Early in November, at a dinner Clare organized for his return to New York, Luce gave a long, rambling talk about his visit. He spoke hopefully about a new “understanding between the ‘West’ … and the ‘East,’” and about a strengthened relationship between the United States and China. He urged a “restoration of business activity,” and he spoke optimistically about the Kuomintang’s ability to fend off the challenge from the Communists. But to many in his audience, some of them followers of the much different assessments of the plight of China that were coming from the New York Times (and that had come recently from Time itself in Theodore White’s last dispatches), Luce’s optimism seemed unrealistic. “He seemed to be spending his time modifying his sentences to make sure that all of them contributed to the utmost to make the Generalissimo a hero,” Henry Wallace, one of the guests, recorded in his diary. Luce remained undeterred by the skeptics around him. He continued busily to press policy recommendations on officials in Washington. After a meeting with Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, he wrote smugly of the praise he had received from McCloy for a recent Life editorial lauding the progress of Chiang and his regime and encouraging continued American aid. China, he insisted, was now the test of the Truman administration’s ability to prove its strength and competence, “the opportunity for clear, forthright policy … and … for effective leadership at home.”14
The first years after the war were dark ones for Luce—and not just because of the great issues facing the world. It was also a time of turmoil in his marriage. In the aftermath of Ann Brokaw’s death, it was impossible for either Harry or Clare to live their once blithely separate lives, maintaining a public relationship when useful while enjoying romantic escapes with others during their long periods apart. But Harry, who had never wholly reconciled himself to the end of his first marriage, also now found it difficult to end his second, despite its bleakness and despite his continuing relationship with Jean Dalrymple. Clare tried to bury herself in work—her reelection to Congress in 1944 and her busy life in Washington. But politics no longer interested her very much, and she found herself spending more and more time away from it, including an ill-fated stint as an actress in summer stock in Connecticut. Her aide, Albert Morano, took over the running of the office. (A local newspaper, noting Clare’s frequent absences from Washington, ran an acid story under a picture of Morano with a headline “Our Real Congressman,” which he eventually became.) Well before the expiration of her second term, she made it clear that she would not be a candidate again. But her departure from politics, combined with her continuing estrangement from Harry, drove her deeper into depression, what she described as a sense of worthlessness, mixed with a yearning for death. Twice, according to Harry, she attempted suicide—although he did not consider the attempts serious. As always, he was incapable of responding effectively to her obvious calls for attention and comfort. On some days she simply sat alone in a darkened room. On others she tried to resume her once-active social life, but never for very long. She referred to her depression as “Mr. Screwtape” (a demonic figure in a C. S. Lewis novel) with whom she was in continuous struggle.15
Clare’s depression and restlessness led her to a search for spiritual comfort—something else she realized she could not expect from Harry. Having tried and failed to right herself through intensive psychoanalysis, she turned instead to the Catholic Church and, at first unknown to her husband, began considering conversion. (She had previously been religiously inactive, although as a child she had occasionally been thrust into Episcopalian institutions.) She quickly attracted the attention of Monsignor Fulton Sheen, who had a renowned (and militantly conservative) radio program and who later became the archbishop of Rochester, New York. Sheen spent more time teaching Clare the precepts of the church than he had ever spent on any other convert, he later said. He stayed with her in part because she was an intelligent and inquisitive student, but also because he knew that capturing so eminent a woman for the church would enhance his own reputation. On February 16, 1946, before a handful of people (Harry not among them) at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, she was baptized a Catholic. The editors at Time struggled to find a way to record the event—which was receiving wide attention across the country—and finally settled on a small political notice: “Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce’s ‘good and sufficient reason’ for deciding not to run for re-election in Connecticut suddenly became clear: she was received into the Roman Catholic Church.” Billings, who managed the sensitive story, wrote privately that the conversion was “logical for a half-crazy woman who must always be doing the bizarre to attract notice.” Harry, however, did not discourage her (despite his own lifelong commitment to the Presbyterian Church and despite his mother’s appalled reaction to Clare’s repudiation of the “glorious faith which is life to me”). On the contrary, he provided what Clare called the essential “aid and sympathy” that gave her the courage to take this step, and that “in the end … has saved my reason—and probably my life.”16
Clare’s conversion may have reduced her despair and what she called her intermittent “death wish.” But it did not bring her real peace. Looking back over her marriage, she began to see herself as the victim of Harry’s inability to express or even feel genuine love. “I have been cheated of my womanly inheritance, thru no fault of mine,” she wrote Harry in 1947. “The cheaters appear to me as a crew of selfish, cruel … usurpers, of whom you are seen to be the callous leader…. For it is not your desire to love any woman—least of all now, me, with your body, mind, and soul.” But Clare was less concerned about their shared past than about their cloudy future. She came to believe that Harry had supported her conversion because it would allow him to divorce her so that he could marry Jean Dalrymple. Clare wrote him: “You realized (I know now) that [the conversion] meant the end of any real husband and wife relationship…. You believed my conversion would mean your legal freedom…. You assumed a divorce would certainly follow … in a manner which left you on high moral grounds (‘Ah! The Catholic Church broke up our marriage!’).” Jean Dalrymple later recounted Harry’s claim to her that “in [Clare’s] religion, we are no longer married, because in her religion I’m still married to Lila. She cannot live with me as my wife.” But Clare’s lawyers, and the Catholic Church, argued otherwise—and Clare’s friends (most notably Bernard Baruch) urged her to fight Harry on the ground of what he cared about most, Time Inc. She demanded 51 percent of the company’s stock and $4 million. Harry unsurprisingly refused, and the prospect of a divorce—and remarriage—rapidly dimmed. The relationship with Jean sputtered along for a short while longer and then ended.17
For someone as remote and aloof as Harry, he was often surprisingly open about his marital problems in conversations with members of his senior staff, several of whom—eager to reveal their intimacy with Luce—promptly began circulating rumors about his private life, many of them false. Harry, they whispered, was considering suicide. He was being blackmailed by a woman. C. D. Jackson (the principal source of the rumors) claimed to have experienced a scene of “Clare on knees, holding Harry’s legs, big melodramatic tears and crying ‘It’s all because I couldn’t give you a baby that you don’t love me any more.’” (In reality it had been Harry who had not wanted her to have a baby.) Despite the falsehood of most of these rumors, Harry was almost as miserable as Clare. According to Billings, Luce wondered “why he doesn’t get any sympathy from his friends!” Billings was ready with his own answer:
I was pretty depressed, just by the vague outlines of Luce’s mess, and yet I wasn’t really sorry for him because he is so cross and bad mannered and inconsiderate that I like to see him suffer. Yet I hope his private dirt doesn’t splatter on the company and therefore on me…. I’m just tired of being disappointed in people—of having them collapse morally right before me.
And yet Billings also retained a shred of sympathy for his colleague of decades. “Poor lonely soul,” he wrote. “Unable to get any normal wholesome fun out of life and when he
does try, it all goes rotten…. A tragic spectacle!”18
It was not just the legal and financial obstacles that kept Luce in his marriage. His bond with Clare—tattered and bruised as it was—remained significant even in the midst of some of their bitterest battles. Clare, at the end of a long, morose, and angry letter, nevertheless wrote that “I would with the utmost joy die for you this or any other night. For I never loved another, except my Ann, so deeply.” And Harry replied with, for him, remarkable warmth:
I suppose what you are trying to make out … is what my heart says 1) about you and 2) about me…. Well, I can tell you quite simply about the first. You are the incomparable person in my life. I loved you without reservation in the dearest hope of happiness for us both. I failed in my love before and yet I deeply believe I would not fail again, because if there is an “again,” it would be a most precious gift.
But these warm and loving sentiments seemed to be possible only in writing, and when they were apart. Harry was usually reserved and inarticulate in his actual conversations with his wife. And Clare wrote him that “I shall fail miserably, within a week if I permit myself any discussions with you on personal matters…. It is better, then, for quite a while … to confine ourselves to only such matters as interest you or me [except] our … ruined relations.” Their marriage continued—but for the most part because of a chilly loyalty, with occasional clumsy efforts at reconciliation, and with little warmth or intimacy. “With Clare no longer in Washington,” Billings wondered, “what does their private life together here become?” The answer was that they continued to remain apart more often than not; and that when they were together the only real passion came from Clare’s occasional eruptions of anger and misery. “Grover came in,” Billings wrote in the fall of 1947, “to confide that Clare was again on the rampage, and giving Harry hellish trouble.”19
Shortly before the end of World War II, Harry sent Clare a long, sprawling, handwritten letter outlining his hopes for his own future. He wrote of a vague hope to be secretary of state, but dismissed it as unrealistic. Instead “I would like to be and be recognized as a great and good Editor,” and “I would like to achieve that degree of personal integrity which I believe it is possible for me to achieve, but which to date I am far from having achieved.” He said almost nothing in his letter about his relationship with his wife, but the specter of his failed marriages certainly loomed large in his sense that he had not yet achieved a position of real integrity. “I have too much fragmentation in my life. I am not all in one place—or, as it seems all in one piece.” Since childhood he had dreamed of being both a great man and a good man. Now, and not for the first time, he was questioning both. Was his publishing empire helping to better the world as much as he had hoped? Was he conducting his personal life with the integrity and honesty he expected of himself? The answer to both questions, he feared, was no. The magazines, he believed, had yet to reach the importance and influence that Luce believed they could. They had not yet focused clearly enough on the great “human questions” that would define the next generation. And his personal life was, by almost any standard, in ruins: without love, without real friends, without the ability to experience what he called “enjoyment”—a lonely man whose only solace was work, but a man struggling still with the missionary fervor that had shaped his life. Unlike Clare however he could live stoically with his disappointments. His life was not what he had imagined it would be, but it had rewards enough—his fame, his power, and most of all his company and his magazines, always his indispensable refuge from other, less controllable, aspects of his life. “I am happy,” he wrote Clare during a vacation in New Hampshire, “… because of all that life has given me,” and perhaps most of all because of what he considered the opportunity to “be of service to the world,” to help shape “the first global era in history.”20
The magazines, and the company that contained them, had always been his first priority, more important to him than anything else in his adult life, including his marriages. When he began to tire of his life with Lila, he compensated by spending more time at the office. When things were going badly with Clare, which was much of the time, he often became especially engaged in his work. This was nowhere more true than in the dark days of his crisis with Clare and his thwarted romance. The end of the war was, for him, not a period of triumph but a call to new goals. Even before Japan’s surrender in August 1945, Luce was launching what he called a “rethinking” of his magazines—all of them. For Luce, whose day-to-day connection with the magazines had long been intermittent, a major editorial rethinking was a way to reacquaint himself with his publications. To his editors, who were frantically working to publish their magazines every week or month, it was a considerable additional burden—but one they had no choice but to shoulder. As always when Luce tried to reassert his control, he kept everyone busy. He called frequent meetings, sometimes over dinner at his home or in restaurants, sometimes during working hours in the office, and sometimes through telephone calls at any time of the day or night. But most of all, as always, he wrote memos—long, rambling meditations that, as one of his editors later recalled, “landed on the desk with an unwelcome thud.”21
T. S. Matthews, the managing editor of Time, responded to Luce’s invitation to rethink by claiming that the magazine was becoming stale, was running too smoothly, was losing some of its best writers, and was in short “not as good as it should be … [not] as dull as the N.Y. Times; but … dull in a way all its own.” He proposed making the magazine smaller, consolidating its sections, streamlining the staff, and ridding the magazine of “our flinty, our malicious but not altogether insane tone.” Luce, even while pushing the rethinking, was at the same time defensive, especially of Time. “TIME is good enough!” he wrote in response to Matthews. It “needed no deep changes, just some polishing.” Uninterested in Matthews’s large, structural suggestions, he offered instead a list of small tweaks—better headlines, more coverage of Congress and the Supreme Court, and more attention to religion and business. (He also hotly denied that Time’s prose was still “flinty” or “malicious.”) Matthews pointed to the many criticisms of Time as “opinion disguised as fact.” But Luce dismissed such comments. He considered them attacks on the whole “newsmagazine idea.” Time was supposed to be opinionated, he always insisted.22
Even so the self-criticisms continued. Henry A. Grunwald, then a rising editor on the magazine (and years later editor in chief), also wrote a long memo in 1949 on “the things that disturb me about TIME.” They included “the magazine’s weekly sameness,” “signs of threatening shallowness,” “morale (its weakness) and enthusiasm (its lack).” But Luce still continued to defend Time, even three years after he had launched the “rethinking” project, while at the same time pushing (and thus confusing) his editors to make it “more interesting.” Just as Luce had rejected the suggestions of his editors, the editors strongly resisted many of his proposed changes. At one point he suggested a new section to be called “Punditry & Prophesy,” an idea that Billings considered “pretty trashy” and that Luce soon abandoned. Mostly he simply evaluated the existing departments and nudged them to be “better.” His work on Time after the war was, in short, less an effort truly to reshape the magazine than to assert his continued authority, which he often felt he was losing. At one point he wrote Matthews a snide memo about the leftist labor leader Harry Bridges, who Luce insisted was planning
to conquer Hawaii…. He pretty nearly did it in November 1946 and you will recall that Time endeavored to be of the greatest possible assistance to him. This is to state as a matter of policy that, for the purposes of the 1947–48 battle, Time Inc. is 100% in favor of the property owners, capitalists and corporations of Hawaii and 100% against Harry Bridges and anyone who is in any way allied with him…. I hope—but without real hope—that Time Inc. led by Time will give some dynamic reflection on the above stated policy. I realize that is unlikely—if for no other reason than that I have laid it down as cat
egorical policy.
Billings reproached him for his “wild exaggeration” and “bitter sarcasm,” and Luce grudgingly apologized to Matthews. But he remained aggrieved and irritable, continued to argue with Matthews, and finally ordered him to take a year’s leave to think about how to improve the magazine—the penultimate step in Matthews’s movement out of the job, and the company. Matthews was a victim of his assertion of independence, not of poor editing.23
The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century Page 45
