On August 22, 1924, she had given birth to her only child, Ann Clare. Six years of George’s alcoholism, and living in his dreary, moated Fifth Avenue mansion, had propelled Clare to Reno in 1929. Divorced with ample alimony, she had settled with little Ann into a spacious apartment on Manhattan’s East Side.
As Clare Boothe Brokaw, she could have continued life as a socialite, summering in Newport and wintering in Palm Beach. But motherhood did not fulfill her, and her brilliant mind and restless spirit needed more than upper-class diversions. So when she met the magazine owner Condé Nast at a dinner party, she had asked him for a job. Soon she was writing captions and essays at Vogue, and in two years had become managing editor of Nast’s showcase publication, Vanity Fair. She had also published a critically praised book entitled Stuffed Shirts, consisting of linked tales that exposed the vanity, stupidity, hypocrisy, and decadence of the so-called elite.26 By her thirtieth year, Clare had matured into a professional and social sensation, as well as one of the most desirable women in Manhattan.
In 1935, Henry Robinson Luce, admitting to a “coup de foudre,” had left his wife, Lila, and two young sons to marry Clare—just in time to see her first play, Abide With Me, flop on Broadway. A grim melodrama based on her Brokaw nightmare, it gave little foretaste of the acid wit that made The Women, her next play and most enduring accomplishment, one of the hits of the 1936–1937 season. Produced by Max Gordon, with Robert B. Sinclair directing an all-female cast of forty, and Jo Mielziner designing lavish sets, the play was a stinging satire of naive, vacuous, and malicious Park Avenue gossips. It broke Broadway attendance records for a nonmusical, and went on to become a perennial staple in theaters around the world. The Women also reached the screen as a lavish MGM movie, adapted by Anita Loos and directed by George Cukor. Starring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, and Joan Fontaine, it featured 237 outfits by the designer Adrian, and was second only to Gone With the Wind in 1939 box office receipts.27
Well before that, Harry Luce had planned to make use of his wife’s editorial skills on his new, hugely successful picture magazine, Life, for which she had given him many seminal ideas. But editors at Time Inc. had rejected having another Luce on the masthead, not to mention Clare’s domineering feminine presence in the office. Unbowed by this disappointment, and by the death of her mother in a particularly gruesome automobile accident, Clare had followed The Women with two more Broadway successes, both made into movies: Kiss the Boys Goodbye and the anti-Nazi Margin for Error.28
Hitler’s subsequent invasion of Poland had revived Clare’s military interests. In early 1940, she spent several weeks in France and England collecting material for a nonfiction book, Europe in the Spring. It became a bestseller, but the author was so self-referential in her accounts of meetings with refugees and generals that Dorothy Parker sardonically entitled her review “All Clare on the Western Front.”29
Inured after Abide With Me to adverse criticism or sarcasm, Clare had next turned her reporting skills to the Sino-Japanese War. She had toured the Far East on military planes, documenting the blitz on Chungking for Life, befriending a beleaguered Chiang Kai-shek, and undertaking to raise American funds for him. In the Philippines, while researching a profile of General Douglas MacArthur, she had begun an affair with the Supreme Commander’s mysterious intelligence chief, General Charles Willoughby—“the one man that I could have run away with.”30 In his dark, handsome Germanic persona, Willoughby combined her favorite preoccupations: spying, warfare, and romance.
Upon returning stateside, Clare had pulled off one of the biggest scoops in contemporary journalism when her Life cover story on MacArthur appeared on December 7, 1941, the day of Pearl Harbor.
Thirteen months after that lethal attack, Representative Luce knew that she was uniquely qualified to help influence the course of the war. In 1942 alone, she had flown seventy-five thousand miles reporting on the various fronts.31 What other member of Congress had dodged bullets in France, and bombs in Belgium and Indochina? Who else on Capitol Hill had reported on desert battles against Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in North Africa, stood in trenches in Burma on assignment to interview General Joseph Stilwell, or struck up a friendship with Jawaharlal Nehru in India? The widely read articles resulting from these experiences had been a major factor in her election to Congress.
Clare supported American armed entry into both Eastern and Western theaters, but, like President Roosevelt, she was not interested in saving the British Empire. On the contrary, she hoped to see all colonies disbanded after the war. But first she wanted German and Italian Fascism destroyed, Japanese expansionism brought to an end, and international Communism’s threat to democracy curbed. Her impatient nature notwithstanding, she was determined to do all she could to have such injustices redressed during her time in Congress. To these ends, it was imperative that she obtain a seat, if not on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, then on the almost equally prestigious Committee on Military Affairs.
2
GLOBALONEY
Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
While waiting for a committee assignment, Clare was not shy of crossing party lines. She let it be known that she approved of the President’s recent State of the Union speech, in which he had aggressively declared, “The period of our defensive attrition in the Pacific is drawing to a close.… This year we intend to advance.” In Europe, too, “we are going to strike, and strike hard.… The Nazis and Fascists have asked for it—and—they—are—going—to—get—it,” FDR added with trademark forcefulness. Clare called these words “heartening,” and praised his modesty in not taking more credit for last November’s successful North Africa landings.1
Roosevelt was amused by a poem in the newspaper PM that mocked her for having once accused him of fighting a “soft war.”
O Lovely Luce—O Comely Clare!
Do you remember—way back there—
Holding your lacquered nails aloft,
“The war we fight,” you said, “is soft.”
And while the vote hung in the balance
You turned the trick with all your talents.
You were the keystone brave and buoyant.
By Lucifer, were you clarevoyant!2
The President sent the verses to John W. McCormack, the House majority leader, with a note asking, “Can’t you find a freshman Congressman on our side who will wait his chance until the first time Clare talks and then quote this poem?”3
Clare bided her time before voicing any opinions in Congress, but continued to speak her mind to reporters. When Eleanor Roosevelt suggested that the voting age for servicemen be lowered to eighteen, so that those willing to die for their country should have a say in governing it, Clare disagreed. “If boys in uniform are allowed to vote, boys out of uniform … must be allowed to vote. So must girls of eighteen.”4
On Tuesday, January 12, she spoke at a sold-out Women’s National Press Club dinner for new Congresswomen. Supersvelte in a black silk suit and flowered scarf, she challenged the view of some of her colleagues that after the war there would be greater economic opportunities for the six million American women who now held jobs. Female factory workers in her constituency had told her that given a choice, they would prefer to return to homemaking. The reason for this preference was “biological,” she said. Women had an innate need to procreate and be nurturers.5
Evidently, Clare Boothe Luce was not a strict feminist. She had succeeded in a man’s world, and believed that women were entitled to careers if they wanted them. But she was also an accomplished seductress, having married once, if not twice, for money, social position, and power.
In the question period that followed, someone asked Clare if she intended to write any more plays. She jokingly said that it reminded her of the boy who put twelve eggs under a hen, explaining to his father, “I just wanted to see the old fool spread herself.”
Clare’s saving grace w
as her talent to amuse, sweetening her frequent flights of pomposity and startling frankness. Another reporter had to admit he had lost his earlier prejudice toward her. “From the serious to the humorous, with a most refreshing vocabulary which had us in stitches … it was evident that she had made good and knew it. She has a warm smile … the effect is irresistible.”6
The following day, Clare learned that she would not be appointed to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. This was hardly a surprise, because two senior Republican women—Rogers of Massachusetts and Bolton of Ohio—were already on it. She focused her hopes on the all-male Committee on Military Affairs. Since her teens, she had been fascinated with things military, naval, and aeronautical.
On Thursday, January 14, Clare was told that she was indeed being considered for the military panel. This was exciting news to share with her husband, who took the midnight train to Washington to spend his first weekend with her since the election.
Henry (“Harry”) Luce at age forty-four was an imposing presence in his custom-tailored suit and gray Chesterfield overcoat with velvet collar. But he wore his fine clothes awkwardly, as if Clare had coaxed him into them. This was often the case. Among his peers, he appeared engaged, informed, and charming, a perfect escort for his wife in the political circles in which she now moved.7
Henry and Clare Luce, 1943 (illustration credit 2.1)
He left behind him in New York a number of gossipy, protective senior employees who had long watched Clare’s progress with skeptical interest, and were wondering if they could be unbiased in covering her in public office. Chief among these “Time Incers” was John Billings, who had been managing editor of Life since its inception in the mid-1930s. A wellborn Southerner, Billings was quiet and deferential to Harry, but he was a shrewd observer and an indefatigable, acerbic diarist. He noted that Clare was getting a lot of attention in Washington, not all of it favorable. “I’m glad for I really don’t like her.”8
For more than seven years, Harry had faced the question of how extensively his wife’s activities should be reported in his magazines, aside from how much space they should give to her writings. He felt that it was appropriate to review her plays, even unfavorably, if warranted, and that her war articles should receive the same ruthless editing as anybody else’s. During her recent election campaign, he had made sure that she was not covered more extensively than other contestants. In fact, Clare could, and did, argue that she got less newsprint than she deserved, considering how celebrated she had become on Broadway. Now, with Time selling more than a million copies a week, and Life more than three million, Harry faced a delicate challenge in doing justice to Representative Luce while avoiding accusations of neglect or nepotism.
Although always proud of Clare’s successes, he believed that her canny political instincts and oratorical skills, combined with beauty and a mind able to penetrate to the core of the most complex issues, would now take her to greater heights. He had been astounded by her stamina on Fairfield County’s grueling campaign trail. It had included early-morning visits to humid, smelly hat factories in Danbury, shouted conversations in deafening munition plants in Bridgeport, and trudges through the muddy barnyards of Trumbull farmers. She had even gone to a Norfolk tire mill at three o’clock one morning to discuss labor problems with carbon-dusty rubber puddlers, and was probably the only Connecticut candidate to slide down a firehouse pole to solicit votes.9
Harry had earlier marveled at his wife’s physical bravery in war zones, and relished her fearlessness in attacking not only populist Democrats, but the Old Guard snobs of the GOP. Speaking at a dinner in her honor given by bejeweled supporters, she said, “One of the troubles with the Republican party is that it contains too many prehistoric millionaires who wear too many orchids.”10
Henry Luce aspired to politics himself, but lacked one essential quality: a penchant for pressing the flesh. A shy, sometime stutterer, he was so in awe of Clare’s ease in talking with all kinds of people, from the most brilliant scientist to the humblest manual worker, that he admitted wanting to “bow inwardly with admiration.”11 He hoped that by having Clare in Congress, he could go beyond his influence as a media tycoon, and directly affect legislation advancing his own ideological goals. The most passionate of these—a cause deriving directly from his missionary childhood in the Far East—was that the United States should support Chiang Kai-shek in freeing China, first from its Japanese conquerers, and then from Mao Tse-tung’s Communist insurgency.
Phenomenally successful though Harry was in his own right, his awe of Clare had damaged their once rapturous marital relationship. She frequently absented herself from him in the hope that apartness might revive his libido. For years it had been flagging, at least vis-à-vis her. His frankly admitted problem was that having put her on a pedestal, he felt it was sacrilegious—at least according to his Presbyterian scruples—to have sex with someone so sanctified. Bewildered by this, Clare had spent months in Europe in 1940, researching a book on the Phony War, hoping for a cable of sexual yearning from her husband. But she had waited fruitlessly, right up to the eve of the German army’s arrival in Paris. Her dedication to Europe in the Spring read, “To HRL, who understood why I wanted to go.”12
The problem went far back. After a mere two years of marriage, both Luces had “wandered off the reservation,” as a character in The Women put it. Clare hankered for the intensity of her teenage romance with Julian Simpson, an English army officer, and was nostalgic about her later affair with Bernard Baruch, the famous Wall Street speculator and supporter of FDR. She had enjoyed a few European assignations with Joseph P. Kennedy (whose son John occasionally dated her daughter), and was in the second year—mainly epistolary now—of her romance with General Charles Willoughby.
Harry’s infrequent extramarital exploits tended to be more fraught. As a churchgoer, he felt equal guilt about one-night or long-term liaisons. Although tall and attractive to many women, he had begun in his forty-fifth year to show the effects of heavy smoking, steady drinking, and indifference to food and exercise. His skin sagged in places, and his hair was receding.
Confirmation of Clare’s election to the Committee on Military Affairs came on Monday, January 18. She told her home newspaper, Greenwich Time, that she was “well satisfied” to be the only woman among its thirty members.13
General Charles Willoughby on duty in the Pacific, c. 1943 (illustration credit 2.2)
But that feeling dwindled as the reality of the committee’s typical agenda began to dawn on her. Its discussions tended to be about infrastructure, inefficiency, and profligate spending, rather than far-flung battles. She found herself having to deal with such dry subjects as irregularities in the construction of airfields by U.S. Army engineers, delays in expanding a Florida hospital, wasteful operations in a General Electric supercharger plant, and a report of fifty-five cases of gonorrhea in a Missouri barracks.14
The Committee on Military Affairs could, at least, divert itself in late January by monitoring President Roosevelt’s two-week trip to Casablanca for a conference with Winston Churchill. The main purpose of this meeting (prompted by Josef Stalin’s urgent request for the opening of a second Western Front to relieve pressure on his defenses in the East) was to plot when, where, and how Allied forces might cross the English Channel and invade the European mainland. Although that day was obviously far off, FDR and Churchill also wanted to discuss post-invasion strategy. The President had a dramatic proposal: that the Axis must submit to no less than “unconditional surrender.” Churchill was likely to agree, but the danger was that if this policy became known, plotters within the Reich would see no ultimate advantage in overthrowing Hitler, thus prolonging the war.15
Clare’s office was already receiving some 150 letters a day, a record for a House newcomer. She told her assistants to answer mail from servicemen and constituents first. About a third of the letters came from women, and most were friendly, asking for autographs, photographs, or endorsements. Others offere
d legislative suggestions. Lecture invitations came from groups hoping to enjoy her much-publicized candor and humor.
Her impact on everyday Washington life was evident all over town. Hairdressers advertised styles called “the Clarette” or “the Lucian” or “the Clare Bo.” One correspondent reported that visitors to the nation’s capital wanted to see three things: “The Washington Monument, The Lincoln Memorial, and Clare Boothe Luce.”16
Social mavens predicted that “Mrs. Henry R. Luce” would buy or rent a large house in a fashionable neighborhood, in order to entertain lavishly. But Clare already had a Georgian-style mansion on fifty-nine acres in Greenwich, Connecticut, and a spacious suite at the Waldorf Towers on Park Avenue in New York City. Determined to focus on work while she was in Washington, she chose to remain in her five-room, $750-a-month, air-conditioned apartment in the residential annex of the Wardman Park Hotel on Woodley Road, N.W.
She quickly established a daily routine. Assisted by a maid—her only domestic luxury, due to the city’s lack of manpower—she took a foamy bath, sprayed herself with pine scent bought during her California trip, checked her nail polish for chips, and pinned a rose to her lapel, its stem in a tiny vial of water. After breakfast, she was chauffeured to Capitol Hill, until she decided to forgo that convenience, in the interests of economy and gas rationing, and took a taxi instead. She was generally at her office by nine.
Price of Fame Page 2
