Price of Fame

by Sylvia Jukes Morris

  By 1943, only half of the women in Congress were willing to join Clare in supporting another submission. Representative Louis Ludlow of Indiana reintroduced the amendment on January 6, 1943. Not one of his forty-two co-sponsors was female. This might have been avoided had an invitation from the Connecticut State Committee of the NWP, asking Clare to be co-sponsor, been answered promptly when she first arrived in Washington. But it had lain neglected in her mound of mail, and the group had assumed she was indifferent.7

  The Bridgeport Herald facetiously reported that the failure of “Blondilocks” to introduce the ERA bill had disappointed NWP supporters in her home state.8 To make amends, Clare announced her full backing for passage of the bill. But she did not think the feminist issue as important as winning the war, and keeping the nation secure and solvent.9

  Custom required the President to invite freshmen members of Congress to an informal reception at the White House. Franklin Roosevelt saw it as an opportunity, under the guise of a casual exchange of views, to probe each new arrival for collaborative potential—or the reverse. Clare, for her part, seized on it as an opportunity for a serious discussion with the Chief Executive. To let FDR know what was on her mind in advance, she accepted his invitation in a letter, releasing a copy to the press.10 It brazenly questioned his handling of the war and criticized his attempts to increase the powers of the executive branch.

  She wrote that she and her Republican colleagues were worried that food shortages might arise in the United States because of the dual demands of the military and farm programs. Meanwhile, the inability of the War Manpower Commission to figure out how many workers were needed for specific programs, and how to get them, “may lead to a calamitous cramping of war industry.” Not mincing her words, she informed Roosevelt that Congress was feeling “the people’s long-delayed fury against the swollen and wasteful Washington bureaucracies that have burgeoned through the years.” Finally, she said that the GOP hoped to win power soon, because it had confidence in “the political validity and human worth of historical Republicanism.”11

  This was hardly the best way to ingratiate herself with FDR, and a prompt reprimand came from his press secretary, Steve Early. The publication of her letter, Early wrote, had created a “widespread” misapprehension that the upcoming reception would be substantive. To spare her “any possible disappointment,” he stressed that she should not expect a purely social evening to “hold promise of political discussions.”12

  Clare arrived at the White House on Wednesday, March 10, ten minutes late. This time her tardy entrance violated executive protocol. Consequently, she did not feel welcome. In the State Dining Room, she found small tables laden with mostly masculine fare: beer, cheese, crackers, cigars, and cigarettes. There was no opportunity for an extended conversation with the wheelchair-bound President, since leaders of the House and Senate were introducing their 117 new members to him party by party, in groups of 20 or 30. Roosevelt did most of the talking, telling anecdotes of his Casablanca trip, and apologizing for not being routinely available to congressional visitors now that he was so busy with war reports and conferences. He was especially effusive with Winifred Stanley, holding her hand as he chatted, and addressing only a cool “Good evening” to Clare. When she left, he patronizingly called out, “How’s Henry?”13

  The President’s peremptory treatment added to Clare’s distaste for political life. She shared her malaise with General Willoughby, who was some ten thousand miles away in Australia, planning MacArthur’s return to the Philippines.

  I hate Washington, I don’t like being in Congress … and the bleak way it circumscribes my life. After only two short months of it I know that power and office are two things I don’t want … yet I’ll go through it cheerfully for the next two years, if only I could feel anything could be accomplished on the plus side for either the war, or the peace.… Frankly my health is wretched. I am abominably tired, and feel like chucking it all and going off to a sandy beach somewhere.14

  Years of listening to Bernard Baruch notwithstanding, economic policy was not Clare’s strongpoint. She found herself confused by the reaction of Congress and business to the President’s 1943 budget proposals. With war costs approaching $7 billion a month, and the national debt near $150 billion, it did not surprise her that Roosevelt called for $16 billion in extra taxes and/or savings. Her puzzlement grew when, of all people, the treasurer of Macy’s, Beardsley Ruml, proposed that the government reduce the deficit by forgiving all or part of individual taxes for 1942. This was presumably in the hope that Americans would use their gains to invest in industry and the war effort. Roosevelt said he could not simultaneously agree to cuts that would benefit mostly the rich, and ask for an increase “in taxes and savings from the mass of our people.”15

  After pondering both policies, Clare offered an amendment to what became known as the Ruml-Carlson bill, limiting tax relief to the first $25,000 of income. She said that wealthy citizens, herself included, did not need a windfall from the Treasury. In fact, she advocated “taxing the rich almost to the point of constitutional confiscation.” These were not exactly sound Republican sentiments, and her amendment was defeated in the House on March 30 with a roar of, “No!”16

  On April 9, Clare appeared in Greenwich for the first time since her election, to address a war bond rally. The following afternoon, after attending a lunch in her honor co-hosted by her former campaign manager, William Brennan, and the Fairfield County Republican Committee, she went to New York to celebrate what was nominally her fortieth birthday. Actually, that anniversary had been on March 10, but she had long since changed the date because she preferred being an Aries to a Pisces.17

  Rather than dine in some intimate setting with her husband, Clare went to see the movie version of her play Margin for Error, directed by and starring Otto Preminger, which had just opened in New York. Afterward, she went to a party at the apartment of an old friend, Margaret (“Maggie”) Case, society editor of Vogue. Other guests included the movie producer Sir Alexander Korda and his wife, Merle Oberon, the journalist and travel writer John Gunther, Marcia Davenport, author of the novel The Valley of Decision, the actor Raymond Massey, and John Foster, a British barrister whom Clare had met and flirted with on trips to London. As wine and liquor flowed, Foster joked about the congressional corpse that had gone unnoticed for four days because people were so used to legislators “lying in the House.”18

  Although Clare may not have accepted it at the time, this party marked the onset of her middle age. She had grown used to the preferential treatment afforded her as a smart, wealthy, and humorous woman, able to impress all in her orbit. But the traditional end of youth brought with it the likelihood of more loneliness.

  4

  THE MOST TALKED-ABOUT MEMBER

  In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

  —OSCAR WILDE

  Before a broadcast speech to fifteen hundred Republicans in Bridgeport on April 17, Clare was introduced by a state leader as “the daughter of a Yankee fiddler who knew poverty in her youth.” She did not dispute this description, and launched into a mini-sermon on the need for tax reform. Then, taking advantage of the traditional privilege of office to speak at length on multiple subjects, she shifted topics to military matters: the “bloody” battles American servicemen were fighting, the shortage of submarines, escort vessels, and blimps to confront the Axis U-boat menace, and the Pentagon’s incompetent handling of manpower recruitment, which might soon lead to the forcible drafting of not only men, but women, boys, and girls. She criticized Washington politicians for having “one eye on the war and the other one on the next elections,” and complained about “jurisdictional jealousies that swirl about the head of every legislator, and the red tape which tangles his feet.” Although President Roosevelt was a patient and cheerful man, she said, he lacked “administrative ability.” As for Congress, it was dilatory in leaving its most significant
work to be done by committees.1

  The Boston Globe reported this litany of complaints, adding that Mrs. Luce had “already told her friends that two years on Capitol Hill will be plenty.” After returning to the House, Clare found herself ostracized by fellow members, who left the seats on either side of her empty.2

  Displaying a combination of ingenuousness and conceit, Clare admitted to a New York Mirror columnist that she had been curious enough to find out what her colleagues thought of her. Most, she discovered, were “secretly proud” to be associated with a celebrity. One had stated that when he asked constituents what he could do for them, they said they wanted to meet Representative Luce. She did not hesitate to quote his bemused, “If I only knew her well enough to take them all over to her office, I wouldn’t have to worry about the next election.”3

  Clare also managed to dismay and alienate some major figures in the other branches of government. In mid-May, she attended an exclusive dinner in honor of the Under Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Richard Law, and found herself talking to Felix Frankfurter, the recently appointed Supreme Court Justice and Roosevelt confidant. The opportunity to match wits with one of the best minds in the country was one she would normally welcome. But Frankfurter seemed neither to warm to her as a woman nor to care to engage her in serious dialogue.

  She might have been further discomfited had she known that at least three other guests, including Mrs. Frankfurter, thought she was dull and humorless. “She is undoubtedly what Dick Law calls ‘decorative,’ i.e. has all the style that money can buy and a slim figure can carry off,” the Justice wrote later in his diary, “but no real charm, no beauty except big and attractive eyes (doll’s eyes that close and open), no give and take of spirit or mind. She behaves like a schoolteacher … makes little speeches and has unmitigated self-assurance.… I wholly distrust her motives.”4

  On May 17, three days after her encounter with Frankfurter, Clare had lunch with another Roosevelt intimate, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. She wanted to find out, on behalf of her constituents, how much oil would be available for driving and home heating in the coming winter. Ickes could have told her over the phone that the outlook was not encouraging. But he was curious to meet the new Congresswoman who, Hill gossip had it, had once been the mistress of Bernard Baruch. In his diary, Ickes described her as the most talked-about member of the House. “She has not attempted to hide her light under a bushel and on two or three occasions she has made herself look foolish.” He conceded that Clare was good-looking, if “brittle,” but said her vaunted sex appeal escaped him.5

  The condescension of jurists and cabinet officers did not gall Clare as much as the continuing false gallantry of her male colleagues in the House. In a letter to Pearl S. Buck, the Nobel Prize–winning novelist, she complained of the “myriad little snubs and discriminations” inflicted on her and other Congresswomen. They were treated “with the traditional solicitude strangers are wont to show old ladies crossing Fifth Avenue, or with the teasing deference uncles and older brothers show to girls on the day they graduate from High School.” Behind the mask of courtesy was “an unwillingness to assign ‘the girls’ … to good committee jobs, or to permit us to speak on important and newsworthy legislation.”6

  This was not entirely fair, since she had a seat on a prestigious committee and had been allowed, in her maiden speech, to address one of the most crucial issues facing the postwar world. Her male colleagues in Military Affairs had to listen when Clare slammed such patronizing legislation as the “Wayward Wives Bill,” whose aim was to cut off benefits from any woman who was unfaithful while her husband fought abroad. She proposed an amendment “that if the serviceman is unfaithful overseas, the wife’s allowance be doubled.”7

  Chairman Andrew J. May agreed with her that this would be an extremely hard bill to implement, so it was not recommended for passage.8 But duller members continued to be intolerant of Clare’s combination of logic and wit.

  Weary of the pettiness and superficiality of much of her four months in Washington, Clare welcomed an opportunity to write a weekly column called “Here the Gavel Fell” for CBI [China-Burma-India] Roundup, an official magazine for servicemen in the Far East. Her first piece appeared on May 13, 1943, and caused an immediate stir.

  “Young people of the United States,” she wrote, “are raised in a decade of the rubber stamp Congresses.” This implied that her own was one of them, and suggested that her colleagues of both parties were too much in awe of President Roosevelt. In follow-up essays, she accused FDR of being too busy with military maneuvers to help stabilize the economy, and recommended that “guerilla sorties” be made to reduce New Deal bureaucracies. After twelve such columns, an exasperated War Department banned them, saying that Congresswoman Luce’s views on controversial political questions had “no place in an Army publication.”9

  Clare felt the cancellation was probably due to her having “been in the hair of those who are not anxious to have our men overseas know how many people feel about the home front.”10 One GI in the CBI theater protested her ouster in verse:

  Come brothers, let us mourn forsooth:

  They nipped the nib of fair Clare Boothe.

  Hushed in her journalistic prime

  No sinner she: the printed word

  Was all in which the lady erred

  Her dreadful controversial ink

  Induced poor Army lads to think!

  (A heinous habit which a man

  Must strive to conquer if he can.)11

  During the mid-June brouhaha over Clare’s CBI Roundup columns, General Willoughby arrived in Washington. The boom to nominate his chief, Douglas MacArthur, for the presidency in 1944 was gathering strength, and Clare was all for it, especially if it meant she would see more of Charles. “In two years, people grow away from one another.… Even a month, a week together from time to time would bridge the gap.” He too was unhappy over their enforced two-year separation. At times, he confessed, she scared him off with her feelings of “habit, belonging, obligation” vis-à-vis Harry.12

  Although Willoughby was officially in town for meetings at the Pentagon, he needed to find out, as discreetly as only an intelligence officer could, just how much support there was among Republican leaders for MacArthur’s candidacy.13 He dined with Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, whom Clare had already lobbied to the same end. Willoughby’s effusive praise of his chief convinced the Senator to organize a MacArthur-for-President Committee, and publish an article in Collier’s magazine, “Why I Am for MacArthur,” saying that the general was the only man capable of defeating Roosevelt during wartime.14

  Willoughby stayed at the Wardman Park Hotel, conveniently near Clare’s apartment. Given her high profile, and the extreme delicacy of his mission—an army officer trying to whip up political opposition to his Commander in Chief—they were careful not to be seen too much together, enjoying private moments instead.

  Clare made her second controversial House speech on June 24, 1943, this time to a full chamber. It was entitled “What Is America’s Foreign Policy?” and argued that the country had none. As presently governed, the United States had only nationalistic ideals, and idealism, however noble, did not necessarily win the respect of other powers. “There is a world of difference between sentiment and policy,” she pointed out, defining the latter as “procedure … based on self-interest [that] may be at total variance with the accepted principles, or spiritual concepts of a nation.”

  If the United States had had a firm, unsentimental foreign policy during the 1930s, she said, the “isolationist” President Roosevelt would not have sent a message of congratulation to Chamberlain after Munich, and Japan would not have been allowed to buy American steel in order “to beat our only potential ally in the Far East [China] to her knees.” It was only after Pearl Harbor that FDR had hastily and unimaginatively adopted the worldview of Winston Churchill.15

  Helen Essary of the Washington Times-Herald described the address as “on
e of the most daring ever heard in Congress.” As Clare, looking innocent and ultrafeminine in a black-and-white-flowered silk dress, spoke of programs being “midwifed by secret diplomacy,” and the administration plunging the American people into “an abyss of moral confusion,” she drew the ire of some of the ablest Democratic scrappers in Congress.16 But Republicans cheered, and one on the Foreign Affairs Committee passed her a note, saying the speech was the best he had heard on the subject.17

  Essary divined that if Clare was to succeed over time, she “must prove that in addition to brains, beauty, and audacity she also has stamina. There is a chance that so dazzling a butterfly may be bored—too soon.” The reporter ended her article by suggesting Congresswoman Luce for Vice President on the Republican ticket in 1944, to put “zip, drama, and light into the campaign.”18

  On Sunday, June 27, Clare appeared in Appleton, Wisconsin, to give the keynote speech at the state Republican convention. It was rare for a freshman Representative to be offered such a high-profile role. She began with criticism of her own party. Business-friendly “Old Deal” policies in earlier GOP administrations, she said, had failed to do justice to farm and other laborers, and led to Roosevelt’s New Deal. Corrective Democratic programs had also been useless, in her view, discouraging individual enterprise. Should FDR run for a fourth term, she predicted that he would have to campaign on his foreign policy record—for what it was worth—and his management of the war, rather than his ineffectual domestic record. She criticized the President’s “windy” political rhetoric as “dazzle dust terms thrown in people’s eyes in order to be able to complain that [they] do not see.”19