by Gore Vidal
At that last lunch, Clare mentioned the one story that most enraged her. A zealous convert to Catholicism, she is supposed to have been observed in the Vatican, haranguing the Pope, who kept saying, over and over again, ever more desperately, “But, Madam, I am Catholic.”
“The story was invented by . . .” She named a name I’ve forgotten. “It’s not like me at all, anyway.” But, of course, it was. Once, when we were both going at each other in a political quarrel, she said, grimly, “I see you have a didactic side, too.”
“Anyway, I had a talk with Punch Sulzberger”—the Times’ publisher. “And I said I know that that story is going to be the lead in my obituary and it’s absolutely untrue and you must do something about it.”
“Did he?” The Times’ little treacheries were almost in a class with Harry’s own Time magazine.
“Well, you’ll know before I will.” I did, in 1987. The story was repeated widely.
After Eleanor Roosevelt, Clare was easily the most hated woman of her time—she was too beautiful, too successful in the theater, in politics, in marriage. Feminism as we now know it was a minor eccentricity in those days. Otherwise, she might have been admired as what she was, a very tough woman who had so perfectly made it in a man’s world. But then, as one thinks of Hillary Clinton, perhaps not—of course, Hillary-haters are mostly men, and the men of long ago were generally fetched by Clare. It was the women who wanted to do her in. She had her revenge.
Clare had a savage tongue as well as the dangerous gift of phrase. In her ascent from poverty and from a life on the wrong side of just about every track the country had to offer, she educated herself, and became rich through a society marriage to one George Brokaw and then the union with Luce. She also maintained a long relationship with Bernard Baruch, thirty-two years her senior, with whom she had, she records sadly in her diary, “half-sex.” “He gave her millions,” my mother would say with wonder. But Clare would say that he only invested money for her, and, as a popular playwright, she earned a great deal.
With Clare’s second Broadway play, she let the girls have it. The Women, with its all-female cast, was a great success in the theater and on the screen. The women struck back as best they could: Clare could not have written the play all by herself; it was actually the work of George Kaufman and Moss Hart, together or separately. Finally, Kaufman made a public statement: If he had written The Women, “why should I sign it Clare Boothe?” No one seems to have had any more than an editorial hand in a comedy whose bubbling misogyny was Clare at her purest.
But, from that moment on, practically everything she wrote was supposedly the work of a man, including her wartime reportage for Life. Rather like Hillary Clinton, today, Clare could not be allowed to win.
At lunch: “Do you realize that because of Harry I was never on the cover of Time?”
“He kept you off?”
“No, they kept me off. The editors.” I should note that for almost a half century to appear on the cover of Time meant that its subject was a permanent, for good or ill, member of the world’s grandest vanity fair.
Even Dawn Powell, our best mid-century novelist, had it in for Clare. Dawn herself had enjoyed almost no success from her novels and plays; then along comes what she regards as a dilettante beauty who takes Broadway—and all the other ways save the strait and narrow—by the proverbial storm. Dawn parodies the Luces as Julian and Amanda in A Time to Be Born. Like everyone else, Dawn takes it for granted that Amanda doesn’t bother to do her own writing. Amanda believes that “the tragedy of the Attic poets, Keats, Shelley, Burns, was not that they died young but that they were obliged by poverty to do all their own writing.”
Dawn also reflects another generally held theory about Clare: that a woman so attractive to men must be, at heart, cold and calculating and . . . yes, the ultimate putdown in sexist times, frigid. “She knew,” writes Dawn, “exactly what she wanted from life, which was, in a word, everything. . . . She had a genuine distaste for sexual intimacy . . . but there were so many things to be gained by trading on sex and she thought so little of the process that she itched to use it as currency once again.”
Morris has read Clare’s diaries; and candid they are. Apparently, she liked sex very much. At eighteen she fell in love with a young Army lieutenant who then married an older woman with money, proving to Clare that man is “only a sublimated anthropoid ape.” But the iron—or should one say the bright gold?—had entered her soul. “I’ll marry for money,” she confided to a girlfriend. “Lots of it. . . . Damned if I’ll ever love any mere man. Money! I need it and the power it brings, and someday you shall hear my name spoken of as famous.” This was fifteen years before Scarlett O’Hara sprang, full-bosomed, from the pages of Gone With the Wind.
In 1922, Clare’s mother and Clare were taken to Europe by her stepfather, Dr. Austin. In the shabby streets of defeated Berlin, Clare had a vastation. Newspapers were sailing along the sidewalk. One wrapped itself around her leg, she told me in 1970 over lunch at her beachside pleasure dome in Hawaii. “My mother had a sententious side to her—which I’ve inherited, they tell me.” Clare gave me a quick look to cut me off at the pass. “Anyway, when she saw that newspaper she said, ‘This is the sort of thing that happens when a society grows decadent and no longer keeps itself up.’ I was deeply impressed. Now you ask me why I gave up New York. Well, one day not long after Harry died, I came out of the Sherry Netherland and a newspaper suddenly wrapped itself around my leg. I heard my mother’s voice, saw a street even worse than that dusty Berlin street, realized the Weimar Republic had arrived in New York, and so I went off to live in Hawaii, happily beneath the American flag.”
In youth, Clare tried silent-movie acting, without success. Later she worked briefly for that passionate women’s-rights activist Alva Vanderbilt Belmont. But Clare was not made for distributing pamphlets. She was sexually experienced by the time she married money in the form of George Brokaw, who was an alcoholic then in his mid-forties. Although Clare claimed to have brought a virginal body to the bridal suite at the Plaza Hotel, she also claimed that she wanted to jump out the window on their wedding night. When her new husband didn’t simply pass out, the mustard remained largely uncut, or, as she later put it, with hardly a virginal tentativeness, “The Bill of Fare is neither varied nor sufficient.” Eventually, a daughter was born, followed by a friendly divorce.
The restless Mrs. Brokaw wanted a job at Vogue. When nothing seemed available, she simply arrived one day, took over a desk, and soon was put to work writing picture captions. No one ever actually hired her. But everyone was delighted that she was there. She was now twenty-six. What next on the Bill of Fare? Why not Fame? As she wrote in her school yearbook, “What rage for fame attends both great and small.” This aphorism is perhaps not airtight—the small are too busy trying to survive ever to daydream of a ride in triumph through the streets of Persepolis.
From Vogue she moved to Condé Nast’s Vanity Fair, where she wrote a great deal of lively copy. Condé Nast’s wife, Leslie, was a daughter of Bilitis, in those days the most secretive cult in the United States. Clare, ever experimental, allowed Leslie to seduce her, commenting afterward on the prodigious length and sharpness of Leslie’s fingernails. But the central affair in Clare’s life was with Donald Freeman, a young, brilliant, unbeautiful editor who taught her a good deal about writing. When Freeman killed himself in a car crash, Clare was consoled by the fact that she was his successor as managing editor of Vanity Fair; she also got her hands on his journals, and kept them. In his last letter to her he wrote, “It is only human nature that I should be discarded—what with . . . men of affairs like Mr. Baruch sighing for your time. . . . It has been only in the past few days that the cloud of my three years’ love for you has been gradually lifting from the brain of one who has almost been a madman for the whole time.” She was now twenty-nine.
Two years later, at a dinner, Fame arrived in the shape of “a tall sandy-haired man whose copious eyebrows arch
ed over narrow eyes.” Apparently, she teased Henry R. Luce about the flaws in his latest magazine, Fortune, and suggested he publish a picture magazine. (She had given Condé Nast the same advice, but he lacked the money.) Luce did his usual social number, firing dozens of questions at her, like a prosecuting attorney; then he looked at his watch, said he was late, left. Clare thought him the rudest man she had ever met and was, of course, hooked.
They next met at an Elsa Maxwell ball at the Waldorf-Astoria. After a drink together, he said that he had something he wanted to tell her. They found as private a spot as they could. Clare expected a job offer. Instead she had a Luce offer: “The French call it coup de foudre. I know you are the one woman in my life.” Clare was astonished: she had been in his life, thus far, less than an hour. Luce also said, according to Morris, that “whether or not romance developed between them . . . he had decided to end his marriage of eleven years. For at least the last two, he had felt a need for a different kind of companionship. His wife did not share his interests.” Six years later, I heard him make the exact same speech to my mother—only by then Clare was the wife.
In Miami, while the foudre was still electrifying him, they became as one sexually; and this proved to be an ominous failure. Although no man can become a daughter of Bilitis, Morris tells us that “in old age, Clare painfully recalled Harry’s strong hands and long fingers. ‘If he touched you it was like he was tearing you apart. I suppose today I would have given him a handbook of sex, but in those days women were expected to keep quiet.’ ” I must say it is hard to imagine Clare not lecturing him on the spot, but then her clumsy partner meant not only money but Fame. He was, periodically, impotent with Clare, unlike his first wife, with whom “he simply did it and then rolled over and thought about Time.”
Whatever their incompatibilities, each needed the idea of the other. What failed them in the sack sustained them on the page, and they wrote each other interesting analyses of themselves. Clare: “A badly burnt child I am so afraid of happiness, that let a perfect moment begin to unfold like a rose in my hands, and I instantly try to crush it.” Harry: “Happiness, I thought until recently, had nothing whatever to do with my life. . . . Now I think otherwise. . . . There are those who can always hear, beneath the rumble of traffic, the stars singing.” One must not forget that he was the indulgent employer of the dread poet Archibald MacLeish. Clare: “Most everyone that knew me casually preferred to think of me as a cold, remote, shrewd and ambitious woman: I have always contrived to behave so in their company.” Others thought her a sexpot, but, “until I met you I never knew anyone who challenged enough of the real heart and mind of me, to interrupt me in my emotional juggling.” Thus Lioness to Lion.
The first Mrs. Luce took Harry to the cleaners; as a result, he became a resident of Connecticut, where there was no state income tax. Clare returned to playwriting, but, as Morris points out, “reluctant to be totally honest about her experiences, she was at the same time so self-obsessed that she was unable to write well about anyone or anything else.” Two days after her play Abide with Me failed on Broadway, she married Luce. Time’s play reviewer was in a bind. He drafted a favorable review. Luce, in his role as God, said, “Show isn’t that good. Write what you thought.” He did. Later she beat Harry at golf; he never played with her again. Also, her attempts to be helpful with the magazines were sternly rebuffed, particularly when she expected to have a hand in what she always claimed was her original idea, a photo magazine that became the highly popular Life. Soon Lion was more or less permanently impotent with Lioness, not perhaps the best situation for a man of a romantic if narrow temperament to find himself in. But they had by then been more or less permanently incorporated, with him as the highly potent senior partner. With no role to play in his magazines, Clare was obliged to make her own fame, in what was then, after movie stardom, the showiest place of all, Broadway.
In three days in 1936 Clare wrote the first draft of The Women, par for the Noel Coward course, to which she brought her . . . what is it? a mashie? Anyway, commercially the play was a hole in one, and the all-star film that George Cukor made of it still amuses audiences. At the time, this hymn to misogyny rather shocked the gentlemen while, perversely, the ladies were delighted with Clare’s witty send-ups of other ladies. Meanwhile, 1936 was also a year of triumph for Harry. Life appeared, and was a success. Harry was now having Presidential daydreams. Then The New Yorker’s Wolcott Gibbs did a Profile of him, in which Time’s awful phony Homeric style was parodied: “Prone he to wave aside pleasures . . . argues still that ‘names make news,’ that he would not hesitate to print a scandal involving his best friend”—or get off with his wife. When Harry complained to The New Yorker’s editor, Harold Ross, he was told that the Luce periodicals had a reputation for “crassness in description, for cruelty and scandal-mongering and insult.” That was the upside. As for Harry himself, he was held to be “mean,” even “scurrilous” at times, and was “in a hell of a position to ask anything.” What price glory?
In 1938, the Luces decided to check out Hitler’s Germany. It was Harry who missed the point, and Clare, possibly because of her long affair with Baruch and her mother’s affair with Jacobs, who quickly saw the dangerous rise in anti-Semitism. (Incidentally, it is now the custom to establish that anyone worthy of an “intimate” biography must be revealed not only as a homosexual but as an anti-Semite: plainly the two most dreadful “preferences” of all. Clare did have at least one fling with a daughter of Bilitis, but she was no anti-Semite.) Where Harry noted, approvingly, that Hitler had “suspended the class system,” whatever that meant, Clare saw a close analogy between the Nazis and our own Ku Klux Klan: “Indeed the swastika never burns more brightly or savagely in the Schwarzwald than the Fiery Cross of the Klan once burned in the bayous and cypress swamps of Dixie.” This was from the introduction to her next Broadway hit, Kiss the Boys Good-Bye, set in the South. Meanwhile, her friend Baruch was trying to get Roosevelt to rearm. “The nation is not ready,” said the President, who, himself, was.
Like so many successful commercialites, Clare had immortal longings. Would she—could she—reach Shaw’s level? George Bernard, not Irwin (who had rebuffed her advances). Eleanor Roosevelt wrote that Miss Boothe might indeed be a first-class playwright, “when the bitterness of the experiences which she has evidently had are completely out of her system.” Clare thanked her for the kind thought but said that the cold “stupidity” of this world had done her in, she feared, as a potential builder of another, “sweeter place.”
Back to Europe in the crucial year 1939. Clare flirted with Gertrude Stein. Then, in two weeks, she wrote her anti-Nazi play, Margin for Error, a somewhat confused melodrama with quite a few sharp, funny lines: “The Third Reich allows no margin for error.”
Clare was now turning more and more political. In September 1939, she marched into the office of Life’s editor and said that she wanted to be a war correspondent. She was no longer just the boss’s interfering wife. She was a famous writer and, as such, she was hired, though Harry worried about their being separated for so long, even though they had not been getting on. So, as was her habit, Clare wrote him a position paper, noting that for him “to conjure up some dominant discontent or misery out of such good fortune as ours is positively wanton.” Then:
There are times when a man or woman does better to act with sense than to react with sensibility. This seems to me to be one of them. . . . I would like to show more sympathy to you in this matter, but . . . if I did, I should not be acting with as much love as I feel for you. You see, I not only love you . . . but I like you, and admire you far more than you think. Indeed, you always seem to be afraid that if I didn’t love you blindly, I would dislike you openly. That is not the case. . . . Now darling, to bed. I do not like to go to bed without you. But somehow, lately, even when I’m with you, I seem to go to bed without you.
Had Broadway been less sternly lowbrow, Clare might have been our Congreve.
Har
ry’s response was hardly in the same class. In short, he said he feared Time’s winged wastebasket. By February 1940, they were discussing divorce. Meanwhile, war correspondent Clare was having a splendid time in Europe. Lecherous Ambassador to Britain Joe Kennedy had designs on her as well as a good deal of pro-Nazi propaganda to pour into her ear. Clare was at the Ritz Hotel in Paris when the Germans swept through France. She wanted to stay until the very end, but on May 30th the concierge told her that she must leave the now deserted hotel, because “the Germans are coming.” When Clare asked him how he knew, he said, “Because they have reservations.”
Clare’s reports were well written and became a successful book, Europe in the Spring. Dorothy Parker’s review was headed “All Clare on the Western Front.” “While it is never said,” Parker notes, “that the teller is the bravest of all those present, it comes through.”
