, "Well, maybe I can talk to this priest." So she found his number, she called him up.  And he said, "I can't help you. I know you're in spiritual trouble. I can't help you because I'm not enough of an intellect for you, but I will recommend you to Father, then-Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen." So he became her catechist. He talked to her, and he said in interviews later, he said he had never spent as many months – he spent about usually a couple, three weeks with people he was converting. But he had to spend many months with her because her questions were so deep, so profound, she really had to be really convinced. And he said, "In the end, I realized that nobody could convince Clare to convert to Catholicism; God had to strike her with lightning and she had to be convinced."

And that's really what happened in the end. And it gave her peace for many, many years. But, of course, it wasn't forever because deep down … There's a marvelous quote on the back of the book, as you'll see. There's a picture of Clare with the soldiers at the Western front, and they're all staring hard at her and smiling and she's laughing and she looks like a really, really charming, happy person. 

But the person who wrote an introduction to her account of her conversion, which was three articles from the McCall's magazine called "The Real Reason," these people, the Catholic publishers – Frank Sheed, who was Wilfrid Sheed's father, and Maisie Sheed, his mother, they were Catholic publishers – they wanted to put these three essays, very, very moving essays into a book. Still call it The Real Reason . But Clare had become Ambassador by then and she was having enough trouble distinguishing between being Ambassador to Rome itself or being Ambassador to the Vatican. She didn't want a book about her religious conversion coming out at that time.  But this woman, Maisie Ward, wrote a brilliant introduction that would have gone at the front of the book. She said, "Never was a woman more actually named, Clare, clarity, clearness, because her intellect was just able to cut through the most difficult problems. Also she had everything that you would think would make for happiness. She had a wonderful husband. She had money. She had gifts. She had good friends. But something in her prevented her, because happiness is complexity. Happiness means you're a complex personality and you come to happiness through the complexities of life. But Clare had nothing but darkness at the core. Of course, because she came with all that baggage, no matter how well life her life was going, at the end, in the dark night of the soul, it was Clare with all the baggage that she brought with her from the life which had been a painful life, for the most part, really. 

NIGEL HAMILTON:   I did find that very moving. This was somebody who was struggling – and as you say, her brother committed suicide as a pilot – who was struggling with depression and a sense of– what was it that she felt, that she just wasn't loved enough? She seems to have collected …

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   That's excellent.  

NIGEL HAMILTON:   Through the book, page after page, she collects these incredibly interesting friends. I mean, not just the famous ones, but even the ones we don't know. But they're all interesting people. She seems to spark the Mexican composer Chavez, or…

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   General Willoughby, chief of intelligence to MacArthur.

NIGEL HAMILTON:   MacArthur's chief of intelligence. 

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   And Lucian Truscott, too. He simply adored her. Adored her. 

NIGEL HAMILTON:   Great corps commander.

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Couldn't leave his wife and children, but he did love her, I think, until he died.

NIGEL HAMILTON:   Somerset Maugham. Just tell us the story of going to lunch with Somerset Maugham.

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Oh, yes. I'll get to that, but you've raised a very good point about her never having enough love and I think it's true. Psychiatrists will tell you this, that the narcissistic personality, which she certainly was, is often the result of faulty parenting, particularly if you as a child are given more than you can actually cope with. 

You're not old enough yet to deal with some issues.

Clare was always put in a position where she taking care of this mother who never had enough money, never had enough men in her life. And Clare was put in that position. And I think that became part of her own personality eventually; the mother never thought she was loved enough and Clare never thought she was. So although she had these spectacular lovers who were absolutely devoted to her, she was always terrified of rejection. So she always got out of the relationship before they dumped her. That was a pattern through her life. 

The thing about Harry, and I think why that endured, is in the end he was always there for her as a friend, if not always as a lover. But she was terribly dependent on Harry Luce. The survival of that marriage was terribly important to her, because it was the only thing in her whole life that remained throughout. There's a line in The Women where the mother is talking about the woman who's about to get divorced. She said, "Don't go through with this divorce, because being together at the end is what really matters." And I think Clare felt that. That was a line from Clare's heart. She felt being with Harry at the end was really important.

NIGEL HAMILTON:   How many times did she try to commit suicide?

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Well, we're giving away all the plot, aren't we? [laughter] 

NIGEL HAMILTON:   All right, we won't count. 

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Don't just count the times!

NIGEL HAMILTON:   But again, that was something that moved me deeply. Her struggle, if you like.

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Depressions, yes, acute depression.

NIGEL HAMILTON:   Even though she's not this warm figure, you can't help but empathize with the depth of her depression and sense that there's something wrong with her at the end of the day. She recognizes that and she's right in many ways.

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   It was so bad some days she would stand in the middle of a room, and she said – there were several doors out of that room – "And I simply was frozen. I couldn't decide which door to go through." And somebody called me up who's a doctor and said, "Well, I've been reading this book and it's all about these depressions. Was she bipolar or what?" Of course, bipolar was not a word that was bandied about in those days; I don't think it existed. Of course, borderline personality, a Princess Diana kind of character that is so distraught and so confused sometimes that when they come down to the breakfast table, the husband doesn't know who's going to show up because they're either the depressive or they're the somebody on a big high, or they're charming, or they're witting. 

This is indigenous; she couldn't help this. This is a clinical condition and of course, it wasn't diagnosed. But one doctor who was with her throughout her life, actually, even when she moved different places.  They stayed in touch until his death and then she took up with his son. And at one point, she'd attempted suicide one night and Harry summoned this doctor and he said, "It's Payne Whitney, we have to put her in Payne Whitney,” which is where Marilyn Monroe was put, if you recall. Just as luck would have it, the very next day Eisenhower called her and said, "Clare, guess what? The Pope has died and I want you to go to Rome as my ambassador at the funeral. And then I want you to go back two weeks later for the coronation of the new Pope." And that snapped her out of the depression because again she was useful. Again, she was going to be in the limelight, which is the only place she was really comfortable, I think.

NIGEL HAMILTON:   We're going to allow people to ask questions. 

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Oh, yes. 

NIGEL HAMILTON:   We've probably talked enough between ourselves. I want to get us to talk a little bit about, while you're here in Boston, about our mutual passion, which is for the business of biography, of how best to record a human life. Or rather, how best we individually, because there are a hundred different ways in which you can do a human life. So I wanted to talk just briefly about this business of the architecture of biography. 

You are lucky – and I'm lucky with my FDR book, because mine is just the first volume of two volumes about FDR as commander in chief – you were allowed to tell Clare's story in two big volumes and in a world of Twitter and 140 characters. How do you see the mission, the purpose of biography, of the biographer today in choosing and portraying a human being? 

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Interesting what you said earlier about how you get the subject. As I said, I think the subject chooses you and Nigel can probably tell you how he got into his books, too. But then you have to have a format – how am I going to tell this life? Am I going to tell it chapter and verse from the day they were born till the day they die? Or am I going to focus on a period of their life? Or just deal with their careers? Or only their personal life?

For my part, my books sort of write themselves. I don't have any plan. I just do it by instinct. But I can see that Nigel, with this book – which is wonderful, by the way. I've read volume one and am waiting now for volume two. But he decided to just do FDR as commander in chief and point out that it wasn't Churchill actually who was the prime person, character in that story of World War II, but very early in the game, as early as 1942, FDR emerged as the decision maker. Mainly because, of course, he had the money, he had the manpower, he had the industrial capacity to turn out all those planes and tanks and rifles and train all those soldiers, which Europe no longer had. So he emerged. So he deals with episodes that show FDR emerging as the prime brain behind the war. So he chose that method.

NIGEL HAMILTON:   To put it succinctly, I'd say I have an agenda. I definitely want to change history. If history is how we see the past, I feel very strongly we do not give President Roosevelt the acknowledgement that he deserves for having won World War II and given us the world we live in.  So I'm writing with an agenda. But I don't feel you have that agenda with Clare Boothe Luce. I feel you have done what … Somebody wrote in a review in the Times that my book was the memoir that FDR hadn't been able to write. Well, I think that is actually more true of your volume. This is Clare Boothe Luce's life as she herself knew she couldn't write. I mean, FDR had hoped to write his memoirs had he lived. He was only, what, 62 when he died.  But Clare Boothe Luce decided she couldn't write that and you finally have come forward, and you have written it. I think she would be terribly proud of what you've done. 

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   They say they never like the books written about them.

NIGEL HAMILTON:   She was a big woman in that respect. I mean, she could take criticism; she knew that was part and parcel. There is a quote where she tells somebody "Swallow it." She's been in Hollywood. If you've been in Hollywood, you know what it's like. But I think you've done her a tremendous service. So the question is, in tackling a life on that scale, where do you go next?

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Where do I go next?

NIGEL HAMILTON:   Yes.

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Waiting for that knock on the door, somebody to find me. 

NIGEL HAMILTON:   What's in this file? What are the names?

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   What are the names of the current?  Well, we don't have anybody who you could call a Renaissance woman anymore, do we. We have Margaret Thatcher, but she concentrated on politics. We have Sandra Day O'Connor; as Clare would say, she went to the top of her particular pole. Clare, said to me – she didn't think she wanted a biography done or it could be done – she said, "Because I never reached the top of any particular tree." I said, "Well, I know you weren't Tennessee Williams or even Arthur Miller because you didn't stick with it.  Do you think if you hadn't been rich, you would have gone back and worked on those plays that were rejected at one point?" And she said, "Without a doubt."  In other words, money was a bad thing for Clare in some ways. It gave her too much security. Didn't have to go back and fix the play. Just move on to another field.  So I don't know if I'll ever find a Renaissance woman like that who's so multifaceted, who's not only a writer but a politician and a diplomat, and also a scuba diver -- we haven't even gone into that -- and a painter, a mosaicist.

NIGEL HAMILTON:   We have to leave some things.

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Have to leave something.

NIGEL HAMILTON:   Let's move on to some questions, please. We have microphones here. Amy, do you want to …

AMY MACDONALD:   I'll start. This is such an example of her humor. Could you tell the story, the McCall's article she did when she was asked is it improper for Jacqueline Kennedy to be wearing clothes made in Paris, as a First Lady, and her response to that I thought was so funny.   Then, the other question is, have you listened to the oral tapes of Jacqueline Kennedy with Arthur Schlesinger?

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Yes, I have, indeed. I used them.

AMY MACDONALD:   So the scene when Clare Boothe Luce meets JFK for lunch and Jacqueline kind of excoriates her and says at one point she had three martinis before she had lunch with the President. And he was just appalled by her. I was wondering if maybe that reaction had to do with her sarcastic remark about Jacqueline Kennedy's clothes, although JFK seemed to take it in stride very well.

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Yes, they were trying to stir up trouble, because Clare was always very wary. She said, "I'm never going to get into a catfight with women, because that's just what they want." So she always tried to be very nice with competitors. And she didn't see Jackie Kennedy as a competitor, exactly, but she got out of that by saying, "Mrs. Kennedy doesn't have to go anywhere for her clothes. Mrs. Kennedy would look good in a gunny sack." So that just quietened the press straight up for what could they say?

But I was going to read you actually this incident which you've just reminded me of. She got a call one day from Letiticia Baldridge, who was JFK's social secretary, as you know, and had been Clare's social secretary at the embassy in Rome. So they knew each other from way back. And she said, "Oh, Jack wants to see you, the President wants to see you." So she thought,”Well, I wonder why. Maybe he wants to talk to me about Cuba.”  because it was the height of the Cuban crisis at that point. So she goes to Washington, and I don't know about the drinks before lunch. I would have thought that unlikely knowing JFK probably knew that Clare didn't hold her liquor well. She didn't have to drink a lot before it really affected her.  But they go in and they have lunch and they begin to talk, and he said, "Well, now, Clare, what's on your mind?" And she thought to herself, "Well, I thought he was asking me here because there was something on his mind."  So they begin the conversation and I thought I would just let you hear a little bit of their – because again, she had total recall. She went home, she wrote it all out. So in the Library of Congress it's "My conversation with Kennedy today," and she wrote the whole thing out.

AMY MACDONALD:   I thought it was taped, it was so …

NIGEL HAMILTON:   If you look in Sylvia's footnotes, it's actually Clare's own notes after the talk. And I wondered how come this isn't on the White House recordings.

AMY MACDONALD:  Yes, exactly.

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Yes, it should have been.

NIGEL HAMILTON:   It would be interesting to know the President's …

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   I'll read you just a few lines. They're there chatting away and she says, "Oh, you know, all Presidents, really, they go down – famous people have one line that's associated with their fame, like “He died on the cross to save us,” or “He freed the slaves.” What's going to be your line?" she says to Kennedy and he says, "Oh, I'm not interested in my place in history." He wants to talk about more things. "What he really is concerned about at this time actually is he doesn't think he's getting good coverage in Time, Life and Fortune. " [laughter]  And he hoped that he could influence her. He thought she had more influence than she did. But on editorial policy, she had no influence whatsoever. 

Anyway, they'd been talking about Berlin and the Berlin situation, and he said, "There are some situations you just have to live with," he said. Clare asked, "Why should Americans tolerate the presence of Russian military power 90 miles from Florida? Why is the exclusion of communism in Vietnam and the Near East more important to us than in our own sea off our own shores?"  He said, "Your policy then is war with Cuba and the risk of nuclear with the USSR." "The Soviets had not risked it over Vietnam or Korea," Clare reminded him. She felt the United States should call their bluff in its own hemisphere. Kennedy was dubious. "Calling their bluff, as you put it, could lead to nuclear war." "Nuclear war will settle nothing for anybody," she said. "But if Khrushchev really believes it will, now is the time to find out." [laughter]  "You would rather take Cuba then and hold Vietnam or Berlin?" "We are holding Vietnam alone," she said. "Berlin is a multilateral commitment. If our allies want to hold it at the risk of nuclear war, we will be in better shape to honor that commitment without Russia at our back door."  Kennedy rejected her brinkmanship. "I do not wish or intend to be the President who goes down in history as having unleashed nuclear war." And it goes on; that's not the end. 

NIGEL HAMILTON:   Do you want to come forward? Then everybody can hear your question.

Q:   Could you say a few words about her life in Hawaii. And why on earth would she leave the power centers of New York and Washington to go to an island in the middle of the Pacific?

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Jimmy Carter. [laughter] That's why she left. When she got there, of course, she built herself a magnificent house. She had been going to go over there with Harry. They had plans, they had architectural drawings and everything, which she moderated after his death. But she went ahead with the plans because she always wanted to live in America. Even the car – when I went out to visit her, she sent a car to the airport and it's General Motors and "Made especially for Clare Boothe Luce" was on the dashboard. She was a real patriot.

The election of Regan brought her back. By that time she'd been there about over ten years and she said to me, "I'm living in a fur-lined rut." And she hoped that if she could be back and be the grande dame of the Republican Party, maybe she could get on the President's foreign intelligence advisory board, or something like that. Which of course she promptly did.  So she came back to Washington and she sold off the house in 1984 when he was clearly going to get a second term. And she did get put on to that board and she served on that until she died.

NIGEL HAMILTON:   She was in self-appointed exile in Hawaii.

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Self-appointed exile, yes. 

Q:   Can you talk about her involvement with LSD, how she got involved and how long it went on and then went motivated her to stop her sessions.

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Again, as I told you, she always wanted to be in the avant garde of everything. She was curious. When she died, she was studying nuclear physics and chemistry. She had all the latest gadgets. I loved that about her, because I can't even put on a record. But she could do everything like that.

NIGEL HAMILTON:   You don't put on a record.

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   I still put on records, that's all I can do. Anyway, I really admired that about her. What was the question now? Oh, yes, about the LSD.  So of course when LSD came, she wanted to try it. She also later on tried marijuana but didn't become addicted or anything like that. Or except I think to LSD she did become a bit addicted because she had good trips. [laughter] But in 1959, when it was just coming in to vogue, it was still legal. There were experiments going on, particularly at the veterans' hospital in California under a man called Dr. Sidney Cohen. A brilliant physician who had hoped to use it with psychotics, with schizophrenics, with any troubled people, people with severe depression, with criminals, with violent people of any kind. And he wanted also to see how it influenced highly creative or highly intelligence people, if their abilities could be enhanced by taking the drug.

So she was very happy to be part of that experiment, except that she never actually went out to the hospital to be supervised. She got the drug via a friend of Dr. Cohen who was called Gerald Heard. He was a British philosopher who had worked for the BBC before emigrating to America. And he administered the drug to her, because he could induce better trips, somehow. Dr. Cohen said, "I'm really more interested in the subterranean. I want to go deeper. But if you want to have the light experience, if you want to float, go with Gerald." So she went with Gerald, and she had really good trips. She saw the flowers breathing. She could hear music. And she really enjoyed her trips. And she went on taking LSD well into the '60s, until about '63 or '64, until it became illegal because people started to take it and jump out of windows, and things. So they had to make it illegal, and she of course stopped then.But it was a drug that certainly appealed to her.

NIGEL HAMILTON:   Do you think it helped her?

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   I wonder about if it helped her with that. Because apparently the influence of LSD lasts for many weeks after you take it. And Senator Morse, who interviewed her for the Brazil job, he detected something psychologically strange about her. And apparently that's what his specialty was; in college he studied psychology. And he twigged that. And I wonder if it wasn't– because she actually admitted, she said, "It lasts with me for several weeks after taking it." And she went to those hearings shortly after taking LSD. So maybe there was something that Senator Morse picked up on. 

Q:   After writing the book and being close with her for many months, I'm sure, what was your feeling toward her as a woman personally? How did you feel about her? Would you like her as a friend or just as writing a book about her? Would you have liked to converse with her on a daily basis? How did you feel about her?

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   I adored her, really. In fact, my husband got very worried because Clare was ill at one point and she was between maids; she didn't have anybody staying with her. I could see she didn't want to be alone because she wasn't feeling well. So we volunteered to stay for a few days, and I would make her supper and I would make her breakfast and lunch and everything. So I got to know her eating habits pretty well that way.

One night she said, "Oh, let's watch Brideshead Revisited ," the war series. She liked to watch TV in bed always, so she was laying there. She said, "Come and sit behind me." So we propped our pillows, and I sat there and Edmund sat on the floor and we watched the episode.  It turned out to be the one where Jeremy Irons, if you remember, is making love to Julia on board the Queen Mary as they crossed the Atlantic, and the sea is going like this. Clare is watching the love scene and her glasses are down on the end of her nose, I remember it, and she's looking over the top, and she said, "Well, on PBS, they can only do it in the missionary position." [laughter] 

You couldn't help adoring a person like that because her humor was just one of the most delightful things about her. So yes, I did. And my husband at that point was very worried because he said, "You're in danger of losing your objectivity. You're beginning to care for her."

NIGEL HAMILTON:   I was going to say, you recognized, or Edmund recognized a certain danger, which I have with FDR.

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   He's seductive. He's a really likeable person.

NIGEL HAMILTON:   I think he is a great hero in the first volume. But in the second volume – and you're dealing with a woman who becomes more difficult as time goes on – FDR begins to make some really terrible mistakes, particularly towards, just what I'm writing about, General de Gaulle and the French in World War II, and mistakes of judgment, almost out of hubris and arrogance and the dislike of DeGaulle, and he loses his objectivity. I found that actually as I'm writing this, I'm alarmed, I can't sleep properly, because here is this man I so admire and he's doing the wrong thing and I want to stop him in hindsight. 

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   I had an experience of that kind, too, yes.

NIGEL HAMILTON:   To put it bluntly, why has it taken you so long to do the second volume?

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Well, she was a seductress, Clare was. So you always felt her charm. She was always very with you when she was with you. She was intense in that way. And I just was taking everything she was telling me as gospel truth. So I thought, well, just in the interest of history, really, I ought to check a few facts. She's getting on in years now, maybe not all of these things are accurate.

So I started with the birth certificate. And I found actually she wasn't born on April 10 th , which is when she celebrated her birthday. She never lied about her age; it was nothing to do with the year. So I found that she was actually born on March the 10 th . So I said, "Clare, I got your birth certificate and it says you were born on"– she said, "I thought

Mother had always told me I was born on Easter Sunday." I said, "Well, actually, April 10 th was Good Friday that year. It was not anything to do with the date of Easter."  And she said, "Well, I must admit you're one hell of a detective." [laughter] I said, "It's not that difficult, you just go down to city hall and you get the birth certificate." And she said, "Well, I never wanted to be a Pisces. I wanted to be an Aries because they're more lighthearted and gay." [laughter] So she simply arbitrarily changed the date because she didn't want that sign. [laughter] So it was nothing really sinister at all. It was something quite trivial, really. 

Q:   Thank you very much. Question: You had mentioned at the very beginning of your remarks that she was apprehensive about her own life, her memoir, because what she might have to redact about Harry which she couldn't say that would be hurtful to him. I'm wondering if in your research and writing and your companionship with her, over your time, what you ended up crystallizing in the book that now is here, if that changed as a result of her not being here. Did you feel that over time your perspective on her changed?

And had she been alive, your writing might have been a little bit different?

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   I was always aware that the subject is never going to like the book. Because in some way you're seeing them as they don't see themselves, in some strange way. Maybe she thought I emphasized this too much, or I did not emphasize that enough. She was afraid I was going to write more about romance than about Rome, for example, because I had to do a lot of research about those lovers; they were very big figures and I had to have them large in the book. But in the end, Rome fascinated me to such an extent that I think it covers five chapters in volume two.

NIGEL HAMILTON:   It's too long. [laughter] 

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   It's too long in a way. But I felt this is what she was most proud of. I have to give this weight, because she would have wanted this. So in a way, I was kind of paying attention to her after death, because I wanted her accomplishment to be really fully documented and without being boring or anything. I don't think it ever drags down because it's always such an exciting period. 

And of course, she got poisoned, as you probably know. The ceiling in her bedroom, which was in this old villa in Rome … It was her own fault in a way, because she put in a washing machine above her bedroom. So the maids used to go up there and one of her aides said, "There were these peasants stomping around up there," he said. And they would run the machines while she always had breakfast in bed. She always looked at her mail, she looked at her notes for the day and read the newspapers in bed. So she always drank her coffee there.  And with the shaking ceiling, this old paint was loosened and the dust fell into her coffee and into her breakfast. She got arsenic lead poisoning. They

didn't know, of course, where it was coming from. They only did the test and found that it was arsenic in the blood test. But at first they thought, of course, it was the Italian communists, because she was so trying to get the communists out of the factories and she was so effective in that:  "You're not getting American aid unless you get rid of those communists in the factories." She was adamant, and they thought they got into the kitchen somehow and they were poisoning her food.

It was only when the CIA came over, pretending they were architects, and they went all around the villa looking for evidence and they found on her record player, her old disk – she was learning Italian all the time, she kept trying to learn better Italian – they found a film of dust. And they asked the maids, "How often do you dust in this room?" And they said "We dust daily." They said, "Well, what's this dust?"  So they scraped some off, took it to the US Naval Laboratory in Naples. They tested it and lo and behold, arsenic from the old paint. But of course it took many, many months. She lost hair. Her teeth fell out. She had horrible colic and she lost a tremendous amount of weight, like 30 pounds, and she was already pretty skinny.  Anyway, that was another story in the Rome period, which gave a lot of spice to that story. But it is a good story of her real accomplishment in the diplomatic field.

NIGEL HAMILTON:   Unless there’s somebody else to ask a question, please, what about – one advantage of writing about somebody who – I was going to say somebody who is recently alive or dead, but in some ways it may actually be more difficult if somebody's alive.

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Yes, that's true, too. Oh, I didn't answer your question about why it took so long. Yes, why it took so long:  Because while she was alive I couldn't write. Because I traveled a lot with her, I could never get to writing. Also, I was still researching the papers. Then they declassified the State Department papers. So the things I wasn't allowed to see when I first went, I had to go back, do all that work again, to get the declassified material.  Then the trunk of papers that I'd seen in Hawaii, which were all the important personal documents, the diaries, the love letters, everything, was shipped to the Library of Congress, along with a lot of Clare's furniture, when she left Hawaii. And it never showed up at the Library. And she thought it had been lost at sea or on the docks or stolen. Never came. So it was a really difficult period those last years with her, because this trunk never showed up. 

After her death, a friend of hers went to help the Sotheby's people who were going to sell Clare's furniture and bits and pieces up in New York. He called me and said, "Sylvia, you won't believe this. That trunk is here in this warehouse on River Road in Washington." And it was clearly labeled "Library of Congress," and it just got misshipped. So I couldn't finish the book without those papers. They were the most important to get to the heart of her. That was in the trunk. And that's another reason for the long delay of completing the book. 

NIGEL HAMILTON:   When you write, do you like to do the research first and then write the book? Or do you write it in sections, research, do the section?

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   No, for volume one, I completed – in fact, when I wrote volume one, it was supposed to be just volume one. But I got so fascinated by her early years, and I thought her accomplishments with all the things she had to overcome were so great that they needed to be documented. Becoming Vanity Fair editor, for example; after only two years of working on a magazine, she became the managing editor. So all of these accomplishments, reporting on war, and then getting elected to Congress and I'd only got halfway through the life when I'd already got 600 pages. And I didn't want a doorstop. I said to the publisher, "Look, I don't know what you think, but we don't want a 1200-page book here." He said, "Go ahead, do another volume."

So I ended volume one and I called it Rage for Fame . It's Clare, actually, who said that line. I found it one of her yearbooks, which was also in that trunk. In the yearbook, she had a picture of herself and underneath she had written the line, "A rage for fame attends both great and small." And I thought, well, that's pretty nice for a 14-year-old, but I'd better check it out. Being Clare, better check it out.  So I found out that actually it was a double line, it was the last two lines of an ode by Peter Pindar, who was a British poet, 18 th century poet. And I found the poem:  "Rage for fame attends both great and small"; the last line was, "better be damned than not be named at all."

So Clare wanted to be famous from childhood and that line was her line, rage for fame. And it's called Rage for Fame: The Ascent of Clare Boothe Luce. And I called the second book Price of Fame because I think she paid a huge price in personal terms for her service to her country. Those jobs were enormous jobs. She was never in the best of health. She was frail physically, although she was tremendously energetic, a lot of febrile energy. But then that became Price of Fame: The Honorable Clare Boothe Luce , which was her title of course after her period in Congress and throughout the diplomatic career.

NIGEL HAMILTON:   And in terms of writing, had you finished the research and then sort of narrated the story?

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   I covered the life, yes, in terms of the Library of Congress papers. But as I said, those declassified papers came later at the State Department. I had to go back and redo those. And of course, more people came out after her death, too. They were more willing to talk, for example, they were more candid than they had been during her life. Not that it was all insalubrious stuff, but … Oh, my husband's got a question, look out. [laughter] 

EDMUND MORRIS:   Nigel, she gracefully evaded your question about is it easier to write about a living person or a dead one. That identical question was posed to me when it was announced that I was going to write the biography of Ronald Reagan when he was still President. And this guy from the New York Times came down to Washington, said, "Mr. Morris, you've written about the dead Theodore Roosevelt. Now you're going to write about the alive Ronald Reagan. What kind of biography do you prefer?" I'd not actually thought about the question yet, so I stammered and was wondering what to say, and she was in the kitchen listening. 

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   She, Sylvia.

EDMUND MORRIS:   Sylvia. Eavesdropping as usual. And she shouted out, "Dead is easier." [laughter] 

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   I suppose that's right. Because after Clare died, a lot more people came forward. 

NIGEL HAMILTON:   I have written two volumes about President Bill Clinton and that was very difficult.

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Because he was living, too. [laughter]  It's hard. Because also, you're more in danger, as I aid, of losing your objectivity with somebody who's still alive. Because they're a subject, they're there. They're still there influencing how you feel about them on a daily basis. You get the objectivity after they die more, I think. Would you agree? Well, Clinton's not dead yet so you don't know.

NIGEL HAMILTON:   That's why I haven't written a third book. 

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Are you going to? Do you think you might?

NIGEL HAMILTON:   No. 

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   You might. Never say never.

NIGEL HAMILTON:   I still have to finish FDR.

Well, everybody, thank you so much for coming. [applause]

SYLVIA JUKES MORRIS:   Thank you very much. You're very nice. Great questions. 

THE END 

Clare Boothe Luce, the Conservative Politician Who Wrote an All-Female Play

Clare Boothe Luce was a socialite, an editor, a feminist playwright, a devout Roman Catholic, a Republican Congresswoman, an early LSD user, an ambassador, and, believe it or not, more.

Her life story reads as if might describe about twelve completely different women: from humble origins, Clare Boothe Luce (March 10, 1903 – October 9, 1987) became a socialite, a magazine editor, a war reporter, a feminist playwright, a devout Roman Catholic, a Republican Congresswoman, an early LSD user, an American ambassador, and, believe it or not, more. One writer describes her life as a cross between “ Sex and the City and Game of Thrones; ” her biographer claimed that everyone who ever met her fell in love with her .

In 1974, the illustrious Luce granted an interview to Rodelle Wientraub, assistant editor of a humble literary journal called The Shaw Review . The topic was “The Gift of Imagination,” and somehow, Luce manages to comment on an issue very real to writers working in today’s heady political climate: ought creative types turn to politics?

Luce breaks down her writing career, sharing how her first Broadway play, Abide With Me , “abode with no one. A melodrama without a trace of humor, it was a flop. The reviews would have discouraged anyone less stubborn than I to abandon playwrighting forever.” Instead she went on to write  The Women, a satire distinguished by its all-female cast, cementing her reputation as a wit.  The Women  became a Broadway hit in 1936 and Hollywood classic in 1939. (Another not-quite-as-succesful Hollywood version was made in 2008).

Luce comments, “American playwrights do not like or understand women—at least not normal women. None of them has ever managed to create a believable flesh and blood, attractive female character.” One wonders whether or not she included herself in that number, for  The Women  is populated by wise-cracking, acid-tongued women fighting over men, none of whom is what one would call a “believable” or “likable” character.

The Women  is not exactly a feminist work of art. It wouldn’t even pass the Bechdel Test , as all the women talk about is, well, men. They are catty back-stabbers, with the exception of the too-good-to-be-true protagonist Mary. By the end (spoiler alert!), after Mary’s frenemies have convinced her that she needs a divorce, she triumphs by becoming, essentially, one of them.

But despite its all-woman gimmick, Luce never set out to make a feminist, or indeed any, political statement with the play. In fact, she told Weintraub, “Playwrights should leave politics alone. Involvement with contemporary politics will almost invariably ruin a creative talent.”

Luce did not, obviously, take her own advice. Instead, after marrying publishing magnate Henry Luce, she embarked on a political career. In 1942 she was elected to the House of Representatives. By 1953, Luce became the American ambassador to Italy, the first American woman ever to hold such a high diplomatic post. She devoted herself to public life, and essentially quit writing. As she put it, “Such small talent as I had as a playwright was ruined by my involvement in politics!”

While the (hilarious) mean-girl sniping of  The Women might not read as particularly feminist today, and her politics were not always what we would now call pro-woman, Luce’s legacy continues to support women. The Clare Boothe Luce Fund, as stipulated by her will , provides grants to encourage young women to enter, study, graduate, and teach in science, mathematics, and engineering.

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America’s First Renaissance Woman : Clare Boothe Luce: 1903-1987

“A great man is one sentence,” Clare Boothe Luce was fond of pronouncing. “History has no time for more than one sentence, and it is always a sentence that has an active verb.” In her own life, however, Luce insistently defied her own prescription, as she did so many assumptions. Too successful and too driven ever to confine herself to a single sentence, she completed an entire paragraph, baroque with ornamental periods, bristling with active verbs and packed with household names.

For more than a half-century, Luce was on whispering terms with history, the friend of Winston Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek, the wife of America’s most prominent publishing tycoon, the acquaintance of every President from Herbert Hoover to Ronald Reagan. Yet even as she was winning over great men, she was overturning the very notion of the “great man” by storming all the old boys’ clubs of power without ever relinquishing her femininity. In the space of 20 years, while presiding as the darling of the society columns, she was managing editor of a national magazine, successful Broadway playwright, war correspondent, Congresswoman and ambassador.

In a sense, the only thing against Luce was her ability to play many roles and break all the rules, as a woman conquering what was primarily a man’s world. As one of the first great career women in American history, Luce found herself alternately patronized by those who saw her only as a woman and anathematized by those who saw only her career. For some, she was too elegant to be intelligent, for others too sharp-witted to be ladylike. An early feminist whose most famous play showed women at their cattiest, a formidable grande dame of high society who was one of its most caustic satirists, Luce made a career of eluding categories.

And of cultivating enemies. Because she switched hats so often, she was accused of changing her tastes with the seasons. Because she was so tireless and acid-tongued an evangelist for her opinions, and because her opinions were so fierce — especially a longtime hatred of Communism and an unswerving devotion to the Catholicism to which she converted in mid-life — she presented an irresistible target to her adversaries. And because she had the misfortune of being on easy terms with glamour as well as with success, she was sometimes accused of manipulating men, sometimes of being manipulated by them. While admirers gushed over her rare blend of cleverness and charm, detractors focused only on her deployment of those strengths. The ambiguous effect of being accosted by the demure whirlwind was, said one newspaper, like “being dynamited by angel cake.”

When Clare Boothe Luce died last week in Washington at the age of 84, the country lost the pre-eminent Renaissance woman of the century, a pioneer who had shown once and for all that “self-made woman” need not be a contradiction in terms. If greatness, as she once said to Churchill, means “to see, to say, to serve,” some measure of it surely belonged to so shrewd an observer, so pungent a speaker and so versatile a public servant.

The trajectory of Luce’s career was especially dramatic given the modesty of her origins. Her mother was a former chorus girl, her father a violinist who . deserted his family when his daughter was nine. Before long, however, Clare Boothe was decorating her resume. In 1913 she was Mary Pickford’s understudy in a play titled A Good Little Devil; by eleven she had written a play of her own; and at 16 she had run away from home to work in a factory making paper favors. When her mother remarried, she began to enjoy her first taste of society and was soon zestfully embracing all the paradoxes of getting ahead as a woman: at 18 she was working for the feminist cause, including distributing pamphlets urging women to “make themselves heard,” while just two years later she was accepting a convenient marriage to George Tuttle Brokaw, an unstable millionaire 23 years her senior who was, by her own characteristic admission, a ” bore.”

By the time she divorced Brokaw, after six years of marriage, she was assured of a handsome settlement to help her take on the world. That she promptly did. At a dinner party in 1929, she asked her host, Publishing Magnate Conde Nast, for a job. He, taking her for a social butterfly, refused. She, unwilling to take no for an answer, simply went to the offices of his main magazine, Vogue, sat down at an unoccupied desk and announced that she was ready to start work writing captions. Within four years she was managing editor of Nast’s Vanity Fair, a magazine that she shaped in her own smart and irreverent image, at once reveling in the emperor’s latest fashions and revealing them for what they really were.

Having mastered that world, she turned her attentions to another. In 1934 she was introduced to Henry Luce, a missionary’s son who was the co-founder and editor in chief of Time Inc. She introduced him to an idea she had dreamed up, a glossy picture magazine to be known as LIFE. Just two days before their wedding, in November 1935, her first play, Abide with Me, opened on Broadway. In a review rewritten by the editor in chief and the playwright herself, the play was panned in TIME for its “tedious psychiatry.” It closed after only 36 performances.

Her next play fared better: The Women, a pitiless satire featuring 35 characters, all of them women and most of them harpies, sniping, gossiping and philandering their way through the beauty salons and the drawing rooms of Park Avenue. A showcase for its author’s diamond-sharp barbs and her wicked wit (“a frozen asset” is how a virgin describes herself in the play), it opened in December 1936, ran for more than 600 performances and was soon turned into a popular movie. Having proved herself on that front, Luce took off again, this time to tour the world and cover the war for LIFE.

Sometime during those turbulent years, it occurred to Luce that her gift for strong opinions and withering bons mots might actually be best suited to another stage, and in 1942 she was elected Connecticut’s first Congresswoman. Inevitably, those last two syllables dogged her in the largely all-male preserve of Washington, and her attempts to be taken seriously were not assisted by a typical poll that crowned her “the second best pair of legs in the country.”

Luce was not one to take such condescension calmly. Immovable in her beliefs and intrepid in expressing them, she quickly established herself as one of the most implacable foes of the New Deal and especially of any and all appeasement of the Soviet Union. When Vice President Henry Wallace suggested a postwar policy of opening the skies to every plane, Luce dubbed his brainchild “globaloney.” As for F.D.R., she said, he had “lied us into a war into which he should have led us.” Small wonder, then, that hers was one of the most hotly contested seats in the country when she sought, and won, re- election in 1944.

In part because of the death in a car accident of her only child Ann at the age of 19, she turned toward Catholicism and decided in 1946 not to run for re-election. Needless to say, a Luce retirement was hardly a rest: the years that followed found her explaining her conversion in a series of articles titled “The Real Reason”; memorably denouncing the Democrats as a speaker at the 1948 Republican National Convention; receiving an Oscar nomination in 1949 for her original story for the gentle comedy Come to the Stable, about two nuns setting up a hospital for children; and, in 1952, making 47 separate radio and TV appearances on behalf of Dwight Eisenhower. A 1953 Gallup poll showed that she was, after Eleanor Roosevelt, Queen Elizabeth II and Mamie Eisenhower, the most admired woman in the world.

That same year, she returned to the public stage as Washington’s emissary to Italy, the first American woman to be named ambassador to a major power. As usual, Luce made a spectacular entrance and exit: in her first major speech, just a couple of weeks before the Italian general election, she broke nearly every unwritten rule by eschewing diplomatic platitudes in favor of a pointed warning about the “grave consequences” for voters if they became “unhappy victims of totalitarianism of the right or of the left.” Four years later, she resigned for reasons of health: dust laced with lead arsenate had been flaking off the painted ceiling of her bedroom, gradually poisoning her.

As usual, the dramatic gestures and splashy headlines (ARSENIC AND OLD LUCE) obscured many of her more significant achievements in Rome. By the time she left, Luce had played an important role in persuading Italian businessmen to fight Communist labor domination; had helped resolve a decades-old dispute with the signing by Italy and Yugoslavia of the Trieste settlement in 1954; and had seen Italy join the United Nations. Luce’s predecessor had been recognized by exactly 2% of the Italian population; “La Luce” was known to 50%.

Although her departure from Rome marked the end of Luce’s official roles, she was not offstage for long. In the years that followed, the irrepressible campaigner mastered scuba diving, took up painting and constantly peppered the press with salty jeremiads. After her husband died in 1967, she pursued her interests as energetically as ever. In 1971 she dusted off a couple of past incarnations with a new play, Slam the Door Softly, that was characteristically full of tart one-liners (“I don’t want alimony; I want severance pay”). A year later she held a reception for President Richard Nixon at her oceanfront estate in Honolulu before he met with Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka of Japan. Luce held no position, official or otherwise, with the magazines her late husband founded, but she did not hesitate to let their editors know when she disagreed with them. In 1974, rallying behind an embattled Nixon, she castigated TIME in an unusually stinging letter that denounced its “editorial overinvestment in the destruction of the President.”

When the Republicans returned to Washington in 1981 after a four-year hiatus, so too did Luce, resuming her position on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Throughout her last years, the elder stateswoman held court among young Republicans as a kind of inspirational eminence, an unmistakable figure at every conservative function, silver-haired, bright- eyed, dripping pearls and epigrams. Of all the laurels bestowed upon her in recent years, perhaps the most fitting was the Sylvanus Thayer Award, West Point’s highest civilian honor, given to those who best embody the academy’s motto of “Duty, Honor, Country.”

In her final years Luce often seemed to miss the battles that had engaged her for so long, and she frequently bemoaned the fact that she had outlived all her “warm personal enemies.” In a sense, what she was really lamenting was that she had, in the end, outlasted controversy. By the time of her death last week, it no longer seemed quite so remarkable that one woman could occupy so many and such different seats of power. That, perhaps, was the greatest of all the sentences that Clare Boothe Luce left to history.

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Clare Boothe Luce

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• Spartacus Educational - Biography of Clare Boothe Luce
• Clare Boothe Luce - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Clare Boothe Luce (born March 10, 1903, New York , New York, U.S.—died October 9, 1987, Washington, D.C.) was an American playwright, politician, and celebrity, noted for her satiric sense of humour and for her role in American politics.

Luce was born into poverty and an unstable home life; her father, William Franklin Boothe, left the family when she was eight years old. Through sacrifices by her mother, she was able to attend private schools in Garden City and Tarrytown , New York. At age 20 she married George Brokaw, the wealthy son of a clothing manufacturer and 23 years her senior. Partly because of Brokaw’s alcoholism, their marriage ended in divorce six years later, and she received a large settlement; the couple had one child.

From 1930 to 1934 Luce worked as an editor at Vogue and Vanity Fair . In the latter she published short sketches satirizing New York society, some of which were collected in Stuffed Shirts (1931). In 1935 she met Henry R. Luce , the world-renowned publisher of Time and later Life magazine; they married one month after he divorced his wife of 12 years.

After an earlier play failed, Luce wrote The Women (1936), a comedy that ran for 657 performances on Broadway; Kiss the Boys Goodbye (1938), a satire on American life; and Margin for Error (1939), an anti-Nazi play. All three were adapted into motion pictures. From 1939 to 1940 Luce worked as a war correspondent for Life magazine and recounted her experiences in Europe in the Spring (1940).

Luce was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican from Connecticut , serving from 1943 to 1947, and became influential in Republican Party politics. After the death of her 19-year-old daughter in a car accident in 1944, she began conversations with the Reverend Fulton J. Sheen , which resulted in her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1946.

Luce served as ambassador to Italy from 1953 to 1956, was a public supporter of Barry Goldwater in the 1960s, and served on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under presidents Richard Nixon , Gerald Ford , and Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and ’80s. In 1983 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom . She is remembered for her feisty demeanour and her acid wit, which she displayed in oft-quoted aphorisms such as, “No good deed goes unpunished.”

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Women Come to the Front Clare Boothe Luce

Talented, wealthy, beautiful, and controversial, Clare Boothe Luce (1903-1987) is best remembered as a congresswoman (1942-1946), ambassador, playwright, socialite, and spouse of magazine magnate Henry R. Luce of Time - Life - Fortune . Less familiar is Luce's wartime journalism, which included a book, Europe in the Spring (1940) and many on-location articles for Life .

Though she covered a wide range of World War II battlefronts, Luce considered her war reportage merely "time off" from her true vocation as playwright. Nonetheless, Luce endured the discomforts, frustrations, and dangers encountered by even the most seasoned war correspondent. Besides experiencing bombing raids in Europe and the Far East, she faced house arrest in Trinidad by British Customs when a draft Life article about poor military preparedness in Libya proved too accurate for Allied comfort. Luce's unsettling observations led longtime friend Winston Churchill to revamp Middle Eastern military policy.

Luce's initial encounter with the war in 1940 produced Europe in the Spring , her first non- fiction book. Anxious to convince fellow Americans of the dangers of isolationism, Luce wrote a vivid, anecdotal account of her four-month visit to "a world where men have decided to die together because they are unable to find a way to live together."

Luce's Career Launched at Vanity Fair

[Clare Boothe Luce], c. 1935. Clare Boothe Luce Collection

Poster for Anti-Nazi Film

Margin for Error , Hollywood: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1943

"I Decided To Go to Europe and See About the War"

Clare Boothe Luce, Europe in the Spring , Alfred A. Knopf, 1940, title page. General Collections, Library of Congress (102)

Trip to Pacific War Zone

George Rodger, [General Chiang Kai-Shek and Madame Chiang welcome Clare Boothe Luce], April 1942

Luce Interview with General Stilwell

George Rodger, [General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell arrives at his Maymyo headquarters and speaks with Clare Boothe Luce and Captain Fred Eldridge], April 7, 1942

"My insides had not stopped quivering. …"

George Rodger, [Clare Boothe Luce photographing casualties in Maymyo, Burma], April 8, 1942

Japanese Attack on Maymyo, Burma

Clare Boothe Luce, [Wounded Burmese], April 8, 1942

Profile of General MacArthur

Clare Boothe, "MacArthur of the Far East," Life , December 8, 1941, pp. 123 - Life , December 8, 1941, pp.122, General Collections, Library of Congress (108) http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/wcf/images/wcf108b.jpg ">122

Luce with Philippine President Quezon

[Luce with Manuel Quezon and Admiral Thomas Hart], October 1941

Luce's Burma Article

Clare Boothe, "Burma Mission," Life , June 15, 1942, pp. 94- Life , June 15, 1942, pp. 95, General Collections, Library of Congress (112) http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/wcf/images/wcf112b.jpg ">95

World Leaders in Luce's Circle

[Clare Boothe Luce with Jacques Phillipe Leclerc] c. 1944

[Clare Boothe Luce with George S. Patton, Jr.] c. 1944

Censorship in the Name of Security

[Clare Boothe Luce in Cairo], June 1942

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A Woman at the Center, Drifting to the Fringe

By Janet Maslin

• July 13, 2014
• Share full article

“Price of Fame” completes Sylvia Jukes Morris’s two-volume character study of Clare Boothe Luce, one of the 20th century’s most ambitious, unstoppable and undeniably ingenious characters. The whole project weighs in at a mere 1,296 pages, so it does not even set the Morris house record. This author is married to Edmund Morris, whose splendid, three-volume Theodore Roosevelt totaled almost twice that page count.

Mr. Morris comes up in “Price of Fame,” because he was present at the creation: a November 1980 Georgetown dinner party at which the Morrises and Luce first met. Luce was not told she was in the presence of a would-be biographer. But she kissed Ms. Morris goodbye, saying “Good night, you sweet thing.” Definitely a good sign.

During the remaining 6 years and 11 months of Luce’s life, Ms. Morris had extraordinary access to the woman, her paper trail and her personal history. She picked up the kind of detail to which most biographers are not privy, like the fact that Luce called her ulcers Qaddafi and Begin, or that she had enough calling card cases to auction off a whole collection of them. (“I feel a need to simplify my life.”) And there were the stories full of famous suitors, like the one about Clare’s having gone to bed and hearing someone sneak in and trip over the coal shuttle. “It was Bernie Baruch!” She’d been expecting Randolph Churchill.

All of this is by way of saying that Luce, in her later years, remained a corker. And though Ms. Morris’s first volume, “Rage for Fame,” was packed with what is conventionally known as the good stuff — wretched origins; Luce’s clawing her way to the top; gold-digging and world-class vamping; an acting career; becoming the toast of New York’s cafe society; a career in magazine editing; writing a colossal hit play, “The Women”; and, of course, bagging the biggest catch in Manhattan, the married magazine mogul Henry Luce — Part 2 has plenty to work with. Even if it has to dwell on Yugoslavia’s post-World War II struggle with Italy over the port of Trieste.

“Price of Fame” begins seductively (how else?) in 1943, as Luce, the newly elected Republican congresswoman from Connecticut, arrives in Washington, with her battable eyes, sharp elbows and all. A picture at the front of the book shows her bright eyes, beribboned hair and sweet smile, all of which belie her methods and makeup (less sugar than steel). What’s much more telling is that Luce, the stepdaughter of a congressman, knows that it takes waiting in line to get a sizable office suite with a lavatory, and that’s the kind of office she wants. Not being someone who ever stands in line for anything, she sends an aide to do it for her.

Overwhelmed with an initial rush of press attention, especially after she coined the word “globaloney” to raise the temperature of rhetoric in the House, Luce went on to correct another fellow representative’s grammar, thus winning herself a lingering reputation for being dragon-tongued. This made her best ideas less likely to be heard and the congressional life turn tedious more quickly than expected. Those who underestimated her, like Justice Felix Frankfurter of the Supreme Court, saw “doll’s eyes that close and open” but “no give and take of spirit or mind.”

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Let’s Not Forget  G.I.  Joe and G.I. Jim

Clare Boothe Luce

June 27, 1944 — Republican National Convention, Chicago Stadium, Chicago IL

We have been called together in a time of historic crisis to choose the next President of the United States.

Plainly the honor of speaking to you in this hour so fraught with consequences has come to me because I am a woman. Through one woman’s voice our party seeks to honor the millions of American women in war-supporting industries, the millions in Red Cross work and the thousands upon thousands in civil service, in hospital and canteen and volunteer work. Our party honors the women in the armed services and our truly noble Army and Navy nurses. Their courage has written a new chapter for American history books. Above all we honor the wives and sisters and sweethearts and mothers of our fighting men. The morale of the home front has been largely in their keeping. They have kept it to the height of their morale on the battle fronts.

And yet, I know and you know that American women do not wish their praises sung as women any more than they wish political pleas made to them as women. They feel no differently from men about the ever-growing threats from the government. They feel no differently about the inefficiency, abusiveness, evasion, self-seeking and personal whim in the management of this nation’s business, which are little by little distorting our democracy into a dictatorial bumbledom. And certainly they feel no differently about pressing this war to the enemy’s innermost gates, or creating from the sick havocs of war itself a fair and healthy peace.

Service Men’s Welfare But there is one thing that women feel, not differently but more deeply about than men. That is the welfare of their sons and brothers and husbands in the services.

In this crowded convention hall, it is rare to see a woman without the little red and white pin whose blue star shows that somewhere on land, in the air, at sea, there is a man in uniform who is very dear to her. It is no more than the truth to say that he is dearer to her than all else in the world. To speak of what is closest to the mind and heart of an American woman today is inevitable to speak of the man who is known affectionately at home and fearsomely on every battlefront as G.I. Joe.

American women want these minutes and, yes, every minute of our thought and concern, to turn to this fighting man. His hopes, his aspirations, his dangerous present, and his still uncertain future, are uppermost in their minds.

Now G.I. Joe’s last name is legion, because there are about 12,000,000 of him. What his immediate wants are today, his generals know best. Mostly they are more tools, and better tools, which will increase his margin of safety and multiple his chances of victory. To the filling of these wants, all Americans are pledged to the limit of their capacity.

But this convention is gathered together to consider not so much G.I. Joe’s immediate wants, as to clarify what his wants are likely to be in the next four years and to plan to meet those wants.

Before this convention is done it will clearly interpret his longterm wants in keynote and platform, and to the honoring of them our candidate will pledge himself.

The great Norwegian, Ibsen, said, “I hold that men most in the right who is most closely in league with the future.”

Prove Right in November We shall prove to be the most in the right in November. For here the Republican party will choose the man most closely in league with G.I. Joe’s future as he and his family see it.

We know that Joe himself is not thinking of his future wants at this hour.  He is too busy engaging a desperate enemy. If you asked him today today what he wants of the future, he would probably say, “I want to go home, of course. But I want to go home by way of Berlin and Tokyo.”

And this tremendous and heroic want of Joe’s to sail into the roadsteads of Yokohama, and march by the waters of the Rhine, is alone a greater guarantee of the future security of our nation than any guaranty we can offer.

This is Joe’s gift, beyond price, to America.

We have come together to nominate a President who will jealously and prayerfully guard that gift all his years in office.

Joe wants his country to be secure, from here out, because no matter how confused some people may be at home, here is no doubt in Joe’s mind what he is fighting for. Joe knew it the minute he landed on foreign soil. A fellow name Colonel Robert L. Scott wrote it in a book called God Is My Co-Pilot. And it was never said better by any man — “Know what we are fighting for?. . .  It’s the understanding that comes when you’ve seen the rest of the world, when you’ve seen the filth and corruption of all the hellholes Americans are fighting in today,. . .  Then you know … for it’s seared on your soul — that we have the best country in the universe. You know that you have everything to live for and the Japs and the Germans have everything to die for.”

We have come together here to nominate the kind of President who in the years ahead will keep Joe’s America — America; that is to say, a country in which a man and woman have everything to live for.

But wait. If today you asked Joe, in the heat of battle, why he wanted to get to Berlin and Tokyo, why he wanted to keep America, America, you might get a very unexpected and sobering answer. He’d say that the biggest reason was that he wanted to vindicate and avenge G.I. Jim. And because G.I. Jim is the biggest reason today that Joe is fighting like a man possessed of devils and guarded by angels, we had better talk of him in the time that remains to us.

Who is G.I. Jim? Ask rather, who was G.I. Jim? He was Joe’s pal; his buddy, his brother. Jim was the fellow who lived next door to you. But “he shall return no more to his house, neither shall his place know him anymore.” Jim was, you see, immobilized by enemy gunfire, immobilized for all eternity.

But Jim’s last name was not legion. You read casualty lists. You have seen Jim’s last name there: Smith, Martof, Johnson, Chang. Novac, Leblanc, Konstakis, Yamada, O’Toole. Svendson, Sanchez, Potavin, Goldstein, Rossi, Nordal, Wrobleweski, McGregor, Schneider, Jones. . . You see, Jim was the grandson and great-grandson of many nations. But he was the son of the United States of America. He was the defender of the republic and the lover of liberty. And he died as his father died in 1918, and their fathers in 1898, 1861, in 1846 and in 1812, in 1776. He died to make a more perfect union, “that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

His young bones bleach on the tropical roads of Bataan. A white cross marks his narrow grave on some Pacific island. His dust dulls the crimson of the roses that bloom in the ruins of an Italian village. The deserts of Africa, the jungles of Burma, the rice fields of China, the plains of Assam, the jagged hills of Attu, the cold depths of the seven seas, the very snows of the arctic, are the richer for mingling with the mortal part of him. Today his blood flecks the foam of the waves that fall on the Normandy beachheads. He drops again and again amid the thunder of shells, while silently down on the tragic soil of France the white apple blossoms drift over him. Yes, even as it was in 1918. Or, nameless phrase, tantalizing and inscrutable as the misty black and bottomless pit of time. Jim is just “missing in action.” Then all that marks him anywhere is a gold star in the window and the tears that are silently shed for him.

There are many gold stars on the women sitting in these halls. To all who loved Jim, even more than those who love Joe, everything we do and say here must be reasonable and inspiring.

We are come together here to nominate a President who will make sure that Jim’s sacrifice shall not prove useless in the years that lie ahead.

For a fighting man dies for the future as well as the past; to keep all that was fine of his country’s yesterday and to give it a chance for a finer tomorrow.   Death Inevitable? Do we here in this convention dare ask if Jim’s heroic death in battle was historically inevitable? If this war might not have been averted? We know that this war was in the making everywhere in the world after 1918. In the making here too. Might not skillful and determined American statesmanship have helped to unmake it all through the 30s? Or, when it was clear to our government that it was too late to avert war, might not truthful and fearless leadership have prepared us better for it in material and in morale, in arms and in aims? These are bitter questions. And the answers to bitter questions belong to time’s perspective. Being we human, we Republicans are partisan. But being partisan, we risk being unjust if we try to answer these questions in days so fateful. But this, even as partisans, we dare say: The last twelve years have not been Republican years. Maybe Republican presidents during the 20s were overconfident that sanity would prevail abroad. But it was not a Republican President who dealt with the visibility rising menaces of Hitler and Mussolini and Hirohito. Our was not the administration that promised young Jim’s mother and father and neighbors and friends economic security and peace. Yes, peace. No Republican President gave these promises which were kept to their ears, but broken to their hearts. For this terrible truth can not be denied; these promises, which were given by a government that was elected again and again and again because it made them lie quite as dead as young Jim lies now. Jim was the heroic heir of the unheroic Roosevelt decade: A decade of confusion and conflict that ended in war.

In war itself, Jim learned hard and challenging truths that his government was too soft and cynical, in peace, to tell him. In battle he learned that all his life is a risk: that a fellow has first to rely on himself, before his comrades can rely on him; he learned that perfect teamwork is possible only after a man is willing to stand up to the worst alone. Jim found out that a large part of his security lay in his own willingness to take a lot of responsibility for it. That being the ease, he asked no more than the bent tools, a chance to use his own brains in the pinches and the kind of leaders who were willing to risk their skins a little too, when the pinches came. Of course all his knowledge, born in the struggle to survive, will be of more use to Joe, the veteran, than to Jim. For in the end, Jim also learned that the only perfect democracy is the democracy of the dead.

But Jim did not complain too much about his government. Sure, mistakes, awful mistakes, had been made by his government. But Jim figured that anybody can make mistakes. Maybe his friends and neighbors had made them, too. How could his friends and neighbors tell that they had been going for some promises that could not, or should not, be kept? How could they tell that some of them were never spoken to be kept. Maybe they’d have talked differently, voted differently, if they’d known all the facts. But maybe they wouldn’t. Anyway, Jim has taken the rap for every one from the man in the White House down to the man in the house around the corner. And it was O.K. with him. Jim was ready to pay with his life for his countrymen’s mistakes, any time, if it gave the homefolks and good old Joe and his family a fresh start in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, in a world wiped clean of the Nazi marauders and Japanese spoilers.

Jim Would Skip It If Jim could stand here and talk to you he’d say, “Listen, folks, the past wasn’t perfect. But skip it. Get on with the business of making this old world better. You’ve got the land, the tools, the know-how and big bunches of people who want to pull together. No country ever had more. And you’ve got great and friendly nations who want to pitch in with you, like they pitched in with me and Joe to fight the Japs and Germans. Take your hats off to the past, but take your coats off to the future. I didn’t look back when I struck the beaches. Is it tougher at home for you fellows?”

This is what Jim would say if he could stand here and talk to you. Well, I suspect Jim is at this convention, although he is no longer, you understand, a Republican or a Democrat. But a man who dies to keep America America just might like to stay on a bit to see whether or not he’s really succeeded. So if Jim were here, it might be the most natural thing in the other world. Maybe he was brought here by some friend who knows his way around American presidential conventions. Yes, maybe he was brought here by General George Washington. All Americans know that the general’s spirit has watched over every gathering where Presidents have been picked for 147 years. And if that is the case, then Jim has learned a lot he never knew before about American Presidents. For example, while Jim always knew from the history books that the general was a soldier without blemish, now he knows that Washington was a President who, if he erred, as all Presidents do, erred with integrity. He knows that General Washington might have become America’s King, and that President Washington might have stayed in power all his days, the early days of our weak and infant republic. They were days of terrible crisis and stupendous emergencies. Wild disorders of frontier life, political confusion worse than any we know, marked Washington’s last years in office. And there were great social and economic injustices still to be corrected. Then every man said that George Washington was the indispensable man. Who understood and could better save the new liberty he had given a new nation? Jim knew that Washington so loved his country and the institutions that he helped to author, that he refused more than two terms.That was a tradition Washington’s spirit never saw broken at any President-making gathering until it was broken by the man who promised in this very city twelve years ago that “happy days are here again,” who promised peace, yes, peace, to Jim’s mother and father. But Jim knows why Washington is calm even so. Why? Well, Washington knows better today than he knew a century and a half ago, that no one man can save our nation’s institutions. But free men always always have another chance to make their own history, because, in peace or in war, free men must always choose their President. Among free men a political choice is inescapable. Even those who refuse to choose and stay home from the polls, make a choice: they choose not to choose. This is the noble paradox of a republic.

Want Us to Choose Oh yes, Jim and his friend, the father of his country, want us to choose well, as well as we know how here: They want us to choose a man who would rather tell the truth than be President; to choose a man who loves his country and its institutions more than he loves power. But they do not want us to pretend that any one Republican, more than any one Democrat, is indispensable. They want us to think as Americans. And as Americans. They want us to raise here a “standard to which the wise and honest can repair.” They know that the event, today as yesterday, is in the hands of God.

And this we will do, for Jim’s sake. And then we can say, before all our fellow citizens, that his spirit and Washington’s spirit will be happier here than at the Democratic convention.

Then Jim can exultantly say: “I am the risen soldier. I have come from a thousand towns, the city blocks, the factories, the fields of this fair land.

— “Many am I, yet truly one, the son of many streams that poured the wealth into the common cup, the wide and golden cup of liberty.

“I am the risen soldier, though I die I shall live on and, living, still achieve my country’s mission — liberty in truth.

“Lord it is sweet to die —  as it were good to live, to strive for these United States, which, in Your wisdom You have willed should be a beacon to the world, a living shrine of liberty and charity in peace.”

Hurry Home, Joe

It is as Americans that we are gathered here. We come to choose a President who need not apologize for the mistakes of the past but who will redeem them, who need not explain G.I. Jim’s death,  but who will justify it. Apology and explanation must suffice for the next convention that meets in this city.

We Republicans are here to build a greater and freer America, not only for, but with the millions of young, triumphant, boastful G.I. Joes, who are fighting their way home to us. Let the next convention that meets here point to Joe’s homecoming with foreboding. Let another party call Joe who has saved us, “the terrible problem of the returned veteran.” Another candidate, not ours, can hold Joe’s return as an economic club over the heads of the people. We are Americans! We say, “Joe, we welcome you. So hurry home, Joe, by way of Berlin and Tokyo. We need you to build this great America!”

Source: Indianapolis News , June 28, 1944.

The Role of American Women in Wartime Rhetorical Anaylsis

• Communications

Clare Boothe Luce

Clare Boothe Luce blazed many trails for women in her lifetime, as editor of  Vanity Fair  magazine, a front-line female European and Asian war journalist in WWII, an acclaimed author and playwright, a two-term U.S. Congresswoman, and as the first woman to be appointed U.S. Ambassador to a major nation (first Italy and then Brazil).    As a journalist, she wrote extensively about the dangers posed by the dictatorships of Hitler and Mussolini. As a playwright, her brilliant satire came to the fore in  The Women , a smash hit opening on Broadway in 1936 and later as a film. As the first woman member of Congress representing Connecticut and as a diplomat, she was recognized as a persistent and effective advocate of freedom, both home and abroad. Long before national attention focused on the dearth of women in the science, math and engineering fields, Ms. Luce was instrumental in the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission and later established an endowment (the Clare Boothe Luce Program) for what has become one of the single most significant sources of private support for women in science, mathematics and engineering. Thus far, the endowment has supported more than 1,900 women pursuing careers in these fields. Clare Boothe Luce was recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983.

Year Honored: 2017 Birth: 1903 - 1987 Born In: New York Achievements: Arts, Government, Humanities, Philanthropy Worked In: Connecticut, New York, Washington, D.C., United States of America, Britain, Belgium, China, France, India, Italy, Myanmar, the Netherlands (traveling journalist) Educated In: New York, United States of America Schools Attended: St. Mary's School, Miss Mason's School, "The Castle,” Clare Tree Major's School of Theatre

Clare Boothe Luce

Clare Boothe Luce served as U.S. ambassador to Italy from 1953 to 1956, the first American woman appointed to a major ambassadorial post abroad. She also served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1943 to 1947.

Luce was born March 10, 1903, in New York City. Her original ambition was to become an actress and she briefly attended a school of the theater in New York City. She was also active in the suffrage movement as a young woman. She married George Tuttle Brokaw, a New York clothing manufacturer, in 1923, and they had a daughter, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1929. In 1930, Luce became associate editor for Vanity Fair, resigning in 1934 to pursue a career as a playwright. In 1935, she married Henry "Harry" Robinson Luce, the founder of Time, Life and Fortune magazines. She continued her writing career, publishing a number of magazine articles and authoring several plays, including "The Women" (1936), her most successful play. From 1939 to 1940, Luce worked as a war correspondent for Life magazine.

In 1942, Luce was elected to the United States House of Representatives for Connecticut's 4th Congressional District, filling the seat formerly held by her stepfather. After the death of her daughter in 1944, Luce's interest in politics decreased and she declined to run for re-election in 1946. She joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1946 and began moving to the far right in the Republican Party.

In 1953, President Eisenhower appointed her U.S. ambassador to Italy. She served on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan. In 1983 Luce was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Reagan.

Luce died of brain cancer on October 9, 1987, at age 84.

Henry Luce Foundation (n.d.). About Clare Boothe Luce. Retrieved on Feb. 28, 2020, from https://www.hluce.org/programs/clare-boothe-luce-program/about/.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2020, Feb. 18). Clare Luce Booth: American playwright and statesman. In Britannica. Retrieved on Feb. 28, 2020 from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Clare-Boothe-Luce-American-playwright-and-statesman.

United States House of Representatives. Luce, Clare Booth . Retrieved on Feb. 28, 2020, from https://history.house.gov/People/Detail/17213.

• The Role of American Women in Wartime - Sept. 24,1942

Neither the Catt Center nor Iowa State University is affiliated with any individual in the Archives or any political party. Inclusion in the Archives is not an endorsement by the center or the university.

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• What Is Cinema?

Fast and Luce

On one of the last nights that Clare Boothe Luce went out in her life, her friend Marvin Liebman took her to a fine Chinese restaurant in her beloved Washington. Mrs. Luce ordered velvet chicken, which she said reminded her of the hundreds of meals she had shared with the “Gimo,” as Time, one of her late husband’s many magazines, had so often styled its pet crusader, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. The “Gimo” was now long dead, and Clare Luce was eighty-four years old, weeks away from death, yet her appearance was remarkable. Her skin remained translucent as a pearl, her eyes, despite her near blindness, the cold blue of an aquamarine. She was dressed exquisitely in pastel silks. Though she could hardly walk and her legendary Great Lady brittleness and acuity—fodder for the four biographies already written about her—had been eroded by cancer and loneliness, that night she was “on,” talking constantly, telling stories of SALT and NATO, Burma and London, Joe McCarthy and Ike, the “Gimo” and his wife, the “Missimo,” with herself at the very center of each anecdote, dazzling for ever and absolutely a young man from the Federal Trade Commission whom Liebman had invited along to meet the legend before it was too late.

The stories were not new, and part of her mystique was her tireless and ruthless ability to perform them, no interruptions permitted. Her friends speculated that her incessant talking was a form of self-protection: See how smart I am. In public, she was indisputably actressy, a woman of theater, calling everyone “darling”; her voice was pure Bette Davis, husky and tough, with a few Connecticut-lady trills thrown in for effect: “tomahtoes,” “my deah gahdener.” But somewhere in the middle of dinner, she seemed to tire of talking of “darling Douglas—MacArthur, you know” and “Franklin and that dreadful Eleanor,” and her voice lost the toughness which had always marked her social persona. She retreated into the realm of the private Clare, a woman of considerable vulnerability, alone at the end of her life without a web of friends to buoy her spirit, without children, without her husband to enhance her Washington status. She was an angry woman with a brain tumor, powerless and near death, contemplating the end. “You know, I have had a terrible life,” she finally said. “I married two men I really didn’t like. My only daughter was killed in a car accident. My brother committed suicide. Has my life been a life for anyone to envy?”

Clare Boothe Luce invented herself completely and absolutely, as all Great Ladies who start with nothing but brains, ambition, and the required sublime looks inevitably do. Mrs. Luce, however, did it better and longer than her peers—if she had any—and created an image based on glamour, brains, flint, and the ability to make people believe that every word she said was true.

“You know,” she would tell friends, “once I was at the White House with Franklin—Roosevelt, you know—and he said to me, ‘Clare, if only I could think of a way to try to explain to our great country what I am doing, if only I could think of some phrase which would sum it all up!’ I said to Franklin, ‘My dear Mr. President, what about using the term “a new deal”?’ ” This anecdote had endless variations: “I was in London during the blitz with dear Winston—Churchill, you know—and the bombs started falling, and Winston and I were at the Savoy. Winston said, ‘The British people have such guts, Clare—if only I could think of a way to describe their struggle,’ and I said, ‘How about “blood, sweat, and tears”?’”

She would also tell friends that Jock Whitney, David Rockefeller, Averell Harriman, and George Bernard Shaw had wanted to marry her, and that Strom Thurmond had goosed her—all untrue. Once, when People magazine, part of her late husband’s Time-Life empire, was doing a profile of her, a researcher called Clare’s friend Shirley Clurman in a panic. “Mrs. Clurman,” the researcher said, “not one word that Mrs. Luce has told our reporter checks out!”

There was hardly need for her to make anything up. By the time she was thirty-four years old, she had been an understudy for Mary Pickford; a suffragette flying gliders for her patron, Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont; a socialite married to a rich Newport dipsomaniac named George Brokaw, by whom she had one daughter; a divorcée with a ton of alimony at the beginning of the Depression; and, as Clare Boothe Brokaw, the cheeky managing editor of Vanity Fair. “I don’t think my position unusual for a woman. I’m following a perfectly natural urge to do what I like,” she disingenuously told a World-Telegram reporter in 1933, when she was thirty. She was rumored to have had affairs with Buckminster Fuller and Bernard Baruch, and had written a best-selling collection of satirical essays called Stuffed Shirts. After marrying Henry Luce, the publishing tycoon, in 1935, she wrote plays, including one Broadway classic, served as a correspondent during World War II, became a Republican congress woman, and in 1953 was the first woman to be made American ambassador to a major country. It was only at the end of her life, when she was stuck in an apartment at the Watergate and seemed hardly at peace, that some of her friends began to wonder if, for all her ambition and power, it might have occurred to Clare that she had got things slightly wrong.

When she died last October, *Time,*her late husband’s most influential magazine, called her “the pre-eminent Renaissance woman of the century.” There were memorial services in New York and Washington, attended by friends and associates that included Richard Nixon, Patrick Buchanan, former secretary of state William Rogers, Vernon Walters, and William Buckley, whom she had cajoled to prevail upon Cardinal O’Connor to allow her service to be held in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

If, in her long and eventful life, Mrs. Luce had her share of detractors, and she did, even the most vehement of them, such as Helen Lawrenson and Dorothy Parker, always believed that their bête noire got everything she ever wanted.

‘Things happened to her that didn’t happen to other people,” a priest who was close to Clare Luce late in life said. But when she talked of her earliest years, she could never seem to recall the facts the same way twice. Her father was like a character in a dream. In her biographies, he is described variously as a fiddler, a Memphis Coca-Cola bottler, the proprietor of the Boothe Piano Company—sometimes the time frame is so distorted that he appears to have had all these professions simultaneously. There is no debate on one overwhelming fact: William Booth, a descendant of John Wilkes Booth, abandoned Clare and her brother in their early childhood. (The e was added to Booth—again sources differ—either by Clare’s grandfather, to distance his family from Lincoln’s assassin, or by Clare herself, for effect.) Clare’s mother, a woman of such beauty that her daughter was said to pale by comparison, was left to fend for herself, and the Booth family, without Mr. Booth, wound up in a boardinghouse. Anyway, that is what Clare Luce would tell interviewers. “Mother always cooked fried eggs by opening the gas jet over the radiator and keeping the window open so the landlord wouldn’t smell her cooking and throw us out,” she said. Mrs. Booth’s maternal efforts were focused completely on young Clare, perhaps because she realized that a blonde, curly-headed daughter could be peddled more successfully than a son. One probable reason why Clare as an adult rarely entertained any doubt about her self-worth was that she had had such unreserved mother love as a child. Much of Clare’s childhood frustration centered on her search for her father, and she later told friends that she once met him in a subway long after her mother had assured her he was dead. Although he had abandoned the family for a common showgirl, Clare’s mother informed her dramatically that he had left them for Mary Garden, a famous opera star of the era. “Keeping up the bella figura ran in Clare’s family,” a friend said.

By age ten, Clare was making the rounds at the Biograph studio, trying to fulfill her mother’s ambitions for her to be the new Mary Pickford. In one movie, she actually understudied Pickford. Mrs. Booth made every effort to shield her from other children, thereby nurturing the complete self-absorption that she would always be noted for. “When I was a child, I was so lonely I became a compulsive eater,” Clare said. “My mother’s tendency, because of the boardinghouse, was to cook very little and to buy everything at the bakery.” Although Clare would lose her baby fat, she never lost her primal devotion to sweets, and as a rich, autocratic old lady running a great household, she used to insist that her houseguests conform to her lunch menu: naked lettuce leaves followed by a great wedge of apple pie or chocolate cake.

When Clare was still small, Mrs. Booth had the luck to take up with a married Jewish tire merchant named Joseph Jacobs, who advised her to gamble every penny she had from her divorce settlement on a single stock. She did, and made enough to take Clare out of the boardinghouse and off to the small hotels of Paris, where she could give her “culture” and a patina of the education she lacked. Clare perfected her French while her brother was parked in an American military school. Several years later, Clare was returning from another sojourn abroad when luck struck again, in the form of the daffy suffragette-socialite Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont. Clare and Mrs. Belmont struck up an acquaintance, and Mrs. Belmont was so impressed with her that she confided to Elsa Maxwell, according to Maxwell’s autobiography, “I met a girl on the boat who has all the earmarks of talent and success. She’s only seventeen and she’s poor, but she has beauty and brains to go as far as her ambition will take her. . . . I’m going to give her a push in the right direction.”

Eventually Clare would marry Mrs. Belmont’s candidate for her, George Brokaw, the Newport millionaire alcoholic, who at age forty-three had never attempted matrimony and whose mother, upon meeting Clare, no doubt begged her to marry him. She was all of nineteen. Their daughter, Ann, was born almost immediately, but Clare was hardly maternal. “Rich women are not too put upon by their children,” she later said. “You don’t have to do all the things for a child that those women who had to stay at home did. My Ann had a French governess who took care of her until she was twelve years old and went off to boarding school.” Brokaw’s Newport world, which Clare would spike in Stuffed Shirts, always shunned Clare as a penniless social climber, but as Mrs. Brokaw she was nevertheless able to move into a limestone-and-marble mansion on the corner of Seventy-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue. The union, however, was doomed. Years later, she would tell the writer Dominick Dunne, whom she met at a luncheon in Newport, “I know all about violence and physical abuse because my first husband used to beat me severely when he got drunk. Once, I can remember coming home from a party and walking up our vast marble staircase at the Fifth Avenue house while he was striking me. I thought, If I just gave him one shove down the staircase I would be rid of him forever.” Instead, she paid a call on old Mrs. Brokaw and begged her to permit a divorce. Mrs. Brokaw did, and in 1929 Clare found herself with a settlement of $425,000 plus $30,000 a year for living expenses and her five-year-old daughter, whom she had been forced, in an unusually ugly custody battle, to give up to her former husband for six months each year.

Imagine Clare Boothe Brokaw that autumn of 1929. She was twenty-six years old, released from the confines of a vile Newport marriage, a nervy glamour girl who claimed that Cecil Beaton had pronounced her “drenchingly lovely.” (Beaton had made the remark about someone else, according to Helen Lawrenson, and Clare “just pinched it.”) She was breathtaking, however; she had had her nose fixed, and had lightened her hair since her Newport days, and although her clothes were often too fussy and her figure was imperfect, she radiated an aura of fragility which camouflaged her brazen intentions and seemed to reduce every man she ever met to a stuttering fool. “That poor little kid,” Bernard Baruch used to call her.

As the stock market crashed, Clare moved to a large apartment on East Fifty-second Street and hired for her painter the father of fifteen-year-old Leo Lerman of Brooklyn, who is now editorial adviser of Condé Nast Publications. “My father was determined to show me what a magnificent New York apartment was,” he recalled, “and I can remember driving up on Fifty-second Street in my father’s truck and seeing this exquisite blonde standing on the corner with her dog. I think she was wearing the first Chanel suit I ever saw. It was black with a saw-toothed hem, and with it she had on the most beautiful blouse. When I was introduced to her, however, she was surprisingly cold, almost charmless. I can remember thinking that she had no interest in children at all. There was no sign of her daughter in the apartment.”

At this stage Clare Boothe Brokaw clearly placed immense value on being known for her style. Her dining room, which overlooked the city, Lerman remembered, “was covered with silver tea paper painted over with a panorama of the New York skyline in Matisse colors.” The table, which seated twenty, was smoky mirror glass, reflecting the mural of New York and Clare’s own skyscraper ambitions. Her living room was also very much à la mode, a study in Chinese red, black, and white. It was the era when publisher Condé Nast and editor Frank Crowninshield, with his cane and endless charm, presided over New York, defining who was elegant and who was not through the pages of Vogue and Vanity Fair. Great Ladies of the era were immaculate, impeccable, able to make smart chat at smart clubs. Janet Rhinelander Stewart and Mona Williams were considered the arbiters of style, but Clare probably modeled herself more on the irrepressible Alice Roosevelt Long worth, whose feistiness she certainly must have admired. Clare had the money and nerve to prop up her ambitions; she met Condé Nast at a party and demanded a job. When he said no, she showed up anyway—she just sat down at a desk at Vogue and wrote captions until he relented.

She was quickly moved to Vanity Fair, a man’s world editorially and more her style than the frivolous world of Vogue in 1930. In those days Vanity Fair was quartered in three semi-partitioned rooms between the elevators and the airy, scented suites of Vogue. Clare started off writing captions for the Hall of Fame. One of her first was about Henry Luce, the founder of Time, whom she had loathed on first sight. “He claims that he has no other interest outside of his work, and that his work fills his waking hours,” she wrote. Soon she was promoted to writing short, tart pieces, and with a facility that never left her she wrote dozens of essays about the world of privilege and pretense: “Hollywood Is Not So Bad,” “Portrait of a Fashionable Painter,” “Life Among the Snobs,” “The Great Garbo,” “Talking Up—and Thinking Down,” this last a social climber’s guide to making sparkling conversation. “The cardinal rule to be remembered is that all contemporary conversation must be limned or suggested against a sparkling background of sex . . . the multitudinous shades of which can be a polite pink at the lobster course to a passionate purple at the grapes,” she advised. Wilfrid Sheed, in his biography of Clare Luce, observed that her pieces were remarkable because they depended “entirely on flourishes of wit and style,” as if the essayist were winging it “on virtuosity and press clippings: not a report but a performance.”

The Vanity Fair of that era was an aesthetic and intellectual paradise, ruled over by Crowninshield, whom everyone called “Crowny,” and his managing editor, Donald Freeman (Clare was rumored to have been involved with him too). The magazine was required reading for the smart set, and the best writers and photographers, as well as the nobs they chronicled, would wander in and out of the office all day. Hey wood Broun, John O’Hara (another rumored lover), Robert Sherwood, George Jean Nathan, Edward Steichen, George Arliss (who often arrived carrying a snake), Dorothy Parker, Walter Lippmann, and Elsa Maxwell showed up frequently. It became part of Clare’s legend that each morning before she appeared she would already have been attended to by a hairdresser and manicurist, and, according to her former copy editor, Jeanne Ballot Winham, she “would be wearing a perfect little suit with lots of frills at the collar and cuffs.” Despite Clare’s blond fragility, she was, Winham recalled, “a female who had male ideas.” Helen Lawrenson, who as Helen Brown Norden worked at Vanity Fair then as well as later, once wrote of Clare’s ability to social climb: she would call a star such as Constance Bennett to invite her to a dinner for Maurice Chevalier and then ask Chevalier for Connie Bennett. If Clare invented that well-worn trick, she was rewarded with a constant parade of celebrities, who attended her parties and marveled at her style. On her office desk was a sign that read, “Down to Gehenna or up to the throne, / He travels the fastest who travels alone.” When Donald Freeman was killed in a car accident in 1932, it was Clare Boothe Brokaw, not “Brownie,” as she called the future Helen Lawrenson, who was made the new managing editor of Vanity Fair.

Each morning, Jeanne Winham remembered, “Clare would sit in her office poring over hundreds of news photos that had been taken the day before, analyzing what we should cover.” One of her most popular features was “Ike and Mike—They Look Alike,” the clever pairing of photos in which mismatched people resembled each other, and perhaps the inspiration for Spy magazine’s “Separated at Birth.” As managing editor, Clare Brokaw determined who was renowned and accomplished enough for the magazine’s Hall of Fame or outré enough for the opposite distinction: “We Nominate for Oblivion.” (After Clare left Vanity Fair , she made the 1934 Hall of Fame herself, along with Shirley Temple and Robert Moses.) Even as she helped introduce the newest French painters to America, she realized the obvious—that with a depression raging, Vanity Fair had better forget the froth and turn to politics if it wanted to stay afloat. Once, Condé Nast proposed a satirical cover on “the Forgotten Man.” Clare gave her boss a cold stare, according to one of her biographers, and said, “I don’t see anything even remotely funny about people being hungry.” (Helen Lawrenson later took credit for this remark.) She enjoyed taking jabs at world leaders, and she mercilessly attacked the Roosevelts. F.D.R., for his part, loathed her, and much later at the White House said to an aide within her earshot, “Will you get that woman out of here.” Bernard Baruch took her with him to the Democratic convention of 1932. (“Mr. Baruch, I would like you to teach me all about business policy,” she had said coyly to the elder statesman when she first met him through Condé Nast, and he was charmed for life.) The reporter Arthur Krock called her “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” but despite her money and fame Clare had her insecurities. “The Algonquin crowd was too much for me,” she once said. “I couldn’t compete with them.” Instead, Clare presided at the weekly Vanity Fair lunches in the Graybar Building, where eggs Benedict were catered by the Savarin Restaurant downstairs.

It became clear during the Vanity Fair days that Clare Luce had made a grave miscalculation in her quest to go the distance as a Great Lady: she dismissed most women and relied on men for her ascent. Women quickly learned not to trust her, and she failed to foresee that at the end of every Great Lady’s life, when the powerful husbands are dead, the looks are gone, and sex is but a memory, it is the companionship and goodwill of other women that she needs. Empathy, compassion, and generosity are the strong suits of female friendship, and Clare was not known for an abundance of any of these qualities.

A well-known Helen Lawrenson story had Clare inviting the women at Vanity Fair to one of her parties. “Just wear what you have on at the office,” she said, and then greeted them at the door wearing a dazzling gown of gold lamé. What is less well known is that Lawrenson published that anecdote in Esquire in a famous hatchet job on her former friend just months after Clare had given her $3,000 because she was down-and-out. Clare did have close friends, such as Colleen Moore, the actress, and the socialite Buffy Cobb, although Buffy and Clare once had a falling-out over a man and were not on good terms for ten years.

Clare, of course, was capable of kindnesses: she invited Wilfrid Sheed, at age eighteen, to spend the summer at her home in Connecticut. “Watch out for envy,” she advised him. “I don’t see why anyone would envy a guy with polio,” he told her. “Yes, I guess that might slow them down some. But they’ll find a way,” she said. Often impulsively, she would paint pictures for friends or take them on trips. But female friends to go the distance with eluded Clare, perhaps because few women wanted to be subjected for hours to hearing Clare on the necessity of the China lobby or on her perceptions of U Thant. Yet on first meeting, the uninitiated were always stunned by the quality of her mind.

Clare was known for her sense of humor, and her humor was very Broadway, a bit weary and angry, not fast and bright like Dorothy Parker’s. Clare’s style was cynical: “No good turn goes unpunished”; “Home is where you hang your architect”; “I can’t avoid writing. It’s a sort of nervous tic I have developed since I gave up needlepoint.” When Clare was young, she loved playing good-natured and girlish practical jokes. Once, in the early 1930s, when she was traveling through Europe with a friend from Vanity Fair , a concierge switched her passport with that of a man who was incredibly handsome and well traveled, as Clare discovered when she studied his passport. Unbelievably, the next day Clare found herself sitting next to this suave stranger on a train. “Let me read your palm,” she said, fixing him with her cerulean gaze. “You have been in Morocco, Russia, and Ceylon. You were born in June of 1905 . . . ” The stranger was mesmerized, and Clare never confessed it was a gag. “This led to the most wonderful affair,” she confided to a friend years later. At times her plays could have an equal note of farce. In Kiss the Boys Goodbye , a radical columnist remarks to a maid, “I’ll bet the pool’s full of scum.” The maid replies, “Nawsuh, comrade, you ain’t been in yet.”

In 1935 Clare captivated Henry Luce, who influenced about 40 million readers and viewers—one-third of America—with his Lucepress, consisting of Time, Fortune, and the March of Time newsreels, which interpreted the week’s events for moviegoers all over the globe. She snagged Luce with facility and speed, causing him to leave his lovely wife. Lila, after merely being introduced to him on three public occasions. The last of these was a ball Elsa Maxwell gave for Cole Porter, where Luce took Clare from her escort while his wife was dancing, and walked her through the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria to announce without sentiment or fanfare, and much to her astonishment, that he would marry her as soon as he could obtain a divorce.

She did not say no. Certainly, an often observed maxim about Clare was how much she wanted power. She loved men with “big heads,” she used to say, “the Gary Cooper type.” She was as gorgeous as a courtesan, but her appeal was more “a head thing than a body thing,” as one of her friends said. She now finally had her dream man, and somewhere in the relentless and self-made Harry Luce she must also have seen her secret self. “A woman’s best protection is—the right man,” a character observes in The Women , which Clare wrote the year after she married Harry.

She wrote the first draft in three days, while perched in bed with a blue bow in her hair, waited on by her four maids. Tactlessly, she announced that fact to the world, thereby alienating all those writers who were not quite as facile and certainly not as rich at the height of the Depression. But The Women ran more than six hundred performances, and by 1941 had played in twenty-five countries and ten languages, and made the author $200,000. Her women were “dirty little trollops,” “double-crossing little squirts,” or “Park Avenue pushovers,” and her odd attitude toward her sex permeated this, the most famous of her six plays: “She doesn’t want to be a woman . . . ” “Who does?” “Oh, Mother, what fun is there to be a lady?” “One more piece of motherly advice: Don’t confide in your girl friends!” Her bevy of females spoke their minds, and in all of them there was a bit of Clare—in Crystal, the trashy opportunist; in Mary, the longsuffering wife who opines to her daughter, “These days, darling, ladies do all the things men do. They fly aeroplanes across the ocean, they go into politics and business.” But perhaps Clare’s vulnerabilities were most visible in her martyred Edith, who says, “If a woman’s got any instincts, she feels when her husband’s off the reservation.”

“Harry did not like show business people,” Clare Luce once confided to her biographer Wilfrid Sheed as a means of explaining why she stopped writing for the theater, which had been her true passion. Harry Luce didn’t think much of liberal Democrats either. “You couldn’t be married to Harry and not be a Republican,” Clare told Sheed. And so Clare became a war correspondent—the “Body by Fisher of the campaign,” the columnist Dorothy Thompson sneered—an ardent conservative, a Republican congress woman from Connecticut, a speaker at Republican conventions, and finally the ambassador to Italy, a stint that was notable for her belief that she was being poisoned by paint at the official residence.

As Mrs. Luce, Clare was protected from ever worrying about money or status again. She presided over an immense aerie in Manhattan; Sugar Hill, her twenty-one-room mansion in Ridgefield, Connecticut; and a vast plantation in South Carolina called Mepkin, with thirty black servants who, when Clare was in residence, would float thousands of freshly cut azaleas on the muddy river that fed the Mepkin rice paddies. “Clare did not like to walk in her gardens and see silty water,” a friend said. Cabinet officers and prime ministers found their way to her table. Politicians, military men, and movie stars perpetually courted the Luces, hoping to be rewarded with the cover of Time. With all this splendor, the Luce houses were astonishing for their utter conventionality: lots of glass (even a Steuben collection), pastels, and such coldness, a friend remarked, that it seemed as if the Luces were so consumed with their need for power that cozy domesticity could play no part in their lives. “Gentiles don’t re-cover,” she once remarked to the producer Allan Carr when he noticed the stuffing coming out of one of her chairs. And yet, in her Connecticut house every towel, sheet, and pillowcase was emblazoned with her monogram, CBL, as if new money were running amok in the mansion. Even so, she was a mediocre and often reluctant hostess, sometimes taking to her bed if she didn’t feel like entertaining, although in one amazing breach of taste the dignitary she neglected in this way was Greece’s Princess Sophia. Clare was given to black moods, when she would vanish into her bedroom for days on end, terrifying her houseguests and especially her stepson. Hank Luce. The mood swings could have been a performance, and her lack of graciousness a sign that Clare ultimately felt she no longer had to try so hard—she could now afford to be cavalier. “They”— the supplicants and the climbers—needed her and her husband’s magazines more than she needed them. And for a long time that was true.

In the beginning they were a supreme couple. Harry was “star-struck,” according to a longtime friend, and he loved “displaying Clare.” For her part, Clare was dazzled by Harry, whose originality of thought matched her own. Here at last was not a society drunk but a man of stature. Harry Luce was a journalistic genius who believed so much in his own thoughts that he would publish a four-hundred-page book called The Ideas of Henry Luce . Even better, Harry had the power and the money to protect Clare from her frequent critics. A famous story has Harry querying a lingerie bill for $7,000 and Clare responding, “Well, Harry, are we wealthy or aren’t we?” Even if Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin wits and most theater critics sniped at Clare, as the wife of Time-Life she could be impervious. With Harry behind her, Clare could continue her childhood pattern of never entertaining a moment of selfdoubt. Often she and Harry would stay up until dawn, their heads locked together, talking incessantly about world events. They were an intellectual match; both revered power but lacked time for anyone who wasn’t useful. “Clare would be nice to her inferiors if she could find any,” Dorothy Parker once cracked. But Clare had gone beyond “Dottie” to become Harry’s “idea person,” a friend said. Perhaps to flatter her husband, Clare often spoke in Timespeak, saying things like “No nitwit he.” Harry’s nickname for Clare was Mike. The Luces traveled constantly, and they would play complicated word games for hours. (Q: I know Mr. and Mrs. Pen and their son, a flower. A: John Quill.) Above all, Harry was powerful and serious enough to be a father figure for Clare, and in the early photographs of the Luces, she is radiant.

It is fashionable to say about Clare Luce that she was a liar, but she was really more of a fabulist, who happened to be married to a brilliant propagandist. Like her husband, the son of a Presbyterian missionary based in China, she believed that she understood the notion of truth from the creation, and her obligation, like his, was to advance that truth. Clare was not the kind of woman who was going to criticize her husband for his penchant for twisting journalism to serve his political views. “The weekly fiction magazine,” other reporters would call Luce’s Time —in private, of course. “ Time today is the gratuitous sneer and the open mouth of shocked belief . . . the clasped hands of Presbyterian piety,” a pre-Murdoch New York Post once declared. Harry told Clare, according to one of his biographers, that he could fancy no one who was his superior intellectually. “What about Einstein and John Kieran?” Clare responded archly. (Kieran was a famous sportswriter and the star of the popular radio program Information, Please .) Certainly, like Harry, she was convinced that her version of history was definitive. And she was not shy about discussing her role in world affairs. Her war reportage was equally solipsistic: “I had a talk with handsome, blueeyed, crisp-moustached General Alexander”; “Madame Chiang read me a bitter article that she had written”; “I ate dinner with the Gissimo, Hollington Tong, and Madame.”

Sex went out of the Luce marriage very quickly, according to Clare’s friends. Harry wanted a wife who would stay at home, and he had chosen Clare. Just before they married, according to Henry Luce’s biographer W. A. Swanberg, Daniel Longwell, a Time executive, went to see Clare in Salzburg and took it upon himself to say that the best thing she could do would be to settle down and have lots of babies and stay out of the magazines. Clare reportedly burst into tears and said she couldn’t have any more children. Despite the editor’s warning, Clare for years tried to influence the magazines, but Luce’s top men always fought her, and Luce would not override them. For her part, Clare was extraordinarily condescending to the Time-Life staff, whom she called “Harry’s little people.” She always took credit for thinking up Life .

Later, Clare was even more competitive with Harry, and he didn’t like to be beaten. Everything was a challenge to her; she loved jigsaw puzzles and word games and trained herself to be a superb shot and horsewoman. She often entertained guests by performing an Olympic-quality swan dive off her high board—she was still diving at seventy—and she prided herself on mastering everything she took up, including needlepoint. She would rarely defer to Harry, and at dinners she would regale one end of the table while he held forth at the other, reportedly glaring viciously at her every so often. “Clare and Harry were like circles that intersected but did not overlap,” Hank Luce explained. “Clare did not care a hoot about China, she didn’t understand Presbyterianism, she was ignorant of all the charities and institutions that my father supported.”

Clare Luce was of course far wittier and better company than her husband, which was not exactly guaranteed to do much for his competitive ego or their pleasure in bed. “Harry is serially impotent,” Clare once told a friend, by which she meant that he could not conduct affairs with other women and keep up a sexual pretense with her at the same time. However Presbyterian Harry was, he had his share of worldly desires. At one point he almost left Clare for Lady Jeanne Campbell, Lord Beaverbrook’s daughter, and Clare remarked, “If Harry marries Jeannie and I marry Beaverbrook, then I will be my husband’s grandmother.” Lady Jeanne married Norman Mailer instead. There was at times a feeling among those who knew Clare well that she was relieved to have the sexual pressure lifted, but she once confided to Wilfrid Sheed that this was absolutely not the case. She was tremendously bothered by the lack of intimacy in her marriage, and, worse than that, her female vanity was hurt. “I could tell you an incident that would prove this,” Sheed told me, “but I would not betray the confidence. I believe it should die with her.” When Clare decided to run for Congress in 1942, Harry was delighted. “I am convinced that Harry just wants me out of the house,” she told friends.

Of course, she was aided immensely in her quest for glory by the hype she received from her husband’s magazines, a hype that reached such astonishing proportions that when she left for Europe to cover the war for Life , Dorothy Parker referred to her dispatches as “All Clare on the Western Front.”

‘Did you manage to see your daughter, Ann, as much as you wanted to?” a friend once asked Clare Luce in a taped interview that has never been released. There was a pause as Clare, then an old woman, readied her answer. “No,” she said. “When I started to do war reporting and run for Congress, with Ann’s vacations from boarding school and college, things didn’t always fit together properly.” Mrs. Luce, speaking thirty years after the fact, sounded remarkably dispassionate, but perhaps that too was part of the theatrical persona she had developed to camouflage her emotions about the central tragedy of her life.

It happened in January of 1944. Clare, Ann, and Harry had spent the month of December, as always, at Mepkin, their South Carolina plantation. Mepkin meant family to Clare; it was the first real dirt she had ever owned as a Great Lady, and a symbol that she was now a woman of property. Her friend Bernard Baruch, who owned Hobcaw Barony, the plantation just down the road, had told her about Mepkin’s availability, and when Clare saw the immense acreage in the South Carolina low country for the first time, she said to Harry, “This is the most beautiful property I have ever seen in my life.” And so, in 1936, Harry bought the seven-thousand-acre plantation for his bride. It was truly magnificent: sunlight dappled the live-oak trees with their veils of Spanish moss, and the soft South Carolina air gave the place a haunting beauty, which Clare always spoke of as “melancholy.” Harry and Clare stocked their plantation with quail and other game for their frequent shooting parties and hired the architect Edward Durell Stone to design several modern brick-and-glass houses, which she named Strawberry, Tartleberry, Washington, and Claremont. She used the acquisition of Mepkin as an opportunity for more press, by writing about her new passion for the South in Vogue: “Let me say that I am one of Dixie’s latest enthusiastic converts. . . . Ah, shades of the Ravenels and Lees and Carters, I blush. . . . I can only plead this extenuating circumstance: we bought [Mepkin] from a Northerner who got it from another Northerner and none of us got it terribly cheap.” Later she wrote, “I wasn’t going to build a vast plantation house, because that would have been fraudulent. After all, I was a newcomer.” In the 1930s there were no decent roads to get to Mepkin, which was deep in rural South Carolina— Ku Klux Klan country. Every year the Luces would take the long train ride from New York to Charleston, where a boat would take them up the Carolina coast and onto the Cooper River, which flowed past their property. Ann adored Mepkin, so for Clare the month of December, when Ann was home from boarding school and later Stanford University, was a cherished and special family time.

It had been especially so that Christmas of 1943, while the war was raging. Ann was then a senior at Stanford, and Clare had long since published her book Europe in the Spring , in which she warned America of the danger of Hitler. As Ann had got older, she had grown closer to her mother and, as Hank Luce, her stepbrother, remembered, “just as opinionated.” She was tall and sharp-featured, not as pretty as Clare but attractive and very smart, and Harry Luce adored her. He frequently wrote her letters when she was still at Foxcroft, which she would answer by telling him how she had defended the family honor when her snobby classmates made awful remarks about Time . Clare often felt guilty about her absences from Ann. When she left for Europe as a reporter in 1940, she sent her daughter a long, falsely cheerful, and guilt-ridden letter about leaving her yet again. The letter says much about their relationship, which has been portrayed, perhaps unfairly, as consistently distant. Clare loved her daughter, but she was already a famous magazine editor without a husband when her child was growing up, and then she was Mrs. Luce, a social eminence, a hit play-wright, and a celebrity journalist in an era when rich women routinely parked their children with governesses and in fancy schools.

Annie my darling—You were a grand little trouper about my going and I really loved you better at that moment, for the swell way you took it, more than I ever did perhaps before! . . . Hdya like the new clothes? Do you look adoreable in that little frilled bathing suit? . . . Is the green tea gown with the frills flattering or isn’t it? Please send me lots of news in your first letter. . . . You’d think perhaps that I’d be the one with the news, seeing as how I’m travelling to Europe on a big boat. . . . I send you millions, BUT millions of kisses my sweetheart. Your Mother.

Just after New Year’s of 1944, Ann Brokaw left Mepkin with her mother. Ann was on her way west to go back to Stanford; Clare was heading for Los Angeles to give a speech. The trip was special for both of them. They would have two weeks of traveling and seeing friends together before Ann was due back at school. “We had such a beautiful time together on that trip,” Clare recalled in the last years of her life. “We took a train, and Annie took the upper berth and I took the lower berth, and I can still see her funny little face sticking out. She said to me, ‘Mother, I know the strangest thing. I know all of a sudden that I will never be married.’ And I said to her, ‘What a funny idea! You’re beautiful—of course you’ll be married. Don’t you want to be?’ And she said, ‘Yes, I do. Of course. But I never will be.’

“When we got to San Francisco, it was decided that I would drive her down to Stanford very early. The night before, she came into my room at the Mark Hopkins and said, ‘Mother, you don’t have to drive me down early, because a friend will take me in her car, and you can come down later for lunch.’ ”

And so Clare Boothe Luce slept late, a decision she no doubt regretted bitterly for the rest of her life. “That morning a terrible woman who had been traveling with us as a secretary for me came into my bedroom and began to shake me. ‘Wake up! Wake up! Your daughter’s been killed. Ann is dead!’ She screamed at me that Ann and her friend had been hit by a man who had gone through a light and sideswiped the convertible. She was shaking me by the shoulders, saying Ann had been thrown from the open car and hit a tree and broken her neck. It was so strange. . . . I called up Harry. I remember the first words he said: ‘Not that beautiful girl. Not that beautiful girl. I’ll be right out to take care of everything.’ I had to get away from that terrible secretary who brought me the bad news. . . . I called a friend of mine who was one of the officers I had met in that slit trench in Burma and I said, ‘I need you terribly badly. . . . ’ We just walked and walked through San Francisco. . . . I couldn’t cry, for some odd reason. And when Harry got there, we took Ann back to Mepkin, because we had all had such marvelous times together there. . . . I buried her in the churchyard on the next plantation.”

Ann’s death changed Clare Boothe Luce’s life irrevocably. She blamed herself completely for neglecting her only child, for missing the small moments, and the large ones, of a girl’s life that elude a mother building a stellar career. She began to tell friends that everything she had done as a young woman on the make had been a “complete waste”; her years of brittle cleverness mortified her now. She no doubt believed she was being punished for her precocity with the loss of her child. For months, Harry Luce could not pull her out of her depression. Then, slowly, she emerged from her profound grief and sadness into the predictable next stage of reacting to the loss of Ann: she became filled with rage. “What kind of God would take my child?” she asked a priest. Consumed with anger, Clare at first tried to lose herself in the secular world. Some months after Ann’s death, she entered the most vicious congressional race of her career, lashing out at the ailing Franklin Roosevelt, who was running for a fourth term, as she might have wished to lash out against the fates that had taken her daughter away from her. She announced to the world, as she barnstormed through Connecticut, that Roosevelt was so ill that it was doubtful if he could survive four more years. Even worse, Harry Luce had just acquired a large percentage of the NBC Blue radio network, and Clare used this new acquisition as a forum for her attacks. It was often difficult to feel sympathetic with her, because her anger seemingly knew no bounds. At the 1944 Republican convention, she excoriated F.D.R. by practically accusing him of murdering “G.I. Joe and G.I. Jim,” her term for the dead American soldiers that she said Roosevelt had promised never to send overseas. Coming, as her speech did, just as Hitler’s death camps were being liberated—and after she and Harry Luce had lobbied for years for America’s intervention in Europe—her speech was considered a shocking aberration from a political sharpie. The New Yorker commented that the speech “made it difficult to keep anything on our stomach for twenty-four hours.” However grief-stricken and beautiful Clare Luce was, she was sternly and rightly criticized for this smear. Even the Bridgeport Post , which had always supported her, said that “at times she is positively cruel.”

She was spread too thin to write. Shredding F.D.R. and Eleanor on any dais that she could obtain took up the time she might better have spent at her typewriter. Like her husband, she was a shrill ideologue. When she campaigned for Congress in 1944, Dorothy Parker, Clifton Fadiman, and Tallulah Bank-head showed up to speak out against her—a fact which may have inadvertently ensured her victory.

It is difficult to know exactly when Clare began to turn away from the secular world and toward the comforts of the church. At the end of the war she was in Europe, and perhaps what she saw on that gruesome voyage eroded her personal rage and caused her to seek a spiritual cure. Soon after Buchenwald was liberated, she asked an American general to take her in, and no human being who saw the bodies stacked up there like firewood in 1945 ever got over it. To survive a world gone crazy, Clare, like many others after the war, reached out to a religion that was pure and uncut by modernity. Harry’s Presbyterianism was not sufficient for her; she would need the centuries-old ritual, the imperial purple, the incense, and the fine intellectual ballast of Thomas Aquinas and the church fathers. When she came home to America, she began to take instruction from a friend of hers, a simple Polish priest, but he quickly passed her on to the big gun, Monsignor Fulton Sheen, understanding full well that Clare Luce would need a priest—as she herself later said—“who had seen the rise and fall of empires.”

However pious she could appear, there were strill flashes of the old Clare. When she addressed the Republican National Convention of 1948, Dorothy Kilgallen wrote of her, “Clare was a sight to see as she stood on tiptoe in her black suede flatties and railed against the ‘troubadors of trouble’ and ‘the crooners of catastrophe.’ ” She called the former vice president Henry Wallace “Stalin’s Mortimer Snerd” and Wallace’s notions “globaloney.” But, like Harry, she was terrified of Communists and believed as fervently as he did in the notion of the American Century, the anthem and the flag, Manifest Destiny, Significant Ideas.

Clare had always thought in terms of absolute good and evil, and perhaps the church, with its belief in divine absolution, saved her life. Later she would write in McCall’s that she had become Catholic “in order to rid myself of my burden of sin.” She became convinced that she would meet Ann in the beauty of the afterlife, but, however religious she became, the loss of Ann remained a persistent and tragic wound. In her last years, as she was moving from her retreat in Hawaii back to Washington, her friend Cobey Black discovered her in a studio on the grounds of her Kahala estate sobbing uncontrollably. “Never move at this stage in your life, Cobey,” she told her. “Throwing away a lifetime of possessions will cause you such pain it will undo you.” Nearby, in a trash can, was a small pair of Dutch wooden shoes a servant had thoughtlessly discarded. On the back, in a small, childish hand, was the message “To Mommy, I love you so much, Ann.”

But the real loneliness was yet to come. In the 1950s Harry was still alive, chasing Communists and reigning over his empire, and Clare’s becoming a devout Catholic had the additional and unexpected benefit of releasing her from feeling sexually rejected by him. She now had a psychological loophole to save her female vanity as Harry sought the comforts of other women—a fact which was known to their intimates. Clare had been, after all, a divorced woman when she married Harry, and the church did not recognize her second marriage. If she slept with Harry Luce, as a Catholic convert, she would be committing a mortal sin. And so, she confided to friends, once she became Catholic she and Harry lived together as “brother and sister.” Ironically, with the sexual pressure lifted, the Luce marriage went into high gear. They became terrific allies, Man and Superman, stronger together than they had ever been in the past. Clare was soon back in action, campaigning for Eisenhower, who repaid the compliment by naming her the first woman ambassador to a major country, in this case Italy. “I won’t go without Harry,” she told him, and Harry agreed to being in Rome with her six months a year. Harry soon grew used to his wife affecting a huge cross with every outfit she wore, and he tolerated all the priests who now surrounded her. But neither Clare nor Harry could ever go back to Mepkin with a clear heart, and soon after her conversion Clare turned her beloved plantation over to a community of Trappist monks, who to this day happily give visitors a tour of the Luce azalea beds.

She created an image and she stuck with it, surviving a long life with the same desires which had driven her as a child: she wanted to be taken seriously and she wanted to be a factor in society, even after Harry had retired from Time and the Luces had retreated to Phoenix. A marvelous picture of Clare Luce was taken a few years ago. Her face is serene, sheathed with the tiniest lines, and in one hand is a rose of such perfection Redouté might have created it. A print shawl is wrapped around her shoulders. “That is how Clare should have been as an old lady and never was,” her friend Marvin Liebman said.

Harry Luce surprised everyone who knew him in that he actually retired from Time when he turned the magazine over to his successor, Hedley Donovan, in 1964. Clare was less able to slow down and move into another phase of her life. She continued to call Richard Clurman, who was then one of the top editors of Time , to suggest story ideas. “Clare used to be fascinated by U.F.O.’s, and wanted all kinds of antivivisection stories assigned,” he said. It was impossible for her to sit still. In retirement, Clare campaigned for Barry Goldwater, wrote articles for National Review , and followed the minutiae of politics to such a degree that she could recite the voting records of key Republican senators and congressmen. At night, while Harry read, she would sit with him, surrounded by boxes of glue, Styrofoam, velvet, sequins, and ribbons, making Christmas ornaments of such professionalism that she sold them at Henri Bendel and donated the money to charity. But in Arizona, surrounded by retirees and shopping malls, Clare began to sag in spirit. She lost interest in her looks, stopped wearing makeup and cut her hair in a Buster Brown style. She told friends that the worst thing about getting old was that men “no longer want you.” “Oh, Harry, you are married to an old, old woman,” she once said to her husband, according to Shirley Clurman. “Yes,” Luce replied, “but I am married to a beautiful old woman.”

Clare continued to grow depressed in the desert and longed for the sea. She had fallen in love with Hawaii in 1938, when she had vacationed there with Harry and Ann. She had published her experiences in Vogue , with photos of her with her surfing instructor, Captain Hale, and of Ann “surf-riding” at Waikiki. “Here’s another secret about Hawaii,” she wrote breathlessly, “ how you’ll miss it, miss it all , when three thousand miles of the calm Pacific is between it and you! Hawaii, someone once said, is a state of mind.”

Harry and Clare made elaborate plans to build a Kahala retreat on the beach on fashionable Diamond Head Road, and once again they chose Edward Durell Stone as their designer. It would be the most expensive house ever constructed in Hawaii up to that time, with a dining room that could accommodate thirty, separate studies for Harry and Clare, and several studios on the grounds for servants and guests—all facing the ocean. They no doubt imagined that a stream of journalists and politicians would make this place a necessary stop on the way to the Far East. Additionally, Harry would be much closer to his beloved China. “This was to be their last house,” a friend said, and they were making plans to entertain the local bankers and mayors. “They were so happy,” Cobey Black said. “It was to be a new life.”

But it was not to be. In Phoenix, a few months before they were to move, Harry Luce began to cough violently. He was hospitalized, but he seemed fine, reading his Bible and watching Perry Mason on TV. That night he woke up and screamed, “Oh, Jesus!” Nurses came running, but Luce had died instantly of a coronary occlusion. He died so unexpectedly that he had left no burial instructions with either his son, Hank, or Clare, but Hank remembered that he had once mentioned he would like to be buried at Mepkin next to his adored stepdaughter, Ann. A simple stone marked the site in a grove of live oaks, and the monks carved Clare’s name on it too. After the funeral, the Trappists approached Mrs. Luce. “We have some marble left over that we are planning to use for your tomb,” they told her. “Would you like to see it?” “God, no!” she said.

Curiously, for all their closeness, Harry Luce left Clare “the absolute minimum he could get away with without having the will challenged,” according to a close associate. Clare would receive the interest from a trust he set up for her—and nothing else. Upon Clare’s death, the trust would revert to the Henry Luce Foundation, which was to be administered not by Clare but by Hank. And so, at age sixty-four, Clare Boothe Luce could not properly enjoy the spoils of power, as Brooke Astor, for example, was able to when her husband Vincent willed her control of the Vincent Astor Foundation, which gave her the fun of being not only a Great Lady but also a philanthropist to be courted and admired. Clare became a widow on a fixed income, admittedly an extremely high fixed income. “Why wouldn’t Harry Luce have given his wife that power?” I asked a close friend of hers. “In the end, maybe Harry didn’t like Clare that much,” the friend said. But perhaps the explanation was more complicated: in death, Harry Luce was finally able to score one on Clare. She might be a better shot, a wittier host, a more sought-after speaker, the one chosen as ambassador, but he was after all the boss, and he knew that his son would carry on his tradition in a manner more to his liking.

Even worse, Clare began to lose her legendary ability to enchant the powerful. After Harry’s death, she was once invited to the Laurance Rockefellers’ for dinner. She wanted desperately to be embraced by the Rockefeller world, a friend said, but it didn’t happen. She reportedly carried on all through the evening about politics and money, but her trenchant brittleness just seemed meanspirited, not precocious and clever as it had when she was a fragile young glamour girl. A part of the New York social world closed to her forever. “You were only friends with Clare on her terms,” an acquaintance said.

Clare instructed Edward Durell Stone to redesign her Hawaiian house as a one-person palace. “I don’t want a lot of guests,” she said. Friends moved in to supervise the construction. “You better make sure I can see the sunset from my lanai when I’m drinking my evening martini,” William Buckley said she told them. Clare’s house was “eccentric and nutty,” a friend said, with the same immense dining room and entertaining areas that she and Harry had wanted, but now it had only one small guest bedroom. Clare’s own bedroom was huge, a vast pastel retreat with a study attached, leading out to private beach paths. Her bathroom had a separate beauty-parlor sink for her hairdresser’s daily visit, and six servants changed the dozens of arrangements of tropical flowers each day. Macaws and parakeets flew through the house. Additionally, Clare had three room-size closets, where her dresses hung on rotating electric racks of the sort usually found in dry cleaners’. One entire closet was used to store Louis Vuitton trunks that dated from her days as Mrs. Brokaw. “Clare was a pack rat. She never threw anything away,” a friend said. Even Clare’s living room had a glass-case coffee table with every medal she had ever won displayed inside.

She flourished in Hawaii, swam every day and started wearing makeup again. She ran her Hawaiian household with a discipline that was often daunting to guests. “We would be told that drinks were served on the lanai at 6:30 P.M. sharp and dinner was to be at 7 P.M., because Clare did not want to discommode the servants,” the writer Miriam Ungerer said. In the guest room, there was a row of buttons on the telephone that one could use to call for a laundress, a snack, or even a sleeping pill. Clothes left in a heap on a chair would be returned within an hour, beautifully pressed, with hems magically repaired. Such was Clare’s tyranny that women lunch guests quickly divined that they would be served iced tea while the men received a carafe of white wine. “There was something about Clare that prevented you from ever dreaming of asking if you could have a glass of wine,” Miriam Ungerer said.

But Clare was hardly idle in Honolulu. For a long while she served on political committees such as the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, to which Richard Nixon had appointed her. She prided herself on her role as the grand old lady of the Republican Party; the Washington Post was hurled onto her lawn as soon as it hit Honolulu. Her telephone would ring constantly from Washington—politicians seeking advice and favors. Clare would answer the phone as if she were the housekeeper in order to screen calls: “Hello. Mrs. Luce’s residence. Who is calling Mrs. Luce?” Once, she was on the telephone with Edward Kennedy when her neighbor Allan Carr was over. “When Clare hung up, she came onto the lanai and said, ‘Teddy is a nice boy, but he has so much to learn.’ ” Often she would fly to Washington or New York for meetings and dinners, and when Reagan was elected president she made plans to leave Hawaii behind her and sail into Washington for her final years. “She felt like she was going back in triumph, as if she were playing the final scene from Hello, Dolly! ” Allan Carr said.

Washington, however, would prove a letdown as Clare began to realize that her luster had dimmed. Unlike the distinguished statesman Averell Harriman, whose immense accomplishments and prestige were constantly propped up by his tireless wife, Pamela, Clare had no one in Washington to champion her in old age. She remained an indifferent hostess, and her apartment at the Watergate was spacious but not grand. The special treatment which she had had in Hawaii as a novelty act and the grand reception which had always been accorded her when Luce was alive seemed more difficult to come by in a city which cared more for current leverage than history. Her friends appeared to have entered into a tacit conspiracy to allow Clare the illusion that she was still the young and vibrant dynamo. Inevitably, she would say she was working on a new article, or concept, or speech, and she hired public-relations consultants to introduce her to the “right” people in town. She still cared so much. A new group came into her life, particularly Edwin J. Feulner, the head of the conservative Heritage Foundation, but also columnists, lobbyists, and young White House speech writers. Her loyal friend William Buckley was a great help to her in Washington, reminding the Reagans of her presence, for example, and Mrs. Luce was thrilled when, two months before her eightieth birthday, President Reagan awarded her the Medal of Freedom at an honorary luncheon.

But her last years were not happy; the effort required to keep up the image was too great, and Clare had grown old and tired of camouflage, of pulling on the girdle every night for another meaningless event. Each time she went out to a party, she would take three flowers from her hostess’s table as she was leaving. “One is for Harry, one is for Ann, and one is for my mother,” she would say. Always searching for family, Clare grew especially close to Hank Luce’s second wife, Nancy, whom she had known since Nancy was a schoolgirl in Charleston. Clare always said Nancy reminded her of Ann. Although Clare and Hank had had a distant and cold relationship when Hank was young, after Henry Luce died, Clare went to him and apologized for years of imperious neglect. “The reason I have been cold to you all these years is because I never wanted to compete with your mother for your affections,” she told him—a bit of flattery he was gracious enough to believe. In fact, Clare needed Hank Luce, and she adored his wife. She was devastated to learn, in 1986, that Nancy, who was fifty-six, had incurable cancer. And so Clare Luce in the last years of her life was paradoxically at her most maternal, traveling to New York almost every weekend to take care of her stepson’s wife. Perhaps she reasoned that she would be able to do for Nancy what she had never been able to do for her Ann. Sometimes she would arrive at the shuttle in a wheelchair, telling the friends who accompanied her, “This was what I always dreaded, to be a helpless little old lady.”

Once, in New York, she was strong enough to take a long walk down Madison Avenue and over to her old neighborhood near Beekman Place. She strolled back and walked into Bergdorf Goodman to look for a fine dress, but was horrified to see that a new Geoffrey Beene evening dress now cost $3,000. Despite her huge income, she was appalled by this excess, and, like so many old people reared in poverty who become rich, she was consumed with money worries, as if she were still the destitute Clare Booth eating penny rolls in the boardinghouse. That night she seemed overwhelmingly sad. “This is not my town anymore,” she said. “I feel lost here.”

After Nancy Luce died, Clare slipped into another profound depression, as if she were reliving Ann’s death. Last year she began demonstrating funny symptoms, such as forgetting names and losing her speech. At first her doctors believed she was suffering from “hysterical depression,” a theory supported by most of her remaining friends. Like Harry Luce before her, Clare had driven away many of those. friends with the potential to truly love her.

“I want to give a farewell party,” Clare suddenly told her friends last summer. She was eighty-four years old, and she had learned that her problem was not psychological. She had a brain tumor. Instead of becoming gloomy, she became extraordinarily cheerful, even smiling when the doctor explained the severity of her condition. “She knew she was at the realization of a conclusion,” the Trappist abbot of Mepkin told me. Once, when a friend came to visit her, Mrs. Luce pulled up her bedsheet: “Look at those legs. They used to be so gorgeous!” At the memorial service for Grace Kelly in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, she said to William Buckley, “That is how I would like to go out.” Even at the end, she was a drama queen, a woman of theater, planning her good-bye party at the Watergate. Shirley Clurman counseled her to do it “properly,” with plenty of staff and good food, but Clare had her own ideas. “I want it very simple,” she said, “home-style, with lots of children, and bowls of spaghetti on each table, and maybe Dove Bars for dessert.” Thirty guests were invited, and Clare sat on a low stool for part of the evening so that her guests had to bend down to talk to her. “Good-bye,” she would say weakly, as if she knew that this was the last time she would ever see them.

One month later the abbot of Mepkin drove up through the Blue Ridge Mountains to Washington to see Clare. Although he had not been invited, he knew it was time. Father Christian and Clare had been together on dozens of occasions through the years, as recently as the previous June, when Clare had showed him photographs of Ann in the glory days of Mepkin, on a swing in a grove of Spanish-oak trees, a young girl filled with promise and joy, smiling as the wind caught her hair. “Isn’t she a lovely girl?” Clare had said, reverting to the present tense. And now it was autumn and Father Christian had felt compelled to come to Washington again. “When I arrived, I introduced as tactfully as I could the sacrament of reconciliation and the last rites.” From her bed, “in a beautiful clear voice,” she said to him, “I want everything.” And so the abbot of Mepkin spoke with her of the beatific vision, the celebration of eternal life, in which she would once again be united with Ann. As the abbot left Mrs. Luce’s bedroom, she said to her housekeeper, “I am so happy now. To think that the father came all the way from South Carolina.” Three weeks later, Clare Boothe Luce was dead.

Her funeral at Mepkin was private. A sign went up in front of her former plantation: NO VISITORS. Only about thirty people traveled to South Carolina to mourn the woman of the century. She was buried in the shadow of an immense white-granite cross, in the small grove where she had walked so many times, staring at her daughter’s headstone or off into the distance at the Cooper River, where Irish immigrants had once toiled building a dike for twenty-five cents a day. The Trappists performed the ceremony with their characteristic austerity: no organ, just a simple guitar. Mrs. Luce was laid out not in a bronze coffin but in a varnished pine box.

Clare’s money from Harry reverted to the Luce Foundation, but Hank Luce was thoughtful enough to allow her to make bequests of her choosing. Her list was, William Buckley said, “eccentric and rather charming, perhaps Clare’s way of saying ‘Up yours!’ ” The girl who had never gone to college left fellowships to all the colleges and universities that had honored her with degrees. She left $500,000 to the archconservative Heritage Foundation, presided over by her friend Ed Feulner, but not a cent to Buckley’s National Review, although she had mentioned that she wanted to leave a grant for summer internships for worthy young journalists.

The week after Clare Luce’s death, a memorial service was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but that celebration too seemed curiously anticlimactic. In New York, where celebrity funerals are often great social events, Clare Boothe Luce’s service was crowded but hardly stellar, as if there were a subliminal recognition in the upper reaches that she had outlived her time. Fifth Avenue was not cordoned off to hold back the curious, as it had been for Averell Harriman’s funeral, and neither President Reagan nor Vice President Bush chose to attend. The noontime service on that crisp October day was filled with heavenly-rest seekers who seemed astonished to have wandered into an ordinary mass conducted by Cardinal O’Connor with William Buckley as eulogist and Richard Nixon and Jerome Zip-kin among the mourners. The altar was not banked with Clare’s favorite peach-colored roses, and there were no children to mourn her passing and to carry on. “Clare would have been mortified by this service,” Marvin Liebman said as he walked out of the cathedral into the brilliance of the clear autumn day. “But perhaps her life was a cautionary tale.” Even as he spoke, a few paparazzi who had gathered on East Fiftieth Street were scanning the crowd for notables, but their cameras remained mostly at their sides.

Marie Brenner

Writer-at-large.

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[Pamphlets by and about Clare Boothe Luce].

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